CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE
T HE FOOTSTEPS C LEMMIE registered as she was halfway down the narrow alley—a shortcut from the library to the main road—did not have her quickening her pace. The clip-clop-clatter of the senior librarian’s favourite spiky ankle boots was unmistakable.
Clemmie turned and waited.
‘Clem, I caught you!’
The older woman paused to catch her breath as she pressed one hand to her dramatically heaving chest and the other to her pink-streaked bleached crop to protect it from the wind. Clemmie’s boss was waging a one-woman war against the mousy librarian stereotype and, as she liked to boast, she was winning!
With a questioning shake of her head Clemmie waited for her to catch her breath. To make Lily run in those heels it had to be a problem.
‘You were catching the train home tonight?’
Still puzzled, Clemmie nodded and shivered. The alley was a wind tunnel.
‘I haven’t packed yet,’ she admitted ruefully as she pulled her hood up protectively over her red curls. ‘But hopefully I’ll get a late train tonight, or if not first thing...’ A possible reason for the chase occurred to her. ‘Has Prue called in sick? I thought she looked a bit off this morning. Do you want me to do a shift tomorrow morning? I could if you’re pushed, and leave later,’ she offered.
‘Prue was just hungover,’ her boss inserted drily. ‘I despair of you—you are such a pushover. I know you swapped shifts with Prue last week. She takes advantage.’
‘I didn’t mind. So, what is...?’
‘I wanted to give you a heads-up in case you were heading straight for the station. It’s the trains.’
‘What about the trains?’
‘There aren’t any—its rail Armageddon!’ she declared dramatically. ‘All over the news. I just heard there’s a major points failure and a goods train derailment. No casualties, thankfully. And apparently the strike talks have broken down again.’
Clemmie pushed out a sigh, her breath turning misty white in the cold, damp air. ‘Just what I need.’
‘You could hire a car? Wait...can you drive?’
‘I haven’t driven since I passed my test, and that was eleven years ago.’
She couldn’t afford to run a car, or for that matter hire one. A depressing thought had she been the sort of person who allowed herself to be worried about such things.
‘But don’t worry. I’ll think of something. You go indoors; you’ll freeze to death,’ she added as an extra-strong gust blew her hood off. For several seconds she was blinded by her red curls.
‘Well, good luck—and have a good holiday.’
Clemmie made her goodbyes and, hunching her shoulders, set off for the walk home. That was one of the advantages of the house-share. She saved on transport costs. The house she occupied with ten other people, who in the agent’s details had been described as young professionals, was within easy walking distance of work.
Another was that against the odds they got on reasonably well—though not all were so young, and ‘professional’ was stretching the point. She spent the ten-minute walk considering this obstacle to her holiday, and by the time she had reached the house and let herself in she had a possible solution in mind.
The house was in darkness, the last of her housemates having left the previous evening. They had all made what the landlord had termed ‘alternative arrangements’ for the next fortnight—which was how long the landlord had said the decorators would be in.
She reached for the light switch and fished out her phone, unfastening her coat but leaving it on as she walked through to the kitchen.
It was a biggish house—high ceilings, three floors. The sort that had once boasted a cook and a maid. There were few original features remaining, but it did still retain the odd creaking board and dark corner, which were more noticeable when it was empty—like now.
Not an issue for Clemmie. who was not spooked by creaking boards. For the first eight years of her life she had lived in a much bigger and older house, with multiple creaks and even a reputed ghost. She didn’t believe in ghosts and she quite liked creaks.
Someone had left the radio playing, and the invisible news reader, sounding irritatingly upbeat about the situation, was outlining the combination of events that threatened train services this weekend.
Figuring the chances of the weather report offering any light relief were slim, she switched off the news channel and turned to her phone, scrolling until she reached the name Joaquin Perez and smiled to herself.
It wasn’t often that a librarian assistant’s list of contacts included a billionaire hedge fund boss who, among his accomplishments, was the founder of the Perez Investment House.
It was just as well she had his private number and also, just in case, that of his PA, because without them, access to the handsome, newsworthy and much lusted-after billionaire was virtually impossible. Members of the general public did not gain access to Joaquin without being screened by multiple layers of protective security.
It didn’t stop his fans trying. His perfect profile and other parts of his anatomy were frequently the subject of debate among his league of devoted online followers, who often shared crazy fantasies about him. They all seemed to share one fantasy—namely that they were the perfect woman for him and one night spent with them would make him realise this.
Clemmie had shared a night with him.
She had been eleven at the time, and Joaquin a lanky thirteen.
Her expression softened when the memory of him climbing in through her bedroom window slid through her head.
He had responded to her wail of ‘It should have been me, not Chrissie!’ by telling her she was being an idiot, before pulling the covers up to her chin and lying down beside her while she sobbed herself to sleep.
The next morning he had been gone before she woke and, going downstairs, found her mum asleep, her head on the kitchen table beside an empty wine bottle.
The anniversary of her twin’s death was still tough for them both—it always would be—but these days they got together and shared their memories of Chrissie. There were tears, but there was also laughter.
She was jolted back to the present by a deep voice with an almost tactile ‘shiver down the spine’ quality.
‘Hold on. I’ll be with you in a minute.’
She hung on. She couldn’t hear what Joaquin was saying but, even muffled, his delivery suggested that any fools within a fifty-yard radius should take cover.
This was a Joaquin that she did not know; she wasn’t sure she’d want to. He was a supremely self-confident person. He had a self-confidence that bordered on arrogance...and actually crossed the line frequently.
You couldn’t simply correlate his confidence with the social position and wealth he had been born into, or the fortune he had made. It was more about self-belief and his total commitment to following through with something he thought strongly about.
He didn’t appear to need the approval of anyone.
More of a people-pleaser, Clemmie envied him sometimes.
‘Bad time?’ she asked.
‘No, Clemmie. I’m all yours.’
Those were words that she could imagine quite a few women heard in their dreams—in a different context, obviously. Because she and Joaquin were not friends with benefits—just friends.
And she liked it that way.
Her brow furrowed as she put her phone on speaker and laid it on the table, freeing up her hands to remove the annoying strands of untameable hair from her face.
‘Are you back from New York?’
She knew that he’d been based there for the last four months, although why remained a little vague to her, but she imagined that it involved him becoming even more wealthy than he already was.
How rich did a person need to be?
Clemmie answered her own question, because she suspected that Joaquin didn’t need to be rich. Oh, he spoke about the freedom that money gave him, but money was not a goal in itself. He enjoyed, perhaps needed the challenge of pitting himself against the odds and winning.
An image of him climbing a seemingly smooth rock face and punching the air in triumph when he reached the top flashed into her head. She had chickened out before she’d gone a few feet and slithered clumsily back to the ground. Chrissie had always been the brave one. Like Joaquin, her twin had been hooked on the adrenalin rush.
If her twin had lived, would she have ended up being Joaquin’s best friend?
Feeling immediately guilty for the thought, she gave a shamed grimace.
‘Got back last night,’ he said.
‘Your text...’
‘The one you never replied to?’
She ignored the wry interruption and passed on an explanation. ‘Are you still going to Maplehurst this weekend?’
‘I am.’
‘Me too—and I’m a bit stranded.’
‘You need a lift?’ He spoke into the pause. ‘You just nodded, didn’t you?’
She laughed. ‘I nodded enthusiastically .’ She paused. ‘And you just smiled, didn’t you?’
His short burst of laughter was warm and deep.
‘I had planned to go back tonight, or tomorrow morning,’ she said. ‘But obviously I can fit in with you.’
‘I’ll pick you up in...an hour and a half?’
‘Am I being a nuisance?’
‘Why change the habit of a lifetime? Address?’
As soon as she had given it he hung up, and her phone immediately began to shrill again. She glanced at the caller ID.
‘Hello, Mum.’
‘The trains! So when will you get home? You will be here to meet Harry?’
Clemmie pictured her parent, looking effortlessly chic in something she had just thrown on, rubbing fretfully at the gold locket she always wore—the one that had a photo of herself as a baby in one half and her sister in the other.
‘Calm down, Mum, I’ve got it sorted,’ she said, ignoring the voice in her head that pointed out the benefits of not getting home. ‘I’ve got a lift.’
It wasn’t that she didn’t love visits home—she did. But this time it would not just be her and her mum. It would be her, her mum and her mum’s new boyfriend, the latest in a long line of losers that had followed the biggest loser of all—her dad.
The difference was that her mum was engaged to this one, and she couldn’t wait for Clemmie to meet the man who, according to her mum, was ‘perfect’. But then all the men in her mother’s life had at some stage been perfect—until they were revealed as not!
Her mum, capable and sensible in all other ways, had a blind spot when it came to men and their faults. To make things worse, she fell in love so easily—but maybe that was because she was falling in love for two, because Clemmie didn’t fall in love at all.
She didn’t believe it was about falling . That made it seem accidental, and Clemmie was always in control of her decisions and her hormones. She had no intention of falling for someone who would swear eternal devotion one minute and betray her the next.
‘Someone I know...a boyfriend?’ Ruth Leith continued, not giving her daughter a chance to interrupt. ‘Would he like to stay over? We could...’
‘Mum, I didn’t say it was a “he”?’
There was a slight hesitation before her mum reacted to the teasing interruption. Then, ‘So long as you are happy, Clemmie.’
‘Oh, Mum. I’m not gay! And I know you wouldn’t care if I was. Actually, it is a “he”, but don’t get excited. It’s Joaquin; he’s spending a couple of weeks at the manor.’
This was information that even her mum couldn’t spin into anything romantic. Aside from her belief in true love, her mum was too much of a realist.
The Joaquins of this world did not date women who were short, skinny and had red hair that refused to be tamed no matter how much product got poured on it.
‘Oh, right. It’s good that you have a lift, but since when was he coming here? No one told me. The house is closed up—and what about catering?’
Maplehurst Manor was normally closed at this time of year. Joaquin’s mother, who owned the place—a gift, apparently, from her husband—wasn’t keen on British winters, and every February the Perez family had a ritual en masse get-together in their Spanish castle.
The manor hadn’t always been closed up in the winter. Clemmie could recall sitting at one of the windows, rubbing a space in the frosted pane to watch the snow fall. She could even still recall her last Christmas there, when it had still been her family home.
She suspected she might have romanticised the memories. February snow had meant freezing to death, because the heating had never worked. But she still got a nostalgic ache, thinking about the logs spitting in the smoky, massive inglenooks of the Elizabethan mansion deep in the Dorset countryside that her father’s family had called home for centuries. That was before her dad had gambled it and pretty much everything else away.
Her handsome dad was not sentimental about the Leith family’s ancient seat. He wasn’t sentimental, full stop. He was charismatic, and charming, and when she had been too young to know better Clemmie had adored him, competing for his attention—which had been a waste of time and effort.
He had always preferred Chrissie.
His attempts to stay in touch with his only living daughter now involved the occasional postcard from wherever he was in the world.
She hadn’t seen him in years, and she knew that he’d never paid a penny of the child support he’d been meant to to her mum—who, since the divorce, had lived in the gatehouse that came with her new job: housekeeper in her old home. He had taken off when Chrissie was diagnosed, leaving a note saying it was ‘doing his head in’ and he couldn’t bear to see his pretty daughter lose her hair.
He had said he would come for the funeral, and Clemmie had rather stupidly believed him, but he hadn’t turned up.
‘I was looking forward to spending my time with you and Harry,’ her mother said now.
It was a lie, but not the sort that hurt people—the sort that Clemmie could never forgive.
She could see why her mum sounded disgruntled. When the house was empty her workload as housekeeper was light, but if any family member was in residence she was kept busy and often brought in casual local labour to help, along with outside catering firms to cope with social events.
‘It’s only Joaquin, as far as I know, so I’m sure you still can.’
‘Is he bringing anyone? A girlfriend ?’
Clemmie, who knew her mum’s appetite for celebrity gossip well—especially when she knew the celebrity personally, and had once regularly fed him at her kitchen table—stemmed the flow of speculation.
‘I haven’t the foggiest, Mum.’
As children, she and Joaquin had enjoyed an unexpected friendship. Unexpected when you considered that Joaquin and his family had lived in the grand house she had once called home while her mum, no longer lady of the manor, had become housekeeper to the new owners.
A perfect solution, her mum had said, because it came with the gatehouse cottage and Clemmie wouldn’t have the added disruption of changing schools.
Her mum had been pretty upbeat about what most people would consider a huge downgrade, pointing out that the roof didn’t leak and the plumbing was not ancient.
Clemmie had been less philosophical, but she’d pretended to be okay with the arrangement for her mum’s sake, while secretly she longed for her old room with the leaking roof.
The room she had shared with her twin, Chrissie.
Her mum, perhaps sensing how she felt, or maybe on the suggestion of the counsellor who had been part of Clemmie’s life for a couple years, had moved a second bed into her tiny new room at the gatehouse, and nobody had said anything when she’d arranged all Chrissie’s stuffed toys on it in the exact way that her twin had left them.
She had, however, hated Joaquin before she’d even known his name.
Her first encounter with the boy who had stolen her home had been in the woods that surrounded the manor. Clemmie had still thought of them as her woods, even though they were owned by this new family. That day she had climbed a tree to rescue a cat. The cat had rescued itself, which had left Clemmie hanging from a branch by her snagged cardigan.
Rescued by the new boy from the manor, she had responded by kicking him when he’d said, with the lofty superiority of ten years to her eight, that girls could not climb and told her she was trespassing.
It hadn’t been the most promising of starts, but things had thawed during that first long summer holiday, and then they had bonded over their respective parents’ disastrous unions and a mutual determination not ever to marry, because marriage was for idiots.
‘At least you have one good parent. Both of mine are rubbish,’ he had told her during one of their early exchanges, and she had realised he was right: she was lucky.
Her dad might be a nightmare but her mum, despite her bad taste in men, was fantastic. His family might be loaded—the Perez family were old money and new money, his grandfather having built a second fortune when he’d invested in a computer firm that soon became a global brand, and all Joaquin had to do was ask and he got anything he asked for—but both his parents were awful!
In fact, the entire Perez family were snobbish. They were the sort of people who guarded the family name and were willing to go to great lengths to maintain the illusion of being the perfect family. Their name might be synonymous with philanthropy, but they were ruthless when it came to preserving their own good name.
It helped if you had the money to buy yourself out of trouble—and they did. A Perez didn’t divorce, Joaquin had explained to her. They stayed unhappily married. Although according to him his own parents might have broken with that particular tradition.
His dad had bought his mother Maplehurst Manor. And after that gift his mother had conveniently forgotten his dad’s pregnant girlfriend—the one who had killed herself. There would be no baby to embarrass the Perez family and the girl had not had any relatives.
Ironic, really, that his family cared about their family name too much while her own dad didn’t care about his at all.
Despite the fact they had both grown up and changed as their lives had taken very different paths—though Joaquin’s contempt for marriage remained—their friendship had lasted.
Hence Clemmie came to have a billionaire hedge fund boss listed in the contacts on her phone.
They made a point of texting weekly, and sometimes it was more, but it was eighteen months since she had last seen him face to face, and their exchanges did not include the salacious details her mum craved. Like everyone else, Clemmie got her gossip from social media and news outlets, which seemed to suggest Joaquin was on the point of matrimony on a weekly basis.
She supposed it was inevitable that they would grow apart, and that the process would speed up once he did settle for one partner. Girlfriends or wives might not like their man texting another woman at two in the morning—though to be fair it hadn’t been that time where he was—no matter how innocuous the text.
That time she had turned over and gone back to sleep, meaning to respond the next morning. She was going to miss those selfish texts...
She shrugged off the heavy, self-indulgent weight of self-pity before it could claim her. What was the point of getting down about something that hadn’t happened yet and might not?
Her lips twisted into a small self-mocking smile. It could be she was flattering herself, because not even her mother, who frequently called her ‘pretty’, would claim she was the sort of woman beautiful women felt threatened by. And Clemmie herself was too much of a realist to make that claim.
She was philosophical about her lack of looks. It wasn’t that she was plain, precisely, but her features were not symmetrical enough for conventional beauty, or even prettiness. Her mouth was too big for her small triangular face, and her colouring was not to everyone’s taste. Though the combination of creamy freckled skin, red hair and pale green eyes did make her stand out from the crowd.
‘Well, if he does turn up with some woman in tow give me a text.’
‘I will,’ promised Clemmie, who until that moment had not even thought of such a possibility.
Now, as she climbed the stairs to finish packing, it was all she could think of. That and the low-level nausea churning in her stomach. She really shouldn’t have skipped lunch.
There was no reason he shouldn’t be bringing his latest lover, and no reason he should tell her if he was. She had never allowed herself to foster any romantic feelings for Joaquin, even when it had occurred to her that there was a very good reason that conversations stopped when he walked into a room.
He was, of course, an off-the-scale gorgeous and sinfully sexy man. Way back she had had a few breath-catching, skin-tingling moments that she had probably been too inexperienced to hide from him, but he’d pretended not to notice. Or maybe the brutal truth was he genuinely hadn’t?
She had no intention of finding out. She valued their friendship too much for that to happen. Besides, she had observed from a distance the casual, often callous way he treated his lovers, and it was definitely better to remain his friend—which was a much more permanent position.
Luckily, she hadn’t fallen in any real way—which, if her mum was any measure, meant being in lurve involved being totally oblivious to a man’s faults.
Clemmie was well aware of Joaquin’s faults, and she wasn’t about to allow herself the self-indulgence of filling up space in her head with unrequited lust. Life was too short for self-induced unhappiness.
Besides, not only was she not his type—which seemed to involve having curves, endless legs and a pout—sometimes men were just so predictable —he was definitely not her type. He couldn’t be, because there was still a big question mark over her ‘type’.
She had met men who ticked all the boxes on her list—the list in her head...it wasn’t as if she had a spreadsheet or anything. She was prepared to be flexible—just not the sort of flexible that got her lumbered with a compulsive liar like her dad. Unfortunately, all the men who seemed suitable, and also fancied her, did absolutely nothing for Clemmie—not even a tingle.
She didn’t really count the kiss she’d shared with Joaquin on her eighteenth. Well, she couldn’t. That had only been a birthday kiss, and they’d both laughed about it the next day—him more than her.
But then he hadn’t instigated the kiss, had he? Though in her defence wine had been involved. The bottle he had packed in the luxury picnic basket he had pulled from the boot of his sports car when they had arrived at her favourite lakeside spot.
The sun had shone...it had been a perfect day. The wine and the sun had made her sleepy and she had lain down on the blanket, a hand lifted to her face to protect her eyes from the sun, and fallen asleep.
At first she had swatted at the grass tickling her nose, and then, when she had opened her eyes, she had seen the hand holding the grass belonged to Joaquin, who was stretched out beside her. He had long left behind being skinny and lanky by that time; he had filled out in all the right places.
She had said something rude and pulled the strand of grass from his fingers, and he had grinned his ‘fallen angel on steroids’ grin.
It had been a purely spontaneous gesture when she had raised herself onto one elbow and pressed her mouth to his. He hadn’t moved, but she had, reacting to the wine or to something more basic as her lips moved across his.
She remembered feeling warm...and dizzy. Then her confusion had been followed by deep mortification as he’d removed her hands, which had found their way around his neck.
The rejection had felt like someone throwing a bucket of ice water over her. If she could have crawled out of her skin she would have.
‘Too much wine,’ he’d said, and his lazy, relaxed attitude had not lowered her embarrassment level, but at least he hadn’t laughed.
That was the day she had acknowledged her crush and it had died a death.
Joaquin sat in the lay-by he had pulled in to so he could answer a call. It didn’t require a long conversation, just a decision, and decision-making was not something he struggled with.
He took the opportunity to check in with his PA, Rose, to whom he had left the task of rearranging his calendar. He had planned to go down to Maplehurst tomorrow, but the shift in his diary was not too onerous, and his PA was excellent. She would not appreciate any attempt on his part to micro-manage her.
His confidence was rewarded. There were no issues, and there was nothing preventing him having an extra day at Maplehurst. He had always liked the place, but it was where his mother based herself for a portion of the year—not the perfect situation. He frequently wished that she was as distant and remote now as she had been when he was a child.
Of course he knew it wasn’t maternal love that made her so attentive these days. It was the fact that he could be appealed to for extra funds to supplement her position of ‘near penury’.
He knew full well this wasn’t the case—she received a more than generous allowance from his father, and frequent top-ups when her errant husband was caught doing something embarrassing with one of his youthful social secretaries, physiotherapists or wellness gurus.
It had been a year since Joaquin had been to the manor, and that had been for a party his mother had thrown—some sort of charity thing. Clemmie had not been there, so he’d been bored out of his mind—especially as his mother had invited a few candidates to be the mother of the grandchildren she was longing for. He found the aforementioned ‘longing’ a bit strange, considering the fact that when he was a child having him in the same room as her for more than five minutes at a stretch had brought up the subject of her ‘delicate nerves’.
This time his mother wouldn’t be there. She, along with the rest of his extended family, would be gathered at the castillo , the official reason being the annual dinner party they gave, which was meant to celebrate his parents’ and his grandparents’ joint wedding anniversaries—a celebration so embedded in family tradition that even his grandfather’s death had not stopped it happening.
He seemed to be the only person who appreciated the irony and the sheer hypocrisy of celebrating two marriages which, by anyone’s measure, were absolute disasters. And it wasn’t just a night. He could have coped with a single night of hypocrisy, but over the years the celebration had morphed into a fortnight of family togetherness, which translated as half of his February involving extended sniping and back-biting. Though on one subject the disparate sections of his extended family were all of one mind—it was time he got married. It was his duty .
Duty was overrated, but it wasn’t even duty that made him turn up each February. There was a large element of sheer laziness involved. Bottom line: not going required more effort than turning up.
Over the years he had perfected the art of tuning out the nagging, and it actually amused him that they thought they could influence him, that they wielded any power at all over him. But that was his family, and their collective ego was vast.
However, his tolerance had limits, and his grandmother had recently pushed it beyond that limit.
Talk about insulting his intelligence!
Her manipulation hadn’t even been subtle. It had been about as subtle as the monster of an ugly engagement ring she had sent him, with the attached message that she was sending this ‘precious ring’ to him now because she wouldn’t live to see it on his bride’s finger. The ink had even been artistically smudged—presumably by her heartbroken tears falling on the paper.
He knew for a fact that the ring had sat in a bank vault for years, because it had belonged to his grandmother’s mother-in-law, whom she had loathed.
Remembering the damned thing was still in his pocket, he fished it out and put it in the glovebox before starting up the car.
Joaquin had no worries over his grandparent’s imminent demise—she had just returned from a sponsored trek up Kilimanjaro and left the film crew who had been recording the event for a TV show entitled Eighty is the New Fifty in her wake.
But her stunt had had an effect—though not the one she had intended. It had brought home to him the hell he was voluntarily walking into.
He was an adult who wielded power, commanded respect and on occasion fear, and yet here he was, meekly submitting every year to a week of moral blackmail and nagging. His family had clearly taken his indifference for pliability.
But he had a professional reputation for being remote and inaccessible—a reputation that was pretty much well-earned. It was about time he lived up to that reputation. In no other aspect of his life would he have allowed such a situation to continue.
It was time he broke the cycle—and there was no time like the present.
He had responded to his grandmother by text.
I have made alternative plans for next week.
He had re-read the text, to make sure there was no hint of an excuse, and that no element of humouring could be read into the stark sentence, and pressed ‘send’.
It was only then that he’d wondered about the ‘alternative plans’ he had boasted of. For some reason he’d thought of Maplehurst. Although he spent every summer there, he’d never been there at this time of year. He remembered that one year Clemmie had sent him pictures of the manor covered in snow, and the image had stayed with him.
His mother spent large sections of the year at Maplehurst, playing lady of the manor and hosting charity events. It was a comfortable way to avoid her husband, who spent his time moving from one fashionable spot to another with a variety of nubile youthful ‘assistants’ in tow, to cater to all his needs. But she was never there during the winter months, and after Christmas she went straight from their ski lodge to the castillo. After that she made the return trip, with a short detour for a detox at her favourite exclusive Swiss spa.
He hadn’t shared the details of his alternative arrangements with anyone except in the text he had sent Clemmie, who hadn’t got back to him.
That hadn’t rung alarm bells.
There would be a reason.
He had speculated briefly about what that might be...a new job...or a new boyfriend?
The idea seemed...
He felt the weariness he had experienced of late settling over him and pushed both it and the question away. For a friendship to last into adulthood there were unspoken boundaries which had to be maintained, and he wanted that friendship to last. Actually, probably needed it to, he acknowledged.
His thoughts drifted to that moment when he had come close to overstepping that boundary. When Clemmie had been just eighteen, and a little bit tipsy, he had watched her sleep, her lashes fluttering on her cheeks, her breasts rising and falling. He’d just been thinking about adjusting the parasol to protect her face from the sun when she’d given a little cry in her sleep, her arms thrashing as she fought off some invisible demon in her daymare.
Did she still have the nightmare she had once told him about? he’d wondered. The one where she tried to save her sister but found there was a choice: she could save her sister or herself. She always woke up crying in shame, feeling irrationally responsible for her twin’s death.
She had reacted to the tickle of his piece of grass on her face and opened her eyes, and in that moment, before she was even fully awake, she had kissed him.
He still didn’t know how he had not responded, when every instinct in his body had been urging him to explore the warm lips being offered up to him, to push her back on to the rug and...
But a small corner of his brain had kept repeating, This is Clemmie...this is Clemmie.
And it had been Clemmie—but not the Clemmie who was his.
Clemmie was a constant in his life. She was the antidote to his adulatory press releases and to all the people telling him how brilliant he was. Sometimes her outlook on life left him anxious for her; she had an ability to view the world through rose-coloured lenses—though maybe that should be green. Clemmie possessed the most extraordinary aquamarine eyes that could smile without moving any other muscle in her expressive face. Despite her pale colouring and pre-Raphaelite mass of red curls, her lashes were naturally dark, as were her straight brows.
He was thinking of her face when he arrived on the street where she apparently now lived. It was long, with no defining features to make it seem any different from several of the roads he had driven through to get here, lined with tall houses mostly split into apartments.
He scanned the area for a parking space. Some of the redbrick Victorian houses had their original wrought-iron fences, but most had knocked the walls down and concreted over the tiny gardens to create parking spaces. He was about to give in when an MPV beside a builders’ skip pulled out and he neatly pulled into the space.
He located the number that Clemmie had given him, but before he could hit the doorbell it suddenly opened, revealing a long, narrow hallway painted in an anonymous discoloured cream. The only colour came from the original encaustic tiles on the floor.