So Now You're Back

by Heidi Rice

  ‘Oh, shut up.’ She clicked off her seat belt and stood, the furrow on her forehead deep enough to rival the Grand Canyon. ‘I’m going to the toilet.’ She grabbed her purse from under her seat. ‘And I’d really appreciate it if you would leave me alone when I return. Getting through this flight without having a breakdown is my main priority and mulling over the crappiest four years of my life is not going to help make that happen.’

  She marched off, leaving him to stew in her wake.

  Since when had he been the one suggesting they take a stroll down memory lane? Was he the one who had brought up their schooldays? No. And where did she get off saying their four years together had been the crappiest years of her life?

  They hadn’t all been crap. Had they?

  And what, exactly, did any of this have to do with his underpants?

  After slamming the toilet door hard enough to rattle the frame, Halle glared at herself in the mirror above the sink.

  Are you on crack? What the hell were you thinking?

  Arguing with Luke Best had always been a futile and frustrating task. When they’d been together, she’d spent four long years believing that if she just kept chipping away at that emotional shield, she’d eventually discover the real Luke beneath and be able to fix him. Unfortunately, the real Luke had turned out to be as shallow and thickheaded as the fake Luke. The man had about as much empathy as a slab of reinforced concrete.

  So he hadn’t had enough clean underwear as a boy? So he’d kept the squalor of his home life a secret? None of that mattered now.

  She absolutely refused to feel sorry for that boy. There were no excuses for the callous way he’d treated her. None.

  She dumped her purse on the vanity and repinned the few strands of hair that had escaped her chignon during her near-death experience at take-off. She then wet a paper towel and dabbed the back of her neck, which still burned with indignation. After digging out the plastic bag that contained her cosmetics in handy one-hundred-millilitre containers, she set about removing her make-up. And then reapplying it.

  Not that it needed repairing. But as the simple ritual unfolded, her nerves settled.

  She smoothed on foundation. Obviously, he’d caught her at a weak moment.

  She dabbed on powder. A weak moment they could both have avoided if he hadn’t insisted on bumping himself up to first, too, just to get in her face.

  Her fingers trembled as she rolled out her lipstick, recalling the red indents of her nails on the tanned skin of his hand.

  She breathed. He’d held her hand, so what? She would have been fine once the Xanax had kicked in without him there. The tremble faded and she outlined her lips with a fresh layer of pale pink mocha.

  Getting fixated on his crotch and the memory of hitting third base at the fifth-form recital had been a major misstep, though. Because the halcyon memory had been distorted by teenage naivety and rioting hormones, making her remember Luke as a troubled boy, reckless and thrilling and eager to please. And sneaking back on the shirt tails of that memory had come all those old futile misguided hopes. That she could change Luke, that she could fix him, by saving him from the demons he refused to talk about.

  But it had never happened then, and it wasn’t happening now, because there was nothing there to fix, even if she still had the desire to fix it. Which she did not.

  Luke is a lost cause. Always was. Always will be.

  She packed her make-up back into her purse and took one last look at herself in the mirror.

  This was New Halle. This was Truly Indestructible Halle. Not the excitable, easily swayed child who had once been so desperate to make Luke love her, she’d been willing to let him stomp all over her.

  This was the woman who had money and class and a career she adored and that had made her a star—on BBC Two at least—and bought her a house in the most sought-after postcode in London. This was the woman who had two amazing children whom she loved to bits—especially when they weren’t trying to kill each other. This was the woman who was happy, no, ecstatic, to live her life on her own terms, and who no longer had to handle hopeless causes like Luke Best.

  She swept out of the bathroom, her resolve repaired alongside her make-up.

  There would be no more pointless arguments about Luke’s inability to share and discuss his fucked-up childhood. There would be no more reminiscing about his magic fingers. And absolutely under no circumstances would there be any more ruminating on whether or not he was wearing underwear.

  Because rich, classy, career-orientated supermum Halle didn’t care about any of that any more. She was here to make his phantom memoirs go away and to have a two-week break at his expense. And maybe, just maybe, to hear him own up to what a shit he’d been to her back then. But she wasn’t going to push, because she didn’t need to hear his excuses, or his sob stories, or deal with his drama any more.

  She had more than enough of her own.

  The plane shuddered as she stepped out of the cubicle. She gripped the door frame, holding on until the judder of air turbulence subsided. Her stomach wobbled, her pulse fluttered, but the nausea didn’t return.

  How about that? Sitting next to Luke Best had an upside; it had effectively distracted her from her terror of plummeting to her doom from thirty thousand feet.

  That or the Xanax.

  Chapter 9

  Halle held on as the hire car took another tight bend on the solitary two-lane road that had been undulating upwards for over an hour through the lonely, isolated, densely wooded landscape.

  Thanks to a surprisingly untroubled sleep—make that virtually comatose sleep—on the plane, and despite her wristwatch telling her it was close to midnight in the UK, she felt alert and well-rested.

  The drive from the airport had been a snarl of five-lane freeways edged by nondescript strip malls, which had eventually taken them through Atlanta. The city had been a surprise. After reading Gone with the Wind in her teens, she’d expected the quaint peach-tree-lined streets of colonial houses decorated with porches and picket fences, but the mirrored high-rise blocks, not so much. Modern-day Atlanta seemed to be a thriving mix of commerce and Civil War Americana comfortable with, rather than conflicted about, its past.

  She’d drifted off to sleep again, Luke silent and apparently lost in his own thoughts beside her, as the road evened out into endless pasturelands lined with orphaned mailboxes, only to wake up again in the Nantahala National Forest, the mailboxes and most other signs of human habitation now gone.

  As the road snaked up through the trees, the landscape had become more primal—and beautiful in its isolation.

  This wasn’t what America meant to her. Apart from a couple of trips to Disney World with Aldo, she’d only ever been to New York and Los Angeles. During both of those trips, all she’d seen was the inside of corporate offices and a quick tour of the tourist sites—but it had pretty much convinced her that, like in London, where you were supposedly never more than eight feet from a rat (and certainly never more than eight feet from someone who would tell you that), in the US you were never further than eight feet from the nearest Starbucks.

  As she scanned the majestic forest of towering oaks and maples and fir trees that edged the road, she guessed they were at least eighty miles from the nearest Starbucks now.

  She wished she’d stayed awake long enough on the plane to read Mel’s carefully annotated file, loaded on her iBook, that detailed the landscape and the resort and their itinerary for the next two weeks. Because her laptop was currently stuffed in her luggage in the boot of the Lexus and her curiosity had outweighed her desire not to seem incompetent or unprepared about five hairpin bends ago.

  ‘What are we supposed to be doing at this resort?’ she asked over the noise of a local radio station playing back-to-back country classics. And steeled herself for a condescending look from Luke.

  He thumbed the volume down using the buttons embedded in the steering wheel and flicked his glance from the road. ‘You want an answ
er to that question I’d be happy to oblige, but I’ve got one for you first.’

  She levelled a look at him, noting the testy tone. Did he have the hump about something? Other than her lack of research? ‘Ask away, although I can’t promise to answer it.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you for your secret fudge recipe,’ he said curtly. ‘I was merely going to ask if you’ve finished sulking. Or is this only another ten-second truce?’

  Halle’s jaw tensed. Since when had she been sulking? ‘I see, so when a woman doesn’t have anything to say to you, it must be because she’s sulking. And not because you’re just not that interesting?’ If he thought he was going to hit any bullseyes with a cheap shot like that, he could forget it. She had been in guerrilla training for the past five years with his teenage daughter—who had turned sulking into an art form. ‘How very convenient for your ego.’

  ‘You’ve spoken exactly thirty-two words to me in close to—’ he paused to check his watch ‘—thirteen hours.’

  ‘Thirty-two? That many?’

  ‘Yup, I counted.’

  She quelled the spurt of astonishment that he’d been paying enough attention to her to count them. Or that he actually seemed to care enough to be upset about it.

  Luckily for him, I’m big enough not to gloat.

  ‘My goodness, you’re more interesting than I thought.’ Or not to gloat too much.

  If anyone had a right to sulk about this trip, it was her.

  ‘The way I see it,’ he said, ‘I could be the most boring guy on the planet and that would still get into the Guinness Book of World-Record Sulks.’

  ‘Then you’d be wrong. If you’d spent as much time with your teenage daughter as I have, you’d know thirty-three words in thirteen hours wouldn’t even be worthy of a mention in the footnotes.’

  ‘Lizzie doesn’t sulk.’ He looked genuinely surprised. ‘Or not much for a teenage girl packed full of rioting hormones.’

  Halle’s pulse stumbled. Was he serious? Surely he must have some knowledge of their daughter’s dark side? How could Luke have escaped all the angst, and the agony, the sullen strops and the cutting remarks that had been her life ever since Lizzie hit puberty?

  How was that fair?

  ‘Excuse me, but are you talking about our daughter, Lizzie?’ She attempted to clarify. ‘The child we conceived nineteen years ago after we got legless at that Oasis gig and had unprotected sex against the back wall of the Clapham Grand? The Lizzie who changed the significance of “Wonderwall” forever?’

  He chuckled, even though she hadn’t actually intended to be funny. ‘It was pretty wonderful, wasn’t it, despite the consequences.’

  Despite the consequences.

  The callow remark hit home. She’d always been suspicious about his reaction to the pregnancy, and all his insincere platitudes at the time, about being willing to respect her choice, live up to his responsibilities and support her and their baby. The fact he’d done a runner to Paris to shack up with another woman a couple of years later when they had needed him the most was a fairly big clue he’d been lying about that, like so much else.

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself, Best. The only wonderful thing about that shag was the fact it gave us a daughter.’ A daughter he hadn’t wanted then, which might explain why he knew so little about her now.

  ‘OK, that does it.’ He braked sharply, throwing Halle forward. She slapped her hand down to stop from rearranging her face on the dashboard.

  The car shuddered to a stop on the grass verge. She grasped her throat, her heart having slammed into her larynx.

  ‘I know it all went to hell.’ He swung round, taking advantage of her inability to talk. ‘And I know a lot of that was my fault.’

  Her astonishment at the forthright admission of guilt was superseded by shock when he continued, his tone grim. ‘But you don’t get to rewrite history. We had four years together and not all of them were shit, OK? And it definitely wasn’t shit against that wall when we made Lizzie. I still remember how tight and wet you were, and how you gripped me when you came, and how, when I came, it felt as if my balls had exploded. My knees ached because I had to lock them they were shaking so hard when you told me I was your Wonderwall. And even though you were drunk and it was super cheesy, and I made a joke about it, it meant something. To me at least.’

  ‘I think I’ve swallowed my tongue,’ she croaked, her heart now embedded in her diaphragm.

  How could he remember that so clearly, so vividly? She didn’t want to remember the girl she’d been, or the idiotic things she’d said—and done. But she especially didn’t want to know he’d remembered them, too.

  He swore softly, lifting a bottle of water out of the cupholder. ‘Here.’ He unscrewed the cap and offered it to her.

  She took a hasty gulp. The cool liquid hit her raw throat and she coughed.

  ‘Sorry, I braked too hard. You OK?’ His hand settled between her shoulder blades and rubbed. The coughing subsided and she shifted back. His hand fell away, but the tingles radiating up her spine didn’t. Annoyingly.

  She studied his face, the harsh expression, the day-old stubble, the lines that creased the skin around those brilliant blue eyes and the dark smudge of fatigue beneath.

  ‘You look exhausted,’ she managed at last. That had to explain the uncharacteristic burst of emotion. One thing Luke had never been was volatile. If anything, he’d always been too laid-back. She’d originally found that reckless devil-may-care charm unbearably sexy, until it became apparent it was merely a symptom of Luke’s complete inability to give a shit about anything that mattered.

  From the frown on his face now, though, it seemed he might actually give a shit about this. The low murmur of someone singing about their achy-breaky heart on the radio became deafening.

  But then the line of his lips quirked and her heart rate eased back out of the danger zone. This Luke she recognised. The one who had tempted her to do inappropriate things, in inappropriate places, while pretending to care, when he never had.

  Shut up and breathe. Breathing is good. It might even stop you making an even bigger tit of yourself.

  The heady flow of oxygen cleared the fog of exhaustion that had settled into Luke’s brain when they’d crossed the state line about fifty miles back.

  ‘I guess I didn’t sleep much on the plane.’ Or at all. Because he’d been busy reading through all the research he’d downloaded about Monroe before the trip. And ignoring Halle, curled up in her pod two feet away, her hands tucked under her head in the foetal position she’d favoured when they’d shared a bed.

  ‘Sounds like all that money you spent on your lie-flat bed was wasted,’ she said. ‘Bummer.’

  The air released from Luke’s lungs at the snarky comment. Snark was good, too.

  Because it was the opposite of sentiment. And sentiment was bad, because it had a bad habit of dredging up all those damn what-ifs. The what-ifs that had hounded him—and hampered his recovery—in the early years, after he’d run away.

  He scrubbed his hands down his face to erase the old guilt.

  Insane outbursts about that epic shag against the back wall of the Clapham Grand were out. As was rehashing the long-forgotten mistakes he’d once made with Lizzie’s mother.

  ‘I can drive,’ she said, clearly just as keen to avoid talking about his major loss of cool. ‘I actually slept on the plane. And I would rather not end up in a heap of charred metal at the bottom of a ravine.’

  ‘It’s not too far now. I can sleep when we get there.’ Like the dead. He needed the full ten hours a night if he was going to cope with being this close to Halle without shoving his foot down his throat again.

  No doubt about it, she got to him, still.

  Those light brown eyes, the colour of aged sherry with the tempting flecks of gold. The ripple of sensation in his crotch when the clasp of her bra had dug into his palm through her silk blouse. For a moment, as she’d coughed her lungs up, she’d seemed like sof
t, sweet, adoring and permanently optimistic Halle again. The girl who had mesmerised him once.

  But that was an illusion. An illusion he wasn’t about to get caught out by again.

  He shifted in his seat to ease the pressure on his fly before she noticed. Not to worry, he’d be able to control his sex drive when he wasn’t so exhausted his bones had melted into the upholstery.

  He shifted the transmission into drive and pulled out onto the empty road while conceding that the decision to remain celibate for the past four months might not have been such a stellar plan. Nothing like adding the pressure cooker of a sex-starved libido to an already charged situation.

  ‘You never answered my question,’ Halle said. ‘What is there to do at this resort for the next two weeks? I hope there’s a pool.’

  He eased his foot off the gas to take the next bend in the road, determined not to let the whiney tone rankle. ‘I sent your PA my brief for the article with all those details a week ago. Didn’t she pass it on?’

  ‘Of course she did, but I have a full-on career, not to mention a commitment to running a household with two children in it on my own. Arranging my schedule to accommodate this trip took up enough of my time.’

  Meaning she hadn’t bothered to read it. He pressed his foot back on the gas pedal, dragging up his last reserves of patience.

  Getting her here had been his priority. Her hostility had been expected. He was an expert at dealing with hostile subjects. When he wasn’t on the verge of going into a coma or in the middle of a four-month dry spell.

  ‘All right, well, let me give you a rundown. The resort’s facilities are basically luxury log cabins arranged in secluded settings throughout the two-hundred-acre property, which borders the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.’ He reeled off the information he’d been reviewing on the plane while she slept. There was no pool, but she didn’t need to know that just yet. ‘Monroe guarantees privacy and high-end spec for his mostly celebrity and/or super-rich and gullible clientele.’ Nope, not gonna rise to the pissy tone. At all. ‘His method of therapy, such as it is, seems to be based on a standard cognitive behavioural approach.’