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‘Thirteen years. My parents split when I was eleven. Mam and I moved to England when I was thirteen and I haven’t seen him since.’
‘My father died thirteen years ago.’ Something in his chest moved as he thought of Cara going through her own personal trauma while his own life was shattering, first by the death of his father and then by Luisa’s vile and ultimately devastating actions.
‘I’m sorry.’ Her voice softened. ‘I’ve seen pictures of your dad—you look just like him.’
‘Sì. He was a very handsome man.’
This time she did laugh. ‘Oh, you are so full of yourself.’
‘You can be full of me too if you want.’
‘Are you trying to make me sick again?’
He chuckled, glancing over at her, certain there was the trace of a smile playing on her lips.
Mind out of the gutter, he chided himself. He needed to keep his attention focused on the road before him, not on memories of burying himself inside her tight sweetness.
All the same, he took a sharp breath in the hope it would loosen the tightness in his groin.
‘Did your mother stop your father from seeing you after she left him?’
‘No. He stopped himself from seeing me. It was too much hassle for him to go across the Irish channel and see his eldest child. We exchange Christmas cards and that’s it.’
For a moment he thought she was going to say something else, but when he glanced at her, he saw her eyes were closed and she was massaging her forehead. For all her bitterness there was a definite vulnerability about her when she spoke of her parents.
‘Did you miss him?’
‘My father?’
‘Yes. It must have been a hard time for you.’
She laughed, a noise that sounded as if it were being done through a sucked lemon. ‘If anything, it was a relief. My father is a serial shagger. He cheated on my mum so many times I think even he lost count.’
‘Were you aware of this at the time?’ Surely her father would have been discreet?
‘I’ve always known, even when I was too young to understand. They never bothered keeping it a secret from me. I caught him out twice—once when I was going to the park with my friends and walked past the local pub and saw him through the window draped over some woman.’
‘He was with another woman in your local pub?’ Even Pepe, who was not easily shocked, was shocked at this.
‘You think that’s bad?’ Her tone rose in pitch. ‘The next time I caught him out, which couldn’t have been more than six months later, I found him in the marital bed with another woman—a different woman from the woman he was with in the pub.’
‘You caught him in the act?’
‘No, thank God. They were lying in bed. I remember my dad was smoking a cigarette. I don’t know what shocked me the most—I’d no idea he was a smoker.’
And Cara had no idea why she was sharing all this with Pepe of all people.
It had been the same over the weekend they’d shared together. He was such an easy person to talk to and had such an unerring ability to make the person he was with—namely her—believe that every word she uttered was worth listening to, that it was quite possible to spill your guts to him without even realising. He’d done it then, listened to her rabbit on for hours about her love of her job, her hopes for the future.
No one had ever made her feel like that before.
He’d made her believe she was special.
It would be all too easy to believe it again.
She opened the window a little further and practically stuck her nose out of it, inhaling the cold air gratefully. It compressed the anger and pain of those horrible memories back down to a manageable level.
Silence sprang between them, a silence that was on the verge of becoming uncomfortable when Pepe said, ‘What did you do? Did you tell your mother?’
She sucked in more cold air before answering. ‘Yes. Yes, I did. He didn’t even bother to deny it. She threw him out for all of two days before taking him back. She always took him back.’
Her stomach twisted a little more as she recalled hearing them ‘make up’. They hadn’t cared that their ten-year-old daughter was in the house. They’d never cared.
Her entire childhood had revolved around her father’s affairs and her mother’s reactions to them. Those reactions had never been about Cara. Their daughter had been secondary to everything in their sick marriage where sex was a weapon used to hurt each other in the most cruel and demeaning ways.
‘I always swore I’d never get involved with a man who was like my father, so more fool me.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
