‘I wasn’t scorned. As it happened I was the one who broke it off,’ she flung at him.
‘Were you?’
‘Yes. He gave me an ultimatum and I rejected the choice that included him.’ Keith had been afraid that the financial and emotional cost of providing long-term care for her ailing father would be too great a drain on their marriage, but the idea of placing someone she loved in an institution, no matter how well run, was abhorrent to Harriet. It was ironic that her father had died only weeks after she had given Keith his modest ring back.
‘Go to bed with me or the wedding’s off?’
Her eyes burned with fury. ‘Of course not! We were already—’
She sucked in her breath as she realised what he’d goaded her into betraying.
‘Lovers,’ he finished for her, with a gentleness that was at odds with the inflexible grip on her wrists. ‘Relax, Harriet; there’s no shame in saying it. Nor any sin in an adult woman committing herself heart, mind and body to the man with whom she believes she is going to spend the rest of her life.’
‘Then why do I feel as if I’m being crucified for it?’ she said pointedly, tugging once more against his captive hold.
‘Because you’re still evading the original question. Who is Frank?’
He had the tenacity of a bulldog…or was just someone who was very focused on achieving his aims.
‘Why do you have to know?’ she said huskily. Her eyes stung. What was it about Marcus Fox that lured her into thinking he would understand? Even she recognised that her reactions had been way out of proportion to the event.
‘Because the mere thought of him took all the light out of your eyes. What has he done to you, Harriet?’
‘Nothing.’ She looked up at him with deeply wounded eyes. ‘I—he’s dead. Frank’s dead.’ She had to repeat it twice to make it seem real. ‘He was killed…last week. He—I came home from work on Friday night and found him…’ Her voice sank to a whisper and she closed her eyes, her lashes wet.
‘Found him where? Here in the house?’
‘No.’ She sniffed inelegantly, opening her eyes as she said brokenly, ‘Outside, at the side of the road—in—in the gutter.’
‘The gutter?’ He dropped her hands and took her shoulders in a powerful grip. His usual poker-face was vivid with stunned emotion. The knowledge of his shared outrage made the tears tremble on her lashes. She hadn’t cried when it happened. She had been too angry, too betrayed by the sheer unfairness of life. Something in her had snapped, had driven her to cry, Enough!
‘I think it was a hit-and
-run. He was just left there…like a piece of rubbish…’
‘My God, what did the police say?’ he said roughly.
‘I didn’t call them. What was the point? What could they do? What could anyone do?’ She smeared the tears away with the back of her hand. ‘So…I…buried him myself…in the back garden, by the roses.’
He recoiled without loosening his grip. ‘You buried a man in your back garden?’
She peered at him through her blurry eyes, astonished. ‘What man?’
‘Frank!’
Realisation hit her like an avalanche. ‘Frank wasn’t a man,’ she cried shrilly. ‘He was my cat.’
‘Your cat?’ If she hadn’t been so upset she might have found his expression of confused relief funny. Not many people got to confuse that razor-sharp brain. ‘My God, Frank is a cat?’
‘Was, not is.’ Harriet was stricken by a sudden mental image of a furry ginger face and sleepy copper eyes and the comforting purr that was always there when she woke in the night, reminding her that she was not entirely alone in the world. Her throat thickened again, forming a dam against the renewed pressure of tears as she braced herself to be told sternly that she was overreacting.
‘I know a cat isn’t as important as a person,’ she whispered, ‘but animals feel pain too…He was old, and a bit slow. I should have shut him inside when I went to work, but it gets stuffy in the house sometimes and he loves—loved to stroll and sleep in the garden. He used to curl up by the roses, where I buried him…’ The dam broke, her grief rushing down the spillway. She hiccuped and stuffed a fist in her mouth to try to stem the salty tide.
‘Oh, Harriet!’ Suddenly she was snatched hard against his chest and his strong arms were wrapped around her, blissfully, suffocatingly, painfully tight, supporting her, rocking her, pressing her wet cheek against the satin lapel of his jacket as she struggled not to make a complete idiot of herself. ‘Don’t!’ he said as she choked and gulped. ‘Don’t fight it, Harriet. Cry if you want to…’
‘But I don’t want to,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s silly to be so upset. He was only a cat!’ They were all the things she had expected him to say.
‘But he was yours…’ He hesitated as he made a leap of perception. ‘Or was he your parents’?’