Undertaking Love Read Free Page B

family outside.’
    His brows knitted together at her harsh words. Gabe, in turn, watched pink spots burn on Marla’s cheeks.
    ‘Look, that probably sounded heartless, and honestly, I’m
really
not, but I … I just won’t let this happen.’
    His expression was unreadable as he stared at her across the table. She went for broke.
    ‘The bottom line, Gabe, is this. Your business will kill my business.’
    Gabe steepled his fingers in front of him, and any trace of merriment had died in his eyes when he looked up.
    ‘Then we have ourselves a problem.’
    Marla’s stomach flipped over.
    ‘Because here’s the thing, Marla.’
    His voice was soft enough for her to have to lean in close in order to hear him.
    ‘People come to me to celebrate love too, it’s just at the other end of life’s spectrum. It might not be
happy
, or
frothy
, but my services are just as important as yours. More so, probably.’
    Distaste dripped from his every word, and pure steel underscored his deceptively soft tone.
    ‘You’ve made it very clear that I’m not your ideal neighbour, and trust me, I’ll make every effort to minimise the impact I have on you.’
    He shook his head with a look of derision and scraped his chair back. He crossed the tiny kitchen in a couple of paces, before turning in the doorway to deliver his parting shot.
    ‘But make no mistake. Whether you like it or not, in a few weeks’ time I absolutely
will
be opening for business next door.’
    Emily slid down the bathroom wall, slumping to the floor, her back pressed against the radiator to ease the all too familiar ache. She hurled the unopened pregnancy test across the room. At least the tell-tale scarlet streak on the loo roll had saved her the bother of wasting eight pounds this month – not that she’d expected much else, given that she and Tom had barely even seen each other, let alone made love.
    What had started out as a crazy, exciting plan to make a baby had steadily turned into a monthly cycle of failure and heartache, that, month on month, was ripping the heart right out of their marriage.
    Seventeen months, to be precise. Eighteen, including this one.
    They hadn’t expected to score a homerun on their first month, of course not. Hoped maybe, but not expected. Nonetheless, Emily had passed that first month daydreaming of ways to tell Tom their happy news. Would she buy him a card? Spell out ‘daddy’ in Alphabetti Spaghetti? No, Tom hated tinned spaghetti. And anyway, he’d want them to do the test together, wouldn’t he?
    In the end, they’d perched side by side on the edge of the bath and passed the upside down stick between them as if it might singe the skin off their fingers.
    ‘You look. No, you! Please, you do it, I can’t …’
    In their defence, they had every reason to feel hopeful. Hugh Hefner himself would have been impressed with the way they’d dedicated themselves to their task over the month, but all they wound up with for their trouble was numb bums from the ceramic bath and a stubbornly empty window where there should have been a blue line. Month two followed pretty much the same pattern. Month three involved a little less sex and a decent bottle of Rioja to drown their sorrows. Month four … well, suffice to say it had been one long downhill slide from there to here, eighteen months later on the bathroom floor.
    Emily was just glad Tom was away on business.
Again
. At least this way there was no one around to have to paint a brave face on for. She could quite easily spend the entire evening curled up against the radiator. In the end she cried herself to sleep, and only the lure of a very large glass of Shiraz held enough incentive to make her drag herself downstairs some time just before midnight.
    Three hundred miles away, Tom dropped down onto the bullet hard mattress in his drab Brussels hotel room and kicked off his shoes. It had been a long day of ball-ache meetings, and he was hot and hassled. He needed to