‘Maybe.’
Abby leaned towards Gemma and lowered her voice a little, even though what with the family getting ready upstairs there was no one within earshot. ‘I also subsequently found out something that would suggest that he takes bottling things up to the extreme.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like he was nearly married once.’
Gemma’s eyes widened. ‘Really?’
Abby nodded.
‘Blimey. I hadn’t heard that.’
‘That’s my point.’
‘What happened?’
‘Well, from what I can gather it was around Christmas five years ago. He was jilted. At the last minute. Literally at the altar.’
‘Heavens.’
‘I know. Apparently his fiancée decided she was too in love with an old flame she’d hooked up with again on Facebook to go through with it.’
Gemma winced. ‘Ouch. That has to have hurt.’
Abby nodded. ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Yet when he said that he didn’t particularly like this time of year all he mentioned was the commercialism of it and the lack of business opportunity.’
‘Well, to be fair to him, what else would you have expected? He’d hardly have spilled all the details to a complete stranger. Who would?’
‘No, but you’d have thought there’d at least be a flicker of, I don’t know, something.’ Abby shook her head at the memory of how cool he’d been about it. How smoothly the excuses had slid off his tongue. How quickly. How practised the lack of emotion had seemed. ‘But he came across as being so totally unfazed by it.’
‘Maybe he is.’
‘But then why would he still be hung up over the time-of-year thing?’
Gemma frowned. ‘Hmm. You have a point. But how come we didn’t know about this? In fact, how come no one knows about this? I’d have thought it would have provided enough fodder for the gossip mags to keep going for months.’
‘Well, quite. But all I found was an engagement announcement and then a tiny five-line article about what had happened and how the wedding had been called off. On an obscure blog somewhere. It didn’t appear anywhere in the press, so the whole thing must have somehow been hushed up or something.’
‘Crikey.’
As her belt began to ring and vibrate Abby extracted her phone, glanced down at the unknown number and hit the silence button before sticking it back in the pouch.
‘Anyway,’ she said, making a note on her clipboard to check and call back once she’d got through this London’s Next Top Tween Model birthday party, ‘the point is that while I wouldn’t mind a boyfriend, the last thing I need is to get involved with someone who bottles everything up. All that second-guessing and getting it wrong...’ She grimaced as thoughts of her family and their total inability to communicate spun through her head. ‘So not my bag.’
‘I suppose not. But I still think you’re making a mistake.’
‘Better now than later,’ said Abby lightly, determinedly putting Leo and last night from her mind because she really didn’t need the distraction right now, or ever. ‘Besides, if anything more did happen between us I’d only end up wanting to be the one to change him and we know how well that works out.’
‘We do.’
‘Not well at all because men don’t want to be changed. And I can understand that. I don’t really want to be changed either.’
‘Who does?’
Silence fell for a moment as the relationships of Abby’s youth flickered through her head and maybe Gemma’s flickered through hers, and then she froze. ‘Oh, no.’
‘What?’