Hand On Heart: Sequel to Head Over Heels by Sara Downing Read Free Book Online Page A

wasn’t always solely a family affair.  Very often they would have friends round, and the afternoon would be spent eating, drinking and chatting, sometimes through to the evening, and frequently with complete disregard for the fact that it was school the following day.  Alex loved days like that, but secretly preferred the quiet Sundays they spent together, just them and the kids, enjoying a more subdued lunch, followed by a walk up the hill, a family bike ride, or on a wet afternoon, watching DVDs back to back. 
    ‘Nope, didn’t invite anyone today, as far as I can remember,’ Alex replied, frowning slightly as she wracked her brain, wondering if she had actually mentioned lunch to someone in passing and had then gone and completely forgotten about it.  There was no way, at the speed Archie was wolfing down his lunch, that they could stretch these quantities to accommodate guests.
    ‘Well, better go and see who it is then,’ Mark said. 
    ‘I’ll go,’ offered Rosie.
    ‘Daddy, it’s Granny,’ she announced moments later.
    Well, neither set of Grandparents had been invited today, Alex knew for sure, relieved in part that she wasn’t going crazy, but also resenting slightly the unplanned intrusion on their lunch.  She headed into the hall, with Mark close on her heels.  Something must be up, as Mark’s parents never came to see them without an invitation.
    Margaret dropped her suitcase onto the hall floor, and closed the door on the retreating taxi.
    ‘Mum, what on earth’s the matter?’ Mark asked, seeing her ashen face.
    ‘Mark, darling, I’ve left your father,’ she said and burst into tears.
     
     
    ‘So where’s Dad now?’ Mark asked.  Margaret hadn’t left the kitchen table, and had only stopped crying for long enough to sip at her tea a couple of times.  Alex had sent the children back into the dining room to finish their lunch, but hers and Mark’s sat uneaten, gravy congealing unappetisingly on soggy vegetables. 
    ‘With HER, I should imagine,’ she spat.  ‘Bitch.  How could she?  How pathetic of him, what a cliché he is.  I mean, she’s half his age, what was he thinking?’
    Bruce’s actions, although shocking and the last thing Mark had expected to hear today, or any day come to that, were very clichéd.  Apparently he’d been having an affair with a lecturer he’d met at the university.  She was in her mid-forties, a married mother of two, though unhappily, Bruce had informed Margaret.  Like that was any kind of excuse for doing what she had done with Bruce.  The woman had responsibilities, and had failed in her duty to her family, as far as Margaret saw it, as well as destroying her and Bruce’s marriage in the process.
    ‘No wonder he wants to spend all his time in that bloody place, instead of home with me, where he should be.  Jesus, Mark, I’ve invested my whole life into that marriage, and now, when we should be enjoying our retirement together, he’s off, doing THAT, with her.  How could he?  For God’s sake, isn’t he a bit old to be having a mid-life crisis?  Stupid old bugger.’
    She dissolved into floods of tears again.  Mark had never thought of his parents as particularly intimate, although he’d always assumed they loved one another in their own funny little way.  He couldn’t really recall seeing many signs of affection between them, but each being the other’s intellectual equal, their dinner table conversations had been stimulating, and they never ran out of things to talk about.  All children, even adult ones, seem programmed not to see their parents as sexual beings, so the thought that his father was off doing ‘THAT’, as his mother put it, with another woman, someone of a similar age to himself, made Mark feel physically sick. He was furious with his father.  Why couldn’t the silly old man just be content to relax into old age and spend some quality time with the woman who had helped him get there? 
    ‘So what will you