Chapter Eight
Mia
I’d lost my mind. There was no other explanation for me accosting Luke outside the gym and coercing him into being my silent fuck toy. Not that he’d taken much coercion...or had he? It was hard to tell—I didn’t know him anymore.
I barely knew myself.
The phone number he’d scrawled on my arm haunted me, even now, three days after I’d scrubbed it from my skinwithout noting it down anywhere else. What waswrongwith me? Had I really hounded him down for nothing? Or was coming to my senses for the best?
Either way, I hadn’t been to the gym since, and blaming my insane behaviour on a year of celibacy and the rush of exercise-fuelled endorphins was the only thing getting me through.
It helped that Luke seemed to have disappeared off the face ofthe earth. After a fortnight of seeing him everywhere, Gus had apparently taken to walking home from work every night.
“Don’t start,” he said. “I’m so over you and him, and you’ve only been back two weeks.”
I had nothing sensible to say. I made him the worst stir-fry in the world for dinner and retreated to my room. It was Saturday night—the eve of my sole lie-in of the week as I didn’ttake orders or open the shop on Sundays—and I was bored. Restless. A dangerous thing, as for me, restless equalled reckless. In an effort to distract myself from hunting down Luke’s number, I fished my divorce papers out of the drawer I’d stuffed them in.
Signing them was easy, but letting go of five years of hard work was proving more difficult. Freedom was worth a lot, but my mother haddied for everything I’d ever made of myself. Giving it up cut me to the bone.
Gus came upstairs as I was flicking despairingly through the pages.
“I’m going out.”
I rolled my eyes. “Of course you are.”
“Don’t be like that. I asked you if you wanted to do something.”
It was true, but I’d refused his offer of company in favour of sulking in my room like a stroppy teenager.
“Is that your divorce stuff?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you ever going to tell me about that?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Who he is. How it started. Why it ended. The usual stuff,chère sœur.”
I sighed. Gus had been pretty good about letting me be, but I couldn’t hold out on him forever. “His name was Laurent. I met him at a dodgy wine bar in Porte d’Orléans when I was looking for cheappremises for my first shop. I was young and stupid, and he promised me everything I’d never had—everything I thought I wanted. But he turned out to be a controlling douchebag, and when he realised I’d figured that out, he drained our bank accounts and ran off with a mutual friend.”
“When was this?”
“A year ago. By then we’d invested in a bigger shop, and I tried to keep it going, but he’dtaken so much I had to fold. I came back here with all I had left, thankful I’d stashed some capital in UK accounts he didn’t know about.”
Gus folded his arms and leaned on the door frame, concern clouding the hurt swimming in his dark gaze. “Are you scared of him?”
“What?”
“Come on, Mia. You think I didn’t see your face when this envelope turned up? Or the way you jump every timethe shop door opens? I know you’re dancing around Luke, but I’ve never seen you on edge like this.”
“I’m not on edge.”
“Mia.”
“I’mnot,” I snapped, before it occurred to me that Gus wasn’t as easily persuaded by me shouting as he’d been five years ago. “It’s just—I don’t know. He was a weird guy, okay? I can’t explain it... It’s just—”
I stopped and tried to find words to describethe handsome stranger who’d charmed me so absolutely back then. “Laurent always gets what he wants. And he doesn’t like decisions being taken out of his hands. He’s divorcing me so I don’t get to divorce him, but even though he’s rinsing me for everything we had together, it feels too easy. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
