stared out of the window, her bright blue eyelids unblinking.
Nick sighed and fiddled with the soldering iron sitting on the bench.
‘Yeah. Thanks for nothing, babe.’
Adele was working on her laptop when Nick came to find her. She was still all jittery after their confrontation in the hall. She’d almost faltered—almost. But in the end she’d managed to pull herself together and Nick would never know how close she’d come to soothing his anger away with a kiss.
She tried to pretend she wasn’t aware of him standing in the doorway of the little box room they used as a study.
‘I’m busy, Nick,’ she said eventually, without looking round.
‘We’ve got to talk some time.’
She shrugged and tried to concentrate on the words on the screen. None of them seemed to be recognisable as English any more. She read a sentence for the third time then gave up.
‘OK. We’ll talk.’ She swivelled round in her chair and folded her arms. ‘Fire away.’
Nick shook his head. ‘Not like this. Let’s get onto neutral territory. How about I take you out to lunch?’
Once upon a time, she’d loved spending long, lazy Sunday lunches with Nick. They’d sit outside in the pub garden in summer and huddle up to the fire inside in winter. She didn’t want to be reminded of happier days, but he was right. They had to talk at some point and she might as well get it out of the way.
‘OK, but you’re paying.’
‘Of course.’
Nick flashed his dimples and Adele had the feeling she was agreeing to a whole heap of trouble.
‘What’s this all about, then, Nick?’
They’d sat through most of the main course talking about nothing. Whether that was a good thing or not, she wasn’t sure. All she knew was that the small talk was getting to her and she had to know one way or the other. Her heart broke into a trot at the thought of the ‘D’ word that might come out of his mouth. Bizarrely, it was the last word she wanted to hear, despite the fact it had been the one at the forefront of her mind since last summer.
Nick played with a roast potato on his plate.
‘It’s Mum’s sixty-fifth birthday this year.’
Adele nodded. ‘I know.’ Then she frowned.
What was he up to? She leaned forward and tried to catch his gaze. He seemed to be absorbed in shepherding all his peas into a little pile with his knife.
‘How is Maggie?’
She’d been a bit of a coward on that front after Nick had left. Everyone knew she was useless at keeping up with correspondence and she’d hidden behind that as an excuse to keep contact with Nick’s family to a minimum. Yes, she’d dashed off the odd email and sent a Christmas card, but she’d avoided the messages on the answering machine, pretending to herself she was too busy with her work. In the last few months, everything had gone a little quiet.
The truth was, she was just plain scared. Scared, now she and Nick were no longer a couple, that maybe his mother and sisters would go cold on her. Just as her own parents had. She’d only been part of the family by default, after all. It had been easier to avoid anything deep than risk finding out her fears had some foundation.
He poked the pile of peas with his knife and sent them scattering. ‘You know Mum…’
Adele tried not to let the shame show on her face. She’d been a coward, plain and simple.
She knew Nick’s mother better than she knew her own. Which wasn’t difficult, seeing as the last time she’d seen her parents in the flesh was a good three years ago. But that was nothing unusual. It had been that way since they’d packed her off to boarding-school so her mother could flit around the world with her father as he moved from exotic location to exotic location with his job.
Maggie Hughes was the sort of woman she’d fantasised about having as a parent in her teenage years. Her house was always full of children and grandchildren, who complained constantly that she had her nose in their business just a little too much, but it never seemed to stop them coming. She had a big heart and had made sure Adele always felt part of the family, always felt wanted. She was a little too indulgent with her only son, perhaps, but nobody was perfect.
‘Give her my love when you speak to her, won’t you?’
Nick coughed. ‘Well, I was kind of thinking you could tell her yourself—in person.’
‘And when would that be, exactly? You haven’t forgotten with all your Hollywood high-flying that she moved in with Auntie Beverley last year, have you? Scotland is a long way to go for a cup of tea and a chat.’
‘She’s having a big birthday bash. Charlotte is organising it and, of course, my other sisters have been roped in too.’
Adele could imagine it. Nick had three older sisters. They were a formidable force en masse. Their only weakness was a huge soft spot for their baby brother. She’d heard plenty of stories about the scrapes Nick had got himself into as a cheeky young lad, and for every misdemeanour there was a matching tale of how one or all of the sisters had bailed him out, duffed up the bully, or cleaned up the resulting mess.
‘What’s this party got to do with me?’
Nick looked at her from under the wayward tuft of hair. ‘Mum wants you to come. In fact, she’s insisting.’
‘Why?’ Maggie was always so sensible. ‘Surely she knows that having both of us together at the party would just make things awkward. Why would she want to risk her big night like that?’
‘Er—that’s the thing, you see. I haven’t really told her about…us.’
Adele felt the band of tension across her forehead tighten a few notches. ‘Us?’
‘About our…you know…problems.’
The plate on the table swam before her eyes. The sinking feeling that he’d done it again—walked away from a difficult situation, leaving someone else to deal with the fallout—crept up on her and sat on her shoulder whispering nasty little words in her ear.
Surely, not even Nick could be that daft? She looked at him. That lopsided cocky smile said it all. He always pulled that one out of the bag when he knew he’d done something that was going to make her blood boil.
It was all Adele could do not to pick up his plate and pour the contents, gravy and all, over his head. She should have had a medal for managing to stand up and walk stiffly from the restaurant without spontaneously combusting.
She gulped in a lungful of winter air and hoped it would cool her down before he caught her up. She did not want to make a huge scene in the car park of The Partridge.
This was typical Nick! Why had she even let him open his mouth in the first place? She had known no good could come of it, yet she’d trotted down the road with him like the class-A doormat that she
