Wedding Fever. Lee Wilkinson
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and family would automatically follow.
But she’d learnt a painful, mortifying lesson and learnt it well. Never, never again would she allow passion to rule her.
She had scarcely arrived home when a phone call from her father, enquiring how Martha was, threw her into a panic. Unused to lying, she found herself stammering, ‘Sh-she doesn’t seem too bad...’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’m not sure... Some kind of flu...’
‘Then you can cope? You don’t need me back?’
‘Of course not.’
‘How did you manage at such short notice?’
Doing her best to sound her normal self, Raine endeavoured to answer her father’s questions and allay his. concern.
‘Well, don’t try to go into work as well as taking care of Martha,’ he said eventually.
‘I’ll see how things are,’ she hedged.
‘And let me know if you need me.’
‘I’m sure I won’t. I’d much rather you stayed with Uncle Harry... Give him my love.’
‘Don’t go,’ Ralph said. ‘Nick’s waiting to speak to you...’
‘Raine...’
She heard the urgency in the deep voice as, trembling in every limb, she put the phone down.
Common sense told her it would have been better to speak to him, to pretend, for her pride’s sake, that the little incident had meant nothing to her. But she knew only too well that she would have been unable to hide her pain and misery, her humiliation and shame.
The next weeks were the worst of her life. Feeling as though she was slowly bleeding to death, Raine somehow struggled through the long days and even longer nights.
Martha, having been told only that Raine had needed an excuse to come home, looked at her with anxious eyes, but, never one to pry, said nothing.
Nick tried several times to ring her, but Raine refused to speak to him, and, recognising his bold scrawl, destroyed the letters he sent unopened.
She went back to the office and tried to lose herself in her work, but the thought of Nick was always at the back of her mind, and a black weight of emptiness lay on her spirit.
She missed him and longed for him constantly, even while she reminded herself that he was hard and callous and uncaring—that he’d not only used her but betrayed his fiancée.
Ralph was reluctant to leave his brother, and it was a month before he came home. Though Raine was still fighting a desolation of spirit so intense that she felt she would never recover, she was able to hide it better by then, and met her father’s shrewd eyes with relative composure.
When, apart from asking how Harry was, she avoided mentioning Boston, Ralph took the bull by the horns. ‘What did you and Nick quarrel about?’
‘What makes you think we quarrelled?’
‘Don’t take me for a fool, girl. I know you’ve been refusing to speak to him, and, though Martha did her best, she’s no better at lying than you are.’
When Raine said nothing, her father went on, ‘It must have been something pretty serious to send you running home like a scalded cat, but I’m sure—’
‘Please, Dad,’ she broke in desperately. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
Seeing her set face, the stubborn line of her mouth, he sighed. ‘Perhaps you’ll change your mind when Nick comes over.’
Feeling as though she’d been punched in the solar plexus, she croaked, ‘Over here? When is he coming?’
‘He said as soon as he can get away. Probably this weekend.’
CHAPTER TWO
AFTER a night spent tossing and turning, and with her mind finally made up, Raine rose early and pushed a few necessities into a case. That done, she wrote a note to her father saying that she was going up to London for a few days, then, while the household still slept, she quietly let herself out.
No doubt it was cowardly, but she couldn’t bear to stay and face Nick. Whatever it was that was bringing him here—a pricking conscience? Belated guilt at not having told her he had a fiancée?—she didn’t want to know.
Nothing he could say or do would wipe out the past or mitigate her shame. Seeing him again, hearing him apologise, would only add unbearably to her humiliation, strip away any remaining shreds of self-respect.
It was a dark, chilly November morning, with mist lying over the herbaceous borders and shrouding the trees, and, feeling like a fugitive, she hurried down to the old stable block that many years previously had been converted into garages.
The engine of her small car sprang into life immediately, and, its lights feeling the mist like the antennae of some insect, she drove down the drive and turned left towards the station.
Leaving the car in the station car park, she caught the early train into town. By breakfast-time she was booked into a quiet hotel near Green Park, confident that she could safely lose herself in London until Nick had given up and gone back to the States.
Over the next few days she did her level best not to think about him, but the memories refused to be banished completely.
Whenever she relaxed her guard she recalled the smile in his voice when he spoke to her, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled at her, the swift mental affinity which had made them enjoy each other’s company so much... And a great deal more she would rather have forgotten.
And would forget, she vowed. She wouldn’t let herself keep on recalling the past, thinking of a man who belonged to another woman. A man who had only wanted to use her.
Knowing it would drive her mad to sit in her room, she forced herself to go out each day—walking, window-shopping, visiting museums and art galleries, passing the time somehow, anyhow, until she could go home.
On the fifth day of her self-imposed exile her phone call to White Ladies shook her, making her drop the receiver as though it were red-hot when Nick’s deep voice answered.
Though she had no appetite, she made herself eat, and at night, refusing to let herself brood, she went to concerts, to the opera and to a couple of the long-running shows.
Leaving the theatre on Friday night, after seeing a musical, she found that it was raining. Rather then just stand being jostled by the crowd, she had started to walk down Shaftesbury Avenue, keeping her eye open for a taxi, when she cannoned into a tall, slimly built man hurrying the opposite way.
The impact made her step back and drop her clutch-bag, which opened, spilling its contents all over the wet pavement.
‘I’m so sorry,’ the well-dressed stranger apologised, and, stooping, he began to gather up her belongings and drop them back into her bag.
Thanking him, she admitted, ‘It was my fault. I was trying to find a taxi and not looking where I was going.’ As she spoke she put weight on her right foot and winced.
‘Is there something wrong?’ he asked, his voice clear, with a distinctly upper-class accent.
‘I’ve just stepped awkwardly and turned my ankle. It’s nothing serious.’
‘Can you walk?’
‘Oh, yes.’ She took a step to prove it, and winced again.
His look held concern. ‘Perhaps I’d better give you a lift. My car’s quite close.’
When she hesitated, he added, ‘You won’t stand