Free The Key by Geraldine O'Hara Page B

didn’t do anything.”
    I walked on, up the steps, panicked for a second that I’d lost my keys in the river. I patted my jeans pocket, the familiar bulge of them beneath my palm, then pulled them out and let us in. Stood in the living room and allowed the tears to fall, hot and fat and searing down my cheeks. Clutched the itchy blanket tighter around me to ward off shivers that had decided to join my pity party.
    David pulled me to him, held me close. “I meant it, you know. What I said. I don’t bloody care who you are—Jane Smith or the crazy Chantal Rossi. I knew the second you’d said Mont Blanc that you weren’t French, and it didn’t matter. I still wanted to see you every day, still do. I like you. A lot. Understand?”
    I nodded, forehead rubbing against his damp T-shirt, and wondered, as sobs began their bizarre dance up my chest and out of my mouth, what the hell he’d want to do that for.

Chapter Nine
     
     
     
    “Chantal Rossi Thompson, come here, woman!”
    I still couldn’t get used to being called that. Not only did I have a new surname, courtesy of us getting married a week ago, but I’d had my birth name changed too. How many women could say their future husbands had understood why they’d pretended to be some nutball French woman, accepted it, then suggested she legally become said nutball French woman?
    David was amazing.
    I stared ahead at the endless stretch of beach, at the sand dunes of a place in the South of France, where sand dunes abounded. The ocean swooshed to my right, white spume chasing itself up the beach then retreating, as if the dry sand had shocked it into tumbling backwards. Sea birds squawked, wheeled in wide circles, nothing like the brazen, chip-fed gulls of Brighton, who swooped low and threatened to thieve your sandwich right out of your hand.
    Our honeymoon location had been a surprise to me until we’d arrived. David having a private jet had meant I hadn’t had to see where we were going on a destination board or have a desk clerk give it away in a fake chirpy voice as we handed over our passports. It had warmed me that he’d recalled the time I’d said I wished we were on a French beach so we could fuck behind a dune. The idea of that didn’t appeal in reality, though—all that sand in my bits wasn’t an attractive prospect—but David had packed a blanket in the hopes I’d change my mind.
    Shirking Jane Smith had been so easy, and once, David had said that I’d been Chantal all along, I’d just needed the courage to be her—be myself. Apparently, when I’d left my flat on the day of our wedding, Mr Big Bollocks had come out and shed a tear. I’d been so busy drowning in nerves that I’d failed to notice, but Dad had asked, as we’d sat in the car, me arranging my dress so it didn’t crease, what on earth that sobbing man had down his pants. David had pointed out that my swollen neighbour had a crush on me, yet I’d failed to realise all that time. I’d just thought he was a pervert with a perpetual hard-on.
    “Don’t you go off without me, Mrs!” David called.
    I turned around and walked backwards, toes sinking into the sand, and took in every bit of him as he strode towards me, bogged down like a packhorse with a cooler in one hand, a rucksack in the other and a rolled-up towel beneath each arm. I’d offered to carry something, but he’d insisted that wasn’t the way it worked. He would carry our things—and that had been the end of that.
    Still a gentleman. I knew he always would be.
    The sun was behind me, and he looked as if he was glowing. He’d tanned quickly—unlike me, who was burnt and getting sore despite slathering myself with sun cream—and the sight of him had me thinking of some bronzed god. I wasn’t biased either. Plenty of women on this private beach had been giving him the eye and, funny enough, it hadn’t upset me. He was mine. After all, he’d told me I was the key that fitted quite snugly into his keyhole. I’d