His Other Lover by Lucy Dawson Read Free Book Online Page A

I shouldn’t be snooping in his stuff, but I’d gone past the having morals stage: it was proof I wanted. Proof that I was wrong, that I’d made a stupid mistake and could go back to bed feeling a little bit silly and bloody glad I hadn’t woken him up.
    But there was nothing to reassure me. Just a list of quotes and notes for a job, tile quantities and wiring requirements.
    I opened a filing box: nothing much in there either. Accountants’ letters, tax receipts. I turned back to his desk and another stack of papers.
    I came across the receipt for our weekend away and on careful inspection realized we’d been billed wrongly—there was a room service order on there we didn’t have. I tucked it in my dressing-gown pocket and made a mental note to ring the hotel in the morning and get it refunded.
    I still couldn’t find the phone bills, though, and that worried me even more than the prospect of finding them. He had got something to hide. Otherwise why weren’t they on view with everything else? I sat at his desk wondering what to do next, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the light of his laptop was still on. I lifted the lid up and it whirred loudly as it restarted. My heart stopped again and I froze but, after a second of sitting there holding my breath and waiting, he didn’t appear at the door. Cautiously I looked at the screen.
    There were a number of files on his desktop, but it was all work stuff. There was one called personal, but it was just his CV.
    I clicked on his e-mail icon and scanned through hundreds of mails, but there was nothing from or to Liz.
    So if she was a client, I thought to myself quickly— if she was a client—where was the correspondence from her? There were no quotes, no nothing. Doesn’t everyone use e-mail for work these days?
    I looked in some box files round his desk; none of them had anything that made reference to Liz. Who was this woman?
    I stood up and accidentally stood on a slippery magazine that resulted in my nearly doing the splits on the carpet. When I glanced down to see what I’d trodden on, I saw the program for the show he took me to on our weekend away.
    My heart softened. We had had a really good time…I picked it up and ran my fingers down the spine of the glossy cover. It was such a great weekend. I started to absently flick through the pages, glancing at the pictures. Perhaps I could just talk to him about the text? Surely it could be explained…
    But just as I was on the brink of dismissing it all, resolving just to ask him who she was in the morning and going back to bed, something caught my eye.
    A photo was smiling out of the page. It was a girl with long, blonde hair and a familiar face. I knew I’d seen her before. I was frowning and puzzling when it dawned on me. It was the gallery girl, the one with the tattoo from the film about exploitation that I’d seen that very afternoon.
    I studied the picture. She looked different, as she would in a contemporary outfit—in an outfit full stop—but it was definitely her. Same full lips, almost feline features and arched eyebrows. My eyes dropped down to the bio under the picture. It read: Teasel—Elizabeth Andersen.
    It took a moment. I stared at the picture and the words for what felt like a full five minutes before my brain ground into action: Hang on a minute… that’s a coincidence…A girl yourecognize from a gallery exhibit that Pete took you to is in a program in Pete’s office and it just turns out that her name is Elizabeth, just as you happen to be searching for Pete’s phone bills to find out who a mystery Liz is…whaddya know? Whadda the chances, eh? Pete and Liz, Pete and Liz, Liz and Pete…
    I looked at the photo again and she stared back at me, a knowing, seductive smile. I slowly started to realize that this was the woman I was looking for. This was Liz. Scanning disbelievingly through her bio notes, my eyes flickered and skimmed over the words:
    Teasel—Elizabeth