Don't Go Breaking My Heart: Break Up to Make Up / Always the Best Man

She closed her eyes. No. She had to be strong. She couldn’t weaken now. Missing out on one last chance to see them all—to say goodbye to them—was the price she’d have to pay to keep her sanity and her heart intact.

She had to focus on the fact that, once again, he was asking her to drop everything and trot off after him. And there were no guarantees that he wouldn’t leave again after it was all over. He hadn’t mentioned wanting to get back together again, had he? He just needed her to save his skin.

Too bad. He could save his own sorry hide.

He had no idea of the torment she’d been through after he’d left. She had to remember that black place and all the reasons why she never wanted to go back there.

So as Nick lounged against the door jamb, she let the blackness feed her anger until it was good and bubbling. And then she hauled his bag the short distance to the front door and flung it onto the garden path. When Nick let out a strangled hey and dived after it, she slammed the door and locked it behind him.

She punched the button on the remote control again and again. Celebrity chefs. TV’s Worst Mishaps. Top Ten Pop Stars She Didn’t Recognise. Why wasn’t there anything good on the telly? She had more than fifty channels to choose from, for goodness’ sake. There had to be something mildly interesting. Even a schmaltzy TV movie would be better than nothing.

Mind you, it was almost three o’clock in the morning.

She yawned. Normally she’d have been tucked up in bed hours ago, but tonight she just couldn’t calm down enough even to bother with the pretence of going upstairs and getting changed into her PJs. And there was something oddly comforting about sitting in the dark with only the flicker of the television for company.

Mona would say she was wallowing. Mona would probably be right.

But a girl was allowed to wallow after she’d kicked the man she loved out of her life for good.

She threw the remote onto the sofa cushion next to her and tried to concentrate on the sitcom rerun she’d stopped at.

It was no good denying it. She loved Nick. He wouldn’t make her half as crazy if she didn’t. She might try to kid herself she was trying to lock him out of her heart as well as her house, but, in reality, there was no point. He was firmly embedded there.

But that didn’t mean they were capable of building a life together.

They had different priorities. No, it was more than that. They were so utterly different that she wondered how things had lasted as long as four years. Five, if you counted the year before they got married. And then there was the year before that, when Nick had steadily pursued her and she had steadily refused until he’d worn her down and made her laugh.

She’d been very firm with him. One date—no more.

Only she’d discovered one date wasn’t enough. Well, that was how it had seemed at the time. Maybe she’d have been better off listening to her feminine intuition—the alarm in her head that had yelled code red, code red every time Nick was in range.

She sighed and let her eyes wander round the room. It was stupid to feel so desolate at the thought of saying goodbye to Nick for ever. She’d made up her mind months ago.

The light on the answer-phone was blinking. Her heart hiccuped into action. Nick?

She jabbed the button and waited for the message.

‘Hi, Nick. It’s Debbie.’

Sister number two.

‘Mum thought you might have got back by now. Hope the jet lag’s not too bad. Anyway, just to let you know that Mum is over the worst of her last round of chemo, so it’s all systems go for the party. Give me a ring and I’ll fill you in. Tell Adele there’s a chocolate torte with her name on it waiting for her. Bye.’

Chemo?

Nick’s mum had cancer? The whole world seemed to somersault. Maggie couldn’t die. She was too resilient, too vital. Why hadn’t Nick told her?

Because you never gave him a chance, a little voice whispered. Too busy feeling sorry for yourself. You shut him out while you were grieving and then, when you were ready to listen, he’d given up. And she’d been too proud to call him, too battered and hurt to risk losing him again if he rejected her. She’d lost so much already. It had been easier to blame him and nurse her grief.

If only she could call him now. He must be feeling awful. But she’d slung him out without a thought as to where he might go and she had no idea how to contact him.

Whereas she had a few close friends she had known for years, Nick always seemed to have a nebulous cloud of acquaintances. He was popular, but he was always giving up one interest to try another, tiring of the same sports clubs and restaurants quickly.

The only one who’d been constant was his old college mate—what was his name? Kelvin? Connor? No, Callum. That was it. But she’d only met him twice and had no record of his address or phone number.

She sank back into the sofa and clicked the television off. The room was plunged into darkness, but she just sat there staring at nothing, for what seemed like hours.

Then she heard a rattle at the front door. She held her breath. It must be the wind, surely? She strained to hear more but it had all gone quiet again. The door had two locks, anyway. She was just about to breathe out when she heard the noise again.

No. This time it wasn’t just a rattle. She could hear the lock turning. Goose-pimples broke out all over her arms and her stomach nosedived, but somehow she couldn’t move. All she could do was huddle herself into a ball in the corner of the sofa and try to slow the rise and fall of her chest.

If only Nick were here! Why couldn’t this have happened last night when the big lunk had been asleep in the kitchen?

Then came the sound she had been dreading: the second lock clicked and she heard the door creak open. She held her breath and, as quietly as she could, she eased herself off the sofa and hid behind the armchair. Her ankles cracked as she crouched down and she was sure the noise was as loud as a gunshot.

Someone was in the house! She began to shake. The phone. She needed the phone.

But it was across the other side of the room, and the intruder was moving down the hall towards the living-room door. She couldn’t risk it. Even if she could creep over there and make it back in time, she’d be heard talking once she made the call.

She peered out over the arm of the chair just as the living-room door brushed across the carpet. A shadow moved towards her and she froze.

CHAPTER THREE

THE burglar felt down the side of the armchair. He was so close his breath warmed the air near her. He didn’t find what he was looking for and moved his arm to reach behind the side of the chair where she was hiding.

Adele did the only thing she could think of. He wasn’t wearing gloves and when his hand was only inches from her face she lunged forward and sank her teeth into the exposed skin of his wrist.

He let out a yelp of pain and jumped back, tripping over his own feet as he did so.

‘What the…?’

Adele had been preparing to scratch and bite and kick and do anything she could think of to get out of there safely. Her leg was draped across the arm of the chair, ready to spring over it and out of the door while he was off balance.

The hairs on the back of her neck rose. That voice…

‘Nick?’

There was a shuffling noise as he got to his feet.

‘Thanks for the warm welcome, sweetheart!’

‘What are you…? What do you think you…?’ The adrenaline surge quickly converted fear to anger. Given a choice of fight or flight, Adele was ready to get down and dirty. However, the heightened state of awareness seemed to be short-circuiting her ability to form a coherent sentence.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and tried again.

‘What the heck are you doing creeping round my house in the middle of the night?’

‘Our house.’

‘Stop nit-picking! You scared me half to death!’

‘I was looking for—’ Nick leaned over and turned on a table lamp ‘—this.’

He reached past her and picked up a leather wallet lying by her foot.

‘And this.’

A mobile phone was only a few inches away.

Adele stared at it. It wasn’t the one he’d used to have. For some strange reason the knowledge made her very sad.

‘I took them out of my jeans pocket earlier on. I discovered that it’s actually very hard to find somewhere to stay with none of my friends’ phone numbers and no money for a hotel.’

She was so dazed she didn’t know what to say. One minute she’d been wishing him here and, now her wish had been granted, she was ready to boot him out of the door again. All her anger suffocated in a cloud of bafflement.

‘How did you get in?’ she asked, still staring at the phone.

Nick reached into his back pocket, pulled out a set of keys and dangled them from the tip of his finger. Adele focused on them slowly.

He shrugged. ‘I thought you’d be in bed. I’d planned to slip in quietly, get my things and disappear again. You would never have known I’d been here.’

‘You have keys?’ Why were the most basic concepts so hard to grasp all of a sudden?

‘Yup.’

She tightened her forehead until her brows puckered. ‘So, if you still have keys, why didn’t you use them when you first turned up here?’

‘Dunno. I was trying to be polite, I suppose.’

Nick? Trying to be polite? Did not compute.

He’d dive-bombed into her life again in his size-eleven boots, tried to manoeuvre her into going to a party five hundred miles away and he was worried about letting himself into his own house? It was so absurd she couldn’t even start to get her head round it.

So she did the only thing she could; she collapsed into the chair, one leg hanging over the edge, and started to laugh. And then she found she couldn’t stop. Pretty soon, tears were running down her face.

Only Nick could do this. The man was impossible, intolerable and impossible some more.

For once, Nick didn’t have a cheeky grin plastered all over his face. He just kept staring at her and blinking. He looked so lost, and when he looked like that he was impossible to resist.

She let the rest of the mirth out on one long breath and shook her head. ‘You’ll never find anywhere to stay at this time of night. You might as well go and get your things and put them in the spare room. We’ll talk later.’

When Adele swept into the kitchen at six-thirty that morning she found Nick sitting at the table waiting for her. She stopped in her tracks and tilted her head to one side.

‘You’re up early.’ About three hours too early for his normal routine.

‘You said we were going to talk.’

She pushed up the stiff cuff of her blouse and looked at her watch. ‘I’m not missing work today, Nick. I have a life and I’m not putting it on hold for you.’

He grimaced. ‘Yeah, and don’t I know it.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

He rubbed the corner of one eye with his index finger. ‘Ignore me. I’m tired and grumpy. The rest of us mortals don’t spring out of bed before dawn without a hair out of place like you do.’

He might not be dressed, but he was looking much better than mortal with his pyjamas done up on the wrong button and his hair sticking up in five different directions.

Hold on. Since when did Nick wear pyjamas?

But then her thoughts veered dangerously to what he normally wore in bed and a blush crept up her neck and kept going until it was under her hairline. Pyjamas were definitely better for her blood pressure than the alternative.

Adele looked down at her skirt and blouse and her high heels then smoothed an invisible hair into the twist at the back of her head.

He’d done it again. Sometimes, all Nick had to do was be in the same room as her and she was questioning herself. When she’d walked down the stairs this morning she’d felt confident, efficient, ready to face the world. Now she just felt…overdressed.

‘I’m just up and ready for the office, that’s all. Some of us can’t spend all our time locked in the garden shed until three in the morning and call it work, you know.’

Nick yawned and covered his hand with his mouth. ‘I’m too tired to have this argument again. Can we just take it as a given that I act like a three-year-old and you’re the grown-up? Then we can skip all the shouting.’

She wanted to say ‘No, I don’t want to skip it,’ but that would make her the three-year-old, so she bit her tongue and made her way to the coffee-maker. Much to her surprise, it was already on and hot, steaming coffee was waiting for her.

Nick got up from where he was sitting and handed her a mug.

‘The office doesn’t open until nine. We’ve got time to talk.’

Adele opened her mouth to speak.

‘Yes, I know you always like to be in before eight, but even then we’ve got time.’

She closed it again and nodded. However, once she and Nick were seated either side of the table again, the room fell into silence.

Finally, Adele could bear it no more.

‘Why didn’t you tell me your mum was ill?’

Nick’s jaw dropped. ‘How did you find out?’

‘Debbie left a message for you on the answer-phone. I suppose your mum’s not the only one who doesn’t know we’ve been living apart for almost a year.’

‘You know how close they all are. If any of them knew, they’d be sure to blab it to Mum and I didn’t want to give her the extra worry.’

‘You should have told me.’

Nick gave her a lopsided look. ‘I seem to remember hearing an awful lot of dial tone in our phone conversations.’

‘Not then. Now. Why didn’t you say anything yesterday?’

‘It seemed too much like emotional blackmail.’

She took a sip of her coffee. ‘I would call it being honest, actually.’

‘Are you telling me that you wouldn’t have felt duty bound to make the trip, even if it was the last thing on earth you wanted to do?’

She looked down and rubbed at a mark on the table with her fingertip. Nick was right. She would have gone to the party whether she wanted to or not if she’d known the truth. The thought didn’t sit comfortably with her. In her opinion, knowing all the facts meant she was in control. She wasn’t going to let him use keeping her in the dark as an excuse, even if, by some strange logic, it sounded kind of noble.

‘Well, I know now, don’t I?’

Nick’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. ‘What are you going to do?’

She breathed in and sat up straight. ‘I propose we deal with this in an adult manner. I’ll go to Scotland with you. I love your mum and I wouldn’t want to upset her, but—’

Nick leapt up from where he was sitting and hauled her into his arms.

‘Thank you,’ he whispered into her ear. ‘I really mean it. This is going to mean so much to Mum. You don’t know how grateful I am.’

She would have told him how much she understood if he hadn’t been squeezing her so tight she thought her lungs would collapse. So much for dealing with this in an adult manner.

Her hands made contact with his shoulders and she was going to prise herself from the hug, but then the smell of him, the warm feeling from his arms around her started to work on her senses. It had been so long since she’d hugged anyone.

In fact, she didn’t think she’d had a proper cuddle since Nick had left. Mona didn’t do mushy stuff, as she put it. That left baby Bethany and her older brother, Josh. But even those hugs were bitter-sweet, reminding her of what could have been, but now never would be.

She told herself to let go, to ease herself out of his arms now his grip was loosening, but he smelled so good and felt so warm that she had to hang on for a couple more seconds. And then a few seconds more.

Slowly, she became aware that the hands that had been squeezing were now flat against her back. The fingers started to move, softly stroking, and a shiver skipped up her spine and kept travelling upwards until the tingle concentrated somewhere behind her ears.

Then she heard him inhale, as if he were breathing in her scent and couldn’t get enough of it, and it tipped her completely over the edge. Moisture welled in her eyes and collected in her lower lashes.

She yearned for the days of blissful ignorance when she’d thought they’d last for ever. She missed the knowledge in that, in at least one person’s eyes, she was special, good enough. It was such a pity that reality had eventually had to intrude on the fantasy.

He pulled back to look at her and she saw an answering ache in his eyes.

‘Adele,’ he whispered as he lowered his head.

She meant to duck away from the kiss, but somehow she couldn’t. She was trapped by a magnetic force that kept her clinging to him. Maybe it was a trick of memory, or maybe it was because she’d been unknowingly waiting for this moment for the last nine months, but this kiss was even better than the ones she tried not to remember, more electrically charged, more tender, more sweet, more…everything.

It was only as her fingers wandered to the top button of his skew-whiff pyjamas that she came to her senses. What was she doing? Was she mad?

She mustn’t forget that when she’d faced the worst crisis of her life, he’d abandoned her. She hadn’t been able to depend on him. No matter how much they cared for each other or how good the chemistry was, it didn’t mean they could survive a future together without tearing each other into tiny shreds.

She left the button in its proper place and scrabbled away from him.

He reached for her and she shook her head. ‘This changes nothing.’

In fact, it had. It made the path she had to take even clearer. If she were to keep her heart safe from this man, she was going to have to take drastic measures. She slipped into business-mode, all starch and crisp efficiency. It was the only way to get through this.

‘As I said, I propose we deal with this in an adult manner, no matter how daft it is that you’ve been keeping your mum in the dark.’

Nick’s smile wavered altogether. ‘I was trying to save her extra stress at a time when she already had enough on her plate. Breast cancer is pretty serious, you know. I wouldn’t call what I did juvenile.’

Inwardly Adele squirmed, but she didn’t twitch a millimetre on the outside. Not even an eyelash. She made very sure of that.

‘I know cancer is serious. I’m not stupid. I’m just saying you went about this in entirely the wrong way. You just bounded in like you always do and played the situation from moment to moment, rather than considering what the long-term consequences would be. You have to tell her the truth about us.’

‘What is the truth, Adele? One minute you’re pushing me away, the next you’re…What happened just now, for instance?’

She shuffled backwards until her bottom bumped against the counter. ‘That was you getting over-enthusiastic, as usual.’

The wary look in his eyes said he wasn’t buying it completely. So what? Neither was she, but that didn’t mean she was going to cave in and admit it.

‘You make me sound like a Labrador.’

Adele swallowed. She hadn’t meant to insult him, only keep him at arm’s length the best way she knew how—with words. Sharp, nasty, barbed-wire words.

And the truth was, at his best, he was like a Labrador—loyal, loving and with boundless energy, but that didn’t make him any less destructive, and she had more at stake than a pair of soggy slippers or a chewed newspaper.

‘And you seemed fairly enthusiastic yourself,’ he added.

He was right. How pathetic had she been? She’d spent almost a year carefully building up her defences against him and he’d turned them to marshmallow in just over twenty-four hours.

She had to do something to safeguard herself, to make sure the barbed wire was nailed firmly in place.

‘You want an answer from me about where this relationship is going?’

He threw his hands up, asking a question. ‘I was hoping that we’d have a chance to work that one out on the drive to Invergarrig.’

‘You don’t have to wait for the weekend; I can tell you now.’

Nick just stared at her.

‘I’ll go to the party with you, Nick, but there are some conditions.’

‘Conditions,’ he echoed.

‘Yes. It’s time you stopped stampeding over other people’s lives. It’s time to take responsibility for your actions.’

His mouth thinned into a line, but while he wasn’t answering back or flashing his dimples she needed to forge on.

‘I will do you this favour if you agree to a divorce. When we get home from Scotland, I’m going to see a solicitor.’

He couldn’t have looked more stunned if she’d actually reached out and slapped him round the face. Her stomach lurched as she heard her own words echo in her ears.

There. She’d said it out loud; she couldn’t undo it now.

‘It’s time to move on. I’ve got a life of my own to lead. I can’t spend the rest of it clearing up after you.’

Nick looked her straight in the eye and this time she did squirm. He seemed greyer, with all the boundless energy sucked out of him.

‘Fine. At least I know where I stand now.’

The sticky edge of the envelope refused to behave itself. Even when Nick had finished trying to smooth it down it was still bumpy and slightly off to one side. He propped it up against the coffee-maker—Adele’s first stop after a busy day at the office.

His bag was waiting for him in the hall, standing guard almost. He picked it up, hauled it outside and closed the door gently behind him. Then he stared at the glossy black paint on the front door for a good ten seconds.

The keys were warm when he pulled them from his back pocket. The letterbox felt icy in comparison, still cold from the overnight frost. He pushed against the stiff flap and dropped the bunch of keys inside. When he heard them jangle against the mat, he turned and walked away.

The air seemed curiously still when Adele opened the front door and dropped her briefcase in its usual spot. She tried to work out what was missing as she wrestled herself free of her coat and hung it away in the cupboard.

Nick must be in his workshop, rummaging for his famous recipe for fake blood. She’d make them a nice dinner and they’d discuss the situation calmly and rationally. They just didn’t work well together as a couple, that was all. There was no reason why the separation couldn’t be amicable. They could still be friends.

The envelope was the first thing she saw as she walked into the kitchen. She frowned. Nick’s handwriting in bright green felt-tip.

She picked it up and opened it, using her index finger as a paper knife, and pulled out a couple of thin sheets torn from a ring-bound notepad.

Adele, I’m staying at Craig’s for a couple of nights—thought it was best we both had a bit of space. Mum would like us to be up in Invergarrig on Friday night for a family dinner. Let me know if that’s not convenient and we’ll travel up on Saturday instead. I’ll give you a call in a couple of days when we’ve both had a chance to cool down.

N

Cool down? She was perfectly cool!

She folded the sheets in half, even smoothing down the frilly edges where they had been torn from the notepad, and placed them back inside the envelope. Then she didn’t know what to do with it, so she propped it up against the coffee-maker again and walked out of the kitchen.

She made her way upstairs and absent-mindedly turned on the bath taps.