Chapter 47
47
Holly’s heart somersaulted as she opened the front door. Obviously, she wasn’t the only one who’d thought about making an impression. Giles had turned up in his racing green vintage sports car – the same car he had taken her out in for dinner on the first day they met all those years ago. Gosh, she had thought their relationship was complicated then, and it had been.
She’d actually thought she liked him, in a romantic sense. He, on the other hand, was just spending time with her because he was trying to get her business. No, that wasn’t fair. He did like spending time with her. He just liked the idea of owning her business more. But now they were past that and were in an even bigger mess.
Giles didn’t even look in her direction as Holly opened the car door and slipped inside. Instead, he was typing into the sat nav on his phone. When that was done, he sat back, switched on the engine and began to reverse out of the drive. All without a single word to her. So much for thinking they were going to clear the air.
It wasn’t until they turned out of Bourton onto the Fosse Way road that he actually spoke.
‘Why don’t you use the time to get some sleep,’ he said. ‘And don’t worry, I’ll drive fast. I don’t want this to take any longer than you do.’
Holly opened her mouth, then closed it again. The last thing she wanted was to get into an argument before they were even out of the Cotswolds. But then, if he wasn’t going to speak to her, why the hell had he agreed to the trip?
The longer the silence endured, the more Holly’s mind spiralled. Had he seen the email, or not? That was the first question she wanted to ask. The second was, had he spoken to Faye? Faye would completely back up Holly, at least with the pub situation, which would be enough to prove Sienna was a liar. Those two questions were the minimum she needed answers to, but this stony silence was making it impossible to know where to start, and when she did finally speak, over an hour and a half into the journey, it was a very different question that left her lips.
‘I take it you didn’t say anything to Sienna?’ she asked.
Giles scoffed. ‘No. Of course not.’
‘Right. Of course you didn’t say anything to her,’ Holly said, struggling with the silence that was falling between them again. ‘Why would you say anything? You love her. You’re going to marry her.’
‘Exactly.’
‘That’s why we’re going to look at flowers.’
‘Right. Because I love her.’
Holly nodded again. It was all the things that weren’t being said that were painful. That felt as though they were physically pulling at every muscle in her body. She couldn’t manage the rest of the car journey with this level of tension. She wouldn’t survive. Her head would explode.
‘I wrote you an email,’ she said.
For the first time, Giles’s eyes flicked off the road to look at her. ‘I know.’
‘Did you… did you read it? The other one, I mean, did you read…’ She was about to ask if he’d read the one she’d asked him to delete when Giles slammed the steering wheel.
‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ he said.
Holly looked at the road in front of her. The traffic was less than ideal, with several lorries, et cetera, but she’d seen worse. That was until she looked at the sat nav and saw that the time of the journey had just gone up by an hour and a half. With four hours still to go, it was as if they had made no progress at all. Maybe Giles’s first suggestion that she go to sleep to get through the trip wasn’t such a bad idea after all.