One Night with Her Ex

by Lucy King

  But now he was here, now he’d seen her clear hostility towards him—which she’d been less successful at hiding than she probably thought—it struck him that maybe he’d been a bit reckless. And maybe he wasn’t being very fair.

  OK, so he wanted to talk things through and offload, but perhaps Lily didn’t. Who was he to insist they rake up the past when, considering the boyfriends she’d mentioned, she’d evidently moved on in a way that he didn’t think he had?

  By turning up out of the blue like this and demanding they talk he’d put her in an impossible position. He’d probably shot her intentions to relax and enjoy her holiday to pieces. Given what he knew of her he wouldn’t be all that surprised if she’d hopped on a boat to the mainland to catch the next flight home. Or at the very least hotfooted it to one of the other islands that made up the archipelago in an effort to put some distance between them and resume her holiday in peace.

  Either one of which was looking increasingly likely, he thought, glancing at his watch, because it was now quarter past eight and Lily was never late.

  Beating back the disappointment beginning to sweep through him, Kit swallowed hard and forced himself to focus on practicalities. If she wasn’t late, if she had gone, what would he do next? Go after her again and this time lock her up or something to make flight impossible? Leave her in peace until they got home? Or give up altogether?

  As his stomach began to churn Kit exhaled slowly and told himself to calm down. He’d give her another fifteen minutes, then he’d put in a call, and, depending on whether or how she answered, would take things from there.

  Thirty seconds later, however, the doubt over whether or not she’d left and what he’d do about it vanished because despite having his back to the entrance to the bar he knew Lily was there. He could feel it in the way his muscles tensed with awareness, the prickling of his skin, the overwhelming sense of relief that flooded through him.

  Deliberately slowly he set down his beer, turned round, and at the sight of her his heart stopped. For a moment he felt winded. Blinded. Stunned. She was wearing a simple floaty black dress and sparkly flip-flops, and she was clutching a small black bag. Her neck was bare but big silvery hooped earrings hung from her earlobes.

  Her dress wasn’t particularly revealing or overly clingy, yet something about her made his mouth go dry. It was as if she were sort of glowing from the inside out. Her dark hair shone in the soft light of the bar and her eyes gleamed and her mouth was curved into a barely there smile that had his pulse racing.

  She looked… He racked his brains for a moment to find the right word. Serene. That was it. She looked serene.

  While he felt anything but.

  With his heart beating double time Kit watched as she walked over to him and for the first time in years felt a stab of panic because he didn’t know whether to kiss her mouth, her cheek, shake her hand or do nothing.

  His indecision was as terrifying as the decision he had to make, and his palms went damp in a way that had nothing to do with the condensation that he’d felt on his beer glass.

  With every step she took his head swam just that little bit more, until she stopped right in front of him and, thank goodness, took the decision out of his hands by reaching up and planting a soft, light kiss on his cheek.

  Then she stepped back and smiled up at him, presumably completely unaware of how she was affecting him.

  ‘You look nice,’ she said, giving him a quick once-over that had heat shooting through him.

  ‘You look beautiful,’ he replied, once he’d managed to clear his head of her scent and unglue his tongue from the roof of his mouth.

  ‘Thank you.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘I booked a table.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Would you like a drink before we sit down?’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘If you would.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  Feeling as if a swarm of bees had invaded his body, Kit swallowed hard. For crying out loud, this was absurd. He was thirty-two. He ran a global multimillion-pound business. He was known for being decisive, intuitive and utterly ruthless when the situation called for it. Yet here he was, being rendered practically tongue-tied by the prospect of an evening with his ex-wife. His totally calm and in control ex-wife. Who was expecting not a drooling idiot of a dining companion, but a possibly difficult conversation that he’d insisted upon.

  Telling himself he really had to get a grip, with superhuman effort Kit pulled himself together. ‘Let’s just go straight to the table, shall we?’ he muttered, taking her hand and practically marching her across the bar and out onto the sand.

  SIX

  This wasn’t a date. This wasn’t a date. This wasn’t a date.

  As she followed Kit to the table that sat at the water’s edge and was set for two Lily tried to concentrate on the mantra rolling around her head and not on the electricity that emanated from the connection of her hand with his and was zapping through her, but it was proving no more helpful now than it had when she’d been getting ready.

  After going back to her room earlier this afternoon and taking a cold shower, which hadn’t done much to obliterate the hundred or so grasshoppers that had seemed to have taken up residence in her stomach at the thought of the date—no, dinner—with Kit, she’d decided that while donning armour was a must, mainlining tequila probably wasn’t the way to handle the evening. She was in a jittery enough state as it was and with alcohol loosening her already iffy inhibitions who knew what might happen?

  Once she’d made that pleasingly mature decision, she’d called her sister and after that, well, she hadn’t known what to think about anything.

  As she’d dialled the number she’d been planning to tear a strip off Zoe for revealing her whereabouts to Kit of all people. She’d been going to say she understood that her sister was at a heightened level of happiness at the moment, but that she had to realise that not everyone was in search of the same, and that she certainly wasn’t looking for it with Kit. She’d even been prepared to counter-argue the excuse of Kit’s powers of persuasion she was sure Zoe was going to give.

  What she hadn’t been prepared for, however, was her sister’s declaration that she thought Kit still had feelings for her, that he’d said he might still love her and that that was why she’d told him where she was. To give them the opportunity to see whether they had a second chance. Or something.

  In something of a daze Lily had hung up, and it was then that she’d descended into the kind of emotional turmoil she’d spent so long avoiding, her head teeming with questions such as ‘Could he?’ ‘Did he?’ and her heart beginning to swell with what she had the awful suspicion might be hope.

  Which made such a mockery of everything she’d spent the last five years trying to convince herself of that it was no wonder she’d worked herself up into such a state. For the best part of the next couple of hours she’d paced up and down her room wondering whether her sister had got it right and then trying to figure out that if she had, what she—Lily—wanted, if anything, and what, if anything, she felt.

  Before she knew it it was half past seven and she still hadn’t dried her hair. Bafflingly none the wiser about how she felt about any of it, she’d put it to the back of her mind while she got ready, and there it had stayed until she’d seen him standing at the bar, nursing his beer and looking so familiar and so gorgeous that her heart had turned over and her brain had turned to jelly and she couldn’t think about anything at all.

  So she’d schooled her features into a neutral arrangement that she hoped masked the craziness that was going on inside her head, had taken a deep, steadying breath and told herself to remember what dinner was about.

  But, heavens, it was difficult to focus when her head was filled with the look on Kit’s face when he’d turned and seen her. She didn’t think she was wearing anything particularly astonishing but from the heat in his eyes she felt as if she were the most beautiful woman
he’d ever seen. Perhaps on the planet.

  It was even harder to concentrate on the reason they were here when everything about the place, from the lighting to the music and even the positioning of the tables, screamed intimacy, privacy and romance.

  They reached their table at the same time as a waiter, who pulled out Lily’s chair, waited for her to sit down and then did the same for Kit opposite. He handed them each a menu, took their order for aperitifs and then melted away.

  Glancing down at the list of dishes, each of which sounded more mouth-watering than the previous, Lily swiftly made her choice. As did Kit, judging by the way he put the menu down with a brief nod and sat back.

  Her eyes met his, their gazes locked and as the seconds ticked by she became achingly aware of the beating of her heart, the sound of her breathing, of every inch of her body come to think of it. The connection between them was as strong as ever, the attraction undeniable, and the tension, the heat and the anticipation still simmered.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ said Kit eventually, the faint surprise in his voice as much as his words snapping her out of her reverie.

  Lily swallowed hard and gave herself a quick mental shake. She had to get a grip. She really did if she was going to make it through dinner. ‘What, here on the island?’ she asked, which she didn’t think made much sense. ‘Or here at this table?’ Which did.

  ‘Here with me. Now.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘It had crossed my mind that you might have used the afternoon to run away.’

  Ah, he knew her so well. ‘It crossed mine too,’ she said with a small smile, ‘but then I figured what would that have achieved? Avoidance isn’t the way to deal with any of this.’

  Kit leaned back and looked at her, a thoughtful expression flickering across his face in the twilight. ‘What is?’

  She gave a little shrug. ‘I’m not sure. Honesty maybe?’

  ‘Honesty works for me.’

  He glanced up and smiled his thanks at the waiter who’d set a glass of champagne in front of her and was now doing the same with his beer for him and her breath caught. Goodness, his smile really was something else. She’d been on the receiving end of it so many times but it had never failed to affect her. Still didn’t, it seemed, because the waiter was looking down at her expectantly as apparently it was time to order and she couldn’t for the life of her remember what she’d chosen.

  Indicating that Kit should go first with a wave of her hand, Lily picked up the menu and while he ordered lobster followed by tilapia she found with relief her starter of prawns and main of curried sea bass.

  ‘I’m sorry about New Year’s Eve,’ said Kit once the waiter had disappeared with their order and they were once again alone.

  ‘New Year’s Eve?’ echoed Lily, her eyebrows lifting a little. ‘Why? What is there to be sorry about?’

  ‘What isn’t there to be sorry about?’ he muttered, shifting in his chair as if suddenly finding it uncomfortable. ‘I turned up out of the blue, virtually forced you to let me in and then behaved like a crazed hormonal out-of-control teenager.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ she said, feeling herself flush at the memory of how out of control they’d both been. How reckless and deluded she’d been. ‘Well, consider your apology accepted.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  See, they could be perfectly civilised about this, she thought, taking a sip of champagne, which was cold and dry and utterly delicious. Even if she was a total mess inside.

  ‘I wasn’t surprised you threw me out what with the…ah…way things went,’ he said and went a little red.

  She stared at him for a second and then put her glass down. ‘You think I threw you out because I was cross I hadn’t, well, you know…?’ Neither of them was usually such a prude about these things, but then normally they didn’t discuss them in public. At least she didn’t.

  Now it was he who raised his eyebrows. ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘When you told me that you hadn’t had sex for five years it occurred to me that the last woman you’d slept with was, well, you know…’ She braced herself, then in the spirit of the honesty she’d just claimed she believed was the way forwards, said, ‘Her.’

  Kit frowned. ‘I see.’

  ‘It freaked me out. Brought back a time I’ve spent five years trying to forget.’

  He rubbed a hand over his face. ‘Of course. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I realise now that I might have overreacted a bit, but in my defence it had been quite an emotionally stressful night, even before you turned up.’ She shrugged and shot him a faint smile. ‘Anyway, it’s not your fault.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ he asked, his face dark and his eyes glittering in the twilight. ‘Isn’t everything?’

  And there it was. The moment she could either agree that it was and they’d stay where they were, with Kit in all likelihood heading home and out of her life first thing in the morning, or she could tell him what she’d come to realise and they could both move on, although God knew where to.

  Knowing what she had to do for her own peace of mind as much as Kit’s, Lily took a deep breath. ‘Not really,’ she said and felt the release of a kind of pressure she hadn’t realised had been building up inside her.

  Kit sat up, alert and to all appearances in something of a state of shock. ‘What?’

  ‘There’s no need to look quite so surprised,’ she said, although she couldn’t really blame him given how, at the time, she’d totally laid the responsibility for what he’d done at his door. ‘I’ve had plenty of time over the years to think and I’ve come to realise that what happened between us wasn’t your fault. Or at least not entirely.’

  ‘Really?’

  She nodded and broke off a piece of bread. ‘Oh, I know what I said then, and I know I laid the blame for it all going wrong wholly at your feet, but that wasn’t very fair of me.’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’ he said, his astonishment fading and leaving the expression on his face totally unreadable.

  ‘You know it wasn’t. And you told me so, many times. Not that I was willing to listen. At the time all I could focus on was what you’d done and I didn’t think about what might have led to it.’ She popped the bread into her mouth, chewed for a moment and then swallowed. ‘I mean, you’re not the cheating sort, Kit, but I was so blinded by hurt, so wrecked by the feeling of betrayal, I didn’t see that. I didn’t ask myself why you’d done it and I didn’t think about my role in everything. As far as I could see I didn’t have a role other than as the only victim. I’d been going through hell and you didn’t seem to understand.’

  ‘I tried.’

  ‘I know you did.’

  ‘But maybe not enough.’

  ‘Maybe I didn’t let you.’

  He rubbed a hand along his jaw. ‘With hindsight I should have been firmer and I should have made us face things together.’ He let out a humourless laugh. ‘But believe it or not I wasn’t having all that much fun either.’

  ‘I realise that now.’ She sighed. ‘But the whole IVF thing was so grim and painful and devastating and by its very definition so physically mainly about me that I failed to see it involved both of us. Plus I knew how much you wanted children being an only child and things, and the knowledge that I couldn’t have them just about broke me apart. I didn’t cope with things very well and I shut you out.’

  ‘I allowed you to.’ Kit shoved his hands through his hair and frowned. ‘I told myself that I was giving you space but in reality I think what I was doing was avoiding something I didn’t have a clue how to handle.’

  It was the first time he’d acknowledged his contribution to the collapse of their marriage and it warmed a part of her deep inside that had always been so cold.

  ‘Really we were both victims, weren’t we?’ she mused, feeling an odd sense of calm spread through her. ‘Of something we didn�
�t have the strength or maturity or understanding to deal with.’ She paused. ‘Of course you topping things off by going and sleeping with someone else didn’t exactly help.’

  As her words hung between them Kit paled beneath his tan. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for that,’ he said, his voice cracking a little. ‘There’s this nugget of guilt that’s always there and I’m so sorry, Lily. For everything. But particularly for betraying your trust like that.’

  ‘You’re forgiven.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course.’ She took a quick sip of champagne. ‘Five years is too long to be angry and resentful and I think I forgave you ages ago. I get now that you must have been feeling lonely and isolated and all those other things you said at the time,’ she said, remembering the endless evenings she’d spent going over it all. ‘That doesn’t mean what you did didn’t devastate me, because it did. But I can sort of see how it happened. I mean, we hadn’t had sex for months, had we? And we were barely speaking. We were virtual strangers. Something had to give at some point.’

  His jaw tightened and shadows flickered across his face. ‘Nevertheless I made that choice to cheat,’ he said gruffly. ‘I was the one that trampled all over our marriage vows.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘I’ve regretted it ever since.’

  ‘Did you ever consider not telling me?’

  ‘For about a nanosecond.’

  She tilted her head and looked at him. ‘Was it really just sex and a one-off?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then maybe it would have been better if you hadn’t.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Although our marriage was dead in the water long before that, wasn’t it? So the end result would probably have been the same.’

  ‘If I’d thought there was any hope of salvaging it I’d never have done what I did,’ said Kit.

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No. Not that it’s any excuse. Nothing excuses it. Certainly none of the justifications I came up with.’