More Than Just One Night (The Selwood Sisters Novellas)
Read More Than Just One Night (The Selwood Sisters Novellas) Online
Authors: Claire Baxter
More Than Just One Night
By
Claire Baxter
Text
copyright © 2013 Claire Baxter
All
Rights Reserved
Cover
image: Yuri Arcurs | Shutterstock
This
book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
1
Cora couldn’t believe she’d done it. True,
the evidence was sleeping alongside her, and gorgeous evidence he was, but if
someone had told her yesterday that she’d be spending the night with a man,
she’d have laughed. Loudly. Since her husband’s fatal heart attack, she’d had
enough to contend with just getting through each day; she hadn’t had the time
or desire to even think about...well, this sort of thing. And if someone had
told her that she’d be spending the night with a
younger
man, she’d have
asked them what they were on.
But last night, she’d met Alex, and six years
of celibacy had ended in spectacular fashion. She turned her head on the pillow
to gaze at his face, all sharp angles and firm lines in the sunlight streaming
through the window. No salt and pepper in his black hair, but then there
wouldn’t be, would there? Because he was only…what? Early thirties? Thirty-five
at a push.
What would he think when he saw
her
in
daylight?
Oh, hell, that couldn’t happen. What an idiot!
She should have gone back to her own room while it was still dark. Now she had
a problem. Not only how to get out of bed without waking him, but how to make
it from his room back to hers without being seen by all sorts of people on the
way. Any number of them could be delegates at the same conference, which meant
there was a good chance of bumping into someone she knew, and if her
obviously-from-the-night-before dress didn’t give her away, her bed hair
definitely would. Gah! How had she got herself into this situation?
The covers were tangled between his legs, and
there was no way she’d be able to extricate them without disturbing him. No
chance of doing the only-in-the-movies glide out of bed with the sheet wrapped
around her, then.
She edged her way across the bed, then went
for it, swinging her legs over the side and rising to her feet in one movement.
Holding her breath, she looked back at Alex, but he didn’t so much as murmur in
his sleep. She exhaled with relief. Now to find her clothes.
Having gathered all her belongings she locked
herself in the bathroom and turned on the light. With trepidation she looked in
the mirror and her hand shot to her mouth. The make-up smudges beneath her
eyes, made her look even older than her forty-two years. She looked nearly as
bad as she felt, and that was pretty bad. Too much wine.
She could only be grateful that she hadn’t
been seen in this state by the thirty-something eye-candy sleeping in the other
room.
What had she been thinking, dropping off to
sleep like that?
What had she been thinking when she’d made
the decision to sleep with him?
She shook her head at her reflection. She
wasn’t this woman. She didn’t make snap decisions; she was a planner to the
point of obsession, and she certainly hadn’t planned to do something so out of
character.
After scrubbing her face, she scrambled into
her clothes, hurrying in case he woke while she was in his bathroom. The alcohol
had been a factor, of course, but wasn’t to blame entirely. The truth was,
she’d been thoroughly flattered when Alex had flirted with her. It had been so
long since a man had shown any interest in her at all, and the shock of finding
herself on the receiving end of his attention had made her lose all semblance
of common sense. It was the last night of the conference with no scheduled
activities, so when he’d suggested dinner, she’d been happy to share a table
with him.
There was a big difference between sharing a
table and sharing a bed, of course, and she had no reasonable explanation for
making the leap from one to the other. She’d felt as if she were role playing,
and being away from home had contributed to a sense of an alternate reality. The
knowledge that no one need ever know what she’d done had been the clincher. She
could, so she had. Simple as that.
She had no make-up in her handbag, but she
did find a comb, and she flattened her hair into something approaching presentable.
It wasn’t good, but would have to do. If she kept her head down, hopefully no
one would recognise her from the conference. She’d barely have time to shower
once she reached her room, before packing and catching a taxi to the airport,
and that suited her just fine. She didn’t want time to think about what she was
doing.
Later, as she sat on the plane heading home, Cora
finally let herself think about the man she’d left behind. Leaving had been the
only option. Even disregarding the fact that Alex couldn’t seriously be
interested in her, anything beyond a one-night stand with him was impossible
for her.
For a start, she had grown-up children. How
would Fern and Justin feel about their mother sleeping with another man, let
alone with someone like him? Would they call him a toy boy? Even the words turned
her stomach. Cora couldn’t bear the mortification of people knowing her
personal business. She wasn’t the sort of woman to flaunt her ability to
attract a younger lover. She was
private
about her private life. Not
that there had been any private life to be public about for a long time.
Besides, she had an image to maintain as a no-nonsense business woman.
Having taken over the family engineering
company on Paul’s death, she’d been determined that no one would take advantage
of her; she wouldn’t allow anyone in the industry to find a chink in her
armour, and Alex…well, he would be more than a chink. More like a gaping hole.
People would talk. Her employees would
gossip
about her.
No, no, no. She could never put herself in
that position. So, yes, leaving him without a word was the right thing to do,
but still a nagging disappointment lingered. She knew nothing about him. They’d
deliberately avoided talking about their jobs, agreeing within the first few
minutes of meeting that work was off the agenda for one night. They hadn’t
exchanged surnames. It had all added to the excitement of the evening, and she
had to admit, she’d been
very
excited. The sex…oh god, the sex had been
like nothing she’d ever experienced, but she’d been a staid married woman for
half of her life so that was hardly surprising. She grabbed the safety
instruction card from the seat pocket in front of her and fanned her face.
Her elderly neighbour looked up from her
magazine. “Horrible, isn’t it? I suffered terribly with them myself. Mine were
so bad I thought global warming was my fault.”
Cora gave the woman a weak smile. Wonderful
to be reminded that she looked her age. She took a file from her briefcase and
opened it. Not that she was trying to be unfriendly, but she had too much on
her mind for small-talk. She shook her head at the flight attendant who offered
her breakfast. Her churning stomach wouldn’t let her think about food. Between
the alcohol she’d consumed the previous night and the tension this morning, it
was like a washing machine.
The figures on the page in front of her made
no sense. She let her head fall back against the headrest and closed her eyes,
glad that she had the weekend to recover from the conference, and her
after-hours activities, before she had to throw herself into another working
week. Fern was coming to stay, and her new boyfriend was joining them for the
weekend. Cora was looking forward to meeting him.
Thirty-six hours later, Cora took her seat at
a table in her favourite Newcastle restaurant, silently fuming. Fern sat beside
her and across the table, Russell, Fern’s boyfriend. Ha!
Boy
friend
indeed. He was older than
her
. She’d been struggling to hide her
feelings ever since the two of them had arrived in his Jaguar. As soon as she’d
seen the car roll up she’d known that this was no twenty-something lover that
Fern had brought to meet her. And the irony of her own liaison with a man
younger than this one had not been lost on her.
“Sorry, I just need to….” Fern got to her
feet again with a vague wave towards the rear of the room. “Will you order for
me, darling?”
Russell gave Fern an indulgent smile. “Of
course, sweetness.”
He was handsome, she’d give him that, but at
Fern’s age she shouldn’t find greying temples attractive, should she? This was
so much worse than her last boyfriend, the one with the safety pin through his
eyebrow. Cora had been tempted to ask whether it was holding his eyebrow in
place and if it was prone to falling off. She’d restrained herself, though, aware
that her humour wouldn’t be appreciated. That boy was monosyllabic, but at
least he was in Fern’s age-bracket.
She waited till Fern was out of earshot then
pinned Russell with her best glare. “So, Russell, what are you doing with
someone as young as my daughter?”
He looked up. Surprise melted from his face
as he met her glare with a stony expression. “Really, Cora, you don’t want me
to answer that literally, do you?”
“Yes.
No!
”
One eyebrow lifted.
She clenched her jaw, but consciously relaxed
it when she spotted Fern heading back towards them. What? She’d never been so
quick in the bathroom at home. “She’s coming back already. We’ll continue this
conversation later.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
The short exchange had left Cora even more
determined that the relationship had to end, but she had enough parenting
experience to understand that the very worst thing she could do was tell Fern
what she really thought.
Fern slipped back into her seat. “Have you
ordered?”
“Not yet,” Cora said. As she took her glasses
from her handbag so that she could read the menu, she saw Russell reach into
his jacket and take out a pair of his own.
“Awful when you get to our age, isn’t it?”
she said with a fake smile and a nod at the glasses in his hand. “One of the
first signs of getting old.”
And as she bent her head over the menu she
caught a glimpse of Fern’s grimace, and mentally chalked up a point. Game on, Russell.
Three weeks later, while she waited for her
wholemeal toast to cook Cora leaned against the kitchen bench and glanced over
the spreadsheet she’d printed in preparation for her Monday morning meeting.
She wanted to believe that her case was solid, because she needed a win out of
this mediation. The client was happy with the work that Selwoods had done on
his project, just not with the hike in costs they were claiming.
The toaster flung her slices into the air,
and jerked her brain away from the figures she was studying.
“Morning, Mum.” Fern picked up one of the
toast slices from the counter-top, and nibbled on the corner. “Do we have any
bacon? I feel like bacon for breakfast.”
Cora frowned. “No. You know I don’t buy bacon
because of the—”
“Cholesterol, I know. But I like it. What
about eggs? You could scramble some eggs for me.”
“
You
could scramble some eggs for yourself.
I have to go to work. And that’s my toast you’re eating.”
She spread her single remaining slice of
toast with cholesterol-lowering margarine. “Did I hear Russell come in with you
last night?”
“Yes. Why?”
This was horrible. She’d hoped that by now
Fern would have tired of a man old enough to be her father. Was that what was
going on here? Was Fern looking for a father figure because Paul had passed
away when she was a vulnerable teenager? Her toast tasted like cardboard when
she bit into it. Fern might be in her twenties now — just — but she was still as
vulnerable as that teenager had been. The trouble was, she was too old for Cora
to lay down the law about who she should and shouldn’t see.