One Night in Italy by Lucy Diamond Read Free Book Online

first. Er . . . nobody. She’d lost touch with all her school friends years ago. Sod it, she’d stay in a hostel if she had to. The airfare had eaten up most of her savings, but she could scrape enough cash for a night or two somewhere cheap. Keep your distance , she reminded herself. That way she’d avoid getting hurt again.

Chapter Four
    Il segreto – The secret
    Catherine didn’t have a clue where she was going as she accelerated away from the house, tears pouring down her cheeks. She just had to get away, far from her husband, and . . . her . That woman. How could Mike have done such a thing? In their bed !
    She couldn’t concentrate on the road, barely saw the junctions and bends as she hurtled along, adrenalin roaring. The woman’s face kept slamming into her mind, the casual way she’d said ‘Oops,’ like she thought the situation was funny. To think she’d had the nerve to look Catherine in the eye and smirk, actually smirk, while she was lying on Catherine’s Marks and Spencer sheets with Catherine’s husband sticking his traitorous cock in her.
    How had it happened? She didn’t understand. What about the paperwork Mike was meant to be doing? Had it all been a lie? Had he thought, Great, the wife and kids are out of the house all day, I’ll shag someone else ?
    No. Not Mike. No way.
    She was already starting to doubt her own eyes, her own brain. She must have made a mistake somewhere during that bizarre two minutes up in their bedroom. Mike always did say she was about as observant as Stevie Wonder. He was right. What was more, he was not the sort of man who had sex with strange women in broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon. He just wasn’t. ‘You muppet,’ she imagined him saying when she came back. ‘Did you seriously think I’d do the dirty on you? Even for you, that’s ridiculous.’
    Maybe it was some weird hallucination. Some terrible feverish brain strain, brought on by the stress of the children going. But . . .
    She gulped loudly and snottily. Wise up, Catherine. Deep down, she knew there had been no hallucination, no mistake. She had seen them, however much she wanted to pretend otherwise. Mike and the blonde woman. The blonde, nubile, pert-boobed, definitely younger, definitely sexier woman. Naked. On their marital bed, the goose-feather duvet kicked off onto the carpet. She had seen them.
    Overcome with shock and grief, she pulled into a layby and sat with her head on the steering wheel, hazard lights flashing, and burst into tears.
    Nearly nineteen years earlier, Catherine had marched into hospital fully braced to say, ‘I don’t want it.’ She planned to book herself in for an abortion as soon as possible to get rid of the interloper in her womb – the mistake – and that would be the end of it. Well, she was only twenty, wasn’t she? Two years into her degree and accidentally pregnant from a holiday fling – it wasn’t like she could possibly go through with it.
    She lay there on the hard paper-towel-covered bed, waiting as the sonographer rubbed the cold blue jelly on her tummy then started moving the transducer around. ‘Don’t even look,’ her friend Zoe had advised. ‘It’s only a blob, not a baby.’ But then the sonographer announced ‘Twins!’ in an excited sort of way, and Catherine found herself unexpectedly transfixed by the monitor, showing the two bulbous heads and bodies. Twins! Not blobs of cells but two actual babies growing inside her. Tiny little people. Whoa.
    Their heads were close together as if they were having a private conversation in the shared dark intimacy. In fact . . . ‘They’re holding hands,’ she whispered, eyes wide in shocked delight.
    ‘It does look like it, doesn’t it,’ the sonographer said. ‘Sweet.’
    It was sweet. It was the sweetest thing Catherine had ever seen. And in the next moment, a force had taken over her, something primitive and rushing and fierce, and she knew, just like that, that an abortion was out of the