Lynne Marshall – Marry Me: The Proposal Plan / Single Dad, Nurse Bride / Millionaire in Command (страница 12)

Elizabeth smiled at her. ‘How is your young man, dear?’ she asked politely. Lucy felt a rush of sudden guilt. Her mind had been full of Gabriel and talking about their shared past had made her feel happy and nostalgic, but also unsettled. She could kick herself for feeling so girly and flustered at the suggestion of them ever being a couple. She hadn’t spared a thought for Ed all day. But that didn’t necessarily mean she was betraying him, did it? It was just this place, nothing more. Being here was bound to stir up her feelings. Her past here had been so turbulent, it would surely be strange if it didn’t evoke strong emotions.

‘Ed? He’s well, thank you.’ She felt a sudden desire to confide in Elizabeth, to affirm to her, and perhaps also to herself, that romantic thoughts in her head were linked only to him and not for a second to Gabriel. ‘Between you and me I was hoping we might settle down and get married, but he doesn’t seem to take the hint. Gabriel thinks he’s lazy and doesn’t do enough to look after me, but you know how overprotective he can be.’

Elizabeth sighed. She was quiet for a moment before saying, ‘Relationships, Lucy, good relationships, don’t come along by accident in my experience. You have to work at them. Both of you. One of you doing everything just isn’t enough—it has to be a partnership. Gordon and I have had our ups and downs—goodness, we’ve been married a long time now. But we’ve always pulled together. He’s a pain sometimes but I wouldn’t be without him, not for anything.’

Lucy grinned.

‘Only you can say if this Ed puts enough effort in. You make sure he’s the right one for you. You deserve nothing less.’

Shortly afterwards they returned to the house and Lucy was glad when she and Gabriel left for Bath. Talking to Elizabeth had stirred her mind up far too much for her to relax on the journey home. She sat in silence in the car next to Gabriel, the memory coming unbidden to her in all its clarity of the first time she’d met Alison, and her face flushed with mortification as she remembered the circumstances of that meeting.

If Gabriel had guessed how she was feeling after he left for uni, he never let on, just behaving the way he always did, full of news about his course, his new life and his new friends. Yet her delusions had grown until she’d believed herself to be in love with him. The brotherly hugs he gave her and the occasional holding of her hand she’d begun to construe as reciprocation of her fledgling feelings, and she would lay awake at night thinking about him.

She blushed as she remembered her behaviour. A typical stupid teenage crush, that was what it had been. And she’d come so close to Gabe finding out about it that the memory alone still made her heart hammer and her cheeks burn.

Shortly into Gabriel’s second term, his visits home began to dwindle and he was useless at keeping in touch. Lucy phoned him so often that she later realised she must have been becoming a pest. She recalled now that there were many occasions when his housemates had told her he was out. With the benefit of age and maturity she now saw that he was probably fed up with her constant contact and was trying, albeit gently, to avoid her.

Convinced Gabriel would feel the same about her if she could just see him and declare her feelings, she’d decided on impulse to visit him one day, when missing him had all become too much. She remembered gazing out of the window of the bus from the train station and thinking to herself how busy and vibrant Oxford seemed compared to the Cotswold villages she was used to. She remembered the butterflies in her stomach on the bus to his digs as the miles between them fell away…

She grinned as she climbed the steps to his front door, thinking how pleased he would be to see her. She was wearing a new sea-green top, which she knew brought out the colour of her eyes, and she ’d spent ages trying to get her hair to behave itself. But the broad smile she’d been unable to keep off her face dwindled as the door opened. Not Gabriel but a slender and impossibly pretty blonde girl.

The girl smiled kindly at Lucy. ‘Can I help you? ‘

Lucy craned to see behind her into the hallway. Maybe she’d got the wrong house. But before she had time to say anything Gabriel himself appeared. He came to the door and suddenly she felt light-headed. She didn’t look up into the gorgeous slate-grey eyes and walk into his embrace, the way she’d planned to all the way here. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from his arm, which slid easily around the blonde girl’s waist as he nestled close enough to her to enable him to see around the door.

‘Lucy!’ he exclaimed, in obvious surprise. She noticed he didn’t let go of the girl as he opened the door wider. Instead he slipped his hand into hers and they surveyed her together. Lucy felt her heart twist in her chest and she swallowed hard to stop the burning sensation that began at the back of her throat. She had to find a way out of this.

‘Surprise!’ she said on impulse, weakly shrugging her shoulders. She was agonisingly aware suddenly of how idiotic she must seem to Gabriel just turning up like this unannounced, like some runaway.

‘Lucy, this is a lovely surprise, but does your dad know you’re here?’ His unintended patronising concern made her face flame with humiliation. She was sixteen after all, not a child.

Before she could speak, he addressed the blonde girl. ‘Ali, this is Lucy.’ Lucy couldn’t seem to look away from the entwined hands. ‘I told you about her. Kind of like my baby sister from back home. ‘

Alison smiled at her. ‘Hi, Lucy,’ she said warmly. ‘It’s good to meet you. Gabriel’s mentioned you a few times. It’s nice to put a face to a name. ‘

A few times. Gabriel hadn’t been out of her thoughts for longer than a few minutes these past weeks, but he clearly hadn’t been dwelling on her in the same way.

She was snatched back from her thoughts of the past when Gabriel touched her hand briefly before replacing his on the steering wheel. ‘You’re quiet, Lu. Everything all right?’

‘Fine. I’m just tired.’ Her hand tingled at his touch and she stared down at it. Oh, what is happening here? She felt the blush creep up her face, as if Oxford had happened yesterday, and she was grateful that his attention was focused on the road so he wouldn’t notice. She remembered that she only managed to stomach an hour or so of seeing the two of them together. Alison was studying medicine and they both had rooms in the shared house. She could see they were besotted with each other. Lucy had been so full of excitement at seeing him, believing him to be unknowingly in love with her, expecting to fall into his arms as it all became clear to him. Well, she’d certainly found him in love, just not with her.

She’d managed to hold it together at the house but she’d sobbed her heart out all the way back to Gloucestershire on the bus and then the train. The only comfort she’d had was that she’d stopped short of making a fool of herself by exposing her feelings to him. His baby sister. It stung. She was so hurt and humiliated that her first instinct had been to avoid him completely. She stopped calling him after that. But she quickly realised how stupid she was to think she could cut him from her life. She needed him far too much for that.

So when he’d brought Alison back to the manor she hadn’t stayed away. It had crushed her to see how happy he was. It became clear that their relationship was not going to be over quickly. That it was a proper, adult relationship. Alison completed him in a way Lucy never had. They’d been all things to each other for so long and now she wasn’t enough for him any more. And she began to see with growing, frightening clarity that there could very easily be no place for her at all in all this. She was totally dispensable in the face of his perfect future with Alison. And under threat of losing him altogether, she’d made a decision. Better to keep him as a friend than to lose him completely from her life because of her own stupid pride.

And so it was that she had played the part of childhood best friend until it became no longer an act and was second nature to her. In the years since she had managed to convince herself that her behaviour had been nothing more than a ridiculous teenage crush, brought on by the sudden gap he had left in her life when he went to university, combined with the worsening hell that was her inescapable home life.

Since that awful moment at sixteen she’d never again allowed herself to consider Gabriel as more than a friend, a brother, but that apparently hadn’t stopped his parents doing just that. Thinking about it now made her feel suddenly hot, as if she’d walked into a sauna. Before she could stop herself she was trying the idea for size in her head. Her stomach fluttered and she covered it angrily with her hands. It had been a crush. Nothing more.

Then why did you blush when his mother mentioned it? She fought that thought with all her might. She couldn’t imagine a circumstance in which she would lay their friendship on the line. Gabriel was useless at relationships; they rarely lasted longer than a month. He just didn’t seem to have it in him since Alison died. Lucy’s talk today with his mother had highlighted that more strongly than ever. What if they got together and it didn’t work out? For the first time since she was sixteen she considered what it would be like to have a life without Gabe in it, and it shocked her to the core now as it had then. She would never allow that to happen.