Then and Always (21 page)

He sounded so delighted but it was hard to suppress a groan when several hefty-looking albums and a box of memorabilia were produced from the side of the settee and placed on the coffee table before me.

“Now, I’ve just got to go into town for a while, so you two can browse through these. I’m sure Matt will be able to answer
any questions you have—probably far better than me. I don’t suppose you tell me half of what’s really going on in your life!”

Considering recent events, that was probably just as well.

I WAS SEVERAL
pages into the first album when the front door clicked shut. Moving closer to my side on the settee, Matt gently removed the album from my hands and slid his arms about me, drawing me toward him.

“Let’s leave the old photos for now, huh? I think I can find a much better way of helping you remember.”

And before I could say anything to stop him, or even consider if I wanted to stop him at all, his mouth was on mine, persuasively commanding me to respond. And after a moment of immobility, I did. Perhaps this was the very thing I needed to jolt my memory back. Maybe it wasn’t just in fairy tales that the prince’s kiss could bring the sleeping princess back to life. And Matt, with his sexy good looks and masterful self-confidence, was accomplished enough to elicit a response from a shop mannequin—let alone the woman who’d been on the receiving end of those kisses for the past seven years.

As his lips moved on mine and his hands traveled possessively up and down my back, suddenly I
did
remember. I remembered how deeply I had fallen in love with him as a teenager, how much he had meant to me back then. I remembered him, as women do the world over, in the way they never forget their first love. But I also remembered how I’d brutally severed him from my life when Jimmy died. And what I remembered most of all was that while ending things with Matt had caused me pain, it had been insignificant compared
to the agony of my grief. And if it
did
turn out that those events had only ever existed in my imagination—and the evidence for that was now pretty compelling—well, you didn’t need a degree in psychology to work out the message my subconscious had been trying to give me.

I didn’t push him away, but I couldn’t respond to him either.

“Rachel?” he murmured into my ear, pausing to nip gently upon my neck, making me shiver in spite of myself. He drew back to survey my face, his own a clear portrait of desire.

“Too much for now? Do you want me to stop?”

I nodded, and thankfully he understood. I could see the effort it took him to regain his composure and I felt guilty at having led him on. I wondered if this was how Jimmy had felt the night before. The thread that wound the tapestry of our lives together suddenly seemed heavily laced in irony.

“Maybe we could just look through the stuff Dad left out?” I suggested lamely.

“If that’s what you want,” he agreed, but added in a soft vow, “But don’t think I’m giving up on you that easily.”

I’m certain he meant it as a pledge of things to come, so why couldn’t I shake the feeling his words sounded more like a threat than a promise?

Three albums and several hours later, I was no closer to remembering the last five years and I was bored with looking at pictures of me with people I never knew, in places I had never been. Although Matt could supply a large proportion of the missing data, a whole host of photographs taken during my university days remained a mystery.

“Looks like I had a good time,” I proclaimed, plucking a photograph from the pile, which captured me with my arms
flung around the shoulders of several friends, beer bottles in hand, all smiling broadly, and drunkenly, at the camera.

“Uni was good,” Matt agreed, then breached my defenses by leaning over and planting a kiss upon my lips. “But it was hard being so far apart from you for three years. Things are so much better now.”

I guessed I was just going to have to take his word for it on that. And you couldn’t help but admire the man’s unshakable confidence. “And we managed to survive the long-distance-relationship thing?”

Was there something that flashed quickly through his eyes, some small hesitation?

“Well, we’re still together, so we must have done something right.”

There
was
something there in his voice that didn’t sound quite so sure, and then he tried to divert me with a little sidetracking of his own.

“And now we are engaged,” he declared, undeniable satisfaction in his voice.

“And now we are engaged,” I echoed, my own voice full of another emotion entirely.

“ARE YOU SURE
you don’t want to join us, Tony? You’re more than welcome.”

The words were polite enough, though I wondered if my dad could hear that the sentiment wasn’t entirely heartfelt. The twinkle in my father’s eye told me he understood perfectly.

“No, no, you two run along and enjoy yourselves. You don’t want me tagging along and ruining your dinner. And besides, I have to make up the spare room for Matt.”

Touché, Dad, excellently done.

Matt said nothing until we were safely inside the leather cocoon of his car.

“So I’m to be banished to the spare room again, am I?”

I tried not to smile but I could feel my quivering lips beginning to betray me.

“I’m sure he thinks we’re still teenagers,” he complained, gunning the engine with unnecessary vigor before pulling away from the curb. “He’s still got that old not-under-my-roof thing going on. What does he think we get up to in London?”

As I actually didn’t
know
what we got up to in London, I thought it best not to respond.

“Anyway,” said Matt, turning to me with an irreverent wink and a grin, “I still remember which of the floorboards in the hall creak, so just remember to leave your door unlatched.”

I laughed nervously, not sure if he was joking, but made a mental note to secure my door when we got back.

We had a surprisingly good time that evening, all things considered. Once away from the house and my father’s watchful eye, Matt seemed more himself, or the self I remembered from years gone by. He was attentive and charming, and it was impossible to ignore the envious glances directed toward me from several females in the gastropub we’d gone to.

“That’s something I had happily forgotten,” I said, after yet another very obvious what-does-he-see-in-her appraisal.

Matt dismissed it with a shrug, lifting my hand to his lips and grazing my knuckles with a kiss.

“You have absolutely nothing to worry about. You’re the only one for me, you always have been.”

“It doesn’t worry me, it’s just annoying, that’s all. And rude.”

He got to his feet then. “I’m just going to see where they’ve got to with the bill.” But before leaving, he dropped a light kiss on my head. “Just remember, I’ve only got eyes for you.”

Less than two minutes later, something happened to make me wonder just how true that statement actually was.

Matt was crossing the restaurant in the direction of the bar when a small humming sound coming from the edge of the table caught my attention. His mobile phone lay beside our empty plates, its slim shape vibrating persistently against the crockery to indicate an incoming call. I glanced up to summon him back but some instinct made me check the phone first. On the small square screen the caller’s identity was displayed in bold green neon. I could read it quite clearly upside down, but nevertheless swiveled the phone with my index finger until it was the right way up. Cathy. Five harmless letters, but something about them rang a warning bell that had nothing to do with the incoming call.

WHY WAS CATHY
calling Matt? My hand crept toward the small device, but some instinct stayed me from taking the call. Several diners from nearby tables had turned around at the ringing. I met their gazes with an apologetic smile but still didn’t answer the phone. Eventually it stopped.

A minute or two later Matt returned, carrying my coat. Now was the time to tell him about the missed call. To ask why Cathy, whom he claimed he hadn’t seen in years until the night of my accident, was phoning him on his mobile phone, the number of which I clearly recalled him saying was only given out to his closest friends and family. But I didn’t ask.

It rang again on the way home. We were stationary at
traffic lights and he smoothly extracted the phone from his pocket to check the display. An unreadable expression crossed his features as his fingers moved rapidly to disconnect the call without answering it. Intuition told me it was Cathy again, even before I heard the lie in his voice.

“Who was that?”

“Just someone from work. It can wait until tomorrow.”

The lights were still on downstairs when we returned, so Matt took advantage of our last moments of privacy on the doorstep as I hunted in my bag for my key.

“I had a very nice time tonight, Miss Wiltshire.”

I tried to smile but all I could think about was the strange look that had been on his face when the phone had rung in the car.

“Do you think your dad will come after me with a shotgun if I try for a goodnight kiss on the doorstep?”

And without waiting for my reply, he pulled me against him firmly and gave the sort of kiss that in other circumstances might have left me weak at the knees. His eyes were dark with desire when we drew apart, and he didn’t appear to have noticed that my mind had been on other things during the embrace.

I reached into my bag and extracted the key. Walking close behind me as we entered the hall to greet my father, Matt whispered mischievously in my ear. “Don’t forget what I said earlier about your bedroom door.”

I DIDN’T REALIZE
the huge knot of tension I had been holding in my body all day until I was finally alone in my room. I kicked off my shoes and sank down heavily upon the old single bed. Then, alone for the first time since my disastrous
night with Jimmy, I could feel the edges of the seal begin to weaken. The thoughts and feelings I had tried to bury so deeply in the vault of my mind now refused to be silenced. But there was so much to deal with, so many conflicting emotions, that I literally felt overwhelmed by the deluge. Having to launch straight from the pain and humiliation of Jimmy’s rejection to fending off Matt, who was understandably bewildered at my tepid response, was too much for me to cope with.

To quiet my chaotic thoughts, I began to straighten and tidy my room and belongings, finally bending to pick up the case I had taken to London the night before. I unzipped the holdall and allowed the contents to fall in an untidy heap upon the bedcovers.

It took only moments to put away the smaller items, which left just the cotton nightdress I had worn at the hotel. I reached out for the garment, intending to wear it to bed, but the moment I touched the soft fabric, a vivid image filled my vision. I could no longer see my own bedroom and was suddenly transported back to the hotel. I could feel the heat of Jimmy’s lips on mine, feel them as strongly as if he were there in front of me. I had never believed in psychometry—didn’t believe in anything psychic really—but the sensation of Jimmy tugging the nightdress slowly from my body was replayed in excruciatingly exquisite detail. My fingers held tightly on to the folds of cotton, reliving the moment when I had finally opened my heart to a truth I had denied for so long.

I gave an angry cry and threw the nightdress away across the bed. It lay in a crumpled heap, an innocuous scrap of material, but I could almost see the heat of Jimmy’s fingerprints burned into the fabric. To me the garment would be forever
branded and I knew I could not wear it, not with my fiancé sleeping fifteen feet away down the corridor. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to wear it again.

I dreamt vividly again that night, my subconscious still in as much turmoil as my waking mind. In my dream I was asleep—not in my childhood bedroom, but somewhere strange I didn’t recognize. But my dad was there too, close enough for me to hear his voice, but not so near that I could make out the words. And in my dream I knew I had an important appointment to keep. The nature of the assignation wasn’t clear—it might have been with the amnesia specialist, or it could have been something else altogether—all I knew was that my dream was filled with a dire foreboding that I would oversleep and miss the vital meeting.

I had had similar dreams before, when something important was looming, like examinations or a holiday, and while this dream was similar to those, it felt far more urgent.

It was imperative that I not oversleep. In my dream I knew that there would be catastrophic consequences to missing the appointment, that this was not something that could merely be rescheduled for another date. Endorsing this, I could hear my father whispering to my dreaming self:

“Time to wake up, Rachel, it’s time to wake up now.”

I wanted to answer him, to let him know I
was
awake, but sleep held me in its grip and I couldn’t shake off the manacles of slumber to reply. The impotence of not waking up and getting to the appointment on time was beginning to frighten me now, and I could feel my heart start to quicken in frustration.

The beeping began slowly, filtering into the dream like small sharp stabs from a needle. It pierced through the mists of sleep, its sharp insistent tone commanding that it not be
ignored. What
was
that sound? In my dream I could hear it really clearly, and as the fetters of sleep began to loosen, I realized it was an alarm. As I blinked myself awake I could still hear the beeping. Dazed, I reached out my hand to the bedside table. It must be an alarm clock, which I had inadvertently set before going to sleep. But my groping hand found no such clock beside the bed.

I lifted my head from the pillows. The fog lifted a little more and I realized the beeping was getting fainter and fainter and a moment later was gone. I blinked stupidly in the darkness, confused by the dream, and then I caught the familiar odor of my father’s favorite aftershave. That woke me more than even the imaginary alarm clock had done. It wasn’t the first time I had detected this fragrance in the night, but as my father had assured me he wasn’t checking on me during the night, what did it mean? Was it even possible to hallucinate a smell?