She didn’t even bother to tell her sister face to face. She couldn’t face the concern and the questions.
So she left a note on the kitchen table. She would be in Dublin. She gave the name of the hotel and the phone number in case of an emergency, but failed to mention when she would be back.
And it felt glorious to walk out of the house, with a holdall, two good books and no one asking her what she was doing.
The feeling persisted on the flight over, and even the reality of checking into the hotel wasn’t sufficient for Tessa to doubt for a single minute that she had done the right thing.
The place she had managed to find so close to New Year was small and cosy. She took a deep breath and filled her nostrils with the fragrant scent of polished wood and lavender. There were intimate touches everywhere, from the pretty furnishings to the pictures on the walls. She would shop during the day and then just read in the communal, oak-panelled sitting room with the roaring fire and clumps of deep, worn chairs. Read and forget. She could feel herself forgetting already!
It was a mantra she kept up for the remainder of the day, which was spent browsing in the shops, having lunch in a café where she watched the world hurry by under brilliant blue but freezing skies, and reading book number one in front of the fire. The couple who ran the tiny hotel were charming and showed no curiosity at her request to eat early so that she could retire to her room before midnight. By dinnertime, as she was ushered to a small table at the back of the discreetly lit dining room, now festive in preparation for celebrations later, Tessa was convinced that she was finally beginning to unwind. Maybe, she considered lazily, she would move to Dublin permanently. Start afresh. Forget everything and most of all forget Curtis Diaz.#p#分页标题#e#
Which was why, taking her time with her soup and letting her mind toy with the fantasy of a time ahead when she could barely remember his name, let alone what he looked like, Tessa almost managed not to see the tall, dark figure that was suddenly looming at the far end of the room. He was talking to Bill Winters, the owner of the hotel while his eyes drifted slowly across the expanse of the dining area. And those blue eyes connected with hers just as realisation hit home with a resounding crash. Even so, the sight of Curtis here was sufficiently unbelievable for her to take it in. So she watched as he crossed the room, blinking in disbelief. The vision didn’t clear. It continued to come closer until her shocked brain forced her to acknowledge that this was no dream. Curtis Diaz was here. At which point she gently returned her soup spoon to its bowl, before it clattered to the floor, and eyed him with gaping horror.
‘Your sister told me where you were,’ he said heavily. ‘Carry on eating. I don’t want to disrupt your meal.’
Disrupt her meal? What about disrupting her life? He had no right to be here, Tessa thought with uncurling anger. He had no right to just show up when she was trying so hard to forget all about him!
‘I seem to have lost my appetite.’ He was staring at her and she couldn’t fathom what was in those dangerous, deep blue eyes. ‘Why have you come here?’ she demanded in a low, shaking voice. ‘It’s New Year’s Eve…shouldn’t you be out somewhere?’ With a leggy blonde?
‘Do you think I want to be here?’ Curtis rasped, raking his fingers through his hair. ‘I came because I had to.’
Which smelled to Tessa of work. Curtis Diaz only felt obligated to do things that impacted on his professional life. Mr No Commitment had no such qualms when it came to emotions, she thought bitterly.
‘If it’s to do with work, forget it. My replacement can deal with whatever I left behind. There’s no way I’m going back to hold anyone’s hand and walk them through my filing system.’
‘It’s not to do with work, for God’s sake!’ He banged one fist on the table and Tessa started back in alarm, heart beating like a sledgehammer.
‘Then what? We’ve talked already. Too much. There’s nothing left to say.’
‘You never told me that you loved me.’
His words dropped like lead pellets into the thick pool of silence and every ripple that spread outwards was more horrifying than the last. Tessa felt her face whiten. She opened her mouth to speak and nothing came out.
‘I…I…well,’ she finally managed to say in a voice she didn’t recognise as her own, ‘I didn’t because it’s a ridiculous idea.’ As if to lend edge to what she had said, she laughed hysterically, a little too hysterically.
Someone came to remove her soup bowl and she was aware of Curtis telling him to wait a while before he brought the next course. The instruction was accepted with a deferential nod. Tessa watched all this through a haze of sickening panic.