Extra Time (21 page)

‘Oh, Ryan.’ Ellen smiled, leaning forward to kiss him quickly before letting him go, her eyes back on the bracelet, but not before she’d thrown the sales assistant a very brief but nonetheless noticeable look that said
‘Back off, sister!’
And Ryan couldn’t help but smile, too. She might look all pretty and innocent, but underneath that soft exterior was a woman after his own heart. ‘Thank you so much!’

‘We’ll take it,’ Ryan said, turning the Fisher grin back up full pelt and directing it at the woman behind the counter. Her expression was a little less friendly than it had been a second ago, when she’d thought she might have stood a chance with this famous footballer, but that was before she’d realised his girlfriend wasn’t quite as oblivious to her less-than-subtle flirting than she’d first thought she was. She’d got the ‘off-limits’ message loud and clear. Once upon a time that would have bothered Ryan, but not now. He just didn’t have the energy anymore. It was nice to know he still had what it took to make the women want him, but, at the same time, he couldn’t be bothered to take all of them up on their sometimes quite-blatant offers. Not as bothered as he’d used to be, anyway. ‘Do you want to keep it on?’ he asked Ellen, who looked at him with excited eyes, nodding wildly. He handed over one of his many debit cards and watched with slight amusement as the sales assistant made the transaction, leaving him with one last renewed attempt to gain his attention. But fluttering eyelashes and a sexy smile didn’t always cut it with him these days. He was looking for more than that. He was looking for a relationship that was going to change his life, and he’d found that. Once. Whether he could do that again remained to be seen.

‘Come on.’ He smiled at Ellen, slipping his hand into hers, leaving the rejected sales assistant with one final blast of the Ryan Fisher grin before they left the shop. ‘Today’s
your
day so you decide what we do next. Whatever you want. Anything.’

‘Well,’ she said, turning to face him, standing on tiptoe to plant a kiss on his mouth. ‘I really fancy lunch somewhere, maybe in Durham, down by the river. Then how about a drive into Sunderland and a walk along the beach? It’s such a lovely day and I feel like being out in the fresh air.’

‘Really?’ Ryan grinned, snaking an arm around her waist, pulling her closer. ‘You mean, you don’t want to spend the afternoon indulging in the many delights
I’ve
got to offer?’

She giggled, nuzzling her nose against his neck. ‘There’s plenty of time for that later, isn’t there?’

‘Yeah,’ he whispered, kissing the top of her head. ‘There’s plenty of time for that later.’

There was plenty of time for everything, wasn’t there? But he knew there wasn’t. Not really. If he was going to do what he was seriously thinking about doing, then he needed to make a decision quick. But that really all depended on Amber. Everything depended on Amber. Everything.

Amber turned the cup round and round on its saucer, staring straight ahead of her. She couldn’t really describe what she was feeling right now, because she just felt empty, devoid of any emotion, Dr. Lowry’s words still ringing loud and clear in her ears –
‘It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll ever have a child of your own, Amber. I’m really very sorry…’

They kept playing over and over in her head like some cruel mantra, taunting her, telling her what she’d already known, deep down inside. But hearing the words hadn’t made facing the truth any easier. It just finally made it real.

‘Amber?’

She looked up at the sound of his voice. ‘I’m fine, so don’t ask, okay?’

Jim sat down opposite her, wishing there was something he could do, something he could say to make it all right, but what
could
he do? All he could really do was be there for her, if she wanted him to be. And the way things had gone lately he wasn’t altogether sure that was going to be the case. ‘I was thinking…’

She looked at him again, finally pushing her untouched coffee away. She just didn’t feel like drinking it.

‘How about I take some time off…’

‘Jim, come on. How the hell are you going to be able to do that, huh? The new season’s only just started, you’re in the process of defending the league title, and you know as well as I do that you can’t just take time off whenever you feel like it. You don’t have that kind of job.’

‘I can if I need to, Amber. I’m not indispensable. Colin can take over for a couple of weeks if there’s something I need to deal with…’

‘Something you need to
deal
with? This isn’t some situation that can be sorted out with a week away in Magaluf.’ She sat back, sighing heavily as she stared up at the ceiling. ‘This is something
I
have to deal with, Jim.’ She looked at him, his expression one she really couldn’t read. ‘Me. I have to live with this, and I will. I’ll get used to it. It’s not like I’ve been told I’m dying or anything.’

‘
You
have to deal with it?’

‘Yes. Me. I’m the one…’

‘And you don’t think that news affected me, too, huh? You don’t think that maybe it’s killing
me
, too? This isn’t something
you
have to deal with, Amber. It’s something
we
have to deal with. Together.’

She held his gaze, her head beginning to thump with the stress of the day, and it was only lunchtime. ‘You already have a son, Jim. You know what it’s like to be a parent, and that’s something I’ll never get the chance to experience now. So… so yes, this is something
I
have to deal with. Because you have no idea how I’m feeling right now. No idea.’

‘Do you know how selfish that sounds?’

She said nothing for a second before letting out a small laugh. ‘Sorry, you’re going to sit there and lecture
me
about being selfish? You, the man who…’ She stood up, pushing her chair back away from the table and walking over to the French windows. ‘You kept Brandon a secret from me for all those years, Jim. When I… when I came home from university, all those years ago… when I let you back into my life, despite what you’d already done to me, you knew you were a father and yet you chose to keep that from me. You chose to shut me out, to lie to me – to everyone – so don’t sit there and tell me
I’m
being selfish.’

‘I did that for
you
, Amber. Everything, all of it, I did it for you.’

She swung round to face him as he walked over to her, but she put her hand out to stop him from coming any closer. ‘No you didn’t, Jim. You didn’t do it for me, not really. You did it because you knew that telling me the truth could mean you lost everything
you
wanted. And even after all those years apart you still couldn’t do it, could you? You still couldn’t bring yourself to tell me the truth, so instead you made sure I fell so deep in love with you that once I
did
eventually find out there was no way I could walk away from you, no matter how I was really feeling. That isn’t doing it for me.’

‘Amber…’

She took a deep breath, exhaling slowly as she threw her head back again in an attempt to keep the tears that had been threatening all morning from falling, because she didn’t want to cry. Crying wouldn’t do anyone any good.

‘I can’t do this right now, Jim.’

‘Amber, come on, honey, please…’

But she’d pushed past him before he had a chance to stop her, running out of the house and into her car. She had no idea where she was going, she just knew that she needed to get out for a while, she needed to get away from Jim. She needed time to think, to get her head straight. Time to think about what she was going to do now, because she really didn’t know. In just a matter of days her world had been turned upside down – again – and where she went from here was anybody’s guess.

Ryan pressed
send
and sat back in his seat, placing both hands behind his head as he exhaled deep and loud. Had he done the right thing? Without saying a word to Max? He didn’t know. He didn’t really know anything anymore, all he knew was that he had to do something. He’d wanted to wait, wanted to see if Jim Allen’s out-of-the-blue revelation that Brandon Palmer was his son was going to have some kind of effect on his and Amber’s marriage, but who was he kidding? He was living in some kind of fantasy world where he wished things would happen with no real concrete evidence that they would ever turn out in his favour.

No, he needed to move on and he needed to make sure things were put in place to make that happen, sooner rather than later. For the sake of his own future.

Slipping his phone back into his pocket, he smiled as Ellen returned to the bench he was sitting on, carrying two polystyrene cups of coffee she’d bought from a nearby snack van. They’d just spent a pleasant half an hour walking along the coast at Seaburn, enjoying the sunshine, and for a few blissful minutes he’d almost forgotten he had anything else going on in his life other than an incredible career and a beautiful woman by his side. A beautiful woman that he could quite possibly be lining up for heartache at some point soon, even though that was the last thing he wanted.

‘Here you go.’ She smiled, handing him a coffee as she sat down beside him. ‘Isn’t it lovely here? I used to come down to this beach all the time when I was younger.’

‘Did you grow up around here?’ Ryan asked, taking a sip of extremely strong and incredibly hot coffee. Just the way he liked it.

She nodded, putting her coffee down for a second while she pulled her blonde hair back into a ponytail. ‘I was born in Newcastle, but we moved to Sunderland when I was a baby. My dad’s originally from this side of the river – Durham born and bred. And he’s a staunch Wearside Spartans fan.’

‘Whoa, I bet he was over the moon when his daughter started working at Tynebridge, then. Or did he see it more as you infiltrating enemy lines?’

She laughed, picking her coffee back up and swirling it round in the cup before taking a sip. ‘Well, he wasn’t overcome with excitement, let’s put it that way, but the fact I can get him decent seats for the local derby always makes up for the fact his only child’s working for the opposition.’

Ryan watched as she smiled at a small boy who ran past their bench into the arms of his mother, screaming with excitement as she held out an ice cream for him. He’d had a great day with Ellen, he couldn’t deny that. A long and lazy lunch in a riverside restaurant in Durham followed by this slow walk along the Sunderland seafront – he’d felt the most relaxed he’d felt in a long time. So why had he still felt the need to send that email? Why couldn’t he just give what was happening here a chance? Give Ellen a chance, a real chance. Because he knew, deep down inside, that he couldn’t really give anyone or anything a chance until he got his own head sorted. Properly sorted. Until he could move on from the one thing that was stopping him from believing he could finally make that new start.

‘You look miles away.’

Ellen’s soft voice shook him back to reality and he quickly pulled himself together, smiling at her. ‘Sorry. I guess the fresh air is making me drift off.’

‘I haven’t worn you out too much, have I?’ she smirked, and he couldn’t help laughing.

‘Sweetheart, you couldn’t wear me out if you tried.’

‘Want to prove that?’

‘You setting me some kind of challenge?’ He grinned, enjoying the flirtatious sparring that had started up.

‘I thought Ryan Fisher liked challenges?’ Her eyes met his over the rim of her coffee cup.

‘Oh, he’s real big on challenges, beautiful. Real big.’

And none was bigger than the challenge he’d just set himself. But whether he got the chance to play it all out was something he had yet to find out.

‘I think you know my feelings on Jim Allen, Amber.’ Freddie Sullivan leaned back against the windowsill, folding his arms as Amber settled herself into the corner of her father’s new and extremely comfortable sofa. An ex-professional footballer, and now manager of a local First Division team, Freddie had once been best friends with Jim. But to say that his relationship with his former friend and teammate had been severely strained after the revelations of Amber’s teenage affair with him was somewhat of an understatement. For Amber’s sake Freddie had tried to get on with Jim, tried to forgive him for what he’d done to her all those years ago. And he’d tried, really hard, to understand why she still loved him so much after everything that had happened, but he still found it difficult. Jim had joined Newcastle Red Star as a twenty-seven-year-old player just as Freddie was reaching the end of his playing career there, but Freddie had still taken him under his wing, brought him into his family. And to think that he’d abused that trust by turning Amber’s then-very-young head was something Freddie found very hard to deal with. ‘For all those years he hid that kid from everyone… doesn’t that tell you what kind of a man he is?’

Amber pushed a hand through her hair, curling her legs up underneath her as she sank further down into the sofa. Part of her just wanted to snuggle up and sleep, try to forget the day she’d just had, but life wasn’t that simple anymore. True, she’d run to daddy in the hope that he could give her some kind of comfort, but she’d only been kidding herself really. She should have known that coming here was only going to mean that she had to listen to her father reeling off a list of
‘I told you sos’
until she just switched off and tried to think about something else.

‘I’m over it, Dad. Really.’

Freddie looked at his daughter with a somewhat incredulous expression. ‘You’re over it? What? You mean, he suddenly unveils his secret son to the world, gets you to pretend you knew about him all along, and you sit there and tell me you’re over it?’

‘He didn’t get me to pretend anything, Dad. Okay? That was my idea. And I think it was the best idea in the long run. I can do without the added media storm it would cause if people got wind of the fact Jim had kept Brandon a secret from his wife.’

‘People should know what he’s really like,’ Freddie muttered. ‘All those years, we trusted him, me and your mam. We took him into our home, into our family…’