Bought: One Bride

“Holly!” he called after her as he pushed through the coffee-shop door in her wake.

She halted at the kerb just long enough to send a distressed glance over her shoulder at him. Then she dashed out into the road.

The loud screech of brakes assaulted Richard’s ears as he saw a white van hurtling down the hill towards her.

They said your life flashed before you the moment before you died. The truth flashed before Richard’s eyes the moment before he thought Holly would die.

He loved her. Loved her as he’d never loved Joanna.

The thought of burying Holly gave him a strength and a speed that was inhuman. Some guardian angel must have lifted him and propelled him across that road, because before he knew it he was diving into mid-air, taking her with him out of harm’s way.

She screamed as they crashed into the gutter on the other side, Richard’s body buffering hers against the fall. Richard didn’t scream. He was thanking God for his mercy.

People quickly milled around them, helping them to their feet, asking if they were all right. The driver from the white van, which had stopped. People from the coffee shop. Passers-by.

“I…I think so,” Holly said shakily. “Richard? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he insisted, even as his leg throbbed with pain under his trousers. Thank God the weather had turned cool that day and he’d been wearing a leather jacket, or all his arms would have been grazed.

“Your face is bleeding,” Holly said, reaching up to touch his cheek.

Someone produced some tissues, which he dabbed against his cut cheekbone.

“Come back into the coffee shop,” the lady proprietor insisted. “You’ve had a bad shock. A sit down and a hot sweet drink is called for.”

Holly knew the woman was right. She also knew Richard had just saved her life. But to go back and sit down with him. To have to talk to him.

“Please, Holly,” he said, perhaps guessing that she still wanted to flee.

She closed her eyes rather than look at him. He took her arm and led her back across the road to the coffee shop. She finally opened her eyes after she’d been settled back in the chair she’d occupied earlier. The sight of her engagement ring still in the middle of the table brought back the reasons for her fleeing in the first place.

Richard’s admission to buying the shop behind her back.

Why? The reason was obvious. He’d wanted her to be evicted. Wanted her to have nowhere else to go, but him.

Two new cups of milk coffee arrived, into which the waitress heaped some sugar.

“Drink up, dears,” she advised before leaving them to it.

Holly just sat there, saying nothing.

“You shouldn’t have run like that, Holly,” Richard said quietly at last. “You could have been killed.”

“Better dead than wed to a man like you.”

“Don’t say that,” he choked out, his face ashen. “I love you, Holly. I know you won’t believe me, but it’s true.”

“How dare you?” she snapped under her breath. “It’s despicable to lie about something like that! But then you are despicable.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more. What I did was despicable. But I do love you.”

“You simply can’t accept defeat, can you? You don’t love me,” she said bitterly. “Everyone knows you’re still in love with Joanna. Your mother. Your friends. I’m just a means to an end.”

“That’s not true.”

“Don’t you dare try to tell me what’s true and what isn’t. I know the truth.”

“No, you don’t,” he bit out. “And neither does anyone else. You think I’m still in love with Joanna? Well, you’re wrong. I hate her. No, that’s wrong. I don’t even hate her any more. She’s not worthy of being hated. Because that would mean she was worthy of being loved.”

Holly gaped at him.

“Yes, well you might be surprised. But I couldn’t let anyone know I was married to an unfaithful bitch, could I? Not me. Mr Successful. Impossible to tell anyone that she’d been expecting a child when she was killed, especially when that child definitely wasn’t mine. Ever since she died I thought she’d been having an affair and that she’d been going to pass the child off as mine. But Kim finally filled in the gaps for me when I rang her the other day and demanded to know the truth. Joanna was going to have an abortion on the day she was killed. She didn’t even know who the father of her child was. It could have been any of half a dozen men she let screw her at a party she threw when I was away. Isn’t that a lovely thought? My wife, a slut!”