Love & Freedom (Choc Lit)

by Moorcroft, Sue

Cursing, he cut the connection, pressing so hard that the screen bowed. He rang Clarissa. She sounded alarmed. ‘Martyn? What’s the matter?’

  ‘I need the key to the bungalow.’

  ‘Now? It’s the middle of the night, Martyn, has Honor locked herself out? What about …?’ She trailed away.

  ‘Exactly,’ he agreed. ‘What about her husband, who got into the bungalow without her permission? What about if Honor’s locked in there with him and he won’t let her answer the door?’

  ‘I’ll come right down.’

  ‘Good. Because in ten minutes, I start smashing windows.’ Martyn paced the patio and glared at the hawthorn bushes that filled the space between the bungalow and its neighbours, almost impossible to penetrate, squeeze past or climb over. As a key was about to arrive, he decided against trying to scale fences in and out of neighbouring gardens or doing anything else to wake the neighbours. The last thing he needed right now was a patrol car wailing up with its lights flashing.

  Bad enough that the key arrived clutched in the hand of Clarissa, who had woken up enough to want to cling on to it whilst she hissed an interrogation into the early morning hush. Martyn listened for five seconds, decided that that was about four too long, and snitched the key out of her fingers. ‘You stay here,’ he instructed, jamming the key into the lock. But, of course, she followed him in.

  It didn’t take him long to race through the few rooms, seeing them neat, clean … and empty. In the bedroom, he threw open the wardrobe and the drawers. Empty. Empty. Empty.

  Fighting the urge to roar with rage, he picked up a note from the floor. See you in Hamilton Drives, babe.

  Bastard.

  Underneath Stef’s words, Honor had written, It’s time for me to go home. xxx

  She’d known that he’d come looking – the message was undoubtedly for him.

  It seemed as if the world had hit the pause button.

  Clarissa came up quietly and, without a word, he showed her the note, hot with shame.

  She made a small, inarticulate noise of pain. ‘Martyn, what I did was wrong–’

  He shook his head. He’d done enough blame shifting. He did something he should do more often and put his arm around Clarissa. ‘It’s my fault that she’s gone.’

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Honor felt as if she hadn’t slept for days. In fact, she calculated fuzzily, battling a luggage cart that wanted to travel in circles, it was only about a day-and-a-half. It just felt like more. After lying awake all night at the hotel, she hadn’t been able to sleep on the flight, staring at movies without taking them in and picking at the airline food, tension banging inside her head.

  Still, it was good to be home. Even if it was odd to be home.

  Most of the voices around her were American, but she’d grown used to the pecking English accent and the ironic humour. And everyone was dressed for summer here because there would definitely be one, unlike the crazy English weather that would fry you one day and drown you the next.

  Exiting the Arrivals hall she sagged, wishing she’d booked her transportation between the airport and Hamilton Drives ahead. But then she heard her name and suddenly there was long-haired Jessamine in shorts, waving, and even grinning Zach home from Texas, looking too big and manly in black denim cut offs to be her little brother.

  And her dad, buttoned up in a tan golf shirt, who crossed the polished floor, yanked her from behind her luggage cart and into a bear hug. ‘When Will rang last night and said that Stefan had just gotten home, alone, I nearly lost my mind. If Jessamine hadn’t found out about the same time that you were on your way, too, I would have jumped on the first plane to England.’

  He sounded so fiercely protective that Honor felt fresh tears prickling. ‘Well, here I am,’ was all she could whisper.

  The arms tightened. ‘It’s so good to see you, honey.’

  In no time, she found herself packed into the front passenger seat of her dad’s blue Ford Escape, though Zach-long-legs should have been awarded that prime spot. Zach tugged her ponytail and said, ‘Did you get to see many castles, Honor?’ And everyone talked about England and history and Honor’s trip, lightly, neutrally. Nobody mentioned Stef or jail or the way that Honor had taken off without a word.

  Next thing, they were drawing up outside the double garage doors at her father’s house and Honor realised that somewhere, as the Escape rolled soporifically along route 7, her eyes had closed. She’d zoned out of the family conversation, missed the sunlit lake flickering through the trees and missed driving through her home town and seeing the mall and the church and all the places that she’d known since she was a child. Already, Zach was dragging out her cases while Garvin put his arm around her and steered her indoors.

  In the large, well-remembered kitchen, Honor stood still, just letting home flood into her. A tall woman was waiting, smile at the ready. ‘Karen! How are you?’ Guiltily, Honor realised that she hadn’t asked after Karen on the whole trip north from the airport.

  Karen gave her a hug. ‘Hi, Honor. Welcome home.’ And, miraculously, she didn’t give out any lectures. Karen might have a certain ‘my way or the highway’ aspect to her personality, but at least she wasn’t asking why Honor had run home. Like, had she done anything stupid. Like falling in love with someone when you weren’t completely free to. Like messing up that person’s life. She just glanced at Garvin with something like relief.

  In an instant, Honor saw not a partisan mom – or not only a partisan mom – but a woman who had taken on someone else’s kid, a kid who had never hesitated to remind her that she wasn’t her real mom, even though she was the woman who had made Honor’s dad happy.

  She felt a twinge of shame. ‘It’s good to see you, Karen. I guess I’m imposing on you–’

  ‘Not on family,’ said Karen, simply. ‘I got your room ready for however long you want to stay.’

  That’s when Honor began to cry.

  Jessamine dragged her into her arms. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  Wildly, Honor shook her head.

  Garvin: ‘You maybe ought to, honey.’

  Zach: ‘Can any of us do anything to help?’

  Honor gulped. ‘No-o-oo.’ But their sympathy and love made her cry harder, blubbing great sobs around sentence fragments. ‘Ru won’t know I’ve gone … I feel so bad about him.’

  ‘Is Ru a guy you hooked up with?’ asked Jessamine, so obviously trying her hardest to understand.

  ‘Nooooo,’ howled Honor, laying her head on Jessie’s shoulder. ‘My bro-oth-ther. Rufus Gordon.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, Rufus the brother,’ breathed Zach.

  Jessamine patted Honor’s back. ‘Oh no, another brother! No wonder you’re upset.’

  ‘This must seem really weird to you two,’ Honor hiccupped. ‘But he’s fourteen and Robina isn’t the ideal mom. I got to really love him.’

  ‘It’s only a little bit weird,’ soothed Jessamine. ‘We know what a good big sister you are.’

  Honor unwound from around poor Jessie, who must be feeling hot and damp, and took a deep breath. ‘I have to find Stef.’ She ignored the exchange of dubious glances around the table. ‘Dad, do you know if he’s staying with Will?’

  ‘I guess he is. Should I call Will and check?’

  Honor rubbed her eyes. ‘No, I’ll just go on over. There’s no telling what he’ll do if he gets advance notice I’m going to show up.’

  She borrowed her dad’s car, even though she knew by that spaced-out, distant, grit-eyed feeling that she was way too exhausted to drive. Her dad knew it, too, because he’d said, ‘I’ll drive you when you’re ready.’ But she waited until he was on the phone and slipped his keys off the row of hooks in the kitchen and sneaked out.

  Now she thought that maybe she ought to have sneaked Jessamine or Zach out to drive for her, too, because driving when she was too tired to think straight couldn’t be good.

  Luckily, Will’s house wasn’t far – what was far, in Hamilton Drives? – an
d so she wasn’t a public menace for more than a few minutes. And, whaddya know, there was Stef, sitting on the porch on the swing seat, eating ice cream with one hand and tapping away on his laptop with the other, looking up with a crooked grin as she barrelled into the drive and as close as she could get to the porch without running over the flower beds.

  She put the car in park and jumped down.

  ‘Hey, babe,’ Stef called, cautiously, as if weighing up her mood.

  Set-faced, she marched up and glared down at him. ‘Put them back.’

  He paused. ‘Put what back?’ Thoughtfully, he gave a couple of taps to the keyboard.

  She sent him a death glare. ‘Don’t mess with me over this, Stef. Put them back. Put all those websites and Twitter and Facebook accounts back exactly as you found them. Get rid of the porn and the fake sites. Put. Them. All. Back.’

  Stef lifted his brows, his eyes calculating as he absorbed her words. Then he smiled. ‘If you’re going to get a divorce, why should I do anything for you?’

  ‘Because what you’ve done is wrong, you’ve threatened someone’s career and you want to put it right?’

  He pulled a considering face and then shook his head. ‘Nope. That isn’t it.’ His fingers tapped some more. Then a slow smile spread over his face. ‘OK, I’ll make sure all those sites are exactly as they used to be. All you have to do is stay away from that pretty English boy and give our marriage another go. Come back to me, babe. You’re “Honor-bound” to.’ A joke, but his eyes told her that he was deadly serious.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  ‘My mother called me Freedom.’ But, slowly, resignedly, she took the seat beside him, sinking into the dark green cushion of the swing.

  He sat absolutely still, as if she were one of the wild squirrels that skittered up and down the nearby sour gum trees and he knew that any sudden movement would send her whirling from the porch.

  ‘Your mother doesn’t even know who you are. Babe, we’re childhood sweethearts and I love you. I’m sorry that my pranks got me sent to jail and I get how hard that was on you. But I’m straightening myself out. I swear. We can begin with a clean sheet and I’ll be the man you want me to be. Stay home, Honor. Let’s try again. We can work things out.’

  The softness of the swing cushion surrounded her, as if it thought she was back where she ought to be. She looked into his face. His tousled hair and eyes the colour of ginger. Thought of never seeing Martyn again and her heart gave a great spasm. She swallowed, noisily. ‘OK,’ she whispered. ‘I guess now Martyn’s careers are screwed because of me … You put those sites back as they were, right now.’

  His smile turned to satisfaction. ‘OK, babe. It’ll just take me a few minutes.’

  He put the bowl of ice cream on the floor to free both hands, his fingers flying over the keys. Honor watched, remembering Martyn’s face when he’d discovered what Stef had done to him. The thunder. The distress. And she knew that what she was about to do was worth it, to save his career. Careers.

  It didn’t seem to take Stef long. He spun the laptop around and passed it over. ‘There.’

  She checked out Martyn’s site and the site of Ace Smith Model Management. Martyn’s Facebook page. No porn. No defamatory messages. Her shoulders melted with relief and fatigue fizzed at the periphery of her vision like a waiting black swarm. ‘That’s good.’ She stooped to lay the computer down on the wooden porch floor, the planks shrunken and separated from decades of Connecticut summers, and picked up Stef’s ice cream bowl.

  With a swift movement, she inverted it, dumping the contents on the computer keyboard.

  ‘Honor–!’

  She squished the melting blobs right between the keys, rubbing circles that forced it, creamy, shiny, into every crevice.

  Stef rose slowly to his feet, his voice shaking. ‘That’s not even funny. My laptop – I spent a fortune on that, I doubled the RAM, the graphics card is–’

  She clambered to her feet, swaying with weariness. ‘It’s a prank, Stef. Pranks aren’t funny. They cause pain and they screw with people’s lives.’

  ‘It’s criminal damage–’

  ‘Yeah.’ She folded her arms, leaning a hip on the porch rail to keep herself on her feet. ‘Call the cops. I have to speak to them anyway. To tell them about you committing identity theft again.’

  He scowled. But there was uncertainty in his eyes. ‘They won’t be interested in something that happened outside of the state.’

  ‘Let’s just put it to the test.’

  Standoff. She stepped forward, so that he could read in her face how deadly serious she was. ‘But I won’t talk to the cops – for you, babe. If you sign those divorce papers when they’re served and forget all about us giving our marriage another go.’

  His face set like stone, eyes flat. ‘OK,’ he conceded, eventually. ‘I guess I don’t have a choice. What in the hell’s happened to you? This isn’t “Honor-able”.’

  She pushed the laptop closer to him with her toes, the ice cream melting and dripping from the edges. ‘Sometimes, I’m really not in that “Honor-able” little compartment you try to squeeze me into.’ But her heart ached for him. For the Stef he used to be and all the Stefs he wouldn’t be, as long as he could only turn his intellect to mischief instead of making a life. She made her voice gentle. ‘There can’t be a marriage where there’s no trust or respect.’

  She left him standing on the shady porch as she climbed into the car, turned around in the drive and headed for her father’s house.

  By the time she pulled up, she was so tired she could hardly see. Her last shreds of energy had gone into the final Honor-Stef confrontation.

  Karen was at the stove, sizzling something in a wok, and had already set one end of the table while Garvin worked at the other. He sprang up, lines of anxiety all over his face. ‘Where the hell did you skip off to this time?’

  Honor hung her tired arms around him. ‘Sorry, Dad. I guess I stole your car. Do you mind if I don’t talk about it, just yet? I’m going upstairs and I’m going to sleep for a week. Karen, that dinner smells delicious but I can’t eat a thing.’

  Garvin hugged her, hard, with all the unconditional, unquestioning love she’d had from him all of her life. ‘OK, honey. You go sleep.’

  Chapter Forty

  Her cell phone informed her that it was 07.13 Eastern Daylight Saving Time, Saturday August 10th in Hamilton Drives, CT, USA. The weather was sunny and already 72 degrees.

  She had slept for more than twelve hours. She lay under the single sheet that was all she needed in the summer and blinked at the sun edging the blinds, trying to orientate herself. She was in her childhood room at home, pearly pink and ivory, and the blind rattled in the morning breeze in the old familiar way. She swallowed. Her phone might as well have said, You’re back where you started. Now what?

  She closed her eyes again.

  The next time she woke it was nearly ten and the household was alive. She could hear her father and Karen laughing downstairs and Zach’s voice from his room, probably on the phone.

  She’d hardly noticed last night that her old bathroom had been made into a wet room, with a big chrome showerhead and a crystal clear screen. Now she stood beneath the deluge and let the water rouse her, before dressing in shorts and a T from the bags Zach had brought up for her, and drying her hair. She hadn’t answered the question Now what? yet but figured it could be left until after the weekend. Then she’d have to decide, and maybe do something sensible like get all her belongings in one place–

  She thought of the red suitcase she’d left in Martyn’s apartment and turned her mind swiftly away. There was nothing there that couldn’t be replaced if … If he didn’t contact her when he saw all his sites restored to perfection.

  Sometime today she was going to have to get all superhero and turn her UK phone on and see if he’d been trying to call. And hope it wasn’t to say, ‘Let’s just call it quits.’ That would plunge her into an abyss of grief she wasn’t
yet strong enough to plumb. Her heart already felt leaden enough to drag her to the edge.

  Whatever happened with Martyn, she would call Ru, soon, maybe tomorrow. She would call Ru and keep calling him, because she was a continuing thread in his life, whereas, in Martyn’s, she could be no more than a loose end. Maybe one he wished he could unpick.

  She shook away those thoughts and concentrated on her hair, braiding it to one side of her neck and capturing it in a white band.

  Pasting on a serene expression, she ran downstairs to join her family. Judging from the sympathetic looks, the serene expression wasn’t fooling anyone, but at least, even if they were bursting to, nobody said, ‘So how are you?’ or ‘What went wrong?’, which would be guaranteed to melt her to tears.

  In a kitchen that went with someone who liked to cook – a range, copper pans and lethal looking knives – Karen, her blonde hair loose around her head, poured Honor coffee.

  Jessamine had ready one of her customary massive hugs. ‘How about a movie, later? We might even let Zachary come with us, seeing as he’s home till he goes back to college.’

  ‘Gee, thanks, a chick flick,’ mocked Zach, tugging Honor’s hair.

  She ruffled his, which he’d let grow long in front, in return. ‘So how was Texas?’

  Zach grinned from behind the hair she’d dragged over his eye, reminding her of Ru. ‘Hot. I fit right in.’

  Garvin held a file as if he’d meant to work, looking over his reading glasses. ‘It’s good to see you kids all together.’ Which produced a ball-sized lump in Honor’s throat and she had to blow her nose.

  Karen shook chicken breasts in a bag full of something to season them and then put them in the refrigerator, taking out salad to wash.

  ‘Looks to me like a barbecue,’ Honor commented, joining her at the sink, as she always would have.

  Karen smiled. ‘I thought it would be nice, while everybody’s together. It’s too hot to cook in here. But I can do this if you want to talk to your dad – Oh, there’s the door.’ She slipped away up the hall.