All That Mullarkey (39 page)

His voice was early morning grumbly. ‘Why have you been glaring ferociously at the ceiling?’

She rolled back down. Sighed. ‘We shouldn’t have done it.’

When he frowned his spikes of hair quivered. ‘No good?’

‘Of course it was –’ She halted, laughed unwillingly. ‘You know how good.’

‘So what’s the problem?’ His thumb stroked her knuckles.

She took a deep breath. ‘Because it’s never going to go any further, but it stops either of us getting it on with someone else.’ Another breath, still deeper. ‘I think you ought to move out. I know you’ve loved living with Shona and I’m sorry if leaving her is painful, but you can see her as much as you want. I don’t want you to be bound by some misplaced responsibility to me. You ought to be thinking of the rest of your life now, not babysitting, helping with my decorating and being couply.

‘For a while it gave you somewhere to get over all the shit Gav caused and me a chance to get on my feet. But the nuisance campaign’s over. And if this is going to keep happening –’ She jerked away and scurried for the bathroom.

A nice hot shower, a few private tears, Justin would have time to vacate her room. She’d be bright and breezy again by the time she next saw him.

But when she re-entered her room he hadn’t moved an inch. In fact, as soon as she appeared, he carried on as if she’d never left. ‘So you’d like me to live somewhere else?’

She nodded, tugging her towelling dressing-gown belt and searching for her brush.

‘If you want me to, I’ll go. Just explain why.’

She sat on the bottom of the bed, scraping her hairbrush moodily on the duvet cover. ‘I don’t like the idea of being friends who share a daughter and, occasionally, a bed. It’s a compromise. Half-hearted.’

Through the silence that followed, the lilac blossom on the quilt cover melted and blurred as her eyes filled. She concentrated very hard on not letting the tears fall. When Justin snatched back the covers and lurched to his feet, walking naked across the bed before jumping down to land beside her, she looked away and concentrated harder. She would not cry!

The gentleness of his arms around her almost tempted her to sag against the comfort of his chest, the bed-warm, man smell of his skin, but she would not cry. His voice was a deep, sympathetic rumble. ‘Suppose I want to be couply?’

The tears began to fall. ‘You shouldn’t say things like that!’ The sleeve of her dressing gown had to do to wipe her eyes. ‘It’s all wrong. Drew said I had a husband and a child –’

‘Ex-husband. And my child.’

‘Exactly. You’re here out of some misplaced sense of responsibility, and because you’re mad about Shona. Not me! I’m bad for you.’

He pulled her round to face him. ‘What misplaced responsibility?’

She scrubbed her eyes with her other sleeve and sniffed unattractively. ‘Because of Shona. But your responsibility’s to her, not me.’

‘I know I’m responsible for her. Why are you bad for me?’

She sniffed again, digging in her pocket for a tissue. ‘All that stuff. You know, you said it. And Drew says it.’

‘What stuff? When? What does Drew say?’

She risked a glance through lashes spiky with tears. ‘You said I wasn’t straight with you, we had too much bad history. And Drew thinks I’m after someone to look after me. And, anyway,’ she added, turning to face him properly, inspired by a flash of insight. ‘You only kept in touch once you found out about Shona.’

His eyes flashed. She noticed that, if he frowned horribly enough, one eyebrow did a little curl above the bridge of his nose.

‘Listen,’ he said very clearly, as if talking to some drunken imbecile. He grasped her hands and squeezed them too hard. ‘I did say some of that stuff when I first found out about Shona. My brain was all to hell in a handcart. Suddenly there was this little person on the planet that I’d helped put there – you’d had ages to get your head round it but I’d had a few hours. I was jet-lagged, I’d had to throw those jokers out of the flat. I wasn’t at my best.

‘I had some jumbled idea of giving myself space while I got back on an even keel. Truthfully, it was just an awful lot of bollocks.’ His lips pressed momentarily on her hair. ‘Look at me.’

Slowly, she peeped.

He smiled.

Her heart did that funny, blossomy thing, making the back of her neck prickle.

He murmured, ‘When I came to see you – I didn’t know Shona existed.’ He kissed her nose. ‘I came back to see you.’ Another kiss. ‘Because mad and bad as I thought you were, I couldn’t forget you. And I thought it was worth a little drive to Middledip to find out what your husband situation was.’

‘Really?’ She tipped her head back.

‘Truly.’ He nibbled her throat.

‘Positive?’ She sniffed.

He blew gently between her breasts. ‘Why do you think I’ve been hanging around like some loser with a crush? I do love Shona, but Cleo …’ He raised his mouth to hover over hers. ‘I’ve loved you since you climbed off that jet-ski, fully dressed, soaked to the skin, and laughing.’

Epilogue

She was home before him, letting Shona run in first, following on with the mother’s burden of toys, jacket and backpack as well as her own bag of pens, badges and handouts that she’d need for work the next day. The house was warm and welcoming in the sunshine and much fresher now she’d gone through almost every room with the magnolia paint.

She’d been dying to come home all day. It had been a real Monday kind of long day, the weekend still fresh in her mind and the working week repellent. Probably because she’d spent the weekend in a cloud of happiness. So much happiness her legs felt weak. So much sex her life had gone funny.

Briskly, she dumped her burdens in the kitchen and began putting the finishing touches to the evening meal, answering Shona’s stream of words and nearly-words until she heard the front door open. Instantly, she was deserted as Shona trundled energetically into the hall. ‘Jussin!’

‘Sho-naaaaa!’

A fit of giggles and a happy shriek, then Shona reappeared upside down over Justin’s shoulder.

Cleo’s heart missed a beat as Justin yanked Cleo to him for a kiss, his lips hot and hard on hers, while Shona continued to squeal with pleasure from behind his back. ‘Do you know I’ve got to adopt Shona if I want normal parental rights?’

Wrong-footed by his plunging into such an unexpected conversation, Cleo broke away to shuffle the cutlery onto the table. ‘I think I did know that. I’d forgotten. But you can do that, can’t you? It’s only sensible.’

‘It’s not sensible, it’s stupid because she’s my daughter. I thought it might be good if we all had the same name and when I looked into it I found out all this other legal stuff. It’s unreal!’ He swivelled Shona right side up.

Cleo stared at him. A flush of shock began to creep up her body. She said, faintly, ‘But we don’t have the same name.’

‘Ah.’ He put Shona down. Very slowly he leaned forward and kissed Cleo’s eyelids. ‘I think it’ll be better if we’re all Mullarkey, for Shona’s sake. What do you think?’

She turned to stir the sauce, letting her hair slide down and cover her face. ‘I’ll tell you when I know what you’re actually asking.’ She turned to drain the carrots, hoping that he’d think that it was the steam that was making her face so red.

Silence.

She flicked a glance behind her as she returned the carrots to the hob. And then stopped dead! ‘Oh
Justin
!’ she wailed, almost dropping the pan. ‘That wall’s only just been painted.’

Guiltily, he examined the pen in his hand. ‘It’s one of those for a whiteboard, isn’t it? It’ll wipe off?’

She began to laugh. ‘It’s for a flip chart! It’s called a
marker
.’

‘Oh.’

On the wall, black on the fresh cream wall, it said:
I love you. I want to marry you. Love Justin.

Slowly, he picked up a cloth and wiped at the corner of the final ‘n’. It didn’t come off.

He grinned. ‘That’s fine. It’s permanent.’

Sue Moorcroft is an accomplished writer of novels, serials, short stories and articles, as well as a creative writing tutor and a competition judge.

Her other novels include
Starting Over
,
Want to Know a Secret?
,
Love & Freedom
and prior to Choc Lit -
Uphill
 
All
 
the
 
Way
.
Her novel
Dream a Little Dream
will be published by Choc Lit in November 2012.

She is also the commissioning editor and a contributor to
Loves Me, Loves Me Not
, an anthology of short
 
stories celebrating the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s 50th
 
anniversary and the author of
Love Writing – How to Make Money Writing Romantic or Erotic Fiction
.

www.suemoorcroft.com

www.suemoorcroft.wordpress.com

www.twitter.com/suemoorcroft

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Is their love strong enough to overcome the past? Or will it take more than either of them is prepared to give?

Find out more and purchase in the kindle store:
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