Chapter Twenty-Eight
In the office a few days later, Brianna hesitantly picked up the phone. She had never had to do this. Never had to contact an ex-lover. In previous relationships she had said goodbye and never looked back. This was different, on two levels. Firstly, Mitch had been the one saying goodbye. Secondly, they worked for the same organisation. Not seeing each other again wasn’t an option, unless one of them left. She couldn’t see Mitch leaving. Neither was she prepared to take that route. Not when work was the only thing keeping her sane. Taking in a deep breath, she dialled his number.
‘McBride.’ At the sound of his deep, clipped voice, her heart lurched.
‘Mitch, it’s Brianna.’ She hesitated. What did you say to an ex-lover? ‘How are you?’ she asked formally.
‘Well, thank you,’ came the clearly amused reply. ‘And you?’
‘Damn you, Mitch,’ she replied crossly. ‘You can stop your mockery. I’m feeling my way here. I don’t know the etiquette for greeting an ex-lover.’
‘What did you do with your other ex’s then?’
‘I never spoke to them again.’
He let out a soft laugh. ‘Ouch, so cruel. I suppose I should be flattered then.’
Annoyed by his apparent ease with the situation, Brianna turned frosty. ‘No. This is a work call. I’m making it because I have to, not because I want to.’
There was a pause. ‘Consider me put in my place. Fire away then. What do you want?’
‘I’ve been talking to the chief medic in the army about the possibility of a mutually agreeable liaison.’
‘You’ve been talking to Gerald?’ His voice rose dangerously with each word he uttered.
‘Yes,’ she replied coolly. ‘He speaks very highly of you.’
‘Where is this going, Brianna?’ Annoyance crackled over the line.
‘I discussed the possibility of you doing a few training sessions with the medical staff there. Nothing major, just a couple of times a year. Sharing your experiences might provide them with valuable insight on handling field-based trauma situations. In return it would give Medic SOS a high profile within the army. Hopefully, in the longer term, some of them may choose to join us in the future.’
The silence stretched across the phone wires. ‘And did you consider, for one minute, that it might have been polite to contact me first, before you started offering my services around?’
The words were slow, measured and deadly and uttered in exactly the right tone to put her back up. Anger was a good antidote to a broken heart. ‘I didn’t realise I had to go running to you every time I wanted to speak to somebody.’
‘You’re being deliberately obtuse. I want to know why you didn’t bother to talk to me first before contacting my old boss, and discussing my time.’
All at once the heat of her argument fell away, leaving her empty. She loved him. She missed him. Talking to him now was agony. ‘The truth is, I didn’t want to talk to you,’ she admitted, her voice wobbling slightly. ‘This is hard for me, Mitch. I figured if I contacted him first and he wasn’t interested, then I would be saved a conversation with you.’
There was a long, deep sigh on the other end of the phone. ‘Just your bad luck he liked the idea then.’ She could almost picture his wry smile. ‘Look, it’s a good initiative, Brianna. If I haven’t told you already, then I’ll do it now. You’re one smart cookie.’ A pause. ‘And if it helps any, this isn’t easy for me, either.’
Tears, unbidden, crept down her cheeks. Why did you end it then? she wanted to scream down the phone at him but she was in an office, surrounded by interested females. And anyway, it was old ground and she had to move on. He was a stubborn man. Once his mind was made up, there would be no changing it. ‘Good,’ was all she said, before asking Mitch to follow up with Gerald, and quickly ending the call.
* * *
The conversation with Mitch had churned up her feelings again. She knew she had to stop brooding about him, but she couldn’t. And when she pictured him, it was often right at the moment that Henry had shouted off about Catherine. Mitch had looked devastated. It kept preying on her mind. It hadn’t been the look of a man shamed by his actions. No, it had been the look of a man tortured. A man who had obviously cared about Catherine very deeply. Which meant nothing Henry had said made sense.
‘I can’t let this drop,’ she told Melanie later that evening as they shared a bottle of wine in her apartment. Part of Melanie’s cheer up Brianna strategy.
‘And meddling in Mitch’s past is going to get you back into his good books how, exactly?’
Trust a friend to be blunt. ‘I’m not meddling. Think of it this way, if he is a gold-digger . . .’ Melanie’s mouth gaped open. ‘No, of course I know he’s not, but if he was, if he had embezzled money out of a rich old lady. Well then, I’d have a right to know, wouldn’t I? He was my boyfriend.’
‘That’s some pretty warped logic, if you ask me.’
‘No, it’s not. It makes perfect sense. Us rich girls have to be very careful, you know.’
‘Hey, who am I to stop you? I’m just the sidekick. If you really believe this is the right thing to do, I’m right behind you. Wincing and rolling my eyes, maybe, but I’m here. I’ll even get you Simon’s number.’ She fished around in her handbag and pulled out her phone. ‘Here, go for it.’
Brianna took the phone, gulped, gulped again, then punched in the numbers. ‘Simon, it’s Brianna.’
‘Well, this is a nice surprise. What can I do for you?’
Melanie leaned in to listen, nodding reassuringly at Brianna.
‘I’m a bit embarrassed really,’ she began, acting the part of the dumb rich girl. ‘All that business last week with Mitch. I’m ashamed I was so easily conned by him. I wondered if you wouldn’t mind telling me what happened with your aunt. How Mitch managed to play her.’
‘Well, it was a long time ago,’ Simon replied slowly. ‘I remember Dad telling us his sister, who’s quite a bit older than him, had instructed the family solicitor to change her will and leave her house to a boy who’d been living with her. That was Mitch. Dad wasn’t happy. We were the original beneficiaries of the will, as Aunt Catherine had no children.’
‘What did your Dad do when he found out?’
‘He knew Catherine must have been conned. After all, why else would an elderly woman leave money to an eighteen-year-old the rest of the family had never heard of? So he told the solicitor to stall on the changes and to send a letter to Mitch saying he wasn’t to contact Catherine again or they would call the police. It seems he’d already tricked her out of some money. They didn’t want her duped into giving anything more. Especially her home. That’s something that should go to family, not some chancer who came in off the streets.’
Brianna bit back all the ripe responses that immediately came to her mind. ‘It sounds like your aunt had a lucky escape,’ she murmured instead.
‘And so did you from the sound of things.’
‘Yes, it would appear so. What did Catherine think about all this?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never spoken to her about any of it.’
‘Simon, do you think Catherine would mind if I contacted her? I don’t want to upset her, but it might help both of us to talk about how we were taken in by this man.’
Beside her, Melanie stifled a gasp and gaped at her.
‘I’m sure my aunt wouldn’t mind,’ Simon replied, oblivious to Melanie’s muffled sounds of horror. ‘She’s a bit old now, but you’d never know to talk to her. She’s bright as a button. She’d probably enjoy the company.’
A minute later, Brianna was clutching Catherine’s phone number in her hand. The key to Mitch’s past.
‘Well, that was ridiculously easy.’ Melanie glanced down at the scribbled number. ‘But now you’ve got it, what the flipping heck are you going to do with it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Brianna admitted shakily. ‘God I need a drink.’ As she poured herself a glass of wine her hands trembled.
‘If you phone Catherine now, you really are meddling in stuff that’s not yours to meddle in,’ Melanie warned.
‘I know.’
‘And if Mitch ever finds out, he won’t just be angry, he’ll be apoplectic. From what I’ve seen, and what you’ve told me, the man guards his privacy as if it were the crown jewels. Invading it like this would be, well, tantamount to betrayal I guess.’
‘I know that, too.’ She took another large gulp of wine. ‘But what if there’s been some sort of misunderstanding? What if my interfering can help Mitch in some way? He did once mention a kind lady who’d taken him in and helped him go to university. If this is that lady, he might want to speak to her again.’
‘So why hasn’t he? He’s hardly the shy retiring type.’
‘Maybe they lost contact.’ She stood and snatched up the phone. ‘Bugger it. I’ve got this far, I might as well follow through with it now.’ Ignoring Melanie’s grimace, Brianna took another swig of wine, for Dutch courage, and dialled Catherine’s number.
‘Hello?’
‘Good evening, is that Catherine?’ Before the lady had a chance to reply, Brianna continued in a rush. ‘You don’t know me. I’m Brianna Worthington, and I’m a friend of Mitch McBride.’
There was silence on the end of the phone. It went on for so long Melanie mouthed at her to check Catherine was still there.
‘Yes, dear, I’m still here,’ the old lady confirmed. ‘Hearing Mitch’s name, it’s such a shock. I haven’t heard it for so many years.’
Brianna’s heart was pounding so much she could hear it. She hoped to God Catherine couldn’t hear it, too. ‘I wondered if you could spare me a few minutes to talk about him?’
‘Well, of course. Is he all right? He’s not in any trouble?’ The concern in her voice was clear, and Brianna felt a rush of relief. Whatever had happened, Catherine clearly didn’t still hate Mitch for it.
‘He’s fine, really. It’s quite a long story though. Would you mind if I came over, perhaps tomorrow evening, to talk to you in person?’
Next to her Melanie let out a strangled noise and mimed slitting her throat. Brianna ignored her and concentrated on Catherine’s reply and the warmth of her voice.
‘I wouldn’t mind at all, dear. In fact, I’d love to talk to you about Mitch. I always wondered what happened to him. He used to write so regularly, and then, out of the blue, his letters stopped coming, and I never heard from him again.’
Brianna’s still pounding heart skipped a beat. ‘Catherine, are you sure you didn’t ask your family to write to Mitch, instructing him you didn’t want him to contact you anymore?’
‘Why ever would I have done that? He was like a son to me. No, dear, I may be in my dotage, but I know for a fact I would never have wanted Mitch to stop seeing me. I assumed he got bored of writing to an old woman. That he’d found himself a new life and didn’t need a constant reminder of his old one.’
‘Catherine, I think there’s a lot we need to talk about,’ Brianna replied softly. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Melanie waited for Brianna to take down Catherine’s address and put the phone down before clearing her throat. ‘So, you’re not meddling, but you’ve now arranged to visit a very important lady in Mitch’s past without his knowledge.’
Slowly Brianna leant forward and put her face in her hands. ‘It would appear that way, yes.’
‘God Brie, I hope you know what you’re doing.’
Hysterical laughter bubbled out of her. ‘Of course I don’t.’