The Passion Play Read online

  The Passion Play

  Amelia Hart

  Contents

  Chapters 1 – 30

  Books by Amelia Hart

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dan faced Felicity across the cramped span of carpet in his office, a concrete bunker of a room deep in the bowels of the football stadium. "You must have seen this coming."

  Felicity swallowed, her throat aching strangely. Never. She had never seen it coming.

  "The writing's been on the wall now for years. Years. You can't expect me to go without kids, Floss. You and me, we're just not meant to be together. It's clear as the balls on a bull." He had his chin up in that way of his, his feet wide apart, his hands on his hips and a frown on his brow. The same look he gave her anytime he expected her to try and talk some sense into him.

  His pig-headed look. Like Felicity was a tiresome annoyance; like his ears were closed; like it didn't matter what she said or how she said it. The discussion was already over with, and she had missed it.

  She tried anyway. One had to try. One could not just give up.

  "Aren't we about more than just kids, Dan? Aren't we about us? About our . . . partnership?" It hurt to have to say it out loud. He should not need convincing. This should be hers by right, after twelve years.

  He twitched, like a horse shaking off a fly. "It's been fun, Floss. I won't say we haven't had some good times. But it's not enough. Not right. If we were meant to be together we'd have kids by now."

  "We can do the tests." She said it grimly, already knowing his response. "I've said it a hundred times. We can find out what's wrong and fix it."

  He looked away, one hand lifting in a slashing gesture to cut her off. "No. If it's meant to be it'll just happen. Kids like that will never be as good. As hardy. Nature doesn't want them."

  She pressed her teeth together until she could speak calmly. If she raised her voice he would dismiss her completely, call her hysterical and walk away.

  "Thousands of beautiful children are born every year with only a little assistance. I'm sure it wouldn't take much. Just a-"

  "Not my kids. I deserve better than that."

  "I'm so sick of hearing-" she bit it back, and took another deep breath. "What exactly do you propose to do, then?"

  "It's best if we keep things friendly. There's no need for anyone to get angry. I'll pay you alimony - just a little. After all you won't need much, you have your work. You'll be able to see all the clients you want and never have to worry about taking care of me, cooking me dinners and running my errands. It'll probably be a relief to have me out from underfoot. You can keep the house, too. I'm willing to be generous. You've been a good wife, Floss. A good wife."

  She stared at him. Still handsome. His jaw line was softer than it had been twelve years ago when he first swept her off her feet. His moderate paunch emerged from his tailored suit, covered in pinstripes, a sophisticated white-on-gray.

  She really saw him. For the first time in so many years, she looked at him and saw him. Self-assured, certain of his natural superiority, the rightness of his course. Willing to let the rest of the world orbit around him as she had done. Now he was cutting her loose. He was finished with her.

  She searched for the heartbreak she was supposed to feel.

  She found nothing. It bewildered her. Divorce was meant to be traumatic; a huge schism in a woman's life. So where was the pain? She should be crying. She should be begging him to change his mind. That was how it was supposed to go, and she was a master at doing things as they were supposed to be done.

  Yet when she looked at him there was a profound emptiness. She had not looked at him for years. Not really.

  She had adjusted his tie a thousand times, checked his hair was all in place, skimmed her eyes over his teeth when prompted to be sure there was nothing stuck in them. She had gone with him to pick out clothes, watched him watch himself in the bathroom mirror while they started or ended their day at the same time. She knew his face almost as well as her own.

  But that wasn't the same as really seeing a person. They never quarreled - barely even disagreed. He spoke and she listened. He made requests and she carried them out. She never complained. He did, only rarely, when something wasn't quite done to his standards. They moved peacefully in parallel together through the years and then-

  Then this, as abrupt as a bucket of ice water.

  What was the right script for this moment? "You should have said you were feeling this way," she tried. It emerged dully.

  "No point boring on about it. I didn't want to make you feel bad."

  "Why should I feel bad?"

  "About . . ." for the first time he looked uncertain. ". . . about the kids. Not having any, I mean."

  "Why on earth would I feel bad about that?" she asked with more emphasis, an edge of scorn.

  "You want kids."

  "Of course I want them." Wanted them, longed for them, wept bitter tears through the years, month after month. She had pleaded at him to try fertility procedures, different positions, different timing, despite his annoyance at her fussing. Until time taught her it was not going to happen. Eventually she folded the bitter yearning away and their marriage became better. Smoother. She resigned herself to just him, only him to be her family, and took better care of him than ever.

  She stared at his face. A hard stare. One that gave no ground. She watched him squirm under the weight of it until finally he was forced to elaborate – to say the words she knew waited inside.

  "I didn't want you to feel bad that you can't." He extended a hand in sympathy.

  "I don't feel bad about that, Dan. I don't feel at all bad about it. Because not one single doctor has told me it's my fault."

  "That's just because you haven't asked. It's not me." He snorted, his eyebrows raised at the idea that he, physically superior specimen, could lack the virility to spray out children on all sides at whim. Science might be on her side but that hardly mattered. Not where Daniel King was concerned. He wrote his own rules and that included the laws of basic biology: that it took two people to produce a fertilized egg.

  She was sick of the whole topic. "What are your plans then?"

  "I . . . ah . . . I'll stay in a hotel for now, and I'll find myself a place soon; a rental or something. Don't you worry about that. I'll be fine. You just take care of yourself now.” After an awkward pause he repeated himself: "You can keep the house."

  "Yes. I heard you." If she wasn't going to be sad, should she feel anger? Surely this blankness was not normal?

  "I've . . . I've already packed. So that's . . . that's all." He shifted now from one foot to the other, and she imagined he had several other speeches all prepared and ready to deliver. She had thwarted him with her limp response. "You have your car here. I've got the drycleaning." He nodded at the suit he had asked her to drop off at the stadium: a final errand from the wife he was about to discard. "You can go when you want."

  "Yes," she said, and the word sounded hard and final, like the slam of a door. She turned away, and then she saw it, standing previously out of sight by the doorway.

  Her suitcase. Her big one, beautifully made and sturdy, with all the pockets that she liked so things came easily to hand. She loved that suitcase. She really loved it. She sucked in an abrupt lungful of air and opened her mouth to shout she would be damned if he got her suitcase.

  But no. It was already packed – he was already gone from the house. She could buy another one. It might not be quite the same model but perhaps it would be even better. You never could tell with such things. There was no point in making a fuss.

  She pressed her lips together tight, and put her hand on the door handle. Then she had a final thought.


  "Dan?" She turned.

  He looked up, his lips curving in a little smile, his eyes warming in tender pity. He opened his mouth to speak.

  "The keys. Give me your house keys, please." She stretched out a flat palm.

  He paused, gave a surprised huff, reached with a slow hand for his trouser pocket, and pulled the small bunch out with a jangle. Then he started to work off the house key from the ring.

  "The back door as well," she prompted, "and the garage."

  "I must say, you're taking this all very calmly." There was a sour note in his voice.

  "I can see you've made up your mind. I know how immovable you are once your mind's made up." Mulish. Insanely stubborn, past all good sense. He believed it to be one of his strengths. She had always thought an unwillingness to shift one's stance was a weakness.

  He dropped the three keys into her hand and she closed her fingers around them, the jagged edges still warm from his body heat but cooling quickly against her chill skin.

  Now she went, swiftly, without another word said, a sensation in her throat like she was choking on something that rose higher and higher inside her. Tears?

  She had to get out, out of the building with its bustle of morning training, NFL players and team staff. How very like Dan to choose this place to end their marriage. The seat of his power and authority, crammed with people to watch and stare at any disturbance. She would never make a scene, in such a place. Never embarrass him here.

  Dependable, obedient Felicity King.

  Would it be better if she could cry? Surely that would be more natural, more right? Better than this ache in her throat and another under her breastbone. She would get to the privacy of her car and drive. She had an hour before her first work appointment of the day. She would drive to a place she could be alone, and then if the tears arrived it would be alright.

  If she could cry, it would be alright. Better than this frightening blankness.

  ___

  Luke needed a shower, bad. He could smell the sweat of his own exertion plastering his body. It had been a good session, and now his muscles twitched with exhaustion. As they should when a man pushed hard to his limits. He grinned, pleased with the feeling of his own healthy body, loosely-hinged, injury-free and charged with the sweet song of endorphins.

  More than a year, and he still had it in him to love the high of it: pulling hard for this team, his team. The camaraderie and the belonging, striving for a common goal. Yeah, it sure was something. He reached out a hand to trail fingertips along the blank gray wall, to feel his connection to the place – more home to him than his tidy condo, more relished than all the swanky places he had ever seen or visited.

  His stadium.

  Into the corridor ahead of him, coming down from the stairs up to the manager's office, stepped a familiar figure. She turned away from him before he could see her face, but he knew that hair, that body, that snappy high-heeled walk far better than he should. The way she moved – prim, self-contained, secretly fluid – seized his attention every time, not just when she went down a corridor ahead of him. Every time Felicity King came around the stadium to see Mr King, Luke ended up watching her.

  Not that he wanted to watch Mrs King, of course. No man wanted to be caught staring at the wife of his boss. That was a good way to get the bad sort of attention. He worked hard to keep his nose clean. He wasn't going to mess up that way, no sir, no how. Even if he had been the sort of man to fool around with another man's woman. Which he wasn't.

  Of course watching Mrs King wasn't a sin. Not exactly. It was more the way he watched that made him feel so guilty, like he ought to be hauled up for it. It was the things he found himself thinking about her. Things no man should think about a good woman who was thoroughly married.

  Like how soft her skin looked, soft like rose petals. Like looking at how the skin on her neck matched that on her arms, her legs, and wondering if that skin looked the same way all over her body. Like imagining kissing his way up those slender legs all the way to heaven, and finding out.

  She had this way sometimes of laying the tip of her index finger right in the center of her lower lip when she was thinking things through, that damn near drove him crazy. He always wanted to move that finger just far enough to one side to kiss those pink lips.

  Not that he would ever say so. Only try not to stare too long and hard at her. Try not to dream too long and hard about her. A married woman. Damn.

  In fact they had only talked a couple of times in the year he had been on the team. Three times maybe.

  Aw, no use pretending. Three times precisely, and him never once managing to string together something intelligent to say to her.

  That first time she spoke to him, just after he arrived, said, "It's hard to be the new guy, isn't it? Is there anything I can do for you, Mr Barrett? Anything you need?" and blinked up at him with those big, innocent gray eyes, he had felt himself get aroused, to his dumbstruck horror.

  He had sat down abruptly on the bench beside him, pursed his lips, shook his head. Goddamn, but that was embarrassing.

  He didn't think she'd noticed. She just tolerantly went on making polite conversation and smiling that gentle smile at him, asking him how he was fitting into the team. Were the other players treating him nicely? Was he enjoying himself? He found it hard to answer her questions with anything approaching sense, nodded and said, "Yes, Ma'am," and reddened like a tongue-tied school boy.

  She wasn't a big talker. More of a listener. He saw her listening all the time. She listened to the players who clustered round to say hello when she came in on some errand for Mr King. Listened to the coach when he explained something to her about the game – something she probably knew after this many years as the manager's wife, but she listened politely all the same. Listened to Mr King while he lectured her about the donuts she'd brought the team, told her she couldn't feed stuff like that to top athletes, went on about it till the whole team was shifting uncomfortably and wishing they didn't have to hear a grown woman scolded like a naughty child.

  Sean and Matt made a point of waylaying her as she walked away with those donuts, stole the box out of her hands and took off with it. Sean gave her a thumbs-up and Matt had already gobbled down the first sugary lump on his way out the door. She looked around, all guilty-like, to see if Mr King had caught the byplay, but he was talking to Big Joe. Big Joe who might just have asked the manager a question at the right time to distract him.

  All she saw was nods and smiles, and she turned pink and went out.

  They all liked her. She was a good woman. The sort of sweet, ladylike type that earned a man's respect as easy as breathing.

  The sort no decent man would think about the way he thought about her. He didn't rate himself much for it, but neither could he seem to stop.

  Anymore than he could stop watching her now, walking down the corridor ahead of him, her heels clicking on the concrete floor. Her blond hair was coiled up in some clever way, sleek and professional, and it gleamed even in the dull fluorescent light.

  Her shoulders were hunched, and maybe her walk was less liquid than usual, jerkier.

  Luke frowned. Was something wrong?

  Instead of taking the left to the changing rooms and showers like he knew he should, he carried on following her, trying to make up his mind to say her name, to ask how she was. But there was no space in that swift, determined pace for small talk and 'Howdy, Ma'am.'

  He hesitated too long and she hit the end of the corridor without slowing at the double doors, her out-thrust arms working the lever bar in a quick motion that sent them back against the outside wall with a bang. She was out into the bright light and he blinked and squinted, stopped for a moment on the threshold to orient himself. She was yards away, already at the side of her car, and as he saw her face - bone-tight and so pale it was almost green - he knew he was too right.

  And too late.

  As he called out her name she slammed the car door, shutting herself in, a
nd threw the car into reverse, not even checking to see there was no one behind her. There wasn't. He was the only other person in the carpark, and if she saw him jog several steps after her she gave no sign of it. She drove bent over the wheel like her gut hurt, he saw in the last, brief glimpse he had of her before she was away down the long rows of parked cars. He stared after her, and wished he had spoken sooner instead of silently following, gazing at her perfect ass, like a chump.

  It took a deliberate effort to unclench his fists, to breathe normally, when he wanted to find whatever had put that expression on her face, and pound it. Not his place, to protect her, to solve her problems. Not his right, and dumbass stupid to want it to be. Wanting something didn't make it yours.

  He turned away, to go back inside for that shower. Carlos was on his way out, his tan face serene, probably riding the same endorphin kick Luke had been enjoying only moments before. They passed each other with an exchange of "Hey," but a moment later he stopped and pivoted as Carlos said, "Hey, man, where's good to get a bite to eat around here?"

  "Mama Bolton's, just up the road and round the corner. The red-and-white stripe awning."

  "You want to come?" Carlos flicked a thumb in casual invitation, taking his turn to be the new guy, newest member of the team, brashly confident but with a layer of anxiety just under the surface. He tried too hard, but Luke wasn't the kind of man to hold it against him.

  "Got to have a shower." Luke lifted the hem of his shirt and flapped it so it slapped damply against his own skin, uncomfortably chill now in the Fall cool.

  "'Kay. What about the nightlife? You guys go to bars or clubs or whatever?"

  "Sometimes." He took pity on the kid. "Not tonight. Friday. We can hit a couple of the places in town. How about it?"

  "Yeah, dude. Sounds good. Want to meet some ladies."

  Wanted to see how his new-and-improved status as an NFL player would work to get him laid, no doubt. And the kid was good enough looking - big square face and even white teeth - he'd probably do alright.