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The next morning she pushed back the sheets of Ares’s bed and crept out silently, steeling herself to recognise that this was almost over. Soon there would be no more waking up beside him, no more pressing back against his naked body, teasing him with her proximity, silently pleading with him to make love to her again. There was only a handful of nights left to enjoy Ares, and then she’d never see him again. Because he didn’t want her.
The sand was cold beneath her feet, and damp from the receding waves’ kiss. She walked slowly at first, her arms wrapped across her chest, her eyes on the distant stars in the sky, each dwindling by the second, losing their sparkle as light permeated their backdrop.
Her first thought should have been of Danica. The little girl who’d lost her mother, and in some ways her father too, who’d been sent to live with an uncle who’d outsourced her care because he didn’t know how to accommodate her in his life and heart. The little girl who had calmed at the first sign of real love and understanding. Her first thought should have been of the baby, but it wasn’t. Though she would miss Danica like an absent limb, her feelings for Ares were so much more complex.
She could admit how she felt about Danica. She could understand every single emotion she had for the baby. The sense of affection, of protectiveness, her amusement at the little faces Danica pulled—everything there made sense.
She felt, Bea supposed, as one was meant to when confronted with an adorable, helpless, dependent, sweet infant. She loved her.
It was simple and made sense, whereas everything she felt for Ares was a Dumpster fire of doubt. Physically, she understood what she wanted. He was gorgeous and he made her feel as though she were floating. She could never have counted how many orgasms they’d shared, but that wasn’t the whole story. This was more than just sex. It was the way his leg brushed hers beneath the dinner table each evening, the way he held her vice-like, clamped to his chest as he slept, as though he needed to exhale and inhale with the same rhythm she did. It was the way he reached for her hand when they walked, or watched her as she did something as banal as making coffee. It was the way she’d felt that first morning when she’d seen him holding Danica and a wound in her heart had started to stitch back together.
But beyond the physical it was all so murky and uncertain.
She knew she didn’t want to do as he’d suggested the night before. She didn’t want to walk away from him and forget he existed. She didn’t want to live without him in her life.
The realisation made her gasp. She stopped walking, shocked into an inability to put even one foot in front of the other. It shouldn’t have surprised her so much; wasn’t that what she’d been suggesting last night? Hadn’t she tried to find a way to maintain some form of relationship with Ares?
And he’d shut her down. Pushed her away. Oh, he’d done it so well, so beautifully, so kindly, as though he really cared about hurting her feelings, but the root cause had been the same. He wanted her to leave at the agreed upon time. He wanted her to leave and never contact him again.
He wanted her out of his life.
Her fist lifted and pressed against her mouth, blocking the sob that was welling in her chest.
Everything Bea had ever read about adoption had spoken of the total unwavering love and commitment an adoptive parent felt for their adopted child—the fact that most wouldn’t make the distinction between biological and adopted. That hadn’t been the case for her. Not only had her adoptive parents acted as though they regretted bringing her into their lives, her mother had frequently said as much. Not in so many words—Alice was too delicate for that—but she’d made it abundantly clear how she felt.
Like the time a photographer from a glossy magazine had come to the house to take photos to accompany an article they were featuring, and Alice had sent Bea to the study, suggesting it would be better with ‘just the real family’. She’d been thirteen years old, home from school for a brief holiday, and the phrase hadn’t made sense at first, then it had filtered into her brain like a thunderstorm at its peak, screeching and whirling with the force of a tornado. She’d gone to her room and cried, but out of those tears a determination had formed. She’d sworn she’d never let Alice hurt her again.
Oh, that hadn’t been possible. Though Bea tried to be hard-hearted, she wasn’t. Naturally she was soft and loving, and every insult and exclusion from the only people she thought of as family lashed her like a whip at her spine.
It wasn’t only their cruelty that had cut her, though. It was their volatility. When Alice had wanted the world to see her as a compassionate, altruistic doyenne of charitable acts, she’d brought out Bea for everyone to see, disregarding Bea’s natural dislike for cameras and attention. At those times Alice appeared to dote on Bea, and Bea, so starved for affection and warmth, had lapped it up, craving more, wondering what she’d done to deserve the sudden spurt of affection. It would dissipate just as abruptly as it had emerged, Bea packed off back to boarding school, and weeks would pass without a call or text message from her parents.
Her spirit broke so many times over the years, she thought it had been destroyed beyond repair.
She thought she’d got to the point where she would never again run the risk of being hurt. She’d pulled right back from her adoptive parents, deciding that she could play her part at Christmastime, visiting them for lunch and then speaking to Ronnie and Alice as equals—the less she expected of them, the better things went.
She’d grown out of wanting their love, and she’d told herself she’d never want anyone’s love again. It was too dangerous, too likely to lead to emotional carnage, and God knew she’d suffered enough of that in her lifetime.
She sank down onto the sand; it was cold beneath her bottom. Staring out to sea, a wall of fear surrounded her, as vast as the ocean beyond this bay.
Despite everything they’d done to her, Bea loved her parents. She’d tried not to, but love wasn’t something you could choose to feel or avoid. Love was as non-optional as breathing. And somewhere since meeting him, probably the night he’d stormed into the office, so cranky and unlike anyone she’d ever known before, Bea had fallen head over heels in love with Ares.
It was a disaster.
She knew without a shadow of a doubt that he would never love her back. And she knew intimately the pain that came from loving and not having that love returned.
If he felt anything for her whatsoever, he would have accepted her suggestion that they find a way to continue seeing one another, even after she went back to London. He hadn’t. He didn’t love her and that meant one thing and one thing only.
Bea had to escape.
