Forget Me Knot Read Online Free Page B

and fall into bed.
    It wasn’t as if Toby hadn’t tried to get time off so that the two of them could spend more time together. For half of the eight months they’d been going out, he’d been promising that they would take a romantic break. But every time they got close to booking something, another case would come up or another major deal would be on the verge of collapse, which only he could rescue.
    Last month they had finally made it to Paris. By way of apology for all the aborted trips, Toby’s law firm had paid and booked them into the Georges Cinq for an entire week.
    On the first night, they went to bed early with a bottle of Cristal. Abby lay there in her brand-new La Perla satin negligee, waiting for Toby to ravish her. When he tried but failed to rise to the occasion—despite vigorous and inventive encouragement on her part—they put it down to his exhaustion. “You’ll be fine tomorrow, just you see,” Abby soothed, stroking his hair. But the following night was no different. Toby said it was like trying to force jelly into a slot machine. Again she held him and comforted him and did her best to convince him that getting anxious would only make the situation worse.
    They had just fallen asleep on the second night when the phone rang.
    “Leave it,” Abby said. “Whoever it is can leave a message.”
    “No, I must take it,” Toby said, reaching out to pick up the receiver. “It could be the office.”
    It was. A moment later, Toby was looking taut and running his fingers through his hair. “Yep. OK, fine. I’ll be there. Leave it to me.” He put down the phone and turned back to Abby. “The MSP merger is about to go tits up. I have to go to Brussels tomorrow to try and rescue it.”
    “Oh, come on, Toby, this was meant to be our romantic break. We really need this time together; surely they can send somebody else.”
    “No, they can’t. This is my case. My responsibility.”
    She didn’t mean to lie there looking sullen, but she couldn’t help it.
    “Abby, what do you suggest I do, tell my bosses to take a running jump? I am paid a fortune to do this job.”
    “That doesn’t mean they own you.”
    “You know what, Abs? Actually it does.”
    In many ways she admired Toby’s work ethic. After all, he received money from a family trust fund and had no real need to earn a living. He maintained that the importance of working hard and contributing to the world was something his mother had instilled in him. Apart from the occasional meeting with the managers employed to run the Kenwood estate, his late father had never worked. The man had been a drunk and a gambler. By the time he died of cirrhosis of the liver at age fifty-six, he had boozed and gambled away hundreds of thousands of pounds—not that this had left much more than a slight dent in the family fortune. “Eventually my mother came to despise the pathetic wretch he had turned into,” Toby had confided to Abby. “After he died, she became a local magistrate, hospital governor and master of the hunt. She also threw herself into charity work. She worked nonstop, and with my father gone, she became my role model.”
    Now Toby reached out and took Abby’s hand. “Look, I will make this up to you, I promise. I’ll make sure I’m back by six tomorrow—seven at the latest.” He suggested she spend the day at the Louvre—where she had never been. “And afterward we’ll meet up for dinner. I’ll book somewhere really special.”
    She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “OK. Deal,” she said.
    The next morning, Abby woke to see Toby standing in front of the mirror.
    “Mornin’,” she said through a yawn.
    “Thank heavens I changed my mind and packed a suit,” he said by way of greeting. “I almost didn’t. But then I thought it might be nice to wear one if we went out for a posh dinner.” He lifted his shirt collar and draped a gray-and-purple-striped silk tie around his neck.
    When he’d finished adjusting his tie,