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A loud buzzing played in her ears. Her throat ran so dry no amount of swallowing could moisten it.
She cleared her suddenly arid throat. ‘Your pilot’s waiting for us.’
His gaze held a moment longer before he smiled and shook his head.
* * *
‘More wine?’
Charley blinked. She’d been a thousand miles away.
She breathed deeply and fixed a smile to her face. ‘Go on, then. We might as well order our food too.’ They’d been in the restaurant for an hour and still there was no sign of her dad. Neither was he answering his phone.
‘Are you sure?’
She gazed back at the menu open on her lap. She didn’t want to look at Raul or the sympathy radiating from him.
He was only an hour late. For her dad, that was nothing. As a kid she’d often spent whole days waiting for him to arrive.
‘Definitely. The minute we order is the minute he’ll arrive,’ she said brightly. ‘You wait, he’ll be here any second.’
‘Of course he will,’ Raul agreed with eyes that said he thought the total opposite.
She snatched up her glass and downed the last of the red liquid. Forget bouquets of blackcurrant and cinnamon and whatever else it was reputed to have, the only attribute she cared for was its anaesthetic quality.
She was an adult now, she reminded herself, and had long ago accepted her dad for who he was: a man who had certain reliability issues.
Yet waiting for him as an adult still made her feel like the little girl who would wait for hours for his car to pull into the car park, and the adolescent who would skive off school for fear of missing out on an unexpected visit from him.
He would be here.
They ordered their dishes and more drinks were brought over.
Her phone vibrated.
She knew what it would say before she opened it.
‘Has something come up?’ Raul asked carefully, while she read her dad’s brief message. He didn’t need to be psychic either.
She forced a cheerful smile to her face and nodded. ‘There’s something wrong with his car—it’s making strange noises. He doesn’t think it’s safe to continue the drive.’
She’d known she should have travelled to him and would have done if she hadn’t been spending the day at Poco Rio. When she was the one to make the effort there was less chance of some emergency cropping up at the last minute.
But...since her dad had moved to the Costa Dorado, he hadn’t made the effort to visit her once. The intention had been there though, she reminded herself. They’d made plenty of dates for him to come to her. She’d even bought him a car so he could get around and not be stuck in his beachside home.
She should have arranged to meet him in Barcelona, not here in Valencia. Barcelona was much closer to him.
‘That’s a shame,’ Raul said.
‘There’ll be another time.’
Another time for him to stand her up.
It had been bad enough worrying that Raul was going to be late for the meal too. He’d travelled to Brazil on Wednesday, only arriving back that afternoon. Two nights of fret and worry.
Sometimes, when she let her mind wander too far, she heard his words echo in her head. ‘Sometimes, Señora Cazorla, I look at you and I remember exactly why I fell in love with you.’
She’d laughed it off but under the bonhomie she’d turned into a wreck. His words had terrified her.
If he’d loved her so much then why had he given up on her so easily? Two years of silence had said it all.
He’d made her into the perfect Cazorla wife but as soon as she’d denied him what he wanted, a child, he’d given up on her.
Just as her father only wanted her when he needed money.
Charley was disposable.
Nothing similar had been mentioned in the subsequent weeks but those words had stayed with her.
Then he’d gone off to Brazil, the land of beautiful women, leaving her alone for the first time since they’d got back together—got back together temporarily, she reminded herself—and found herself alone in his huge bed with a brain that refused to switch off.
They were only temporary, her brain had screamed. In less than a couple of months they would head their separate ways.
Oh, why had he said it? Why had he mentioned the L word?
He hadn’t said he loved her now. Just that he’d loved her then.
But he didn’t love you then. If he had he would never have tried to change you.
In defiance, she’d rolled over to the middle of the bed.
Come the morning and after a few hours of broken sleep, she’d been back on her own side with his pillow in her arms. She’d had to stop those same arms throwing themselves around him when he’d arrived at Poco Rio late that afternoon, as they were clearing up after a long day. She’d wanted to hug him even harder when he’d taken her briefly to the new centre so she could see how all the renovations were going.
