Honeymoon With A Stranger - Pivotal Moment

Jack looked up as Anna walked into his office, notebook in hand, hair anchored into a messy bun by a pencil. As she retrieved it her hair escaped, drawing attention to the creamy skin of her neck.

He threw impatient hands up. ‘For Pete’s sake, what are you doing? I’m trying to work here.’

She scribbled a note. ‘So am I. You’re paying me to spruce the place up aren’t you? If any room ever needed a female touch it’s this one. I mean look at this old tat.’

She ran a hand along the back of the threadbare sofa in the corner. He’d had it for years and was fond of its faded paisley pattern and fraying seams. Out of fashion and past its best. A bit like him.

‘I meant the rest of the hotel!’ he snapped. ‘This is my office. I like it this way.’

She gave him a pitying look and crossed the room to his desk. ‘Jack, I’m sorry to have to break this to you but this isn’t an office. It’s a man-cave.’ She reached for the rugby ball paperweight. His hand flew out, intercepting her wrist. The sudden heat that smoldered between them made him forget all about her attack on his sanctuary and he was on his feet before he had proper control of his mind.

‘There’s someone from Gossip! Magazine in Reception asking for Anna Clark,’ Marie said, bursting in.

He dropped Anna’s wrist as if burned and the situation slipped back into focus. Anna was his employee. No more.

‘Hideous little toad of a journalist. I thought I’d seen the last of them when we moved here.’ Her sharp gaze softened at the shock on Anna’s face and she held up a reassuring hand. ‘No need to panic. I told him we’ve got no one of that name staying here.’ She shrugged. ‘I thought I was pretty convincing but he’s ordered coffee and set up camp on the lobby sofa, so you might want to stay put until the coast’s clear.’

She disappeared back to Reception and Anna took a step after her. He quickly blocked her path and moved her away from the door, pushing it shut. Her obstinate shrug as she tried to shake him off intensified their closeness, and his pulse began to climb.

Uneasiness kicked in and simmered low in his belly. He felt the threat to the quiet life he’d built here. And something new. An undeniable urge to protect Anna.

He kept his voice steady. ‘Have you any idea what will happen if that guy sees you? Or worse, figures out who I am? The whole media circus will descend on this place. They’ll drag me into your situation and rehash my past all over again. They won’t care what they say if it makes a good story.’

Her shoulders were rigid beneath his hands and his fingers moved automatically to find and press away the tension. She looked up at him and he stopped.

‘Relax,’ he said. ‘We just stay calm, keep out of sight and he’ll be gone before you know it.’

Her slight frame slowly yielded and she allowed him to lead her out of the sightline of the door and to the furthest corner of the room. She was trembling. He could feel it through the thin fabric of her shirt and it wrenched at his heart. He knew what she was going through and he wanted to make it all disappear. He kept his arm tightly around her and pulled her down next to him on the old sofa.

Anna felt the tension slowly subside as she nestled into the crook of Jack’s arm. She was glad he was so big. The bulky muscles of his arm surrounding her and the warmth of his body made her feel safe, comforted. The nauseous feeling of being trapped began to slip away. The little office was dimly lit, the sofa tucked away in a dark corner. The lived-in smell of the old furniture was somehow soothing. She wanted to stay here with him and never be found.

‘You really think it will be that simple? We keep quiet and he’ll go away?’ She really wasn’t sure that was realistic. Not if, as she suspected, she’d been grassed up by her meddling mother. She wanted the journalist out of here right now. Gone.

‘Definitely,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘Making a fuss or throwing him out is the worst thing we could do, it would be like putting a neon sign on the hotel roof – ‘Anna Clark is here!’’

They sat in silence for a moment. She was acutely aware of his arm around her, the deep woody scent of his aftershave, his fingers firm against her arm. She felt a prickle of guilt. He’d spent the last five years dodging the media and now within days she’d brought them right to his doorstep. She couldn’t blame him if he made her pack her bags the moment the reporter had left.

‘I’m sorry,’ she offered.

Anna’s eyes were turned up to his and Jack’s heart turned gently over. There wasn’t a hint of colour in her face.

‘It isn’t your fault,’ he said.

She sighed. ‘Yes it is. I think my mother’s told that magazine where I am because she wants me to do an interview. You know the kind of thing, me as the woman scorned showing plenty of cleavage and leg.’

He felt an unexpected wave of nausea. Past experience told him she must be tempted. Everyone has a price, he was well aware of that.

‘They pay serious money, you know,’ he said, watching for her reaction carefully. ‘The kind of money that gets you a deposit on a flat, a new car, a designer wardrobe.’

She laughed lightly. ‘You sound like my mother. Public interest in me isn’t going to last. A couple of magazine interviews would be about the limit of it. I have to think of the long term. Sell my story now and always be known as the girl Johnny Tornado dumped? I don’t want to be defined by that for the rest of my life, I just want to be normal.’

She sighed and picked at a loose thread on the arm of the sofa.

‘Principles are about the only thing I’ve got left,’ she said. ‘I should have ended it months ago. There wouldn’t be any of this grief if I had. I knew things weren’t right between us and he tried to tell me it wasn’t working, but I couldn’t give up. And now look at me. I’m completely stuck and I’ve dragged you into it too.

Contrite was something new for her. The change from her usual bravado made her seem all the more vulnerable. He wanted to scoop her into his arms and carry her away from all this.

‘So staying together was more important to you than being happy? Where the hell is the sense in that?’

She paused, frowning, and then tipped her eyes back up to his with a look of confusion. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

He considered her for a moment. What made her tick?

‘Well, what was it like then?’

She didn’t reply and he gave her a squeeze of encouragement.

‘Come on, unless you want to go out there and give that reporter what he came for you’re stuck with me, at least for now. Tell me about Johnny. Make me understand why someone as strong as you would stick with an idiot like him for better than a decade. Why didn’t you end it, if things were as bad as you say?’

For the longest moment she didn’t know if she would answer, let alone what she would say. Then she glanced up and met his gaze full on. She could see sympathy and understanding. Her guard slipped the tiniest bit.

‘This room reminds me of my father, you know.’ She nodded around the room at the pictures and rugby memorabilia. He was a big rugby fan. Big fan of yours too.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Was?’

‘He died a couple of years ago.’

‘Sorry to hear that.’

She waved a dismissive hand. ‘It’s fine, she said.

He waited. He heard her take a breath.

‘And maybe that’s the root of the problem. It really shouldn’t be fine.’

Something had clicked into place in her mind these last days. A piece of the puzzle she’d held askew for the longest time because she didn’t want the full picture. Why would she? It was so much easier to throw all the blame at Johnny. She hadn’t wanted to see the truth, to accept her own part in causing all this.

‘If I’m honest, Jack, the reason I stayed with Johnny goes a long way back. The reason for the way I’ve behaved, the mess I’ve made.’

He didn’t flinch, he just continued to hold her, and she made the decision to run with this. To throw it all out to be picked over like rubbish. The litter of her life.

‘My father died a couple of years ago. But I lost him long before that,’ she said.

Her mind backtracked down through the years. She wasn’t in this dark little office anymore. She was just a kid again.

‘I came home from school one day, when I was about ten,’ she said, not seeing the desk or the pictures. Her mind was deep in the past. ‘I was expecting it to be just the same as every other day. Watch some TV, maybe play outside, then Dad would be home from work and we’d have dinner.’ She shrugged. ‘Except that day he never came home.’

She quickly glanced up to gauge his expression. Neutral. Not looking at her, just listening.

‘He did it when I wasn’t there, Jack,’ she said. ‘He moved out while I was at school because it was easier for him that way. He knew he was giving in, that he was weak. If he’d truly believed it was the only way forward, the right thing to do, he would have waited and told me properly, explained everything, reassured me. But he didn’t. He was too ashamed.

She felt the comforting squeeze of his arm. ‘That must have been tough.’

She searched for the right words. ‘I felt as if I wasn’t important, that’s the closest I can get to it…but I’m not a kid anymore. I should be over it.’

She felt him shake his head lightly against her hair but she knew she was right, she sounded pathetic, self-indulgent. She wanted to make him understand.

‘He’d left his coat,’ she said. ‘It was hanging in the hallway just like it always did, on the hook. His hook. I kept telling my mother he couldn’t have gone because his coat was still there. And she said he’d just taken the essentials.'

She drew in a shaky deep breath. Even all these years down the line the memory still had the power to hurt.

‘The essentials! What could be more essential than me? He left me behind like some old piece of clothing that he could replace.’

She remembered so clearly the empty aching feeling of being dispensable that her stomach clenched sickly. The desperate feeling of wanting to matter and knowing she didn’t.

‘And then I met Johnny,’ she said.

Jack leaned forward almost imperceptibly and she glanced up at his face, inches away from hers. She could see his interest sharpen in the way his eyes focused, in the light frown that touched his brows.

She picked at the loose thread again, pulling it, as the image filled her mind. Teenage Johnny, with his long hair and his guitar.

‘It was more than some teen crush.’ She thought of the way Johnny had always held her hand. In public and in private, as if she was something to be proud of. ‘It was the first time I’d felt important to someone since my dad left. If you knew my mother you’d understand what I mean. There’s only ever been one significant person in her life and that’s her. I started spending all my spare time with Johnny and suddenly Dad being gone didn’t hurt so much because I mattered to someone.’

Jack made no move. She cuddled against him, soothed by his warmth.

‘It worked for a long time,’ she said. ‘And I thought it always would. I don’t want you to get the idea that it’s been years of hell because it hasn’t. The fame and all the rubbish that came with it only arrived in the last year or so. Up until then our relationship was the one thing I could rely on. And that made it so hard for me to let go. If I’m honest, I think I would have kept going, insisting that we still had a chance, for just about ever. Even though at the end neither one of us was happy.’

The familiar anger towards Johnny surged through her. Anger that he’d ended it in the most humiliating way imaginable. He’d snatched away her future and her private life, all in one swift movement.

‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making excuses for him. If I get back home and find any of his stuff left in my flat I’ll be lobbing it straight in the nearest skip.’ She pointed an emphatic finger at Jack and he grinned down at her indignant expression. ‘I’m just saying…maybe I went wrong in places too, that’s all.’

Fury at Johnny hadn’t dissipated, but she had to take some responsibility if she was to have any chance of moving on from this.

‘In the end maybe he thought the only way to finish it was to damage us irreparably, to do something terrible, unforgivable. Because he knew I’d never give up, never stop working at it. I wasn’t going to throw my hand in like my father did.’

The office was silent. She could hear the clock ticking on the wall behind him, the occasional ring of the phone out in Reception. She could hear her own breathing. What would he think of her now? Obsessive and clingy?

‘Changed your mind about him now? About me?’ she asked. ‘You could say I drove him into the arms of the other woman. That was his escape route. I pushed and pushed ahead with the wedding thinking it would cure everything.’

‘I wasn’t thinking anything like that,’ he said.

Squeezing her shoulders supportively suddenly didn’t feel like enough. She was trapped in events from long ago, just like he was. Too consumed by the person she used to be to appreciate that her future didn’t need to be defined by her past. He put his free hand to her cheek, felt the softness of her skin beneath his fingertips, the silky tendrils of her hair against his hand.

He wanted to make it all better for her.

‘Did you think I was going to judge you? You’re talking to the master of living in the past here.’ She glanced up and he smiled at her, wanting to lift her spirits. ‘You may have had a point about this room. It’s a shrine to my life as it was a decade ago. Maybe it’s time both of us thought about drawing a line under what’s gone before. You really can move on and put it behind you. You just have to want to. ’

He tilted her face up gently so he could look at her. The troubled expression in her eyes made his heart twist and he kissed her forehead, intending it as a gesture of friendship, encouragement. He breathed in the warm sweet scent of her hair and felt the cool silk of her skin beneath his lips. Sparks of longing began fizzing deep in his abdomen. He had thought himself able to keep to the role of supportive friend. But on a deep instinctive level he wanted more, far more from her than that.

Anna felt a rush of happiness. Jack hadn’t judged her and he didn’t blame her for bringing the press back into his life. He had understood. But as he leaned back and met her gaze she saw more than friendship lingering in his eyes. His hand against her cheek sent a dizzying rush of heat right through her. The feel of his body against hers shifted from comforting to delicious. She breathed in the musky warmth of his skin and as he lowered his lips to hers, it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

Desire surged through her at the feel of his mouth against hers. His fingers tangled in her hair, his touch one moment a reassuring squeeze the next an urgent caress. His deliberate tenderness was new to her, and sizzling waves of excitement curled through her body, shortening her breath and making her heart race. Her lips parted and she melted against him. His hand slipped slowly, tantalizingly around her waist and eased her gently back against the butter-soft fabric of the old sofa.

A sudden noise crashed into her consciousness as the door burst open. A blinding flash filled the room. Bewildered, she scrambled to sit up straight as Jack leapt away from her. And then icy despair flooded through her as she blinked and saw the journalist, an expression of triumph on his face as he held the camera aloft.