Fault Lines by Natasha Cooper Read Free Book Online

stick with them, even when they annoy you.’
    ‘Some people.’ He was serious. ‘Mostly you.’
    Trish considered asking what it was she did that annoyed him, but then thought better of it.
    ‘So, anyway, while Kara was feeling so boosted by the job offer, Jed just had to take her down. He told her she’d never hack it, and that if she believed anyone would offer her a job so much bigger than her current one unless they positively wanted her to fail, she must be even stupider than he’d thought.’
    ‘Charming!’ George poured more wine into both their glasses.
    ‘Wasn’t it? And there was plenty more on the lines of: “Given that you’ll be out on your ear within twelve months, I’m buggered if I’m going to up sticks and move to an armpit like Kingsford, only to have to move again.”‘
    ‘No wonder she left him.’
    ‘Exactly. She said that she told him she hadn’t realised he despised her so much, and she wasn’t sure she could bear to live with someone who felt like that about her. He said she could do as she damn well pleased, that he’d fallen out of love with her years before and only stuck with her out of charity. Oh, yes, and he also told her that she bored him rigid in bed and out of it, that her bum was droopy and her tits were getting as wrinkled as pricked balloons.’
    ‘Sounds as though she had pretty awful taste in men,’ George said, too casually, as he helped himself to more risotto, scraping the rich brown burnt bits from the edge of the pan. Then he looked up. ‘What’s the matter?’
    ‘You’re making it her fault. That’s not fair.’ Trish could see that George had heard the stiffness in her voice and was irritated by it, but he couldn’t have known that something that felt like an unpeeled lychee was stuck in her throat.
    ‘You said yourself that she’d lived with this Jed character for five years, Trish,’ he said, sounding infuriatingly reasonable, ‘and he sounds unspeakable. She didn’t have to stay so long. Ergo, she must have had poor taste in men – or a masochistic streak five miles wide, and none of your descriptions of her have ever suggested that.’
    Trish drank some wine, concentrating on her glass. The lychee wouldn’t move and she wasn’t going to say anything else until she could be sure she’d sound normal.
    ‘Oh, Trish, come off it.’ George wasn’t quite laughing at her, but he wasn’t taking her seriously. ‘I know she was a friend of yours and I know she’s dead – and that’s miserable for you and worse for her – but that doesn’t mean you have to ignore the laws of logic and start claiming that she couldn’t have contributed to anything that ever went wrong in her life. Now does it? It’s not like you to be irrational and –
    ‘I just can’t stand it when people blame the victim,’ she snapped. ‘Like those judges who say that a skimpily dressed woman out on her own at night has invited rape.’
    ‘After eighteen months you ought to know me better than that.’ George’s quiet voice sounded odd after Trish’s unusual harshness. His eyes had gone blank. He looked hurt.
    At once she reached across the table for his hand. After a moment he let her have it, although sometimes he still chose to reject such casually affectionate gestures, particularly when she’d made him angry. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘But I suppose I can’t always stop my subconscious making me afraid you’ll turn out to be different… Don’t you ever have doubts about me?’
    ‘I don’t go in for your sort of angst,’ he said.
    She was relieved to see that his lips were horizontal again and his eyes looking more lively.
    ‘I trust you and I trust my own judgement. I wouldn’t love you if you weren’t who you are.’ There was still something cold about him, withdrawn. Then he shrugged. ‘Since I do love you, I know you’re the sort of person I can love.’
    ‘I wish I’d done a degree in logic or philosophy or something instead of law,’