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“You speak it fluently?”
“Huh?” She murmured, her eyes huge in her face as she stared at him. Her throat hurt and her heart was aching.
“German.”
“Yes. And French and Italian.”
Caradoc wasn’t often thrown off balance. In negotiations, he made sure he had every single detail regarding his opposition. Not simply the pertinent facts, but the irrelevant ones too. Finn wasn’t his opposition though. And he knew only what she’d chosen to reveal; only what he’d bothered to ask.
The thought displeased him. Should he have asked her more? He didn’t usually waste time getting to know the women he was sleeping with. Not beyond the cursory conversations that were necessary to flesh out the time they weren’t enjoying one another’s bodies.
“Why?” A simple question while his fingers moved the zip lower still, so that it was now halfway down her back and his fingers could trace patterns against her flesh.
She sucked in a deep breath as he lowered his mouth to her shoulder and kissed her gently. Sweetly. Her chest was heavy, as though a batch of bricks was pressing down on it.
“Because of my dad,” she said simply, not being intentionally vague.
“Your dad?” He prompted, wondering at the fanning sense of interest.
She moved a little in his lap, making him painfully aware of his arousal, and slipped an arm around his shoulders. It caused the dress to gape, where he’d undone it, and he reached for her breast instinctively, freeing them from the fabric so that he could feel their perfect roundness in the palm of his hand. Finn’s eyes didn’t leave his face.
“My dad’s a mechanic. Retired now. But he still toys with the engines.” She sucked in a breath as he ran his fingers over her nipples. “I used to spend a lot of time at the garage with him.”
“Learning to change tyres?” He teased with that richly indolent tone of his.
She nodded, her lips lifting into a smile. “Exactly.” She sipped her wine again, enjoying its robust fullness. “My dad’s the smartest man I’ve ever known. He’s got a mind like an ocean, just filled with this fast-paced, crazy, clever construction of ideas and knowledge and thoughts and philosophies. He taught me to question everything, but he also taught me to never stop learning.”
Caradoc didn’t want to analyse why her obvious praise and respect for this man was bothersome to him.
“And so he taught you German?” He prompted, when she didn’t continue.
“No. He taught me that you can perform one task better when you’re focussed on something else. He used to play CDs while he worked on the cars. Some of them were language instruction tapes, you know, German, Japanese, whatever. I’d listen with him, and he’d work, and we’d learn stuff together.”
“Fascinating,” Caradoc said, and he meant it. What must that closeness be like?
“Yeah, it was. I mean, it wasn’t just languages. He’d put on documentaries about anything and everything. And sometimes, he’d make me go and sit somewhere else, so that I would read, rather than listen. He’s huge on reading.” She shook her head slowly. “I mean, he must have been freaking exhausted. He was a single parent, and he worked long hours, but he’d still read to me every night. And I don’t mean just a silly picture book. I mean chapters and chapters of actual books. Tolkien, Dahl, Blyton, Lewis … Anything I wanted.” As if only just realising how enthusiastically she’d been talking, she shrugged, a little embarrassed. “He gave me the best gift in the world – his love of learning.”
“And yet you chose to drive cars for a living?” Caradoc heard the words only after he’d said them, and he saw that they were condescending. The remorse he felt was, he told himself, unwarranted. After all, she had chosen a job that required little skill and smarts, and she could have been so much more.
But his question had hurt. Until that moment, she’d never felt embarrassed about her choice of career. She’d felt proud. “Is there something wrong with that?” She forced herself to probe.
“Yes,” he said, deciding he’d already started down this road. “You could be anything you wanted. Anything.”
“I am what I wanted.” She felt a defensiveness in her chest. After all, she’d grown up in East London; her friends had all come from the same estate. She wasn’t ashamed of her working class roots. “I like what I do.”
“More than, say, passing on your father’s love of learning to a whole classroom of children? I’ve seen you with Madison. You could have been a teacher. I’ve heard you speak and make words into magic. You could have been a writer. Why a driver? Why spend your life ferrying rich bastards like me from one place to another?”
“There’s more to it than that,” she intoned flatly. And there was. So why was her chest clutching as though she was being compressed physically. “And it’s not really any of your business, is it?”
There she had a point. Caradoc nursed it. She was just a woman he was sleeping with. True, he’d already given her more importance than any of his prior lovers by insisting she accompany him to New York. He should have left her in England. He should have enjoyed her at Bagleyhurst and then come back to the States, and forgotten all about her. Instead, he’d folded her into his life, unwilling – yet – to end what they were.
But what they were was just physical.
There was no point getting bogged down in the semantics of her life decisions.
Yet Finn had been thinking, and his disapproval didn’t sit well with her. She sighed heavily. “I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that no one’s ever spoken to me like that about my work.”
Then no one had ever valued her enough to encourage her to strive for what was beyond her immediate reach, he thought with scathing frustration.
