The Bridesmaid's Baby Bump Read Online Free PDF

he still considered it a character flaw.
    He hoped he’d be able to make a good fist of explaining to Eliza why he hadn’t got in touch until now.
    He put the four-by-four into gear and headed for the Captain Cook Highway to Port Douglas. Why they called it a highway, he’d never know—it was a narrow two-lane road in most places. To the left was dense vegetation, right back to the distant hills. To the right was the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, its turquoise sea bounded by narrow, deserted beaches, broken by small islands. In places the road ran almost next to the sand. He’d driven along this road many times, but never failed to be impressed by the grandeur of the view.
    He didn’t look at Eliza but kept his eyes on the road. ‘I’ll cut straight to it,’ he said. ‘I want to apologise for not getting in touch when I said I would. I owe you an explanation.’
    ‘Fire away,’ Eliza said.
    Her voice was cool. The implication? This had better be good.
    He swallowed hard. ‘The divorce eventually came through three months ago.’
    ‘I heard. Congratulations.’
    He couldn’t keep the cynical note from his voice. ‘You congratulate me. Lots of people congratulated me. A divorce party was even suggested. To celebrate my freedom from the ball and chain.’
    ‘Party Queens has organised a few divorce parties. They’re quite a thing these days.’
    ‘Not my thing,’ he said vehemently. ‘I didn’t want congratulations. Or parties to celebrate what I saw as a failure. The end of something that didn’t work.’
    ‘Was that because you were still...still in love with your wife?’
    A quick glance showed Eliza had a tight grip on the red handbag she held on her lap. He hated talking about stuff like this. Even after all he’d worked on in the last months.
    ‘No. There hadn’t been any love there for a long time. It ended with no anger or animosity. Just indifference. Which was almost worse.’
    He’d met his ex when they were both teenagers. They’d dated on and off over the early years. Marriage had felt inevitable. He’d changed a lot; she hadn’t wanted change. Then she’d betrayed him. He’d loved her. It had hurt.
    ‘That must have been traumatic in its own way.’ Eliza’s reply sounded studiously neutral.
    ‘More traumatic than I could have imagined. The process dragged on for too long.’
    ‘It must have been a relief when it was all settled.’
    Again he read the subtext to her sentence: All settled, but you didn’t call me. It hinted at a hurt she couldn’t mask. Hurt caused by him . He had to make amends.
    ‘I didn’t feel relief. I felt like I’d been turned upside down and wasn’t sure where I’d landed. Couldn’t find my feet. My ex and I had been together off and on for years, married for seven. Then I was on my own. It wasn’t just her I’d lost. It was a way of life.’
    ‘I understand that,’ she said.
    The shadow that passed across her face hinted at unspoken pain. She’d gone through divorce too. Though she hadn’t talked much about it on the previous occasions when they had met.
    He dragged in a deep breath. Spit it out. Get this over and done with. ‘It took a few wipe-out weeks at work for me to realise going out and drinking wasn’t the way to deal with it.’
    ‘It usually isn’t,’ she said.
    He was a guy. A tough, successful guy. To him, being unable to cope with loss was a sign of weakness. Weakness he wasn’t genetically programmed to admit to. But the way he’d fallen to pieces had lost him money. That couldn’t be allowed to happen again.
    ‘Surely you had counselling?’ she said. ‘I did after my divorce. It helped.’
    ‘Guys like me don’t do counselling.’
    ‘You bottle it all up inside you instead?’
    ‘Something like that.’
    ‘That’s not healthy—it festers,’ she said. ‘Not that it’s any of my business.’
    The definitive turning point in his life had not been his divorce. That had come much earlier, when he’d been