Page 3 of Moonlight Kisses at Willow Tree Hall

‘You have lipstick on your face,’ she finally blurted out.

He brought out a handkerchief and wiped away the traces of scarlet from his lips, the silence stretching out between them as she watched.

After he had put his handkerchief back into his pocket and finally made eye contact with her, she exploded.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she told him, reeling from what she had witnessed. ‘Two years of going out and I can’t believe you chose tonight of all nights to cheat on me. I thought we were happy! I thought you were going to propose!’

‘I wasn’t,’ he suddenly snapped, coming back to life. ‘Youthought I was going to propose.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘And God forbid we should step away from your wretched life plan!’

She gave a start. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I mean, our whole lives have been mapped out according to you! When we get engaged, married, kids… It’s exhausting!’

Lily was shocked. How had this become her fault?

‘I thought you loved me,’ she told him, the pain causing her words to thicken in her throat.

‘You don’t give anyone a chance to love you,’ he told her. ‘You’re so busy organising everyone and making them feel insecure that you don’t give anyone a chance. Especially when they muck up and make a mistake. If they’re not perfect, you shut down on them.’

‘I’m not like that,’ she told him quickly.

His handsome face was staring stonily at her now. ‘It makes you cold, Lily. Ice cold. You’re like some kind of robot on automatic pilot.’

Tears stung her eyes. He really thought she was that bad? Surely he understood why she had closed her emotions off for so long? That the pain in her past had made her the way she was?

She struggled to hold herself together. ‘Well, I can see now that I was sadly mistaken in thinking that we even had a future together,’ she said, in a wavering voice. ‘I shall post your front door keys through the letterbox tomorrow on the way into work.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘That’s right. Go on with your planning.’

She wanted to ask him how long he had felt like that – how long he had seemingly hated her for.

But she couldn’t bear it. She didn’t want to know how he felt any more. She was wounded and so very upset.

She shook her head, as if dislodging an annoying insect rather than watching her dreams of marriage burst into flames and die before her.

‘We must get back to the party,’ she announced. ‘We both have a job to do.’

‘Of course,’ he drawled. ‘The show must always go on, eh?’

She watched him walk away, leaving her alone in the corner of the terrace away from the other partygoers. To her horror, she felt a tear roll down her cheek. She angrily wiped it away.

Not now, she reminded herself. She didn’t have time to show weakness. She had a job to do. At least for another week, that was.

What she really wanted to do at that precise moment was to kick and scream and wail. Her younger, wilder self would have thrown a drink in his face, like in the movies. For a second, she relished the dream of Mark standing there dripping and miserable. To be free enough to do something that daring, it was so tempting…

But she reminded herself that part wasn’t her any more. The wild, emotional side of her was long since buried beneath the guilt of what she had done to her family with her selfish actions.

So Lily straightened her back and strode back towards the main hall as if she didn’t have a care in the world and her heart hadn’t just been broken into a thousand pieces.

2

Jack Carter doodled on his notepad whilst his colleague continued to drone on about something next to him.

Meetings. He seemed to spend his whole life in them.

He glanced out of the window at the blue skies high above the skyscrapers of the city of London. A glorious summer day. A perfect day to be out on his motorbike, he thought with a pang of longing. The urge to break free of the homogenised air-conditioning and smog of the city and hit the leafy country lanes on his bike was never stronger than on beautiful days like today.

He frowned to himself. Not that he could ride his motorbike at the moment. He had let the road tax lapse whilst he had been abroad in Dubai for the past three years and had yet to sort it out, despite having been home for a couple of months.