Waves of Betrayal (The Isabel Marsh Trilogy Book 1) (26 page)

She leans on the wall for a while, watching people pass by and then, when she can bare the silence no longer, she brings up her iPod and docking station. The confident lyrics of Anastasia fill her with renewed energy.

Lifting the lid of the hot tub and randomly pressing the buttons until she finds “subdued lighting” and “relaxing bubbles”, she steps out of her clothes and climbs, naked, into the warm water. Gin and tonic in hand, she begins to quietly sing along with the music, feeling very liberated.

Barely two hours after Marcos had kissed her goodbye outside her house, she is startled to hear the doorbell. She gasps and slops out of the hot tub, soaking the tiles with water, grabbing a towel from the back of one of the chairs. She slips her feet into a pair of flip-flops at the top of the stairs and hurries carefully down the marble stairs.

‘Marcos,’ she gasps, as she sees him standing there, looking so smart in a black shirt and light blue jeans.
The wait is over!
she thinks happily as she grips the towel in place with trembling fingers.

Marcos does not move. He makes no attempt to embrace or kiss her and his hands hang limp and empty at his sides.

‘Marcos?’ she whispers, emerging from behind the door, leaving a puddle of water as it runs down her back, dripping from her wet hair, ‘Marcos, what happened?’

‘I’m so, so sorry, Isabel,’ he says, rubbing his forehead with one hand, tears springing to his eyes, ‘I couldn’t do it.’

‘You...?’

‘I can’t do it because she had some news for me first,’ he says quickly. ‘She’s pregnant Isa, Leanne is pregnant.’

 Isabel reaches out for him desperately as his face crumples, but he steps slowly away from her. ‘I’m just so sorry,’ he sobs, holding his empty hands out in front of him.

He turns abruptly, tripping on the step in a hurry to get back to his car. Isabel runs out after him in her towel, her eyes wide in confusion, refusing to believe what she has just heard.

‘Marcos, stop,’ she screams after him as he reaches his car, ‘Leanne... she’s having an
affair.
’

Marcos freezes with his hand on the door handle and turns to look at her with such pain in his eyes. ‘No Isabel, don’t do this. This isn’t you...!’ he shouts, almost angrily.

‘But... but she
is!
Ask her, we saw her,’ she continues desperately, ‘Rachel and I, we saw her. The baby probably isn’t even yours... please, please come back,’ she cries, aware that she is attracting attention to herself as people pass them on the opposite side of the street.

‘Isabel, don’t, please. That’s a really low shot,
really
low,’ he says, quieter now, as she sees the sympathy in his eyes. ‘Do you think I’d be stupid enough to believe that you would have been happy to have let me go ahead and marry a woman who you
knew
was having an affair?! You think I believe that you wouldn’t have told me sooner?’

‘But I knew you wouldn’t believe me,’ Isabel cries, her voice coming out as a high pitched squeak, desperate not to let him go. ‘You’d have thought that I was just trying to split you up, don’t you see?’ she begs, as she is almost close enough to reach out and hold on to him, to physically prevent him from leaving her. ‘I thought it was kinder this way. We fell in love, you and I,’ she says, smiling through her tears, ‘we
are
in love,’ she continues, reaching out and touching his arm. ‘And this way you need never have known the pain of Leanne’s infidelity. You need never have known.’

For a few seconds, Isabel believes that she may have convinced Marcos to stay. He stares into her eyes with such affection, rubs his thumb down her cheek, wiping away a tear, and then turns away helplessly and walks slowly back to his car. ‘I have to go,’ he says, turning his head away, unable to watch as Isabel crumples against the wall, wrapping her arms around her stomach as the overwhelming feeling of loss threatens to engulf her again. Her heart is racing as she thinks back to the day on the beach when she found out about Paul. The feeling is the same,
only this time I will not run
, she swears to herself. She watches Marcos’s car disappear around the corner. Anger replaces her pain as she drags herself up from her crouched, foetal-like position on the ground. She nods reassuringly at a concerned elderly couple, watching her from across the road, and walks back to her house, slamming the door firmly behind her.

‘Bitch!’
she screams through her teeth, kicking off her flips-flops and groaning until her throat hurts. She collapses against the door. Tears of frustration running down her face.

Sitting with her back against the front door, she contemplates phoning Marcos, but then realises that she has no proof and, all of a sudden, she has somehow turned into the jealous vindictive one.
How the hell did that happen?!
she cries to herself, cradling her head in her hands.

She considers calling Rachel or her parents but, for the first time in her life, she actually wants to be alone. She can’t bear to go through the whole story with anyone or even have to explain anything. She decides to send a short text to Rachel to discourage her from calling her later. She is not in the mood for talking.

Can’t wait to cu soon. Leanne is pregnant and I have no proof of her affair. It’s over:( Don’t worry, I’m fine. Will let u know when I’ll be home when I book flights. Please don’t call, having an early night X

After what feels like a very long time, Isabel sends the text, gets up from the floor and swings open the fridge door. She can’t bear to stay in the house, so she grabs her beach bag and starts frantically filling it with what she feels are necessities. The final thing to go into the bag is the nearly full bottle of Gin and a few cans of tonic. Without thinking too much about where she is going and what she is doing, she puts on her bikini and slips a loose beach dress over her head. She retrieves her flips-flops, locks the front door and heads out onto the promenade.

She has no energy to walk far, so she steps into the deep, soft sand, enjoying its comforting warmth on her feet. She heads towards the edge of the sea. The sun is setting over the horizon and there are very few people left on the beach. There are a few Spanish families packing away their gazebos and sun beds, but most people seem to have already settled themselves on the terraces of the beach bars. She stops, as close to the sea as she can get without actually getting wet, drops her bag at her feet and stands gazing out across the shimmering water. It looks almost black at this time of day, but Isabel finds something quite comforting about the gentle ebb and flow of the little waves, the hypnotic sound as it laps over the sand. She sits down, crosses her legs and watches shells tumbling in and out of the water. She is surprised to find that she actually feels quite at peace. The decision has been taken out of her hands. She knows that she can no longer stay in Spain, living so close to Marcos and his pregnant fiancée. ‘
Nor will I have a job!’
she laughs sadly, picking up a stone and hurling it into the sea.

She hears a group of men on the promenade, shouting and cajoling each other as they tumble into the nearest beach bar. She imagines them all, glowing from a day on the beach, smelling of aftershave. They’ll prop up the bar for a while, soaking up the atmosphere. Then check if there is anything or anyone worth staying around for. A loud cheer goes up. She imagines they are challenging each other to down shots. For a moment, she considers joining them.
Why not?
she thinks,
I’m a single woman and still young and attractive enough!

She sighs loudly as she realises that she’s not in the mood for company and she would only regret it in the morning. Instead, she reaches into her beach bag and takes out the bottle of gin. She nestles it into the sand next to her, whilst she fishes out the glass tumbler and a can of cold tonic. ‘Sod ‘em all!’
she says under her breath and mixes her drink. She raises her glass to the dark, tarry sea and takes a long, satisfying drink.

Feeling herself relax, she lays out her towel, building up a bank of sand serving as her pillow, and takes out the selection of nibbles she had thrown randomly into the bag. Isabel refills her glass and holds it between her knees as she tears off a creamy chunk of brie with her fingers. As the gin starts to take effect, she finds herself grinning widely. On the verge of the giggles, she rips off chunks of crusty bread and dips them into a cool pot of hummus. Emboldened by the alcohol, she stands slightly unsteadily in the sand, pulls her dress over her head and wades into the sea.

S
ince arriving in Málaga, five days ago, Paul has been trawling the bars of Torremolinos looking for Isabel. He knows that she is there, somewhere. It had cost him his dignity hammering on Joan’s front door last Sunday morning, crying, convincing her that he had spoken to Isabel and that she was prepared to forgive him. Poor Joan will, of course, have found out since, from Isabel’s parents, that this isn’t necessarily the total truth, but he hopes that she will keep quiet, in order to protect her own reputation, if nothing else. She wouldn’t tell him the exact address, but he hopes that the name of the town is enough. As far as the people of Cartheston are concerned, he has merely disappeared off the scene. Heartbroken. There is, of course, some truth in this. He
is
heartbroken and cannot regret the stupid affair enough.

As yet, he hasn’t met anyone who knows Isabel, but he struck the jackpot yesterday when a waiter in a local beach bar told him that there is a girl staying nearby who matches her description perfectly. He was even more convinced that it was her, when the waiter went on to say that she had come in with a friend, a larger girl, a few times the week before.
It has to be her!
he thinks, as he makes his way along the promenade with a group of lads from his hostel. They have been drinking all day, but he knows, without a doubt, that he would still recognise Isabel anywhere.

They stumble into the blue and white beach bar and Paul looks around frantically, hoping to see Isabel there.
Sipping a cocktail with a new friend maybe?
he thinks. There are a few girls, giggling in the shade of the terrace but his heart sinks as he realises that none of them are
his
girl, his Isabel. He yearns to hold her in his arms, to get down on his knees in front of everyone if necessary, to ask her to forgive him and to spend the rest of her life with him. He hasn’t bought a ring yet, ‘but there will be one,’ he smiles to himself as one of the lads hands him a shot of tequila and there is a loud drunken roar as they all slam their glasses down on the bar in unison.

‘We stayin’ a while?’ asks Paul, ‘I’m just gonna find the bog. Mine’s a pint,’ he says, slapping one of the lads on the shoulder.

When he returns, there are four tables pushed together on the terrace, loaded with pints of San Miguel. He joins them, takes a drink and sloshes it clumsily against the bloke’s pint glass next to him. ‘Cheers mate,’ he says loudly, spilling lager down his white knee-length shorts. There is an outburst of ‘Cheers’ along the tables as they take long, noisy slurps, swinging back on their chairs and eyeing up the group of girls in the corner.

Paul turns away from the group and gazes out to sea. There is nobody on the beach now, apart from a couple of young boys playing football on the grassy oasis amongst the palm trees.

He is suddenly distracted by a figure out of the corner of his eye. It is too dark to see properly and they are quite a distance away. He is transfixed as the dark outline of a female figure stands and pulls her dress over her head. He watches her wade slowly into the water, sending glistening, moonlit ripples out towards the horizon. She stands waist-deep and trickles water over her shoulders before plunging under the surface, sweeping her long dark hair off her face when she surfaces a short distance away. ‘Isabel...’ he whispers to himself.

Paul leaves the bar and heads out towards the lonely figure. He watches her float for a while and then gracefully walk back to her towel, wringing out her hair and lifting her face to the stars above, her gorgeous body swaying lightly in the sand.

‘Iz...?’ he asks quietly, not wanting to startle her.

Isabel picks up her dress, instinctively, and holds it to her chest as she spins around to face him.

‘Paul...!? But, what are you doing here? How did you...?’

‘Shhhhh,’ he interrupts, taking a few steps closer to her so that they can see each other more clearly by the faint light of the moon.

Paul is totally shocked as, instead of pushing him away as he had imagined, Isabel throws herself gratefully into his arms and begins to sob.

‘Izzy, what are you doing here alone at this time of night?’ he asks her gently, as her sobs subside.

She lifts her head from his chest, still clinging to his shirt, enjoying his musky familiar smell and looks up into his eyes. ‘Me?!’ she laughs, through her tears, ‘I could ask you the same question!’

Paul realises that she does not expect an answer when she buries her head back into his chest and begins to shiver in the cool evening air.

‘Where are you staying?’ he asks, lifting her chin affectionately, ‘come on, let’s go and get you warm. You’re freezing.’

M
arcos is angry; he has never felt such anger. His hand shakes as he looks again at the photo on his mobile phone, zooming in again and again, willing it to be someone else. The beautiful features do not change. There is no denying that it is Leanne. She is staring lovingly into the eyes of a blonde-haired man. He can’t see his face but they are holding hands across the table, clearly very much in love, and they clearly know each other well. Rachel had told him, in her text, that they had taken the photo as a joke. She and Isabel had laughed at the sickeningly-soppy couple and had pretended to take a selfie, cutting all but Rachel’s right shoulder out of the shot. Very well framed. ‘Framed!’ he sneers under his breath, leaning against the bathroom wall, thinking how ironic that is.
Leanne has been well and truly framed
, he thinks.

He puts his phone down on the sink and stares at his face in the mirror. How could he have trusted her? And how can he believe that the baby she is carrying is his? He wants her out. Out of his house, right this second. He continues to stare at his own reflection, unable to move. The sheer hatred that runs through his veins makes him feel sick. He daren’t leave the bathroom for fear of how he will react when he confronts Leanne with the evidence. She will lie, of course. She’s obviously very good at that.