The Other Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

old, old bottom-of-the-barrel suggestion that she really wanted Michael back. He knew that that wasn’t true; once, it had hurt her, when she thought that he believed it. Now, she knew better.
    â€˜Then why haven’t you done anything about divorcing him?’ he demanded, as though they hadn’t had the conversation forty times before.
    â€˜I have. You know I have.’
    â€˜Oh, sure. By mutual consent – it could – all have been over and done with if you’d divorced him for adultery, and we wouldn’t have to be living in two separate flats!’
    She asked him what right she would have had to do that, since she had been committing adultery for two years before he had finally set up home with some girl from the office.
    â€˜You told me he had women all the time you were married,’ Lloyd said, managing to make it sound as though she had lied about it for some reason.
    She sighed. ‘He did. I’ll rephrase it. I was committing the kind of adultery that would stand up in court long before he was. You can hardly cite some woman in Brussels or an air-hostess he spent the night with in Frankfurt.’ She even smiled; this was, she thought, the winding-down process, when the argument would give way to near-banter and eventually to a sort of forced humour. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘I didn’t care at the time, so I can hardly get all moral about it now, can I?’
    â€˜Then you could have let him divorce you.’
    â€˜I don’t believe this,’ she said, the exasperation almost manufactured these days. He was trying to exasperate her, so she would be exasperated. Acting. Lloyd did a lot of that; it must be rubbing off on her.
    She was relaxed now; it was all over bar the making-up, which she didn’t enjoy as much as they said you were supposed to. It was all part of the inevitable pattern of the rows, and the very predictability made her uneasy. But it was better than the row itself, and she welcomed the signs of a truce, so she played along. ‘If I’d done that, he would have named you – and then where would we have been?’
    â€˜Where would you have been, you mean.’
    She frowned, puzzled, but carried on, perhaps a touch grimly, with the point-counterpoint. ‘ No, I don’t,’ she said. ‘You’re the senior officer – you’re the one who would have been held responsible.’
    â€˜But I’m not the one who’s looking for promotion, am I?’ he shouted. ‘I’m not the one who’s suddenly decided that I want to be chief constable!’
    She hadn’t predicted that.
The bank of fog reflected back her headlights, and Melissa, suddenly aware of how fast she was driving, braked hard, almost as though the wall of vapour was a solid obstruction. The car entered its yellow depths, and visibility was virtually non-existent. She signalled the right turn; ahead of her she could see pinpoints of light. Much sooner than she expected, the car was almost on top of her, and she realised that she had strayed on to the wrong side of the road. She wrenched her wheel to the left, swearing with shock.
    She didn’t see the motorcyclist at all until she was almost on top of him. She was still pulling left, cutting in front of him, and for a desperate moment, a crash seemed inevitable. The motorcyclist took the only option open to him and roared through the almost impossible gap to safety.
    Melissa’s hands shook on the wheel as she pulled the car up on the waste ground, and watched him go on his invisible unlit way into the layer of mist, apparently unconcerned that he had been an inch away from being a statistic.
    Colin Drummond knew how narrowly he had escaped death. He had accelerated away from the danger in instinctive self-preservation, but he didn’t reduce his speed now that the danger had passed; he wanted it; he needed it. And he still didn’t put on his lights, because he