After twenty minutes, as he heard some of the opening and closing of the front door as the neighbours drifted off in pairs, he returned to the sitting room to find Georgie and his mother clearing away the various nibbles that had been brought out as fodder for the hungry masses.
‘Bit of bad news, I’m afraid,’ he said, interrupting the amicable chatter about nothing and everything. ‘I’m going to have to leave first thing in the morning for Singapore.’ Attuned that he now was to the reality of the situation, he noticed Georgie’s expression, a mixture of disappointment and apprehension. Lord, but he would have to do something about that and sooner rather than later. ‘Can’t be helped,’ he interrupted their protests and walked across to his mother and placed a kiss lightly on her head. ‘I’ll try and make it down for the new year, Didi, but I can’t promise anything. Deals have no respect for holidays. I guess I should consider myself lucky that Singapore will only be for three days. Nothing worse than being on a plane on New Year’s Eve. Somehow,’ he tried to lighten the suddenly grey mood, ‘party poppers and funny hats don’t quite have the same fun quality.’ Normally, Georgie would have laughed at this and cracked a joke about whether he would even recognise a party hat if it dropped onto his head, but she was silent and watchful.
Didi jumped into the awkward silence and began fussing over him, asking concerned, rhetorical questions about whether he worked too hard and clucking in sympathy at the horror of having to work over the Christmas period, especially when they had all been having such a wonderful time.
Georgie didn’t say a word and Pierre angrily read criticism in her wide green eyes. What had she been expecting? he wondered. A marriage proposal?
By the time Didi finally announced that she was heading upstairs and please don’t forget to switch off the Christmas lights, old Mrs Evans had a terrible accident last Christmas with a burnt carpet, Pierre had latched onto a very healthy dose of anger and self-justification. What was Georgie accusing him of with those huge, reproachful eyes? Had he promised anything?
‘I don’t actually have to go anywhere,’ he told her abruptly, shutting the kitchen door.
‘Right.’
‘But it’s not, is it, Georgie?’ He raked his fingers through his hair and Georgie looked back at him, not saying anything. Well, it had been going nowhere and nowhere had just come faster than she had expected. What on earth had she been thinking when she had imagined that she could somehow make herself indispensable? No one was indispensable to Pierre, possibly with the exception of his mother and that was what she now needed to focus on. The good things that had come out of their brief relationship. The good it had done for Didi, the good it had done for her relationship with her son.
‘I thought we had a deal,’ he told her accusingly. ‘I thought we both knew the limits of…of this…’
‘We do.’
‘I do.’ He walked across to the kitchen table and perched against it, staring at her. ‘But this evening…this is real, Georgie, but it’s something that exists purely in a moment in time. The truth is that I saw something on your face…you want more than I’m prepared to give…and, dammit, don’t look at me like that!’
‘Like what?’ Pride warred with a desperate need to tell the truth. ‘Okay. I know what you mean.’ She sighed and lowered her eyes, staring at the quarry-tiled kitchen floor, which was a much safer area on which to focus her attention. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t obey the rules of the game, Pierre.’ She laughed a little unsteadily. ‘I don’t know what came over me. One minute I really disapproved of you and everything you stood for and the next minute…’ She shrugged. ‘It happens. Our head says one thing and our heart still does crazy things.’ Every word felt wrenched out of her but she kept her voice as neutral as she could. She could feel her heart doing crazy somersaults in her chest and all she could think was, Why didn’t I stop this when I could?#p#分页标题#e##p#分页标题#e#
‘So you know why I think we have to call it a day.’
‘No.’ She looked at him directly in the eyes. ‘No, I really don’t. I’m not going to ask you to commit to anything, but why do you have to run scared just because I’ve got feelings for you and I’ve laid them on the line?’
‘Run scared? Run scared? I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I’ve never run scared of anything in my whole damned life, least of all a woman!’