by Jessica Hart
‘You love it really, Perdita,’ said Ed. ‘It always sounds as if you and Tom have a good time there.’
‘That’s what I think,’ Millie put in, while Perdita and Tom were still gaping. ‘I don’t see much sign of her edges getting less sharp, though!’
‘How can you say that?’ Perdita protested, finding her voice at last. ‘My edges are so rounded now I’m practically a ball!’
Millie’s face lit up with a sudden idea. ‘And, talking of balls…why don’t we have one to launch the project?’
‘A ball? In Ellsborough?’
‘Well, a party, then,’ Millie amended, obviously throwing herself into her new role with gusto. ‘We’ll invite everybody we know to get people talking about it, and get The Ellsborough Press and local businesses along.’
‘It’s a brilliant idea, but parties cost money,’ said Grace doubtfully.
‘I know, but I’m sure a company with a sense of corporate social responsibility like Bell Browning would like to sponsor it…wouldn’t they, Ed?’
Ed laughed and threw up his hands in surrender. ‘I’d better say yes or I’ll end up like Paul, nursing a sore arm all week!’
‘Thank you!’ He earned dazzling smiles from Grace and Millie, and Perdita couldn’t help wondering which of them he had been trying to please.
Never had she been so glad to see her guests leave. Her jaw was aching with the effort of keeping her smile in place by the time she closed the door on the last of them. Ed, in fact, had offered to stay and help her clear up, but perversely Perdita had insisted that she could manage on her own.
Now she wished that he had stayed, even if it would have meant Tom and Cassie and Lauren staying too. What was it she had said to Ed? I don’t get lonely. And she didn’t, not normally. She loved her flat but, after she finished clearing up, she sat on the sofa, listening to the silence, and realised that what she had thought was tranquillity was in fact emptiness.
The thought made Perdita feel very sad, but she fought down the tears that clogged her throat without warning. There was no point in feeling sorry for herself. She was the one who had given Nick the ultimatum, so she only had herself to blame when he’d chosen the option she hadn’t wanted. It had taken time, but she had convinced herself in the end that independence and self-reliance were better than the constant struggle for Nick’s attention.
But they came at a cost.
She was only feeling restless because the party had been so loud and now everyone was gone, Perdita told herself. There were worse things than being alone. But she couldn’t help remembering what Ed had said about being married, about thinking about it as sharing rather than giving up.
‘Oh, I’m just getting maudlin!’ Jumping up from the sofa with an exclamation of irritation, she went to stand on her balcony and look down at the river. It was a beautiful, golden October evening and the water was still and tranquil. People were strolling along the banks, enjoying the autumn sunshine.
Was it just her, Perdita wondered bleakly, or did everyone seem to be a couple or part of a family? Everyone had someone to enjoy the evening with.
Except her.
She shook herself impatiently. It wasn’t like her to get down like this. She wasn’t a fool. She knew she was only feeling this way because she liked Ed more than she wanted to admit, and the fact was that she hadn’t enjoyed seeing him get on quite so well with Millie and Grace.
And this in spite of the fact that she loved Millie and wished she could find someone who would appreciate her and treat her like the gem that she was. Millie needed a lovely, kind, intelligent man like Ed, and Grace deserved another chance at happiness too. If she were a nicer person, Perdita decided darkly, she would be really happy to see either of them end up with Ed.
Evidently she was a horrible person, though, because the truth was that she wanted him for herself, and she didn’t want anyone else to have him, even her dearest Millie. But she didn’t want the pain and anguish that would inevitably follow, that was for sure. Perdita tested her heart gingerly. It had taken her a long time to get over Nick. She might be feeling a bit sad this evening, but it was nothing compared to the wretchedness of those long months when she couldn’t imagine ever being really happy again.
Did she want to go back to feeling that way again? No, no, no. Perdita’s mind reared back in horror at the idea. Absolutely not.
So forget about Ed, she told herself. Sticking with being friends was a good plan. Any more and she’d be risking her poor, battered heart all over again, and this time she wouldn’t be able to tell herself that she didn’t know exactly how hard it was to fall in love with a single father.
Perdita squared her shoulders. She was a big girl now. She knew what the situation was, and she had made her decision. It was time to stop being such a baby and accept the way things were.
Well, she could do that, Perdita thought, resigned. But she didn’t have to be happy about it, surely?
‘Have you got a minute?’ Ed caught Perdita as she was leaving the boardroom where they had been having the monthly meeting of departmental heads.
‘Of course.’
Perdita was on her best behaviour today. This was the first time she had seen Ed since the lunch party on Sunday, and she had had three days to pull herself together and stop being silly about him.
And she had thought it had worked until he’d walked into the meeting and her heart had started springing around her chest.
Still, it was easier to pretend to be cool and businesslike when they were talking about budgets and performance targets and she was armoured in her best suit with its classy little jacket that always made her feel a bit like Audrey Hepburn, although without the same gamine charm, obviously.
She clutched her files to her chest in an attempt to keep her heart under control as Ed accompanied her down the corridor to the lifts.
‘Thank you for Sunday,’ said Ed. ‘We all really enjoyed it.’
Perdita managed a rather stiff smile. ‘I’m glad.’
There was a tiny pause. ‘Do you remember that music you liked when you came round to supper?’
‘The Bach?’
‘Exactly. It turns out that they’re playing that piece in a concert in St Margaret’s on Saturday. I wondered if you’d like to go?’
Ed felt stupidly nervous as he waited for Perdita to reply. It had seemed such a simple invitation when he had practised it earlier. Music they both enjoyed, a beautiful setting-what reason could she have to say no?
But Perdita was definitely hesitating. She pushed the button to summon the lifts and glanced at him a little uncertainly.
‘You did say that you wished that you got to classical concerts more often,’ he reminded her, and then worried in case she thought he was being pushy.
‘That’s true…’
‘But perhaps you’ve got other plans for Saturday night?’ he said, hating the false heartiness in his voice. It was so long since he had asked a woman out. Didn’t she realise how nervous he was? And how much he wanted her to say yes?
‘Well, no,’ Perdita had to admit. Afterwards she wondered why she hadn’t just lied and pretended that she had a heavy date, but at the time it never occurred to her. Being less than straight wasn’t something that came naturally to her.
‘Then please come.’ Ed threw pride to the wind and told Perdita the truth. ‘The girls keep nagging at me to get a life, and this concert is my first step. I don’t want to go home and tell them that I fell at the first hurdle of asking someone to go with me.’
When he put it like that, it was hard to say no. And really, what was the big deal about going to a concert with him? It was exactly the kind of thing you did with a friend. It wasn’t like dinner, or even a drink. It wasn’t a date.
Naturally, that didn’t stop Perdita feeling pathetically, stupidly, ridiculously jittery as she waited for Ed to pick her up that Saturday. The plan was for him to leave his car outside her flat so they could walk into town together. And really, how
hard could it be? Perdita asked herself. A church wasn’t exactly an intimate environment. They would sit next to each other, listen to some beautiful music, walk home and say goodnight-and she would be ready for the kissing on the cheek thing this time too.
She would keep it cool, keep it casual. Easy.
Typically, the long spell of fine weather had broken in time for the weekend and sullen clouds had been lowering over the city all day, threatening to rain but never quite getting round to it. Her bedroom window overlooked the street and Perdita peered out, to check the weather and not to see if Ed had arrived yet, of course. She had deliberately dressed down in a soft skirt and boots, but she decided at the last minute to pull on a loose cardigan as well and take a coat after all.
Ed was even better prepared. ‘I’ve brought an umbrella,’ he said, holding it up. ‘Just in case it rains on the way back.’
Having given herself a particularly stern talking-to in the minutes before he’d arrived, Perdita managed the cool, casual thing quite well at first. They talked easily as they walked down the river and then up over the bridge into the heart of the old city.
Ed seemed to be going for cool and casual as well, and Perdita began to wonder if she had misinterpreted things when he had told her that his daughters were nagging him to get a life. Perhaps they weren’t thinking in terms of a girlfriend at all? They had probably just meant that he needed to make some new friends.
Which would be good, of course, because if a friend was all he wanted, she could do that without any problem. That was all she wanted too, and if she was just going out with a friend, she could treat him like Rick or Millie and stop feeling tense.
So why was she still vibrating like a tuning fork?
The concert was held in one of the city’s medieval churches, which provided an atmospheric setting and wonderful acoustics. They sat in the old pews, which weren’t that comfortable to begin with and got a whole lot more uncomfortable when someone tried to find a space at the end of the row and they all had to shuffle along.
For one awkward moment Perdita found herself jammed up against Ed’s rock-solid body before, with a lot of whispered apologies along the line, they managed to rearrange themselves. Perdita felt thoroughly flustered by the brief encounter and one whole side of her body seemed to be strumming where it had been pressed against his. She had thought the time their fingers had brushed in his kitchen was disturbing enough, but this was much worse.
She shifted very carefully on the pew. He was still very close. It would take only a moment’s relaxation for their shoulders to lean against each other, or their thighs to touch, and that would never do.
Perdita sat rigidly and looked at the worn carvings on the pillars, at the soaring arches, at the frankly rather unpleasantly hairy neck of the man in front of her, at everything and anything except Ed, who was sitting in self-contained silence beside her.
Not that she needed to be looking at him to picture the humorous grey eyes or the wry set of his mouth. That slight bump in his nose, the way the hair grew at his temples, the exact line of his jaw…Perdita could have drawn them in her sleep, and that worried her. She had known her friend Rick for years and years, but she wouldn’t be able to picture him down to the same tiny details.
Once she had known Nick like that, had treasured every tiny detail of him, but now she struggled to conjure him up with anything like the same sharpness. When she thought of him now, what she remembered was the sadness in his eyes, and her own longing and despair.
And now she was sitting next to another man and wanting to touch him with such a fierce need that she felt physically sick. Perdita’s gaze skittered desperately around the church, but time and again it would graze Ed’s profile in spite of her best efforts not to look at him. Her eyes kept being drawn to the corner of his mouth, to the pulse beating in his neck below his ear, to the severe angle of his cheek.
They were so close. His shoulder was just there, right next to hers. It would be so easy to lean against him and press her lips to his throat. So easy to lay her hand on his thigh. Perdita’s palm actually tingled with the realisation of how little it would take to touch him, and she clutched her hands together in her lap, terrified that one of them might reach out for him of its own accord.
Her whole body seemed to be humming and strumming and, much as Perdita wanted to believe that she was uplifted by the music, she knew that it wasn’t Bach having this effect on her. It was Ed, doing nothing, saying nothing, just listening quietly to the orchestra as the music swelled and soared up into the roof.
Perdita began to feel quite dizzy with the effort of keeping herself under control, and her mind scrabbled desperately to keep a foothold on reality. Ed was her boss, remember?
He was a single father, remember?
She wasn’t interested in being more than a friend, remember that one?
But it was so hard to remember when he was mere inches away.
When the orchestra broke for an interval, Perdita leapt to her feet before they had all finished applauding, unable to bear the excruciating temptation of sitting so close for a moment longer. ‘I could do with stretching my legs,’ she said abruptly. ‘These pews weren’t designed for modern bottoms!’
Since there was no bar to repair to, and the weather was distinctly uninviting outside, they wandered around the church, Perdita chattering feverishly in great bursts and then drying up completely because she couldn’t think of anything to say other than, Take me home and make love to me.
The words bubbled in her throat, pressing at her lips until she was in a panic in case they actually burst out of her and she shouted them out loud in the church. At least it would startle all the other concert-goers out of the conversations they were conducting in suitably hushed, reverent tones, Perdita thought wildly. Terrified that Ed would somehow guess what she was thinking, she hugged her arms together and stared at an eighteenth-century funerary monument with ferocious concentration.
There was a stir as the orchestra started filing back in and people headed back to their seats. Ed put his hand against the small of Perdita’s back to guide her through the crowd and the last breath in her lungs evaporated at his touch. She could feel the warmth of his palm through two layers of clothing and every sense in her body tingled. She was burning, simmering, shimmering with it. Surely Ed could see?
But his expression was impossible to read. He hadn’t been flirting, but there had been a smile at the back of his eyes when he looked at her and was it her imagination or was he letting his hand linger on her back longer than was strictly necessary?
Was he?
Perdita barely heard the second part of the concert above the thrumming in her blood and it was a relief to throw her energies into clapping enthusiastically, which at least gave her a chance to pull herself together. Then they got into the business of gathering up coats and Ed’s umbrella and shuffling along as the crowd funnelled through the doors at the west end of the church, so she had a few minutes to compose herself.
But it was all wasted the moment she realised that it was still raining outside. On the one hand, it was a very good thing that Ed had been prepared enough to bring an umbrella, so at least they wouldn’t get wet. On the other, they were going to have to walk close together all the way back to her flat, and that wasn’t good. That wasn’t good at all.
‘This thing’s big enough for both of us,’ said Ed, putting up the umbrella and holding it over Perdita’s head. ‘Come and stay dry.’
Perdita held herself stiffly as they walked back through the city in a charged silence. The streets were slick with rain and tyres hissed as the cars passed them. On a Saturday night there were lots of people around, either going home after an evening out or, in the case of the younger ones, just getting ready to start theirs. They moved in packs through the streets, the girls teetering on high heels and skimpily dressed in spite of the rain.
Ed shook his head. ‘That’ll be Cassie in a couple of years. She’s dying to be old enoug
h to go clubbing.’
‘Tell her she’ll catch her death if she doesn’t wear a nice cardie,’ said Perdita.
He gave a snort of laughter. ‘I can already hear her reply!’
Perdita was desperately aware of him under the umbrella. Plunging her hands in her pockets, out of temptation, she walked with her head bent and concentrated on breathing nice and steady.
Should she invite Ed in for coffee when they got back to her flat? It would be rude not to, but how was she going to keep her hands off him if they were alone with her single squashy sofa and the soft light of a table lamp and the rain against the windows?
Perdita swallowed hard. What would Ed think if she did invite him in? Would he think that she meant to make coffee, or would he interpret it as meaning something quite different? He could always refuse if he didn’t want to, she reasoned, and, frankly, why should he? Sheer lust had made her tongue-tied and nervous, so it wasn’t as if she had been scintillating company tonight. She stole a glance at Ed’s unyielding profile. He was probably formulating a polite excuse about getting back to the kids even now.
But what if he did come up? What then? Perdita’s mouth dried at the prospect, so much so that the whole question could very well turn out to be academic as she doubted that she could even manage, Would you like a cup of coffee?
They had crossed the bridge and were walking along the river bank now. It was darker down here, but the lamps between the trees cast a wavering yellow light on the dark gleam of water. The river walk was a popular route home for lots of people on this side of town, so they weren’t quite alone, but it felt as if they were cut off from everyone else by an invisible shield that trapped them in a universe all of their own where there was only the soft splatter of rain on the umbrella, the muted click of their footsteps and the booming of her pulse.
Absorbed in thought, she was unaware of Ed’s gaze on her face. Her skin gleamed palely in the dim light and he could make out the curve of her mouth and the alluring sweep of her lashes against her cheek. Even in the dark, Perdita was vivid, even when silent, there was a sensuous kind of fizz and sparkle about her, as if her body wasn’t big enough to contain her personality.
