Читать книгу After Hours... - Christy McKellen, Bella Bucannon - Страница 13
ОглавлениеIF SOMEONE HAD asked Max to explain exactly what had prompted him to suggest that Cara move in, he was pretty sure he’d have been stumped for an answer.
All he knew was that he couldn’t let things go on the way they were. Judging by her outburst, she was clearly struggling to cope with all that life had thrown at her recently and it was no skin off his nose to let her stay for a few nights in one of the empty bedrooms.
He had enough of them, after all.
Also, as a good friend of her cousin’s he felt a responsibility to make sure that Cara was okay whilst Poppy was away and unable to help her herself. He knew from experience that good friends were essential when life decided to throw its twisted cruelty your way, and he was acutely aware that it was the support and encouragement of his friends that had helped him find his way out of the darkness after Jemima died.
Watching Cara working hard the next day, he was glad she was still around. When she was on good form, she was an asset to the business and, truthfully, it had become comforting for him to have another person around—it stopped him from thinking so much in the resounding silence of the house.
They hadn’t talked about what had happened again, which was a relief. He just wanted everything to get back to the way it had been with the minimum of fuss. With that in mind, he was a little concerned about what it would be like having her around at the weekend. He’d probably end up working, like he always did, so he wasn’t too worried about the daytime, but they’d need to make sure they gave each other enough space in the evenings so they didn’t end up biting each other’s heads off again.
With any luck, she’d be out a lot of the time anyway, flat-hunting or seeing friends.
At six o’clock he leant back in his chair and stretched his arms above his head, working the kinks out of his tight muscles.
‘Time to finish for the day, Cara,’ he said to the side of her head.
She glanced round at him, the expression in her eyes far away, as if she was in the middle of a thought.
‘Um, okay. I’ll just finish this.’ She tapped on her keyboard for a few more seconds before closing the laptop with a flourish.
‘Okay then. Bring on the weekend.’ She flashed him a cheeky smile, which gave him pause.
‘You’re not thinking of bringing the party to this house, I hope.’
Quickly switching to a solemn expression, she gave a shake of her head. ‘Of course not. That’s not what I meant.’
‘Hmm.’
The corner of her mouth twitched upwards. ‘You seem to have a really skewed impression of me. I don’t go in for heavy drinking and partying—it’s really not my style.’
‘Okay.’ He held up both hands. ‘Not that it’s any of my business; you can stay out all night at the weekends, for all I care,’ he said, aware of a strange plummeting sensation in his chest as images of what she might get up to out on the town flashed through his head.
Good God, man—you’re not her keeper.
‘As long as your work doesn’t suffer,’ he added quickly.
‘Actually,’ she said, slouching back in her seat and hooking her slender arm over the back of her chair, ‘I was thinking about cooking you a meal tonight, to say thank you for letting me stay.’
He wasn’t sure why, but the thought of that made him uncomfortable. Perhaps because it would blur the lines between employee and friend too much.
‘That’s kind, but I have plans tonight,’ he lied, racking his brain to remember what his friend Dan had said about his availability this weekend. Even if he was busy he was sure he could rustle up a dinner invitation somewhere else, to let Cara off the hook without any bad feelings.
‘And you don’t need to thank me for letting you stay here. It’s what any decent human being would have done.’
Her face seemed to fall a little and she drew her arm back in towards her body, sliding her hands between her knees so that her shoulders hunched inwards. ‘Oh, okay, well, I’m just going to pop out and shop for my own dinner, so I’ll see you shortly,’ she said, ramping her smile back up again and wheeling her chair away from the desk with her feet.
‘Actually, I’m heading out myself in a minute and I’ll probably be back late, so I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Her smile froze. ‘Right. Well, have a good night.’
This was ridiculous. The last thing he’d wanted was for them both to feel awkward about living under the same roof.
He let out a long sigh and pushed his hair away from his face. ‘Look, Cara, don’t think you have to hang out with me while you’re staying here. We don’t need to be in each other’s pockets the whole time. Feel free to do your own thing.’
Clearly he’d been a bit brusque because she recoiled a little. ‘I understand,’ she said, getting up and awkwardly pushing her chair back under her desk. ‘Have a good night!’ she said in that overly chirpy way she had, which he was beginning to learn meant he’d offended her.
Not waiting for his reply, she turned her back on him and walked straight out of the room, her shoulders stiff.
Great. This was exactly what he’d hoped to avoid.
He scrubbed a hand over his face. Maybe it had been a mistake to ask her to stay.
But he couldn’t kick her out now.
All he could do was cross his fingers and hope she’d find herself another place to live soon.
* * *
To his surprise, he didn’t see much of Cara over the next couple of days. She’d obviously taken his suggestion about giving each other space to heart and was avoiding being in the house with him as much as possible.
The extremity of her desertion grated on his nerves.
What was it that made it impossible for them to understand each other? They were very different in temperament, of course, which didn’t help, but it was more than that. It was as if there was some kind of meaning-altering force field between them.
On Sunday, when the silence in the house got too much for him, he went out for a long walk around Hyde Park. He stopped at the café next to the water for lunch, something he and Jemima had done most Sundays, fighting against the painful undertow of nostalgia that dragged at him as he sat there alone. It was all so intensely familiar.
All except for the empty seat in front of him.
He snorted into his drink, disgusted with himself for being so pathetic. He should consider himself lucky. He was the one who got to have a future, unlike his big-hearted, selfless wife. The woman who everyone had loved. One of the few people, in his opinion, who had truly deserved a long and happy life.
Arriving home mid-afternoon, he walked in to find the undertones of Cara’s perfume hanging in the air.
So she was back then.
Closing his eyes, he imagined he could actually sense her presence in the atmosphere, like a low hum of white noise.
Or was he being overly sensitive?
Probably.
From the moment she’d agreed to move in he’d experienced a strange undercurrent of apprehension and it seemed to be affecting his state of mind.
After stowing his shoes and coat in the cloakroom, he went into the living room to find that a large display of flowers had been placed on top of the grand piano. He bristled, remembering the way he’d felt the last time Cara had started to mess with his environment.
Sighing, he rubbed a hand through his hair, attempting to release the tension in his scalp. They were just flowers. He really needed to chill out or he was going to drive himself insane. Jemima would have laughed if she’d seen how strung-out he was over something so inconsequential. He could almost hear her teasing voice ringing in his ears.
A noise startled him and he whipped round to see Cara standing in the doorway to the room, dressed in worn jeans and a sloppy sweater, her face scrubbed of make-up and her bright blue eyes luminous in the soft afternoon light. To his overwrought brain, she seemed to radiate an ethereal kind of beauty, her long hair lying in soft, undulating waves around her face and her creamy skin radiant with health. He experienced a strangely intense moment of confusion, and he realised that somewhere in the depths of his screwed-up consciousness he’d half expected it to be Jemima standing there instead—which was why his, ‘Hello,’ came out more gruffly than he’d intended.
Her welcoming smile faltered and she glanced down at her fingernails and frowned, as if fighting an impulse to chew on them, but when she looked back up her smile was firmly back in place.
‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’ She tipped her head towards the piano behind him. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but the spring sunshine inspired me to put fresh flowers in most of the rooms—not your bedroom, of course; I didn’t go in there,’ she added quickly. ‘The house seemed to be crying out for a bit of life and colour and I wanted to do something to say thank you for letting me stay, even though you said I didn’t need to.’
‘Sure. That’s fine,’ was all he could muster. For some reason his blood was flying through his veins and he felt so hot he thought he might spontaneously combust at any second.
‘Oh, and I stripped and remade the bed in the room next to yours,’ she added casually. ‘It looked like the cleaners had missed it. I gave it a good vacuum, too; it was really dusty.’
The heat was swept away by a flood of icy panic. ‘You what?’
The ferocity in his tone obviously alarmed her because she flinched and blinked hard.
But hurting Cara’s feelings was the least of his worries right then.
Not waiting for her reply, he pushed past her and raced up the stairs, aware of his heart thumping painfully in his chest as he willed it not to be so.
Please don’t let her have destroyed that room.
Reaching the landing on the top floor, he flung open the door and stared into the now immaculate bedroom, the stringent scent of cleaning fluid clogging his throat and making his stomach roll.
She’d stripped it bare.
Everything he’d been protecting from the past had been torn off or wiped away. The bed, as she’d said, now had fresh linen on it.
He heard her laboured breath behind him as she made it up to the landing and whipped round to face her.
‘Where are the sheets from the bed, Cara?’ he demanded, well past the point of being able to conceal his anger.
Her face was drained of all colour. ‘What did I do wrong?’
‘The sheets, Cara—where are the sheets?’
‘I washed them,’ she whispered, unable to meet his eyes. ‘They’re in the dryer.’
That was it then. Jemima’s room was ruined.
Bitterness welled in his gut as he took in her wide-eyed bewilderment. The woman was a walking disaster area and she’d caused nothing but trouble since she got here.
A rage he couldn’t contain made him pace towards her.
‘Why do you have to meddle with everything? Hmm? What is it with you? This need to please all the time isn’t natural. In fact it’s downright pathetic. Just keep your hands off my personal stuff, okay? Is that really too much to ask?’
She seemed frozen to the spot as she stared at him with glassy eyes, her jaw clamped so tight he could see the muscle flickering under the pressure, but, instead of shouting back this time, she dragged in a sharp, painful-sounding breath before turning on the spot and walking out of the room.
He listened to her heavy footsteps on the stairs and then the slam of her bedroom door, wincing as the sound reverberated through his aching head. Staring down at the soulless bed, he allowed the heat of his bitterness and anger and shame to wash through him, leaving behind an icy numbness in its wake.
Then he closed his eyes, dropped his chin to his chest and sank down onto the last place he’d been truly happy.
* * *
Oh, God, please don’t let this be happening to me. Again.
Cara wrapped her arms around her middle and pressed her forehead against the cool wall of her bedroom, waiting for the dizziness and nausea to subside so she could pack up her things and leave.
What was it with her? She seemed destined to put herself in a position of weakness, where the only option left to her was to give up and run away.
Which she really didn’t want to do again.
But she had to protect herself. She couldn’t be around someone so toxic—someone who clearly thought so little of her. Even Ewan hadn’t been that cruel to her when he’d left her after she’d failed to live up to his exacting standards. She’d never seen a look of such pure disgust on anyone’s face before. The mere memory of it made the dizziness worse.
There was no way she was staying in a place where she’d be liable to see that look again. She’d rather go home and admit to her parents that she’d failed and deal with their badly concealed disappointment than stay here with Max any longer.
She’d never met anyone with such a quick temper. What was his problem, anyway? He appeared to have everything here: the security of a beautiful house in one of the most sought-after areas of London, a thriving business, friends who invited him out for dinner, and he clearly had pots of cash to cushion his easy, comfortable life. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more incensed she became.
Who was he to speak to her like that? Sure, there had been a couple of little bumps in the road when she’d not exactly been at her best, but she’d worked above and beyond the call of duty for the rest of the time. And she’d been trying to do something nice for him in making the house look good—pretty much the only thing she could think of to offer as a thank you to a man who seemed to have everything. What had been so awful about that? She knew she could be a bit over the top in trying to please people sometimes, but this hadn’t been a big thing. It was just an empty guest room that had been overlooked.
Wasn’t it?
The extremity of his reaction niggled at her.
Surely just giving it a quick clean didn’t deserve that angry reaction.
No.
He was a control freak bully and she needed to get away from him.
As soon as she was sure the dizziness had passed, she carefully packed up all her things and zipped them into her suitcase, fighting with all her might against the tight pressure in her throat and the itchy heat in her eyes.
She’d known this opportunity had to be too good to be true—the job, working with someone as impressive as Max and definitely being invited to stay in this amazing house.
But she wasn’t going to skulk away. If she didn’t face up to Max one last time with her head held high she’d regret it for the rest of her life. He wasn’t going to run her out of here; she was going to leave in her time and on her terms.
Taking a deep breath, she rolled her shoulders back and fixed the bland look of calm she’d become so practised at onto her face.
Okay. Time for one last confrontation.
She found Max in the guest room where she’d left him, sitting on the bed with his head in his hands, his hunched shoulders stretching his T-shirt tight against his broad back.
As she walked into the room, he looked up at her with an expression of such torment on his face that it made her stop in her tracks.
What was going on? She’d expected him to still be angry, but instead he looked—beaten.
Did he regret what he’d said to her?
Giving herself a mental shake, she took another deliberate step towards him. It didn’t matter; there wasn’t anything he could say to make up for the cruelty of his last statement anyway. This wasn’t the first time he’d treated her with such brutal disdain and she wasn’t going to put up with it any longer.
Forcing back her shoulders, she took one final step closer to him, feeling her legs shaking with tension.
‘This isn’t going to work, Max. I can’t live in a place where I’m constantly afraid of doing the wrong thing and making you angry. I don’t know what I did that was so bad, or what’s going on with you to make you react like that, but I’m not going to let you destroy what’s left of my confidence. I’m not going to be a victim any more.’ She took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘So I’m leaving now. And that goes for the job, too.’
Her heart gave a lurch at the flash of contrition in his eyes, but she knew she had to be strong and walk away for her own good.
‘Goodbye, Max, and good luck.’
As she turned to go, fighting against the tears that threatened to give her away, she thought she heard the bedsprings creak as if he’d stood up, but didn’t turn round to find out.
She was halfway down the stairs when she heard Max’s voice behind her. ‘Wait, Cara!’
Spinning round, she held up a hand to stop him from coming any closer, intensely aware that, despite her anger with him, there was a small part of her that was desperate to hear him say something nice to her, to persuade her that he wasn’t the monster he seemed to be. ‘I can’t walk on eggshells around you any more, Max; I don’t think my heart will stand it.’
In any way, shape or form.
He slumped down onto the top step and put his elbows on his knees, his whole posture defeated. ‘Don’t go,’ he said quietly.
‘I have to.’
Looking up, he fixed her with a glassy stare. ‘I know I’ve been a nightmare to be around recently—’ He frowned and shook his head. ‘It’s not you, Cara—it’s one hundred per cent me. Please, at least hear me out. I need to tell you what’s going on so you don’t leave thinking any of this is your fault.’ He sighed and rubbed a hand through his hair. ‘That’s the last thing I want to happen.’
She paused. Even if she still chose to leave after hearing him out, at least she’d know why it hadn’t worked and be able to make peace with her decision to walk away.
The silence stretched to breaking point between them. ‘Okay,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘Thank you.’ Getting up from the step, he gestured down the stairs. ‘Let’s go into the sitting room.’
Once there, she perched on the edge of the sofa and waited for him to take the chair opposite, but he surprised her by sitting next to her instead, sinking back into the cushions with a long guttural sigh which managed to touch every nerve-ending in her body.
‘This is going to make me sound mentally unstable.’
She turned to frown at him. ‘Oka-ay...’ she said, failing to keep her apprehension out of her voice.
‘That bed hasn’t been changed since my wife, Jemima, died a year and a half ago.’
Hot horror slid through her, her skin prickling as if she were being stabbed with a thousand needles. ‘But I thought you said—’ She shook her suddenly fuzzy head. ‘You never said—’ Words, it seemed, had totally failed her. Everything she knew about him slipped sickeningly into place: the ever-fluctuating moods, the reluctance to talk about his personal life, his anger at her meddling with things in his house.
His wife’s house.
Looking away, he stared at the wall opposite, sitting forward with clenched fists as if he was steeling himself to get it all out in the open.
‘I couldn’t bring myself to change it.’ He paused and she saw his shoulders rise then fall as he took a deep breath. ‘The bed, I mean. It still smelled faintly like her. I let her mother take all her clothes and other personal effects—what would I have done with them?—but the bed was mine. The last place we’d been together before I lost her—’ he took another breath, pushing back his hunched shoulders ‘—before she died.’
‘Oh, God, Max... I’m so, so sorry. I had no idea.’
He huffed out a dry laugh. ‘How could you? I did everything I could to avoid talking to you about it.’ He grimaced. ‘Because, to be honest, I’ve done enough talking about it to last me a lifetime. I guess, in my twisted imagination, I thought if you didn’t know, I could pretend it hadn’t happened when you were around. Outside of work, you’re the first normal, unconnected thing I’ve had in my life since I lost her and I guess I was hanging on to that.’
He turned to look at her again. ‘I should have told you, Cara, especially after you moved in, but I couldn’t find a way to bring it up without—’ He paused and swallowed hard, the look in his eyes so wretched that, without thinking, she reached out and laid a hand on his bare forearm.
He frowned down at where their bodies connected and the air seemed to crackle around them.
Disconcerted by the heat of him beneath her fingertips, she withdrew her hand and laid it back on her lap.
‘It’s kind of you to consider me normal,’ she said, flipping him a grin, hoping the levity might go some way to smoothing out the sudden weird tension between them.
He gave a gentle snort, as if to acknowledge her pathetic attempt at humour.
Why had she never recognised his behaviour as grief before? Now she knew to look for it, it was starkly discernible in the deep frown lines in his face and the haunted look in his eyes.
But she’d been so caught up in her own private universe of problems she hadn’t even considered why Max seemed so bitter all the time.
She’d thought he had everything.
How wrong she’d been.
They sat in silence for a while, the only sound in the room the soothing tick-tock of the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, like a steady heartbeat in the chaos.
‘How did she die?’ Cara asked eventually. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t be keen to revisit this conversation and she wanted to have all the information from this point onwards so she could avoid any future blunders.
The familiarity of the question seemed to rouse him. ‘She had a subarachnoid haemorrhage—it’s where a blood vessel in the brain bursts—’ he added, when she frowned at him in confusion. ‘On our one-year wedding anniversary. It happened totally out of the blue. I was late for our celebration dinner and I got a phone message saying she’d collapsed in the restaurant. By the time I got to the hospital she had such extensive brain damage she didn’t even recognise me. She died two weeks later. I never got to say goodbye properly.’ He snorted gently. ‘The last thing I said to her before it happened was “Stop being such a nag; I won’t be late,” when I left her in bed that morning and went to work.’
Cara had to swallow past the tightness in her throat before she could speak. ‘That’s why you didn’t want me to leave here with us on bad terms.’ She put a hand back onto his arm and gave it an ineffectual rub, feeling completely out of her depth. ‘Oh, Max, I’m so sorry. What a horrible thing to happen.’
He leant back against the cushions, breaking the contact of her touch, and stared up at the ceiling. ‘I often wonder whether I would have noticed some signs if I’d paid more attention to her. If I hadn’t been so caught up with work—’
She couldn’t think of a single thing to say to make him feel better—though maybe there wasn’t anything she could say. Sometimes you didn’t need answers or solutions; you just needed someone to listen and agree with you about how cruel life could be.
He turned to look at her, his mouth drawn into a tight line.
‘Look, Cara, I can see that you wanting to help comes from a good place. You’re a kind and decent person—much more decent than I am.’ He gave her a pained smile, which she returned. ‘I’ve been on my own here for so long I’ve clearly become very selfish with my personal space.’ He rubbed a hand across his brow. ‘And this was Jemima’s house—she was the one who chose how to decorate it and made it a home for us.’ He turned to make full eye contact with her again, his expression apologetic. ‘It’s taking a bit of adjusting to, having someone else around. Despite evidence to the contrary, I really appreciate the thoughtful gestures you’ve made.’
His reference to her gestures only made the heavy feeling in her stomach worse.
‘I’m really sorry, Max. I can totally understand why you’d find it hard to see me meddling with Jemima’s things. I think I was so excited by the idea of living in such a beautiful house that I got a bit carried away. I forgot I was just a visitor here and that it’s your home. That was selfish of me.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t want you to feel like that. While you’re here it’s your home, too.’
She frowned and turned away to stare down at the floor, distracted for a moment by how scratty and out of place her old slippers looked against the rich cream-coloured wool carpet.
That was exactly the problem. It wasn’t her home and it never would be. She didn’t really fit here.
For some reason that made her feel more depressed than she had since the day she’d left her last job.
‘Have you had any luck with finding a flat to rent?’ he asked, breaking the silence that had fallen like a suffocating layer of dust between them.
‘Not yet, but I have an appointment to view somewhere tomorrow and there are new places coming up all the time. I’ll find something soon, I’m sure of it,’ she said, plastering what must have been the worst fake smile she’d ever mustered onto her face.
He nodded slowly, but didn’t say anything.
Twitching with discomfort now, she stood up. ‘I should go.’
He frowned at her in confusion. ‘What do you mean? Where are you going?’
‘Back to Sarah’s. I think that would be best.’
Standing up, too, he put out a hand as if to touch her, but stopped himself and shoved it into the back pocket of his jeans instead.
‘Look, don’t leave. I promise to be less of an ogre. I let my anger get the better of me, which was unfair.’
‘I don’t know, Max—’ She couldn’t stay here now. Could she?
Obviously seeing the hesitation on her face, he leant forward and waited until she made eye contact. ‘I like having you around.’ There was a teasing lightness in his expression that made her feel as if he was finally showing her the real Max. The one who had been hiding inside layers of brusque aloofness and icy calm for the past few weeks.
Warmth pooled, deep in her body. ‘Really? I feel like I’ve made nothing but a nuisance of myself since I got here.’
He gave another snort and the first proper smile she’d seen in a while. It made his whole face light up and the sight of it sent a rush of warm pleasure across her skin. ‘It’s certainly been eventful having you here.’
She couldn’t help but return his grin, despite the feeling that she was somehow losing control of herself.
‘Stay. Please.’
Her heart turned over at the expression on his face. It was something she’d never seen before. Against all the odds, he looked hopeful.
Despite a warning voice in the back of her head, she knew there was no way she could walk out of the door now that he’d laid himself bare. She could see that the extreme mood swings were coming from a place of deep pain and the very last thing he needed was to be left alone with just his tormenting memories for company in this big empty house.
It appeared as though they needed each other.
The levelling of the emotional stakes galvanised her.
‘Okay,’ she said, giving him a reassuring smile. ‘I’ll stay. On one condition.’
‘And that is?’
‘That you talk to me when you feel the gloom descending—like a person, not just an employee. And let me help if I can.’ She crossed her arms and raised a challenging eyebrow.
He huffed out a laugh. ‘And how do you propose to help?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps I can jolly you out of your moods, if you give me the chance.’
‘Jolly. That’s a fitting word for you.’
‘Yeah, well, someone has to raise the positivity levels in this house of doom.’ She stilled, wondering whether she’d gone a step too far, but when she dared to peek at him he was smiling, albeit in a rather bemused way.
A sense of relief washed over her. The last thing she wanted to do was read the situation wrong now they’d had a breakthrough. In fact, she really ought to push for a treaty to make things crystal clear between them.
‘Look, at the risk of micromanaging the situation, can we agree that from this point on you’ll be totally straight with me, and in return I promise to be totally straight with you?’
He gave her a puzzled look. ‘Why? Is there something you need to tell me?’
She considered admitting she’d lied about why she’d left her last job and dismissed it immediately. There was no point going over that right now; it had no relevance to this and it would make her sound totally pathetic compared to what he’d been through.
‘No, no! Nothing! It was just a turn of phrase.’
He snorted gently, rolling his eyes upward, his mouth lifting at the corner. ‘Okay then, Miss Fix-it, total honesty it is. You’ve got yourself a deal.’
