The Birds and the Bees(62)

Jo MacLean heard the mobile ring and she clicked ‘ignore'. It was  Matthew. She relished the thought of the panic he must be in now, but  she felt no sympathy. Not once had he convinced her he was the Golden  Goose but a second time, with that ridiculous paltry lottery win. What  he had coming to him would serve him right, because if she had known the  truth about his financial state, she would never have left Adam.

Out of all the men she'd had, she really had regretted letting Adam go  the most. He'd been lovely – kind, generous and so very gentle. She hadn't  even minded that much about the revolting ponytail and long straggly  beard he had been growing to shave off for charity, and that spoke  volumes. She wished now that she had stayed and married him – well, for a  while anyway. He had been bitten hard before and was nervous about  taking that step, but she would have won him over to the idea, had she  not been distracted by Matthew and his hot-air talk about his so-called  investments.

She had started to notice weeks ago that Colin Seed was a far more  frequent visitor to the department than usual. Matthew had hit the nail  on the head thinking Jo was the attraction. It had been so easy to hook  him: a few tears by his Bentley in the executive car park and he was  putty in her hands. He was the contingency plan she put into place, just  in case things soured with Matthew. Jo MacLean always liked to have a  contingency plan. She made sure she was in total control of her own  destiny.                       
       
           



       

Then she had seen Adam with Stevie and it had driven her half-crazy. It  surprised her, because she didn't think herself capable of feelings that  deep. She wanted him back immediately, and it never occurred to her  that the space she had left in his life would not still be open to her.  She had gone to see him at the gym, wearing one of the suits he had  bought for her, her hair down as he liked it best, but he had turned her  down. He said he didn't love her any more.

Now Jo's suitcases were in her car ready to take to Colin's  house – Colin's monstrously huge eight-bedroomed house in the most elegant  part of Leeds suburbia – and even better, she had persuaded him to take  the position in New York.

Adoration, love-gifts, a new life in the Big Apple and pots of real  money to look forward to – this time Jo MacLean, the ultimate bird of  passage, thought she really had cracked it.



Matthew drove carefully home because his hands were shaking too much to  speed. He felt as if he was in The Blair Witch Project – a big foresty  mess that he couldn't get out of, and things could only get worse. He  pulled up noisily outside his house, plunged the key into the lock then  crashed through the rooms, calling out Jo's name in despair. She was not  there, and nor were any of her things. His house looked shabby and  dusty and full of ugly unwanted bits. It wasn't unlike his life.



Jo rang Adam from the car, just before she turned into Colin's drive.  She told him she had left Matthew and had nowhere to go. She found  herself sobbing real tears, and when she told him that she was sorry for  everything and loved him, truly loved him, she meant it.

He told her she had no idea what love was and he put the phone down.





Chapter 50




By her own admission, this was ridiculous. Stevie had all the same  feelings as a seventeen year old on her first date as she waited for  Adam to come home from work that night. She had been so full of nervous  energy back then, waiting for David Idziaszczyk to knock on her door and  take her to Rebecca's nightclub, that she had been sick on her shoes in  the hallway and had a mad scramble to wipe up and spray her legs with  her mum's Youth Dew. She dipped into the memory of her first love and  smiled. On the day she finally learned to spell his name, he'd dumped  her. She thought her life had ended and there were many dramatic  wailings to be had. The heartbreaks didn't get any easier with age but  neither did the love-bugs, now tickling the walls of her tummy, get any  less active.

Danny was staying the night at Catherine's because there was a teachers'  ‘inset' day at school tomorrow, whatever they were. Latin for ‘a rest  from the little buggers' probably. Cath was always offering to babysit  at the moment, for her own mischievous reasons, and tonight, well,  Stevie was not prepared to look a gift horse in the mouth.

She checked the large coffee cake cooking in the oven. She was quite  proud that she had managed to make it without blowing up the lovely  cottage kitchen. The vegetables were all ready in their pans, the fillet  steaks in the fridge waiting to be cooked, the wine breathing on the  work surface. Why she was going to all this trouble was anyone's guess.  Adam MacLean wouldn't look in her direction in a million years, she knew  that, but some little romantic (and stupid) part of her wanted to run  with the feeling that he might. Just for a few days. Just until her head  could get around the fact that soon they would go their separate ways  and probably only see each other in passing in the gym. Then one day she  would see him roaring past her in a sports car with a gorgeous, tall,  slim woman next to him, her long, dark hair streaming behind and Stevie  would be a distant memory, an amusing after-dinner tale at best. I once  knew a woman who wrote for Midnight Moon. Now, what was her name again … ?  And Stevie would still be alone, still writing out fictional lives full  of the hope and love that she wanted so much for herself.

She was just rolling the edges of the big cake in battered-up Flake when  he came in, dropped his bag by the door and smiled as the cocktail of  nice domestic aromas hit him at full pelt. He carried a couple of  bottles of wine in his hand. He just wanted to savour the last few days  of being with her, he knew that was all he had left. He should have told  Stevie that Jo had gone, but he feared that would accelerate her  journey back to his arms. He should leave now and not prolong the  heartache, but he just wanted to be with her, a little longer, an  hourglass-worth of time with someone who had the same voluminous  capacity to love as he did. Someone warm and generous, imperfect,  irritating, annoying, frustrating, bloody lovely.

‘Hi,' she said. ‘I got some steaks, if you want one. Nothing special.'                       
       
           



       

She had baked. This was special. Well, to him. No one, except his Granny Walker, had ever made him a cake before.

‘I got some wine, if you fancy a glass.'

‘Yes, I do, thanks. There's a bottle open already over there.'

‘Ho'd on a wee minute until I get oot o' this clobba.'

He said he liked his steak well done, not still moo-ing and struggling  on the end of his fork, as she had once thought he might. She slapped  them in the pan and as they sizzled in the hot olive oil, she smiled to  herself, thinking about him upstairs, changing out of his work ‘clobba'.

He poured two glasses of the open red, when he at last came down in a  T-shirt and jeans. She tried hard not to look at his muscular arms, the  definition of his chest under the snow-white material, his fantastic  chunk of a bum and big crushing thighs shaping the denim.

‘Where's the wean?'

‘He's at Catherine's. They're having a cinema night. The Incredibles again, I think, for the forty-billionth time.'

‘Och, that's a shame. I was going to have a kick aboot wi' him in the garden.'

Fond of him as Matthew had been, he had never once said ‘that's a shame'  when Danny wasn't around, Stevie suddenly realized. Then again, she had  realized quite a lot recently. Mostly how pale her real relationship  with Matthew had been, even when placed at the side of this imaginary  one with Adam.

‘Can I help?' he asked.

‘Yes, you can pass me the brandy and those peppercorns, unless you want your steak plain.'

‘Aye, plain for me, please. I want to taste that meat, it looks braw … good.'

‘I understand you now, you don't need to translate.'

He smiled. The wine swirled in his head already. He wanted to get  horribly plastered and rip all her clothes off, but for now, he got on  with slicing some tomatoes.

‘Bea Pollen!' he chuckled, when they were sitting down on the sofa,  mellowing after a lovely meal and gentle banter. They had both suggested  having a sobering raspberry-truffle-flavoured coffee afterwards. He,  before he really did rip her clothes off, and she before she leapt on  him and made a complete twat of herself. They had both kicked off their  shoes and their feet were inches apart on the big long footstool. She  couldn't imagine ever borrowing his socks. He had the biggest feet she  had ever seen. She tried hard not to think what that might mean,  scale-wise.