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Fearless. Proud.
A fracture splintered through his chest.
He told himself it was just part of the game. The better they knew each other, the closer they could appear to be for the cameras. But then her smile suddenly widened, the faintest hint of a gleam in her eye as she spoke.
‘I could let you into a little secret.’
And he knew that telling himself such lies was tantamount to slapping a sticking plaster over a gaping wound and hoping it would do the job.
‘What’s that?’
‘I wasn’t always as driven or wholesome as everyone seems to think.’
It was impossible not to be swept along with her. How was it possible she could lift the mood with a single smile, a single look?
‘Let me guess, you got a B in one of your medical courses,’ he teased.
She actually rolled her eyes at him.
‘You see? No one really
gets me.’
There was no reason that should rankle as much as it did. No reason for him to take it as a challenge. To want to be the first—the only—person who she couldn’t say that to.
‘Go on, then.’ He arched his eyebrows. ‘Shock me.’
She pushed off the glass abruptly, strolling across the room to the view on the other side.
‘I almost got expelled when I was fifteen. I nearly didn’t even get my GCSEs, let alone my A levels.’
‘You did?’ He snorted. ‘Sorry, no chance.’
‘It’s true.’ He could almost believe she was enjoying this. Shocking him. ‘I suddenly realised I was this teenage girl who had lost her mum and I fell into all the typical traps. I couldn’t see the point of school, or learning. The doctors hadn’t been able to save either her or Jack, so what was the point? I fell in with a different crowd and started ditching school, playing truant.’
‘What, to go and drink cider and sit around the local park?’ He was incredulous, but that only served to make her laugh all the more.
‘Actually, we went to the local pool hall and spent all day in there. The brother of one of the group worked there, so if anyone ever came looking he’d let us out the emergency exit. Wow, I used to love that game.’
‘And you did that for weeks? A month?’
Why did this only add to the admiration he had for her? The fact that whatever demons she’d had in the past, the intelligent, quick-thinking, professional doctor she was today only proved she’d beaten them all.
‘Almost a year. My father eventually took me in hand. Told me some home truths, like what my mother would think of me if she saw me.’ She raised her chin and for the first time Louis realised how fine the line was that she was treading, between laughing and crying. ‘It was the first time he’d ever really talked about her to me. Before that, everything I knew, all the photos I had of her had come from my grandparents.’
‘Yet you turned your life around again,’ he breathed. ‘Look at you now.’
‘Yes, I turned it around.’ She tilted her head from one side to the other in a devilish little dance. ‘But not before I’d been put back an academic year. It was mortifying, but some of the others from that crowd hadn’t even been given that opportunity so I knew I had to swallow it. I worked. God, I worked. I worked so hard that by the time I came to sit my GCSEs I’d already been put back into my old year group. After that I never looked back.’
‘Never?’ he challenged softly, her slow smile burning hotly through him as she shook her head.
‘Never.’
‘Then how about we do a little fun, nostalgic looking back now?’
He had no idea why he did it, but Louis held out his hand, waiting as she saw it, tried to resist it.
‘What do you mean?’
