Bittersweet Love - Cathy Williams [64]
Eric glanced across at her and then walked towards her, while Claire meandered off to chat to Anna, making theatrical noises about really having to get to know her sister-in-law-to-be.
‘ Where’s this registrar?’ Eric asked Natalie in a peevish tone. ‘He’s late. Twenty minutes late.’
Natalie looked vaguely at the door and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Maybe,’ she said with a stab at humour, ‘he’s got pre-wedding nerves.’
Eric wasn’t paying her the slightest bit of attention. His eyes were fixed on the door as if he was willing it to open.
‘Besides,’ Natalie sounded, ‘it’ s a chance for Claire to chat to Anna a bit before you two tie the knot.’
Eric turned to look at his sister and his wife-to-be who were standing towards the back of the room and he grunted something about supposing so. All the same, Natalie could understand his anxiety to get it all over and done with. She didn’t exactly relish the thought of standing around in the room for an indefinite length of time either. She wanted to get back to her flat. Not that she had anything planned. Recently, she seemed to be cultivating inactivity, even though she knew that it was not a healthy lifestyle.
She opened her mouth to chat in platitudes to Eric, anything to put a stop to that awful nervous tension that seemed to be overwhelming him, when the door was pushed open. Hard. It banged back against the wall, and Eric said, ‘Thank God. Here at last,’ even though he looked faintly startled. Natalie had a polite smile plastered on her face, and she reassuringly squeezed Eric’s arm.
But it wasn’t the registrar. What registrar, she asked herself afterwards, went around banging doors?
It was Kane, and he definitely did not look as though he had come to wish the happy couple all the best.
CHAPTER TEN
ALL four stopped talking and stared at Kane in shocked amazement. It didn’t take much imagination to know how they looked—like four people who had personally seen Banquo’s ghost. It would have been comical, but Natalie didn’t feel much like laughing at all. She stared at Kane’s face while her mind desperately tried to work out what he was doing here.
Eric was the first to break the silence. He laughed nervously and said in quite a controlled voice, considering the unexpected nature of the situation, ‘I thought you were the registrar.’ He cleared his throat and approached Kane to shake his hand. ‘He’s running a bit late.’ He held out his hand to Kane who looked at it as if it were something quite repellant and most probably contagious, and Eric’s face flushed with bewilderment and then anger. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’ he asked in a more aggressive tone. ‘I don’t recall having asked you.’ He shot a look towards Anna who was still stiff with shock.
‘You didn’t,’ Kane said grimly, his eyes raking over Natalie. He walked across to her, unhurriedly, and said in a disturbingly polite voice, ‘And after all the years we spent together I would have thought that an invitation was the least I could expect’ He obviously had not noticed Anna hovering in the background, or if he had he had chosen to ignore her.
Either way, Natalie still couldn’t work out his presence here. She frowned, puzzled, and he looked at her sardonically, as if to say, Please spare me the butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-mouth routine.
‘You don’t know Eric,’ she pointed out automatically. ‘How did you find out that we would be here anyway?’
He wasn’t looking at anyone else in the room at all by this point. His eyes were fixed on Natalie’s face and she was finding it hard to meet his stare levelly and calmly.
‘I phoned your boss. He told me where you were.’
‘Oh.’ She looked across to Eric and lifted her shoulders in a slight shrug and the gesture seemed to enrage Kane.
Claire hadn’t said a word so far, nor had Anna. They both appeared to have been struck dumb and Natalie could well understand the reaction. She herself was having some difficulty in getting the