know,’ he said. ‘I know. But it backfired on me. Big time. You had this image of me, this expectation. What was I to say? Hey, big surprise, Willow, you thought you were getting the CEO of a seriously profitable company…now come and see what I really do.’
‘I wish you had.’ Her voice wavered and she took another tiny sip of brandy.
‘I’m sorry, Willow. I made a mess of it and I’m truly sorry.’
‘So am I,’ she said. ‘I was ready to trust you with the rest of my life…’
Truth. She demanded it, but so did he. ‘Only until you had a better offer,’ he said, but very gently.
‘It wasn’t that simple.’
‘No, my love, it never is.’
‘I wish you’d told me. Right at the beginning. Brought me here.’
Mike thought about how it would have been with Willow in his arms and nothing between them and the stars but a sheet of glass. ‘So do I.’
‘You should have trusted me.’ And she pulled her feet away.
He felt utterly sickened by the mess he’d made of her life and of his. ‘I made assumptions about you that were wrong. Totally wrong. Cal warned me. He saw…but I thought you were just marking time at your job until you found the right man to marry.’ She looked up from the pale golden spirit pooled in the bottom of her glass and stared at him. ‘Someone with the right name, or the right background. Someone from your own circle.’
‘Oh, right.’ She was seriously offended. ‘And I was busy congratulating myself only yesterday that you weren’t interested in airheads. It never occurred to me that you saw me as one.’
‘I don’t. You aren’t. Except…’
Her eyebrows rose a notch. ‘Except?’ The slow, quiet manner in which she repeated the word did not leave him with the impression that she was calm about any exception. Far from it. ‘You’ve started, Mike. Please finish. I can’t wait to find out exactly how I’ve convinced you that I have nothing between my ears but sawdust.’
He hadn’t said that. He didn’t think it. They both knew it. But there was no retreat. ‘Whenever I came looking for you in the office, you always seemed to be covering some charity fashion show, or the ladies’ lunch club, or the local point-to-point meeting…’ he was remembering exactly how he’d found her at a point-to-point meeting, champagne in one hand, a bunch of Hooray Henrys hanging on her every word ‘…all that social, county stuff. It’s your world.’
‘What if it is? I got sent to cover those events because people knew me, or least they knew my mother, they trust me, they talk to me because they’ve known me since I was in my cradle. I’ve also spent time out on the street with runaway kids, covered life in a woman’s refuge, Saturday night in casualty. Maybe you were busy those days?’ She didn’t wait for him to answer. ‘I don’t just do fluff.’
‘Valentine’s Day wasn’t fluff?’
She flushed angrily. ‘Damn it, Mike, that’s seasonal fun. I didn’t believe you when you said you never read the paper. Clearly I should have taken that statement seriously.’
‘It wasn’t… I didn’t… I thought if I stuck to administration, distanced myself, I wouldn’t get drawn in…’ It was hopeless. How could she begin to understand? ‘I wouldn’t be the first to fall for the siren song of family tradition. It’s hard to resist when everyone thinks you’re just being stubborn. That you’ll come round. When your mother calls and says, “Please…I need you to do this for me…”’ He looked at her, hoping that she could read his sincerity in his eyes. ‘When there’s no one else.’
‘Dear God, Mike, you were going to be running the thing for the rest of your life if you’d married me. That is what you’re saying? You were going to sacrifice the life you wanted—not for family tradition, or your mother, but for me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Idiot!’
‘Cal didn’t think so. He—’
‘I’m not interested in what your best man thinks! I want to know why you didn’t tell me!’
‘I was working on it. I was going to bring you here, put the whole thing on the line, tell you everything. Then my father gave us the house and I could see how much you loved it, how much you wanted it—’ Her explosive interjection suggested otherwise. ‘Except for the taps,’ he said.
‘This just gets worse.’
He found a wry smile from somewhere. ‘I didn’t believe that was possible.’
‘Trust me, it is. I hated that house, Mike.’
‘Oh, come on, you don’t have to pretend. I remember every moment of that day. You were over the moon with excitement. You said, “I can’t believe it. This is more than I can take in. I don’t know what to say. I’m overwhelmed.”’ He wickedly imitated the thrilled voice that she’d used to cover her anguish. ‘Every one of your words, believe me, is indelibly imprinted on my mind.’
‘Then maybe you should have spent a little less time working on your impersonation of me and a little more time thinking about what the words were actually telling you.’
‘I saw you, Willow. And let’s face it, you’d have changed the taps in a second—’
‘The taps. That dear little niche in the hall. The reproduction Adam fireplace, the carriage lamps outside… You’re missing the point here. These are details. It wasn’t you I was running away from. It was that house and everything it stood for. I am not a domesticated woman, and that house…well, it was right out of a 1950s Doris Day movie.’
‘You were pretending? But why?’
She put down her glass. She didn’t need brandy, she needed Mike to see where she was coming from.
‘Your father had just given us half-a-million-pounds-worth of house, Mike. Was I supposed to say, Actually, Mr Armstrong, I know you mean well but you’ve got lousy taste and I wouldn’t live in this house if you paid me? I was brought up to be polite. To say thank you when someone gives you anything, even a lousy rotten juicer that makes you feel as if you’ve surrendered the life you dreamed of and are beginning to live your worst nightmare.’
He stared at her, for a moment totally lost for words. ‘The juicer, too?’ He wanted to laugh. Fortunately, he didn’t.
‘How could you have done that to me? Put that burden on me? No wonder you’ve seemed distant. You were distant. You were a million miles from me.’ She struggled out of the soft embrace of the sofa, stuffing her feet into her shoes. She had to get out of there, go somewhere she could have the howling, miserable weeping fit that she’d been putting off since Saturday. ‘I don’t blame you for taking off the way you did. You must have hated me…’ Her voice broke and he caught her, wrapped his arms around her, pulled her back to hold her close.
‘Sweetheart, please. I don’t hate you. I could never hate you.’
She wouldn’t surrender, but remained stiff and unyielding, her back to
