‘That’d be nice.’
While the kettle was boiling, he switched on some music then held out his hand to her. ‘Dance with me?’
She took his hand and let him draw her into his arms. They swayed together, and when his mouth found hers the rest of the world felt a million miles away.
Coffee forgotten, he carried her up the stairs to his bed. Unzipped her dress and hung it neatly over the back of a chair, then let her strip off his tailcoat and waistcoat.
‘Nice,’ she said when she’d undone his tie and shirt, then ruffled his hair and grinned. ‘You always did look sexy when you came home from the lab, all dishevelled because you’d stuck your hands through your hair like an absent-minded professor while you were thinking about a problem and it never occurred to you to look in a mirror or comb your hair before you came home.’
She remembered? Warmth spread through him.
‘And you’ve always been the sexiest woman I’ve ever known,’ he said, his voice husky with longing.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. The day we got married. Me in that crumpled suit and you in that pretty summer dress.’
‘You and me, always. That’s what we said. And it didn’t happen.’ Her eyes filled with sadness.
He kissed her. ‘Let’s remember the good stuff, not the bad.’ The beginning of their marriage, all those years ago.
And maybe tonight would be closure.
Closure on all the hurt and pain between them.
A chance to move on.
And maybe tomorrow the future would look bright instead of bleak.
CHAPTER SIX
ABIGAIL HALF OPENED her eyes as the light filtered through the curtains.
Then she was instantly awake.
Her own curtains had blackout linings. These ones didn’t—because they weren’t her curtains. This wasn’t her bed. And the man spooned against her, with one arm wrapped round her waist holding her close to him, hadn’t slept in the same bed as her for nearly five years.
Oh, help.
Had this just been the worst mistake of her life?
Maybe it was the wedding that had got to her; it had brought back memories of her own wedding day and how happy she and Brad had been. And it had been, oh, so easy to fall into his arms yesterday. To kiss him in the garden. To let him carry her to his bed when they’d caught a taxi back to his cottage.
She had absolutely no idea what would happen today. They’d both said they needed closure, but had this been the wrong way to do it? There hadn’t been any kind of closure when they’d got divorced. The whole process had all been cold and distant, done through their respective solicitors, and it had left her with so many unanswered questions. Had she not been enough for Brad in the first place, that he’d let her go so easily? Or should she have tried harder to fight for her marriage?
Maybe she ought to leave. But right now she was warm and comfortable, with his arms wrapped round her, and she didn’t want to go anywhere.
How stupid was she, trying to cling on to the past?
They couldn’t go back. She knew that.
But making love with Brad again hadn’t got him out of her system. At all. If anything, it had made her realise just how much she missed him. She filled her life with work—and she loved her business, her staff and her life here—but she knew perfectly well that she kept herself busy to stave off the loneliness. And, although she’d dated a few men during those years, nobody had ever managed to make her feel even the tiniest bit the way Bradley Powell had. So the fairest thing to do had been to keep all her relationships platonic and just not bother dating.
But what now?
How would Brad feel, when he woke?
Would he think last night was a huge mistake? Or...
She didn’t dare let herself hope.
Either she’d fidgeted so much that she’d woken Brad, or he was awake already and was waiting to hear the change in her breathing to tell him that she was awake, because he said softly, ‘Good morning.’
‘Um, good morning,’ she said awkwardly, wriggling round to face him.
He stroked her face. ‘Sunday morning. I do actually have food in the house, so I could make pancakes, if you like.’
It was the best thing he could’ve said to make her relax again, because she had a flashback to the only time he’d ever tried to make her pancakes, one Sunday morning back in their Cambridge days. She laughed. ‘What, and set the smoke detector off?’ He’d burned the pancakes so badly that the alarm had shrieked madly, and he hadn’t been able to stop it. Although she’d finally managed to make it stop by flapping a damp tea towel beneath the smoke detector, the noise had woken everyone in their block of flats and she’d had to bake a massive batch of cookies to mollify their disgruntled neighbours.