that I’m good enough for you now you’re about to embark on this wonderful jet-setting career of yours. If I had been an…accountant, or…an economist, or someone more serious, then you wouldn’t be standing there, airbrushing me out of your life as though I’d never existed!’
‘What do you want me to say, Megan?’ He finally snapped, furious that she was making this already difficult situation even more difficult by demanding answers to hypothetical speculations. ‘That I can’t see myself in a permanent situation with someone who will probably still be fooling around and singing karaoke when she’s thirty-five?’
If he had extracted a whip from his back pocket and slashed it across her face it couldn’t have hurt more, and she stared at him mutely.
‘I apologise,’ he said brusquely. ‘That remark was entirely uncalled for. Why can’t you just accept that there are limitations to this relationship and always have been?’
‘You never mentioned anything about limitations before. You let me give you my undivided love and you never said a word about me not fitting the bill.’
‘Nor did I ever speak to you about a future for us.’
‘No,’ Megan agreed quietly. ‘No, you never did, did you?’
Alessandro steeled himself against the accusatory look in her big blue eyes. ‘I assumed you were aware of the differences between us as well as I was—assumed you knew that my intention was never to remain in Scotland, playing happy families in a cottage somewhere in the middle of nowhere.’
‘I assumed you cared about me.’
‘We had fun, Megan.’ He spun round and stared out of the grimy window to the uninspiring view two floors down. In the rapidly gathering dark the strip of shops opposite promised fish and chips, an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet every lunchtime, a newsagent and that was about it—because the other three shops were boarded up.
‘Fun?’
Alessandro ignored the bitterness that had crept into her voice. When he had first made love to her, had discovered that she was a virgin, he had felt a twinge of discomfort. In retrospect, maybe he should have walked away at that point, rather than allowing her to invest everything into him, but he had been weak and—face it—unable to resist her. He was now paying the price for that weakness.
‘You’re better off without me,’ he said roughly, as he continued to stare outside. ‘You have all you need right here. You’ll teach at that school of yours, only a short distance away from all your family, and in due course you’ll find a guy who will be content with the future you have mapped out.’
Megan had thought that the future she had mapped out for herself had included him!
‘Yes,’ she said dully. He wasn’t even looking at her. He had already written her out of his life and was ready to move on. ‘Why did you make love with me just now if you intended to get rid of me?’ she asked. ‘Was it a one-last-time session for poor old Megan before you sent her on her way?’
Alessandro spun round, but he didn’t make a move towards her. ‘It was…a…mistake…’ And never again would he allow his emotions to control his behaviour.
He gripped the window sill against which he was leaning and reminded himself that, however much she was hurting now, she was still a kid and would bounce back in no time at all. She would even thank him eventually for walking away from her—would realise in time to come that they were worlds apart and whatever they had had would never have stayed the course of time. It was a reassuring thought.
Megan couldn’t bear to look at him. She stood up, staring at the ground as though searching for divine inspiration.
‘I think I’m going to leave now,’ she said, addressing her feet. ‘I’ll just check the bedroom. See if there’s anything of mine that I should take with me.’
He didn’t try to stop her rooting through his stuff. The lack of anything belonging to her now seemed ominous proof of her impermanence in his life. He had never encouraged her to leave any of her things at his place. Sure, she’s forgotten odd bits and pieces now and again, like the clothes she was currently standing in, but he’d always returned them.
The only things she had insisted on leaving were some of her CDs. She was voracious when it came to modern music, whereas he preferred more chilled sounds. Easy listening to the point of coma, she had teased him. Yet another example of those differences between them, which she had stupidly failed to spot but which he had probably noted and lodged away in his mind somewhere, to be brought out later and used in evidence against her.
Without looking in his direction, she quietly gathered her CDs and stuffed them in a plastic bag.
‘I think that’s about everything.’ Some CDs, a toothbrush, some moisture cream, some underwear. Precious little. ‘Good luck with the new job and the new life, Alessandro. I really hope it lives up to expectations and I’m sorry about the mess from the cake. You’ll have to get rid of that yourself.’
Alessandro nodded. He didn’t say anything because there was nothing left to say, and for the first time in his life he didn’t trust himself to speak.
Megan turned away, and was half-disappointed, half-relieved when he didn’t follow her. There was an emptiness growing inside her, and her throat felt horribly dry and tight, but there would be time enough to cry. Once she was back in her little room at college. Just one last look, though. Before she left for good. But when she turned around, it was to find that he was staring out of the window with his back to her.
CHAPTER ONE
MEGAN stooped down so that she was on the same level as the six-year-old, brown-haired, blue-eyed boy in front of her. Face of an angel, but spoiled rotten. She had seen many versions of this child over the past two years, since she had been working in London. It seemed to be particularly predominant at private schools, where children were lavished with all that money could buy but often starved of the things that money couldn’t.
‘Okay, Dominic. Here’s the deal. The show’s about to start, the mummies and daddies are all out there waiting, and the Nativity play just isn’t going to be the same without you in it.’
‘I don’t want to be a tree! I hate the costume, Miss Reynolds, and if you force me then I’m going to tell my mummy, and you’ll be in big trouble. My mummy’s a lawyer, and she can put people into prison!’ he ended, with folded arms and a note of irrefutable triumph in his voice.
Megan clung to her patience with immense difficulty. It had been a mad week. Getting six-year-old children to learn and memorise their lines had proved to be a Herculean feat, and the last thing she needed on the day before school broke up was a badly behaved brat refusing to be a tree.
‘You’re a very important tree,’ she said gently. ‘Very important. The manger wouldn’t be a manger without a very important tree next to it!’ She looked at her watch and mentally tried to calculate how much time she had to convince this tree to take his leading role on stage—a role which involved nothing more strenuous than waving his arms and swaying. She had only been at this particular school for a term, but she had already sussed the difficult ones, and had cleverly steered them away from any roles that involved speech.
‘I want my mummy. She’ll tell you that I can be whatever I want to be! And I want to be a donkey.’
