‘This was a mistake. An awful mistake that should never have happened and now I’d really like it if you went. Please.’
He must have heard the finality in her voice, must have sensed her weariness or something else, because for a long time he just looked at her. Then he nodded. ‘OK, fine,’ he said with a frown. ‘I’ll call you in the morning.’
And with that, he turned on his heel, opened the door and left.
* * *
Lily was avoiding him. That was the only explanation for it.
Kit sat at his desk in his office in the penthouse apartment of his London flagship hotel and the place he called home, and glowered at his phone, which might have been broken for all the use it had been so far.
All morning he’d been trying to get hold of her, but infuriatingly her home landline just rang and rang before the answer machine eventually kicked in, and her mobile went straight to voicemail. The brief email he’d fired off asking her to call him had also gone annoyingly unanswered.
Rubbing a hand along his jaw, Kit reflected back to the way things had ended last night and thought he could sort of understand why Lily might not want to speak to him. He’d had the time of his life and she hadn’t. She must have been disappointed. Frustrated. Exhausted. It had sounded as if she’d had a busy night even before he’d shown up, and what with such an anticlimax perhaps everything had simply got too much.
In his albeit out-of-date experience, Lily’s way of dealing with an emotional overload had always been to shut down, so actually the way she’d responded hadn’t been all that unusual.
Nor had the way he’d responded to her. As he’d done so often in the past, he’d given her the space he thought she needed and left her to it, even though he hadn’t really wanted to.
But that wasn’t the right way to play it. With hindsight it probably never had been. It was entirely possible that the fact that she’d always withdrawn whenever things had got too heavy going and he’d basically let her, under the guise of giving her space, was how things had got so bad so quickly between them.
He should have been firmer all those years ago and insisted that they face things together, however hard. Lily had been right when she’d said that they’d neither talked nor listened; they hadn’t.
Well, whatever had happened in the past, things were going to be different now, he thought, clicking on his inbox for the dozenth time in as many minutes to see if she’d replied. Now he was going to insist on both talking and listening, and that was why her going off grid was so frustrating.
Because apart from deciding that their inability to communicate needed to be fixed, over the course of the night he’d been struck by a truckload of realisations, reached a dozen new conclusions and had come up with a whole load of questions, some of which he wouldn’t mind putting to her.
Such as, what had Lily meant by saying that if he’d asked she might have given him an apology for what she’d done? Why had she let him think that she was going out with someone when she wasn’t? And why the abrupt change in her demeanour in the minutes before he left? One minute she’d been all warm and soft and then next she’d gone all cold and frigid on him, and he wanted to know why.
Mainly, though, he’d realised that whatever he felt for her, and whatever she felt for him, they weren’t over. Not by a long shot.
Setting his jaw, Kit reached for the phone again and was about to hit the redial button when he paused as a thought occurred to him. Despite it being a public holiday, maybe Lily was at work. Maybe that was why there was no answer from home. Maybe she was on the tube and her mobile out of range of a signal. Maybe she was in a meeting. It could be that she wasn’t avoiding him. Merely busy.
Filling with renewed resolve, he looked up her company’s details then punched the number into his phone and sat back to wait while it rang. His stomach churned and his mouth went dry, but that was probably down to the fact that it had been a while since his last coffee and he’d been too preoccupied to bother with breakfast.
‘MMS, good morning.’
‘Zoe?’ he said, recognising the voice of his former sister-in-law.
‘Yes. How can I help?’
‘It’s Kit.’
There was a long silence. Then a faint, ‘Oh.’
‘How are you?’
‘Fine. Yes. Good... Kind of surprised to hear from you, to be honest.’
‘It’s been a while.’
‘You can say that again. How are you?’
‘Fine. Happy New Year.’
‘You too.’ She paused. ‘So...were you after Lily?’
‘Is she there?’
‘No. But then I’m at home. The office is closed today so your call was diverted to my mobile.’
‘Right.’ He frowned. That blew his theory that Lily was at work out of the water. Of course she wasn’t. Who was? It was New Year’s Day. So was she avoiding him after all?
‘Is there a problem or something?’ asked Zoe and he snapped back to the conversation.
‘She’s not answering either of her phones or replying to emails.’
‘No, well, she wouldn’t be.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she’s on a plane.’
Kit frowned, a bit taken aback. A plane? She hadn’t mentioned anything about going away. Not that she’d been under any obligation to, but still... ‘When will she be back?’
‘Not for a couple of weeks.’
A couple of weeks? He wasn’t sure he could wait that long. Patience had never been his strong point—probably one more contributory factor to the breakdown of their marriage—and right now it was wearing increasingly thin.
‘Right. I see,’ he said, switching to his agenda with a couple of clicks and seeing that there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be moved or dealt with by someone else for a couple of weeks. ‘Where is she?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, for one thing, she’s on a job and the work she’s doing requires a certain degree of anonymity and a low profile.’
‘And for another?’
‘And for another I don’t think she’d thank me if I told you where she was. Do you really think she wants to see you after everything?’
Kit set his jaw and took a deep breath. ‘She was happy enough to see me last night.’ Which was a slight stretch of the truth, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
There was a pause. ‘Last night?’
‘We
