‘Oh, I was just on my way across the hall after seeing Miss Gordon when your young man rang,’ Mrs Tate-Collins chimed in before Taylor could speak, turning to him as she added, ‘That’s the lady who lives on this floor, you know, the poor thing. She had a fall the other day and it has shaken her up a little, so I took her a drop of soup and a roll to save her having to think about supper. She is getting on a bit, bless her.’
Marsha saw Taylor gaze into the lined face of the small wizened woman in front of him, who looked ninety if a day, but his voice was perfectly serious when he said, ‘That was kind of you, Mrs Tate-Collins.’
‘Shall we go?’ It was clear Taylor hadn’t got round to mentioning their marital status, which suited her just fine, and she was anxious to get him out of the door before her landlady started another cosy chat. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Tate-Collins,’ she added briskly.
‘Oh, goodbye, dear.’
It was a little surprised, but in view of the fact Marsha had gripped Taylor’s arm with one hand and opened the front door with the other, virtually pushing him on to the top step, she really couldn’t blame her landlady.
‘She’ll think you can’t wait to have your wicked way with me.’ Once they had descended the eight steps and were on the pavement Taylor raised an amused eyebrow at her.
Up to this moment she had successfully fought acknowledging how drop-dead gorgeous he looked, but as her heart missed a couple of beats she said stiffly, ‘Mrs Tate-Collins would never think anything so vulgar.’
‘Really? I thought she had a little twinkle in her eye.’
Any female, whatever her age, would have a twinkle in her eye when she looked at Taylor. That was the effect he had on the whole of womankind. ‘I think not,’ she said crisply. ‘And before we move from here I want to make it perfectly plain that I have agreed to this meeting under sufferance, and only because I want the divorce to go through with the minimum of disruption.’
Taylor surveyed her silently, his customary stern expression now in place. ‘Feel better now you’ve got that off your chest?’ he asked mildly after a very long moment.
Marsha shrugged. ‘I just wanted you to know, that’s all,’ she said, wondering why she suddenly felt like a recalcitrant schoolgirl.
‘Believe me, Fuzz, I was never in any doubt,’ he said drily. ‘You are nothing if not straightforward.’
Which was more than could be said for him. She hadn’t spoken, but the words must have been plain to read on her face because he next said, even more drily, ‘Especially when you say nothing at all.’
‘So, in view of that, why are we doing this?’ she asked a touch bewilderedly. He hadn’t contacted her in almost eighteen months, so why now, with the divorce just weeks away?
‘Because it’s time.’
He had always been good at those—the cryptic one-liners. Right from when she had first met him she had known he was an enigma, but she had thought she’d found the key when he’d asked her to marry him just weeks after they had first been introduced at a dinner party by a mutual friend. Love. She had mistakenly imagined he loved her as she loved him—had loved him, she corrected immediately. Had.
The warm evening was redolent with the faint smells of cooking from various open windows, along with the strains of a popular chart hit and bursts of laughter from the house next door. Marsha watched Taylor wrinkle his aquiline nose. ‘Shall we go?’ he asked quietly, his eyes tight on her face.
She would have liked to have said no and turned on her heel, but it really wasn’t an option. She nodded, allowing him to take her arm as they walked a few steps to where his Aston Martin was parked. He had changed the model in the last eighteen months, she noted silently, although the other car had only been six months old when she had left him. This one was sleek and dark and dangerous—very much like Taylor.
He opened the passenger door for her, and she slid into the expensive interior with a gracefulness she was pleased about, considering the way her stomach was jumping and her legs were trembling. That was the trouble with Taylor, she thought irritably. However much she tried to prepare herself, he always got under her skin.
Once he had joined her in the car, she steeled herself to glance at him as though his closeness bothered her not at all. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Surprise.’ He didn’t look at her, starting the engine and then manoeuvring the powerful car out of the close confines of the parking space. Her eyes fell on the thick gold ring on the third finger of his left hand, and again her heart lurched. Did he wear his wedding band all the time, or had he donned it specially for this evening? she asked herself, before answering in the next breath, what did it matter anyway? The ring was just an item of jewellery if the commitment it was meant to signify wasn’t there. Her own hands had been ringless from the moment she had walked out of their house and out of Taylor’s life.
The car purred along the busy London streets, passing numerous pubs and wine bars where folk were sitting outside drinking or eating in the dying sunshine. In the interim between leaving university and meeting Taylor Marsha had often enjoyed summer evenings with friends in this way, but since the breakdown of her marriage she hadn’t wanted to go back to the old crowd. She still saw one or two of them occasionally, but it wasn’t the same—not for her. They were still all relatively fancy-free and into having a good time, but she felt she had passed that stage and couldn’t go back—certainly not while she was still legally a married woman anyway. Stupid, maybe, she admitted a trifle bitterly, considering the way Taylor had behaved, but she couldn’t help it.
She glanced down at her hands, which were tight fists in her lap, and forced her fingers to relax, uncurling them one by one as she breathed deeply and willed her pulse into a steady beat. ‘I don’t like surprises,’ she said clearly, as though Taylor had just spoken that moment rather than all of ten minutes ago. Ten minutes of ragged vibrating silence.
She kept her gaze on the windscreen as the tawny eyes flashed over her tight profile before returning to the road ahead. ‘Shame,’ he drawled smoothly.
‘So, where are we going?’ And then, as the car made another turning, she knew. He was taking her home! No, not home—home was now her tiny sanctuary in West Kensington. ‘Stop the car please, Taylor,’ she said as evenly as she could.
‘Why?’
His tone was so innocent she knew she was right. ‘Because you told me you were taking me out to dinner,’ she said stonily.
‘I am.’ He gestured with one hand at the immaculate dinner suit he was wearing.
‘Taylor!’ She paused, warning herself to take care not to lose her temper and give him the satisfaction of winning. ‘I recognise where we are,’ she said more calmly. ‘This is a stone’s throw from Harrow.’
He nodded, totally unrepentant. ‘That’s right, and Hannah has been like a dog with two tails knowing you were dropping by tonight.’
Dropping by? Was the man mad? And then the thought of the buxom, middle-aged housekeeper who had mothered her from the first moment she had been introduced to her melted Marsha enough for a lump to come into her throat. She bit down on the emotion, saying, ‘I have no intention of going to your home.’
‘Our home,
