The Doctor's Lost-and-Found Bride (6 page)

As her climax slammed into her, rippling through her body, Max sat up straight; he wrapped his arms round her and kissed her hard, and she felt the answering pulse of his body.

She had no idea how long they stayed there, locked together, just holding each other, but at last he gently eased out of her. He moved slightly so he could grab the duvet, then pulled it over them both and drew her back into his arms, keeping her close.

Neither of them had said a word since they’d started kissing in his hallway. And Marina was unwilling to break the silence, to shatter this strange peace between them. She simply wrapped her arm round his waist and rested her head against his shoulder.

‘Marina,’ he said at last. ‘I really didn’t intend this to happen.’

Was he saying it was a mistake? That he regretted it?

She couldn’t bring herself to ask. Couldn’t face him rejecting her again.

‘I was going to make you something to eat. That was all. Taking you to bed wasn’t something I planned.’

‘Uh-huh,’ she said, carefully keeping her tone noncommittal.

He played with the ends of her hair, just as he had a hundred times before. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault. I could have said no.’ Except she hadn’t wanted to. If anything, she’d been the one to incite it. She’d been the one to start the kiss. And she was still here, still naked, still in his bed, still lying in his arms.

‘Neither of us was thinking straight.’

She swallowed hard. He could say that again.

He sighed. ‘Marina, we need to talk.’

‘Not now.’ Not when she hadn’t got things straight in her head.

‘Yes, now,’ he insisted. ‘There’s one elephant in the room we really can’t avoid. We both got carried away just now—and neither of us was in a fit state to think about contraception.’

He thought they might have made a baby, an unplanned child, like they had before? She flinched at the memory. ‘There’s no need to worry. I’m on the Pill.’

He went very still. ‘Are you…seeing someone?’

‘It’s a bit late to ask now,’ she said wryly. ‘But I’m not the cheating type; you should know that, Max.’

‘I know. Of course you’re not.’ He grimaced. ‘Sorry. I’m not thinking straight.’

Neither was she. ‘No, I’m not seeing anyone. As I’m sure Rosie told you.’

‘She did,’ he admitted. ‘So why are you on the Pill? To sort out your periods?’

‘Yes. After the…’ Her throat closed. Why was it so hard to say that word to him?
Miscarriage
. Ah, hell. He’d know what she meant. One of the biggest elephants in the room. The thing they’d never been able to talk about. The thing that had widened the gap between them day by day, until she hadn’t been able to bear it any longer. ‘My system went a bit haywire. My GP suggested trying the Pill, and it worked.’ She swallowed. ‘Though, just in case you were wondering, I don’t make a habit of sleeping around. So you won’t end up with any—’

He pressed his forefinger lightly against her lips. ‘I
already know that, and I wouldn’t insult you by thinking otherwise. Just for the record,’ he added, ‘it’s the same for me. You’re safe.’

‘OK. So we know the score.’

‘Do we?’ He shifted onto his side, so they were looking each other in the face, and gave her a level stare. ‘We’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to avoid each other as much as possible—and being ultra-polite and professional when we can’t.’

She acknowledged the truth of that with a sardonic smile. ‘And just now we ripped each other’s clothes off and ended up in bed together.’

He gave her a wry smile.

‘It’s probably because we both needed comfort after the day we’ve had.’

‘Probably,’ he agreed.

Oh, that hurt: the acknowledgement that what they’d just shared had simply been comfort for him. Even though she’d been the one to say it, she wished he hadn’t agreed with her so quickly.

And then he gave her the most wicked grin. ‘So. Mission accomplished?’

‘Max Fenton, you’re…’

She really hadn’t expected that.

How had she possibly forgotten Max’s sense of humour—the way he could say something completely inappropriate or surreal and make her laugh? She couldn’t help smiling back. ‘Yes. Mission accomplished.’ She paused. ‘You?’

He nodded. ‘I think we both needed that.’ He stroked her face. ‘We always were good together, Marina.’

True. Until it had gone spectacularly wrong.

And then he said something that really shocked her. ‘I’ve missed you.’

She stared at him, not quite believing what she’d just heard. ‘What did you say?’

‘I’ve missed you.’ His face was utterly open and candid. ‘Having you back in my arms just now made me realise how much.’

He’d missed her.

And what he’d just said…He could have been speaking for her, too. Given how long they’d been apart, it must have cost him a lot to make that admission. The least she could do was match his honesty. ‘I missed you, too,’ she said. Making love with him just now—for a while, the empty spaces in her soul had been filled again. Max had made her feel complete, the first time she’d felt that way since they’d separated.

‘So where do we go from here?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘I have no idea.’

‘Maybe we could start seeing each other?’ he suggested.

Was he serious? He really thought that they could pick up where they left off?

‘Though we should probably take it slowly,’ he added.

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Slowly? Considering your bed’s all rumpled and I have no idea where my clothes are—or yours…’

He gave her a lopsided grin. ‘OK, so we’re not very good at doing “slowly”.’

She returned the smile. ‘We never were. A week, wasn’t it?’

‘Five and a half days.’

He remembered that precisely—from all those years ago? Marina looked at him, stunned. So was he thinking
about the very first time they’d made love? She remembered that night, too. How right it had felt. Even that very first time had been like a kind of homecoming, as if she’d found a place she wanted to be for the rest of her life.

In his arms.

And for four empty years they’d been apart.

‘Max, I’m not so sure this is a good idea. I mean, we know that it works between us in bed. But…’ She shook her head. ‘We crashed and burned last time.’

‘I know. But we’re both older and wiser now,’ Max said, his gaze steady. ‘And I think there’s still unfinished business between us. Otherwise we wouldn’t be right here, right now.’

She swallowed hard. ‘We can’t change the past.’

‘But we can learn from it.’

‘And if it all goes wrong again? I don’t think I could face picking up the pieces a second time.’

‘I don’t think either of us is in a fit state to make any sort of decision right now,’ he said softly. ‘But we do need to talk.’

She blew out a breath. ‘About the other elephants in the room? There are quite a few of them.’

‘Too many to deal with all at once. But if we tackle them one by one we might stand a chance of sorting it all out.’

‘One by one,’ she repeated.

‘When we’re ready. But right now I think you need comfort—because you’re one of life’s fixers, and you take it personally when you can’t make something right. Even if nobody else could’ve made it right, either.’

Since when had he figured her out that well?

‘I need comfort, too,’ he said softly. ‘Stay with me tonight, Marina.’

‘That’s your idea of slowly? Asking me to spend the night with you?’

‘No. I’m trying to be honest. Right now, I think we both need this.’

‘All cats being grey in the dark.’ So this was just comfort. Sex. A way of celebrating life when you’d just had to face death.

‘Absolutely
not
.’ His voice was very clear. ‘I wouldn’t have done this with anyone else in the department, Marina, and neither would you.’

She couldn’t deny the truth of that. She hadn’t slept with anyone since Max, even though she’d had offers.

Had he?

It was none of her business what he’d done since she’d walked out. But the idea of Max making love with another woman cut her to the quick. ‘I can’t stay. I can’t go to work tomorrow in these clothes.’

‘I have a washer-dryer. I can put your stuff through the machine overnight, and your clothes will be clean for the morning. And I have a spare toothbrush.’

It was an easy solution. And she was oh, so tempted. She normally wore dark trousers and a white or cream shirt at work, so it wasn’t as if it would be obvious that she was wearing the same clothes. She could stay, spend the rest of the evening in bed with Max, exorcising some of their demons. Comforting each other.

Making love
. Because it wouldn’t be just sex—not for her.

‘The sensible thing,’ she said, while she still had a few vestiges of self-control, ‘Would be for me to go home.’

He cupped her face with one hand, tracing her lower lip with the pad of his thumb. ‘We’ve had a rough day; it’s not the time for being sensible. You need to be held and so do I.’

‘But you’ve seen worse than today if you’ve been working for Doctors Without Borders.’

He frowned. ‘How do you know about that?’

‘Rosie told me.’ She paused. ‘Why did you go?’

‘I thought we weren’t talking about any of the elephants. Besides, I promised to feed you.’

‘Why did you go?’ she repeated.

He shrugged and sat up, drawing his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms round them. ‘If you really want to know, it felt like the right thing to do. You’d gone to London, and I didn’t want to stay in Bristol without you. There were too many memories and I was miserable. I hated going home to that empty flat. To me it showed I was a failure, that I couldn’t make my marriage work.’

She couldn’t let him take complete responsibility for the break-up. That wasn’t fair. ‘It wasn’t just your fault, Max. There were two of us in that marriage, and I was the one who left.’

He reached out to touch her cheek for a moment. ‘Thank you for that. But I still felt a failure, and facing it every day was too much for me. I couldn’t fix my own problems, but working for Doctors Without Borders meant I could make a difference to other people’s lives. And I really needed to feel that I could do that. That I could fix
something
.’

She could understand that. Wasn’t that part of the reason why she worked in emergency medicine, so she could make a difference?

He looked down at her, unsmiling. ‘As we’re tackling elephants, why did you—’He stopped abruptly. ‘Why did you leave Bristol?’

She knew exactly what he’d been going to ask: why had she walked out on him? Because he’d shut her out and she’d felt that she was the only one making an effort in their marriage. ‘Same reason as you,’ she said. ‘I was miserable
in Bristol. Every time I walked through the city centre I saw pregnant women, and I couldn’t handle it.’ Maybe this was going too far, but she was going to be honest with him. She dragged in a breath. ‘I needed support, Max.’ Support that Max and his family wouldn’t—or couldn’t?—give her. ‘You shut me out. And what happened to us…It was more than I could deal with on my own. I needed you and you just weren’t there. So I came home, because I knew my family would help me get through it. I knew at least here that I’d be loved.’

He still wasn’t smiling, and his expression was unreadable. ‘Enough elephants for now, I think. Though I do owe you an apology.’ He swallowed hard. ‘For not giving you what you needed.’

And in that moment Marina realised. The way he’d acted back then wasn’t because he hadn’t cared. It was because he hadn’t known how to deal with the situation, either. ‘I was the one who walked out.’ She hadn’t stayed to fight for him. ‘So I guess we’re even. I owe you an apology, too.’

He spread his hands, the gesture telling her he didn’t know what to say.

That made two of them.

And the breakup of their marriage was too complicated for them to work out in a single conversation.

‘I’ll make us something to eat.’ He paused. ‘So, do you want me to put your stuff in the washing machine?’

Working for Doctors Without Borders had clearly made him more practical. The old Max wouldn’t even have thought about it until the next morning—when it would’ve been much too late to do anything about it.

Stay or go?

If she stayed, she knew she’d end up making love with him again. Clouding the issues between them.

But, if she left, he’d take it as a rejection and he’d clam up on her. Which meant they would never get the closure they both needed. They’d still be stuck in limbo, unable to move on.

Sleeping with Max didn’t mean that she was still in love with him, or that he was in love with her. They’d already agreed that for tonight this was just comfort—comfort of a kind that only they could give each other. No strings.

Should she stay or should she go?

‘O
NE
thing: this is just tonight? No strings?’ Marina asked.

Max’s expression was completely unreadable. ‘No strings.’

‘Then, yes. I’ll stay.’

‘OK.’ He climbed out of bed, grabbed a pair of jeans from his wardrobe, pulled them on, then took a navy bathrobe from the back of the door and handed it to her. ‘If you want a shower before you come downstairs, the bathroom’s first on the left—and the towels are clean.’

‘Thanks.’

Considering how well they knew each other’s bodies, and what they’d just done, Marina knew it was ridiculous to wait until he’d left the room before climbing out of bed. But she did so anyway, feeling shy—as well as enormously grateful that Max had clearly picked up on it and wasn’t putting any pressure on her.

Max’s bathroom turned out to be very plain and functional, just like his bedroom. Then again, he hadn’t been in London for long. Less than a month. Given that Max had been working abroad, his things were probably still in storage. Certainly she’d seen nothing she remembered from their old flat in Bristol. When she’d left Max, she’d
taken only her clothes, a few books, precious photographs and her omelette pan, not wanting anything around to remind her of the disaster of their marriage.

Another off-limits topic, unless they wanted to tackle another elephant. Though right at that moment Marina thought it would be better to keep things light. Extremely light. Especially as they’d agreed that tonight meant no strings.

She stepped out of the shower, dried herself then pulled his bathrobe on and drew the belt tight. The robe was soft to the touch and smelled of him; it felt like being wrapped in his arms.

She padded through to the kitchen. Max had obviously collected her clothes on the way; she could hear the gentle whirring of the washing machine, and he’d put the kettle on to make coffee.

Though she couldn’t see any sign of the food he’d promised.

‘OK?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘And hungry. Do you want a hand?’

‘Thanks.’ He smiled wryly. ‘You know, I really was going to be nice and make you dinner.’

‘But?’ Something in his expression made her brave. Cheeky. She opened the first cupboard, peered inside and raised an eyebrow when she saw it was completely empty. And so was the next one. ‘I see. You did some training at Old Mother Hubbard’s school of cookery.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Very funny. Not everyone likes cooking, you know.’

Didn’t they? ‘You used to enjoy it.’

‘No, I used to like being in a kitchen with you,’ he cor
rected. ‘You used to do the actual cooking. I just fetched things and washed up and talked to you.’

She hadn’t thought of it that way. She just remembered doing what she always did with her family, everyone joining in and doing a bit, talking, laughing and singing as they washed up, mixed, tasted and cooked—the normal things that families did together. She remembered preparing meals with Max, sharing a single glass of wine with him, and half the time having a long break between preparing the meal and actually cooking it, because they’d ended up in bed together, needing to sate desire more than they’d needed to sate hunger.

She looked in his fridge. There was a lump of cheese he hadn’t wrapped up properly that was going hard round the edges, a carton of orange juice and a carton of milk. So he didn’t even have the makings of an omelette or a basic dish of pasta with tomato sauce. And he didn’t have a fruit bowl of any description. ‘Max, this is atrocious. No wonder you’re so thin. Do you eat at all?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Like what? Do you live on takeaway food or something?’

‘Anyone would think you were the food police,’ he grumbled. ‘There’s nothing wrong with takeaways.’

‘In moderation. But it’s not the same as eating a properly balanced meal.’

‘All right, if you must know, I normally eat at the hospital canteen at lunchtime so I don’t need to do more than make myself a sandwich when I get in.’

She couldn’t help laughing. ‘A fresh-air sandwich, would that be? And an invisible piece of fruit?’

He sighed. ‘I admit, I’m out of bread right now. And fruit. I forgot to buy some today.’

‘Uh-huh.’ That wasn’t all he’d forgotten to buy, from the look of it.

He rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t rub it in. So I’m out of sandwich fillings as well.’

‘I noticed.’

‘And I’m
not
too thin.’

‘No?’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘My mother would take one look at you, make you sit down at the kitchen table and start cooking for you. I bet Rosie said something to you too, didn’t she?’

‘Well—yes,’ he admitted. ‘But your family doesn’t do subtle.’

‘No.’ Though he’d never seemed to mind. She was used to people being open and honest rather than reserved and masking their true feelings with a polite smile. It was so much easier to sort out any problems if you talked about them, instead of expecting the other person to guess what was going on inside your head, the way Max’s family seemed to do.

‘That wasn’t a criticism, by the way,’ Max added.

‘Wasn’t it?’

‘No. I’ve always liked your family. Even when they’re being really full on.’

Because her family always acted out of love, Marina thought. There were no hidden agendas. You always knew exactly where they were coming from, and they said exactly what they meant.

He pulled open a kitchen drawer and extracted a handful of leaflets. ‘Since we’ve established that neither of us is going to be cooking tonight, and I promised to feed you, I’ll order a takeaway. What would you like?’

‘I don’t mind, as long as there isn’t a really long wait.’
Her stomach rumbled, as if to make the point, and she grimaced. ‘Sorry.’

‘It’s OK. Neither of us had time for lunch today. I’m hungry too,’ he said.

‘If you have a corner shop nearby that sells eggs, I could make us an omelette,’ she offered. ‘That’d be quicker than a takeaway.’

‘Technical hitch,’ Max said. ‘I don’t actually have an omelette pan.’

Because she’d taken it with her when she’d left. Somehow it didn’t surprise her that he hadn’t replaced it. ‘Do you have any saucepans of any description?’

‘My kitchen isn’t that bad.’

By her standards, it was. ‘Yes or no, Max?’

He opened a cupboard door to show her. ‘Satisfied?’

‘I can work with them, sure. If you can go and buy some eggs, bacon, cream, dried pasta and salad,’ she said, ‘I’ll make us pasta carbonara. It’ll take ten minutes.’

‘So much for me looking after you,’ Max said wryly.

‘As you just said, not everyone likes cooking. You don’t—but I do. It soothes me,’ she said. ‘And, if I’d been thinking straight, I would’ve suggested going back to mine.’

‘Would you?’ Max asked, giving her a searching look.

She wrinkled her nose. ‘Truthfully? No. I wouldn’t have asked you into my space. But there’s no way I’m going back to my flat right now wearing nothing but your bathrobe. So if you want feeding you’ll have to go to the shop. What did I do with my handbag?’

‘Uh—I put it over here.’ Clearly he’d retrieved it, along with her clothes, from wherever she’d dropped it. ‘But this was my suggestion, so I’m paying. I’ll be back in a tick.’
He pulled on a sweater and a pair of battered running shoes and left.

While Max was gone, Marina laid the table in the kitchen, rummaged in his almost-bare cupboards to find the equipment she needed then wandered into his living room. It was as spartan as his kitchen and bedroom; there were no pictures on the walls, no photographs anywhere, and nothing personal to give a single clue about the person who lived in the flat. There were a few medical textbooks on the bookshelves, but that was all. The décor and furnishings were completely neutral, and his sofa didn’t have so much as a cushion to soften its stark lines.

Max’s flat wasn’t a home, it was just a place to sleep. He might just as well be living out of a suitcase, and it made her heart ache for him. How different it was from her own flat, filled with colour, photographs and memories.

She shook herself. It was none of her business any more. He’d signed the papers. They were officially divorced.

Yet here she was, cutting the hard edges off the lonely lump of cheese in his fridge and grating the rest of it into a small bowl.

She must be mad.

She’d been here before, had her heart broken into tiny pieces that had taken years to glue back together. Yet Max’s words kept echoing in her head.

We’re both older and wiser now.

And I think there’s still unfinished business between us.

Was he right? Could they learn from the past, try again and avoid the mistakes?

Somewhere deep inside, she felt a flicker of something that might just have been hope.

When Max came back from the corner shop and walked into the kitchen, it didn’t feel anything like the room he was used to in his rented flat. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what the shift was: simply that Marina had laid the table for two and was sitting there, mug of coffee in hand, flicking through a medical journal.

‘Sorry—I took liberties with your kettle and your magazine,’ she said. ‘Hope you don’t mind.’

‘Of course not.’ He handed her the carrier bag. ‘Is this lot all OK?’ He’d remembered the brief shopping list she’d given him—eggs, bacon, cream, salad and dried pasta—and added a loaf of bread, plus a decent bottle of Pinot Grigio he’d found in the chiller cabinet.

She looked through them, then glanced up at him and smiled. ‘Fabulous. Do you want to sort the salad while I do this?’

‘Sure.’

‘Did you want a coffee? The kettle’s still hot.’

‘No, I’m fine. But thanks for asking.’

It felt oddly domestic, washing the salad and placing it in a bowl; Max was surprised to discover how much he’d missed being in a kitchen with her. He enjoyed watching Marina cook, the deft way she beat the eggs with the cream, then kept an eye on the pasta at the same time as she was dry-frying the bacon. For the very first time since he’d moved into the flat, the kitchen smelled fantastic. It reminded him of the way it had been when they’d first moved in together, how he’d teased her that she could go on one of those TV shows where people were given random ingredients, and however strange they were that she would manage to come up with something edible—a feast, even.

Although he remembered Marina avidly flicking through
foodie magazines, she hardly ever stuck to a recipe; she used them as springboards for her own imagination. And most of the time she cooked without weighing things, either—a practice he guessed was born from cooking with her mother and her sister from an early age.

As he opened the wine and poured two glasses, she dished up—Max noticed that she’d warmed the plates, too, which he would never have bothered doing—and they sat opposite each other at his kitchen table. Familiar, comfortable, just like he’d done so many times before. He was glad then that he’d agreed to her request of no strings; it avoided any awkwardness between them. Because he wouldn’t have missed sharing this with her, not for the world.

If somehow they could pick their way through the mess of the past, work out how to make a new start…

Too far, too fast. There was a long way to go before they could start to do that.

But it was years since he’d felt that weird lightness inside, a feeling that took him a while to pin down and categorise as hope.

He took a mouthful of the pasta. ‘This is fantastic.’

‘It’s the best comfort food I know,’ she said. Then she gave him a speaking look. ‘It’s not exactly
difficult
to make, Max. And it’s practically as quick as making a sandwich.’

He forbore to comment, knowing that he’d never bother to cook for himself; it didn’t seem worth it, cooking for one. But he loved the fact that she’d made it for him and didn’t fish for extravagant compliments on her skills. She was secure in who she was, and didn’t need anyone to pump her ego for her. He’d always liked that about Marina, her self-sufficiency.

And then, when she’d crumbled, he hadn’t known what
to do. What to say. How to make things right. He’d panicked and buried himself in work to block out the feeling of failure. Except the sense of failure had only deepened when he realised that he’d pushed her away, that she’d walked out on him.

‘The wine’s lovely,’ she said.

‘I’m glad you like it. You always used to prefer white wine to red, as long as it wasn’t oaky.’

She blinked. ‘You remembered that?’

‘Yes.’ There were a lot of other things he remembered about her: the shape of her body fitting against his as he fell asleep; the scent of her hair—and the shadows in her eyes. The shadows they weren’t going to talk about tonight, but that he knew were still there—just masked for a little while until they worked out how to deal with them.

After dinner, they washed up together. Although they didn’t say much, it was a companionable silence rather than the loaded silence that had haunted the end of their marriage. Max switched the washing machine over to the tumble-drying cycle, then ushered her through into the living room. ‘Sorry, I haven’t got round to sorting out a television. Though, if you really want to, we could maybe watch a film on my laptop.’

She smiled. ‘You’re trying too hard, Max. I’m fine. Though, if you want to put some music on, that’d be nice.’

‘Music I can do.’ He connected his MP3 player to the small speakers, selected a playlist of the mellow kind of music he remembered she used to like, and topped up their glasses before joining her on the sofa. He rested the arm nearest to her along the back of the sofa, and was relieved when she curled into him, letting him curve his arm along her shoulders.

‘When did you move in here?’ she asked.

‘The day before I started working at the hospital.’

‘So most of your stuff is still in storage?’

He shrugged. ‘I travel light nowadays. I guess it’s a hangover from working with Doctors Without Borders; I got used to living out of a suitcase.’

‘What made you come back to England?’

‘Do you really want to talk about another elephant?’ he asked softly.

She was silent, but he waited, guessing that she was thinking about it.