by Anna Clifton
“That’s right.”
“And you don’t think it would be a good idea to talk about the logistics of how we’re going to do that exactly?”
Adam shook his head slowly from side to side. “Not tonight—one step at a time,” he muttered then bit down on his bottom lip. It was the only thing he could do to stop himself from launching into the hundred and one ways he wanted to spend every single day with her from that moment onwards, because he knew she wasn’t ready for that—not nearly.
“And you think that focusing on the boys will help us get over this rocky beginning of ours?” she asked, clearly still dubious about the prospects of their success.
“It’s a start.”
“So was Hitler invading Poland,” she shot back with a short laugh before adding, “And so is a goodnight kiss.”
And that was when she did it. Shifting over and snuggling closer to him she lay her hand against his chest and brushed his still mouth with her lips in a searching, lingering kiss. His whole body catapulted itself into a hankering readiness for a repeat of their night in front of his fireplace in England.
He couldn’t move, and he didn’t want to. It was too exhilarating to have her take charge of the physical attraction that was erupting like a bonfire between them, welding them closer together with every passing second.
God, he adored her. Life without her in it had become unimaginable. At that moment he knew that fact to be true with a certainty that made him stop breathing and wonder whether he’d ever start again.
Chapter Thirteen
Rolling over amidst delicious layers of cool, crisp linen Abbie opened her eyes. She knew immediately she’d slept well into the morning because her bedroom was filled with the white light of a fully risen sun on a warm summer’s day.
She stretched and then reached for her phone on the bedside table so that she could check the time. It was after ten. There was no boy-noise to be heard anywhere in the house. True to his word, Adam had taken Henry and Pete out for breakfast.
Sitting up in bed she opened her phone messages to find one from Justin in reply to hers from the night before. He promised he would become her slave for life if she pulled off the Atlantis coup.
The other message was sent a little earlier from Adam to let her know he’d bought breakfast for them all and was taking the boys to the playground in Centennial Park. He also suggested that she wander up there when she woke up.
Abbie bit her lip apprehensively as she wrapped her arms around her legs. Adam’s optimism that everything would be all right if they simply focused on the boys was not buoying her hopes up as it had the night before. In fact, like the settling of night-time dew on grass her heart seemed to have grown heavy with doubt overnight—there were major hurdles still to be faced.
Abbie sighed long and hard as she remembered the way he’d been the night before—that was so Adam. He’d marked out the big picture that they would raise the boys together and as usual, was leaving the blueprints to someone else. Hadn’t he been like that from the moment she’d told him about Henry, with his grand plans for sharing houses and even the boys themselves?
For Abbie though, grand plans and leaps of faith were not enough. The devil in her world lay in the details. And she knew from her years of law that the details were often where the colours in the big picture would start to run if they were not shored up to within an inch of their life.
Within half an hour she’d dressed into shorts and a T-shirt and was soon heading through the northern gates of Centennial Park. From there she could see Adam playing football with the two boys in the distance. He would run, ball held high, as Henry and Pete threw themselves at various parts of his body with whoops of delight, attempting to drag him to the ground. Occasionally they succeeded and Abbie guessed that meant a point to them.
Spotting her as she walked across the grass towards them, the boys peeled themselves off their father and tore across to her.
“Can you play, Mum?” Henry begged, pulling at her arm to drag her towards the game.
“No, not today, honey,” Abbie said firmly, still feeling run down after her night in hospital earlier that week.
“Please, Abbie!” Pete chorused in, pulling at her other arm. Abbie sensed that joining in the game was something the boys were going to be very determined about.
“Stop pulling at her, boys,” Adam directed sternly as he approached. “Abbie’s not playing football today.”
“Why not?” they heralded in disappointment, but they already knew the battle was lost and Pete was soon calling Henry to go back to the playground instead.
Adam gave her a grin, falling into step beside her as they wandered over to a bench next to the playground.
“Croissant?” he offered from a white bag and she took one.
They said little for a while, watching the boys as they seamlessly began to play a new game on the equipment with two other little boys of the same age who’d arrived at the playground.
“Little boys are so different to little girls, aren’t they?” Abbie thought out loud eventually.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, if they’d all been girls the four of them would have gone into a stand-off on the equipment, giving and demanding information about each other until they became friends or rejected one another. Boys don’t bother with all that communicating stuff. They just go straight into a game and sort all that friendship stuff out later.”
Adam grinned approvingly. “I hadn’t thought of it like that but you’re right. The first time I met Justin and JP was in an Oxford pub. We spent ten minutes paying each other out about our accents before we’d even introduced ourselves.”
Abbie smiled. She was picturing the three of them doing just that before she added, “Males are generally straight to the point, that’s for sure. Even when I’m parenting I get embroiled in an argument with Pete and Henry but you, all you do is tell them how it’s going to be and they accept it.”
“Boys are nearly always more obedient with their fathers.”
“Don’t I know it. Sometimes, when I’ve had a particularly full on day and they’re bouncing off the walls my only solace is knowing that you’re coming home and will calm them down for me.”
Abbie sensed Adam turn and rest the heavy weight of his gaze upon her. She shifted her attention away from the boys and towards him too, searching his eyes for the meaning behind his loaded, unfathomable silence.
“What?”
“I wasn’t sure until just now that you were okay with that,” he murmured in a gravelly voice.
“What?”
“You and I raising the boys together in a real home—under the same roof.”
“A real home?” Abbie blurted in stunned surprise, her heart launching itself into a full gallop down the final straight as Adam flinched next to her as though struck with a whip.
“That’s right—a real home,” he replied tensely after a few moments of silence had descended ominously between them.
“When you said last night we’d raise the boys together,” Abbie began, nearly panting in nervous agitation as the veil of misperception dropped away from her eyes. “You meant straight away … as … as a couple in every sense of the word, didn’t you? Oh God, Adam, how did we suddenly jump to that step?”
“But you told me, just now, how you felt about me coming home to you,” he protested, staring at her in staggered disbelief. “What the hell did ‘home’ mean in that sentence if you didn’t mean a family home?”
“I meant … I don’t know what I meant,” Abbie stammered breathlessly as she stared blindly across the park, wondering whether she might have to start breathing into the paper bag holding the croissants to ease the panic attack that was swiftly consuming her. “I … I assumed, after what happened between us in England that I’d be moving back to Maeve’s for a while. Adam,” she began as she turned to him and received the full one hundred volts of his blue eyes, bright with sharp, chary watchfulness. “The thing is, I’m
still not ready to have your mother-ship of a life land right in the middle of mine. I … I still need some distance to …”
Adam scoffed mordantly at that point as Abbie sensed him reel next to him as though she’d just slapped his face very hard. “Distance!” he grated out bitterly. “Would the moon be far enough away for you?”
He stopped then, staring towards the boys in furious incredulity before going on. “I can’t believe you’re taking this position again when last night I told you how I feel about you,” he urged with aching tenderness in his voice. The only problem was that his words were like muffled sounds floating around her underwater, tantalisingly longed for but just beyond the reach of her understanding. “I thought you felt the same way about me but nothing we said to each other last night meant anything to you, did it?”
“That’s not true,” Abbie was almost winded by the pressure rising in her chest. “Last night … the way we talked together, it was wonderful,” she tried to explain, knowing all the while that she could never articulate her way out of the perfect storm she was creating for herself. “But I can’t jump from one wonderful talk to a lifetime commitment—not overnight.”
Yet even as she told herself that her resistance to him was fair and right and reasonable, she couldn’t silence the maddening voice inside her head that was screeching at her like a banshee: ‘If you don’t do something fast, Abbie McCarthy, then the love of your life will walk out of your life—for good’. And in visual confirmation of that shrill voice Adam threw himself back on the bench and stared out across the park, his face crumpling before her eyes with bitter resignation and misery.
“It’s hopeless,” he declared in a voice that had flatlined before she watched him swallowing hard, lines of tension running across his forehead like train tracks, the pulse at his temple pounding visibly. “I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to win your trust and to what end? You’ll keep me at arm’s-length forever, no matter what I do.”
“Not forever. All I need is a bit more time and space to get used to things. You haven’t even told me which side of the planet you’re going to make your home yet,” Abbie argued, feeling increasingly disembodied as though watching over the two of them from above. Yet she was powerless to hold back the terrible consequences of her final push-back as it unfolded before her eyes.
“Don’t!” Adam interrupted, a rare moment of pure agony transforming his voice into one she’d never heard before. “Don’t say anything more. I thought we’d come such a long way but I must be the biggest fool in the world because clearly we haven’t come anywhere at all. The truth is, I thought I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you, but not if you’re going to spend the rest of your life making me jump through trustworthy hoops. If you don’t want me as I am, then I’d rather call it quits right now.”
Adam paused and resting his elbows on his knees stared down at his hands, clasped in front of him.
It was then that Abbie opened her mouth to speak as words of love and commitment rose up from the girl hiding deep within her. That girl knew that nothing was more important than turning away from her past and throwing her whole hand in for the future she longed to share with the man next to her. But in the end not a single sound rose to her lips.
“So you’re quite right,” Adam declared in monotone finality. “I agree with you, it would be better if you moved out. In fact, you should go home, pack your essentials and move out today. I’ll let Henry know he’s to have the first half of this week with you and then he can come back to me.”
With that Adam got to his feet and walked towards the playground where his sons were playing on the equipment. Henry was perched on the topmost rail of the monkey bars, but on seeing his father below called down to him to catch him when he jumped.
Abbie’s heart leapt into her throat in unbridled panic.
It was too high, too dangerous, and Adam was far too upset and distracted to catch him. But before she could call out a warning Adam had turned. Without a moment’s hesitation Henry launched himself from the rail, his small body flying through the air, straight into the safe harbour of his father’s outstretched arms.
* * *
“I’d really appreciate it people …” Justin began, bellowing to be heard above the cacophony of noise that was filling the partners’ conference room, “if you could be sitting down and ready for a twelve o’clock kick-off for these Monday meetings.”
Despite his eagerness to get on with the meeting, most of the partners and management staff were lingering around the coffee trolley. They were laughing and chatting about their weekends and few of them were in the mood to talk partnership business.
But Abbie was perfectly happy to talk about partnership business because she was definitely not in the mood for chatting about her weekend—the worst weekend of her life.
It had begun the moment Adam had walked away from her in the park on Saturday morning. It then plummeted to new depths as she’d packed suitcases and taken herself and her weeping three-year-old back to Maeve’s safe little terrace—the home she’d been so convinced she needed to get back to when she’d bowled her entreaties for distance straight at Adam’s ten pins of hope that very morning.
Abbie’s chin descended into the upturned palm of her hand as she sat alone at the partners’ conference table. She watched her pen swivelling manically between two of her fingers, lost in thought as yet again she relived her weekend with Henry.
He’d moped listlessly around the house for the entire time, every now and then badgering her about going around to Adam’s. When she wouldn’t let him go, he’d asked her endless questions about why they’d had to move out of his father’s house. And Abbie knew she hadn’t handled his questions at all well, her explanations swinging between too complex or too dismissive.
“But I still don’t get it,” he’d complained irritably, allowing the heels of his shoes to kick back against the base of the stool he was sitting on with loud repetitive clunks.
Abbie had stopped cutting his sandwiches at the kitchen bench and opened her mouth to tell him to stop kicking the stool, but then she closed it again. She’d reminded herself just in time that as with all the other occasions that weekend when Henry had indulged in behaviour designed to rile her that he’d simply been looking to find an outlet for his unhappiness over moving out of Adam’s.
Abbie had sighed and placed her hands flat on the bench. “Henry, I know you’re feeling sad and upset about moving back here. I know how much you loved living with Pete and Adam. But it’s only for a few days, and then you can have the rest of the week with them …”
“But you won’t be there,” he’d interjected, swivelling backwards and forwards on his stool. He began to kick the base more violently at that point until Abbie thought her nerve endings would explode with exasperation.
“No, I won’t be there,” she’d replied, deliberately keeping her voice quiet and calm. “Adam and I are not going to live together anymore, but we’re going to arrange things so that you can still live with both of us.”
“Don’t you like Adam and Pete anymore?”
“Henry, please,” Abbie had sighed as she’d run a hand through her hair in quiet torment. “I’ve already told you that I care very much for both of them, but it’s a big thing for a grown-up man and woman to live together. Adam and I … we’re not like a mummy and daddy who are married to each other. But we’re exactly like a mummy and daddy who are married in one way, and that is that we both love you very much and want what’s best for you.”
At that point Henry had raised his vivid blue eyes to meet hers and with a look of clear challenge had stated, “What’s best for me is that we all live together—you, me, Pete and Dad.”
Abbie had reeled at that moment, not just because of the clarity with which her three-year-old had known his own mind, but because it was the first time she’d ever heard him call Adam ‘Dad’.
“Adam and I have decided we can’t live together, Henry, I’m sorry,” Abbie h
ad replied eventually with gentle firmness.
Henry had pouted then, and slipping off his stool threw himself over the back of the lounge chair, reached for the remote and turned on the cartoon channel at a volume set to test her patience. At that point she’d walked into the laundry to take some deep breaths and fight back the tears of loss and grief that had threatened to overwhelm her at every point of her day.
“Hello, stranger!” Sophie Reynolds, Head of HR and Abbie’s best work pal slipped into the chair next to hers. “Have you noticed the boss’s mood this morning?”
“I have,” Abbie replied in agitated distraction, dropping her pen on the table and lifting her head from where it had been resting listlessly in her hand. “What’s wrong with Justin?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” Sophie replied distractedly, watching Justin rifle through his papers in a minor frenzy before turning her gaze back to Abbie. “By the way—you still look tired.”
“I’m fine,” Abbie tossed back quickly—too quickly.
“Well, you don’t look fine,” Sophie retorted in a tone of playful bossiness. “Why didn’t you call me over the weekend? I could have collected the boys to give you and Adam a break. I don’t think you’re fully recovered from last week you know. Where is Adam, by the way?”
“He’s running a three week trial for Justin in the Federal Court.”
“Oh, that’s right. Anyway, I still think you should head home after this meeting and spend the rest of the day in bed.”
“I’m fine, Sophie, truly. If you need to worry about someone then you should worry about him,” Abbie finished, nodding in the direction of Justin on the other side of the table.
Feeling the weight of their stares, Justin looked back at the two of them. But he didn’t smile or acknowledge them. What he did do was look through them as though they were invisible. He then cast his eyes over to the remaining partners still hanging about near the coffee pot.
“If you’d all sit down then we can start!” he called out churlishly, and Abbie felt Sophie squeeze her arm as if to say, ‘Look out, this is going to be one interesting management meeting if the managing partner’s mood is any indication.’
