The only words he spoke were to inform her that he expected to be kept advised of what was going on with the decorating of the house and that all major decisions were naturally to be referred to him, as her boss.
‘Naturally,’ Laura responded with equal cool and she held her head high as she walked away from him, only allowing her emotions to spill over when she was on the train heading back.
At least he would no longer be working under the same roof and she would be spared having to live alongside him, without the joy of knowing his body at night. How easy it had been for her to ignore the truth and kid herself that it didn’t really exist.
Anna had simply forced a situation and she should have been grateful for that because love just grew with time and her love would have known no boundaries.
It was late by the time she reached the house. The workmen had all left, thankfully, although the house hardly felt like a home with the wallpaper stripped from a lot of the walls and the downstairs carpet in the process of being removed.
Laura was barely aware of the chaos, however. She bypassed the kitchen, ignoring the rumbling in her stomach, and headed straight for the bedroom. Luxuriating in a bath seemed like a needless waste of time, so she had a quick shower instead, and then got into her pyjamas, which were items of clothing that she had not recently been wearing.
Gabriel had told her that he had liked to feel her nakedness next to him even when he was asleep, and she had been all too happy to oblige. Now they were a mocking reminder that all of that was over. She was back to pyjamas and loneliness with the added bonus of a future filled with anguished memories and regret.
Gabriel, she was sure, was not lying in his king-sized bed with its silk duvet, nursing thoughts of misery and loss. Hopefully, he was not flicking through his little black book and seeking out her immediate replacement. No, she more imagined him sitting in front of a computer somewhere in the house, in another of those designer-clad, soulless rooms, working.
He would have been. He should have been. If only he could manage to stand up without falling over. Alcohol never had been his way of dealing with anything but, from the relative comfort of a chair in one of the sitting areas, it seemed like a damned good idea. It blurred his feverish, maddening thoughts into a manageable numbness. Unfortunate that it also had such a numbing effect on his limbs, aside, that was, from his arm, which seemed to function perfectly when it came to topping up the whisky glass.
All he needed now was to fall asleep and be spared the occasional pain when a coherent thought managed to find its way to his brain, to remind him of what he had lost and to jeer at him for having got himself in such a position that he had been vulnerable enough to feel the pain of losing.
She didn’t love him. Never had, never would. She had just enjoyed the sex he had provided. He had heard it with his own two ears, and, drunk or not, he was not so far gone that he couldn’t remember that much. He had preached to her a load of bull that it shouldn’t have made a scrap of difference, but he could have been preaching to himself because it did. He could never touch her again now that he knew, for sure, how emotionally indifferent she was to him, but he couldn’t imagine a world in which she was not there to touch and talk to and laugh with. He shook his head in a dazed fashion and wondered whether another small drink might not send him into the arms of sweet, forgetful sleep. Unfortunately, the bottle, he realised, was empty, and he was too damned heavy-limbed to do anything about replacing it.#p#分页标题#e#
At a little past midnight, he finally drifted to sleep with the grim realisation that morning was not going to bring a whole lot more peace of mind.
But he would never go back to her. Even if being apart from her killed him in the process. He would have his things removed and keep in casual touch via telephone, or better still e-mail, even if that meant buying her a computer and getting someone to have it up and running. If he had to come face to face with her, he would bring someone in tow, preferably a very sexy woman, just to prove once and for all how little she had meant to him and to safeguard himself from doing something he might later regret. Such as fall back under her spell.
In a confused way, it all seemed to make sense when the alcohol was still swimming through his bloodstream, and in the morning, when he finally surfaced, he had enough wit to get on the phone and order his secretary to arrange for his things to be returned to London.
Which was why, soon after three in the afternoon, Laura was at hand to witness the quick and efficient departure of all evidence that Gabriel had ever set up office in the house.