Marriage Reunited

‘Our marriage.’

‘Mac, we don’t have a marriage.’ Georgia sighed. ‘We agreed to separate four years ago. It was a mutual decision and since neither of us has changed our mind since then, there doesn’t seem much point in carrying on being married on paper only. Surely you can see that it’s sensible to sort everything out now?’

Sensible. There was a word to describe Georgia, thought Mac, studying her over the desk. She looked tired, he decided, and there were new lines around her smoky-grey eyes, but her blonde hair was still drawn neatly away from her face in a French plait, and she was as immaculately groomed as ever, wearing one of those little suits that always made her look crisp and elegant and just a little buttoned up.

The contrast in the two sides of Georgia had always intrigued him. There was the cool, controlled Georgia who faced the world, and then there was the other, much more alluring Georgia who shed her inhibitions with her neat suit and her sensible shoes, whose smile as she shook her beautiful hair free of its tidy plait had never failed to send a frisson of excitement down his spine.

Look at her now, sitting at her perfectly organised desk, crisp and capable in a scoop-necked silk top and discreet earrings. Who could guess that behind that practical façade was a warm, vibrant, alluring woman? Mac liked to think that he was the only one who knew, the only who had glimpsed the potential in the steady, sensible girl who had escaped the confines of a small Yorkshire town for London all those years ago, the only one to be fascinated and infuriated by her in equal measure.

The realisation that he might not be the only one after all had brought him all the way back from Mozambique, jealousy churning in his gut.

The amusement evaporated from Mac’s face. ‘The thing is, Georgia, you said that neither of us had changed our mind, but that’s not quite true. I have.’

She stared at him. ‘What do you mean, you’ve changed your mind?’

‘About being better off apart than together. I don’t think that any more.’ The navy-blue eyes looked directly into hers. ‘I don’t want a divorce.’

For one long, long moment Georgia couldn’t say anything at all. She was too busy struggling to control her wayward heart which, contrary to all its hard training over the past four years, had done the equivalent of leaping to its feet and punching the air with an exhilarated yes!

How pathetic was that? All those tears, all that heartache. The pain, the confusion, the desolation…she had got over it all. She had survived, she was over him, and now all her body could do was thrill at the mere suggestion that he might, after all, still want her.

Georgia was disgusted with herself. Well, her heart could do what it liked, but her will was stronger now—it had had to be—and she had absolutely no intention of going back to the arguments and the disappointments and the being taken for granted. It had taken her a long time to recover and be ready to move on. This was not the time to slide back down the slippery slope of desire, however sweet and seductive it might be.

‘You may not want a divorce, Mac, but I do,’ she said, hoping that her face didn’t show the turmoil inside her. ‘We’ve been perfectly happy separated for the last four years. What’s the point of us staying married?’

‘What’s the point of us getting divorced?’ he countered.

Tension began to tug at the edge of Georgia’s eye, in spite of her best efforts to stay calm. That tic was a bad habit, one she thought she had kicked along with their marriage.

She could feel the old familiar frustration uncoiling inside her, leaving her taut and jittery. She had tried so hard to get rid of that feeling. Yoga, Pilates, relaxation classes, exercise…all utterly pointless when all it took was for Mac to walk into the room to bring it all back.

Breathe deeply, Georgia told herself. Don’t let him get to you. You’re forty-one, a professional woman, and you don’t need to prove anything to anyone, least of all Mac.

‘I want to move on,’ she said as calmly as she could.

‘Move on?’ Mac echoed, raising derisive brows. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You know what it means, Mac.’ Georgia had to clamp down hard on the irritation that threatened to boil over. She was not going to let this descend into one of their old, circular arguments.

‘Look, we agreed,’ she reminded him. ‘We wanted different things, and neither of us was prepared to compromise, so we decided to separate, and we’ve both led our own lives since then. We should have got divorced four years ago, but it was difficult with you away so much and, since nobody else was involved, there didn’t seem any particular reason to go through all the hassle of a divorce.’

‘But now there is?’ said Mac in a hard voice.

‘Yes.’ Georgia let out a breath. ‘Yes, there is. My life has changed.’

‘So it seems.’

Mac looked pointedly around her cramped office, with its dreary beige walls, old-fashioned filing cabinets, chipped desk and its view through the one glass wall of a newsroom so dated that it was almost a surprise to see computers instead of antiquated typewriters on the desk.

Georgia followed his gaze, knowing that he was remembering the newsroom in the national newspaper where she had worked in London, all steel and glass and technology and endlessly ringing phones. Did he have any idea how trapped she felt here?

‘Why Askerby?’ he asked abruptly. ‘It’s the last place I expected to find you. You couldn’t wait to get away, and it was only guilt that brought you back to sort out family problems. Every time you came home, you’d breathe a sigh of relief to be back in London.’

It was true. She had never wanted to come back and live in Yorkshire, but sometimes you didn’t have a choice.

‘I had my reasons,’ she said in a restrained voice.

His expression hardened. ‘To do with the little boy you’ve adopted?’

‘Yes, Toby. You remember him, don’t you?’

Expecting her to be defensive about her adopted child, Mac was thrown. ‘No…Toby? Who’s Toby?’

‘He’s Becca’s son.’

He might have known Becca would have been behind all this. Mac remembered Georgia’s sister all right. Talk about chalk and cheese. Becca was wild and chaotic, Georgia cool and determined. Forever held up as a contrast to her clever, ambitious sister, Becca had, perhaps inevitably, taken to her role as the black sheep of the family with gusto.

He sighed with exasperation. ‘What’s Becca up to now?’

With Becca you could never tell. She might be in prison, or simply have abandoned her child to go off and live in a commune, and either way it would no doubt fall to Georgia to clean up the mess she had left behind her. Becca had always relied on Georgia to help her out of whatever trouble she was in. Mac hadn’t liked the emotional blackmail she had exerted, implying that it was somehow Georgia’s fault that she hadn’t made a success of her life.

‘Just let her sort it out herself,’ he used to tell Georgia. ‘She’ll never learn to look after herself if she knows all she has to do is pick up the phone to you when things go wrong. I’d let her stew.’

But Georgia never would. ‘She’s my sister,’ she would protest, but Mac knew she felt guilty about being their parents’ favourite, guilty about having the brains and the beauty, guilty about the fact that Becca had never really been able to struggle out from under her shadow.

And now it seemed Becca never would.

‘She’s dead,’ said Georgia tonelessly.

Mac stared at her, shocked. ‘Dead? How? What happened?’

Georgia sighed and ran her fingertips under her eyes. ‘A car accident. She’d been out at a nightclub in Leeds, and she’d been drinking. She should never have been driving at all, but you know Becca.’ Shaking her head, she blew out a breath. ‘It was just fortunate that no one else was involved. Sometimes she could be so…so…’

‘Irresponsible?’ Mac suggested, watching Georgia’s hands clenching and unclenching with frustration.

Her grey eyes met his and then slid away. ‘She was my sister, and I loved her, but sometimes I feel so angry with her for what she’s done to Toby,’ she confessed in a low voice, not looking at him.

‘It’s normal to feel angry at times when you’re grieving,’ said Mac in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘You shouldn’t feel guilty about it.’

He was wasting his breath, of course. He didn’t need to look at her face to know that. Georgia was bound to feel guilty. She always had felt guilty about Becca, and Becca dying wasn’t going to change that.

‘I’m sorry about Becca, Georgia,’ he said sincerely. ‘It must have been a shock for you.’

‘Yes.’ Georgia remembered that terrible phone call, more than a year ago now. Her mother’s distress had been so acute that it had taken ages before Georgia could understand what had happened and, when she had finally grasped what her mother was trying to tell her, she had known at once that her life would never be the same again.

‘Yes, it was,’ she said. ‘It was terrible, but not as terrible as it was for Toby. He was only seven, and he’d lost his whole world. Becca might have been irresponsible, but she did love him, and she was his mother. No one else will ever be able to take her place.’

‘But you’re trying?’