Free The Accidental Wife by Rowan Coleman Page A

after her, and glimpsed the silhouette of her friend on the garage roof before scrambling back into bed.
    ‘Lights out now,’ her mother said, opening the door.
    ‘Yes, Mum,’ Catherine said.
    Her mother paused for a moment, looking at the window, the curtain a little askew.
    ‘Have you had the window open?’ she asked Catherine.
    ‘Sorry,’ Catherine said.
    ‘No windows open at night. Any mad man could get in.’
    Her mother had shut the door behind her, snapping the light switch off as she went. Catherine lay back in her bed, stretching from the ends of her fingers to the tips of her toes, knowing. At last she had something to dream about.
    Things would have been so different, Catherine thought as she finished her glass of wine, if Marc just hadn’t turned up the next day.
    She had told her mother she was going to study at the library, taking a big net bag of books and several pens to prove it. Her mother, who didn’t like her being around the house anyway, didn’t question her. She was glad to see the back of her.
    Catherine deliberately walked along the canal towards the park in a bid to avoid meeting anyone she might know, including Alison, on the high street. The spot in the park where Marc had found her was out of the way, beyond the swings and roundabout, under the canal bridge towards the back of the field where the park met the railway embankment. The grass was long, untouched by the council mower. Catherine felt confident that once she was there she would not be spotted by anyone.
    Which was reassuring because she didn’t expect him to be there at all. She prepared herself for disappointment, relieved that she hadn’t told Alison about him because then, when he didn’t show, when she didn’t see him again, it wouldn’t matter as nobody would know about him, and after a few days or weeks, Catherine would stop thinking about him and her life would get back to exactly the way it had been before.
    But as she made her way under the bridge she could see that Marc was already there waiting for her, leaning against the trunk of the tree they had met under, the August sun painting his bare chest with patches of gold as it danced through the tree’s canopy.
    Catherine stopped in her tracks and looked at him. She was seventeen, the most inexperienced girl in her year, if not the whole school. She was thin and flat-chested, with long bony fingers and feet. What did Marc want with her truly? Because he could not want her like
that
. He couldn’t look at her the way boys looked at Alison and actually want her. Besides, he wasn’t a mere boy. He was a man, more than three years her senior. Seeing him waiting there under the tree for her didn’t make any kind of sense.
    Instinctively Catherine knew that now was the time she should turn back. It was her chance to heed the warning he had given her yesterday and leave. But even as in her mind’s eye she was rotating on her heel and scurrying away to the shelter of the library, her treacherous body was carrying her right to his side.
    ‘I saw you watching me,’ he said, smiling up at her, blinking against the bright sunlight. ‘Having second thoughts?’
    ‘No,’ Catherine said. He reached out, catching her hand and pulled her down onto the grass. ‘It’s just, I look at you and I … I don’t know what you want with me.’
    Marc laughed. ‘Me neither, but it must be something pretty strong because after we said goodbye yesterday I swore blind to myself I wasn’t coming here today. But here I am. And now you’re here I feel happy. I hardly ever feel happy.’
    The two of them watched each other and the anticipation that he might kiss her again made Catherine’s insides burn.
    ‘So what do you want to do today?’ Catherine asked him.
    Applying a very gentle pressure on her shoulders Marc pushed her back into the long grass and lay alongside her, his head propped up on one elbow. ‘I want to lie here in the grass, talking and kissing you,’ he told