The Wedding Proposal

by Sue Moorcroft

  Lucas’s eyes spoke of fatigue but he still looked glad to see her, taking her hand and stroking her palm with his thumb. ‘Sorry for himself. King-sized headache, blurry vision, nausea, complaining that his leg itches in the plaster. Serves him right for acting like a twat.’

  She squeezed his hand. ‘I’m incredibly proud of what you did.’

  He kissed the end of her nose. ‘I’ve had the training, luckily for him. I’m just glad that the precautions we took with his spine proved unnecessary. If he’d messed that up—’ He grimaced.

  ‘Don’t even think about it. Are your mum and dad at the hospital with him?’ She tried not to sound as if she hoped they were safely out of her way. Walking down from the centre she’d caught herself constructing an optimistic scenario where Fiona and Geoffrey, having assured themselves of Charlie’s well-being, would make this a flying visit and be off again first thing in the morning. Then Elle wouldn’t need to even see them.

  But Lucas immediately dashed any such hopes.

  ‘No, they’re on the Shady Lady.’ He looked down at her hand in his for several seconds. When he looked up again she read apprehension in his face

  ‘They wanted to talk to me about you. I said I’d feel more comfortable if you were in on the conversation.’

  Around them, children called as they played in the park, the traffic rumbled on the road, sailing yachts shifted at their moorings and the clinking of their rigging sounded like cutlery being moved gently in a drawer. ‘Wow,’ she said, slowly. Trepidation washed through her. ‘What was their response?’

  ‘They said OK, if that’s what I want.’

  ‘OK.’ She tried to work out what this could mean. It didn’t give her a good feeling that the Roses felt the need to request some kind of summit, despite them being here only because their beloved younger son had been in danger, despite nothing being decided between her and Lucas. It was as if Lucas’s parents were running up a huge red warning flag. Part of her wanted to whine, ‘Why would I want to be in on it? Can’t you talk them round for me?’

  Then anger stiffened her spine. Why was she letting them make her feel threatened? All she’d ever done wrong was get married too young to the wrong man, and let Fiona and Geoffrey look down on her for her mistake, blowing it up into some massive flight of irresponsibility and stupidity. No doubt if she’d come from some upper-middle-class family it would all have been overlooked as an indiscretion of youth. But her average, ordinary family hadn’t compared well to Lucas’s comfortable background. She clenched her fists to remember Fiona once asking, ‘Did your ex-husband have money? Divorce can sometimes be worthwhile.’

  Of course, Elle had been so outraged and humiliated that her stammer had made an appearance. ‘W-we kept our finances s-separate!’

  Fiona had sent her a real courtroom stare.

  Well, bollocks. She’d nothing to be ashamed of. Just because Fiona was a lawyer and Geoffrey a magistrate, they couldn’t create some kind of dock and put her in it to be condemned as not matching up to their precious standards.

  Fuck them, basically.

  ‘Right,’ she breezed. ‘Give me fifteen minutes to shower and change.’

  It wasn’t relief that flicked across Lucas’s features. It was alarm. He leaped up and grabbed her hand as she turned towards Seadancer, his eyes dark and troubled. ‘Did I call this wrong? I’m not siding against you in some kind of half-arsed witch hunt. I just didn’t want you to think I was talking about you behind your back.’

  ‘OK,’ she repeated. And tried to feel reassured.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Elle marched along the quayside towards the Shady Lady with a ‘let’s get it over with’ air. While aboard Seadancer she’d changed into a white dress that looked amazing with her tan, and yanked her hair up into a knot on the top of her head.

  Troubled, Lucas took her hand. A few hours ago it had seemed supportive to refuse to discuss Elle without her being present. He’d felt as if he was ranking himself on her side, creating a boundary for his parents not to cross. But as he’d explained the situation to Elle, defensive wariness had frozen her expression and he could swear she’d shrunk from him. In her eyes there was something he really didn’t like.

  Disappointment?

  As he’d waited on the quayside, trying not to attach any particular importance to her not inviting him to her cabin while she changed, he’d gazed almost unseeingly at two fishermen dangling their lines between the boats in the calm marina waters, and the expression in Elle’s eyes had bothered him. A lot.

  Now, striding beside her, he was beginning to feel like he was not just taking a lamb to slaughter but asking it how it would like to be cooked.

  Much as he loved his parents, he was under few illusions about them. Fiona, particularly, was self-assured and direct to the extent that people in her practice affectionately called her ‘Fearsome Fiona’. Or possibly not always affectionately.

  He halted. ‘You don’t have to do this, you know.’

  She made to carry on up the marina. ‘It’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  His hand tightened on hers and he tugged her back. ‘Not if it’s going to make you uncomfortable.’

  She turned her blue eyes on him, grave and guarded. ‘Your parents have always made me uncomfortable. They never made any effort to make me feel anything else. If I don’t answer their summons then where do we go from here?’ There was anger in her voice but also resignation.

  He didn’t like either one. ‘Shit. I have got it wrong. Now you’re uncomfortable with me.’

  Her gaze switched to the Shady Lady and a small frown creased her brows. Slowly, she said, ‘I don’t think your suggesting that I be given the opportunity to hear their concerns is the issue. The issue is that your parents have an issue. With me. The fact that they’ve prioritised bringing that issue to your attention, considering the circumstances under which they’re on the island, is an indicator of the level of their concern. I think ignoring that would be the wrong thing to do. Signals are there for us to learn from.’

  She sounded if she was in a team meeting. Remote. Assessing. Deciding. Acting.

  His heart sank and he cursed his tendency towards prompt decisions, because it was a complete bitch when those decisions turned out to be wrong. He should have heard his parents out and organised his defences – their defences, his and Elle’s – once he understood the situation, instead of leaping to the stance of it being wrong to talk behind Elle’s back. It had felt wrong. Wrong was wrong. So he’d said so.

  Elle had always said that he saw nothing between right and wrong. She was right.

  Time for damage limitation. ‘Then we’d better send out a few signals of our own, hadn’t we?’ He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed it.

  Her gaze returned to his face and her frown lifted for just a moment. ‘Let’s see,’ was all she said.

  Fiona and Geoffrey were waiting in the saloon, long clear drinks in front of them. ‘Good evening,’ said Fiona, ever the spokesperson.

  ‘Hi,’ said Elle, sliding onto the sofa opposite them without waiting to be invited.

  Geoffrey cleared his throat. ‘Gin and tonic?’

  ‘No thanks.’ Elle hated gin and tonic. It hadn’t taken the senior Roses long to provision the boat to their own tastes.

  ‘Beer?’ suggested Lucas.

  With a quick smile, Elle nodded, watching him jump down into the galley and swoop up bottles from the fridge.

  While showering and changing, Elle had taken a few minutes to think. Ideally, she would have liked her brain to supply her with a confidence-inspiring plan to take the fight to her opponents. She’d tried to visualise herself being more forthright than Fiona, more intimidating than Geoffrey, coolly articulate as she enquired as to the nature of their concerns, impressing them with her maturity and poise.
/>   Unfortunately, it was a vision that refused to form. Much clearer was the spectre of Elle stammering guiltily the instant Fiona fixed her with that legal eagle glare.

  So she’d decided upon the strategy of speaking only to reply, allowing Lucas’s parents to state their business and expose their battle plan. She smoothed down her dress, folded her hands, and looked politely from Fiona to Geoffrey.

  Fiona’s brows lifted. ‘It was a surprise for us to learn that you were living here with Lucas, Elle.’

  ‘Simon’s idea of helping out,’ Lucas supplied. ‘He felt we needed some help to get back together. And it’s worked out better than we first thought it would.’

  ‘I see.’ Fiona looked at Elle.

  Elle gazed back.

  ‘Would you say that you are back together?’ Fiona prompted.

  Again it was Lucas who answered, his voice calm and reasonable. His thigh was warm and firm against Elle’s. ‘I think we’re old enough to sort ourselves out, Mum. You don’t need to be concerned. When we’re ready to tell you something, we’ll tell you.’

  Fiona nodded, sadly, as if she’d feared as much. She exchanged a look with her husband and took a surprisingly enthusiastic slug of gin and tonic. For the first time, it crossed Elle’s mind that Fiona wasn’t enjoying herself. Everything about her spoke of a woman gearing herself up for an unpleasant task.

  Being viewed as an unpleasantness gave her a jagged pain in her chest, and being so obviously disliked made her feel physically sick.

  She had to resist the urge to justify herself. Look I’m not such an awful person. I was young and stupid and I was manipulated. That’s not a crime! At least give me and Lucas a chance. We can mess things up without your help.

  But begging for understanding wasn’t going to win her any respect – or, for that matter, any understanding. She pressed her lips together and left the floor to Fiona.

  This time, when Fiona spoke, it was to her son. Her voice was gentle. ‘I would really have liked us to have this chat in private, Lucas. It would have been so much better.’ She paused.

  They waited.

  Fiona took another slug of her gin. ‘Something happened. We didn’t tell you at the time because we thought it would cause unnecessary pain. You’d already left to live in America with Simon.’ She licked her lips. ‘A man made an appointment to see me at the office. Richard Manion.’

  Elle jumped. She felt the muscles in Lucas’s thigh twitch, as if some reaction was trying to burst out of him.

  Geoffrey stirred, turning his gaze on Elle. ‘I think you call him Ricky,’ he clarified, as if she might not have noticed the name of her ex-husband on Fiona’s lips.

  Fiona darted a glance at Elle, but then returned her gaze to Lucas. ‘I’m very sorry to tell you that Mr Manion tried to blackmail me. He also told me the truth about Elle. It seems as if the boat’s not the only “shady lady” around here.’

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  It was as if the air around her had turned to ice. Elle couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. She felt, more than saw, Lucas turn his head to stare at her. Fiona and Geoffrey were staring at her, too. Everybody in the world was looking at her and waiting for her to speak. ‘B-blackmail?’ she managed, eventually. Her voice sounded distant in her ears. ‘What truth?’

  Fiona turned back to Lucas. ‘You know that we wouldn’t do this if it weren’t absolutely necessary, don’t you?’

  Elle felt a surge of rage at being ignored. ‘WHAT TRUTH?’ she yelled, not caring that everybody jumped.

  Fiona visibly withdrew. ‘You really want me to go through—’

  ‘Every word.’

  ‘I think you’d better.’ Lucas’s voice was without expression.

  With a shrug, Fiona complied. ‘This man, Richard Manion, said he was your husband.’

  ‘Ex-husband,’ Elle corrected her.

  Fiona waved her hand, as if brushing the detail aside. ‘He said that if I didn’t give him money, he’d make sure everybody in town, including the newspapers, knew that our son’s girlfriend was a crook, that she’d been involved in handling stolen goods, receiving, deception, etc. And’—she paused, impressively—‘you’d let Ricky take the blame. He told me about forged cheques, the police looking for you in the past. The data you’d let him share—’

  Elle gasped as if Fiona had leaned forward and driven her fist into Elle’s guts. ‘The shit.’

  Slowly, she turned to Lucas. ‘He’s twisted everything,’ she said, helplessly. ‘I was never in on it.’ Her voice shook. ‘I was a victim.’

  Lucas gave a single nod. ‘Can you tell me how it was from your side?’ Shock was in his frozen face, his expressionless eyes.

  ‘You know the first part.’ She sighed, slumping against the back of the sofa. ‘You know that it didn’t take me long to realise that I’d made a huge mistake but I didn’t really know how to get back from it.’

  Her heart beat in huge heavy thumps as she began the story she could have insisted on telling before. ‘As soon as I had a decent salary, Ricky decided he was going to start his own business. He made over a spare bedroom into his office and boxes of things were always hanging around the garage. It had already become obvious that, financially, he was a nightmare. We began with a joint account but his view of that was that I put money in and he took money out.’

  She swallowed. She was aware of Fiona and Geoffrey listening intently, but her focus was on Lucas. Sweat greased her palms. Her fear at finding herself cornered into regurgitating everything she’d held back for so long threatened to overwhelm logical thought. She took a deep breath, trying to steady herself, trying to order the facts.

  ‘So I separated our finances, opening accounts in my sole name so that I could control my own money. He was really angry.’ She flinched to remember the way that Ricky had roared his fury into her face. ‘Ricky’s manipulative. He never hit me but he was a master of emotional abuse. He’d stoked the tension between my parents and me, yet learned from them how to wield disappointment and guilt as weapons I’d respond to. So I pacified him by taking over paying the bills and rent while he kept whatever he earned for himself.’

  ‘Why didn’t you leave?’ Lucas’s voice was bleak.

  ‘Because of my parents.’ She went on doggedly, miserably. ‘It sounds stupid and weak but they were just waiting for me to fail. The more obvious they made that, the more I couldn’t face admitting that they were right, that marrying Ricky hadn’t been a whirlwind fairy-tale romance but a huge mistake. That our marriage had become nothing more than mutual disappointment and separate lives. You’re probably having problems understanding this because your parents brought you up to believe in yourself. My parents did nothing but fill me with doubts.

  ‘I had my work. I put in long hours at the office; then when the last people were leaving the building and I had to go, too, I brought work home to fill the rest of the evening. Ricky was hooked on laziness, hanging out with mates I didn’t like and didn’t trust.’ The old, ugly feeling washed over her, the shame of finding herself tied to a man who had begun to spend his life with a lager can in one hand and a TV remote in the other. ‘Ricky was rude and boorish, particularly in front of these shifty new mates who began to turn up to smoke and drink with him. They picked arguments with me. They called me “Ricky’s yuppie”. If I was working at the kitchen table I’d try to ignore them but they’d jeer and swear until they drove me up to my room or even out of the house.’ She shuddered.

  ‘Work became all I had. I climbed the ladder. I had a position of responsibility and over the next two years my security clearance level became high. I was trusted and respected, fast-tracked, skipping up the grades. But the downside was that Ricky and his horrible mates felt more and more like a secret I had to hide.’

  She risked a glance at Lucas’s parents and her voice all but dried up. The
condemnation on their faces was clear. She turned back to Lucas hopelessly. He was looking at her as if he’d never seen her before.

  Slowly, she sank back, feeling tried and judged and declared guilty. She completed her tale listlessly. ‘Long story short, one day the police turned up at the house. Ricky wasn’t there and probably hadn’t been for a day or two. I spent so much time avoiding him that I hadn’t thought too much about his absence. The police were looking for him. Once they were happy that I didn’t know what was going on or where he was’—she threw a defiant look at Fiona—‘they told me that complaints had been made. Ricky had been selling stuff on the internet. Some was stolen goods, the rest didn’t exist at all.’

  Her voice had become small and flat. Defensive. ‘I was scared to death it would affect my job. The more information the police shared, the more I began to suspect that he’d stolen data from my laptop, harvesting e-mail addresses to create mailing lists and sending out invoices for fictitious services. Some companies simply paid without checking. I think I fucked up. I must have left my laptop open when his raucous mates had driven me out of the house and one of them had been clever enough to use data held on my machine or even up in the cloud. I could imagine a nightmare inquiry and me losing my job. The only part of my life where I had respect.’

  Deep breath. ‘There was some forging of cheques,’ she admitted. ‘But not by me. When he left, Ricky cleared my account. I’d kept my internet banking password away from him, obviously, so he just did things the old-fashioned way, taking my cheque book and forging my signature on a succession of cheques made out to him, until the account was empty and they began to bounce. Because I wanted this horror story to go away, I took that on the chin, closed that account and opened another in a different bank to render any other cheques he wrote useless.’