Falling for You (29 page)

That stopped Tiff and Sophie in their tracks.

“What? Are you joking?” Sophie narrowed her eyes, suspecting a trick.

“No,” said Jake. “Deadly serious.”

“What, you mean you
really
love each other?”

Jake nodded. “We really do.”

Juliet held her breath.

Tiff and Sophie looked at each other, then started to snicker again.

“What's so funny?” asked Jake.

“You've been mating.” Sophie rocked backward on the bed, whooping gleefully into her cupped hands.

“That's what you do,” confirmed Tiff. Interestedly he added, “If you've mated, you'll have another baby. What are you going to name it?”

“This could be one of those conversations you wish you'd never started,” Juliet whispered in an undertone to Jake.

“Where's it going to live?” Sophie's eyes were bright with interest. “I know, if we give it to Mr. Taylor-Trent, it can live with him. Then everyone will have a child to look after.”

“Interesting thought,” said Jake. “But we're not having a baby. Not just yet, anyway.”

“Right. But when you do, can we choose its name?”

Not overly keen on the prospect of any child of his being called Spider-Man, Jake said, “Out of the way. The nurse is trying to get through. So are you OK with that, then? Me and Juliet, you and Tiff? All four of us living together?”

“Great!” Sophie beamed as the nurse squeezed around to her side of the bed. “Just so long as you don't get married, because I'm not wearing a sissy bridesmaid's dress for anyone.
Ooh
.” She leaned forward ghoulishly as the nurse unwrapped a syringe. “Are you going to take blood? Can I watch?”

Kate was working the lunchtime shift at the Angel. Out by the pool at Dauncey House, Norris lay on his side on the sunbaked flagstones, lazily flicking his ears at passing insects and keeping one eye open should anyone feel like volunteering to take him for a walk.

Anyone being Oliver, the only human being currently on the premises. Norris sighed and closed his eyes. He wasn't getting his hopes up.

Inside the house, Oliver was unable to relax. For the past hour, he'd found himself pacing restlessly from room to room, visualizing the wreckage that was his life. For as long as he could remember, he'd used his position to control people. They did what he said. If the fact that he was a powerful man didn't intimidate them, he resorted to money instead. Whichever, he was used to getting his own way.

Until now.

Oliver paused in the doorway leading through to the drawing room. In a matter of days, his world had spun out of control. Estelle was gone, God knows where. She'd been having an affair with a younger, poorer,
scruffier
man and there was nothing he could do about it. The extent of his reaction had come as quite a shock: it was like assuming that if you had a big toe amputated you wouldn't miss it that much, then discovering afterward that, actually, you couldn't stay upright.

Too late, he was discovering that Estelle was in effect his big toe and that for some time now he'd been taking her for granted.

In truth, he'd taken his entire life for granted. And where did that leave him now? With a seven-year-old son who didn't know him. A defunct marriage. A daughter who was siding with her mother. And an ex-mistress about to leap into an affair with the local Casanova.

Oliver closed his eyes briefly and rubbed his forehead. If he was honest, he possessed a begrudging admiration for Jake Harvey. Jake had done a good job of raising his daughter. He clearly thought the world of Tiff, and Tiff, in turn, adored him. The thing between Jake and Juliet wouldn't last, no question about that, but at least they thought it would. And Jake was no tycoon. He might have the looks, but he'd never have money. Yet it didn't seem to bother him. He truly didn't care. How people could live like that, Oliver would never understand, but for the first time in his life, he found himself almost envious of Jake.

God, what was
happening
to him? As the emotions welled up, Oliver found himself having to swallow hard. The next moment a sudden noise made him jump. Having come in search of companionship, Norris had raised himself up on his hind legs and was pressing his wet nose against the closed French windows. Oliver hurried across the room to let him in before he started frantically scrabbling and leaving paw marks on the glass.

Norris licked his hand and Oliver realized that, right now, Norris probably liked him more than anyone else in the world. If that wasn't enough to reduce a grown man to tears, what was?

“Ugly mutt,” he told Norris gruffly, giving the dog's broad silky head a rub.

Norris gave him a not-very-hopeful look.

Oh, what the hell. It wasn't as if he had anything else to do.

“Go on then,” said Oliver, clicking his fingers and pointing out to the hall. “Fetch your leash.”

Norris couldn't believe his luck. Was he hearing what he thought he'd just heard? This was the one who never took him for a walk. Mesmerized, Norris hesitated, awaiting the magic word that would put him out of his misery.

“Walk,” Oliver said at last.

Yay!
That
was the magic word. Joyfully Norris scrambled out to the hall, locating his leash on the cushioned window seat. It was weird. When he'd first come here, he hadn't enjoyed going for walks at all. Who'd have believed that these days they'd be his absolute favorite thing?

The phone began to ring as Oliver and Norris were leaving the house. Since it couldn't be anything to do with Tiff—Juliet would have rung his cell phone, not the landline—Oliver locked the front door and set off without answering it.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, a taxi pulled up the drive. Gulping a bit at the sight of Oliver's car, Estelle dialed the number again and breathed a sigh of relief when it went unanswered. Oliver was probably still at the hospital, at Tiff's bedside. With Juliet.

“I'll be half an hour,” she told the taxi driver. “There's a nice pub in Main Street if you want to wait there, then come back and pick me up at two.”

The look on the taxi driver's face suggested that if Estelle had an ounce of decency about her, she would invite him into her vast house and make him a nice cup of tea and a sandwich. But for once in her life Estelle didn't care. She didn't have the energy to make polite conversation with a complete stranger. This was her home, where she'd lived for the last twenty-seven years, and she needed to be alone to say good-bye to it.

Having watched the disgruntled driver execute a three-point turn and head off down the drive, Estelle fit her key into the front door.

It felt strange to be back, stranger still to be tiptoeing through her own house. Except there was no need to tiptoe, was there? Everyone else was out. She was here to collect the rest of her clothes, hopefully without interruption.

In the kitchen, which smelled heartbreakingly familiar, Estelle located the roll of black trash bags in the cupboard under the sink and took them upstairs. The suitcases, dauntingly, were piled on top of the wardrobe in the unused spare bedroom. Wasting no time, she rifled through her own wardrobe, pulling out anything she was likely to wear again. When she'd finished doing the same with the chest of drawers and dressing table, she stuffed everything willy-nilly into the trash bags. Oh God, that looked terrible. She couldn't do it. Was there anything tackier than leaving home with your belongings in a bunch of trash bags?

Checking her watch—heavens, five to two already—Estelle told herself not to be such a wimp and braced herself for an assault on the wardrobe in the spare room. This entailed pulling a chair over to the front of the wardrobe, carefully balancing a foot on each of the rolled arms, then reaching up until she was
juuust
able to grasp the dusty handle of the large blue suitcase stored on top of it.

It was the most ridiculous place to keep them. Estelle couldn't imagine whose bright idea it had been in the first place. Now, maintaining her balance on the padded arms of the chair, she had to ease the cobalt-blue case slowly forward, then tip it at just the right angle, so that it slid gracefully into her arms rather than crashed unceremoniously down onto her head.

Panting a bit with the effort, Estelle managed this. She was doing fine, absolutely fine. All she had to concentrate on now was—
ohhh
…

Falling backward, falling backward…

“
Fuck
.” Estelle gasped, finding herself flat on her back on the floor with the suitcase over her face. Pushing it off, she clutched the side of her head and felt the sticky warmth of blood where the metal-edged corner of the case had gouged a hole in her scalp. Oh well, at least the damage wouldn't be visible; it was only in her hair.

At least, it wouldn't be visible once the bleeding stopped.

Gingerly levering herself into a sitting position, Estelle brushed dust from her shirt and felt her head begin to throb. Actually, it hurt quite a lot. Having righted the chair and returned it to its original position, she was about to lug the case through to the master bedroom when the sound of the front door opening downstairs reached her ears.

Damn,
damn
. It was too soon for Kate to be back from the Angel, which meant it had to be Oliver. Far too humiliated to face him, Estelle prayed it was only a flying visit home and that in a matter of minutes he'd be off again. Gazing wildly around, she realized that hiding under the bed wasn't an option—the gap between the base and floor was less than six inches, which was completely hopeless with a bottom like hers. Plus she'd drip blood all over the carpet.

Hearing movement downstairs and panicking, Estelle pulled open the door of the wardrobe and plunged in. The door wouldn't close completely, thanks to the absence of a handle on the inside. But that was OK. She didn't want to be trapped in total darkness. Breathing heavily, squashed like a sardine between a musty overcoat and one of her own ancient taffeta ball gowns, Estelle listened to the sound of footsteps on the stairs and prayed she wouldn't sneeze.

* * *

Bloody dog,
bloody
animal
, Oliver raged as he squelched up the staircase. How was he supposed to have known that Norris could swim? They'd been walking alongside the River Ash when Norris had suddenly spotted a mallard and taken a flying leap into the water. Oliver had experienced no more than a mild jolt of alarm, but the next moment, struggling to free himself from a tangle of underwater reeds, Norris had started yelping and scrabbling in a genuinely help-I'm-drowning kind of way. In a complete panic, Oliver had promptly slithered down the steep river bank into the water. Revolting—and disgustingly cold, compared to his own heated pool—but at least he was only in up to his thighs.

That was until he had waded across to heroically rescue Norris, whereupon the bloody animal, wriggling and splashing, had freed his legs from the weeds and launched himself at Oliver, knocking him off his feet.

Spluttering, gasping, and spitting out fronds of weed, Oliver had come up for air just in time to see Norris, sleek as a seal, swimming effortlessly past him with something that looked suspiciously like a smirk on his face.

Trudging back up Gypsy Lane, trailing the contents of the River Ash in his wake, hadn't been Oliver's finest hour. Norris, trotting along ahead of him, had begun wagging his stumpy tail as they reached the house and Oliver had lost patience with him. Shooing Norris through the side gate into the backyard, he had let himself in through the front door and made his way upstairs.

With the shower running, Oliver had already stripped off his wet muddy clothes when the doorbell began to ring. Heaving a sigh of annoyance but incapable of not answering the door—what if the bell carried on ringing?—he wrapped himself in a toweling robe and padded downstairs.

“Yes?” Oliver brusquely demanded of the man on the doorstep. On the driveway behind him stood a taxi with the engine still running.

“Uh…I'm back.”

“
What?
”

“OK,” said the man, clearly discomfited. “Could you just tell your wife I'm back?”

Oliver frowned. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I'm here to pick up your wife.”

“My wife isn't here. There's no one else in this house. I'm sorry, but there's been some kind of mistake. You've got the wrong address.”

Oliver waited for the taxi driver to turn and leave, but the man was giving him a decidedly odd look.

“I dropped your wife at this house half an hour ago,” he told Oliver. “She said she was here to pick up a load of her stuff and that she'd need a hand carrying it out to the cab. This is where I left her.” His eyes narrowing, he said, “She's definitely expecting me.”

It was Oliver's turn to be taken aback. Why was the man sounding so suspicious?

“
My
wife?” He double-checked. “Blondish? Plumpish? About this tall?”

“That's the one. Disappeared into thin air, has she?”

Could Estelle be here and he hadn't even realized? Bemused, Oliver said, “Hang on. I'll see if she's around,” and closed the front door.

There was no sign of Estelle downstairs. Upstairs, it wasn't until he rounded the corner of the L-shaped master bedroom and spotted the bulging black trash bags that Oliver realized the taxi driver hadn't been hallucinating. Calling out Estelle's name a few times and getting no response, it occurred to him that if she had come back to Ashcombe, she may well have popped over to visit Marcella.

Downstairs once more, he yanked open the front door.

“You're right. My wife was here,” said Oliver. “But she's gone now. Look, she might not be back for a while, so I wouldn't bother waiting if I were you. When she needs one, we'll call another cab.”

The man didn't leave. He backed away a couple of steps, his gaze flickering over Oliver's toweling robe, bare feet, and wet hair.

“What's going on here, mate? Your wife asked me to come back for her. Look, is everything all right?”

All right? For crying out loud, his life was in pieces. How could everything possibly be all right?

But Oliver knew he wanted the man to go, so he shook his head and said wearily, “Don't worry, everything's just fine.”

Clearly unconvinced, the taxi driver said, “Look, mate. Has something…happened?”

Upstairs, Estelle could bear it no longer. The taxi driver, it was blindingly obvious, thought that Oliver had murdered her in a fit of rage and was taking a shower to wash away the evidence. If she didn't show herself, the man would be on the phone to the police in a flash.

Creeping along the landing, cupping the side of her head so as not to leave a trail of blood, Estelle reached the top of the staircase. Her heart lurched at the sight of Oliver, standing in the front doorway with his back to her. Clearing her throat, she called out, “It's OK. I'm not dead,” and saw Oliver spin around in disbelief.