Undertaking Love (30 page)

‘Come on in.’

He collapsed into the chair next to her. One glance at his troubled expression was enough to make her reach for the brandy bottle and an extra glass.

She poured him a drinker’s measure and slid it across the table towards him.

‘You’re the second person to think I need a drink today,’ he said as he wrapped his fingers around the glass.

Marla breathed in deeply, and a heady mix of smoke and Gabe assailed her nostrils.

‘I’m not surprised. You have every right to get drunk after the day you’ve had.’

She touched her glass lightly against his then swallowed a good glug of brandy. The heat stung the back of her throat, and, feeling fortified, she met his eyes.

‘Is it as bad as it looks over there?’

Gabe humphed.

‘Worse.’

He knocked back half of his brandy.

Marla grimaced.

‘Was there anybody in there? Any
bodies,
I mean?’

She had to ask. The macabre question had been on her mind ever since the crass comments made by the crowds earlier.

‘No. Thanks to your ex-boyfriend, business had gone extremely quiet.’

Gabe’s mouth twisted into a line of distaste and he drained his glass. The mention of Rupert frayed Marla’s already tattered nerves.

She handed Gabe the brandy bottle and watched him pour himself a refill.

She looked away, blindsided by the need to make it better for him.

It had been a day of high emotion and drama, and her feelings for Gabe were a jumbled mess. On the one hand, he was damaging her business, and she still harboured a hulking great iceberg of hurt and resentment over the exposé in the newspaper. There was no denying the evidence, and he’d certainly failed to mention that he had been married.

But then in the next breath he’d turn around and do something so intrinsically decent that he’d make her question her judgment all over again.

He was good. He was bad. He was a threat.

He was a comfort. He was beautiful. He scared her stupid.

She reached for the bottle and poured herself another stiff drink.

‘Did Melanie start the fire?’

Rumours had been thrown around wildly ever since the fireman had stumbled out with her in his arms. Jonny had practically opened a book to take bets this afternoon after a couple of tequilas, until Marla had put her stone-cold-sober foot down and stopped him.

Gabe nodded.

‘I had no idea what was going on with her. I still don’t.’ He stared into the bottom of his brandy glass. ‘The hospital is keeping her in tonight, and she’ll be formally charged in the morning.’

Marla cast around for something charitable to say about the girl but found nothing. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Not as sorry as I am. I must have missed so many warning signs.’ He shook his head with a bewildered look. ‘I take it you know that she’d been sleeping with Rupert?’

‘Rupert?’ Marla squeaked, wide eyed with shock. ‘When?’

Gabe shrugged. ‘No idea. Same time as you, I think.’ He drank deeply and then looked at her with an apologetic shrug. ‘Sorry. I assumed that was why you’d split up.’

Marla shook her head, still trying to wrap her head around the idea of Rupert and Melanie. In many ways they made a perfect match. ‘No. I just realised that I didn’t want to marry him after all.’

‘Sensible decision. He’s a dick.’

Marla laughed shakily. ‘Jonny broke his nose.’

‘I know. I think I broke it again yesterday.’

‘Did you really?’

‘He deserved it.’

Marla couldn’t disagree.

‘So what will you do now?’ she asked eventually, not even sure she wanted him to answer. There was a broken, melancholy air around Gabe tonight that filled her with a fear she didn’t understand.

He ran a hand through his dusty hair.

‘I’ve had a gut-full of this place.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m done.’

Her palms went clammy as she stared at him.

‘But you must have been insured? You can rebuild.’

There were dark circles under his eyes and smears of soot mingling with the five-o’clock shadow along his jaw. ‘Yeah, I could rebuild.’ A cynical laugh rattled in his throat. ‘But why would I? Nobody wants the funeral parlour here, Marla. It’s been one fucking nightmare after another since the day I arrived.’

Marla stared into the amber swirls of her brandy. She couldn’t argue with him, and what’s more, she knew that she’d been a big contributor to his difficulties. The knowledge that their campaign had been justified didn’t make her feel any less shabby in the face of Gabe’s despair.

‘I tried, and I failed. I’m no coward, but this is one battle I’m just not destined to win. You can have your street back.’

Marla was stricken by his U-turn. She felt no glory in the victory. ‘What will you do?’ Her voice shook with the effort of holding herself together.

‘I don’t know. I have nothing to stay here for anymore.’

He locked eyes with her and she swallowed hard.

‘You don’t?’ She regretted the whispered words as soon as they’d left her lips.

‘Do I?’

She didn’t want him to leave, but she couldn’t ask him to stay. ‘Gabe, don’t.’

‘Don’t what Marla? Don’t tell you I love you?’

Marla’s heart swooped around in her chest like a caged bird.

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Why not? It’s the truth and you know it, Marla. I love you. I’ve loved you since the first day I saw you.’

Marla slid her glass onto the table, not trusting her hands to hold it any longer. ‘You’re being ridiculous, Gabe... you don’t know what you’re saying. It’s been a long day.’

‘I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. I love you.’

‘Stop it, Gabe. Please, just stop.’

He dragger his chair closer until his knees touched hers.

‘Deny it all you like, but you feel it too. I see you, Marla.’ He reached for her hands. ‘Your mouth says one thing, but your eyes beg me not to listen.’

‘No!’ Marla could feel her well-organised world ripping apart at the seams, and hot tears splashed down her cheeks as she battled to yank the edges back together again. She stumbled to her feet and turned away to grip the cool steel edge of the sink.

Gabe was behind her in seconds, so close that his breath warmed the exposed skin on the back of her neck.

‘Tell me you didn’t feel it when we made love in your garden. In your shower.’ He braced his hands either side of her on the counter. ‘In your bed, for fuck’s sake, Marla.’

The raw catch in his voice squeezed her heart, and she rounded on him in fury and frustration. ‘I didn’t feel it. There, is that what you want? It was sex, Gabe, not love. Grow up...’

He shook his head, and his eyes glittered with hurt every bit as intense as hers.

‘You’re wrong Marla, and you damn well know it.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m not.’

‘Prove it.’

He kissed her. Hard. Marla couldn’t fight him; his nearness wiped away any last vestige of her will power. His kiss was desperate and furious as he hauled her body against his own, and for a few treacherous seconds she let herself hold him.

His mouth softened instantly over hers, achingly sweet – she could taste his love. Honey-coated promises of things that could never be, of roses around doorways and dark-eyed babies with gypsy curls.

Emotions battered her from all sides as his hands moved to cradle her face.

Lust so strong she wanted to rip her clothes off and drag him down onto the kitchen floor; frustration so jagged she wanted to smash every bottle on the drainer behind her; and a protective rush more powerful than any lioness as her fingers slid into his sooty hair and held him close.

Soothed him.

Loved him.

When he lifted his head, the look in his eyes told her that he knew.

He’d dragged the truth from her, in actions if not words.

‘I’m not the enemy any more, Marla. You don’t have to hate me.’

It was the worst thing he could have possibly said. His words mainlined right into the visceral vein of fear that ran through Marla’s core.

She
needed
those barriers between them.

She
needed
a reason to hate him.

She swiped at her mouth with the back of her hand as she fought to get her breathing back under control, and pushed against his chest to put some space between them. He waited for her to speak, his whole body braced for impact, like a passenger on a jet free falling out of the sky.

‘You’re right. I don’t have to hate you anymore. But I don’t love you, Gabe, and I never will.’

Cecilia poured two glasses of wine and put them down on the kitchen table along with the open bottle ready for the refills. She had a feeling they were going to need them.

She stood behind Marla’s chair and stroked her hair for a few seconds. She’d listened to her daughter cry herself to sleep every night for at least two weeks, and she wasn’t prepared to do it again tonight.

Marla didn’t want her hair stroked, and she didn’t want to talk. She wanted to go to bed.

‘What’s wrong, honey?’ her mother asked.

Marla fiddled with the belt of her dressing gown as Cecilia pulled up a chair beside her.

‘Nothing,’ she sniffed.

‘Nothing doesn’t make you cry as much as you have been these past few weeks.’

Marla’s shoulders slumped, defeated. She didn’t have enough fight left in her to deny the truth any longer. Gabe had laid his soul bare that day in the chapel, and she’d sent him away because she’d been too scared to be honest with him, or with herself.

‘It’s Gabe.’

Cecilia nodded and lifted her daughter’s chin.

‘You love him.’

Even though the answer to her mother’s question was quite obviously yes, still she couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud; instead, she nodded.

‘I’m in a mess, mom. Over the last few months I’ve poured all my energy into hating him. I wouldn’t know
how
to love him.’

Cecilia frowned. ‘Why not?’

Marla looked at her mother. The woman called herself a sex therapist. Did she
really
not know? She sighed heavily.

‘Because all I know of love and marriage is what I’ve learned from you.’

Cecilia laid a hand over Marla’s on the table, and sat in silence for a minute or two. ‘You think I like being this way, Marla?’

Marla chewed her lip. ‘I don’t know, mom.’ She shrugged. ‘I guess you’re just not the settling kind.’

Cecilia threw her hands up in the air with an exasperated laugh.

‘Is that really what you think of me?’

Marla didn’t answer, and instead reached for her wine glass.

Cecilia rubbed her chin.

‘I was too young when I married your father,’ she said, quietly. ‘We were a terrible match, but I loved him too much to see it at the time.’

Marla looked up and waited. Her mother never talked about the past.

‘And then when he …’

Cecilia waved her heavily ringed hand around to infer intimacies she’d never shared with her daughter.

‘When he
what
, Mom?’

Cecilia studied the scrubbed pine tabletop and sighed.

‘He was a good father, Marla, but he wasn’t a very good husband. Not long after our first wedding anniversary he slept with his research assistant. And our cleaner.’ Her eyes clouded. ‘The nanny was the last straw.’

Marla stared at her mother in shock. She’d been too young at the time to understand the goings-on in the grown-up world around her, and from that day to this her mother had never spoken a bad word about her father.

‘I never knew.’

Cecilia nodded and patted Marla’s hand. ‘Good. And I wouldn’t be telling you now if I didn’t think it would help you to hear it.’

Marla looked at her mother with new eyes, and finally saw behind the confident, self-centred butterfly facade.

‘I spent the next however-many years ricocheting from one man to the next, always trying to fill the hole your father left in my heart.’

Regret rang clear in her mother’s small voice.

‘And did you?’

Please say yes, because I can’t live with this hole in mine.

Cecilia sighed. ‘You know what, honey? I lost sight of what love was after a while, and even when I finally found it again I somehow managed to let it slip through my fingers.’

Marla suddenly remembered the way her mother had lit up when she saw Robert again that night at Franco’s.

‘It’s not too late, is it?’ she whispered.

‘For me? It probably is, yes.’ Cecilia’s smile was bittersweet. ‘But not for you, Marla. Gabriel is a fine man. If you love him, be brave and grab him.’

Marla was lost for words. She’d invested so much time and effort into making sure she didn’t tread in her mother’s footsteps, but all along her mother had been trying to recapture the only true love she’d ever known.

Who knew? If her father had been a faithful man, her parents might have stayed together, saving her mother from a lifetime of discontent.

And Marla from a lifetime of confusion.

Her head ached.

All of her long-held beliefs about love and marriage were on shifting sands, and somewhere in amongst it all, she knew that she might have missed her one chance for happiness.

‘If I hear White Christmas one more time I’m going to make like Van Gogh and cut my own ears off.’

Jonny swished down the aisle in his purple satin flares to blast the Scissor Sisters in defiance of the season.

It was a little after midday on Christmas Eve, an hour since they’d waved off their final bride and groom of the year. Not that Jonny could complain that it had been a staid, traditional affair. Anything but; the only thing white about the wedding had been the snow that dusted the ground outside. The happy couple had made a surprisingly convincing Agnetha and Bjorn, and Marla’s eyes ached from a morning surrounded by wall-to-wall flower power and kipper ties. Unlike Jonny, she was quite content to listen to the mellow sound of Bing Crosby; her ears ached from one too many renditions of Abba’s ‘Oh I do, I do, I do, I do, I do’.

Emily looked up from her seat next to the aisle. She was dressed in a swirl-patterned maxi dress that drew attention to her massive bump. She crossed her arms over the top of it and narrowed her eyes at Marla.