The Gigolo (17 page)

Kara picked up the phone. Laura Finnegan’s name appeared on the screen. Kara had an urge to open the washing machine and shove his phone back in the pocket of his jeans but that wouldn’t make this go away. He was still seeing Jack’s wife. He’d lied to her. Kara sat at the table and waited for him to finish in the shower. She could feel her anger simmering in the base of her belly. She blinked back her tears. She wasn’t going to cry. And she wasn’t going to allow him to hurt her again.

He appeared in the doorway dressed in the white towelling gown, his hair still wet from his shower, his feet bare. Kara wanted to forget what she’d just seen and fall into his arms but she couldn’t. She handed him a carrier bag with his soaking wet clothes in it.

‘You’re going home and you can take these with you.’

‘Why? What’s happened, Kara?’

She gave him back his phone. You had a call while you were in the shower – from Laura Finnegan. When you didn’t answer she texted you. I did a bad thing and looked at that text. It seems the delightful Laura is in need of your special services. You lied to me. You’re still doing that…stuff.’ Kara had walked along the hall and now she was standing with the door open.

‘I didn’t lie. I’m not doing that any more. I should’ve deleted her number. I’ll do it now. He pressed a few buttons on his phone and then showed her the screen.

‘I want you to leave.’

‘Kara, please. It was a mistake to get into that stuff. I should never have done it. Haven’t you ever made a mistake?’

She looked at him and said: ‘Yes, and now I want you to l
eave.’

William put on his boots and walked to his van in the dressing gown.

‘And you can keep the robe,’ she said and slammed the door but she watched him leave from the window through a veil of tears, and then she went to bed and buried her head under the quilt.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

‘What did you want?’ William rang Laura from his car. ‘I told you I
’ve given up the escort work. I don’t want you to ring me anymore, Laura.’ He was angry. Laura may not have known what she’d done but her call had just broken the fragile trust that he had worked all day to rebuild with Kara.

‘I need you, William. I can’t survive in this marriage without you. I need sex
!’

‘Then ask your husband.’

‘You know he can’t do it. William. I told you, he’s impotent.’

‘No, he’s not, Laura. Your husband is an egotistical, delusional bully
and a liar but he’s not impotent.’

‘You can’t possibly know that. Why would he lie about something like that? I’m his wife.’

‘I’m sorry you had to hear it like this, Laura but you deserve to know. Your husband kept Kara Kavanagh prisoner in his penthouse. He wanted her to have sex with him but she refused. He had an erection, Laura.’

‘Kara might’ve been mistaken – or lying.’

‘She may have been, but Jack also told her that he liked new things.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’ Laura was crying. It was almost as if deep down she knew that something was wrong with the way her husband behaved but hadn’t wanted to admit to it because that would mean her having to leave the life of luxury she was leading as his wife.

‘He told Kara that he wants to keep you a virgin.’

The line went quiet. At first William thought she’d hung up.

‘That’s disgusting!’

‘It’s the truth, Laura. You should leave him – you deserve better.’

‘I don’t know what to do, William.’

‘You’ll be fine. Go stay with your mother for a while.’ He knew she’d figure it out and would probably ring her solicitor as soon as she’d hung up the phone
. She was a strong woman and she had played a part in her own situation. She enjoyed a lavish lifestyle and had been quite prepared to put up with her lot, but she deserved the truth and now she had it.

‘Please don’t call me, again, Laura.’

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

Kara dressed in old clothes and went out into the garden. She was going to redesign it. She hated the municipal park look her gardener had created
, of neatly curving borders following the perimeter walls and planted with summer annuals.

She found a spade in the shed and started cutting hard angles where there had been curves. Cleaving the spade into hard baked soil cut up her burst blisters but she relished in the pain it caused – anything to take her mind off her broken heart. And when she could dig no more and feared stopping and allowing her thoughts to
take purchase in her heart, she took her car out of the garage and drove to the garden centre in search of shrubs.

She hadn’
t opened the garage door in months let alone started the engine. There was a cobweb running from the steering wheel to the top of the windscreen. She swept it away and started the engine. It fired into life on the first turn of the key. She reversed out into the road and slammed her foot onto the accelerator. She wasn’t in the right mood to be behind the wheel. She took a deep breath and slowed down.

Two rhododendrons an acacia and six other assorted shrubs later Kara returned home
to plant them. She ripped out the bedding plants and was about to throw them in the rubbish heap when she realised they were the same pretty, colourful flowers that William had sent her. She picked a bunch of them and took them inside. It seemed a shame to throw away something so beautiful.

Kara sat down at the table and looked at the flowers. It
would
be a shame to throw away something so beautiful, wouldn’t it? She picked up the phone to ring William but put it back down again. The stubborn streak in her wouldn’t allow her to do it.

She went out into the garden instead and
started replanting. The muscles in her arms and her thighs still ached from all the physical activity they had got yesterday but she couldn’t stop. Stopping gave her mind time to think about William and when she did that she cried.

When all the shrubs were planted she took a shower and ate cold sh
epherd’s pie out of the fridge as she cried.

She needed something else to occupy her mind so she started moving furniture around and cleaning windows.

By early evening Kara was too exhausted to eat. She took a glass of wine to bed with her and fell asleep before she’d even finished it.

The following morning
, when Kara had ran out of things to plant and things to move around, she was forced to confront her fears and broken dreams and she curled up on the sofa and cried.
I’ll give myself the rest of the day to get over this…thing and then I have to find a new purpose in life
, Kara told herself, as if it were possible to compartmentalise her emotions in the same way she filed her bank statements.

She turned on the TV, found
a tub of ice-cream and settled down to indulge herself until midnight.

The doorbell rang at her lowest ebb. She considered ignoring it but the ringer was annoyingly persistent. She buried the thought that it might be William come to tell her it had all been a dreadful misunderstanding.

It wasn’t him. It was a courier. He handed her what was obviously a painting wrapped in brown paper.

‘If it was another stupidly expensive painting she would put a knife through it and send it back to him.

‘Wait there a minute. I might want you to take this back where it came from.’

‘I can’t do that, Madam,’ the courier started to walk away.

‘Wait! I’ll pay you.’

The courier waited.

Kara took the painting inside and opened the card attached to it first.

It was, as she’d suspected, from William.

– I’m not apologising. I’ve done nothing wrong but I’m not prepared to throw away something as beautiful as you and I.

Kara ripped the paper off. She could hardly see through her tears.

She propped it up against the kitchen cupboard and smiled. It wasn’t grotesque but it was priceless. It was a rather crudely drawn but very sweet painting of a half built house covered in ivy with the estuary in the background. And in the fore ground there was a stick man in a white hard hat holding hands with a stick woman in a pink one. He’d drawn her with her hair hanging loose around her shoulders, with bits of something that looked like straw stuck in it and he was leaning on a sledge hammer. The painting had been signed: William Baron.

Kara took the bunch of pansies out of the little jar she’d put them in,
dried the stems on some kitchen towel, wrapped them in tissue paper and gave them to the courier with a twenty pound note.

‘Could you deliver these back to the same person, please.’

The doorbell rang an hour later. It was William. He was holding her pink hard hat and high visibility waistcoat.

‘Come on, we have work to do on our house,’ he said.

‘Is that some kind of proposal?’ Kara asked.

‘Would you tell me to fuck off if I said it was?’

‘No,’ Kara replied.

‘Then it is. Let’s go buy an engagement ring and make it official before you change your mind.
’

‘No
, wait. I’d like you to give me a ring like the one you gave me before.’

‘
You mean the one I put here?’ William reached between her legs. ‘The one that claims you as my property?’

‘Yes, that’s the one
.’ Kara blushed.

‘It’ll be my pleasure, Kara.’
William replied with a smile.

The End

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