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She heard the front door open and close and then she was alone, surprised to find that she was crying soundlessly, her tears soaking her hair into wet tendrils that clung stickily to her face. He would never forgive her for this, she thought bleakly into the deathly silence as she sat up slowly, adjusting her clothing with limp shaking hands. She had made things so much worse, or maybe …? She closed her eyes as a thought pierced her heart—maybe they had had to get this bad for him to finally accept it was over? But she didn’t want it to be over. The words were fierce and hot in her head. She wanted him to keep trying, wanted him close because if he went away … Her eyes opened very wide. He would never come back.
She stood up wearily, her head pounding. She was going mad, insane … Of course it had to be over, she knew that. What was the matter with her? ‘You’re cracking up, girl,’ she whispered to herself flatly as she combed the wet tendrils of her hair back from her face slowly. ‘You are so perfect, so very perfect’. The cataclysmic blow he would never understand, but which summed up everything. She wasn’t perfect any more, she was badly flawed and beyond repair. ‘A beautiful little doll.’ Sandra’s words were engraved on her soul in letters of fire, but her eyes were dry by the time she joined him in the car. He glanced once at her white face and then concentrated on the darkness beyond the headlights. ‘Do I take it that was an object lesson in how adeptly you can switch on and off?’ he asked harshly, after a few minutes had screamed by in absolute silence.
‘I didn’t plan it, Blade,’ she protested quietly without looking at his dark profile, wincing as he made a deep sound of disbelief in his throat. ‘I didn’t!’ she said more vehemently. ‘Can you say the same? That you didn’t have this evening all worked out?’
‘If I did it sure wasn’t one of my best deals, was it?’ he growled bitterly and with scathing cynicism. ‘I thought I knew you, Amy, I mean really knew you. I would have trusted my life on that belief. Hell!’ He shook his head angrily as his face hardened into cold steel. ‘I hate a bad loser.’ She missed the self-contempt in his voice, hearing only the words themselves.
‘A bad loser?’ She turned to stare at him in the darkness. ‘Is that all our lovemaking meant to you, one of us winning while the other lost?’
He stiffened, his knuckles white on the steering-wheel, before relaxing slowly after long seconds as he let his breath out between his teeth in a cool tight angry sigh. ‘That’s about what you would expect from me, isn’t it?’ he answered coldly. ‘You’ve made that perfectly clear. And maybe you’re right. According to you there was only ever physical love between us, sex in its crudest form, anyway? At least on your side. Right?’
She froze, unable to reply. ‘Right?’ The word was a pistol shot in the darkness.
‘Yes!’ She took a deep breath as she forced herself to go on, to put the last nail in her coffin. ‘I realise that now. As I said, you were my first lover and I mistook what I felt, our physical attraction, for love. I had nothing to compare it with, no way of knowing …’ Her voice trailed away at the complete stillness of his body.
‘I don’t believe you, Amy,’ he said at last, his voice calm now. ‘I’m darned if I know why, but I don’t. Call it intuition or sixth sense or whatever, but there is more, much more, to all this. But I can see that for whatever reason you have made up your mind, and I won’t try to dissuade you any more. Our marriage is over. I accept it.’
‘You do?’ Where was the relief? The conviction that she had done the right thing now, when she needed it most?
‘Yes, I do.’
The rest of the drive home was conducted in tense silence but never had she been so aware of the big male body next to her. Every movement, however slight, brought her over-stretched nerves to breaking point, and as they drew into the lane leading to Mrs Cox’s cottage she turned to look at him, her face white.
‘This is goodbye, then,’ she stated expressionlessly. ‘I suppose you’ll go back to London tomorrow, you must have a lot to do.’
‘Yes, I have a lot to do.’ As the car drew to a halt he left the engine running as he came to open her door. ‘But I’ve made a promise to Mrs Cox so I shall be around for a while yet. You needn’t worry—’ his voice was mockingly derisive ‘—I’ll leave you alone.’
‘Thank you.’ If the world had stopped, thrown off its axis at that precise moment, she wouldn’t have cared. It was all too much. He was going to go, in a day, a week, believing that it was what she wanted. She shut her eyes tightly for a second. She had to accept it was over. She never had before, she thought wonderingly. Why hadn’t she realised she had been holding on? ‘Goodbye, Blade.’
