‘Well leave quicker. You don’t want the party to be over before you get there.’
‘That’s fine. Okay, I’ll be right there.’
Her grin lasted all the way to the Starbucks drive through – a cappuccino for her and a skinny macchiato for Ken.
She turned up Clyde on the radio, and sang along to a throwback song from Simple Minds. It was her dad’s favourite song, and Ken liked it too – a bit weird but not entirely surprising given that they were almost the same age. Not that they’d ever met. Lila had never told her parents she was seeing a married man. What was the point of admitting that someone wouldn’t leave his wife to be with her? At least, not yet.
If this were a Greek tragedy, she had no doubt that there would be some profound theory that she was attracted to older men because she’d missed her dad so much as a child and never really felt his closeness or approval. But what did the Greeks know? All that mattered was that she loved Ken, and when they’d been apart, she missed their meetings. Missed feeling like this. Missed him.
She’d met him on her first month on the job, bumped into him a few weeks later at a medical conference, and been in bed with him by midnight. Since then, it had been an excruciating seven years of secrets, promises, pleasure and pain. They only ever met in hotels, at quiet meeting points in remote locations or in his office. The closest they’d come to anything resembling a normal relationship was when he travelled to compete in marathons, or to medical conferences. She’d go with him, and there, out of sight, they could eat, and drink, and hold hands and be like every other loved-up couple. That was the pleasure. The pain kicked in when the jealousy crept up on her, when he broke another promise to leave his wife, or when she just desperately wanted to tell the world that she was hisgirl. She wanted to be Mrs Kenneth Manson. It was like an addiction that she just could not break, no matter how many times he let her down or how hard she tried.
When they’d split the last time, she’d been sure it had been for good, had tried to convince herself that was the case. They’d been in a gorgeous suite at the Blythswood Square Hotel, courtesy, once again, of her company expense account. They were well into their second bottle of wine when she’d pushed him to leave his wife, pressed him for a time frame for them to be together, accused him of keeping her dangling on a string for years, reminded him that she wanted to be married by the time she was thirty next year.
He’d refused. Given her the same old line. He’d leave his marriage when the time was right and only he would decide when that would be. She’d cried. She’d raged. But he didn’t budge, so she’d stormed out of the hotel room, gone to the bar, and when she was pulling out her key card to charge her drink to the room, she’d come across the business card that cute guy in the menswear shop had given her that afternoon. On impulse, she’d called, he’d come and picked her up, and she’d cut Ken out of her life.
For a while.
The truth was, much as she tried to make it work with Cammy, he wasn’t her guy. Gorgeous, yes. Funny too. But he didn’t have a shred of Ken’s maturity or come close to his intellect. That’s what turned her on. His brains. His presence. What a cliché. The beautiful young blonde and the distinguished older doctor. She was a trophy wife waiting to happen, if only Ken would bloody hurry up and realise it.
When they’d met up again at the convention in London a few weeks ago, she’d immediately sussed that he’d missed her as much as she’d been lost without him.
She’d worn the red dress he loved in the hope that he’d be there and it didn’t let her down. By midnight, it had been discarded on the floor of a room at The Dorchester – God bless the company credit card – and by dawn, he was promising her they’d make it work.
It was going to happen. She knew it. She hadn’t gambled seven years of her life to walk away with nothing.
In the meantime, she hadn’t had the heart to tell Cammy it was over yet. What was the point? So she could lie alone every night, thinking about what Ken was doing, visualising him sleeping with his wife? Cammy was fun, easy on the eye, and good enough in bed that she didn’t think of Ken every time she orgasmed, so she’d been happy to hang on to him.
Now, it was time for that to change. It had to. Time to move on and seal the deal on the next stage of her life.
She pulled into the parking space outside the hospital and made her way through the complex maze of corridors and lifts to Ken’s office on the fifth floor. Private hospital of course. Ken had given up working for the NHS years before, although that wife of his was still nursing over at Glasgow Central.
His secretary, Marge, was already parked at her desk, her face a mask of efficiency and disapproval. Over the years, Lila had given up trying to win her over. Thankfully, she was screwing Ken, not Marge, so what did it matter what the old boot thought of her? She’d soon change her tune when she was Mrs Lila Manson, wife of the esteemed cardiac surgeon. Then, metaphorically, Marge could kiss her slutty black-knickered arse.
Lila chirped a cheery ‘Good morning’ to the bitter crone as she passed, long having established that she didn’t have to wait to be announced.
The noise of the shower in the office en suite told her that Ken had probably only just arrived before her, no doubt having cycled in. She loved that he kept himself in such good shape. He was over twenty years older than her, but his body – while it didn’t compare to Cammy – was that of a man ten years younger. The age difference didn’t even factor for her though. She’d always had a thing for older men, as her sixth year biology teacher had found out, when she bumped into him a year or two later on a visit to her uni to give a guest lecture to the science students. They’d spent the next two nights in his South Side flat doing things that they’d probably once covered in human anatomy.
The sound of the shower stopped, followed a few moments later by the click of the door. Ken smiled when he saw her sitting on his desk.
‘Calling me this morning? Naughty,’ he told her, but she could see he wasn’t annoyed. He liked her boldness, just as long as it didn’t actually go as far as getting them caught.
A familiar thought ran through Lila’s mind. Surely Bernadette must know? She must. How could she not have guessed, not have questioned all those nights when he was with Lila instead of going home to her? Surely, for her own dignity, she should walk away and allow Ken to be with someone who was a perfect match for him?
Lila pushed the question aside, deciding to address the more pressing matters in front of her right now. She held up the coffee.
‘Room service,’ she announced, flashing a smile that came from the best cosmetic dentist in the city and had set her dad back ten grand. Not that her father had come and held her hand, but a BACS transfer was the second best thing.
Ken took the lid off, dipped his finger in, then trailed a slick of warm coffee from the middle of her neck down to the space between her breasts. She gasped as he leant down and followed the caffeinated path with his tongue. Lila threw her head back, lost in the double pleasure of his hand moving up her thigh.
She opened her legs wider to allow…
The buzz of the phone interrupted the crescendo of ecstasy that was working its way from the toes of her Louboutins upwards.
‘Don’t answer it,’ she whispered, biting his earlobe, holding him there.
‘You know I have to,’ he said, yanking his head away, all business again now.
The ecstasy was immediately swept away by a tsunami of irritation. That bitch Madge. She’d probably timed that, waiting for what she reckoned would be just the right moment to disturb them.
