Loving Our Heroes

Campbell looked at her, startled. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Well, you said she lived in the States, and you don’t seem the kind of man who lets go easily. I wondered if you were going there because you wanted to see her.’

‘Not at all,’ he said sharply. ‘It just happens that’s where the head office is.’

Infuriatingly, though, Tilly’s words had made him pause and examine his own motives for the first time. ‘Of course I’ve considered the chance that I might bump into her,’ he went on after a while. ‘New York is a big city, but Lisa’s new husband is in a similar line of business, so it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that we’ll meet.’

‘Gosh, I hope he’s not more successful than you,’ said Tilly, only half joking, and Campbell smiled grimly.

‘Not any more,’ he said.

CHAPTER SIX

TILLY poured the tea. She could just imagine how Campbell would have been driven to out-perform the man who had taken his wife away from him. It would have hurt anyone, but to a man like Campbell the implication that she had left him for someone more successful must have been an extra dose of salt in the wound.

‘What will it be like, seeing her again?’ she asked.

He shrugged, and she rolled her eyes as she pushed a mug across the table towards him.

‘Come on, you must have thought about it! I’ve spent the last eighteen months practising what I would say to Olivier if I ever saw him again—not that I’ve had the chance to say any of it,’ she added ruefully. ‘It’s probably just as well.’

‘Olivier?’

‘The beat of my heart for two years,’ she said, blue eyes bleak with memory.

And presumably the man who had taught her that the absence of children didn’t make a break-up any easier. Campbell was remembering now.

‘Ah,’ he said. Were commiserations in order? These kinds of emotional conversations always made him uncomfortable. He couldn’t understand why women insisted on talking about this kind of stuff the whole time.

‘What would you have said?’ he asked at last, opting for a practical approach.

Tilly thought about it. ‘It depended on the mood I was in,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I was determined to make him realise just what he’d lost, so I was going to pretend to have a fabulous new lover and carry on as if I’d almost forgotten him. At other times I wanted him to acknowledge how he’d hurt me, but either way I would be very cool and calm.

‘In reality, of course, if I had bumped into Olivier, I would have burst into tears and begged him to come back, and then none of my friends would ever have spoken to me again!’

Campbell studied her across the table. Her generous mouth was twisted in a self-deprecating smile, but the blue eyes were wistful, and he wondered what Olivier was like. Campbell didn’t like the idea of him at all. He didn’t like the idea of anyone hurting Tilly.

She wasn’t beautiful, not like Lisa. Her features were too quirky for that, but there was something alluring about her all the same, he realised. She had warmth and wit and a charm that Lisa had never had, and in a strange way she was sexier, too.

The thought was startling, but Campbell decided it was true. Lisa was slender and elegant and perfect, but she was a woman most men admired from a distance. Tilly was quite different—all soft curves and luminous skin—and there was something irresistibly touchable about her. Any man’s fingers would be twitching with the need to reach out and slide through her hair, to smooth and stroke and explore that warm, lush body, and then he would want to take that mouth and see if it tasted and felt as good as it looked…

Alarmed by how quickly his thoughts had drifted out of control, Campbell slammed on the brakes and gave himself a mental slap.

He drank his tea, feeling jarred and vaguely uneasy. Tilly was the one with the vivid imagination, not him. Campbell Sanderson was famous for his coolness under pressure, for his single-minded pursuit of a goal. He wasn’t a man who let himself get distracted, especially not by a woman. The last time that had happened, he had ended up married to Lisa, and look what a mistake that had been! No way was he doing that again.

‘If you cried, there really would have been no chance of getting him back,’ he said caustically to make up for the fact that while his mind was firmly back under control, his hands were taking rather longer to catch up and were still tingling at the idea of touching Tilly.

Scowling at the sign of weakness, Campbell gripped them firmly around the mug.

‘I know.’ Tilly sighed. ‘What is it with men? Look at you. You’re happy to jump off a cliff but show you a woman in tears and I bet you’d run a mile!’

This was unfortunately so true that Campbell could only glower. ‘I like dealing with facts,’ he said. ‘Emotions are messy.’

Tilly stared at him and shook her head. ‘How on earth did you ever manage to get married in the first place? You must have had to succumb to a teensy little emotion then, surely!’

‘The attraction between us was a physical thing. It was never about hearts and flowers and all that stuff. Lisa’s not like that. She’s like me in lots of ways. She knows what she wants, and she goes after it, and she gets it. And for a time,’ he said, ‘she wanted me.’

Campbell paused, remembering. ‘It’s hard to resist a woman who looks the way she does. You’d have to see her to understand,’ he said, catching Tilly’s sceptical expression.

‘I can’t see you being pushed into doing anything you didn’t want to do, let alone marriage,’ she said. ‘You’re not the passive type.’

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘I did want to marry her.’

‘Because you loved her, or because you could show her off, prove that you had a more beautiful wife than anyone else?’

A very faint flush stained Campbell’s cheekbones. ‘I suppose there’s some truth in that,’ he acknowledged. ‘But marriage was Lisa’s idea. I’d never imagined myself as a marrying type, but she wanted a wedding, and I was mad for her. I didn’t care what happened as long as I could have her. I should have known it wouldn’t last.’

What would it be like to be so beautiful you always got your own way? Tilly wondered. What would it be like to be desired so much by Campbell that he would do whatever you wanted?

‘How long were you married?’ she asked instead.

‘Just three years,’ said Campbell. ‘There was great sexual chemistry but not much else going for the marriage. I was away on operations most of the time, and Lisa wasn’t prepared to sit at home waiting for me. She liked to have fun, and she liked money, and it didn’t take her long to get bored and start to want something more glamorous. Arthur offered her the lifestyle she wanted, so she took it.’

He shrugged, but Tilly couldn’t believe that he was as nonchalant about the failure of his marriage as he pretended. It must have been a huge blow to his pride.

‘Are you hoping that if she sees how successful you are now, she might come back to you?’

Campbell stared at her for a moment, then pushed the mug abruptly aside. ‘No,’ he said instinctively, and then, honestly, ‘I don’t know.’

So what were you thinking, Tilly? Tilly asked herself. That he might say, Of course not, how could I possibly want my beautiful ex-wife with whom I shared such incredible sexual chemistry when I could have you for a brief fling?

‘I was angry when she left,’ he said unexpectedly, almost as if the words had been forced out of him. For a long time all I thought about was seeing Lisa again, and making her regret the choice she had made. I probably did hope that she might change her mind then.’

‘And now?’

‘Now…now I think I want her to see what she could have had if she had stuck with me. Beyond that, I really don’t know. I probably won’t know until I do see her again.’

Well, she had asked and he had answered. Tilly couldn’t complain that he hadn’t been honest. She was very glad that she hadn’t done anything silly, like taking Cleo’s advice. Campbell was like a dog with a bone that it had tired of until the moment someone tried to take it away. Losing Lisa to another man would smack too much of failure for a man like him. Consciously or not, Tilly was prepared to bet that his life since then had been focused on getting his wife back.

Perhaps that was how it should be, she thought, but it was hard not to feel a little disconsolate. No one would ever feel that way about her. Olivier certainly hadn’t, she remembered with a trace of bitterness. Even if she had been the one to dump him, he would probably just have been relieved that she had saved him the trouble. He wouldn’t still be hankering after her four years down the line.

She should just face up to the fact that she wasn’t the kind of girl men got possessive or obsessed about, Tilly decided glumly. She had better just stick to baking.

And, talking of which…She sniffed delicately and looked across at Campbell, who was staring into his tea with a brooding expression.

He glanced up as he felt her eyes on him. ‘What?’

‘How long has your cake been in?’