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She hoped that by occupying herself she might take her mind off Alessandro but, all the while, he was in her head as she remembered the things they had done together, the conversations they had had.
She shakily told herself that it was a good thing that they were finished. It had been destined to end and the sooner the better. How much worse would she have felt had they ended it in two months’ time? Two months during which she would have just continued falling deeper and deeper in love with him! The longer they lasted, the more difficult it would have been to unpick and disentangle her chaotic emotions. She should be thankful!
And yet, thankful was the very last thing she felt. She felt devastated, tearful and...ashamed.
More than anything else, she was angry with him for making her feel that way. She was angry with him for being hard line; for not having an ounce of sympathy in him; for not even trying to see her point of view. She had known from the outset that his sole motivation for sleeping with her was to exact some sort of revenge, to have that wheel turn full circle, to take what he thought had been promised to him eight years ago. Yet, hadn’t he got to know her at all during that period? Had she just been his lover and nothing more?
They hadn’t been rolling around on a mattress all of the time. There had been so many instances when they had talked, when the past hadn’t existed, just the present, just two people getting to know one another. Or so it had felt to her.
She hated him for wiping that all away as though none of it had existed. She hated him for finding it so easy to write her off as though she was worthless.
* * *
Over the next week, as she came closer and closer to her final day at Fitzsimmons, the frustration and anger continued to build inside her. If only she could have maintained the anger, she might have felt protected, but there were so many chinks through which she recalled small acts of thoughtfulness, his wonderful wit, his sharp intellect, his lazy, sexy smile. What they had had all those years ago had been unbearably intense and that intensity had given the times they had shared recently a deep level of communication that was almost intuitive. She missed that. She missed him.
She hadn’t heard a word from him. He had truly disappeared from her life—although, by all accounts, he had been on the scene far more than anticipated at the shelter, where, from what Beth had blithely told her, he appeared suddenly to have taken a keen interest in all the renovations she had planned.
‘He has so many good suggestions for how the money could be spent!’ Beth had enthusiastically listed all the suggestions while Chase had listened in resentful silence. ‘He’s also been kind enough to put us in touch with contacts he has in the contracting business so that we can get the best possible deal!’ Chase had muttered something under her breath which she hoped didn’t sound like the unladylike oath it most certainly was.
Beth had no idea of the history she and Alessandro had shared. It would have been petty and small-minded not to have responded with a similar level of enthusiasm to the hard-nosed billionaire businessman who had previously threatened a hostile buy-out, only to morph into a saint with a positively never-ending supply of ‘brilliant ideas’ and ‘amazingly useful contacts’.
On the Friday, exactly a week after he had walked out of her house, there was a little leaving drinks party for her at the office, to which far more people turned up than she had expected, bearing in mind she had not been the most sociable of the team out of work.
She would be sorely missed, her boss said in the little speech he gave to the assembled members of staff. Everyone raised their glasses of champagne. These were the people she had kept at arm’s length, burying herself in her work and always feeling the unspoken differences between them. And yet, as various of her colleagues came over to talk to her, she could tell that they were genuinely delighted that she intended to pursue her pro bono work in a firm that was solely dedicated to doing that.
Numbers and email addresses were exchanged with various girls whom she had known on a purely superficial basis.
When she tentatively volunteered the information that she would find it tough financially because she had no family to help her out if she started going under, there were no gasps of horror. When she confessed to a couple of the girls that she loved pro bono work because, growing up on a council estate, she had seen misery first-hand and had always wanted to do something about it, they hadn’t walked away, smirking. They had been interested.
By the end of the evening, she had drunk more than she had intended but had also made friends in unexpected places.
Had she made a mistake in erecting so many protective defence mechanisms around her that she had failed to let anyone in? Had her cool distance been a liability in the end, rather than an asset? Had her detachment, which had been put in place for all the right reasons, become a habit which had imprisoned her more firmly than the solid steel bars of a prison cell?
