Thank goodness. She needed something to occupy her time and her thoughts.
And her heart as well?
Livvy dismissed the thought, stifling the pain that came with it.
She hadn’t heard from Gale since Sunday morning and, although she missed her cousin, she was determined not to go back on what she had said.
For so long as Robert Forrest remained a part of her cousin’s life, she could not do so.
She stopped her car and got out. The supermarket had been crowded and she felt tired and jaded, her nerves constantly on edge.
Now, as she went to unlock her door, she was glancing over her shoulder as though half expecting Robert Forrest to materialise behind her.
Robert…it suited him. She gave a fiercely bitter shiver. How long was it going to be like this…how long would it be before she finally started to get over him?
Knowing what he was, which ought to have made it all so much easier, might have increased her misery but it had not decreased her love.
She pushed open her door, wincing beneath the weight of her heavy shopping bags.
There was somebody standing in her living-room. A tall, dark-haired man who had no right whatsoever to be there.
As he came towards her, the earth seemed to tilt beneath her feet. She saw the anger in his eyes and made a small helpless sound of pain.
He took the shopping from her, his fingers manacling her wrist as he almost dragged her into her sitting-room.
‘Just what the hell are you trying to do with yourself?’ he demanded roughly. ‘If you lose any more weight, you’ll…’
It wasn’t her fault she couldn’t eat, she wanted to tell him. It wasn’t her fault she hurt so much inside, ached so much with the burden of her unwanted love, but stubbornly she held the words back, dragging herself out of his grasp to demand bitterly,
‘What are you doing here? How did you get in?’
‘Gale gave me her key,’ he told her.
Gale… Another betrayal. Livvy stifled her pain.
‘She had no right to do that,’ she told him stiffly. ‘She knew I didn’t want to see you. Please leave. Otherwise…’
Otherwise what? Otherwise I might break down completely and tell you just how much I love and need you?
‘I’m not leaving until I’ve said what I’ve come to say,’ Robert told her grimly. ‘And you will listen to me, Livvy. You owe me that much at least…’
‘Owe you?’ She stared at him, fighting down the hysteria exploding inside her.
‘Well, don’t you? Walking…running out on me like that… What was it you were so afraid of, Livvy? That I might want more from you than you were prepared to give?’
That she might want more? He was confusing her, Livvy recognised, deliberately trying to turn the conversation, the situation to his own advantage.
‘Why did you lie to me?’ she challenged him. ‘Why did you pretend to be someone else…?’
‘You were the one who mistook me for a potential buyer for the farmhouse,’ he told her quietly. ‘The last thing I’d expected to find when George had given me the keys for the place so that I could have a few days’ much needed solitude was to find it already inhabited by a very disturbing and aggressive woman. It seemed more sensible to let you go on seeing me as the enemy…than…’
‘Sensible? Deliberately to deceive me?’
The look he gave her had something haunted and pain-filled about it.
‘Yes, I know,’ he said quietly. ‘But you see, I didn’t know then… You called me a misogynist, Livvy, and it’s true that I have felt a certain mistrust of your sex… My marriage…’ He shook his head. ‘My marriage was something that should never have happened. It was all my own fault. I was twenty-one when Claire and I met; she was slightly older, twenty-four. I suppose I was too young and too idealistic to know what real, genuine love was. Because I wanted her and she seemed to want me, I decided that we were in love. And then she told me that she was pregnant… Carrying my child. We’d barely known one another three months. Foolishly I’d assumed… I think I knew even then, before I married her, that all I’d really felt was physical desire, but she was carrying my child…’
He grimaced painfully. ‘Or so I thought… That, like the love she claimed to feel for me, was another fiction, but by the time I realised the truth, by the time she told me that she’d made a mistake and there was to be no baby after all, it was too late and we were married.