Baby By Accident(9)
She sat, her hands clenching white on her lap.
Remembering. Everything.
Lise stared at her bare hand, recalling the graceful filigree on the silver ring once adorning her fourth finger. She hadn’t noticed Robert’s unresponsiveness last night. She hadn’t noticed his coolness, his withdrawal.
Until he’d dropped his bombshell.
In love with another woman. Marrying another woman.
Not her.
“She’s everything I dreamed of.” He’d stood in his formal, stately living room, his grey eyes blazing with passion. A passion Lise had never imagined resided in Robert. “I’m marrying her as soon as I can.”
Marrying. Not Lise.
The other woman.
“She’s funny and vivacious.” The man who held himself in aristocratic hauteur in every situation, now beamed with fevered delight. “She makes me come alive.”
Alive.
Exactly as she, Lise Helton, had come alive last night.
She sucked in a shocked breath. No. No. This couldn’t be the same thing.
“You can’t really think I’d settle for the kind of sex we’ve had for the rest of my life.” Robert’s smirk had been filled with disdain. “Not after I got a taste of what’s possible to have with a real woman.”
A real woman. Not Lise.
The other woman.
“A woman who responds to me with passion and love.”
A woman who responds.
“A woman who’s not an Ice Queen, personified.”
Ice Queen.
Forcing her head up, Lise stared blankly at the empty subway seat across from her. Robert’s words no longer punished her or hurt her. Not like last night, when she’d been crushed and destroyed.
Because they weren’t true.
How ironic. She would never let Vico Mattare know this, but he’d given her a great gift. He’d changed something deep inside her, something she’d yearned for in the past few years, even as she’d dismissed it as unimportant.
She was more than the lady her parents had raised.
She was more than an intelligent CFO.
She was so much more than she’d allowed herself to be.
Change. Lise Helton needed to change.
Glancing through the window, she noticed her stop came next. She eased off of the seat and followed the small crowd of Londoners out of the station and onto her street in the heart of Mayfair.
Dignified Mayfair. A bit staid and old-fashioned, in her opinion. But her opinion hadn’t been asked for. Her father had bought her the flat before consulting her. He wanted her around the right sort of people, he’d said. No riffraff or rabble were allowed in Mayfair, he’d proclaimed. She had gritted her teeth, smiled, accepted, and moved in without complaint. Without objecting. Complaining and objecting with her father and mother were not in her repertoire.
Not until now.
Sure, the place was cool and classic and cultured. Still, it wasn’t what she wanted and her father was no longer around to object. She needed to change. So many things. What she wanted, what she’d dreamed of was a home more like…
More like the place she’d just snuck out of.
The thought stopped her cold.
An emotion, something she didn’t want to label as envy, whispered through her. A snort of derision stomped the emotion dead. There was nothing Vico Mattare had that she wanted. Nothing.
Liar.
She shook the word off and marched down the lane to her front door. Letting herself into her house, she dropped her purse on the steel-and-glass side table. A bath first, then sleep. Tomorrow would be soon enough to cancel a wedding she no longer wanted and tell her mother the news.
“Where have you been?”
The horrified voice stopped Lise cold. She squeezed her eyes shut and stifled the groan in her throat. “Mother.”
“I've been waiting for an hour.”
Possibly the last thing she wanted to find in her home right now was her mother. She supposed if Vico Mattare crouched in wait for her she would consider that the worse of two evils. Yet this certainly came in a strong second. Why had she given her nosy mother a key? Why hadn’t she just said no?
“Mother.” She turned to confront the offended woman standing in her hallway. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
Esther Helton looked rather like an enraged chicken. A hen puffed into a fuming bundle of feathers and froth. Actual feathers sprang from her hat and the crimped lace edging her neckline did give her a slightly molted air. Her face flamed in fuming red.
Definitely an enraged chicken.
Disloyal thoughts. But Lise didn’t feel like a devoted daughter at the moment. Things needed to change.
“I realize you young people think it is perfectly fine to…to…” Her mother waved her hand, unable to say the dirty word. “I, however, expect better from you, Elizabeth. I expect you to act as the lady I raised you to be.”