Love notes (4 page)

“I’d forgotten how beautiful
Yorkshire is,” Aiden said, spookily echoing her thoughts. But then,
he always had been able to read her mind. He sat down next to her
and looked out across the fields and open dales that stretched to
the grey-misted horizon, almost unbroken by road or village. “I
haven’t been here since…”

He’d been about to say, since we
broke up, but thought better of it and allowed the sentence to
trail away unfinished.

“Me neither.” Erika knew exactly
what had been on his mind but couldn’t even go there. She deftly
changed the subject. “In my final year at uni, I composed a
classical piece inspired by all this.” She swept her arm around
her. The opening bars played in her head, transporting her back in
time, but she stopped the thought abruptly before she had time to
remember everything else that had happened around then.

“I always wanted to hear it
performed but Marty had other ideas. A piano concerto isn’t exactly
sexy.”

“Depends who’s performing it.”
Interest flared in Aiden’s eyes again as he looked at her,
intimating that he’d find her sexy, whatever she did. But the spark
died just as quickly and he stared back out into the distance,
looking thoughtful. “Do you regret not pursuing a classical
career?”

Erika shrugged. “I’m paid a
great deal of money to make music. Millions of people download my
songs and I’ve performed all over the world. I might not have had
those chances elsewhere.” Not that a classical career had ever been
an option. “When Marty appeared with his contract, I was broke. I’d
been singing in Los Angeles bars for a few dollars a night and
frankly, I’d have taken any job he offered. Added to which…”

“…you had no reason to come
home,” Aiden finished for her, looking down at his hands.

“I had every reason not to come
home.”

A subtle difference but she made
the point forcefully and Aiden nodded as if he accepted the truth
of it. An uncomfortable silence settled around them while the icy
wind whipped Erika’s breath away and found its way into the gaps in
her clothing. She shivered and pulled her coat closer, wrapping her
scarf tighter around her neck. It seemed inconceivable that, twenty
four hours earlier, she’d left Los Angeles wearing a T shirt and
short skirt. Despite her initial objections, she was now glad that
Aiden had insisted upon buying her a heavy hiking jacket on the way
through Harrogate and snuggled down into it.

Realising they’d probably freeze
to death if they sat there much longer, Erika moved the
conversation on. “So,” she prompted. “You wanted to talk to me
somewhere private. Is this quiet enough for you?”

Aiden laughed. On top of a
windswept hill, in the middle of the Yorkshire dales, they could
have been the last people on Earth. The summit sat so high above
the road that the cars passing below looked like toys, and there
wasn’t another human being in sight for miles. No one else was
apparently brave enough – or foolish enough – to go walking in such
cold weather and they had the world to themselves.

“Five years ago, you ran away
from me,” Aiden began, unusually uncomfortable and staring out
toward a distant peak on the other side of the dale. “I wanted the
chance to explain what happened that night.”

“What is there to explain?”
Erika frowned. “I arrived unexpectedly at your flat to find you
naked on the bed, on top of an equally naked woman. I’d had sex
with you often enough to know what it looked like.”

Aiden saw her point but hadn’t
driven over two hundred miles to leave it there. “I need you to
know she meant nothing to me. We’d met that night at a friend’s
party. We had too much to drink and ended up in bed together.”

“Oh, please!” Erika dragged out
the words to show she had no patience with lame excuses. “Don’t
insult me like this. Next you’ll be saying you didn’t realise how
much you loved me until I left.”

From the look on Aiden’s face,
this was exactly what he’d been about to say but now thought better
of it. “I want you to know, I bitterly regret what happened.”

“What? Sleeping with her, or
getting caught?”

“Both.” At least he was honest.
“But most of all, I regret hurting you.”

For the first time, Aiden
stopped staring at the horizon and turned to look at Erika, forcing
her to return his gaze. His intense, hazel eyes narrowed slightly
as he searched her face for some emotion to react to, or even a
hint that she believed him, but she gave him nothing. Erika had had
too much practice shutting down her emotions, and maintaining her
inner privacy in an over-exposed life, to let anything slip now.
She looked back at him, her face unreadable, even though her mind
swung violently between pretending it no longer mattered and
admitting that he’d broken her heart beyond repair.

“Hurting doesn’t even begin to
cover it,” she told him after the longest pause, struggling not to
think of how close she’d come to emotional collapse. “You reached
in and tore out my heart. It was months before I could think of you
without breaking down.”

“I know.”

“How could you possibly
know?”

Unable to hold back her emotions
any longer, she rounded on him; all the anger and hurt she’d kept
buried for five years, rushing to the surface and boiling over in
white-hot rage. Tears spilled down her cheeks and she swept them
away furiously.

“You weren’t there,” she raged.
“You didn’t see me struggling to make it through a day without you.
You weren’t around to hold me at night when I couldn’t catch my
breath for crying. How could you possibly know?”

“Because it’s in your music.” He
quoted her lyrics. “Crying a river so I can build a bridge and get
over you. A love so pure, I was so sure, shame you never felt it
too. Living in the shadow of love. I’m in every line of those early
songs.”

“So what? I had to get my
revenge somehow.”

“Is that what you wanted?
Revenge?”

“There’s a fine line between
love and hate. Finding you in bed with another woman made me cross
it. I wanted to hurt you as much as you’d hurt me. And when I sing
those songs, the whole world knows what a bastard you are.”

She dried her eyes on her
sleeve, wishing for all the world that she could get up, walk into
another room and lock the door on Aiden Thirstan for good this
time.

“Do you still hate me?” Aiden
held his breath, as if dreading the answer.

“Don’t flatter yourself.” Erika
almost laughed in his face as she fought to bring her emotions back
under control. “To hate you I’d need to think about you. And the
truth is, you never cross my mind these days.”

“Except when you sing,” Aiden
contradicted her. “I saw you perform an acoustic version of Love,
Honour, Betray on TV last year. There were tears in your eyes. It
seemed so raw still.”

Erika fixed him with a
contemptuous glare. “It’s called musical interpretation. Great
performers don’t simply sing songs – they live them. All you saw
was the emotion I needed to carry the lyrics. It had absolutely
nothing to do with you.”

She prayed he wouldn’t spot the
outrageous lie, or work out that she didn’t sing most of her early
songs live because they still remained too painful to perform.

Many had never been heard at all
and stayed locked inside her head, too distressing to give voice
to.

Aiden was right and it was still
raw – like old scar tissue that had never properly healed and
remained tender to the touch. The question she’d longed to ask for
five years bubbled up inside her and forced itself out.

“Why?” she said. “Why lead me on
for five months, and pretend you were in love with me, if you were
only going to fall into bed with someone else as soon as my back
was turned?”

If she hadn’t known better,
Erika could have sworn she saw a look of shame cross Aiden’s face
but doubted he’d ever been troubled with much of a conscience.

“I didn’t pretend about loving
you,” he told her, the tiger’s eyes sparkling angrily. “Everything
I felt was very real.”

“But not real enough,
apparently. Why else would you be in bed with Little Miss
Naked?”

“Because I panicked. Before I
met you, I’d played around. I dated a different girl every night
and had no plans for a long-term relationship. Then you appeared,
out of the blue, the most beautiful, intelligent, sexy woman I’d
ever seen, and I couldn’t help falling for you in a big way.”

“Don’t tell me – you only slept
with her to prove you were in love with me.” She couldn’t believe
him. This man was a walking cliché.

Aiden rushed to justify himself.
“You went back to York to complete your final year. I returned to
London where I told myself that the love and passion we felt for
one another couldn’t possibly have been as intense as I’d
remembered.”

“Funny, I never doubted it.”
This guy was incredible. How could she have crossed an ocean and
cried herself to sleep for six months over him?

“You were twenty-two, for God’s
sake, and on the verge of a career. I hadn’t hit thirty and was
building a business. Neither of us was ready to commit.”

“Who’s talking about commitment?
I never intended trapping you into marriage and forcing you into a
cosy little life.” She refused to be the villain in this. “But that
didn’t stop me loving you with every fibre of my being. I deserved
better, Aiden. You should have been honest with me. Finding you in
bed with another woman broke my heart. It took me a long time to
get over you.”

“But you’re over me now,” he
guessed although it hadn’t taken a great deal of thought to work it
out.

“Absolutely. One hundred per
cent guaranteed. Whatever we were to one another, it’s gone.”

Aiden’s jaw flexed as he clamped
down his teeth, not trusting himself to reply immediately. “You
make it sound very final.”

“You don’t mean…” The absurd
idea that Aiden had appeared in Yorkshire with the intention of
rekindling their relationship made her laugh. “You didn’t race up
here expecting me to fall into your arms again, did you?”

“Of course not.” He answered
sharply, making no effort to conceal his rising anger, although
Erika also saw some other emotion she couldn’t define, but which
had obviously chipped away at his self control. “We parted badly
and I’ve never had chance to tell you how sorry I was, or how much
I regretted hurting you.”

“Any therapist in L.A. would
call that closure but, the truth is, I shut the lid on you years
ago. You may have broken my heart but you also taught me a very
valuable lesson. There’s only one person in this world I can rely
on absolutely, and that’s myself.”

“Would that same therapist call
that trust issues?”

“I prefer to call it inner
strength.”

Her cheeks flushed furiously,
despite the cold and her body tensed. “In fact, I should be
thanking you, Aiden. Had we stayed together, I might never have
gone to America. I certainly wouldn’t have met Marty in a seedy
bar, or made millions out of writing songs about broken hearts.”
She allowed herself a quiet laugh. “Little Miss Naked turned you
into a two-timing bastard and me into a very rich woman. Seems I
got the better half of the bargain. I hope she was worth it.”

Aiden couldn’t help himself and
his full lips softened into a slow, sexy smile. “Trust me. Compared
with you, no one since has been worth it.” Taking her by surprise,
he pulled off his glove and trailed a warm finger down her cold
cheek, sending shivers through Erika. “You’re still the most
beautiful woman I ever saw.”

Erika jerked her head back,
breaking the contact. “You and ten million other men share the same
thought. Join the queue.”

She’d heard all she wanted to
and got to her feet, ready to go back down the hill to the car, but
Aiden caught her hand.

“Sit down,” he ordered. “You’re
not fit to walk back yet.”

He unzipped the rucksack he’d
carried up the hill and produced a flask of coffee. He poured a cup
and held it out to Erika. The prospect of feeling warm again for
the first time in hours proved too tempting and she sat down,
tucking herself into an alcove in the rocks out of the wind. Aiden
joined her there, his broad, warm body shielding her from the worst
of the cold as she laced her fingers around the mug and felt
sensation returning to her hands.

“You came prepared,” she said,
nodding toward the bag. “I wouldn’t have had you down as a boy
scout.” Far too naughty for that.

“The art of survival on freezing
building sites,” he confessed. “Thick coat, warm boots and hot
coffee.”

He took a sip and it glistened
on his lips, drawing Erika’s attention to the sensual curve of his
mouth. It became impossible to ignore the memory of those lips
scorching her skin as they’d trailed kisses along her spine and
down the backs of her thighs.

Or the way Aiden had held her
face between his hands as he’d kissed her so deeply she’d been
transported beyond herself on a tide of passion and longing.

What was it about Aiden Thirstan
that had her cursing his existence one minute and then remembering
the most disturbingly erotic things about him the next?

As if it were yesterday, she
could recall the warm, masculine scent of him, and the taste of his
skin as she ran her tongue from his navel to the hollow at the base
of his neck.

She closed her eyes to slam down
the shutter on such mutinous thoughts and hide the alarming
pictures passing behind them. She let the steaming coffee warm her
face.

“How’s business?” she asked
eventually, desperate to take the conversation onto safer
ground.

“Good.”

He was casual but Erica knew it
was a colossal understatement. In the space of fifteen years, Aiden
had turned his father’s ailing property maintenance company into a
multi-million pound commercial construction firm, heavily involved
in building London’s Olympic park. Thirstan Property Holdings
rarely slipped out of the financial pages, where analysts lauded it
as one of the few companies to ride out the recession. By shrewd
investments, coupled with calculate risks, Aiden had more than
quadrupled his turnover since his split with Erika, making it one
of the most profitable firms in Europe. He’d consolidated his
fortune by floating the company on the Stock Exchange the previous
year, his majority shareholding elevating him to the ranks of the
super-wealthy – and, as a consequence, the gossip columns.