Evidently she was a horrible person, though, because the truth was that she wanted him for herself, and she didn’t want anyone else to have him, even her dearest Millie. But she didn’t want the pain and anguish that would inevitably follow, that was for sure. Perdita tested her heart gingerly. It had taken her a long time to get over Nick. She might be feeling a bit sad this evening, but it was nothing compared to the wretchedness of those long months when she couldn’t imagine ever being really happy again.
Did she want to go back to feeling that way again? No, no, no. Perdita’s mind reared back in horror at the idea. Absolutely not.
So forget about Ed, she told herself. Sticking with being friends was a good plan. Any more and she’d be risking her poor, battered heart all over again, and this time she wouldn’t be able to tell herself that she didn’t know exactly how hard it was to fall in love with a single father.
Perdita squared her shoulders. She was a big girl now. She knew what the situation was, and she had made her decision. It was time to stop being such a baby and accept the way things were.
Well, she could do that, Perdita thought, resigned. But she didn’t have to be happy about it, surely?
‘Have you got a minute?’ Ed caught Perdita as she was leaving the boardroom where they had been having the monthly meeting of departmental heads.
‘Of course.’
Perdita was on her best behaviour today. This was the first time she had seen Ed since the lunch party on Sunday, and she had had three days to pull herself together and stop being silly about him.
And she had thought it had worked until he’d walked into the meeting and her heart had started springing around her chest.
Still, it was easier to pretend to be cool and businesslike when they were talking about budgets and performance targets and she was armoured in her best suit with its classy little jacket that always made her feel a bit like Audrey Hepburn, although without the same gamine charm, obviously.
She clutched her files to her chest in an attempt to keep her heart under control as Ed accompanied her down the corridor to the lifts.
‘Thank you for Sunday,’ said Ed. ‘We all really enjoyed it.’
Perdita managed a rather stiff smile. ‘I’m glad.’
There was a tiny pause. ‘Do you remember that music you liked when you came round to supper?’
‘The Bach?’
‘Exactly. It turns out that they’re playing that piece in a concert in St Margaret’s on Saturday. I wondered if you’d like to go?’
Ed felt stupidly nervous as he waited for Perdita to reply. It had seemed such a simple invitation when he had practised it earlier. Music they both enjoyed, a beautiful setting-what reason could she have to say no?
But Perdita was definitely hesitating. She pushed the button to summon the lifts and glanced at him a little uncertainly.
‘You did say that you wished that you got to classical concerts more often,’ he reminded her, and then worried in case she thought he was being pushy.
‘That’s true…’
‘But perhaps you’ve got other plans for Saturday night?’ he said, hating the false heartiness in his voice. It was so long since he had asked a woman out. Didn’t she realise how nervous he was? And how much he wanted her to say yes?
‘Well, no,’ Perdita had to admit. Afterwards she wondered why she hadn’t just lied and pretended that she had a heavy date, but at the time it never occurred to her. Being less than straight wasn’t something that came naturally to her.
‘Then please come.’ Ed threw pride to the wind and told Perdita the truth. ‘The girls keep nagging at me to get a life, and this concert is my first step. I don’t want to go home and tell them that I fell at the first hurdle of asking someone to go with me.’
When he put it like that, it was hard to say no. And really, what was the big deal about going to a concert with him? It was exactly the kind of thing you did with a friend. It wasn’t like dinner, or even a drink. It wasn’t a
Naturally, that didn’t stop Perdita feeling pathetically, stupidly,
She would keep it cool, keep it casual. Easy.
Typically, the long spell of fine weather had broken in time for the weekend and sullen clouds had been lowering over the city all day, threatening to rain but never quite getting round to it. Her bedroom window overlooked the street and Perdita peered out, to check the weather and not to see if Ed had arrived yet, of course. She had deliberately dressed down in a soft skirt and boots, but she decided at the last minute to pull on a loose cardigan as well and take a coat after all.
Ed was even better prepared. ‘I’ve brought an umbrella,’ he said, holding it up. ‘Just in case it rains on the way back.’
Having given herself a particularly stern talking-to in the minutes before he’d arrived, Perdita managed the cool, casual thing quite well at first. They talked easily as they walked down the river and then up over the bridge into the heart of the old city.
Ed seemed to be going for cool and casual as well, and Perdita began to wonder if she had misinterpreted things when he had told her that his daughters were nagging him to get a life. Perhaps they weren’t thinking in terms of a girlfriend at all? They had probably just meant that he needed to make some new friends.
Which would be good, of course, because if a friend was all he wanted, she could do that without any problem. That was all she wanted too, and if she was just going out with a friend, she could treat him like Rick or Millie and stop feeling tense.
So why was she still vibrating like a tuning fork?
The concert was held in one of the city’s medieval churches, which provided an atmospheric setting and wonderful acoustics. They sat in the old pews, which weren’t that comfortable to begin with and got a whole lot more uncomfortable when someone tried to find a space at the end of the row and they all had to shuffle along.
For one awkward moment Perdita found herself jammed up against Ed’s rock-solid body before, with a lot of whispered apologies along the line, they managed to rearrange themselves. Perdita felt thoroughly flustered by the brief encounter and one whole side of her body seemed to be strumming where it had been pressed against his. She had thought the time their fingers had brushed in his kitchen was disturbing enough, but this was much worse.
She shifted very carefully on the pew. He was still very close. It would take only a moment’s relaxation for their shoulders to lean against each other, or their thighs to touch, and that would never do.
Perdita sat rigidly and looked at the worn carvings on the pillars, at the soaring arches, at the frankly rather unpleasantly hairy neck of the man in front of her, at everything and anything except Ed, who was sitting in self- contained silence beside her.
Not that she needed to be looking at him to picture the humorous grey eyes or the wry set of his mouth. That slight bump in his nose, the way the hair grew at his temples, the exact line of his jaw…Perdita could have drawn them in her sleep, and that worried her. She had known her friend Rick for years and years, but she wouldn’t be able to picture him down to the same tiny details.
Once she had known Nick like that, had treasured every tiny detail of him, but now she struggled to conjure him up with anything like the same sharpness. When she thought of him now, what she remembered was the sadness in his eyes, and her own longing and despair.
And now she was sitting next to another man and wanting to touch him with such a fierce need that she felt physically sick. Perdita’s gaze skittered desperately around the church, but time and again it would graze Ed’s profile in spite of her best efforts not to look at him. Her eyes kept being drawn to the corner of his mouth, to the pulse beating in his neck below his ear, to the severe angle of his cheek.
They were so close. His shoulder was just there, right next to hers. It would be so easy to lean against him and press her lips to his throat. So easy to lay her hand on his thigh. Perdita’s palm actually tingled with the realisation
