Ken picked up the phone, slipped it under his ear and pulled his tie on while he spoke.
‘Yes? Okay, I’m on my way. Tell them to go ahead and get him into pre-op.’
When he put the phone down, Lila looked at him quizzically.
‘So you do actually have a surgery this morning? I thought you were just saying that as an excuse to leave home early. Didn’t you only have an afternoon surgery scheduled today?’
‘An angiogram. Came in late last night.’
She couldn’t hide her disappointment. She’d booked out an hour slot for him this morning on her work schedule – her bosses didn’t need to know that the wealth of orders that came from Ken’s department required five minutes of conversation and fifty-five minutes of the kind of demonstration that hadn’tcome from her company presentation manual. So far today was turning out to be a complete bust. Unless…
‘Will you be finished for noon? I was supposed to meet my mum for lunch but she got a better offer. We could…’
‘River Hotel,’ he said briskly, pulling his jacket on and making for the door, already in fully fledged ‘doctor’ mode. Lila got a flutter of a thrill just from watching him.
God, he was sexy. She felt no guilt about their affair, but even if she had, this feeling of desperate attraction would have been enough to muffle it to death.
‘I’ll have a couple of hours before afternoon surgery.’
‘That’s all?’ Lila asked, exaggerating the petulance.
He smiled – that gorgeous, square-jawed smile that made him look like the doctor in an American soap.
‘That’s all,’ he repeated, running a tantalising finger down the side of her cheek. ‘But I promise we’ll make it count.’
That was the moment. The moment that she decided that she wasn’t going to wait any longer, couldn’t bear not to have him. Enough of playing to his timescale. A plan had been forming in her mind for a long, long time, one that took bottle and a bit of subterfuge, and sure it risked backfiring in a major way, but Lila just had to have confidence that it wouldn’t. She wasn’t prepared to spend another Christmas hoping he’d get away to call her. She definitely didn’t want to spend it pretending to Cammy that they were love’s young dream.
She wanted Ken. And her. Together. Waking up on Christmas morning, swapping the kind of gifts that involved nudity.
No more procrastination. Ken would thank her when it was done and they were together.
By the end of the day, she decided, Ken Manson would be all hers. He just didn’t know it yet.
10 a.m. – Noon
5
Caro
The old man was snoozing now and it reminded her of a photo she’d found in a box of oldpictures of her grandad, fast asleep in a chair, still wearing his party hat after his Christmas lunch. Her granddad on her mother’s side. Caro couldn’t ever remember being curious about her grandparents on her father’s side. There was no conversation that she could recall, no big discussion, only the knowledge, for as far back as she could remember, that her dad’s parents had also died before she was born.
A memory, from a long time ago, surfaced into her consciousness. Her mum, Yvonne, brushing Caro’s hair before bedtime. She’d been about five, maybe six. Her dad sleeping on the sofa. There had been something wrong with him, but Caro hadn’t understood it at the time. He’d been ill and before he came back they’d gone to visit him somewhere. In hospital perhaps? Her forehead crumpled as she tried to pull out more details from the dusty recesses of her childhood. Nothing. Just a feeling that she’d been afraid, and that her mother, Yvonne, had been too.
‘We’re all he’s got,’ her mum had said, almost wistfully, as she ran a huge paddle brush through Caro’s hair. ‘That’s why we have to take such good care of him.’
Her mind turned the volume up on another conversation from long ago. This time she’d been eight or nine. It was in the summer holidays, and her dad was home for a few days, before heading off somewhere else with his Very Important Job.
She didn’t often get bored – there were always more books to read, more stories to write – but on this day she was missing the company of her school friends.
‘I wish I wasn’t an only child,’ she’d announced over a banana sandwich lunch.
‘What are you talking about?’ Dad had responded, in what she could see now was feigned shock. ‘That’s the best way to be! Can you imagine sharing your Christmas presents with someone else?’
She’d thought about it and immediately decided that being an only child maybe wasn’t so bad after all. Dad was okay and he had no brothers or sisters either.
Except… perhaps now she did.
Lila Anderson.
