taken a few weeks’ leave.’
Leave? He turned to Lucy, his office manager. ‘Since when?’
‘Yesterday afternoon. She flew down to Kent in the morning and picked up the guys from their golf tournament but she wasn’t feeling too good after lunch,’ she said, without looking up from her VDU. ‘She hasn’t been looking that great for a few days.’
‘She’s sick?’ His heart seized at the thought.
She shrugged. ‘She appears to have picked something up. The punters take exception to the pilot using the sick bags so I told her to take a few days off to get over it.’ Lucy finally sat back, looked up. ‘She hasn’t taken more than the odd day off since last summer so she decided to make it a proper break.’
‘As opposed to an improper one?’
‘Let’s hope she gets that lucky.’
He bit down hard in an effort to hold in the response that immediately leapt to his lips. ‘Why didn’t you run this by me?’
‘You’ve been in Ireland for the last three days.’
‘You’ve heard of email, text, the phone?’
‘I’ve heard you tell me not to bother you with the minor details,’ she reminded him. ‘If you want me to call and ask you to approve time off for someone who never takes a day off sick, who hasn’t had a holiday in nearly a year, then you need to start looking for a new office manager.’
‘What? No...’ Lucy might be a total grouch but he couldn’t run the office without her. ‘No, of course not, it’s just that...’ It was just that he’d finally geared up the courage to face Miranda, talk to her. ‘She’s...that is everyone...is supposed to give a month’s notice before taking time off.’
‘She could have taken a week’s sick leave,’ she pointed out, clearly not impressed with his people skills.
‘I know. I didn’t mean...’
He turned to the gallery of Goldfinch pilots on the office wall. Miranda looked back at him from her place in the top row, her calm, confident smile never failing to instil confidence in her passengers and guilt, sitting like a lump of lead in his chest, exploded.
He’d broken every rule in the book. He’d lost control, taken advantage of her kindness, behaved in a way that he would have utterly condemned in anyone else.
He’d been a wreck and Miranda’s sweet tenderness had been a healing balm, a gift that he could never repay. Her scent, the softness of her skin, her hair falling from its pins and tumbling over his skin, the life-giving sweetness of her mouth...
Every time he thought about her he was swamped with the memory of that night. Waking with her spooned against his body, the curve of her neck just inches from his lips. Fighting the temptation to rouse her with a kiss and take more of her precious warmth.
Not moving because he knew what he would see in those tender green and gold eyes.
Understanding, pity, a smile that let him off the hook and the awkwardness of a morning after that neither of them knew how to deal with.
Not moving, because the moment she woke it would be over.
He’d drifted back into the kind of sleep that had eluded him for more than a year and the next time he woke, hours later, it was to a note propped against a cold mug of tea.
I’m taking the new aircraft back to base. Take my two-seater, or the train runs hourly at seven minutes past.
See you Monday.
M.
Bright and businesslike, a forget-it-and-move-on message. He couldn’t leave it like that and he couldn’t wait for the train.
He’d flown her little aircraft back to base, his need to see her, reassure her, overriding the PTSD he’d been experiencing since Rachel’s crash. In the darkness of that night there had been no thought of protection and he needed her to know that she was safe, but by the time he touched down no one was answering at her flat and her car was gone.
She must have anticipated the possibility of him turning up at her door, tongue-tied, not knowing what to say and chosen to put some distance between them so that she could face him in the office on Monday morning as if nothing had happened.
It was, undoubtedly, the sensible thing to do and, maybe, if he’d been there on Monday, a shared look would have been enough to get them past that first awkward moment, but on Sunday night the call had come from Cyprus. His local partner had been hurt in a car crash and he’d had to fly out to take control.
He’d told himself that he would call her; he’d picked up the phone a dozen times and then put it down again. Unable to see her face, read her body language, have a clue what she was thinking, he had no idea what to say. Men were from Mars...
His father relied on flowers to cover the word gap and he’d got as far as logging onto an online florist but stalled at the first hurdle when he was invited to choose an occasion. Birthday, anniversary, every cause for celebration you could imagine. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t an option that would cover this particular scenario.
And what flowers?
His father had been lucky—all it took was a tired bunch of chrysanthemums from the garage forecourt to provoke an eye roll, a shake of the head and a smile from his mother.
His own experience of married life suggested that nothing less than long-stemmed red roses would do if you were grovelling. No power on earth would induce him to send them to Miranda.
She deserved more. Much more. She deserved to hear him say the words. If only he could work out what they were.
He’d arrived back from Cyprus determined to clear the air but she was in the Gulf picking up a couple of mares that were booked for a visit to stud. Then he was in France and so it had gone on. Maybe it was coincidence, but if someone had arranged their schedules to keep them apart they couldn’t have done a better job.
Miranda couldn’t change his schedule, but she could swap her own around. Clearly she needed space and he’d had to allow her that.
Until today.
He’d flown back from Ireland determined that, no matter what, he’d talk to her. He still could.
‘I’ll stop by on the way home and take her some grapes,’ he said. It was okay to be concerned about someone you’d known, worked with for years. And grapes didn’t have the dangerously emotive subtext of flowers. Red, black, white—they were just grapes.
‘You’ll have a wasted journey. She checked the times of the trains to London before she left and then called her sister to let her know what time she’d be arriving.’
‘Which sister?’
‘Portia was on the box covering the post-awards parties, she’d have flown home if it was Immi, so it must be the one with the Royal Ballet.’
‘Posy. Did she say how long she’d be away?’
‘She
