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Her heart caught and she cleared her throat, slightly embarrassed to have shared so much of herself. ‘Yes, well, as my mother pointed out, it’s almost every young girl’s fantasy to own horses, and she wasn’t paying for me to attend the best boarding school in the country to become an out-of-work artist.’
Miller heard the note of bitterness in her voice and wondered if Valentino did as well. It made her feel ashamed. Her mother had only ever wanted the best for her.
‘So you stopped dreaming and took up a serious vocation?’ he guessed accurately.
Regretting whatever tangent had got them onto this topic, Miller shifted and pulled her legs up to her chest. ‘Dreams aren’t real. That’s why they’re called dreams.’
‘Following them gives you a purpose.’
‘Putting food on the table gives you a purpose—as my mother found out to her detriment. She had me young and didn’t complete her education. It made her vulnerable.’
He leant forward, his hands dangling over the front of his knees. ‘And I can see why she wouldn’t want that for her daughter. But I doubt she’d want you to give up on your dreams altogether. If we don’t follow our dreams, what’s the point of living?’
His voice was gentle and it annoyed her. Was he being condescending?
‘You don’t know my mum. She has a special bottle of champagne in the fridge for when I make partner.’ And there was no way Miller could imagine disappointing her when she had sacrificed so much for her.
‘But it’s still her dream for you, not yours.’
She flashed him a sharp look but nevertheless felt compelled to answer. To explain herself. ‘My mother has valid points.’
‘I don’t doubt she means well, Miller, but are her points really valid?’
His gentle query made her edgy, because it was the same one that had been taking up her head space since TJ had started subtly hitting on her.
Feeling slightly desperate, she jumped off the table and faced him. ‘It would have been selfish of me to pursue art when my mother gave up so much for me.’ She glanced in the direction of the sun and wondered about the time. ‘We should probably get back.’
He cocked his head to the side and made no attempt to move. ‘Maybe she shouldn’t have pushed you so hard in the direction she saw as right. And what about your father? Didn’t he help with the bills?’
She shook her head. ‘I think he tried to help. For a while. But he lived on a commune, which meant that he didn’t have the means to contribute to the private school my mother chose.’
‘Lived?’
‘He died when I was twenty.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. We weren’t very close and...he died happy. Which I’m glad of now. But—’ She stopped and let out a long breath. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you my life story.’ She never talked about herself like this.
‘Because I asked. Why weren’t you close to your dad?’
Miller snagged her hair behind her ears, memories of her father—fit and happy before the divorce—filling her mind. ‘For years I was angry at him because I blamed him for my world falling apart. He just seemed to give up. He didn’t once try to see me.’ She swallowed past the lump in her throat. ‘He later told me it was too painful.’ And she suspected he hadn’t been able to afford to visit her and had been too proud to lose face. ‘But life is never that simple, and even though it took me a while I see now that it wasn’t all his fault.’
She’d learned that one person always loved more in a relationship than the other; needed more than the other.
In this case it had been her father. Her mother’s post-break-up comments had led Miller to believe that her mother had married her father mainly for a sense of security. Constantly disappointed when he could never hold down a job for very long.
Her parents had never been the greatest role models, and Miller wasn’t sure what she thought about love other than it seemed like a lot of trouble for very little return.
Her eyes sought out the toddlers, but they had gone. Instead, she watched a young couple strolling hand in hand with their large dog. But she wasn’t thinking about them. She was thinking about the man beside her. Was he living his dreams? And what did he think about love? Did he hope to find someone special one day?
Miller felt the blood thicken in her veins at the thought. No doubt the woman he chose would be beautiful beyond comprehension and have the same relaxed attitude to life that he did. She could almost see them now—lazing on a yacht in the Mediterranean, gazing adoringly at each other, a half-naked Valentino leaning across her to seal his lips to—
