He ignores my strangled attempt at a retort and steps out onto the balcony, leaving me and my mother alone.
‘He means well,’ she says once the stony silence apparently gets too much for her to bear. ‘And I’ve heard the Vouvalis boy is quite nice.’
‘That’s not the point!’ I hate how whiny and petulant Isound right now, but I can’t help it. ‘Asher could be the nicest person on the planet – I still don’t want to marry him.’
My mother sighs, then comes to sit beside me on the sofa. She reaches out to place a hand on my arm and I flinch. She pretends not to notice her daughter visibly recoiling from her and folds her hands into her lap instead, like that was always the plan. ‘You know your father struggled a lot growing up?’
I nod stiffly. Everyone knows the Malcolm Davies story. How he bounced around from foster home to foster home and beat every single odd stacked against him to create the absolute titan in the aviation industry that is Peregrine Airways. I don’t need to hear it again, but apparently my mother is incapable of reading the room.
‘There were days when he wouldn’t know where he’d get his next meal from. Times he didn’t have one single pound to his name. He’s been living in fight-or-flight mode since he was a child, and he’s worked damn hard to make sure you’ve never even had a taste of what he went through growing up.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘And I appreciate—’
‘Do you?’ she says briskly. ‘Because you sound like a child.’
‘He’s asking me to marry—’
She waves a dismissive hand in the air, silencing me immediately. ‘He’s asking you to do your part. Arranged marriages are quite common, you know? Every day, men and women all over the world enter into unions not for love, but for financial or social gain. It’s not that out of the ordinary. We’re not asking you to do anything that hasn’t already been a part of the human experience for thousands of years.’
‘Well excuse me for wanting to love the person I agree to spend the rest of my life with,’ I say with a sniff. ‘I didn’t know that was such an unreasonable request.’
For a moment, my mother looks sympathetic. She reaches out to touch my hand again, and this time I let her. She gives me a squeeze, but it does nothing to calm me down. It’s the complete opposite of Asher’s touch from last night. The second he put his hand on my thigh, I felt eerily calm. Now I just feel even more tense.
‘It’s not unreasonable,’ she says softly. ‘It’s just not feasible right now. As I said, Asher Vouvalis is, by all accounts, quite the gentleman. Your father and I would never have agreed to a match with someone who wasn’t.’
‘Have you both forgotten that we have a history?’ I say desperately. I haven’t tried this tack with my mother yet, and maybe there’s a chance it’ll move her in a way it didn’t for my father. ‘Asher Vouvalis had his chance with me and he blew it.’
My mother frowns. ‘What went so wrong? And if it was so bad, why is this the first we’re hearing of it?’
‘I was embarrassed,’ I say, the lie coming effortlessly to me. ‘I just wanted to forget it ever happened. To forget that we were ever a thing.’ I turn to her and grasp her hand in mine. ‘I want to do whatever I can for the business, you know I do, but surely there has to be some other way. I don’t even understand why we so desperately need this deal with the Vouvalis corporation anyway.’
She pulls her hand free and averts her gaze. ‘That’s not for you to worry about.’
‘So you’ll ask me to sign my life away to help, but you won’t even do me the decency of telling me why?’
She purses her lips. ‘Your father… We both just want to make sure you’re taken care of. That you can live a life of luxury and freedom without having to worry the way we did. Can you just trust us, Imani? Trust that we’re doing this, that we’re asking this of you, because we know best. You don’t see it now, but five, ten years from now, you’ll be thanking us.’
‘Ha,’ I scoff. ‘I highly doubt that.’
My mother gives me a sad smile. ‘There was obviously something that drew you to Asher in the first place all those years ago. Focus on that and try and rekindle it. You’ve got time to fall in love again.’
The door to the balcony slides open and my father re-enters the room. He looks even more tired and browbeaten than before.
‘Daddy, I—’
He holds up a tired hand. ‘I don’t want to hear it, Imani. I’ve already arranged it with Georgios. You and Asher will meet next week and start fixing this mess you’ve got us into. No arguments.’
I clench my jaw. ‘Asher and I just aren’t going to work.’
He mimics the same sad smile my mother gave me just a few moments earlier. ‘I sincerely hope that you do.’
CHAPTER TENAsher
I’m fairly certain my father has forgotten about me. I was summoned to his office with an expletive-filled text message in the early hours of the morning, yet it’s currently closer to ten than the intended 9am he asked for, and I’m still waiting in the lobby. Every so often, Natalie, my father’s unfortunate assistant, glances over in my direction and winces. I’m not sure she realises she’s not as discreet as she thinks she is.
So, yeah. He’s either forgotten that he, in a rage, demanded I come in this morning to be yelled at in person, or making me wait is part of my punishment. To be honest, it could go either way with him.
I drum my fingers against the armrest of my seat, the rhythmic tapping the only thing keeping me from going insane.
