A Bed of Broken Promises

by Clare Connelly

  As tempted as she was to tell Marcus’s brother what an absolute swine he was, she railed against it. “What I have to say is between him and me.” She couldn’t help the caustic tone. “Can you help me?”

  “Look, I was just going to go sit by his apartment, waiting for him to show. You’re welcome to join me?”

  She looked up to her mother, who was happily watching a trashy soapie with Maxie. “Fine. Just tell me where and when.”

  He named a street about a block away from Harrods, a private street that lined Hyde Park. And she felt the now-familiar kick of hurt in her chest. He’d lied to her about so much. He was from a different world.

  Before she could second guess what she intended to do, she made up a reason to leave. Rose, clearly not fooled, made no effort to stop her. Whatever was eating her daughter up had to be sorted out. She just hoped this would be the end of whatever it was.

  Andrew Harris in person looked a lot like Marcus. He wasn’t as tall, nor as conventionally good looking, but he was very obviously from the same gene pool. She picked him from a hundred meters away, as she emerged from Knightsbridge tube and crossed towards the gated community that Marcus apparently called home.

  “Hello. I only realized once we’d hung up that I didn’t get your name?”

  “It’s Katie.” She tried to smile. After all, he wasn’t the one she was spitting-chips mad at.

  “Hi Katie, pleased to meet you. Though I gather you’re a little less pleased to meet me. Coffee?”

  She saw that he had two Starbucks cups in his hands and she took one gratefully, expelling a long breath and trying to let some of the tension go from her body. “Thanks.”

  He lifted an eyebrow as she proceeded to say nothing. He could tell from her body language that she was freaking out, but she was resolutely silent.

  “I feel I ought to apologize for my brother,” he said finally. Cecilia always said he had a terrible poker face, and she was right.

  “Oh?”

  “He hasn’t been the same since Iraq. We’re worried about him.”

  She looked across at him, curious despite herself.

  “Iraq?”

  “He didn’t tell you? Well, I guess that makes sense. He doesn’t talk about it with us, but I thought, maybe with a stranger…”

  And her heart turned over at the description, because they really were, in the truest sense of the word, strangers. “No. He was very guarded with what he told me.”

  “I see.” Andrew had never before been in the position of making excuses for Marcus Harris. Marcus had always been an unstoppable force, a power to be reckoned with, and everyone he met thought the world of him. Even the people whose companies he took over were caught up in his powerful, impressive personality. Not this woman. “Look, he’s not himself lately. Losing Bryan like that … it really knocked him around.”

  “As you’d expect,” she said with a determined shrug of her slender shoulders. She didn’t want to get pulled into feeling sorry for Marcus. She had to hold onto her anger. “He did mention that your wife is pregnant. How far along is she?”

  And because Andrew could have talked endlessly about Cecilia and their baby, he did. He talked and talked until Katie thought she was about to fall asleep. Except her body was alive with nervous anticipation. As Andrew waffled on in that diffident American way, she subtly scanned the street.

  And so, the second he rounded the corner, head bent, hands thrust in the pockets of his coat, she saw him. And a second later, Katie saw her. A tall, reed-thin woman wearing a skimpy cocktail dress despite the coolness of the night. Her hand was tucked into his arm, her fingers splayed proprietarily around his forearm, her face lifted gushingly up at his.

  Katie turned her attention back to Marcus, tuning out Andrew’s ongoing flood of information about morning sickness and back pain. He was still in the distance, but she noticed immediately that he looked different. His face was pinched. He’d lost weight. His hair was longer and worn unstyled around his face.

  The moment he saw her, she knew. His eyes flew to her face, and his step faltered. He said something, quietly, to the woman beside him, and then walked onwards, a determined fire in his eyes.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”

  For some reason she couldn’t fathom, he was furious with her. Katie glared up at him.

  “I brought her, Marcus,” Andrew interjected, pushing up from the wall they’d been leaning against and moving to stand between Katie and his brother.

  “Jesus Christ. Andrew, what is this about? You’re supposed to be in New York.”

  “Have you been drinking all day?” Katie interrupted, appalled at the change a few weeks had brought. The smell of scotch was cloying on his breath and his words were slightly slurred.

  “What’s it to you?” He asked fiercely, dragging his eyes back to Katie and regarding her with a disdain so powerful it took her breath away.

  “It just doesn’t seem like you. Then again, I don’t really know you at all, do I?”

  The compunction he should have felt was noticeably absent. If anything, his expression was strangely without emotion, his eyes blank. “So, you found out anyway.”

  “Yes,” she hissed. “I found out.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on between the two of you, but I think we should take this inside.”

  “Cherie?” Marcus turned to the blonde woman, who seemed suddenly less keen.

  “On second thoughts, let’s leave it tonight, baby.” Her familiarity was a knife in Katie’s gut, as was the possessive way she climbed onto tiptoes and pressed a wet kiss against Marcus’s mouth. A mouth that Katie had, until a fortnight ago, considered solely hers.

  The blonde hailed a cab and disappeared from view, leaving the three of them on the footpath. “Well, come in then,” he said, a little shaky as he pushed through the gate.

  “Christ, Marcus, how much have you had to drink?”

  Marcus didn’t answer, nor did he look at either of them. And Katie realized that he was furious! As furious as she was, perhaps. Why? What did he have to be angry about?

  All of the fight went out of her, but she was drawn forward. Following these two brothers though she suddenly wanted to be anywhere else. She hesitated at the door to the building, and Marcus, leaning for support, she suspected, against the mirrored wall of the lift, shot her a withering glare. “Well?”

  Andrew stared at his brother, shocked. “Katie, I’m sorry about Marcus. I don’t know what’s come over him.”

  “That’s fine.” She stepped into the lift. “There’s nothing to apologize for. I came here with the lowest opinion of him and he’s just confirming it for me.”

  Marcus closed his eyes, swaying a little. The week-long bender had not been his brightest idea. He’d never really drunk heavily, but it had seemed to be the only attractive option available to him at present.

  The lift pinged open straight into his apartment and he gestured for them to precede him.

  “So, this is where you live.”

  Marcus didn’t answer, so Andrew spoke for him. “When he’s in London, yes. Katie, can I get you a drink?”

  “No. I won’t be staying long.”

  “I’ll take a coffee,” Marcus said, shooting his brother a warning look.

  “Are you okay on your own with him?” Andrew spoke directly to Katie in a way that made Marcus want to punch his sibling in the face.

  “I’m fine.” She nodded, and waited until Andrew left the room before turning her attention to Marcus.

  Through his sluggish brain, he realized that she still looked like an angel. He felt like death warmed up and she was as ethereally beautiful as ever. He shrugged out of his coat, noticing the way her nose wrinkled as the cigarette smoke, booze and perfume infiltrated the room.

  “You’re a mess,” she whispered. “I can’t believe I ever thought…”

  “Thought what, Katie? What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know anymore.
” She let out a small laugh. “I came to confront you. I think I was hoping you’d be able to say something that would make it all okay.”

  He grunted. “Sorry, not today.”

  “I just can’t fathom why you did it?”

  “Lied to a beautiful woman? I knew you’d turn your back on me if you knew who I was.”

  “So you pretended to be a school teacher and seduced me, made me love you, made my son think you were the best thing since sliced bread, and then disappeared without a thought of how low that was?”

  He shook his head. It wasn’t like that, but his alcohol addled brain couldn’t grasp the explanation. “I really need that coffee. I can hardly think straight.”

  “Tough! I don’t have long and I’m running out of patience. Tell me now. Was this all about Wadeford House?”

  He whipped his head up to face her, causing his eyes to dance with lights. “In the beginning.”

  “I’m a bigger fool than I thought.” She shook her head slowly from side to side.

  She pictured the woman who’d been downstairs. The blonde, with impossibly long legs and a supermodel’s figure. “And you’ve moved on. You’ve been seeing…” she swallowed down the euphemism, “Sleeping with other women? How many? Just blondie down there? Or others, too?”

  He opened his mouth to speak.

  “Don’t answer that,” she interrupted on a sob, putting her hands in front of her face. She tried to hold it together but her heart was breaking into a thousand pieces. All of the dreams she’d held were bursting into flames. “I don’t want to know. Actually. Damn it, I do. Well? If we hadn’t shown up on your doorstep, would you be inside her now?”

  He dipped his head. “That was the plan.” Guilt, unfamiliar and unpalatable, made him color.

  “Oh, God.” She shook her head slowly. “And there’ve been others.”

  He’d tried, but every time he’d got to the point of asking them home, he’d bottled it. “I wanted to forget you…”

  “Oh, how charming. I think that’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard! How many women until you did just that?” Her voice sounded deranged. Little wonder. She was barely holding it together.

  His head was swimming, his brain felt like it was about to explode. “Can we talk about this tomorrow? I’m not doing this right.”

  “Tomorrow?” She laughed, a high-pitched sound that made his stomach feel funny. “Hell, no. This is it for us, David. Marcus. Whoever the hell you are. Finally. I get it. We’re done.”

  He shook his head. “How’d you find out?”

  “Does that matter?”

  “Not really. I just know I’ll wish I asked when I remember this conversation tomorrow.”

  She bit down on her lower lip, which was wobbling. “I went to your house. The house you’d put on the paperwork. And met the real David Trent.”

  “Ah-ha.”

  “Yeah. That’s just what I said.” She swallowed down the lump of tears in her throat. “Amongst other things.”

  It took a huge effort to move his legs but he closed the distance between them. He lifted his hand and ran his finger down the soft flesh of her cheek, but she jumped back, as though he’d tried to burn her.

  “Don’t you ever touch me,” she said, her voice high pitched. “I can’t bear it.”

  He looked confused; lost. A bit like Maxie sometimes when he woke up in the middle of the night and wasn’t sure if he was still in his dream or back in the real world.

  “What’ve I done?”

  “Don’t. Don’t play the innocent. You knew what you were doing from the moment you knocked on my door.”

  “It wasn’t like that. I did not plan this.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Stop it! Don’t treat me like an idiot. Even more than you already have done.”

  “Why did you go there? To his house?”

  She shook her head convulsively. “Can you believe I wanted to tell you that I loved you?”

  He closed his eyes, his face was grey beneath his tan. “God…this is worse than I thought.”

  “Oh, yeah, I can believe that now.” She looked around his apartment, for the first time taking in the deluxe fittings, the expensive furniture, the carpet so thick it was like standing on a cloud. “What a joke. For you, bloody you, to be slumming it with a single mum from the south of England. How you must have laughed at me! And I thought we were meant to be together, despite that awful last night.”

  He shook his head, pain immediately searing the back of his eyes. “I didn’t laugh at you, Katie.”

  She felt sadness run through her at the futility of it all. As Andrew walked back into the room, carrying a couple of mugs of coffee , she clawed into her hand bag.

  “Here.” She pulled out the slightly dog-eared paper she’d been carrying around all week. “Here’s your bloody contract. Wadeford House is yours. I hope you think it was worth the cost.”

  She didn’t even bother to acknowledge Andrew as she fled from the apartment, but when she heard footsteps on the ground behind her, she was disappointed to see it was him, and not Marcus. “Hey, wait up! Look, about my brother. I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened between you, but if it’s any consolation, I’ve never seen him like this. Not even when we lost Bryan.”

  She shrugged, miserably. “No consolation, no.”

  “It’s Iraq. It messed him up.”

  She expelled a long breath. She wanted to know. She was desperate to know. But she was above asking Andrew for information. If she just wanted to know the deal, she could probably find it on the internet. She had wanted Marcus to trust her enough to confide in her. And that horse had bolted.

  When Roberto had left her, she’d thought she was miserable. But it was nothing compared to this sense of soul-destroying grief. Because even though she thought he was the worst kind of liar, and even though she’d seen for herself that he’d picked up his bachelor lifestyle in the blink of an eye, she still couldn’t hate him. And that made her hate herself. Because he deserved nothing from her. Nothing. Not sympathy. Not lust. Not longing.

  She told herself that for the whole next day, while she tried to get through a normal weekend with her mum and some London friends. But still, he was there, in her mind. The whole drive south, with Maxie curled up asleep in the back, and only staticky radio for company, she thought of him. And when she returned to the home that had started it all – the home she’d sold to him – she couldn’t help but think of him. He was everywhere.

  The sofa they’d sat on, night after night, kissing like a couple of high school teenagers in the throes of their first hormonal romance. The kitchen they’d shared breakfasts in. The bathroom they’d had their fight in. And he was in the pictures she had taken, staring back at her. And while she knew she should have deleted them, she couldn’t. It was like scratching an itch, except infinitely more painful. His beautiful face, before she knew that it was a face capable of such deception, stared artlessly into her camera, and those eyes were so filled with passion that even now, through the veil of time, they took her breath away.

  “Maxie,” Katie balled her fists by her side the morning after they’d returned from London. His little face looked up at her earnestly, but his fingers kept twitching with the Lego pieces in his lap, and she knew his mind was focused on reattaching the light saber to Luke Skywalker’s little Lego paw. “Maxie,” she said again, kneeling down in front of him and taking his hands in hers.

  “Yeah?”

  “Darling, I have something to tell you. Something exciting, I think.”

  “What is it, mummy?” His eyes lit up at the mention of excitement and she cringed inwardly. No doubt he expected a promise to an ice cream parlor or something, not the news she was about to deliver.

  “I’ve decided it’s time for us to have a change. Maybe move a bit closer to Grandma Rose. What do you think?”

  His brows knitted together as he digested her sentence. “Like a holiday?”

  “More permanent than that.” She
cleared her throat awkwardly. “You remember David, who stayed with us a few weeks ago?” God, how had she managed to sound normal? Her pulse was racing at the memory.

  “Yeah. I liked him. He was fun.”

  “Well, David liked the house so much that he asked if we would sell it to him. And you know, darling, I really think we’re ready for a change now. I’d like to do something where I could spend more time with you. Maybe take my photographs for a living instead of running the B&B.”

  “But why can’t you do that now?” He frowned. “If Mr. Trent is going to live here, can’t we just stay living here with him?”

  She felt a faint color touch her cheeks at the simplistic suggestion. “It’s going to be his house, though, darling, and he might not want us to live here.”

  “Of course he would. He thinks you’re ace, mummy. I know, because he told me.”

  She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. “Did he?”

  “Yeah. He said you’re one in a million.”

  She compressed her lips. It was bad enough that Marcus had lied to her, but involving Maxie in the fiction was unforgivable. Rage reignited in the pit of her stomach. “Be that as it may, we’re going to move. I’d like to see more of Grandma Rose. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah, mummy. I love Grandma Rose. But what about my school?”

  “I know it will be hard to leave it behind, but we can find you somewhere really fantastic. I was thinking we’d go have a look at some campuses over the holidays.” With the money she’d make when the sale went through, she’d be able to afford a great school for Maxie. It was a definite silver lining to the whole catastrophic incident. The only silver lining.

  “Let’s look at some places on line when you get home from school.” She gave him a quick hug and stood up, wiping her hands on the apron she wore. “Come on now, cheeky chops. Time to get you to class.”

  “Can I take Luke Skywalker?”

  She looked at him tenderly, and relaxed her usual ‘no toys’ rule. “Yes, sweetie. As long as you keep him in your backpack once you get there. Try not to lose him, okay?”

  “You’re the best mum, ever!”