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‘Oh!’ It was more a surprised squeak than a word, and Flynn would have laughed at the shock on her face if it wouldn’t have ruined the mood.
He released her hand and leant back as the waiter appeared with their starters. He had a feeling the conversation wasn’t done yet, but he’d said what he needed to. She knew where he stood now. All he needed was for her to join him.
Easy.
He took a bite of his crostini di fegato while she toyed with her risotto, her fork twirling through the rice grains without ever making it near her mouth. She’d talk when she was ready, he decided, and set about enjoying his starter instead.
He was halfway through when she said, ‘The other night...’ then stopped and winced.
Of course. Their wedding night. Of course she’d want to talk about that in a crowded restaurant where he couldn’t do anything to persuade her that his reluctance to take her to bed had nothing to do with lack of interest.
‘It had been a long day for both of us,’ he said as neutrally as he could.
She waved a hand at him across the table, dismissing his words as unnecessary or irrelevant, he wasn’t completely sure which. ‘That night, I thought for a moment that you might have been in love with my sister.’
Flynn blinked at her in confusion. ‘Why on earth would you think that?’
The burst of laughter Helena didn’t quite manage to contain by slapping her hand to her mouth drew the attention of every other diner in the room. Flynn steadfastly refused to look at or acknowledge them, keeping his gaze on Helena as she simmered down to a giggle.
‘You realise how ridiculous that is, right? You were supposed to marry her four days ago, and you can’t imagine how I might have got the impression that you were in love with her?’
Put like that, he supposed she had a point. ‘Except you knew that the marriage was a business arrangement.’
‘For her, yes. But I’d never spoken to you about how you felt. Still haven’t, actually.’ She paused in a way that suggested he was supposed to remedy that. Immediately. Except at that point the waiter returned to clear their starters, followed by another server carrying their main courses.
Flynn sighed and picked up his wine glass, taking the opportunity to consider his answer. Once they were alone again, he said, ‘Marrying Thea was the plan because it gave us both what we wanted—or at least what I thought she wanted. Business and personal security, a future together and the possibility of children. Plus a good boost for the company PR. She got to escape her ridiculous failures with men, and I got to earn a real place at the family table. It worked.’
‘So, nothing about love at all?’ Helena pressed her fork into her porcetta, cut a sliver and popped it into her mouth. ‘Mmm, this is delicious.’
‘I’ll admit I hoped that one day we might come to love one another. But no, I wasn’t in love with her.’ And it was painfully obvious to all and sundry that she hadn’t been in love with him either. That was the only part that still smarted, just a little. Flynn turned his attention to his main course, mostly to pretend that it didn’t.
‘But you’d spoken about...children. And you admitted that you would have slept with her already, if she’d gone through with the marriage.’ Her neutral tone gave nothing away, no hint of the right answer for him to give. Even if she hadn’t really asked a question.
‘For me, and for Thea, I think, we wanted to make this a real lasting marriage. Even if it didn’t start out from a place of true love or anything. She’s an attractive woman,’ he added, watching Helena’s face closely as he spoke for any sign of a negative reaction. Sometimes when women said they wanted honesty, in his experience, they wanted anything but. ‘And we had an iron-clad fidelity clause. If either of us ever wanted to have sex again, it had to be with each other.’
Helena sat back and studied him, sipping from her own wine glass. ‘I like our story better,’ she said after a moment.
‘Our story?’
‘Yes. It’s more...dramatic. Romantic. Spontaneous.’
‘Of course.’ Flynn’s shoulder muscles relaxed a little now she hadn’t thrown wine in his face for talking about sleeping with her sister. ‘And you like romance and spontaneity.’
‘Who doesn’t?’ She gave a small shrug. ‘But you two would have gone into that marriage with a heavy weight of expectations—written and signed in blood.’
‘I like to think of it as more of a plan,’ Flynn said mildly.
‘You mean a schedule.’ Helena shook her head. ‘But life doesn’t work like that. What if you slept together and it was dreadful?’
Flynn really didn’t want to talk about this, but apparently he didn’t have much of a choice. ‘Then we’d have...I don’t know. Practised, or something.’ Could this be more awkward?
‘What if she couldn’t have children?’ There was something behind Helena’s eyes as she spoke, something he’d have missed if he hadn’t been watching so closely. Was she trying to tell him something? He really hoped not.
‘Then we’d figure something out. IVF or surrogacy. Adoption, maybe.’ As a last resort. If he ever had to adopt, though, he’d do it differently. It would be about giving another lost child the sort of chances he’d had—but without the baggage. Not about what that child could give him.
‘What if she fell in love with someone else?’
‘Then she’d probably run away with him on our wedding morning.’ A joke, but only just.
Helena rolled her eyes. ‘I mean after the wedding.’
‘Then we’d have...’ The thought had never really occurred to him. The marriage was such an escape for both of them, to put them in a position where they didn’t have to take the risk of love, that he couldn’t imagine either of them looking for it outside of their union. ‘We’d have talked about it. Sorted something out.’
‘Like we’re talking now,’ Helena said. ‘And since you’re married to me, not her, I suppose we need to make some decisions about these things.’
And there it was. Everything he wanted, needed and he hadn’t even had to ask for it. By the time Henry arrived with the new marriage contract, she’d be ready to sign, Flynn was sure of it.
‘Just when I was celebrating our story for being different,’ she said with a sigh.
He could afford to give her a little ground now, Flynn decided. He wanted her to be happy, after all. ‘What did you like best about our story?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. The...immediacy of it, I guess. That we got married on a moment’s notice, without all that paperwork and advance planning. If we were actually in love, it would be the most romantic thing ever. As it is...I guess it wasn’t incredibly sensible.’
‘Maybe not,’ Flynn allowed. ‘But I like to think it can work.’
‘Yeah?’ She’d finished eating, Flynn realised, and pushed her plate aside. The bottle of wine was almost empty too.
Maybe it was the wine that gave him the confidence to say, ‘I want with you everything I ever wanted with Thea. Maybe even more. I want us to have a real marriage, and I hope that we will fall in love. But I need to know that you’ll stick with it. That you’ll give us a chance.’
Helena’s bluebell eyes were wide and he could see the indecision in them, even if he couldn’t fathom her reasons for holding back. She worried her lower lip with her teeth for a moment, and Flynn realised he was actually holding his breath. Waiting for his own wife to tell him she wanted to be married to him.
How had it come to this?
‘I will,’ Helena said eventually, so soft he almost didn’t hear. Then she added, stronger this time, ‘Yes, Flynn Ashton, I will stay married to you.’
This time, Flynn was pretty sure it was relief, rather than the wine, that caused his words. ‘In that case, let’s get out of here. I’ve got the perfect way to celebrate.’
A spur-of
-the-moment idea, spontaneous and romantic—she was going to love it.
And suddenly that mattered an awful lot to him.
* * *
Flynn didn’t let go of her hand all the way out to the car. Helena couldn’t decide if the feel of his fingers wrapped around hers was comforting or terrifying.
What had she just done?
The whole idea was to stay married long enough to negate any scandal then get out, quick—preferably before Flynn discovered anything about her history that might ruin their friendship forever. Exes could be friends as long as they didn’t screw up the marriage—or each other—too badly.
But now...now she was promising to stay with him? To try and fall in love—as if that were even a thing people could do—and have a real life—a family!—with him. Everything she’d been avoiding for years.
As Flynn shut the car door after her, letting go of her hand long enough to whisper something to the driver before getting in the other side, Helena closed her eyes and let her head fall back.
Why? What had possessed her to do it?
Well, that one was probably easy enough. Guilt more than anything. Hearing Flynn talk so honestly about what he wanted from this marriage and why... How could she not want to give him that? To give him a place in their family. To give him the one thing he’d always needed most and never had—a place to belong.
