There was no getting round it—if he had been used, if he had been some kind of sick substitute for a man who couldn’t commit to her, then he had a right to know.
He knew where her mother lived. She had touched upon that topic in passing, had mentioned the house with a wistful smile on her face. She had talked about the little village and the picturesque country road which she was fond of walking down, breathing in the fragrance of the summer blossoms, the sharpness of the wintry air, dawdling in autumn on her way from house to village to appreciate the russet reds of the falling leaves.
Oh yes, he had a memory like a computer, and he hadn’t forgotten a single thing she had told him in Paris when she had let her guard down and confided, told him snippets of her past which had seemed to slip out in between their conversations about art and culture, work and deals, the state of the world.
Alice, he thought with a frown as he retired for bed much later that night, would have appreciated the opera. She wouldn’t have asked a bunch of idiotic questions, she wouldn’t have stifled yawns and she wouldn’t have kept looking around her like a bored kid at an adult gathering.
It all came back to Alice. He had never been this obsessed with a woman and he wondered whether it was because he still felt that they had unfinished business between them. If there was some mystery man in the background, then the business would be finished and she would be out on her ear looking for a new job. But if there wasn’t... Maybe what they had started in Paris needed to reach a natural conclusion.
She might say that she didn’t want that, but he did. Badly...and he was a man who always got what he wanted.
* * *
Alice finished preparing the supper and went to join her mother in the little sitting room that overlooked the tidy, pretty garden in which Pamela Morgan spent so much of her spare time, pottering and enjoying being outside where her phobia could not get a grip and drive her back to the safety of the four walls.
There was something that her mother was keeping from her and that was worrying. True, she would be seeing her mother’s therapist on Monday morning first thing, but she couldn’t help wondering if there had been some sort of setback.
The sitting room was bright and airy and very different from the sitting room in the house in which she had grown up. Here, photos of her as a girl were proudly displayed on the mantelpiece and the sofa and chairs were deep and comfortable. It was a cluttered room, which was something her father had loathed, preferring to have as few reminders as possible around that he was a family man.
‘You were telling me all about your trip to Paris,’ Pamela Morgan encouraged as soon as her daughter was sitting down, legs tucked underneath her, cosy and comfortable in her faded jogging bottoms and bedroom slippers, with her hair in a stubby ponytail.
Actually, Alice thought that talking about her trip to Paris was pretty much all she had done since she had arrived. It had been the same last weekend and, whilst she had done her best to skirt round the topic of Gabriel, she had found herself talking about him, recounting some of the anecdotes he had told her. Her mother had made a very good listener, hardly interrupting, and Alice wondered if she had confided more than she should have.
But if her mother wanted to hear more about the Louvre and what they had seen, or the Jardin des Tuileries and how beautiful it was, then so be it.
Alice was accustomed to handling Pamela Morgan with kid gloves. She tiptoed around anything too intrusive, permanently aware that her mother was not one of life’s more robust specimens.
Outside, the day had been surprisingly warm and sunny, and the sun was only now beginning to dip, throwing the garden into lovely, semi-sunlit relief.
In the kitchen, some meat sauce was simmering on the stove. Later they would eat together and, as always, it would be an early night.
As she chatted, her mind played with the thought of Gabriel and how he was enjoying his weekend with the pocket brunette. Had the opera been an aperitif, the taster course before the main meal? Of course it had, she chided herself scornfully. The main meal would have been the bedroom. Gabriel might be lazy when it came to every single form of emotional involvement, but he was just the opposite when it came to physical involvement. On that level, he was one-hundred percent active and engaged.
She wished she could eliminate him from her head, somehow press delete and get rid of all the inconvenient memories that were making her life a living hell.
She didn’t want to quit her job but that was becoming a very real possibility with each passing day. Yesterday, seeing that woman in the office, had been the worst...
It was a reminder of how fleeting she had been for him. Her voice trailed off and she caught her mother looking at her speculatively; she grinned and tried to remember what she had been talking about. Paris? Work? Her flatmate Lucy’s new boyfriend?