so wanted to belong here with him, but this house wasn’t her home and Max wasn’t her husband.
His heart belonged to someone else.
She hated the fact she was jealous of a ghost, and not just because Jemima had been beautiful and talented, but because Max loved her with a fierceness she could barely comprehend.
How could she ever compete with that?
The stone-cold truth was: she couldn’t.
And she couldn’t stay here a moment longer either.
* * *
After carefully folding her clothes into her suitcase, she phoned Sarah to ask whether she could sleep on her couch again, just until she’d moved into the flat that Amber’s cousin had promised to let to her.
‘Sure, you’d be welcome to stay with us again,’ Sarah said, after finally coaxing out the reason for her needing a place to escape to so soon after moving into Max’s house. ‘But you might want to try Anna. She’s going to be away in the States for a couple of weeks from tomorrow and I bet she’d love you to housesit for her.’
One phone call to their friend Anna later and she had a new place to live for the next couple of weeks. So that was her accommodation sorted. Now it was just the small matter of finding a new job.
She’d received an email last week from one of the firms that she’d sent a job application to, offering her an interview, but hadn’t had time to respond to it, being so busy keeping the business afloat while Max was in Manchester. After firing off an email accepting an interview for the Tuesday of that week, she turned her thoughts to her current job.
Even though she was angry and upset with Max, there was no way she was just going to abandon the business without finding someone to take over the role she’d carved out for herself. Max might not want her around, but he was still going to need a PA. The meeting he had with a large corporation in Ireland later this week was an exciting prospect and if he managed to land their business he was going to need to hire more staff, pronto.
So this week it looked as if she was going to be both interviewer and interviewee.
The thought of it both exhausted and saddened her.
But she’d made her bed when she’d shared hers with Max, and now she was going to have to lie in it.
MAX HAD THOUGHT he was okay with the decision to walk away from a relationship with Cara, but his subconscious seemed to have other ideas when he woke up in a cold sweat for the third day running after dreaming that Cara was locked in the house whilst it burnt to the ground and he couldn’t find any way to get her out.
Even after he’d been up for a while and looked through his emails, he still couldn’t get rid of the haunting image of Cara’s face contorted with terror as the flames licked around her. Despite the rational part of his brain telling him it wasn’t real, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d failed her.
Because, of course, he had, he finally accepted, as he sat down to eat his breakfast in the hotel restaurant before his meeting. She’d laid herself bare for him, both figuratively and literally, and he’d abused her trust by treating her as if she meant nothing to him.
Which wasn’t the case at all.
He sighed and rubbed a hand over his tired eyes. The last thing he should be doing right now was worrying about how he’d treated Cara when he was about to walk into one of the biggest corporations in Ireland and convince them to give him their business. This was exactly what he’d feared would happen when he’d first agreed to let her work for him—that the business might suffer. Though, to be fair to Cara, this mess was of his own making.
Feeling his phone vibrate, he lifted it out of his pocket and tapped on the icon to open his text messages. It was from Cara.
With his pulse thumping hard in his throat, he read what she’d written. It simply said:
Good luck today. I’ll be thinking of you.
A heavy pressure built in his chest as he read the words through for a second time.
She was thinking about him.
Those few simple words undid something in him and a wave of pure anguish crashed through his body, stealing his breath and making his vision blur. Despite how he’d treated her, she was still looking out for him.
She wanted him to know that he wasn’t alone.
That was so like Cara. She was such a good person: selfless and kind, but also brave and honourable. Jemima would have loved her.
Taking a deep breath, he mentally pulled himself together. Now was not the time to lose the plot. He had some serious business to attend to and he wasn’t about to let all the work that he and Cara had put into making this opportunity happen go to waste.
* * *
Fourteen hours later Max flopped onto his hotel bed, totally exhausted after spending the whole day selling himself to the prospective clients, then taking them out for a celebratory dinner to mark their partnership when they signed on the dotted line to buy his company’s services.
He’d done it; he’d closed the deal—and a very profitable deal it was, too—which meant he could now comfortably grow the business and hire a team of people to work for him.
His life was moving on.
A strong urge to call Cara and let her know he’d been successful had him sitting up and reaching for his phone, but he stopped himself from tapping on her name at the last second. He couldn’t call her this late at night without it meaning something.
Frustration rattled through him, swiftly followed by such an intense wave of despondency it took his breath away. He needed to talk to someone. Right now.
Scrolling through his contacts, he found the name he wanted and pressed call, his hands twitching with impatience as he listened to the long drones of the dialling tone.
‘Max? Is everything okay?’ said a sleepy voice on the other end of the line.
‘Hi, Poppy, sorry—I forgot it’d be so late where you are,’ he lied.
‘No problem,’ his friend replied, her voice strained as if she was struggling to sit up in bed. ‘What’s up? Is everything okay?’
‘Yes. Fine. Everything’s fine. I won a pivotal contract for the business today so I’m really happy,’ he said, acutely aware of how flat his voice sounded despite his best efforts to sound upbeat.
Apparently it didn’t fool Poppy either. ‘You don’t sound really happy, Max. Are you sure there isn’t something else bothering you?’
His friend was too astute for her own good. But then she’d seen him at his lowest after Jemima died and had taken many a late night call from him throughout that dark time. He hadn’t called her in a while though, so it wasn’t entirely surprising that she thought something was wrong now.
‘Er—’
