That really only left one other option, because he might be many things but he wasn’t stupid enough to ask if it was the time of the month, and that option was him.
He took a breath and braced himself. ‘What have I done?’
‘You? Nothing.’
‘Right.’
She shrugged and drank what was left of her wine. ‘Forget it. It’s late and you have an early start. So let’s go to bed.’
Feeling his patience begin to drain, Kit put his glass down and fought to stay calm. ‘For goodness’ sake, Lily. Don’t do this. Didn’t we say we’d communicate? Talk? Be open with each other? So tell me what’s wrong. Whatever it is, I can take it.’
For a moment there was nothing but silence and as he waited for her to respond he became oddly aware of the beat of his heart, the tingling of his skin. An odd sense of impending doom seeped into him and for the first time since they’d got back together again he felt a flicker of panic.
Then she nodded. Once, briefly, and he didn’t know if he was glad she agreed to open up or petrified at what she was going to say because there was an odd stillness about her. An eerie kind of control. The sort of calm that came before a storm.
‘OK, fine,’ she said, her voice so chilling and her small smile so horribly tight that he began to sweat. ‘You’re right. You’re absolutely right.’
He felt himself tensing and a sudden rush of adrenalin, as if his body was preparing for something, although God knew what. ‘So?’
‘I have a question for you.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Is Paula Burrows the woman you screwed while our marriage was in its death throes?’
As her words echoed through his apartment and shock rocked through him Kit went very still. Of all the possible issues that had been going through his head this hadn’t been one of them so where the hell had this suddenly sprung from?
‘How did you find out about Paula?’ he said with a frown, and then winced because that was the wrong wrong way to put it. He’d made it sound as if Paula were a dirty little secret when nothing could be further from the truth. ‘I mean, how did you hear about her?’
‘My meeting today was with her husband,’ she said, still alarmingly calm although a bit paler than she’d been a minute ago. ‘He said you’d recommended us.’
‘That’s right. I did. I’d forgotten.’
‘You’d forgotten?’ she echoed in disbelief.
‘It was a while ago.’
‘And the answer to my question?’
Kit swallowed hard and killed the temptation to lie because even though it would be the easy way out of this he hadn’t lied to her yet and he didn’t intend to start now. He’d promised her honesty and she’d get it, whatever the fallout. ‘The answer is yes,’ he said, and waited for her reaction, not knowing how the hell he was going to handle it.
Lily went very pale and was gripping the stem of her glass so tightly her knuckles were white. ‘I see,’ she said with a faint nod. ‘So let me get this straight. You work with the woman you cheated on me with. You still see her. And you didn’t think to tell me.’
Knowing that if he wasn’t careful this conversation could go very badly very easily, Kit decided to stick to the unvarnished truth, however brutal. ‘It didn’t occur to me,’ he said, and inwardly winced because it might be the truth but it sounded wholly inadequate.
Lily stared at him as if unable to believe her ears. ‘It didn’t occur to you?’
‘No. She’s worked on a handful of projects for us and I’ve seen her at the most half a dozen times in the last couple of years.’
‘And what do you do when you do? Reminisce about old times?’
‘Of course not,’ he said, choosing to ignore her sarcasm and remain calm and focused because in the face of her evident anger that seemed the only way to get through this. ‘It’s just business.’
‘But none of mine, it would seem.’
He heard the hurt and the bitterness in her voice and it made his heart contract, but what could he say to that? The truth was that he hadn’t thought of Paula as the woman he’d slept with since the morning after that terrible night, when following his confession and the blazing row he’d had with Lily he’d gone into work, resigned on the spot and cleared his desk.
He hadn’t thought to tell Lily about her because Paula genuinely hadn’t crossed his mind once in the last eight weeks.