The Morning After the Night Before: Love & Lust in the city that never sleeps! (23 page)

‘I called my mother after you left,' she started, again. ‘I hated that my first proper call to them was because I needed something, but I really needed her. Her wisdom. Her composure. I needed someone who hadn't been charmed by your smile and wasn't influenced by having seen me so ridiculously delirious with you. I needed her clarity.' She curled her arms around her body. ‘She suggested it might have been for the best, as unpleasant as our parting was. That I deserved better than someone who couldn't be honest with me, who couldn't share of themselves. Someone who could believe such a vile thing about me when I'd done nothing to earn that suspicion. Someone less damaged.'

The pulse at the angle of his jaw, that place she'd used to love to press her lips, worked visibly under his skin. Not reaching out to it took all her strength.

‘I feel sure there's a point coming,' he said.

‘Mum was right,' she gritted. ‘But I couldn't get past what she'd said about damage. I couldn't help the suspicion that everything… all this we've been through…wasn't really about me, at all.'

She looked around her, at the expansive gardens, the grand old homestead. ‘You must meet a lot of people who are very attracted to all this. People who are in it for the money. Now that I see it in context, it only reinforces what I was wondering.'

‘And what's that?'

‘Who it was that burned you so badly. That made you not trust anyone.'

His nostrils flared. ‘You think I'm that oblivious? Or that careless with my assets? Especially my heart. In this family it pays to be guarded.'

Understanding blazed through her. ‘You've never let someone in? You've never loved someone at all?'

Sorrow washed through her.

You never loved
me.

‘Bad investment,' he simply said. ‘And I have too much uncertainty on my plate as it is. Love is a luxury I can't afford. I got slack. Forgot why people like us don't get to have ordinary lives.'

Oh, Harry
… ‘And that's why it was so easy for you to believe I'd been lying to you?'

‘Look at it from my point of view, Izzy.
You
pursued
me.
Pitching Broadmore for funding, coming to my house, sliding so effortlessly into my life. And then I discover you knew who I was—'

‘Just one hour, Harry.'

‘One hour. One week. One month. In that moment, I felt…'

‘Betrayed?' Yep, she knew that feeling. Like a hot knife between the ribs.

‘I felt played.'

‘But I didn't know.'

He shrugged. ‘Maybe it was the wake-up call I needed. I was killing time in London, building up the experience I'd need to run Broadmore in the future. I wasn't there to make a life or fall in love. I'd lost sight of my purpose.'

‘So you just…excised me?'

His eyes glittered. ‘Why not? You did it to your parents.'

Ice-cold grief crystallised in her chest. Was this how they'd felt when she'd let them go? This awful…emptiness?

‘My life was about to change anyway,' he urged. ‘I was just pre-empting it. An emotional entanglement across the world from where my responsibilities were was exactly what I didn't need at that moment.'

Sudden pain curled like a fist in her throat.

Entanglement. Bound by twisted, clinging vines.

Right.

Izzy took a long, unsteady breath. She'd flown across the world on the off-chance that she could talk him around, once things were calmer, his father's condition stable. Once he'd heard her side of the story.

‘I feared this would happen,' she murmured. ‘That you'd rationalise everything, file it away as a thing that happened once with a woman you knew for a few weeks. That you'd forget how good it felt being together. How perfect we were.'

‘We dated for a few weeks, Izzy.' He shrugged, his eyes empty and hard. ‘That's it.'

‘I loved you for every one of those weeks,' she urged past the lump. ‘Harry Mitchell, the man who blew his hard-earned wages on ferries and let me pluck the olives off his pizza and pledged to protect me when we walked at night.' Tears welled dangerously. ‘And, I hunted for any kind of sign that you felt the same and cobbled together this stupid, misguided belief that you could care for someone like me.'

His throat worked visibly. ‘How long would you have lasted in this world, anyway?'

If he'd given it half a chance? Maybe for ever.

But they'd never know now.

Izzy smoothed her dress and then stood as
steadily as her physical and emotional exhaustion would allow. Her cold, dry palms were almost refreshing where the sun had just been.

‘Because your world is so special, Harry? Doesn't really look it from here.'

She turned and took a few steps before pausing and turning back.

‘For the record?
You
pursued
me.
You came to my house, seduced me in my bed, then again in yours, invited me to dinner and into your world. I wanted to trust you despite all the secrets and caginess—your mystery family, your clandestine past, your unspecified future. But you made me doubt what little you did tell me about yourself and, worse, you made me doubt myself. My worth.

‘You kept yourself back from me like I meant nothing. But you also made love to me like I was a princess. And you looked at me like I was the centre of your world.

‘And I believed your eyes.' She shuddered. ‘Despite every fibre of my being warning me not to. Because I didn't want fear to keep me from letting myself love you. My inability to believe that poor little Isadora might have finally struck it rich, emotionally. I wanted to be braver than that.'

Those beautiful lips pressed flat across his jaw.

She turned and curled her hands around his arm, appealing to him.

‘But my courage wasn't what I should have been worried about.'

His voice tightened. ‘Don't worry about me, Izzy. I won't be single for long. The world is mine for the taking.'

Her jaw ached from clenching her back teeth. ‘Something priceless was yours for the taking, Harry. All you had to do was believe in me.'

Her voice cracked entirely on those last words.

He cleared his throat but stood stiff and unrelenting. ‘Do you need money for a taxi?'

Hurt surged along her bloodstream. That he thought a fistful of notes could buy her out of his life. Out of his conscience.

‘I'm not interested in your money,' she said, stepping away from him. ‘But thank you for reminding me it's there.'

‘There's some
things tea can't cure,' Izzy murmured towards the boxroom door that had crept open enough to let a stream of light into her darkness. She totally understood why wounded animals would find a log or a hole in the ground or in the rocks to curl up and die in. The closeness provided a strange kind of comfort.

Womb-like.

Tomb-like.

‘Nonsense,' Poppy said, peering through. ‘I'll never believe that.'

Izzy swung her legs over the edge of her bed and sat up slowly, gingerly receiving the piping-hot cuppa. Poppy's gentle smile was almost her undoing. ‘Thank you.'

‘How are you feeling?'

‘Flat.'

‘Well, flat is an improvement. Flat isn't sobbing.'

‘Oh, I've had my quota of that today, too. And raging. And denial.'

Each one as futile as the others. Harry had made his mind up. The whole butterfly and tornado thing again.

‘Why not come and sit out at the table?' Poppy implored, her dark eyes gently angled.

Poor Poppy. She had her own dramas to deal with and here she was having to babysit a hysterical flatmate. She, Tori and Alex had even taken it in turns to take a day off work to make sure she wasn't alone until next week when she was going home to Manchester and the gentle and accepting hands of her parents.

‘Okay,' she sighed, and Poppy couldn't hide her relief. ‘Yeah, okay.'

It might have been dinner time but it was still light out and Izzy squinted in the rich evening light streaming in the windows.

All right, maybe she had been sequestered away a little too long.

Through the kitchen doorway, Alex stirred a large pot of something that made her empty stomach growl while Tori laid the living-room
table. Business as usual. Except that Tori being here smacked of intervention.

She looked up. ‘Hey, stranger.'

God, this was humiliating. Being the focus of so much pity. But only one person could change that.

‘Anything I can do?' she offered, overly bright.

Poppy looked straight to Alex, who smiled and manufactured an impromptu task. ‘Ah…I could use some help slicing the stir-fry.'

Okay. Stir-fry it was. She crossed to stand next to Alex in front of an array of market vegetables. ‘Just thin sliced?'

‘Nothing fancy.'

She took the chopping knife and began with the mushrooms. In her periphery, he kept a close eye on her. Very close.

‘I'm not going to do anything drastic,' she confirmed.

‘I'm more worried about me. The token male in the room. You could totally make it look like an accident.'

Hey, look at that; her lips still worked.

‘Good to see you smile, Iz,' he murmured.

Sigh.

‘Why are men so difficult to understand, Alex?'

If he only just caught on to what he'd signed up for when he found her a task, Alex hid it well. Or took it on like the warrior he was.

‘We find you lot just as incomprehensible.'

She fell back to chopping and he fell back to stirring. Without looking, she could feel Poppy and Tori busying themselves with stay-close tasks.

He stepped aside and let her scrape the mushrooms into the vat of pasta sauce he was making before she reached for the peppers. But he paused and then turned to her, his voice low.

‘Iz, this isn't about you. If he wanted to, he would have found some other way you failed him. No matter what you did.'

The thing about friends who said very little… you tended to listen very closely to what little they did say.

This isn't about you.
Hadn't she come to much the same conclusion after all those long talks with her mother?

She nodded—just once—and lifted her eyes to her best friends, still hovering nearby on purposeless tasks: refolding the napkins and straightening the perfectly aligned cutlery. At all those familiar, beautiful faces. All staring at her. All full of concern.

‘I love you guys,' she murmured. ‘And I'm going to be okay. Tomorrow morning I'll start running again and I'll touch base with all my clients.'

Life could only pause for so long.

‘Tomorrow's Saturday, Iz,' Tori reminded her gently.

Oh…right. Monday, then.

‘Izzy, don't—' Poppy gnawed her lip.

‘Don't what?'

She leaned forward intently. More focused than Izzy had seen her in a long time. ‘Don't let this put you off. For ever, I mean. Harry was a good guy with some good qualities but he was just one man. You'll meet someone lovely who's able to be completely open with you and who sees you for who you really are. I promise. Please don't shut down emotionally.'

Someone lovely.
That sounded so sweet and safe and…beige.

Someone lovely
wasn't likely to twist her insides up tight enough to explode. Or make her weep with his touch. Or make her laugh out loud in public.

But, truth be told, a little emotional shut-eye sounded pretty good right now. It had been one hell of a fortnight.

She smiled tightly at the curious intensity in Poppy's eyes. Curious coming from a woman who hadn't been in a relationship since…ever.

‘I hope you're right.'

‘I am.'

But all of their faces said they heard the hollowness of Poppy's words, too. Alex excused himself and went into the kitchen to start dishing up.

‘Knock knock?'

Izzy lifted heavy eyes to the doorway as a familiar face peered around it. Lara, from downstairs.

‘I'm so sorry to interrupt,' she said. ‘But there's a man down on the street who's trying to buzz your apartment but can't raise you. He's trying everyone in the building in rotation. I said I'd run up.'

‘We muted it,' Poppy said, ‘so we could have dinner.'

Lara flushed. ‘Should I send him away, then?'

‘Who is it?'

‘Harry Mitchell. He's here for Izzy.'

* * *

Poppy's and Tori's gasps were perfectly synchronised.

‘Harry?' Izzy croaked, her breath now firmly
choked by the fist that had materialised in her chest.

‘You don't have to, Iz,' Tori urged.

She turned towards two concerned faces. ‘He's back.'

‘You were just getting back on your feet,' Poppy muttered.

Her voice grew tiny and she turned her wide eyes to each of her oldest friends in turn. ‘Why is he back, Toz?'