Tessa could think of nothing to say. Her throat had closed up and really she doubted whether she would have been able to speak even if she had wanted to. The truth was going to come at her from every angle, she now realised. It didn’t matter how much she tried to deflect the blows, they would still come because they would never be able to keep a relationship between them silent.
‘You know when Curtis came round the other evening…Lord, but it feels like a thousand years ago!’ Her eyes sparkled as she leant forward, propping her chin in her hand. She had wonderful, tumbling hair that she occasionally straightened, when she wanted to look glamorous. Now, it was a riotous jumble of curls cascading past her shoulders.
‘Yes, I remember.’ Tessa sighed quietly.
‘Well, he asked me all about what I was doing at college and then he told me that I might be just the person to work on some logos for him. You know he’s thinking about extending parts of his operation to the Far East…’
What she was hearing seemed to be coming at her from a long way off. In fact, it took a few seconds for it to sink in, then she said, on a whisper, ‘What are you talking about, Luce?’
‘My work! What else? We decided not to say anything to you because I know you. I knew you’d be disappointed if you thought that I’d been rejected, but yesterday, after he had a look at my portfolio, he said that he was prepared to give me a stab at it. He was so sweet about it! Not patronising at all. He said he liked my work, that it was quirky and inventive, which would be just the sort of thing he would be looking for…’
‘Your work…’ Tessa said hollowly.
‘Why aren’t you excited?’ Lucy demanded, pausing in her breathless excitement to realise that the expected reaction had not arrived.#p#分页标题#e#
‘I am. Excited and thrilled.’ Tessa forced herself to smile but the smile was strained. Why hadn’t he said anything? Why hang on to his silence, letting her fling herself into accusations that were wildly off target?
She remember the puzzled look on his face when she had informed him that she knew about his feelings for her sister.
‘What about your course?’ she asked faintly, dragging the subject back to the prosaic and leaving her restless mind free to wander unimpeded. ‘You can’t possibly give that up. Not when you’ve come so far…’
But Lucy had everything sorted and Tessa half listened, only stirring herself when mention was made of food and, buoyed up by the prospect of her first successful dip into the brave world of advertising, Lucy actually volunteered to go out and buy some. With her own money.
Once she was gone, Tessa went into the sitting room and just let the sound of silence drift over her. Peaceful though it was, it wasn’t nearly peaceful enough to end the nasty tangle of thoughts writhing around in her head like hungry serpents. She moaned softly and closed her eyes.
She still had them optimistically closed when the doorbell went.
The prospect of lunch, even though it might be procured and prepared by her sister in a very rare excursion into domesticity, did not appeal. Tessa didn’t feel hungry. In fact, she felt as though she had crashed headlong into a brick wall.
Which was good, she told herself, trundling to the front door. Because, face it, even if things hadn’t gone utterly pear-shaped now, they would have further down the line. She and the brick wall would still have become close acquaintances somewhere in the future.
She pulled open the front door and her eyes travelled up, and up, and up until they finally rested on Curtis’s dark, glowering face. At which point something like electricity shot through her veins, making her take a step backwards from the impact.
In that brief instant of stunned hesitation, Curtis pushed his way inside and slammed the door shut behind him, then he leaned heavily against it and stared down at her.
‘What are you doing here?’ Tessa asked in a small voice. She took a few more steps backwards, putting distance between them. Her hands fluttered nervously and she clasped them together in front of her.
‘Just passing by. Thought I’d drop in. About now, you should start hurling more accusations about me and your sister, wouldn’t you say? Something along the lines of what a bastard I am?’
‘You should have told me.’
‘Told you what.’
‘That I was wrong about you and Lucy. That you were interested in her work. That that was what all the hushed voices were all about, as well as her desperation to get to your mother’s Boxing Day do. Because she wanted to show you her portfolio. I shouldn’t have had to hear it all from my sister.’