Hawke's Flight (Julia Hawke Series Book 3) by Natasha West

Author:Natasha West [West, Natasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

‘Penny? Are you still there?’

I waited until the giggling subsided and Penny spoke again. ‘Sorry, It’s Zara. She’s just messing about.’

‘Oh’ I said, unsure what else to say. This was becoming a regular thing. Zara this, Zara that.

‘Are we still going to dinner tomorrow?’ she asked.

‘Actually, I wondered if you might want to grab lunch today?’

There was a pause.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’ve already promised Zara that we’d check out a new Thai place around the corner.’

It had been like this for weeks, trying to get time with Penny was getting more and more difficult. And I think I understood why.

I wasn’t exactly making myself pleasurable to be around. It was because I couldn’t talk to her about Karen. And holding it back was making it feel difficult to talk to her in general. It was creating a stiff atmosphere between us. I hated it but I couldn’t seem to do anything to change it.

I wasn’t protecting Karen. God knows, I didn’t owe her anything. And it wasn’t just about protecting Penny’s relationship with her, although it did figure into the equation. But a large part of the reason I didn’t really want to talk to Penny about what had happened was that Karen’s words were lingering like a bad smell. I couldn’t seem to shake them.

Because, and I hated to admit this to myself, I was worried she was right.

I knew I didn’t have to care about what she thought of me. As long as Penny never got caught in the middle, the woman’s opinion had absolutely no bearing on anything at all.

But still, her words were like acid, corrosive, eating into me. Because she’d looked at me and in no time at all, she’d seen the things I saw too. And if she could see it that easily, how could there not be truth in it?

Mine and Penny’s relationship had started in such an ugly time for me. I’d tried to treat her like a fling, even if she’d become a lot more than that. And things were very different now. But if they’d changed once, they could change again. What if the new and improved Julia Hawke was simply a phase? What if it didn’t last? What if the person that Karen saw was the real me?

And what if it was only a matter of time until Penny saw the same thing that her mother had?

Every way I turned it around in my head, all I could see was an end. To me and Penny, to the happiest I’d ever been. To the better person I’d found in myself. It all seemed like a sham, suddenly. I was fooling myself.

I was supposed to be starting a fresh project, a better working practice, and the end of my hellish writer’s block. But the events in Pilldale had put paid to that. My sleeplessness returned with a vengeance. And the block was as fierce as ever.

I was in rough shape. And my face was starting to tell the story in the daylight.

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