Deception (7 page)

He flashed me a wide grin. “It’s a deal,” he said, and floored the accelerator.

Chapter 6

Freddie opened the door to my somewhat hesitant knock and, for a moment, he simply stood there in the doorway, gazing across at me. I couldn’t tell from his expression what he was thinking and I tried not to read anything too significant into it. But I suspected he wasn’t completely unaffected by to my appearance.

“Hello, Freddie,” I said quietly.

“Well, well,” he said finally. “Just look at you.”

I could feel my heart beating in my chest cavity, but I wasn’t sure if it was from nervousness or sexual tension. However, I still managed to keep the face impassive.

“Well, if you’ve finished looking me over, may I please come in?”

“Oh, sure. Sorry.” He made a big show of bowing me into the flat, and closed the door behind me. “Like the hair,” he said as I sashayed past him. “And the perfume.”

“It’s called ‘
Trashed’
,” I said coolly.

And the guy actually believed me, because he just nodded, and said, “New one on me.”

“And you’d know all about women and their individual perfumes wouldn’t you?” I responded tartly as I made my way down the familiar long hallway towards what had once been his and my bedroom at the end of the L-shaped corridor.

He kept pace with me and raised his hands in mock surrender. “You’ve gotten feisty since you’ve been away,” he said admiringly. I knew he was taken with the new me. I heard it in his voice.

I shrugged and tossed my head, as if I didn’t care, yet I was very aware of him, tall, rangy and still absurdly and youthfully good looking. He followed closely on my heels as I pushed open the door and went into the bedroom. I could smell his familiar scent too as he brushed past me. It was making me feeling rather weak-kneed, so I raised my head and straightened my spine as I went over to a closet and hauled my two suitcases from on top.

“Think you’ve lost a few pounds too,” Freddie said, leaning back against the dressing table, crossing his arms casually as he watched me go about slinging shoes, clothes and other personal bits and pieces into the suitcases that I’d slung on top of the bed. “Looking good, Bailey, looking good.”

I ignored him as best I could, while I finished up. Sadly, there really wasn’t much to show for the three years I’d shared with him in the flat.

“Right, I’m done,” I said at last, flipping the cases shut and setting them on the floor. “Guess I’d better get going. I’ve got a taxi waiting for me outside.”

“Back to big brother?”

“Actually no, not this time. Going to visit my dad.”

“I’d say give him my best wishes, but I’m not sure you would.”

“You’re right. I wouldn’t,” I snapped. “Those days are past. You don’t get to have a piece of my family any more. You made your choice. Now you can live with it.”

Even as I spoke, and as I’d so often done in the past when I used to live there, my eyes slid automatically to the wall above the bed. To the place where my portrait should have hung. Now in its place was an abstract painting that looked like a cross between a Jackson Pollock and a Kilm Malm.

“Oh.” And I could hear the tremor in my voice as I spoke, and I swallowed hard. “You’ve taken down your painting of me.”

He shrugged. “It didn’t seem appropriate to leave it hanging there,” Freddie said, managing to convey just a small amount of shame and regret in his voice.

I felt hurt. He’d painted it very early on in our relationship, when I’d been happy and had felt both beautiful and adored all because I was newly in love with such a talented artist. Freddie had taken me to his studio, taken off my clothes and given me a chair to wear. Nothing about the painting was indecent, as I’d straddled the chair and the back of it had hidden most of my naked body. My long brown ringlets had flowed in a cascade of curls over my shoulders and front and down my back, and my chin had rested on my crossed arms which in turn had rested along the top of the back of the chair. He’d captured a look adoring happiness and I’d loved the picture ever since.

“She told you to take it down,” I guessed.

He didn’t reply. Neither to deny or confirm.

“S’pose it’s difficult to concentrate on the job with your ex- girlfriend smiling down on you,” I said, sort of half wangling for more information, while at the same time not wanting to hear any of the lurid details. It’s funny how perverse people can be.

“So where is it then? It belongs to me and I’d like to have it back,” I said, somewhat defiantly, but I was a little nervous that Kristie had decided to feed the shredder with it. I could quite easily imagine her committing such a wilfully destructive act out of sheer malice.

“It’s safe,” said Freddie, as if he’d read my mind. He jerked his head towards the top of a storage cupboard. “In there.”

I started to drag the chair from the dresser over to the cupboard, but he was there before me, barring my way, getting in my face.

“Wait, I’ll get it for you, Bailey. It’s too high up, and I don’t want you toppling over and hurting yourself.”

“So you still care about me a little, huh, Fred?” He was in such close proximity that I began to feel a bit wobbly inside.

“Without your portrait hanging on the wall to remind me, I forgot how pretty you are,” he said softly, his voice deepening.

“I guess having Kristie around made you forget, huh.”

He put his hands on my shoulders, but lightly, and gazed into my eyes. “Don’t be like this, Bailey. You don’t understand how it is with me and Kristie.

“No, I don’t understand, and I don’t want to.”

“She’s like a drug, a sort of addiction that gets under your skin.”

“I told you I don’t want to know.”

I could feel his breath warm on my cheek; he was that close, close enough for a kiss.

Taking a deep breath, I took a step backwards to show him that that wasn’t the reason I was there.

He’d made his choice, in no uncertain terms. The humiliation of it still rankled, no matter how attractive the man was physically, and I wasn’t going to play his game.

“You know, I’m sorry it ended the way it did,” he said, pulling the chair over and balancing on it as he plunged an arm into the depths of the closet. Obviously the picture had been shoved way to the back of the cupboard, out of sight. Out of mind, too, presumably.

“Oh really? How did you want it to end?” I said sarcastically. “How had you actually planned it to happen?”

He looked down at me and his face creased. “I’m not sure I’d had anything
planned
, not really,” he said, frowning. “It just sort of happened. I’m not even sure that I wanted
us
to end at all. But, well, you know, you were there. Things got out of control.”

“You think?”

He jumped down from the chair, clutching a large, rectangular package wrapped loosely in brown paper held in place by string. He held it out to me, looking rather shamefaced.

“Take it, Bailey, it’s yours to do with what you like, for what it’s worth.”

Without a word I took the painting and put it under my arm. I began to wheel my suitcases over to the door.

“She’s always been misunderstood and badly treated, you know,” Freddie said suddenly. “And needy. She’s very needy.”

“Well, I hope you’ll both be very happy together,” I said, flinging open the bedroom door and dragging the cases behind me.

Once more he followed closely on my heels, turning the L-shaped corner and then catching up and walking with me to the front door.

“It doesn’t mean you and I can’t still be friends,” he said, his tone a caress.

Halting in my tracks, I bent down and carefully propped the canvas on the floor against the wall, before turning on my heel to face him.

“Even occasional lovers,” he added, with a grin, before I could say a word. “I’d really like that, Bailey.”

With that I was rendered speechless, and in the sudden silence I heard a noise coming from the kitchen to the right of me. It sounded like a sudden intake of breath.

I butted the door open with my hip, and there ahead of me stood Kristie Gillingham, standing motionless, a cup in one hand, and a soup spoon in the other. She was wearing a baggy old sweat shirt and jeans, and her long red hair was hanging loosely down her back. An opened instant cup-a-soup sachet was on the floor, by the toe of her trainers. She was looking straight at me, and to my mind, she looked almost feverish.

Unable to meet the crazed look in her eyes, my eyes took in the unwashed pots and pans which stood on the counter behind her, the dirty dishes stacked pile high in the sink. A cut glass fruit bowl that I’d once bought on a shopping spree with Freddie now contained just one maggoty looking apple and nothing else. My beloved plants by the window sill, over which I’d once taken such care, now hung bedraggled and dying of thirst, their leaves either dried and dropping off or totally shrivelled on their stalks.

Once it had given me great joy to prepare gourmet type meals and to bake cakes for my beloved in this kitchen of which I’d been very proud and that I’d always tried to keep clean, and it almost broke my heart to see the place in such decay.

I turned back to Kristie, and my eyes dropped to the soup she had been about to snack on. “I hope it bloody well chokes you,” I snarled. “That’ll teach you to listen through doorways to other people’s conversations. And believe me; I know what I’m talking about!”

She leapt forwards as if her bum were on fire, and brandished her spoon in my face. I was hard put not to flinch, but I held my ground. After all, this had been my ground longer than it had been hers.

Tomato soup dripped onto the linoleum like blood dribbling from an open wound.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she snarled back.

Meanwhile Freddie had stepped forward, propping the kitchen door open with one palm against the wood, and was watching us with a look of amazement on his face.

“Kristie! What are
you
doing here,” he demanded of her. “How did you get in?”

The smile she gave him wasn’t particularly sweet. “Oh, I’m often in and out of this place, my darling. Did you honestly think I wouldn’t copy the key that
she
left behind when she was supposed to be gone forever? After
you
told me she’d be gone forever, Freddie?”

Without waiting for an answer, she came closer, pressing me back into the hallway so that literally I was cornered.

“So why are you here?” she repeated.

“None of your business,” I retaliated.

“Did Freddie let you in?” she demanded, then once more she switched her attention, this time to the man standing looking on. “Freddie, did you let her in!”

His shoulders seemed to droop. “I thought you’d gone out, Kris.”

“I did go out. And then I came back. Just as well, eh?”

Part of me registered the friction between them and was glad. So they weren’t quite the cosy a couple I thought. Unless, of course, this was just the way they acted together all the time. Some people were like that. And then I shrugged. What’s it to me how they behaved? This wasn’t my home anymore; they were no longer a part of my life. I had made up my mind. I was turning over a new leaf.

“If you two have a problem, sort it out between yourselves. I don’t give a damn. As for me, don’t worry, I’m not staying any longer. I only came to pick up my belongings.”

I reached for the doorknob and managed to open the door, just as she lunged forward and grabbed hold of my jacket. She yanked so hard I was nearly toppled. We were the same height for once because I was wearing high heels and she was wearing flattish pumps, but I was still alarmed by her strength and the speed of her action.

“What the hell…?” I managed to tug myself free and rounded on her. “Are you completely nuts?”

Coming close, Kristie jabbed the bowl of the spoon towards me, just centimetres away from my throat. Her pupils seemed to have turned black, like twin pools of jet.

“You stay away from him, you hear me?”

“Well, if you let me get to the door, I’ll do just that.”

“I wish I could believe you. But I know you, Bailey Cathcart. I know you.”

The shy and quiet girl I remembered from the office was long gone, replaced by this flame-haired witch with piercing green-black yes who looked as if she wanted to tear me apart.

“Believe me, honey, the man’s all yours.”

She gave me a long, considering look. “He was never yours, that’s for sure, though you would’ve liked him to be. No, you never quite managed to get him to put a ring on your finger, did you? He never promised to love, honour and obey you, did he?”

“I think you’ve got it round the wrong way, you moron,” I said, somewhat fazed by the fact that she kept jabbing the spoon toward my face like the most lethal of weapons. In her hand perhaps it was, since she seemed to be trying to scoop out my eyes with it. “Look, do you mind not shoving that thing in my face? I’ve already eaten.”

She looked at me, long and hard, as if considering her options. Then quite deliberately and very delicately she opened her fingers and let the spoon drop. I heard it clatter as it hit the floor. But I still kept strict eye contact with her. I didn’t quite trust her to look away.