Jilted

Thoughts of just how soon were interrupted as she pushed open the door of her old bedroom. Expecting Mat to have turned the room to other uses, she gasped aloud at the sight in front of her. The room was exactly how she’d left it. Exactly. Goose bumps erupted across her flesh.

Matilda had cleaned and dusted, but aside from that, everything was just as Ellie had left it on that fateful morning. Teenage posters, her collection of troll dolls with rainbow hair, scented candles, lots of photos, a pair of bright purple Dr. Martens and...

Forcing breath through her lungs and one foot in front of the other, Ellie stepped into the room and toward the single bed. Her eyes had already been drawn, like magnets, to the simple white wedding dress that lay draped across the mattress. She stared for a second, mesmerized, before scooping it up and sighing at the feel of soft silk between her fingers. She clutched the A-line gown to her chest as if it were a long-lost teddy bear. Her thoughts immediately traveled back a decade, to a day in Perth when she’d felt like the poster child for happiness.

Marrying Flynn was any girl’s fantasy, and she’d wanted to be his fantasy when he watched her walk down the aisle. Silly, really, but she’d spent hours daydreaming about the expression on his face when he’d see her. She’d loved him so much. So much it made her chest ache if she thought about losing him. Her insides whirled like a roller coaster whenever she even thought about kissing him. And so, when she’d walked past that boutique and seen the most elegant wedding dress with a 50 percent off tag, she’d thought it was fate.

And she’d been euphoric.

The shop had been about to close but she’d dragged in Tegan, her then best friend, and Matilda, and sweet-talked the assistant into letting her try on the dress. When she did, she never wanted to take it off again. It was simply perfect. No need for alterations at all. With Ellie protesting that she’d pay for it, Matilda had handed over her American Express card and someone managed to convince Ellie to take the dress off so the assistant could box it.

A tear dribbled down Ellie’s cheek at the memory. At the thought that she’d once been so sky-high happy.

Thinking she was probably crazy but unable to help herself, Ellie laid her fantasy gown back on the bed and stripped to her mismatched underwear. She wondered if the dress would still fit but, if anything, it was a little on the large side. With great effort she wrangled the tiny pearl buttons at her back and managed to do up every last one of them. She twisted to look in the mirror.

What a sight. Her face was stained red with tears and her hair flat from the cap that had trapped it all day long. She didn’t look like a bride any groom would get choked up over. She looked scary. But despite her appearance, Ellie didn’t look away or remove the dress. She shuddered at the idea of becoming Miss Havisham, but even that miserable vision didn’t spur her to remove it. After a while of standing like this, her eyes caught on something reflected in the mirror. Photo frames littered the old wooden tallboy behind her—most of them sickly sweet heart shapes containing pictures of her and Flynn.

She turned and snatched up a photo. A chill raced up her spine. She sank onto the bed, clutching Flynn’s image tightly in her hands. He was gorgeous. A heartthrob, sex on legs, a devil in denim and dangerously, deliciously beautiful. His all-Australian country-boy grin lit up his whole face, and the gleam in his sea-green eyes spoke volumes about the kind of fun-loving, hardworking bloke he always was.

She’d tried to forget. In the name of self-preservation, she’d not taken even one tiny wallet photo when she left. She’d not allowed herself to think about the life they would have started together—the perfect house they were planning to build on Black Stump, the babies they’d dreamed of having... But now she realized how monumentally she’d failed. She may have repressed the memories but she hadn’t erased them. Looking at him now, tracing his eyes, his nose, his lips with her quaking fingers brought it all rushing back. The intensity of first love, first passion. How he had loved her so completely and stood up for her at every turn. Romeo and Juliet had nothing on Flynn and Ellie. Hope Junction had been up in arms when their golden boy—son of third-generation landowners—had started going out with her. Not only did she not come from farming stock, but her mother had dumped her and her father hadn’t even stuck around long enough to see her born. Thankfully, the teenage Flynn had already developed both backbone and morals. He didn’t give a damn what the town thought. He saw past her situation to the real Ellie, and before long his dedication won over his parents and the rest of the town, too. Pretty soon Ellie was loved and accepted as if she were a fourth-generation local as well, and that was no easy feat. When Flynn had asked her to marry him, everyone was genuinely ecstatic. The only comments about them being too young came from girls Ellie’s age and she wrote off their gibes as simple jealousy.

“Oh, Flynn.” Sniffing, she looked down at the photo and tried to push away the millions of what-ifs that floated into her mind. What if things had been different? What if her mother had never asked to meet her in Perth? What if, for once, she’d put her own needs first and said no? What if Flynn had come with her to Perth as he’d said he would? What if she’d stayed and married him anyway? Would they be happy now? Would they have kids? Some would say her life in Sydney as an actress and celebrity was a charmed one, but her whole body ached with the thought of just how magical it could have been if she’d been living it with Flynn.

* * *

SUNDAY MORNING, FLYNN WOKE. His head throbbed and a heavy naked weight lay sprawled across his equally naked chest. This realization roused him like no bucket of cold water ever could.

Glancing round the lamp-lit room at his surroundings and then taking a closer look at the woman in his arms, he froze. Scenes of the previous night flashed one after the other. Cringeworthy and stupid didn’t even begin to describe what he saw and how he felt. He wanted more than anything to extricate himself from beneath Lauren.

Lauren? Had the drink stolen every ounce of his common sense? Again? He wanted to collect his clothes from wherever they’d landed, flee home, crawl under the bedcovers and stay there all day. He wanted to forget this nightmare had ever happened. But he saw one immediate problem with that tempting scenario. Lauren.

He’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to have noticed the mammoth crush she’d harbored for him since primary school. But he’d been fastidious in avoiding her advances—at least until now. Because although she was fun and pretty—if you liked her kind of style—she was also a local. Flings had been few and far between in recent years, but any that Flynn did have, he kept far outside the boundaries of Hope Junction. Local girls were a no-go zone. It was safer and easier that way.

Lauren, on the other hand, was very local. And she was like most single women approaching their thirtieth year. Stars in her eyes when it came to weddings, babies and happily-ever-afters. But after all Flynn had been through with Ellie, he didn’t have a marrying bone left in his body.

He cursed himself and his lack of restraint, not so much for not resisting Lauren, but for getting so absolutely hammered that he thought hooking up with her was a good idea in the first place. He’d been dry for eight years now, and although his addiction was always in the back of his mind, he’d forgotten how much of a tool he became, and the kind of stupid choices he made, when he got drunk. It wasn’t pretty, nor something he was proud of.

Lauren shifted on his chest. She made a tiny noise like a mewling cat and opened her eyes. Their faces were so close he could do nothing but look straight into her eyes. She smiled like a Cheshire; he gulped like a minnow facing a great white.

“Feeling better this morning, Flynn?”

He couldn’t exactly give her the truth—that her face was the last thing he wanted to see first thing in the morning.

“Last night was something else,” she went on, crawling her nails up his chest and bringing the pads of her fingers to rest on his lips. He tried not to flinch. “But next time, let’s make sure we finish it off, hey?”

His heart skipped a hopeful beat at her words. Could it be possible they hadn’t actually had sex? He had to know.

“I’m...really sorry, Lauren, but my memory’s pretty hazy about last night. Did we...?”

“I should probably be offended that you can’t remember it.” She giggled and began toying with the flesh at his ear. He summoned all his self-control not to tap her hand away, raise his voice and demand she tell him the truth. Instead, he smiled the smile he’d been told, on many occasions, was a danger to womankind.

“Well?”

“You passed out before we got that far.” She laughed, then added something else. But Flynn didn’t take in these last words. He was too busy thanking the Lord for small mercies, promising he’d never touch another drop as long as he lived. But the reprieve didn’t last long. Lauren dipped her head and touched her hot, wet lips to his parched ones. A quick worker, she slid her tongue inside his mouth barely before he’d registered her kiss. Where, in other circumstances, his first thoughts might be of his morning breath, in this instance his only concern was how to escape her clutches. Hell, he’d be happy if he had bad breath and it scared her off.

He placed his hands on her bare shoulders and pushed her upward, looking away when her perky breasts thrust themselves into his line of vision.

“Sorry, Lauren, with the ram sale not far away, I really can’t afford to have a Sunday off. Work to be done, sheep to check on.”

“Damn sheep.” Her lower lip practically touched her chest, but she rolled over and scrounged around on the floor for her discarded clothes. If there was one thing a country girl understood, it was that nothing, no one, came before the farm.

Seizing the opportunity, Flynn scrabbled off the couch, located his shirt and boots and yanked them both on in record time. He knew he should stop and apologize to Lauren. He should explain he hadn’t meant to lead her on, that he hadn’t been thinking straight. But whatever way he put it, she’d be offended and upset. And the honest truth was that he just didn’t have the mental energy to deal with this right now. Not on top of everything else.

So without so much as a kiss on the cheek, he thanked Lauren for letting him stay and fled.

* * *

AFTER CRYING HERSELF to sleep, Ellie slept more soundly than she had in a long time. Maybe it was the emotion of the day before, maybe it was the jet lag, maybe it was the quiet of the country, but in the morning, it was only the sound of the kettle whistling that roused her. It was a noise she hadn’t heard in as long as she could remember. In her other life no one bothered with the time it took to boil a kettle. It was either Starbucks or the staff room machine, which percolated good, strong coffee twenty-four hours a day. It took a second for her to recognize the sound, and then she realized it meant Mat was already up and trying to fend for herself.

Ellie sprang into action. Her hand was on the door handle when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. That was no fancy nightie she saw, it was a wedding dress. Her wedding dress. A shiver ran over her skin and a despondent feeling returned to her chest. With what felt like a brick weighing her down, it was an effort to walk even the few steps back to the bed. She sat and stretched behind her to the row of minuscule buttons. If she kept on like this, she was in danger of returning to that dark place she’d gone to when she first left Flynn and gave up everything that mattered to her. A place so gloomy it had taken all her willpower to drag herself out. She never wanted to go there again. Besides, she was in Hope for Matilda, not to revisit past demons.

“Come on,” she said, urging her wobbly fingers to steady and coordinate. She’d done them up with only relative difficulty; surely the undoing would be easy in comparison. More twisting, more tugging, but it seemed the only thing likely to come undone was her arm socket.

“Argh!” What was meant to be a silent plea between gritted teeth came out loud and angry. She took a deep breath, concentrated, but as the first pearl slipped from its silken prison, there came a hesitant knock on the bedroom door. Ellie froze.

“Yes?” She managed only just to get the word past the lump in her throat.

“Can I help you?” came the response. Ellie frowned at Matilda’s turn of phrase, hoping her godmother hadn’t looked in on her while she’d slept and seen her outfit. The thought chilled her.

“No,” she said, a lot harsher than she intended. “I’m here to help you. What the hell do you think you’re doing wandering around without me? Don’t do anything else. I’ll be out in just a moment.”

She focused her attention back on the dress, but the damn buttons refused to budge. Generally calm in the face of a problem, Ellie’s pulse raced and the muscles in her neck twitched. Stupid tears prickled at the corners of her eyes. As she saw it, she had two choices. Open the door and, despite the shame and embarrassment she’d feel, ask for help, or...

She took another deep breath, positioned her hands at the back of her neck, one on either side of the dress, and yanked. Hard. Tiny pops rippled as the tiny pearls shot around the room. Ellie shimmied out of the dress, scrunched it into a ball and shoved it on top of a stack of old Cosmo magazines at the bottom of the wardrobe. It felt wrong to treat something that had once been so special to her with such disregard, and for a second she hesitated, thought about pulling it out and trying to fix the creases she’d just inflicted. But Matilda’s voice sounded through the door again, more anxious than before.

“Ellie? What was that? Are you sure you’re okay in there?”

She bit down on her lip, turned and lifted the lid on her suitcase. There wasn’t time to get sentimental. “I’m fine,” she said, scrambling around for jeans and a top.

When she finally opened the door and saw the look of worry in the other woman’s eyes, she knew that she hadn’t been able to hide the truth from Matilda.

“You want to talk about it?”

“Nope.” Ellie reached out to take Matilda’s arm. “I want to get some caffeine into my veins, get you settled on the veranda swing and get stuck into those awnings you left half-done.”

Matilda shuffled alongside Ellie into the kitchen. “Don’t think you can change the subject on me, missy. I’ve let it lie for ten years but it’s time. I can see coming back here, to me, to this town, to your room...” Matilda paused and looked deep into Ellie’s eyes. Ellie knew she was thinking about the dress. “It’s messing with your mind. Therapy is expensive, but talking to an old friend is priceless.”

Ellie went to the bench, opened a cupboard and grabbed two large ceramic mugs. Perhaps Mat was right. Perhaps she should talk about why she’d done the unforgivable, why she’d left Flynn standing at the front of a church with the whole town as witness. But Matilda was the only person who’d been there who still believed in her, who could still look her in the eye and not make her feel like the scum of the earth. Hell, she could barely look in the mirror and achieve that feat herself.