Christmas Eve Marriage (HQR Classic) Page 12

  Something changed in his face. ‘It was very nice,’ he said softly.

  She mustn’t look at him. If she looked into his eyes she would blurt out the truth. Thea closed her eyes briefly to gather the strength to disentangle herself from him. Getting off his lap, she went over to the wall where the honeysuckle was entwined with jasmine and the heady scent enveloped her as she brushed against the flowers.

  ‘And we’ve cleared the air,’ she said, forcing brightness into her voice and keeping her back firmly turned to him. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  Thea heard the scrape of the chair as Rhys got to his feet and came to stand behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders and she squeezed her eyes shut against the temptation to lean back against him.

  ‘You’re a very special woman, Thea,’ he said. ‘I hope Harry’s waiting for you at the airport.’

  She didn’t want Harry. She wanted Rhys, but how could she tell him that now? It doesn’t mean anything, she had promised. It’s not about for ever. It’s about here and now. She couldn’t change the rules now.

  ‘It’s our last day tomorrow,’ he said, dropping his hands and stepping back. ‘Let’s make the most of that, too.’

  They tried to make it a good day, but it just didn’t work. Having chatted most of the night, Clara and Sophie were fractious and sulky about having to go home.

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ grumbled Sophie.

  ‘Your mum will be waiting to see you.’ Thea tried to make her look on the bright side but it was hard when her own heart was like a leaden weight inside her. ‘It’ll be lovely to see her again, won’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but then I have to go back to school on Tuesday,’ said Sophie glumly.

  Well, she couldn’t do anything about the start of term. Thea abandoned her efforts to be cheerful. Frankly, it was all she could do to keep the tears that clogged her own throat at bay.

  If she had had the heart for it, she would have laughed at the idea of clearing the air with that kiss. Had they really believed that a kiss would somehow dissolve the tension between them?

  Instead, it had had the opposite effect, so that now they could hardly talk to each other without the air thronging with memories of how it had felt to be able to kiss and to touch. Rhys made no reference to what they had shared, and neither did Thea, but she couldn’t stop thinking about how right it had felt, about the sweetness and the gathering excitement. And with the good memories, like a bitter counterpoint, came the aching realisation that they wouldn’t happen again. It was over.

  None of them felt like going out. The children played in the pool and moaned about having to go back to school. Rhys was abstracted, and spent a lot of time checking the car.

  Thea drifted drearily around the villa, picking up discarded towels and swimming costumes and books she had never got round to reading. Clara had spread her belongings all over the house. Thea found a Game Boy in the bathroom, a T-shirt on the floor in the living area, hair bands in the kitchen.

  Nell would have made Clara pick them up herself, but Thea was glad of something to do other than ache for Rhys. It was her fault. She shouldn’t have pushed that kiss. It hadn’t made it better between them. It was much, much worse to know how close she had come and what she was going to miss.

  It was almost a relief when it was time to have the promised drinks with the Paines. Instructed to be on their best behaviour, Sophie and Clara trailed over behind Rhys and Thea. ‘We could be in the pool instead of having stupid drinks,’ they grumbled.

  ‘You can have a last swim later, but for now you can sit and be polite, or you won’t be swimming again at all.’ Rhys sounded sharp for him, and the girls exchanged glances.

  As it turned out, Kate had no intention of the children taking part in the conversation anyway. She sent them inside to play cards with Hugo and Damian. ‘I don’t want you getting dirty,’ she warned the boys.

  Nick was despatched to find glasses, and she turned to Rhys and Thea. ‘Now, we can sit and enjoy our last evening in peace! Hasn’t it been a marvellous holiday?’

  Thea thought about the sunlit days, about the smell of thyme and the sound of the cicadas. About sitting at local tavernas, and laughing with the girls, and the gleam of Rhys’s smile in the darkness.

  ‘It’s been perfect,’ she said, and glanced at him, sitting beside her with a set face. He didn’t look as if he had had a perfect holiday. ‘None of us want to go home,’ she told Kate to distract her from the fact that Rhys clearly wasn’t in a mood to make polite conversation.

  ‘I always look forward to getting back,’ said Kate briskly as Nick reappeared and to Thea’s relief began handing out drinks. ‘I like to have three weeks to recharge my batteries, but I’m itching to get to work now. There’s always so much to sort out in the office. I sometimes wonder if it’s worth going away at all.’

  Right, what did three weeks with your children count for when it came to keeping your in-tray under control?

  Thea’s mind began to wander as Kate rabbited on about her job and how the entire legal system ground to a halt when she wasn’t there to organise everybody. Rhys was staring morosely down into his glass, and she remembered how he had smiled the night before as he’d pulled her down into his lap, and her body clenched with longing.

  ‘I see you haven’t got a ring yet.’ Thea was caught unawares when Kate switched the subject without warning and fixed an eagle eye on her naked hand. ‘I’d have thought you would take the opportunity to get one while you’re here. I mean, it’s not that long until the wedding, is it?’

  Thea moistened her lips. ‘No, but there’s no hurry. We thought we’d wait until we got home.’

  ‘What have you got in mind? Diamonds, I suppose?’ Kate looked complacently at the massive cluster of diamonds on her own finger.

  ‘Diamonds would be too cold for Thea.’ Rhys’s voice was curt as he took an unexpected part in the conversation. He took Thea’s hand and studied it as if picturing a ring on her finger. ‘She needs a different stone—a sapphire, perhaps?’

  ‘I love sapphires,’ stammered Thea, agonizingly aware of his touch.

  ‘Oh.’ Kate looked down her nose. ‘Well, if that’s what you like…Nick, go and see what those children are doing,’ she snapped suddenly. ‘They’re making a lot of noise in there. I don’t want Hugo and Damian running around.’

  Poor Nick rose obediently, and she turned back to Rhys and Thea. ‘I must confess I always think sapphires a little bit…’ she searched for an alternative to common, which she was clearly longing to say ‘…ordinary,’ she decided eventually. ‘Diamonds are classic, so simple and elegant.’

  ‘Well, I’m an ordinary person,’ said Thea, trying to make a joke of it, but Rhys’s brows drew together and he looked more forbidding than she had ever seen him.

  ‘You’re not ordinary,’ he snapped. ‘And nor are sapphires. They’re beautiful and warm. Like Thea,’ he finished, looking challengingly at Kate.

  ‘The one advantage of going home is that we won’t be exposed to that woman any longer,’ said Rhys under his breath when they finally managed to leave. ‘For the first two minutes you think she’s not as bad as you remembered, and after five minutes you’re ready to scream at how insufferable she can be. I don’t know how Nick puts up with her.’

  ‘I think he’s worse,’ said Thea. ‘He spent half an hour showing me how his mobile phone works!’

  They had gathered up Sophie and Clara, Clara in very bad odour with Kate again for inciting the boys into playing hide-and-seek, first in the house and then in the garden, as a result of which all four of them were extremely grubby. Now they were sitting by the pool in the dark while the girls had their promised last swim, much to the envy of Hugo and Damian.

  ‘You’ll have a hard time shaking her off,’ said Thea, desperate to keep the conversation going. She wasn’t sure how to deal with Rhys in this new, grim mood. ‘Did you hear her suggesting that we go over to their house for dinn
er one night so that we could compare photos?’

  ‘I did. I also heard you say that would be lovely!’

  ‘I had to say something,’ she protested. ‘I could hardly tell her we wouldn’t be seeing each other, let alone them, could I?’

  He glanced at her and then away. ‘No,’ he agreed in a flat voice.

  ‘Kate’s the kind of person who follows up invitations like that, too,’ Thea warned. ‘She’ll track you down via Lynda and keep on and on at you until you agree to go, so you’d better be ready to explain why I’m not around.’

  Rhys stared at the pool, which was unfamiliar in the darkness. ‘I’ll just say we’ve split up.’

  ‘She’ll ask you why. The Kates of this world always do.’

  ‘I’ll tell her that you snore,’ he said with the first glimmer of humour he had shown all evening, and Thea was so relieved to see it that she even managed a laugh.

  ‘You dare!’

  ‘No, I’ll tell her the truth,’ said Rhys after a moment and she stared at him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, not about the pretending,’ he said. ‘I’ll just explain that when I met you, you were on the rebound from a previous affair, but when you got home your old boyfriend was waiting for you and you realised that you’d made a mistake. I hope it’ll be true, too—the bit about Harry waiting for you, anyway. You deserve the best.’

  Why was he so keen on her getting back together with Harry, anyway? Thea wondered crossly. She was sick of hearing how much he hoped Harry would come up trumps. And she would decide who was best for her, thank you very much!

  What was it with men, always telling you how you deserved someone better than them, as if you couldn’t work out for yourself who you wanted? Nell said it was a way of avoiding responsibility.

  ‘What “you deserve someone better than me” actually means is “I can’t be bothered to make the effort for you”,’ she had told Thea.

  So by pushing her towards Harry, Rhys could pretend that her falling in love was nothing to do with him, Thea thought, welcoming the way her resentment was growing. It was easier to feel angry than to bear the aching emptiness of imagining life without him.

  He liked her, he’d wanted her last night, and he’d been in a bad mood all day at the thought of saying goodbye, but none of that was enough to make him stop and think that maybe he could change his mind, that he could be a good father and still have a relationship. That all he needed to do was tell her that he loved her and they could both be happy.

  But it was easier to believe that Harry was responsible for making her happy, wasn’t it? Rhys could reassure himself that it was nothing to do with him. He had kissed her and held her and listened to her and made her laugh and smiled at her, but hey, it wasn’t his fault that she had fallen in love with him, was it?

  And it wasn’t really, Thea realised sadly. She had fallen in love with him all by herself.

  ‘It’ll be a relief not to have to pretend any more, anyway,’ Rhys said after a while.

  For him, maybe. She was going to have to carry on, pretending that last night’s kiss didn’t mean anything to her, pretending that she didn’t love him, pretending that she was bright and cheerful and that her heart wasn’t breaking even as she smiled.

  ‘Yes. Still, it’s been two weeks to remember. It’s not every holiday you get to be engaged!’

  Or fall in love.

  ‘I’m sorry you won’t be getting that sapphire ring.’ At least now Rhys was making the effort to play along, to make these last few hours bearable.

  Thea managed a brilliant smile. ‘Ah well, better luck next time! You never know, maybe Harry will come through after all.’

  Although Harry would opt for diamonds if he did. He would never think about buying her sapphires because they were warm and beautiful and reminded him of her.

  Another silence fell.

  ‘The girls are going to miss each other,’ she said at last.

  ‘They can meet up in London. They don’t live that far away from each other, so I’m sure we can organise something.’

  We presumably meant him and Lynda, though, or possibly him and Nell, Thea thought with a tinge of jealousy. Rhys would probably meet her sister, who had always been so much prettier, so much nicer, so much more sensible. Nell was exactly the kind of woman Rhys would fall for if he ever let himself.

  Oh, she could probably arrange to be around sometimes, but what would be the point? Rhys had made it very clear that he didn’t want a relationship, and Thea was sick of falling in love with men who didn’t love her back.

  That was one pattern she was going to break, she vowed. She was just going to have to bandage up her heart and get on with her life, and maybe one day she would meet a man who was prepared to love her wholeheartedly, the way she needed to be loved.

  As long as she didn’t spend her life wishing that man could be Rhys.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THEA stood in the baggage claim hall and watched the luggage juddering slowly around the carousel. It had been a long, dreary journey, starting in the small hours, and she was gritty-eyed with exhaustion and the sheer strain of keeping tears at bay for so long.

  No sign of their cases yet, and they seemed to have been standing there for hours. Maybe they were lost. Thea couldn’t decide whether that would be a good thing or not. It would delay the moment of saying goodbye for a few minutes longer, but she was dreading losing control so much that part of her longed to get it over with.

  Rhys was stepping forward and lifting a suitcase off the carousel, and the next moment Clara was at her elbow, pointing. ‘There’s my case! And that’s Sophie’s, look.’

  Let mine be lost, prayed Thea in panic, suddenly faced with the fact that as soon as her case appeared there would be no reason to stand here next to Rhys any longer. She would have to walk out into the arrivals hall and into her old life, and he would be gone.

  But here it came, wedged between a set of golf clubs and a battered rucksack. For a moment, Thea was tempted to pretend that she hadn’t seen it, but Clara was already pointing it out to Rhys, who lifted it easily off the carousel and put in on their trolley.

  ‘Ah, there you are!’ Kate came bustling up. ‘We’re all ready to go, so we’ll say goodbye. It’s been super to meet you.’

  She thrust her cheek forward for an air kiss, and Thea dutifully obliged. ‘I presume I can reach you at Rhys’s number? I’ll give you a call,’ she went on without waiting for Thea’s reply, ‘and we’ll fix up supper. Now, must dash. Hugo, Damian! Come along!’

  She breezed off, utterly sure of herself and everybody else, and Thea and Rhys were left alone, isolated in the middle of the crowded hall.

  ‘How are you getting home?’ asked Rhys stiltedly. ‘I left the car here, so we could give you and Clara a lift if you wanted.’

  Thea could have wept. ‘Nell’s going to meet us. She’s not up to driving, but I’m sure my father will have brought her in the car.’

  Why did she have to have a close and loving family? Right then, Thea would willingly have disposed of them all if she could only have a little longer with Rhys.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Good. Well, I’m glad you won’t be struggling with those cases on the tube.’

  ‘No, we’ll be fine.’

  How had it come to this? It wasn’t that long since she had been lost in his arms, and now they were reduced to small talk.

  ‘So,’ said Rhys after a moment. ‘It looks like this is it.’

  The breath leaked out of Thea’s body. ‘Yes.’

  With every fibre of her being she longed for him to suggest meeting up some time, ask for her number, anything to give her hope that he was thinking about seeing her again, but he was giving Clara a goodbye hug and making her giggle, so it looked as if that was that.

  Thea kissed Sophie. ‘I’ll miss you,’ she told her.

  ‘When will I see you again?’ asked Sophie, clinging to her.

  ‘I’m…not sure, Sophie. Some time
, I hope.’

  ‘Soon?’

  ‘I hope so.’ What else could she say?

  Sophie let her go reluctantly and turned to hug Clara, and the moment Thea had been dreading had come.

  She made herself smile at Rhys. The smile came out a bit wavery, but it was the best she could do, and at least she wasn’t throwing herself on his chest, wailing and screaming and begging him not to let her go, which was what she felt like doing. She hoped he was grateful.

  ‘Well…’ she said and kept the smile fixed in place with an enormous effort.

  ‘Thea—’ said Rhys, and then stopped.

  Her heart was hammering painfully. ‘Yes?’ she prompted when he didn’t go on, but he had clearly changed his mind about whatever it was he had been going to say.

  ‘Just…thanks for everything.’

  ‘I should be thanking you,’ she managed.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For looking after us and driving us around,’ she said. ‘We’d never have left the pool if it hadn’t been for you.’

  And she would never have had that wonderful moment of knowing that she had found him and that he was all that she would ever want.

  Reaching up, she kissed him, just on the cheek, but her lips touched the corner of his mouth. She felt his hands close hard around her for a moment, holding her still, and then he released her, letting her step back.

  ‘Goodbye.’ Her voice cracked slightly and she drew a steadying breath as she took hold of the baggage trolley. She couldn’t let go now. ‘Come on,’ she said to Clara. ‘Let’s see if we can find Mum.’

  She made herself walk away from Rhys without looking back. It was one of the hardest things she had ever done. Hardly aware of where she was going, she pushed the trolley through Customs, and suddenly they were out into the Arrivals Hall, disorientated for a moment by finding themselves faced with an enormous crowd of people waiting to greet friends and family.

  They hesitated, scanning the faces. ‘There she is!’ cried Clara as she spotted the familiar figure at last, and she rushed over to her mother, almost knocking her off her crutches. ‘Mum! Mum, we had such a cool time!’