Heartbreaker by Julie Morrigan Read Free Book Online Page B

sweet incense; it masked the musky scent of sex hanging in the air.
    ‘I’d know if someone other than you kissed me, even if he looked like you and wore your shirt, even if it was dark. It would be obvious, it would feel wrong.’
    ‘I didn’t know.’ Johnny was desperate. ‘Please, love.’ He stood up, put his hands on her shoulders. ‘I thought it was you in here. You’ve got to believe me.’
    ‘You’re a liar.’ She twisted out of his grasp, turned her back on him. ‘Avril told me this would happen. She saw it in my tea leaves. She said you were just using me.’
    ‘No. I wouldn’t. I’m not.’
    Erica sobbed, then got her voice under control. ‘We’re finished, Johnny. I don’t ever want to see you again.’ Turning her back on him, she went out to where Avril was waiting for her and they slammed out of the flat.
     
     
     

Chapter 13
    ‘The band was my saviour,’ Johnny told Alex. ‘I poured all my energies into it, writing, practising, performing. I made it my life until I could think of what had happened, think of Erica, without feeling like I’d had my heart ripped out.
    ‘Tom was in bits about it, he really had thought it was all just a bit of a laugh. He told me that Avril had been going on about how she and Erica used to swap clothes and fool people by pretending to be each other when they were kids, so when Erica turned up in Avril’s dress and sat herself on his knee, he just went along with it. It was only when he tried necking on with her that she bailed out. I didn’t know whether to wish he’d tried it on a lot sooner or be grateful he waited so long. If Erica had walked in just a few minutes earlier …’
    He ran his hands through his hair. ‘I think she knew I was serious about her. I think she was starting to feel the same. But when that happened … She just thought that Tom and I had fancied a quick grope of each other’s girl. Although I don’t know how she believed it could be my and Tom’s doing when it was Avril who’d suggested it to her.’
    ‘Why did she do it?’
    ‘God knows. To split me and Erica up? Because she could? She and Tom weren’t serious, it took her less than a week to hook up with another guy, a singer this time. I saw her a couple of times at gigs. She acted like nothing had happened.’ Johnny looked at Alex. ‘With a bloke, it’s easy. You lamp him one if he does the dirty on you. But with a woman … Avril used me. Then afterwards, she was just there, laughing at me, and I was powerless to do anything about it.’
    Johnny stared off into the middle distance, lost in thought.
    ‘But life went on. Things got back to normal.’ He looked at her and smiled, if a little thinly. ‘And like most of the things that happened to us, I got some songs out of it.’
    Alex nodded. A couple of heartbreakingly bleak numbers in the band’s repertoire sprang to mind as possibles, songs that could reduce her to tears if she was down or drunk. And that was without knowing the misery that lay behind them.
    ***
    Back at the pub that evening, Alex took a phone call from her sister Isabel.
    Alex’s little sister was in a state of high excitement. ‘Thank God you answered, I’ve been dying to speak to you. Guess what?’ Isabel didn’t give Alex the chance to guess. ‘I’m pregnant. Actually pregnant.’
    Tears pricked Alex’s eyes. ‘How far on are you?’
    ‘About three months, I reckon. I waited before I said anything to anyone. I think it’s going to be okay this time.’
    Alex fervently hoped so. Isabel had been pregnant twice previously, but both times it had ended in miscarriage. Both had also been well before the three-month mark, so that was hopefully a good sign.
    As Isabel told Alex about her progress so far, how she was feeling, how Robert and his family were coping, Alex yearned to be there, to hug her sister and share properly in her news. Taking a normal approach to the job would have meant being home by now. As it was, she still had