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‘Ethan, smile...’ his mother would croon in unfamiliar affectionate tones as they sat perfectly on the pale blue sofa. ‘Come on, darling.’
And then, as he stood there in the vast hallway, he remembered another day. A morning.
Meghan, his nanny, was shouting as she carried him through the house. ‘You left him in the car!’
Ethan remembered being hauled out of a car and stripped off, and the coolness of a shower and water being poured down his throat.
‘He was asleep!’ His mother had been shouting too. ‘It seemed mean to wake him.’
He hadn’t understood why Meghan had been crying. Why Meghan had said sorry to him, over and over, as she cooled him down, when it hadn’t been her fault.
Ethan was sweating as much as if he’d been running. He pressed the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb and screwed closed his eyes, willing the memory to be gone.
He wanted to go back to normality. Or the strange version of it he and Merida now made.
Ethan pushed open the drawing room door and it was clear that he had interrupted a conversation.
‘Everything okay?’ Jobe checked, because his son was ghostly white.
‘Everything’s fine. What are you two up to?’
‘I was just saying to Merida—why on earth would you move into a hotel when you could come here...?’
‘I left home nearly twenty years ago,’ Ethan snapped. ‘I’ve no intention—’
‘Ethan,’ Jobe interrupted. ‘I’m spending more time at the hospital than here. There’s a full staff. I don’t like the thought of the place standing empty, and there’s no need for your pregnant wife to be staying in a hotel. However luxurious, it’s not a home.’
Had his father not been dying, Ethan would have told him in no uncertain terms what he could do with that idea, but he saved his verdict for after their car ride home.
‘No way.’
‘Well,Ithink it’s a nice idea.’
‘Seriously?’ He gaped, and then he looked at her. ‘Whatever, Merida—it makes no difference to me.’
‘Meaning...?’
‘I’m heading to the Middle East tomorrow.’
‘For how long?’
‘Four weeks.’ He plucked a figure from his head.
‘Your father’sdying, Ethan, and you’re heading off for a month?’
‘Yes,’ Ethan said. ‘He’s the one who wants the ball to keep rolling—well, hotels don’t build themselves.’
Yes, he was running away. But there was no way he was staying in that house. As well as that, he was sick of this farcical marriage, with the stilted dinners and the strained nights out when they smiled, again and again, for the cameras. When they kissed and held hands in the hope that someone was watching, then dropped all contact the moment they were home.
It was killing him, lying upstairs night after night while she slept in the guest room.
‘We couldn’t sleep separately at my father’s...’ Ethan said, and watched her rapid blink.
‘Rita knows...’
‘Rita was born before sex was invented,’ Ethan quipped. ‘She thinks it’s normal for married couples to sleep apart. My father has a fleet of staff...’
Ethan actually no longer gave a damn what the staff thought. It was more a matter of his own wounded pride and, though he loathed their sleeping arrangements, the thought of them lying together night after night and not touching was just impossible.
