‘Please don’t give me those kind of details!’ shrieked Fran.
‘My confidence was shot to pieces, my self-esteem at an all-time low. I felt that my life was suspended because I still wanted him so much. I just couldn’t get him out of my system.’ She sighed. ‘The Valentine ball was my last-ditch attempt, but I knew it was hopeless, even before I saw him dancing with you. The others thought that he really liked you.’
‘I actually think that he did,’ said Fran sadly. ‘But it’s too late now.’
‘Are you sure?’
Fran was not in the mood for telling Rosie that he had just left, uttering the most final-sounding goodbye she had ever heard in her life. Because she had chosen to listen to the story of a scorned woman, instead of what she knew in her heart to be true. ‘Quite sure,’ she said crisply.
‘Fran, just let me tell you something else.’
‘What?’ Fran’s voice was wary.
‘You know he kissed you on the dance floor?’
‘What about it?’
‘Well, that was when I realised that there was no hope any more. And that’s what made me so reckless, I think. You see, he never kissed me, Fran, not once. Even though I shared his bed for the night.’
Fran swallowed as her mind tried to work out the implications of this. No kissing. Sex without tenderness. The opposite of what she had shared with him. ‘Listen, Rosie, I have to go—’
‘But don’t you want to hear about the man I’m going to marry?’
Perhaps she should have chosen just that moment to tell Rosie that she was probably the most insensitive person in the world, but Fran didn’t have the heart. Surely one person who was hurting this badly was enough to be with?
‘Not now,’ she said. ‘I have something l need to do.’
After she had put the phone down, she paced round the flat, trying to put herself in Sam’s place. Would he have flown straight back to London? Or booked into a hotel? And if so, which hotel?
She ran over to her address book where she had all the hotels listed, and started with the best, hardly able to believe her luck when they informed her that yes, Mr. Lockhart had a reservation, and that yes, they would try to find him for her, but they thought that he might be in the process of checking out, if he hadn’t already done so.
Well, she wasn’t going to give him the opportunity.
‘If you see him—tell him to wait!’ Fran puffed.
She ran straight out of the flat and into the street where she hailed a taxi. The driver pulled over, giving her a rather funny look and she wondered why until she realised that she was still in her gold-satin kimono! She looked down at it in horror for a moment, and then shrugged her shoulders. What the heck, she thought. This was Ireland, after all!
‘Get me to the Sherbourne, quick!’ she demanded. ‘Break as many speed limits as you like, just don’t hurt anyone on the way!’
‘Right!’ grinned the driver, who looked as though he had spent his entire life waiting for someone to say just that to him!
The Sherbourne was opulent and grand without being in the least bit stuffy, but even so Fran raised more than a few eyebrows as she rushed inside, tightening the gold-satin sash around her waist as she did so.
‘Can I help you?’ asked the receptionist, giving an almost imperceptible look of alarm in the direction of one of the burly doormen.
‘I’d like to see Mr. Sam Lockhart,’ said Fran. ‘Please.’
‘And is he expecting you?’
Fran indicated her rather unconventional attire. ‘Well, hardly!’
The receptionist ran her eyes down a list in front of her. ‘I think he may have already checked out—’
‘So I have,’ came a deep voice and Fran spun round to find a pair of sapphire eyes studying her with some bemusement.
‘Sam!’ she cried. ‘Oh, Sam!’
The receptionist was now obviously sizing the two of them up and had decided there was no way that someone like Sam would wish to be bothered with someone like Fran.