by Melissa Hill
So, by the time they’d finished their second bottle of wine, Natalie decided she couldn’t hold out if Jay made a move tonight, which he surely would, given that he’d brought her all the way to the most romantic city in the world – and to his own place in the most romantic city in the world – he was hardly going to have her sleep on the couch, was he?
As if reading her thoughts, Jay began to speak. “Look, Natalie, we’ve had a great time this evening, but . . . well, I didn’t want to be presumptuous or anything, so I booked you a room at a small boutique hotel not far from here – just in case you thought I was pressurising you to spend the night,” he added quickly, “with me.”
Her heart sank to her stomach. What kind of man would book a girl into a hotel in Paris when he had his own apartment? He was definitely gay after all, she decided regretfully, or else he found the thought of sleeping with her so repulsive that –
“Of course,” he added, twisting a strand of her hair around one of his fingers, his breath warm and tingly on her skin, “if you decide that you’d like to stay over, well, I won’t argue with that either.”
Then before she could think any more about it, Natalie threw her arms around Jay’s neck and pulled him roughly towards her. Sod Tara and her rules, she thought as he returned her kisses with a fervour that banished all Natalie’s doubts about his sexuality and pushed her back on the couch, his hands roaming freely over her body.
When it came to being committed to not sleeping with Jay just then, on a scale of one to ten, Natalie was minus one million!
Chapter 25
One afternoon, Luke was out digging his garden when he spotted his next-door neighbour return from walking the dogs in the fields.
He liked Liz and since he’d moved into the house properly had been seeing her every day heading off over the fields with the dogs. She was a lovely woman, always so friendly and chatty. A good-looking woman too, he noticed, but what was most appealing about Liz was that she seemed to have a slight frailty about her. In fact, with her dark hair and ladylike ways, she reminded him of his youngest sister, although Ingrid wouldn’t go near a dog to save her life.
“How’s it all going?” she called, giving him a friendly wave while trying to herd the dogs back into their individual kennels. “Doing some work on the garden, I see?”
“I’m nearly sorry I started, to be honest,” he called back, standing up and leaning on his shovel. “It’s bloody hard work! But I thought I’d better do something with it. Actually,” he added, sticking the shovel into the dirt and coming across to chat to her, “your friend Tara shamed me into it with all her talk about it being a wilderness.”
“Really?” Liz smiled. “Yes, Tara can be a bit persuasive all right.”
“Did you two enjoy your night out on the town that time? Apart from having to make conversation with me.”
“Don’t be silly – it was a great night, and once Tara got started there was no fear of us running out of things to say. But I’m sorry she went on at you like that about your job and everything.”
“Yes, she speaks her mind all the same, doesn’t she?” he laughed and Liz laughed too.
“Bit of an understatement, I think!” she said. “Yes, Tara doesn’t hold back.”
“I think she told me she grew up in the village?” Luke queried. “I take it you did too?
“Oh God, no! Can’t you tell from the accent? I’m a true-blue Dub.”
“Oh, I just assumed you two were childhood friends and your accent isn’t particularly noticeable.”
“No, we used to work together in Dublin. But my husband Eric is from here. That’s how we met actually – he’s a school-friend of Tara’s and she introduced us.”
“I see.”
Luke hadn’t met the husband yet, but he remembered Liz saying something about him working in Dublin. Lucky bastard, having a lovely wife and kid like that. At thirty-six, and having done the run of nightclubs and speed-dating and what have you, Luke had just about given up on finding himself a decent prospect, let alone a half-decent woman. Well, at least until now.
“So,” he began, trying to sound offhand, “does she get down to visit you all that much or . . .?” He let the rest of the sentence trail off, as at this Liz smiled knowingly, a bit too knowingly, he thought, reddening a little. Shit, had he made it that obvious?
“She comes down to visit her parents a lot,” said Liz, “so, yes, we do see her quite a bit.”
“Still, I suppose she’s busy in Dublin with her job and everything – she told me all about it when you were away,” he said casually, afraid that he was revealing too much interest in Tara’s life.
“Well, she is busy, but as I said we do get to see her a lot.” Liz met his eyes, her look conveying to Luke that she was very much aware of his reasons for asking. “Why? Are you worried that you might bump into her again? And that she’ll castigate you about your job?”
“Well, if she does, I’ll have an answer for her,” Luke replied, feeling cheered by the fact that Liz hadn’t mentioned anything about Tara having a boyfriend. With her good looks and seemingly fun-loving personality, he’d thought there might have been someone on the scene. But Liz, who clearly knew he was fishing for information about her, hadn’t said a word about Tara being attached. This was good news.
“Yes, you two seemed well able for one another that night!” Liz laughed.
“Hello there!”
Luke and Liz were so busy laughing about Tara that they hadn’t noticed the man come out of Liz’s house. The guy had such a look of suspicion on his face that Luke immediately twigged it was the husband, evidently wondering who it was that was making his wife laugh like that. And so he might.
“Oh, Eric, hi – you’re home!” Liz cried. “Come and meet Luke, our new next-door neighbour.” She turned and looked questioningly at Luke. “You two haven’t met yet, have you?”
Eric stepped forward. “Nice to meet you – I hear you moved in recently. Sorry I haven’t bumped into you before now,” he said amiably, holding out his hand.
But as Luke went to shake the other man’s hand and got a proper look at his face, he realised that Eric was correct in saying that they hadn’t met but was wrong in his assumption that they hadn’t bumped into one another.
They had, Luke thought, as he studied his new neighbour’s husband, but at the time Eric had been sitting on a park bench, deep in conversation with a woman who was definitely not his lovely wife.
“I just don’t know how to thank you!” Natalie gushed down the telephone line to Tara. It had been over three weeks since her trip to Paris with Jay, and the two had been inseparable since.
“Well, I’m still not happy that you broke your promise not to sleep with him,” Tara reminded her briskly, “but I’ll admit that had I been in your situation, I would probably have had problems keeping it too.”
“Ubercalm and controlled you? I don’t believe it for a second!” Natalie joked.
“So things are still going well then?” said Tara, although any fool could tell from Natalie’s elated tone that things were going very well indeed.
“He’s wonderful, Tara, and we get on so well. We have the most amazing chats that last for hours, and at the end of it all, we can barely remember what we’ve talked about. I’ve never felt so . . .” she seemed to be struggling for the right word, “so on a par with a man before. I’m not always worried about how I’m putting myself across or what’ll happen next – I’m just being myself. And, yes, I know it sounds corny, but it’s true!”
“I’m thrilled for you, Natalie – I really am. Jay sounds terrific – almost too good to be true.” He did sound wonderful – sensitive, thoughtful, romantic – and seemed to treat Natalie the way every girl would like to be treated. Tara sorely hoped that the man was everything he seemed to be. Having genuinely fallen for someone this time, it would just be Natalie’s luck for him to turn out to be married or something.
“He is! Oh, Tara, you’d love him – y
ou really would.”
“I’m sure I would. So tell me, do you want to continue our sessions for a little while longer? Or are you happy enough to keep going on your own now? To be honest, I don’t think there’s a whole lot else I can help you with. You seem to be doing just fine on your own.”
“Well, there is one more thing,” Natalie said. “I’d really love for you to . . . I don’t know . . . observe us together.”
“Observe you?”
“Yes, I’d love to hear your opinion – not only on Jay, but also on how the two of us interact. You know, just to be sure that it is as good as I’m making it all sound!”
Tara smiled. “Don’t be silly. You certainly don’t need my blessing – not at this stage anyway.”
“But I’d really love for you to meet him, Tara – I mean, it’s all because of you that we’re together in the first place.”
“Um, I think your good looks and sparkling personality might have had something to do with it,” Tara laughed.
“Nope, I was a disaster before you went to work on me, you know that. And if I didn’t have you coaching me through our dates, I would have messed up this relationship just as easily as I’d messed up all the others. It was you, Tara – you made this happen.”
“Maybe I helped make it happen, Natalie, but all I did was give you a little push in the right direction. I certainly don’t deserve all this praise.”
“But you do! Will you come to London and see us? And let me thank you properly for the wonderful help you’ve given me. Don’t worry – I’ll take care of the flights and the hotel and all that kind of thing.”
“Don’t be silly – I wouldn’t dream of letting you do anything like that.”
“It’s not a problem – it’ll be my way of saying thank you, seeing as you refused point blank to take any payment from me,” she chided. “But will you come, though? Besides meeting Jay, I’d love to see you again too. We could all go out for dinner somewhere, the four of us. I’m sure Jay would get on great with Glenn.”
Tara shook her head. Whatever about her taking off to London to see Natalie, there wasn’t a hope in hell of convincing Glenn to tag along. He was just way too busy with work at the moment and, in truth, she couldn’t see Glenn being the slightest bit interested in coupley dinners with Natalie and her new man. When she said this to Natalie, the other girl sighed.
“I understand. But couldn’t you come on your own then? I know it mightn’t be as much fun, but you could stay with me and we could go shopping or . . . no, wait – why don’t you bring that friend you’re always talking about?”
“Liz?” Tara sat back in her seat. That wasn’t a bad idea. Although she seemed to have cheered up a little in recent weeks, Liz had been going through such a hard time with all this business with Eric that it would be nice for her to get away and enjoy herself. Considering she’d got such enjoyment from their night out a while back.
Liz would adore London. The two of them could go over on a cheapie weekend with one of the low-cost airlines and stay in a nice hotel in town. They could go and meet Natalie (who Liz would love) and the famous Jay, and then they could use the rest of the weekend for shopping and maybe some beauty treatments. It sounded glorious now that she thought about it. She and Liz never did anything like that.
And it would be nice to see Natalie again. She’d enjoyed her company so much in Egypt that when they’d exchanged phone numbers and addresses at the end of the holiday, Tara had every intention of keeping in touch. So it was great that Natalie had made the contact first.
“Well, what do you think?” Natalie asked again. “Will you come for a visit?”
“I think it might be fun,” Tara replied, and instantly a high-pitched squeal was to be heard from the other end.
“It’ll be brilliant!” Natalie cried. “And hopefully it’ll prove to you once and for all that Jay really is as wonderful as he sounds!”
Later that evening, Liz went out to the hallway to answer the ringing telephone, leaving Eric in the living room watching TV.
To her relief, things had improved somewhat in the McGrath household lately. Eric’s frequent disappearances had lessened and he seemed to be spending much more time at home. And although he still tended to be moody and pensive at times, he seemed to be taking more of an interest in Toby.
However, the majority of the changes were of Liz’s own doing.
After her night out with Tara, she’d decided not to mention her suspicions to Eric about his having an affair and had come to the conclusion that she’d been imagining the whole thing.
After all, had there been any concrete evidence to suggest that he was cheating on her? The woman phoning the house looking for Eric that time could simply have been someone from the office who only sounded like Emma because Liz was paranoid about her. And Emma’s apparently “blank” text message appearing on his mobile phone could have very well been as Eric had described it – an accident.
And of course that time she’d suspected that he wasn’t (as he’d told her) going out for a drink with Colm had turned out to be exactly that. As had his visits to his mother. And the weird hours and late nights he’d been working in Dublin were for a very good reason – extra cash to renovate the house. And in fairness, she couldn’t really have expected him to be chatting and laughing like a maniac in Belfast when they’d been there for a family funeral, could she?
So Liz had finally come to the conclusion that she’d imagined the whole lot of it, had spent the last month or two working herself into a frenzy about nothing.
And it was all because of some stupid comment Emma Harrington had made that day in the village, a stupid comment that meant absolutely nothing. So what if Emma had bumped into Eric? How, from that simple remark, had Liz made the giant leap to think that Eric was the mystery father of her baby? Eric was her husband and he loved her.
It was mostly her own fault, though, she knew that.
Insecurity was something Liz had lived with for most of her life and she couldn’t help it. It was only natural that when she’d finally got the life she wanted, the life she’d dreamt about, a home and family to call her own, she’d be terrified of it being taken away from her. She’d been that way all her life. When she was younger, it seemed that every time she’d begun to settle in with one of her brothers and his family, circumstances would change and she’d be uprooted and brought to live with another. Since she lost her parents twenty years before, nothing, least of all family, life had ever been stable in Liz’s life and she supposed it was understandable that she’d worry about the stability of her own. Subconsciously, she’d often worried that the wonderful life she had with Eric and then Toby seemed too good to be true and was probably only looking for something to go wrong.
But, she realised now, through her own stupid and pathetic insecurity, she could very well have ruined everything she had all by herself. So, in the last few weeks, she’d tried her utmost not to let things get to her, not to fret over Eric’s distant moods and working hours, tried not to turn every molehill into a mountain.
And wasn’t she so glad now that she hadn’t confided her fears to Tara? Imagine accusing her sister of having an affair with her husband when there was absolutely no basis for those allegations whatsoever. She surely would have lost Tara as a friend – no matter how close she and her friend were, blood was thicker than water, and even if Tara had understood that the accusation stemmed from Liz’s own insecurities, there would surely always be a faint tension between them. Even though Tara and Emma’s relationship was at times unsteady, there was no question but that Tara would be upset at the idea. Liz would be upset if any member of her family was accused of being a home-wrecker, despite the fact that these days she only saw them once or twice a year.
So Liz was incredibly grateful now that she’d held her tongue and hadn’t confided her fears to anyone. If she had, who knew what kind of a situation she’d be in now?
As it was, she still had Eric as a husband, Tara as a frie
nd and the life she’d always dreamed of. And she wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardise that.
She picked up the ringing phone to find Tara on the other end.
“Do you fancy coming to London with me next weekend?” her friend asked without preamble.
“London? What for?”
“Well, Natalie – you know, the girl I met in Egypt, and the one I’ve been coaching recently?”
“What about her?”
“Well, she persuaded me to come over for a visit, to meet the man of her dreams and the reason she asked for my help in the first place. Apparently she needs my blessing!” Tara added good-humouredly. “Anyway, you’d love her, Liz – she’s a gas woman. And I’m sure she’d know how to show us a good time. She just phoned to tell me she’s organised a gorgeous hotel in Kensington for us, and no doubt she’ll take us somewhere swanky for dinner on Friday night so –”
“For us – she wouldn’t mind me coming too?”
“Of course not, she suggested it in the first place! So does that mean you will come?”
Liz bit her lip. It sounded wonderful. She hadn’t been out of the country since her honeymoon in Portugal three years ago. And wouldn’t it be great to get the chance to go shopping in London – especially with Tara. Her friend would know all the right places to go and would ensure she had her wardrobe updated in no time!
“Oh, I’d love to,” she said, “but I suppose I’d better ask Eric if he’s OK to look after Toby first. Can you hold on?”
Laying down the receiver on the hall table, Liz went back into the living room.
“Didn’t you say earlier that you’re not working next weekend?” she asked her husband, unable to keep the excitement out of her tone.
Eric didn’t look up from the TV. “Yeah – why do you ask?”
