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Here is an except from Chapter 5 of this prize-winning romance.
She gazed at a street lamp in front of her, watching the
moths jostling for position as they flapped round and round. She thought Nicholas was like that light,
attracting all the moth-like creatures, the Annabels, the Clarissas, the
Livvies and probably many more, all irresistibly drawn to his lovely
flame. He could have married any one of
them and made the same mistake as her.
Had he always been entirely truthful with them all? Had he never come close to feeling that
intensity of emotion he seemed to have shared with her, close enough at least
to have wrong-footed somewhere en route?
Could he really know himself so well and be so perfect? Robert certainly thought so. He made him sound like a saint. Saint Nicholas—no, sorry, got one of those
already—and he was a do-gooder too!
Some ten or fifteen minutes must have passed and Julie
wondered if Livvie and Nicholas had finished ‘catching up’ and whether Nicholas
had been left with sufficient strength to have maneuvered her car from the drive
without further damage to either it or the van.
Damage her insurance company would now have to sort out for her.
“There you are!” he exclaimed from a point close behind
her. “I’ve seen to your car for you.”
“And Livvie too, I trust?”
He actually managed the merest flicker of a smile, if it
wasn’t just a tic in his cheek, that is.
Livvie’s ‘catching up’ must have been very therapeutic, Julie thought.
“She’s an old friend,” he explained dismissively, to no-one
in particular.
But not very old, Julie thought. Then she caught her breath as Nicholas came
to sit on the bench beside her. At last
he was coming to his senses!
“Can I ask you one question, Julie? Was it because you thought I was a simple
gardener that you felt you had free license to trample on my feelings?”
She groaned. “Oh
Nicholas, you know that isn’t true.”
“Then it seems I know very little,” he replied dryly. “I suggest you go home now before you freeze
to death.”
She jumped up from the bench, her feet, in their light,
strappy sandals smarting with the cold as she planted them solidly in front of
him and gazed down at him. “My marriage
was over long before I met you. It was a
mistake that should never have happened.
I was ashamed of it. It was like
my career in a way. Passing your exams
doesn’t automatically make you a good doctor in exactly the same way that
signing a book in a registry office doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll have
a good marriage, or even a proper one!
Simon and I were never really husband and wife, we were just good
friends.”
“Simon?” He nodded
and repeated the name in a voice heavy with sarcasm. “Simple Simon? Simply making mistakes?”
Julie knew he was referring to her observation that
sometimes people simply made mistakes in their choice of marriage partners, so
the insult was double-edged. “You have
no right to insult him.” she reproached quietly.
“No, of course not.
He’s your husband.”
“No, Nicholas. Not
anymore, but he is my friend.”
“Really? That’s what
I thought I was. It seems you treat all
your friends the same way. Badly! In my book, friends don’t cheat and lie. You should have told me instead of
deliberately letting me believe you were someone…something else”
“How could I, knowing your views? I grew too attached to you.”
“All the more reason for telling the truth, don’t you
think?”
“But I couldn’t bear to risk losing what we had.”
“We could never have anything built on a foundation of
lies. If I asked your husband, would he
tell me you were never really his wife?
Would he betray you the way you betrayed him? Do you hate all men, Julie? Or is it that you simply don’t know the
difference between right and wrong, or the truth and lying?”
She was as wounded by his tone as much as his words but
still pressed on, her voice little more than a shaky whisper. “I don’t hate you, Nicholas. I love you.”
“I’ll leave your keys on the bench.” His voice sounded icy.
She backed away a pace and stared down at her feet in
misery. Was there nothing she could say
to move this man with whom she had shared so much love? Had she really damaged their relationship so
irrevocably? How could he have changed
so much, her tender lover? Had she done
that to him?
She wanted a glimpse of the old Nicholas to reassure herself
that he had existed and she hadn’t dreamed him up. This cold, hard stranger bore no resemblance
to him.
When she raised her head, Nicholas was no longer there. She had told him she loved him and he had
simply walked away. How much more
humiliation could she take?
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