Free A Whirlwind Marriage by Helen Brooks Page B

she had levered herself away from the flaking wood and fetched the door key out of her handbag.
    This was really the end. She touched her lips, whichwere still bruised and full from his passionate kisses. She wouldn’t ever again wake up beside him after a night of ardent, tempestuous lovemaking and find the smoky grey eyes waiting for her, their warmth intimate and sensual. No more erotic, shameless baths and showers together, when they soaped each other’s bodies and found new ways to bring each other to a state of quivering arousal. No more delicious Sunday mornings in each other’s arms.
    He was a devastating, wonderfully inventive lover, capable of producing such piercing pleasure at times that she had thought she would die from it.
    But she hadn’t died. She threw back the bed covers and quickly slipped into her thick dressing gown, adjusting the bed back into its daytime position as a sofa so that she could turn on the little gas fire and put some warmth into the freezing room. No, she hadn’t died, she thought soberly, as she held a match to the gas jets. She had grown up instead. And she would never have believed it could be so agonisingly painful.
    When Marianne arrived at the supermarket an hour later it was to find the place in something of a panic. Mrs Polinkski had had an early-morning fall and dislocated her knee, which meant that Marianne and the Polinkskis’s two younger daughters—as yet unmarried—were going to be hard pressed.
    Mr Polinkski and the son of the family divided their time between the office and the small warehouse at the back of the supermarket, and neither of them would contemplate working in the front of the shop, despite knowing Mrs Polinkski did the work of two women in her bustling, capable way.
    Consequently, by the end of the long day Marianne’s feet were aching, her head was pounding with the beginning of what felt like a migraine, and when she glancedin the mirror in the little staff cloakroom before leaving the shop she looked as if she had been pulled through a hedge backwards.
    Which made it all the more disconcerting when she emerged into the frosty air and almost into Zeke’s arms.
    ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ It was a despairing cry and he recognised it as such, his mouth—which hadn’t been smiling as it was—tightening still more into a hard line.
    ‘Waiting for you,’ he bit back grimly. ‘And that should have been my line, not yours. I can’t believe my wife is killing herself working all hours in a two-bit shop in the back of nowhere. You look terrible.’
    ‘Thank you so much,’ she shot back furiously. It was the last thing, the very last thing, she needed to hear.
    He made no apology, his face even more belligerent as he scowled ferociously at an inoffensive couple who had been laughing as, arm in arm, they approached them. The laughter stopped and the young couple sidled past, the man putting his arm more protectively round his girlfriend and keeping his eyes warily on Zeke’s dark face until they were well clear.
    ‘Your father is in the car.’
    ‘What?’
    The icy eyes narrowed but his voice was silky as he repeated, with elaborate and insulting patience, ‘Your father is in the car.’
    ‘You’ve brought my father here?’ she hissed angrily. ‘That’s despicable, absolutely despicable, and you know it.’
    “‘Despicable” is not a word I’d choose when someone is trying to allay another person’s worry about the daughter they love,’ he said with sickening self-righteousness.
    ‘Oh, isn’t it?’ She eyed him furiously, her blue eyessparking and her face flushed. ‘You brought him here so he could add his weight to yours and persuade me to go back to the apartment. Admit it!’
    ‘Not at all,’ he said with cool indifference.
    ‘Liar.’ He didn’t like that, and so she repeated it for good measure before going on to say, ‘Have you told him about Liliana?’
    ‘I’ve told him what you have accused me of and