Her Best Worst Mistake

by Sarah Mayberry

  “I boxed at Hackney. Trust me, I’d break more than his nose.”

  They turned into the parking garage.

  “You know who’d look good with a broken nose? Diana,” she said.

  He laughed, the sound echoing off the concrete walls.

  “You think you could take her in a cage match?”

  “I would eat her for breakfast. Wouldn’t even break a sweat.”

  “I’d back you. Any time.”

  She knew he would, too. He was a good man. A real man. The kind who honored his commitments and did the right thing and stood up for what he believed in. He also cooked like a dream and fucked like a god and he made her feel important and sexy and special.

  A wave of love and lust welled up inside her as he unlocked the Jag and held her door open for her. She slid inside, then waited impatiently for him to walk around to the other side of the car and get into the driver’s seat.

  He slid the key into the ignition, but she reached out and caught his arm before he could start the car. “Don’t.”

  He glanced at her, a question in his eyes.

  “Put your seat back,” she said.

  He glanced out the window. It was dark and deserted in the garage, but there were plenty of other cars around.

  “Put your seat back,” she said again.

  He pulled a lever and his seat dropped backward. She reached for his belt buckle, sliding it free with impatient hands. She could feel how hard he was already as she unzipped his fly. He made a small, inarticulate noise as she lowered her head and took him into her mouth.

  He tasted like heat and clean skin and she took him all the way to the back of her throat, reveling in how thick and long he was. His hands slid into her hair as she started to work him, her tongue tormenting the sensitive head of his cock. She poured all her want and all her need into the act, doing her damnedest to tell him with her hands and mouth how important he was to her, how grateful she was for what he’d done tonight, how much his sacrifice meant to her. She felt the tension growing in him and she upped the pace, wanting to give him as much pleasure as she possibly could. Wanting to rock his world.

  “Violet,” he groaned, his voice ragged.

  She could feel how close he was, could feel his hips lift off the seat as he gave into the primitive urge to pump into something. Then he was coming, his body shuddering for long, drawn out seconds. She waited until he was done before giving the head of his beautiful cock one last, regretful lick. She lifted her head to find Martin watching her with heavy-lidded eyes.

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “I wanted to.” So much.

  “You know you’ve ruined me for all other women, right?”

  “That was the plan.”

  He lifted his hand and brushed his knuckles along the curve of her breast, his expression suddenly very serious. “What did I do before you, Violet? I can’t remember.”

  She caught his hand and turned his palm toward her, pressing a kiss into it. She could remember her life before he’d become an essential part of it. She didn’t want to go back there.

  “What would you do if told you that I loved you?” she said quietly, her voice barely above a whisper.

  It felt like the bravest thing she’d ever said, but she needed to know. She was besotted with this man, and she was reasonably certain the feeling was mutual, but it was so much what she wanted, so perfect, she couldn’t quite believe in it.

  “I’d say hallelujah, because I’m crazy ape bonkers for you, Violet Sutcliffe.”

  “I love you.”

  His eyes glinted. “Come here.”

  She didn’t need further encouragement, scrambling across the centre console and onto him. She lay her body over his, chest to chest, hip to hip. His hands came up to frame her face, his thumbs brushing her cheekbones.

  “I love you, too. I’m obsessed with you, and I admire you and I adore you. I love you, Violet.”

  No one had ever declared their love so unequivocally, so sincerely, so convincingly. For a moment her chest seemed to expand, as though her heart was suddenly too big for her body. This man—this amazing, driven, smart, capable, loyal, loving, sexy man—loved her.

  “This feels too good to be true,” she whispered.

  “It’s true. I’m true. And I’m not going anywhere. Not unless you come with me.”

  She closed her eyes, pressing her cheek into his touch, overwhelmed by the joy burgeoning inside her. They sat like that for a long moment, communing silently with one another, allowing the truth to sink into their bones.

  Then a car started up somewhere to their right and she opened her eyes and made the decision she’d been delaying for too long.

  “I need to talk to Elizabeth. As soon as possible.”

  “Okay.”

  “I need to be in the same room as her, to see her face. I don’t want her to just say the polite, reasonable thing to smooth things over when she really wants to scream at me. I want her to scream at me if she has to.”

  “We haven’t done anything wrong, Violet. Elizabeth has no claim on me.”

  Violet nodded, but they both knew it wasn’t as cut and dried as that. Martin had been Elizabeth’s for six years.

  “It will be okay, Violet.”

  It was the second time he’d said those words to her, and they still held a lot of power. But even his love and reassurance couldn’t stop the dart of fear that raced through her as she contemplated the very real prospect of losing her best friend.

  Chapter Eleven

  She booked her ticket that night, sitting in bed beside Martin, his laptop on her knees as she hit the button to confirm her purchase. It was done. Three days from now she would know if she had won the man of her dreams at the expense of her closet, most beloved friend.

  She rang Elizabeth the next morning to announce her visit. E sounded delighted and surprised and excited by the prospect of seeing her. Violet felt like a fraud, as though she was deceiving her friend yet again.

  She packed that night, setting her smallest case by the door. She wanted this over with now, and she regretted not simply jumping on the first flight out. It simply hadn’t been practical, however. She’d needed to organize cover for the store—a student, Andie, who sometimes helped out during busy periods—as well as take delivery of a major shipment.

  It wasn’t until the following day that she remembered that she needed to add her passport details to her booking. She was in the shop at the time, and she flipped the closed sign and raced upstairs to find her passport. Belatedly it occurred to her that it had been a while since she’d used it—it would be deeply frustrating if it had expired.

  She found her passport in her underwear drawer, her shoulders dropping with relief when she flipped it open and saw that it was good for another twelve months. Phew.

  She locked up the flat and started down the stairs, her thoughts racing ahead of her to tomorrow’s flight and what would happen when she landed in Australia. Elizabeth had insisted on picking her up from the airport. It was going to take an act of enormous self control to not simply blurt out her news the moment she saw Elizabeth’s face.

  She wasn’t sure what happened next—if she missed a step or slipped or something else entirely, but the next thing she knew she was tumbling down the remaining half a dozen stairs, arms flailing as she tried and failed to grasp the railing to break her fall. She landed painfully, her ankle twisting beneath her, her knee smashing into the edge of a stair tread.

  For a moment the pain was so intense she couldn’t breathe. Then she was gasping, tears springing to her eyes as she started to shake in reaction. Moving slowly, she used the balustrade to drag herself into a semi-crouch, balancing on her uninjured leg. She tried to move her ankle and cried out in pain.

  It took her a moment to recover from the attempt. Tears rolling down her face, she sank onto a step and pulled her phone from her skirt pocket.

  “Hello. I was just thinking about you,” Martin said warmly.<
br />
  “I’ve had an accident. Can you come? I need you.”

  “Are you okay? What happened? Should I call an ambulance?”

  Later, when the world wasn’t quite so filled with pain, she would take time to appreciate the urgent concern in his voice.

  “I fell down the stairs. I’ve banged my knee and twisted my ankle.”

  “Violet.”

  There was so much meaning in the single word.

  “I’m okay.”

  “You’d better be.”

  She smiled as his fierceness.

  “Ten minutes. Don’t move.”

  He made it in eight, pounding on the street door the second he arrived. She slid down the final couple of steps on her backside and reached up to let him in. He paled when he saw her. Crouching beside her, he touched her face.

  “Jesus, Violet.”

  “I’m okay,” she reassured him again.

  He lifted her skirt and examined first her knee then her ankle. He didn’t touch anything, for which she was hugely grateful.

  His expression was grim when his gaze met hers again.

  “You realize it’s broken, don’t you?”

  “I had an inkling.”

  “We need to get you to hospital.”

  He carried her to the car, placing her carefully in the back seat and arranging his coat to support her ankle.

  “Fifteen minutes, tops, and we’ll be there,” he said as started the engine.

  She lay with her head tilted back, hands fisted in her lap as she tried to breathe through the pain. He carried her into casualty and the nurse took one look at her and ushered them through to a cubicle. X-rays revealed that she had, indeed, broken her ankle. Her knee was merely badly bruised.

  They gave her painkillers and ice for her knee, then a nurse came to stabilise her ankle with a cast. Violet watched the woman work, trying to contain the emotion rising inside her. Martin brushed the hair back from her face and tightened his grip on her hand. She looked up at him, a single tear sliding down her cheek.

  “I’m going to have to cancel my flight, aren’t I?”

  He didn’t bother responding. They both knew she’d be in no condition to walk, let alone fly for quite some time. Fortunately she already had Andie lined up to cover the shop for her while she was away, so she didn’t have to worry about the store for the next week, at least.

  They sent her home with a blue fiberglass cast and crutches. Martin took her to his place and put her to bed. That night he collected a suitcase of things from her apartment and made space in his wardrobe for her clothes.

  “People are going to think I did this on purpose, so you’d be forced to take me in,” she said as she watched him carefully hang her dresses and coats. There was something incredibly endearing about the way he made sure they were hanging just right before he put them on the rail.

  “People are going to think I pushed you down the stairs so you’d have no choice but to move in with me.”

  She called Elizabeth later that evening to tell her the bad news. E was hugely concerned and apologetic that she wasn’t there to commiserate and comfort Violet in person. She sent an enormous basket of flowers and chocolates to the shop the next day and Andie dropped them at Martin’s place on her way home. Violet was staring at them morosely when Martin got in from work that evening. His gaze went from her to the flowers and back again.

  “Elizabeth?”

  “She’s such a good friend. I don’t deserve her.”

  Martin sat on the side of the bed. “You’re a great friend to Elizabeth. Even when I was at my most ridiculous where you were concerned, I understood that.”

  “A truly great friend wouldn’t have so much as sniffed in your direction.”

  “And where would that have left me? Sleepwalking my way through my life?”

  Despite her guilt and misery, she was warmed by his words and the way he looked at her. It still felt like a minor miracle to her that he loved her in the same way that she loved him. Then she caught sight of Elizabeth’s flowers over his shoulder and her smile faded.

  “Call her, Violet. If it’s weighing on you so heavily, call her. I know it’s not what you wanted, but maybe it’s what you have to accept,” Martin said.

  She stared at him, chewing her lip. He was probably right but she hated the idea of having such an important conversation over the phone.

  “You can’t put this off forever, you know that, right?”

  She ducked her head, hating that he could see right through her excuses to her cowardly heart. His hand found her cheek, his palm cupping her jaw.

  “She loves you, Violet. She wants you to be happy.”

  “You were hers for six years, Martin. She was going to marry you. It’s not like I borrowed a pair of her shoes without permission. I borrowed her life.”

  “It was my life, too. Don’t I get a say in any of this? A share of the blame? I’m the one who came to you that first time. I’m the one who kissed you and pushed you down onto the couch.”

  She smiled faintly at his chivalry. “I kissed you, you idiot, and dragged you onto the couch.”

  They argued the toss for a few minutes, which inevitably led to a re-enactment of original events—creatively choreographed to allow for her injuries.

  Afterward, as Martin lay dozing beside her, she tried to psych herself up to call Elizabeth. She knew her procrastination was verging on the pathological at this point and that every day that passed only made things worse. She really needed to bit the bullet.

  She glanced at her phone on the bedside table, but didn’t pick it up.

  She’d never considered herself a weak person. She’d walked away from her family when she was nineteen, striking out into the world with only the feeble funds in her school bank account to keep the wolf from the door. She’d built up a business from nothing, created a life for herself. Yet for some reason she was unable to tackle this situation head on.

  “Give yourself a break, Violet.”

  She turned her head on the pillow. “I thought you were sleeping.”

  “And I thought I’d succeeded in distracting you.”

  “Is that what that was?”

  “Among other things.”

  She smiled, but her heart wasn’t in it. “I don’t like feeling like this.”

  “Guilty?”

  “Yes. And feeble.”

  “You’re not feeble.”

  “Then why is this so hard for me?”

  “Because Elizabeth is your surrogate family.” He said it as though it was perfectly obvious, plainer than the nose on her face.

  She propped herself up on an elbow, arrested. “What do you mean?”

  “You can’t see it?” he asked, his grey eyes gentle. “You’ve lost one family already, and Elizabeth stepped into the breach. She became your sister and your mother and your father, all rolled into one. You did the same for her, mind. You helped her survive her grandparents. You two saved each other. And now you’re afraid that history is going to repeat itself and that once the truth of what has happened between us has been revealed, Elizabeth will reject you in the same way that your father did.”

  It was so simple, so obvious. Violet lay blinking back tears, ridiculously choked up over Martin’s concise take on her situation. She’d been so sure that she’d dealt with all that stuff with her father and stepmother, that she had it under control and yet here it was, raising its ugly head again.

  “Does any of this stuff ever go away?” she asked after a long beat.

  “In my experience, no. But you get to know where the bodies are buried, and you learn how to avoid them and how to cope with them when you can’t avoid them.”

  Violet studied his face in the dim light, then reached out to run a finger along the bristly line of his jaw.

  “How did you get so smart?”

  “The hard way. The same way you got so strong. And you are strong, Violet. You’ll survive this, no matter what happens.”

  She loved h
im for not sugar-coating things, for not attempting to predict Elizabeth’s response.

  “You think I should call her?”

  “I think you should stop carrying all this guilt around and accept that you’re allowed to be happy. And if talking to Elizabeth is going to achieve that, then yes, call her.”

  The words were barely out of his mouth when her phone rang. Martin passed it across to her. She took one look at the caller I.D. and took a deep breath.

  “It’s E.”

  It was as though the fates were adding their encouragement to Martin’s. Telling her that now was the time to unburden herself.

  Martin raised an eyebrow in silent question.

  “Okay,” she said, nodding. “Okay.”

  It was time. Past time. She needed to face the consequences and move on. Even if it was going to hurt like hell. She and Martin couldn’t move forward until this was dealt with. He’d been very careful not to mention his own feelings in any of their discussions so far, but she knew it chaffed on him that their relationship was not yet public.

  She took the call. “Hey, E.” Her voice came out strangely, tight and a little high.

  “Violet. Thank God you’re there. I wanted you to be the first to know—Nathan just asked me to marry him, and I said yes!”

  For a second Violet was speechless. She blinked rapidly, trying to prod her stunned brain into action.

  Elizabeth had flown out to Australia four months ago. And now she was getting married? It was all way too fast, way too crazy, even for a woman who had just turned her life upside down.

  “Violet? Are you still there?”

  Violet gathered her scattered thoughts together and forced herself to say the expected thing, even though her head was teeming with doubts.

  “I am. I’m just blown away. It’s amazing news.” She glanced at Martin as it hit her that this news might be more than a little shocking to him, too.

  No matter what he said, no matter that he was with her now and that she knew in her gut he was happy, the news that Elizabeth was marrying someone so soon after breaking things off with him would have to sting. He wouldn’t be human if it didn’t.

  She reached out and took his hand, aware that her next words would well and truly give the game away as far as the topic of her conversation with Elizabeth went. “Have you set a date yet?”