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She eyed him warily. ‘You’re sorry?’
‘I was baiting you,’ he conceded flatly. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why? Why were you baiting me, I mean?’
There was no reason at all for him to want to be honest with her. But... ‘It was beginning to feel a little too much like a proper date.’ He shrugged. ‘I didn’t want there to be...mixed signals. Ridiculous, I know.’
She hesitated before muttering a reply. ‘Not entirely ridiculous.’
He liked the flush which crept up her neck. Perhaps a little bit too much. And then, as though he couldn’t help himself, he thought of the fact that she had been eighteen when she had a baby. That she had somehow put herself through medical school. It was impossible not to admire the woman.
‘I also could have been a little more thoughtful with regard to money. A little more sensitive. It can’t have been easy to raise your daughter alone, at that age, and still work towards becoming a doctor.’
He didn’t remember moving towards her but suddenly she was right there, and his hand was covering hers, stilling her movements and stopping her from worrying at that loose thread any further.
‘Well,’ she whispered softly, ‘that’s my issue to deal with, not yours. And not anyone else’s.’
There was something so...lost in her expression that he didn’t even think about it—didn’t even consider how much of his own private past he might be giving away—he simply said the one thing that he wished someone had said to him when he’d been eighteen and trying to deal with a bull-headed thirteen-year-old Hetti. Despite everything else, Tak found himself reaching for that connection between them.
‘You’ve done well, Effie. Give yourself a break.’
‘I do,’ she lied.
His gaze said everything. ‘Not enough. I saw how agitated you were when I picked you up from your building. I... I have sisters. I know how hard it is to keep a wilful teenage girl from going off the rails, and I can only imagine what grief your daughter gave you tonight for coming out with me. But that’s just part of growing up. And so what if you don’t have a lot of money? You’ve obviously given your daughter love and guidance—and, frankly, one hell of a role model. She’ll come back to you at some point.’
Then, because her eyes looked glassy and she seemed as though she was desperately fighting to hold it together, and he knew if he hugged her it might look too obvious that he was comforting her, Tak ushered her quickly back into the main hall and swung her out onto the dance floor before she had time to pull away.
‘I don’t dance,’ she said, panicked.
‘All you have to do is follow my lead. Come here.’ He cut her off gruffly, drawing her to him and letting her body settle against his, feeling her stiffen, and resist, and then ultimately crumple slightly against him as she realised there would be no release.
He didn’t want to analyse what it was that had made him do it. What compunction had caused him to pull her onto the dance floor just so that he could hold her body to his. Where he’d imagined her being all evening.
And, as she pressed her head so tightly against his chest that he wondered if she could hear his heart thumping, Tak couldn’t help feeling that this fleeting lowering of her defences was something of a bittersweet victory.
CHAPTER FIVE
EFFIE WAS STARTLED, but then a sense of calm seemed to flow into her. She lifted her gaze to meet his. Those rich mahogany eyes saw so deeply into her she was half afraid he might be able to read her entire past.
First he’d baited her, then he’d argued. And she’d been only too happy to play along, because she’d felt, and resented, the connection that they had. The electric spark. He wasn’t the only one to think it felt more like a real date than a fake one. Worse, she couldn’t bring herself to lament the fact. As though she wanted something...more with him.
‘How?’ she whispered, barely even hearing her own voice. ‘How would you know she’ll come back to me?’
‘Hetti wasn’t the easiest thirteen-year-old. Or fourteen or fifteen-year-old, for that matter. I remember my grandmother used to say, Oh, to love a child and yet simultaneously want to strangle them.’
Effie shook her head, not wanting to read too much into this magical insight into the infamously private Tak Basu’s life ‘You have a whole family. It isn’t the same.’
‘My father was working...’ Something flashed across his face too fast for her to identify it. ‘Mama was...going through her own thing. So I stepped up.’
Why couldn’t she shake the impression that there was more to it? Then again, di
d it matter? Maybe it was the wine making her feel tired, or maybe it was Tak’s demeanour, so capable, so authoritative, so there, which made her want to stop having to be the strong one—if only for a night—and let someone else bear the weight.
‘Nell shoplifted today,’ she announced, before she could think better of it.
Because he had been right when he’d said he thought she had no one to talk to, and because he was offering to be that someone, and because it wasn’t a real date so why not take him up on it? Not because there was something about him which made her feel some kind of bond. That would be nonsensical.
‘You know this how...?’
