Lovers Not Friends. HELEN BROOKS
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face. ‘There couldn’t really be more, could there?’ he said with biting cynicism. ‘It was just that for a minute—’ He stopped abruptly and indicated the car with a violent wave of his hand. ‘Get in, I’ve had more than enough.’
They didn’t speak on the return journey, and as he drew up outside Arthur’s little restaurant he leant across her and opened the door in one easy movement. ‘Goodbye, Amy.’ The tone was flat, all emotion gone.
‘Goodbye.’ She never did know how she got out of the car, but it took all the will power she possessed to walk away. She opened the door of the restaurant without looking round, hearing the car pull away with a furious roar of the powerful engine as she did so. She just made it through the kitchen door before she collapsed in a heap at Arthur Kelly’s feet, her eyes big and stunned.
‘Amy?’ Arthur pulled her to her feet, guiding her to the one and only small stool by the back door, his lined face tight with concern. ‘What on earth is it, lass? What’s happened?’ He patted ineffectually at her hands as he spoke, obviously quite out of his depth.
‘Arthur, can I go home?’ She couldn’t speak for several seconds but when she did her voice was a tiny whisper. ‘I feel awful.’
‘You look it.’ He peered distractedly through the pane of glass in the kitchen door at the customers beyond. ‘I can’t really take you now; I’ll call a taxi, yes?’
‘No, please don’t.’ The nearest taxi-cab service was in a small market town miles away and she needed to be alone now. ‘I’ll be home in ten minutes, I’d rather walk.’
‘You don’t look fit to walk, lass, let me—’
‘Please, Arthur.’ She faced him, her blue eyes enormous. ‘I’d rather.’
‘OK, lass, have it your own way.’ He wrinkled his brow worriedly. ‘But give me a call once you’re home, eh? Just to keep an old man happy.’
‘I will. And I’ll see you tomorrow as usual.’
Much later that night, as Amy sat in her darkened room filled with evening shadows, after a meal cooked by the reputable Mrs Cox of which she hadn’t been able to eat a bite, she forced herself to face the fact that had emerged from her meeting with Blade earlier. She had been hoping subconsciously against all reason and all logic that when she saw him again—and she had known, knowing Blade as she did, that she would see him again—that somehow he would work a miracle and things would be all right. It was ridiculous, insane, like a fully grown adult insisting in believing in Father Christmas when the magic had been dead for years, but a tiny part of her had clung on to the hope without her being aware of it.
In all she had had nine months with him, three of those as his wife, and it had been heaven on earth. She had been terrified that first day, as a relatively new employee of the large catering firm she worked for, when she had been called upon to liaise with the great man’s secretary about a formal dinner Blade was holding that weekend. She had ventured into the massive office block with the warnings and admonitions of the other staff ringing in her ears.
‘He’s incredibly difficult to please, so make sure you get every little detail down on paper.’
‘He never tolerates mistakes; go through things with his secretary at least twice to make sure you’ve got it right.’
‘Don’t question anything he asks for; his word is law.’ The list had been endless and had reduced her to a nervous wreck before she knocked on the door to his secretary’s office, which was more luxurious than her own little flat.
The room had been empty, and as she had stood in the midst of the ankle-deep carpeting, the hushed atmosphere reaching out to intimidate her still more, the catch to her case containing all the firm’s literature had broken and the whole mess of papers cascaded out on to the floor. She had been on her hands and knees retrieving them with frantic haste when a deep cool male voice from the doorway froze her in her tracks.
‘Miss Myatt? From Business Catering?’ She raised doomed eyes to the laconic unsmiling figure leaning lazily in relaxed scrutiny as her brain had died on her. ‘My secretary is indisposed today, Miss Myatt; I’m afraid you will have to talk to me.’
He was afraid? She had followed him weakly into the sumptuous office beyond the interconnecting door, setting the case down quickly, which caused it to spill open again in a repeat of the fiasco.
‘Miss Myatt, this is not your day …’ He moved round the desk to help, dark eyes filled with wicked amusement at her discomfiture.
Later he told her he’d fallen in love with her at that moment. ‘Like a bolt of lightning,’ he’d said seriously, his eyes following the smooth pure profile of her face topped by its mass of rich golden hair. She had been twenty-one and hopelessly naïve; he had been thirty-five and anything but.
He was successful, wildly handsome, with a string of much-publicised affairs credited to his account, but when he told her he had never been in love before she believed him. If it had been different he would have told her. He was that type of man. They had laughed together, loved together—and now it was over. Because Blade Forbes was an action man. Their honeymoon had been spent scuba diving and hang-gliding with long, warm nights of passionate love. He hardly knew what it was to be still. And she had loved that too along with everything else about him.
But how would such a man, hard, dynamic, with a zest for life that was unquenchable, cope with a wife who would be confined to a wheelchair by the time she was thirty and a hospital bed five years after that? Unable to move, breathe by herself?
The impersonal brutality of the stark medical facts came back to her as though she were reading them for the first time. The doctor’s report she had been shown hadn’t pulled any punches; indeed the clinical outline of the effects of the disease that was lying dormant in her body till it was matured enough to rear its head in a few years’ time had seemed almost savage on that first reading. But then, how many ways were there to impart news like that? She twisted in the darkness, a pale slender figure in the shaft of moonlight from the uncurtained window.
The cold, typewritten report was engraved in her memory word for word; she only had to close her eyes for the small black letters to be there in all their severity. Her heart pounded as she ran over them again in her mind, their message of a living death as hard to take now as when she had first read it.
She had been right to leave Blade, she had. She caught her breath on a sob of pain; she had had no choice. But, oh—she gazed round the dark room almost wildly—that didn’t make it any easier.
CHAPTER TWO
‘GOOD morning, Amy.’ She stood transfixed, halfway out of the kitchen door, as Blade sauntered across the small restaurant after shutting the front door quietly behind him.
‘What do you want?’ she breathed softly, her eyes drinking in the sight of him even as her logic repudiated the thrill that had shot through her whole body.
‘Lunch? If that’s not too outrageous? I did assume this was a working restaurant?’ The sarcasm was cold and biting and she blushed hotly as he seated himself at a table, his whole demeanour lazy and relaxed.
‘Why are you here?’ She moved to stand by his chair, her voice a low hiss.
‘I am here to eat,’ he said slowly, with exaggerated patience. ‘You do remember that I do all the things a normal man does? Some with more enjoyment than others,’ he finished silkily, his voice dark and rich and his eyes hard and mocking as she blushed hotly.
Thank goodness John would be away for another twenty-four hours yet; she had to get rid of Blade before that somehow.
‘You know exactly what I mean,’ she flashed back tightly. ‘We said all that could be said yesterday—’
‘We did not,’ he said sharply. ‘And please cut the naïve and stupid act because we both know that you are neither. We still have arrangements to make and matters to discuss. And my movements