‘I still can’t understand why you are going through with it,’ Sophia said with a disapproving snap.
‘You’ve seen him with Robbie, Sophia,’ Melanie reminded her. In an effort to get Sophia and Rafiq to stop sniping at her about each other she had invited Sophia round for drinks. Rafiq had been about to take Robbie to bed when she’d arrived. She had caught him holding his son in his arms, accepting the kind of love-shining hugs Melanie had witnessed many times. ‘They adore each other. I couldn’t stop this now even if I wanted to,’ she concluded heavily.
‘Do you want to?’
She hesitated a bit too long without answering.
‘So you’re the sacrificial lamb.’ Sophia sighed.
Oh, yes, Melanie thought. I sacrifice myself every night in his arms.
Getting up, she walked back to the rail filled with frothy white dresses and began flicking restless fingers along the selection. Why did she let him get away with it? she was asking herself crossly. Had she no pride left at all? 138
She knew the trigger that set him off each time. It was called Serena Cordero. Plant the beautiful Spaniard’s name into his head and he responded by diving into sex like a man in search of blind escape!
But you dive right in there with him, she admitted. In fact you only have to start thinking about diving in and you break out in a hot sweat.
‘I’ll try this one,’ she said, choosing a gown at random which she passed to the hovering assistant who carried it off to the dressing room.
Sophia waited until the woman had gone out of earshot before she said tentatively, ‘Melanie…have you thought about when you’re married to him and things become…intimate?’
‘Are you joking?’ she gasped.
But, no, Sophia wasn’t joking, she realised. She was actually looking like a rather anxious mother hen trying to prepare her innocent chick for what the big bad rooster did.
‘I’m sorry to disillusion you about me, Sophia,’ she responded. ‘But what do you think we have been doing in my home all this time?’
For the first time ever she saw shock then embarrassment flood her tough friend’s face. ‘You mean you—’
The words dried up. Melanie laughed; it sounded strangled. She spun back to face the rail. The silence between them sizzled with the kind of images that just did not belong in this pretty shop adorned with chaste and virginal white.
‘But I thought—’
‘Well, don’t think,’ Melanie cut in on a tight little mutter. Her cheeks were hot. Sophia’s cheeks were hot. What was it about people that they believed they could make assumptions about her? Rafiq believed she was a sex-hungry wanton; Sophia believed she was about as naive and dumb as a woman with a seven-year-old child could possibly be!
Maybe this was a good time for the assistant to reappear, because she helped to carry them over a very uncomfortable moment. Melanie scowled at the dresses on display and wondered what Rafiq would do if she turned up to their wedding in her best black suit?
A beautifully manicured hand appeared to one side of her. ‘You are your own worst enemy, aren’t you?’ Sophia murmured sombrely. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘try this…’
Sophia had pulled a misty-blue silk suit out from amongst the swathes of white. Her whole attitude altered from that moment on. She’s given up on me, Melanie realised as she wriggled into the fitted blue suit. I’ve put myself beyond redemption.
But then I placed myself beyond that when I let him make love to me knowing he was using me to block out another woman, she acknowledged helplessly.
She bought the misty-blue suit. It looked right somehow—made her legs seem longer and her hair more golden, made her eyes glow a deeper shade.
‘What do you think?’
Rafiq was standing in the hallway of Melanie’s house while Ethan Hayes was still looking about him with an interested eye. ‘You must already know that it has tremendous potential,’ Ethan told him. ‘But I don’t know how you expect to modernise the whole house while still maintaining every worn-out feature.’
‘There is an old man’s life etched into those features,’ Rafiq explained. ‘Can we not give the shell an uplift, then simply put everything else back the way it is now?’
‘I am an architect, not a miracle-worker,’ Ethan said dryly ‘The heating is useless, the fires belch smoke, the floorboards creak worryingly and the walls seem to be warning anyone that dares go near them not to remove a single picture unless you want them to fall down. All of that can be put right,’ he stated. ‘But the wallpaper will have to be hand-reproduced, the furniture will need to be sent away for some careful renovation, and nothing we replace will have the patina of age it wears now. I have a worrying suspicion that the deeper we look, we will find wet rot and dry rot, not
to mention woodworm. You need Leona on this, not me, Rafiq,’ he concluded.
‘Leona is busy with other things,’ Rafiq reminded him. ‘I just wanted your opinion before I decided whether to go ahead.’
‘It would be simpler to gut it and start from scratch,’ Ethan advised. ‘You only have to look at the other houses on this street to see what it can look like, given the chance.’