Free It's Raining Men by Milly Johnson Page B

and leave her
alone. She wished she hadn’t accepted his offer of a coffee and shelter from the rain in a nearby tea shop in Covent Garden. She wished she hadn’t let him open the door for her, pull
the chair out for her, work his charm on her. She wished she had walked out there and then when he told her he was married to a dying woman. She wished she hadn’t let him convince her he was
lonely and tortured and stumbling through life not knowing where he was or what he was doing any more. She wished she hadn’t been a stupid idiotic soft touch with a scar on her face who was
so sodding grateful to be loved and found attractive that she believed all the rubbish that tumbled out of his lying gob.
    It was impossible to stop the tears from falling by the time she reached her street. She tried to push them back into her eyes, but they wouldn’t go. She deserved them. She let them drip
steadily down her pale cheeks and then had to stand at the corner in the rain and steady herself before she approached her front door. Michael’s company Mondeo was parked outside her
house.
    As she put her key in the lock, May realized she didn’t have a plan of action. Even if she had, she would have ignored it, though. Her head went into a spin as she heard his cheery
call.
    ‘Hiya. I thought I’d make a start on dinner. Found everything in the fridge.’
    May took off her coat and hung it on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, on top of Michael’s. Then she doubled back, removed her coat from touching his and hung it on a peg on the
wall instead.
    May walked down the hallway towards the kitchen. Every step taking her closer to a confrontation she didn’t want to have – but knew she must.
Oh, please, please make him have a
plausible explanation. I’ll never put another foot wrong in my life, God, but please do this one little thing for me.
    Michael looked so carefree and happy as she stepped into the kitchen. He was wearing her apron and taking the top off the potato dauphinoise carton. She didn’t know where to start, what
words to use.
    ‘What’s up, darling?’ He noticed the expression on her face and hurried around the table to embrace her.
    When her hand shot out to stop him and her voice delivered a fierce ‘Don’t!’ he looked at her as hurt as if she had slapped him across the face.
    ‘May?’
    ‘How old did you say Susan was?’ She hadn’t known what she was going to say until she said it. Her words were as much a surprise to her as they were to him.
    ‘Thirty-five,’ he said, without a quiver in his voice or a nervous blink of the eyes. ‘What makes you ask that?’
    ‘She isn’t in her nineties, then?’
    ‘What?’ He angled his head, like dogs do when they are trying to understand what is going on.
    ‘I said,
Auntie
Susan isn’t in her nineties, then?’ Her voice was trembling.
    Michael’s eyebrows arranged themselves into an arc of confusion but a flickering tic under his eye had appeared. He was holding his composure, but only from the nose down. He had been well
and truly rumbled and he knew it.
    ‘I know,’ said May, sounding a lot stronger than she felt. ‘I know that Susan Hammerton is in her nineties and that you are her great-nephew. I know that you go and visit her
with a blonde – your real wife, I presume?’
    God, this sounded like an episode of
Jeremy Kyle
. All that was missing was a three-toothed best friend brandishing the results of a DNA test.
    ‘You can’t know that because it isn’t true,’ Michael blurted out.
    ‘I do know it because I went to The Pines this morning. To see if there was anything I could do for your wife.’
    He gasped. ‘Why did you do that? Don’t you trust me?’
    ‘What?’ May’s jaw dropped so low that it was in danger of hitting the floor.
    ‘I’m not married,’ he chipped in quickly. ‘I’ve never been married.’
    May stood there in the sort of shock that follows a bucket of iced water being tipped over the head. He