Chapter Nine
CERTAINLY IT HAD been a mistake, Rachel thought as she awoke in his arms. A glorious, wonderful mistake that she would remember fondly and never regret.
But, yes, it had been a mistake—because now she was right back where she didn’t want to be: at the start of the long and painful process of getting over him.
Back to being in love with a man who didn’t love her back.
‘Hey...’ Dominic said as she lifted her head.
‘Did it help?’ Rachel smiled. ‘Did we clear the air?’
‘We did,’ Dominic said. ‘Temporarily at least.’
Because she could tell he already wanted her again, and that he’d been lying there thinking about how right they’d felt. And what that meant.
Rachel was thinking the same.
Here, in his lovely warm bed, their limbs lazy and entwined, it would be so easy to give in to the impossible dream of them.
But this had been about sex, Rachel reminded herself.
Although it had always been far more than just that for her.
How did men do it? she wondered. Or rather, how did Dominic separate love from sex so easily?
She didn’t seek out gossip, but certainly in the weeks since she’d started at The Primary she’d heard enough to know that Dominic hadn’t been lying when he’d said he dated. A lot.
It had taken her years to move on and try another relationship—Gordon had seemed ideal, for he had never pushed her out of her comfort zone the way Dominic did.
He’d accepted that there were things she simply didn’t want to speak about and had left it there—and Rachel had honestly thought she wanted that.
‘What are you thinking?’
Rachel laughed to hide her embarrassment—because she could hardly tell him that she’d just been thinking about Gordon!
‘It’s rude to compare,’ Dominic said.
‘I wasn’t.’
‘I should hope not.’ He smiled. ‘Do you want to know what I was thinking?’ he asked.
Rachel wasn’t sure that she did.
‘I was just thinking about us,’ Dominic said as they lay there in the dark. ‘If we didn’t have a past, and you hadn’t been engaged, if we’d met for the first time that morning in Resus, would we be in bed together now?’
‘No.’ Immediately Rachel shook her head.
‘No?’ Dominic checked.
‘I’d have steered well clear of you,’ Rachel said. ‘I was warned about you from several sources.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
But Rachel was insistent. ‘If we hadn’t already slept together, then I wouldn’t be here now. I mean it, Dominic. You’re not my type.’
‘In what way?’
She lifted one hand from his warm chest and started listing the many ways he did not tick her boxes. ‘The reputation, the attitude, the sports car, the vasectomy so you can screw at whim...’
He caught her hand and buried his lips in her palm in a slow, long kiss that she felt all the way down low to her stomach, and when he had made her want him all over again, he refuted what she had said earlier.
‘I think we’d be exactly here. In fact, I think we’d have been in bed your first week—possibly even the first night.’
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I take for ever to get into bed.’
‘Then you’re the one who’s changed.’
She laughed, a deep low laugh, and it was a forgotten sound that startled her.
Of course there had been laughter in her life since him, but that low belly laugh was one only he had ever elicited—that laugh was private and seductive and it had only ever been heard by Dominic. It was a laugh that provoked, a laugh that begged him to continue this game which always ended in sex.
‘I’m telling the truth,’ she said.
‘Suppose we had just met,’ Dominic said.
She wriggled out of his arms and tried to sit up. But he pulled her back down and pinned her to his chest. Clearly he wanted this conversation and would not let her wriggle out of it.
‘Suppose you’d come out for the staff do last night and you’d suspended your morals and we had ended up in bed. We’d be getting to know each other now...’
Rachel was rather sure that she wouldn’t like whatever he was scheming, but feigned nonchalance. ‘By all accounts, I’d have long since been in a taxi on my way home.’
‘I’m not that much of a bastard, Rachel.’
His chest hair was tickling the side of her face and she was focusing on her breathing as she braced herself for his questions.
‘So,’ he said. ‘I would probably be asking are you seeing anyone?’
‘Well, I would hope not, given that I’m here...’ She cut the rancour and decided to try to play his annoying game. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve just come out of a long-term relationship.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Dominic said. ‘Do you miss him?’ he asked. ‘Or her...?’
‘Stop it!’ Rachel laughed.
‘I’m being politically correct, given we don’t know each other at all. So,’ he asked again, ‘do you miss your ex?’
Not as much as I should, Rachel thought as she lay in Dominic’s arms. Not as much as I missed you.
She settled for, ‘It’s early days,’ and then asked him, ‘What about you? Are you seeing anyone?’
‘Not really.’
‘What sort of answer is that?’
‘Okay, no, I’m not seeing anyone seriously.’
‘Have you, though?’ she asked. ‘Have you ever been in a long-term relationship?’
She wanted to fill in the missing years. She loathed that appendix scar—couldn’t bear it that he must have lain on an operating table as she went about her day. Her hand moved involuntarily down to cover it.
‘No. Well, apart from—’
* * *
But Dominic stopped himself from saying you, because they weren’t supposed to be admitting to the fact that they’d once been married.
He also stopped because her hand was creeping down his body, so he removed it from the danger zone and caught it again. He was doing his best to tread carefully as he coaxed her out of her shell.
‘I think I might need to mend my ways,’ he admitted, and was relieved when she gave that low laugh. The one that signalled him to go on.
He didn’t quite know what to ask next, because every question led back to them, and so, while he had her warm in his bed, he tried to imagine not knowing the little she’d told him.
He picked up a coil of her thick red hair. ‘I love your hair,’ he told her. ‘Where does it come from?’
He felt her tense even at that simple question.
‘My mum,’ Rachel said.
‘So she’s got red hair?’
‘Yes,’ Rachel said. ‘And green eyes like me. She’s Irish.’ She looked up at him, as if to explain why she was keeping it in the present tense. ‘I don’t tell all on first dates, Dominic.’
You don’t tell all ever, he wanted to bite back, but he did not want to send her hurtling from his bed.
Finally, as they lay silently together, he was rewarded for good behaviour.
‘My mum died when I was six.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ Dominic said carefully, and gave her shoulder a little squeeze. He honestly was. And then he asked what he had asked all those years ago, and awaited her same evasive answer even while hoping for more. ‘Do you miss her?’
‘Yes,’ Rachel said.
‘Do you remember her?’ he asked, remembering that she’d always said she didn’t, really.
‘Bits,’ Rachel admitted.
And then she allowed him a glimpse of her memories.
‘I remember feeling confused when she was teaching me to read. I’d try to follow her finger but I didn’t understand how what she was saying could mean “cat”.
She spun stories,’ Rachel explained, and he liked her soft laugh beneath his cheek.
‘A short book took for ever for her to read because she would always elaborate and make up new threads.’
They lay in silence and it was she who broke it.
‘What about your family?’ she asked.
‘They’re...’ The same, he was about to say, and then he remembered they were pretending not to know about each other. ‘My parents are the poster couple for staying together for the sake of money. They are miserable and it shows,’ Dominic said. ‘I’ve barely seen them since...’
It was getting hard for Dominic to play by the rules. Their lives were inextricably linked—a tapestry of a thousand threads, with each stitch linking the next—and it was almost impossible to separate them.
‘Do you miss them?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘In fact, I breathe a huge sigh of relief when the Christmas visit is done with and I don’t have to see them again for months.’
‘So you only see them at Christmas?’
‘And at the odd awards night for my father. I send flowers to my mum on her birthday, and I call her, but again, there’s the same breath of relief when I hang up.’
‘They must miss having a relationship with you?’
‘I don’t really know—and to be honest, I don’t really care.
’ He sighed. ‘I put myself through medical school, Rachel. They said they wanted to help, but I told them it was way too late for that. It was about then that I stopped trying to look out for everyone else and decided to look out for myself instead. I chose to focus on my career rather than relationships, and while some might call me a bastard, that’s only out of hours. I am brilliant at my job.’
‘You don’t think you can have both?’
‘I don’t want both!’ Dominic snapped.
He didn’t want to be in lust with his ex-wife, yet clearly he was—given they were wrapped around each other and her hand was back on his appendix scar and all he wanted to do was move it down.
He’d been so certain that he didn’t want a relationship with her.
Yet here he lay, not wanting her to leave.
And he’d been so completely certain that he didn’t want children that he’d gone and had the snip.
And yet he’d recently checked the success rates of having it reversed.
The rules were falling away, and they could no longer play this game that they were strangers who had only met last night.
Dominic decided that the trouble with bed was... Well, you were naked, and together, and it was all too easy to take one kiss, one deep kiss, and lose yourself in it. Take two, perhaps...
But Dominic would deny them that.
‘Rachel...?’ He peeled her warm body from him—which was a feat indeed, because he was warm and willing too. ‘Why don’t I go and get us something to eat?’
It had been a long time since they’d shared her roll in the staff room after all, and perhaps if they could remove all temptation they would be able to speak some more.
* * *
As Rachel watched Dominic pull on his trousers and shirt, and retrieve his wallet, his words were still hanging in the air.
‘I don’t want both.’
He gave her a haphazard kiss on the side of her mouth and tucked his shirt in. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said.
After he’d gone she sat up and hugged her knees.
What the hell was she doing here? Rachel asked herself. What was she doing, playing Dominic’s little getting-to-know-you game?
She didn’t want her ex-husband to know she was crazy in love with him.
Still.
Still!
What was the point in handing over more of her heart when she knew it was something he didn’t want?
She had been lying in her responses right from the start. When he’d asked her if they’d have ended up in bed had they not shared a past, of course the answer had been yes.
Yes, yes, yes!
Even if it was thirty years from now that Dominic appeared, even if he hobbled in on a walking stick with grey hair and arthritis, he’d have the ability to throw a hand grenade into her life.
Here was the proof!
Right when her life had finally been put in order, here she was back in Dominic’s bed.
But only by chance.
Had she not moved to London and inadvertently taken a job at the hospital where he worked, then she might never have seen him again.
Dominic hadn’t sought her out—he hadn’t looked her up or tried to get in touch during their thirteen years apart.
It was just sex.
And, while sex with Dominic was bliss, Rachel wanted a relationship that was about more than that. And, as Dominic himself had just clearly stated, he didn’t want that.
She wanted more than to warm his bed while he nipped out for a takeaway.
No doubt by Monday they’d be back to attempting to be professional and polite.
And failing.
Rachel knew that if she stayed they’d end up sleeping together again. It was the one thing—the only thing—they could get right.
But this really had to be their last time, because she could not be on call for Dominic and his libido.
Before she left she took out the envelope she’d been carrying in her bag since she’d had the copies of the photographs made and placed it on his dresser, propped up against a bottle of expensive cologne.
And then she wrote a little note and left it on the pillow.
At least now we can remember our last time.
Rachel
They were all caught up now.
* * *
Dominic stepped into the bedroom and saw the empty bed and the note on the pillow.
He would never understand her.
Just when they had started talking—properly talking—she had withdrawn again.
Just when they had finally been getting somewhere, Rachel had crawled back into her shell.
And then he saw the envelope on the dressing table.
These were the photos he had asked for, and he’d been absolutely right: it hurt to examine the past.
They both looked so young.
So very young that he finally forgave himself for not knowing what the hell to do at the time.
Even now he wasn’t sure he would know what to do.
Because there was no such thing as the perfect stillbirth, and no right way to grieve for the loss of a child.
But tonight he was finally starting to.
And as the food went cold, he sat on the edge of his bed and cried for his son.
For the first time he was angry with Rachel.
She should be here, doing this with him.
He had tried so hard with her—he really had. But where was the effort from Rachel?
Had she just handed him this envelope on Friday, he’d have been grateful to look at the photos alone, but she had just left his bed.
Just left his bed and abandoned him to do this alone.
He’d been right all those years ago.
Rachel Walker was cold.