Masked Desires by Elizabeth Coldwell

leave – didn’t you get my note?’
    ‘Note? I didn’t see any note.’
    ‘Well, I left it on the nightstand.’
    He rubbed his face. ‘Now you say that, I do remember a piece of paper falling off the nightstand when I was scrabbling for the room key. I never thought to see what it was, and I didn’t stop to check. I’d woken up to see you shutting the door on your way out. I stuck my head out into the corridor and called after you, but you couldn’t have heard me.’
    ‘The elevator came straight away. I must have been in it by that time.’ I didn’t mention that I thought I’d heard someone shout my name, but had dismissed the idea.
    ‘Well, I got dressed as quick as I could, and went down to the lobby, hoping against hope that you might not have left. There was no sign of you, but that’s when I bumped into Heather.’
    ‘Oh yes, Heather.’ I bit back what I really wanted to say about her as Eddie went on.
    ‘Yeah, she told me she’d just seen you. Said she’d finally found out the truth about us. Of course, I thought you’d come clean about the fact we weren’t dating, and I was preparing myself for whatever shit storm she was going to throw at me – and then she said she knew you didn’t work on the Reporter , and that if you were lying about that, who knew what else you were lying about? Started telling me about the reputation you had on the Reporter , though where all that came from I don’t know.’
    ‘I’m sorry, Eddie. I didn’t realise it, but my old boss was at the ball last night. She’s a friend of Heather’s, and she gave her all the ammunition she needed.’
    ‘Believe me –’ Eddie spread his hands in an expansive gesture ‘– when it comes to my girlfriends, Heather doesn’t need help in conducting a character assassination. She makes her mind up about them before she ever meets them. And that’s why I told her I already knew you didn’t work at the Reporter , since I’d been employing you at the bar for the best part of two months. And the reason I hadn’t told her you were my barmaid was because I knew exactly how she’d tear you down for your choice of job and me for my choice of girlfriend.’ Passion blazed in his eyes; he punched the sofa cushion with his fist.
    ‘I bet she didn’t take too kindly to that.’ I could all too easily picture him and Heather, trading verbal blows with each other in the plush lobby of the Mallory Hotel. Had Phillip stepped in to back up his wife, like he had when she’d been chewing me out, or had he deferred to the younger man’s strength and obvious self-assurance?
    ‘To be honest, I was past caring by then,’ he admitted. ‘I told her it didn’t matter what she thought. I loved you, I wanted to be with you more than any other woman I’d ever known, and nothing she said was going to make any difference to that.’
    I didn’t hear anything he said for a good few seconds after that, too busy digesting those last words. He’d told Heather he loved me. No “might be”, no “think I’m falling” about it. When I tuned back in again, he was saying, ‘There’s something I ought to tell you about my stepsister. Maybe it’ll help explain why she’s got such a downer on everyone I date. I take it you met Phillip?’
    ‘Uh-huh.’ Not quite sure what the man had to do with all this, I listened, picking at the terry fabric of my robe, as Eddie continued.
    ‘Heather started working for Phillip’s firm straight out of business school, on one of these fast-track graduate programmes. She was always going to work her way to the top, whichever company took her on, but she caught Phillip’s attention on a personal level too. And Heather was one of those girls who didn’t have time for a relationship in school; she always claimed it would get in the way of her studies.’
    I nodded. I’d been at college with girls like that. ‘So Phillip was her first serious boyfriend?’
    ‘Yeah, they were married less than a year