Chapter One
brEATHING UNEVENLY, Dulcie Shaw slid through the door of the lecture theatre. The professor giving the lecture, Dr Claire Blake, was already speaking to the assembled students, and Dulcie sat down hurriedly on the last empty seat in the back row and opened her laptop.
She’d run all the way from the labs, and her heart was pounding so loudly she couldn’t hear Dr Blake’s voice but thankfully her notes would be available online.
Several rows closer to the stage, a young man with blond hair and a lazy gaze glanced over at her with a mixture of curiosity and disdain.
He was an undergraduate. She recognised him from the labs.
But it was unlikely he recognised her, she thought.
Working as a lab technician was like having the power of invisibility.
She didn’t dislike the undergraduates. Most, especially the girls, were polite in that awkward way of people recognising their privilege and wanting to apologise for it.
Some simply ignored her. They were mostly male and, even without exchanging a word, she knew they had been raised in homes and schools where the women who cooked and cleaned and applied plasters to scuffed knees were not the kind of women who mattered enough to notice.
They were the kind of men who had a compartmentalised life. They were binary in their thought processes. For them, and, in consequence, for those who crossed their path, life was a flow chart of clear, simple choices.
Me or your mother.
Me or your brother.
Her shoulders stiffened. Because clear and simple didn’t have to mean those choices were fair or right. Sometimes the act of choosing was wrong.
Of course, she was generalising. Not all men were like that. Maybe it was just her father and her husband. But it would be a long time before she tested that theory because, after what had happened with Ettore, she had sworn off dating.
Before him, she had always been careful to keep her relationships on a casual footing. She’d told the men she’d dated that she didn’t like labels, but the truth was even letting someone hold her hand had felt as if she were putting it into a snare.
She’d got away with it because, thanks to her father’s decision to send her to an expensive boarding school, she knew how to smile, to sparkle on command. She’d danced and giggled. And then she’d moved on.
Before things had got too deep or too complicated. Before they had got close enough to have power over her. She couldn’t let that happen. Couldn’t trust anyone to have that power. Power corrupted. It damaged lives. Wrecked relationships. Safer to stay single or travel light.
And then she’d met Ettore Marchesi. Thick dark hair, eyes the exact same colour as the bronze coins on display in the Fitzwilliam Museum up the road, and a sensual mouth that should have warned her to keep her distance.
‘For those of you who are interested, I’ve added a link at the end of the lecture.’ Dr Blake’s voice snapped her attention back to the stage, and she stared fixedly at the screen.
Met.
The word popped into a bubble above her head as if she were a cartoon character.
It was such a small word to describe such a life-altering encounter.
Meeting Ettore had been like atoms colliding to create an entirely new state of being.
A state where hope and anticipation, and the excitement of sharing her life without borders and checkpoints, had felt normal.
A state where she had been a different person.
A Dulcie who had been confident in her choices.
And she had chosen him.
Chosen. Again, such an insipid word.
There had been no choice. Her need for him had been as inexorable and fierce and irresistible as a black hole.
Didn’t stop it being a mistake.
She had trusted the wrong person. Again. Worse, she had trusted herself. And been burned. No skin graft had been required. There was no treatment other than the passing of time and, more critically, the avoidance of any further damage.
But that wasn’t the only reason that stopped her from dating or even thinking about dating. Her eyes dropped to the third finger of her left hand. She didn’t wear Ettore’s ring any more. Not since he’d walked out of her flat and her life two years ago. But legally, they were still married.
Separated. Estranged. In limbo. But married.
And despite not having seen or heard from him since, frustratingly she still felt married.
It wasn’t just the legality of it. Or the lack of definitive closure. She felt bound to him in other ways. Ways that she couldn’t properly identify much less articulate to anyone. But then who would she articulate them to?
Since moving to Cambridge, she had colleagues rather than friends.
Mainly because friends required a level of commitment that she simply couldn’t give right now.
Her limited free time was devoted to Oscar.
Because her brother needed her. Because it was her fault that he was so fragile, so volatile. So damaged.
Her shoulders tensed as she remembered his outburst at the weekend.
‘I knew you didn’t want this. You’ve never wanted me in your life.’
He had been furious, shouting, smashing things and then tearful and scared, clinging to her, begging her not to leave, promising to change.
It was a cycle that had happened so many times already, often enough that she could sense it at a distance as an animal could sense a storm building unseen over a distant landscape.
And it was her fault that Oscar was like this.
She was the one who had left him with their alcoholic mother.
She had abandoned him to an unstable, fractured childhood bouncing between children’s homes and foster care.
He was an addict because of what she’d done. And what she hadn’t done.
She couldn’t change the past. But she could atone.
She could give Oscar the support and love he so badly needed.
In the short term, that meant she needed to keep working, keep studying so she could finish her master’s degree.
Then she could get a better job that paid more money, and she would be able to get him some proper treatment.
That was her longer-term goal, although, truthfully, he needed treatment now. But supporting the two of them was already stretching her finances to near breaking point.
For the rest of the hour, she focused on Dr Blake, and fifty minutes later she was closing her laptop and following the other students down the stairs of the lecture theatre into the hallway.
She wanted to ask the professor a question but there were so many students, and they all seemed to be dawdling like drivers on a motorway looking at a crash on the other side of the carriageway.
What were they looking at?
She stood on her toes, trying to see over their heads, mentally rolling her eyes as she saw that it was just some random man.
He had his broad muscular back to her so she couldn’t see his face, but he must be good-looking, she thought as a group of young women slowed to glance over their shoulders as they passed by, their eyes widening in appreciation.
Curiosity piqued her. She knew most of the staff at the college, and, even though he was standing with his back to her, there was something familiar about the shape of his head.
As if he could sense her gaze, the man rubbed the back of his neck, and she felt a flicker of recognition roll over her skin.
He must be a visiting lecturer. Probably he was waiting for Dr Blake, but as the professor got close enough to speak to him, she pulled out her phone and started talking.
‘Hey, do you mind?’
Dulcie scowled up at a group of young men as they shoved in front of her, hemming her in with their rucksacks and shoulders, their extra height and width momentarily blocking the man from view.
And then suddenly they were stepping to the side of the corridor one after the other as if there was an obstacle in their path or some unseen hand was forcing them to move out of the way.
Five seconds later she saw what it was.
Or rather who it was.
The man was walking towards her, cutting through the mass of students, who turned towards him, their faces tilting up like flowers drawn to the sun.
And at first, she was so distracted by their reaction that she didn’t even look at him, and then, when she did, what she felt was not recognition but pure, unfiltered admiration.
Just as she had that first time when she saw him at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.
She could still remember it now. It was the end of a stressful and ultimately fruitless day.
The storm that had been brewing over the city for days had escalated suddenly overnight, unleashing a ferocious deluge of rain before pounding the city with marble-sized hailstones.
Travel around and out of the city had ground to a halt.
Her flight, all flights, had been cancelled, and the concourse was crowded with refugees from the storm staring up at the blank departures board as if they could conjure up a plane by the power of thought alone.
Everyone looked tired and crumpled, including her, and she had been contemplating a coffee, but the queue was already curving across the concourse like the tail of a depressed cat.
And then, there he was, moving towards her with the muscular grace of a bigger cat, a puma or a jaguar.
Time had stopped. Or that was what it felt like. The edges of the vast room had blurred and everything inside that space was suddenly crisply outlined as if he were the eye of the storm.
And then, as now, every single person had turned to look at him.
Because he was beautiful. Tall, with dark, unkempt hair and a soft, shimmering bedroom gaze that was at odds with his calm, unswerving certainty.
A calm that was nothing like the volatile, emotional tinderbox of her childhood.