Chapter 13
HENRY
Her name was Marielle Bishop-Smith and she was twenty-eight years old, worked in academia and was the daughter of a wealthy property tycoon.
She must have recognized something in him because when their eyes locked at the Christmas party they’d started moving towards each other as though pulled by invisible magnets.
When she reached him she whispered in his ear, in a beautiful, husky voice, ‘Do you want to get out of here?’
‘Very much,’ he’d replied. It was suddenly the thing he wanted most in the world.
She’d giggled, hooked her arm through his and all the awkwardness had left him.
He knew it was a cliché but there was no other way to put it: he felt as light as air, as though all his bad thoughts and feelings had dissipated.
Every sense was on high alert as he helped her into her cream faux-fur coat, his fingers brushing against her soft, porcelain skin.
He couldn’t take his eyes off the silk of her dress shimmering over her curves.
‘I don’t normally do this kind of thing,’ he’d murmured, as they hailed a cab outside the V&A. But I recognized something in you. A kindred spirit.
‘Neither do I.’ She’d smiled up at him in mock wide-eyed innocence and he couldn’t tell if she was joking.
It was the first time he’d felt his heart twist with an emotion he didn’t understand.
They chatted non-stop in the cab on the way to her place.
Words that had failed him in the past now spilt from him as if a dam had been breached.
By the end of that fifteen-minute journey she knew more about him than anyone he’d ever met.
She told him about growing up in a huge but echoing manor house in the countryside, with a conveyor-belt of nannies, a disinterested stepmother and a father who was always away.
He told her about a mother who had left him and a father who hated him and how he’d been desperate to leave home.
‘Now,’ she’d said sternly, as the cab pulled up in front of a red-brick mansion block of apartments near Regent’s Park, ‘I’m trusting you aren’t a serial killer before I let you into my home.
’ Her green eyes flashed and she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. He felt it in every fibre of his being.
If he’d known then about the darkness that lived beneath her glossy facade, would he have made the same decision? He knew, without a doubt, that he would.