All Bets Are On (14 page)

‘That was her too?’

‘I don’t know for certain,’ he said. ‘But, yeah, I think so.’

She sighed and ran a hand through her hair. Try as she might to feel sympathy for him, there was no getting away from the fact she could relate to this girl, this Ellie. Another girl just like her, who’d had the confidence and self-respect crushed out of her by some man just because he was out to have fun. There was a brief dark moment as she remembered the place she’d been in when she’d found out that the pictures intended for Simon’s eyes only had been shared out like sweets. No wonder that she could empathise with this Ellie after that. If he was expecting commiserations he’d come to the wrong girl.

‘Thing is, Harry, you kind of had it coming,’ she said. ‘There are at least half a dozen women in the office who’d probably give that girl a medal.’

She waited for his angry reaction.

‘I know,’ he said.

‘You do?’ Not what she’d expected and she couldn’t hide her surprise.

‘Yes. My first thought was to call the police, press charges, especially on the car damage. You have no idea how pissed I was about that. But then I thought about it and I realised I had to take some responsibility. I just hadn’t seen that she was setting so much store by our relationship. I should have been clearer with her from the start. To me it was only ever going to be a laugh and I messed up, let it run on too long, let her think it was more than it was. She was obviously reading a whole lot more into it than that.’

‘And tonight?’ she said, catching her breath.

He paused.

‘Tonight I realised how upset she must have been to do those things. It wasn’t my finest hour. I feel awful, like I’ve messed with her head. I tried to apologise, tell her that I never meant to hurt her—’

‘And?’

‘She thought I’d had some change of heart, that I’d suddenly seen the light and wanted to get back together. She kissed me before I knew what the hell was happening and then you showed up. I can see how it must have looked.’

For a moment she couldn’t say anything. It all sounded so plausible. Then he reached for her hand and the look of regret in his eyes made her heart melt.

She looked down at her hand, encircled in his, and in that moment she accepted the risk, took his explanation at face value.

She stood up and walked towards the house.

‘You’re going inside? Without a gas mask?’ he called after her.

‘I’ve had an idea,’ she said.

* * *

‘How long has it been here?’ she asked him, grimacing and sniffing the air as she made her way through to his sitting room. Pleasant bay-fronted room, the floors stripped back to boards, a large leather sofa and flat-screen TV. Very single-guy.

‘First noticed it about a week ago,’ he said. ‘Just a whiff of it at first, not enough to make me think there was any kind of problem. But when I got back from Manchester this afternoon it was a million times worse. It’s especially bad downstairs in the sitting room and kitchen.’

‘Your kitchen isn’t exactly an example of perfect hygiene,’ she said.

‘I haven’t got round to washing up,’ he protested. ‘My fridge and cupboards are perfectly clean—you can check.’

She did, walking back to the kitchen and opening cupboard doors. So he was right. And the smell definitely seemed worse in the sitting room, and undoubtedly it was fishy.

‘And when did Ellie last come over here? Your woman scorned.’

‘She hasn’t been over here since she turned my wardrobe into rags.’

He followed her as she walked back down the hall and paced the sitting room, sniffing the air.

‘And it ended a few weeks ago, did you say?’

He nodded as she dragged a chair across to the window sill and climbed on it.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Solving your problem,’ she said. ‘Finding the source.’

He watched her with a bemused expression as she reached up to the curtain pole and unscrewed the pelmet with one hand, the other covering her mouth and nose.

‘Aaargh!’

The smell instantly intensified to the point of unbearable, so strong it made her eyes water. Half laughing and half grimacing, he was suddenly across the room, sliding an arm around her waist and lifting her down to the floor. Her heart skipped a beat at his sudden closeness as he grabbed her hand and pulled her out to the hallway, opening the front door to let the crisp clean night air in. She leaned against the doorway laughing with him.

‘There’s your answer,’ she gasped, gesturing back inside. ‘Prawns in the curtain pole. Now all you need to do is clean the thing out or get rid of it and the smell will be gone.’

He looked down at her, incredulous expression on his face.

‘How the hell did you know?’

She looked down at her fingernails.

‘It came to me just now. When you were telling me about Ellie and the things she did. It just suddenly occurred to me that the smell might be a revenge thing too. At some point in the last couple of weeks—I’m guessing when she came to collect her stuff and shredded your wardrobe—she unscrewed that curtain pole and filled it with fresh prawns. Nothing happened for a couple of weeks until the prawns started to go off, then within days you’ve got the stench from hell. A few more days and you’d probably have had pest control out, had the floorboards up. But you still wouldn’t have found it.’

She glanced back up to see him looking at her curiously.

‘It hadn’t crossed my mind that it could be down to her.’

‘You haven’t heard from her for a few weeks so you assumed it was over with. That’s what you wanted to think. You wanted to dismiss her behaviour as just a brief overreaction to your break-up, whereas I can see where she’s coming from. Sort of,’ she added quickly, so he wouldn’t think she was some kind of stalker from hell too.

He was shaking his head in disbelief.

‘No problem,’ she said. ‘You’ve found it now. You just need to clean the pole out and problem solved.’

She made a move to go back into the house, thinking she might open some windows, but he reached out and touched her wrist, gently held it.

‘You can
sort of see where she’s coming from
?’ he said.

She turned back slowly, looking down at his hand on her arm, and saw with a flash what this actually said about her, what he was probably thinking. Not an hour ago she’d been secretly peering in at his back window and now she wasn’t exactly sympathetic about his relationship revenge.

She looked up at him in the cool darkness, the crisp air making her breath cloud. She could see his blue eyes in the golden light spilling out from the hallway and she could see concern there, not confrontation. Yet she still couldn’t face the humiliation of telling him the reason why she could empathise with this Ellie. She kept it vague.

‘Let’s just say I had a bad relationship. And maybe I can understand why Ellie might have wanted to get her own back. And yes, there’s a part of me that thinks good on her, good on her for standing up for herself. There were times when I wished I had the balls to rip up Simon’s wardrobe or send him pizzas that he hadn’t ordered...’

He was looking at her with his eyebrows raised and she realised she was doing herself no favours here if she wanted to dig herself out of the stalker mould.

‘But the point is, I never
did
anything like that. I never would. Not because I didn’t want to be mean or hurt him, or even because he might call the police and have me warned off.’ She felt a little click in her throat because she was getting upset. ‘I didn’t do any of it because I knew it wouldn’t make me feel better. It wouldn’t change what he’d done.’ She sighed. ‘But I’m not going to lie—I can see Ellie might have got a certain satisfaction from doing these things.’

A long pause.

She waited. Waited for him to wrap the evening up. Call her a taxi. One way or another, he’d be running a mile now.

‘Wait here a sec,’ he said.

He disappeared inside the house and she jumped as she heard windows bang shut, saw the lights go off inside. He returned within five minutes with his keys, jacket and wallet.

‘Come on,’ he said, unlocking the car.

‘I’ll get the Tube,’ she called after him, sudden pride kicking in. Why the hell should she care what his judgement of her was? As if he were some kind of icon for relationship etiquette! ‘I don’t need a lift.’

He stood next to the car, driver’s door open, the light from the car backlighting his face.

‘I’m not taking you home.’ A pause. ‘At least not yet.’ A shrug. ‘Unless you want to go home, in which case you’re insane if you think I’d let you take the Underground at this time of night on your own.’

His concern made her stomach feel soft. Even if it was going to be short-lived.

She walked down the path, joined him by the car.

‘Where are we going then?’

‘Somewhere we can talk that doesn’t smell like a fish market,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand that smell a second longer. I’ll book myself in somewhere tonight and sort the house out tomorrow. We can have a drink and then I’ll drop you home.’

* * *

Rule #10 Sleep with him at your peril. The moment he gets what he wants you become dispensable.

Not for Harry a Travelodge or bargain B&B joint. Half an hour later and he’d booked a room in a luxurious boutique hotel near Regent’s Park. She found herself sitting on a squashy velvet sofa next to the ornate fireplace, her stomach in knots because across the room there was a bed. She held her glass of wine in her hands to stop herself fidgeting. The subtle lighting in the room made him look more gorgeous than ever, light stubble defining his jaw, tiny smile lines etched at the corner of his eyes.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘But I’m not some mad stalker. Peering through your back window was more about me than it was about you. I wanted to believe you at the bar when you told me there was nothing going on between you and Ellie, but trusting my own judgement is so hard. I’ve screwed up so badly in the past. I wasn’t stalking, I was...double-checking.’

He sat down opposite her, his own glass in his hand, and she saw with relief that he was smiling.

‘Is that because of your ex or because of me?’ he said.

He waited but she didn’t answer. His expression was gentle.

‘I don’t think for a moment that you’re some crazy stalker. I think you’re someone who—for whatever reason—finds it hard to trust, to let anyone in. What exactly did he do to make you that insecure?’

She looked at her wine in the glass, soft gold in the flickering light of the votives on the table, and tried to remember the last time she’d actually verbalised what had happened with Simon. She found she couldn’t. Tilly knew of course, she knew everything about Alice. But with the job at Innova she’d simply reinvented herself and built up a whole new bank of friends and colleagues. None of them knew about her past. Those that did had been left behind in Dorset along with her mother and her insane cycle of unsuitable relationships. She’d figured that London would be far enough. Did she really want to unearth all that pain again by entrusting what had happened to someone who inhabited that new life?

Yet Harry had proved her wrong. There was no other woman. She’d let her paranoia get in the way.

And maybe that was driving the problem. Maybe by not talking, not thinking about what Simon had done she’d buried her resentment deep inside her, where it festered like the prawns in Harry’s curtain pole. But letting it out all this time later, just like the stench that had permeated Harry’s house, would be so much worse.

His opinion of her right now couldn’t be clearer. After his encounter with prawn-girl Ellie he wasn’t likely to be interested in an insecure woman who needed endless reassurance. Needy and clingy with revenge potential. She couldn’t bear to be thought of as that. Worse, she couldn’t bear
him
to think of her like that. All that was left was for him to bail and she wasn’t about to tell him her darkest secret when he had to be on the brink of showing her the door.

At least she could get in first with that and salvage what self-respect she had left.

‘Maybe I should go,’ she said, putting her glass down on the low table next to her. She took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry for behaving like an idiot,’ she said. ‘I look at the way I’ve behaved with you, pouring coffee over your head, peering through your window, and you must think I’m some kind of lunatic.’ She gave a helpless laugh. ‘Even
I
think I’m being crazy but it all seems so damn
rational
at the time.’

He smiled at her and she forced herself to carry on.

‘You were right when you said we should disregard everything in the past and just think about us. Default should be trust, until it’s proven otherwise.’ She sighed. ‘But I can’t do that. My default setting is broken. And there’s nothing I can do about it.’

She began to stand up, but before she could get to her feet he was in front of her. He knelt on the floor, his gaze at eye level, blue eyes locked on to hers. His hand found hers, his fingers entwining softly with her own. She looked into his eyes and saw no distaste, no anger. Nothing but concern for her. And something else that made her catch her breath.

Desire.

‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ he said.

As he reached up and stroked her cheek softly she didn’t pull away. Her heart was pounding in her chest and her stomach was a soft squiggly mass of anticipation. Three years since she’d been in such an intimate situation and all thought of control melted away as her own desire took over, melding her firmly in the present. No reference to what had gone before and no room for thoughts about what she stood to lose if she’d made the wrong judgement here.

There was no crushing against her, no forcing things forward at some superhuman pace. His touch was languorous and slow. Always hesitant, letting her know by his tentative movements that stop could be invoked at any moment, waiting for her approval at every turn.

If she’d allowed herself to imagine this moment it would have featured him as the driving force, pushing ever onward to his conclusion. Now she found the opposite.