Best of Friends (26 page)

“You taste all chocolaty,” he murmured, breaking away from her to unfasten the belt of her robe. “It’s very nice.”

“Toblerone—I had no lunch,” said Abby, who’d felt far too nervous to eat before she’d called the whole thing off. Or thought she’d called it off.

“This is more than very nice.” Moving back so he could look at her, Jay’s roving eyes took in the lacy grape silk knickers and the matching demi-tasse bra that left nothing to the imagination, the roseate peaks of her nipples visible through the delicate lace.

In that moment, Abby didn’t care about stretch marks or keeping her poochy little belly sucked in. Her whole body throbbed with lust and she felt beautiful. His desire made her feel beautiful. Desire was definitely the greatest aphrodisiac of all.

“And very sexy. You always were a sexy woman, Abby. I don’t think you knew it but you drove all the men in our year wild with that sexy walk of yours and the way you’d flick your hair back and lift your chin when you wanted something.” Jay reached out a long finger and lazily slipped it into one cup of her bra, pulling the fabric down so her breast was exposed, nipple erect. He didn’t touch her, just looked at her breast, his breathing heavy. Then his eyes locked with Abby’s and she could see the same expression mirrored in his eyes: lust.

“I want you so much, Abby,” he said, and his fingers brushed her nipple, making her arch against him with pleasure. “But you have to want it too.” His fingers squeezed the sensitive peak, sending bolts of sexual electricity pulsing through her. When his mouth followed his fingers, sucking her nipple into the hot cavern of his mouth, making her gasp with wanting him, she was lost.

“Do you want it? Do you want me?” he demanded, his other hand moving down her silky skin to linger tantalisingly at the waist of her lacy knickers. Teasing, his fingers slipped inches inside the knickers, feathery strokes designed to drive her wild. He’d always been able to do that.

“Do you want me?” he repeated.

“Yes,” she moaned, “yes, I want you, Jay.”

“Good,” he said, his eyes almost black as he stared into hers, his fingers delving inside her, making her know that there was absolutely no turning back now …

Afterwards, Jay opened the champagne without spilling a drop.

“To us,” he said, handing Abby a glass.

She drank deeply, the spiky taste of champagne bubbles reviving her from her post-orgasmic exhaustion.

The deli bag contained a mini picnic of tiny soft white rolls filled with cream cheese, a container of smoked chicken and another of soft prawns in mayonnaise.

“You certainly came prepared,” Abby joked as they sat on the bed, their picnic spread out before them on a hotel bath towel. She’d put her sexy underwear back on, not comfortable enough to sit there naked and not wanting to ruin the atmosphere in her giant, teddy bear robe. “Do you normally bring a picnic?”

Jay shot her a quick suspicious glance and, instantly, Abby knew she’d said the wrong thing.

“It was a joke,” she said quickly. “I know you don’t do this type of thing …” And then her voice trailed off because how did she know what he did or didn’t do?

“Abby, I want you to know that I’ve never cheated on Lottie before,” he said slowly, “never. But you and I … we go a long way back, Abby. I’ve never forgotten you. I probably never got over you.”

“Honestly?” she said, eager to stop all talk about Lottie or Tom or the real world where real people would be hurt by what they’d just done.

“Honestly.” Jay filled up her glass. “That summer was what fun and youth were all about. Do you remember that night on the train to Rome when we couldn’t get a sleeper and we curled up on one seat, but kept sliding off?”

“And when we got to Rome we found a tiny hostel and went to bed and slept for a whole day?”

“We didn’t sleep all the time,” Jay reminded her with a grin. By the time they’d drunk the whole bottle, Abby felt sleepily sexy again, and this time it was even better. The booze had anaesthetised her conscience to that comfortable dull point where tomorrow and nemesis were both a long, long way away. Curled beside Jay in the comfort of a king-size bed with 250-thread-count Egyptian sheets cool against her skin, Abby felt strangely beautiful and utterly content. This was where she was supposed to be. Rules were for other people.

The shrill ring of her mobile phone jerked her into reality. Leaning over to the night stand, she plucked it up and automatically answered with a tentative, “Hello?”

“Hi, Abby,” said a voice that rang a bell at the back of Abby’s mind. “It’s Babs Lennon from the
Chronicle.
”

Abby remembered her. Babs was one of the first reporters Abby had ever spoken to, a TV-page veteran who’d written a glowing review of the show and who’d described Abby as “the kind of woman you’d love to invite into your home to sort out your life.” Thrilled, Abby had kept the clipping.

“Hi, Babs,” she said warily, conscious of Jay lying naked beside her, the length of his thigh up against hers. Nobody could have seen her and Jay, could they? Oh no, what would poor Tom think? It would kill him. Remorse hurtled back with the speed of a steeple-chaser. What had she done? And it was public knowledge now if the newspapers were phoning. She’d just have to say they were old friends having a drink in her room, that was all and …

“We’re running a story on the search for the new
Declutter
presenter and I wanted a couple of quotes from you,” Babs went on.

“Oh, yes.” Feeling like a complete idiot for imagining that anyone would be interested in her private life, Abby was aware of the pit of fear in her stomach miraculously closing over. Who did she think she was—Nicole Kidman? She summoned up the energy to answer. “It’s a fabulous idea to get new talent on the show,” she said, trying to sound as if she actually meant it. “We’ve been thinking of ways to revamp
Declutter
and this is one we all love. It’ll be great fun working with another presenter.”

“Fantastic,” said Babs. “So you don’t have any objections to someone else working on the show?”

“Lord, no, why should I?” Abby’s fake smile was stretched to breaking point. “You can’t sit on your laurels in the TV industry, Babs, you know that! It’s vital that we keep the show exciting for the viewers and this is just the thing. The whole team are terribly enthusiastic about it all and we’re looking forward to finding a new TV talent for Beech!”

“Great, great,” repeated Babs with the preoccupied tone of one scrawling quotes in a shorthand notebook. “Thanks for that, Abby. See you around.”

“Yes, see you,” said Abby dully. Sober now, she felt unclean somehow, lying through her teeth. And then it hit her: she’d just done something she’d have to lie through her teeth about for the rest of her married life.

“Abby,” Jay kissed her bare shoulder, nibbling her playfully, “I ought to go. I’ve a function this evening. We’re taking some of our biggest clients out to dinner. Dull, but I’ve got to do it.”

He was off the bed and into the bathroom in one quick movement, and Abby heard the electric hum of the power shower kicking in. She sat motionless on the bed, hangover and guilt mingling together. What had she done?

In what seemed like moments, Jay was back in the bedroom, putting on his clothes. She watched him silently, marvelling at the speed with which he dressed. Tom dressed slowly yet still looked slightly dishevelled. Jay, in contrast, threw his clothes on at practised speed but looked immaculate at the end of it all. Nobody seeing the chic man in the exquisitely cut grey suit and darker grey open-necked shirt, his chestnut hair perfectly smoothed back, would have guessed that an hour before he’d been writhing on a hotel bed with Abby, skin flecked with sweat, hair rumpled as he groaned in orgasm.

“Please don’t be upset, darling,” he told her, pecking a gentle kiss on her cheek. “It has to be like this, we both know that. But I’ll see you again. Soon, very soon.”

And he was gone, with only the empty champagne bottle, the deli carrier bag of rubbish and two condoms rolled up in tissues in the wastepaper basket as proof that he’d been there at all.

Abby looked round her hotel room with something approaching shock. She, sensible Abby Barton, mother to Jess, wife to Tom, had just had sex with someone else in this room. In the cool light of day, without passion flooding through her veins, she knew she’d made a huge mistake.

“Abby, you poor love, you don’t look like you’ve been sleeping,” tuttutted Helen the next day, casting a professional eye over the presenter’s wan face with its under-eye shadows.

Helen was Beech’s hair and make-up artist, and she and Abby were sitting in the back of what Brian liked to call the outside-broadcast trailer, but which was, in fact, a big, rackety van fitted out with a litup make-up area, three chairs, a small red velour couch, a curtained-off rail for wardrobe and a tiny kitchenette for tea and coffee. The outside-broadcast convoy consisted of just three vans: two for equipment, christened AC and DC, and the make-up÷wardrobe one, lovingly known as the Passion Wagon in honour of the red couch. On rainy days, the entire crew had been known to squash into the Passion Wagon to drink endless cups of tea, play poker and engage in some thoroughly enjoyable industry bitching.

Today was a gloriously sunny day and the team were inside Glete Cottage, a tiny two-bedroomed railway cottage in the centre of Dublin into which the owner had crammed the belongings from her previous house, a big family semi with five bedrooms and a conservatory. Abby hadn’t been inside the house yet but she’d seen the photos and knew she’d have her work cut out, if only to decide how to remove the eight-seater dining-room table from the minute kitchen-diner. The movers would need a tin opener to get it out. The prospect of all this hard work wasn’t made easier by the fact that she’d had two hours’ sleep the night before, both hours being after five a.m., when exhaustion had finally overpowered guilt.

Helen dithered over base and finally chose the industrial strength version that would make Abby look strangely tangerine and caked in make-up in normal light, and healthily tanned under the cameras.

“Would you like a coffee, love?” Helen asked. Even though she was only in her early thirties, she mothered the whole crew like everyone’s favourite granny. Lovers’ quarrels, money worries and job difficulties were all aired in Helen’s corner by the crew during quiet moments. Abby felt ridiculously like spilling her own drama out to Helen, but she knew that Helen liked her and she surely wouldn’t feel the same way afterwards if Abby confessed that she’d just cheated on her husband.

“Coffee would be lovely,” she said, choking back a desire to cry. The Passion Wagon was blissfully quiet, and as Helen poured some fragrant coffee from the everperking machine, she asked: “Is everything all right, Abby? You seem very down, not like yourself at all.”

“I’ve done something stupid,” Abby blurted out, and immediately regretted it.

“We all make mistakes,” Helen said calmly. “Nobody shuffles off this mortal coil without a few mess-ups, but that’s what makes us human.” She met Abby’s gaze in the make-up mirror, her sweet brown eyes staring at Abby’s anguished ones. “You’re a good person, Abby. Forgive yourself.”

Abby burst into tears. “I can’t.”

“How are you getting on?” called the newest runner from the back of the van.

“Another fifteen minutes,” replied Helen. “Now shut the door, there’s a good lad.”

The door shut quietly. Helen handed Abby a wad of tissues. “Have a good cry. I’ll keep everyone out for a minute and you can get it out of your system.”

“I’ll look awful on camera, all red eyes,” sobbed Abby, mopping ineffectually.

“Hush,” chided Helen. “I can make you look like Miss World in ten minutes.”

She bustled around, tidying up the make-up area, while Abby tried to compose herself. The desire to spill all had gone. How could she tell Helen what she’d done? She couldn’t forgive herself so how could anyone else?

In the end, she didn’t look quite like Miss World but she still looked pretty good, given the lack of sleep and the redrimmed eyes.

Helen even had a solution for those—white eyeliner pencil used judiciously in the inner eye rim.

“I went through some supplies of that when I worked with Candy on the afternoon show,” remarked Helen, which showed she was trying to cheer Abby up—Helen was famously discreet and never talked about previous jobs. “Candy was a great one for arriving with a raging hangover and eyes so red she looked as if she’d bleed to death if she opened them. She wasn’t a nice person to work with,” Helen added with restraint.

No, thought Abby, but no matter what sort of a prize cow Candy was, at least she wasn’t known to cheat on her husband.

A few hundred miles away in a small room in the breast cancer clinic, the doctor stared at the ultrasound results and thought briefly of the patient who was waiting outside with her husband. Waiting for news that was bad. The couple would undoubtedly suspect bad news now, after the combination of ultrasound
and
needle biopsy. When an ultrasound was being done, whichever member of his team was performing it would talk to the patient as they worked. Nine out of ten breast lumps were benign, they would say, doing their best to make the patient relax. The hundreds of women who walked through the clinic’s doors every week needed that reassurance when they lay down for the screening test. Breast cancer were feared words, no matter what advances there had been in its treatment.

But the mass in this poor woman’s breast looked anything but benign, hence the needle biopsy as well as the ultrasound. The biopsy results would tell him more, but a combination of instinct and long experience told him this was not a cancer caught in its early stages. And he had to break the news.

This was the part of the job he hated; not the long, arduous days, the battles with bureaucracy for more money for the hospital, the endless reports or the arguments he had with his wife whom he hardly saw. Those problems he could handle. What was still heart-breaking, despite many years in the job, was watching people sit in his office with hopeful eyes and then see the hope flicker and die like a blown-out candle when he delivered his news.