‘Then why don’t you take a chance and go with this? I’m not asking you to give anything you don’t feel capable of giving and I take full responsibility for looking after my own emotional welfare.’ Her arms were tightly folded and she could feel her nails biting into her skin.
This was the first time anyone had ever suggested a direction in his life and he didn’t like it. ‘I’m not like you, Georgie,’ he told her coolly. ‘Taking a chance with a woman isn’t in my brief. I have my working life and I have my emotional life and that’s just the way it goes. I wasn’t looking for a fairy-tale romance here when we slept together and nothing’s changed. Besides…’ and this to finally sever her from his life because he had been drifting these past few weeks and life was all about control, not aimless meandering down the high roads and byroads ‘—you’re a nice girl but we don’t live on the same planet.’
‘I’m s small town girl and you’re an uptown kind of guy, is that it?’
‘To put it simply.’ He frowned at her. ‘You said it yourself more than once.’
‘Okay.’
‘And stop saying okay!’
‘There’s nothing more to say, Pierre. What will we say to Didi?’
‘Leave it to me. I’ll take care of it. You can surface when the dust has settled.’
‘Right.’
‘Don’t waste your tears on me, Georgie. This is for the best. You move on with your life and I’ll return to mine. Hopefully the next time we meet, this will all be history for you and there will be no awkwardness between us. After all, we’ve shared a lot these past couple of weeks.’
‘Of course,’ Georgie said politely. How very good to be concerned about her. He could counsel her on putting things behind her because he had no need to counsel himself. There was a hell of a lot to be said for being emotionally detached from the rest of the world. ‘Time heals everything.’ She turned around so that she could stare out of the kitchen window and, without looking over her shoulder, she said remotely, ‘I’ll leave tonight. That way you can explain things to Didi in the morning.’
Pierre opened his mouth, to say what he had no idea. In the end, he simply nodded at her erect back and quietly walked out of the kitchen.
CHAPTER TEN
MEETING his mother had been less than satisfactory. Pierre swivelled his chair and stared out of the glass panels of his office to a city finally surfacing from the stranglehold of winter. The trees were beginning to wake up and there was just the faintest tinge of warmth in the air, enough to encourage people to jettison their thick coats and stick on their macs.
He wondered what Georgia was wearing. How many of those hippie layers would she have stripped off to deal with the rise in temperature?
With a shake of his head, he dragged his thoughts back to Didi.
It had been her first visit to London for a very long time and Pierre had been irrationally thrilled by her obvious approval of his house. She had looked into every room, commenting on the colours and the pictures and declaring her approval as they had sat down for a cup of tea. Everything had been fine up to that point, then, fool that he was, he had angled the conversation round to Georgie.#p#分页标题#e##p#分页标题#e#
There were still those regrets on his mother’s side that things hadn’t worked out between them, but in actual fact she had, three months previously when he had ruefully explained their split, accepted the situation with surprising calm.
Not wanting to dwell on the whole messy business for fear of opening a Pandora’s box, Pierre had, at least to start with, made a determined effort not to mention Georgie when he spoke to Didi on the phone, which he now did at least twice a week. Gradually, though, his curiosity had got the better of him and he had begun dropping her name in the conversations, wondering how she was, angling for information because, as he told himself, he just wanted to make sure that she was okay, that she wasn’t slipping into depression, and when Didi assured him that she was as right as rain he continued asking after her because, as he told his mother, she would have taken their break-up pretty hard and might well be putting on a front but going through personal agony. He just, he told her, didn’t want Georgie falling over the edge.
So although he had told himself that Georgie’s life was no longer his concern, he had still found himself asking his mother about her as they strolled through Harrods in search of a rug for his mother’s sitting room, the old one having been finally put to rest.
And that was when the day had started to unravel because Georgie, his mother had said absent-mindedly as she had stroked one of the Persian rugs and debated whether it was worth the astronomical amount of money, was more than all right. She was seeing someone.