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‘Don’t worry, we’ll find Ant,’ Gwen was saying to Ellie.
He knew it had been a mistake to get his hopes up. Struggling to cling onto his calm, he watched Gwen, holding the child by the hand, vanish back into the cottage...and ignored the odd twisting in his chest as the dark curly head tilted up to her mother.
The child said something that made Gwen pause before she dropped into a graceful stoop and swept the toddler up into her arms with practised ease.
He set his shoulders against the gatepost and wondered who Ant was. But he wasn’t going to ask, because by now he was pretty sure this performance was all about making a point, just because he had arrived ten minutes earlier than they’d agreed in their email exchange. Gwen had already told him he couldn’t come inside because they weren’t quite ready.
He stood outside, feeling very much like a taxi driver with the meter running. It astonished him that a woman who could be totally calm in her professional life could be so disorganised when it came to getting one small child in a car.
Was she trying to show him that parenting was not all fun and games? Well, he’d never thought it was. Actually, it was not a subject that he’d spent much time thinking about—up until now.
Now he was thinking about it a lot, when he wasn’t thinking about what he had done to his brother in depriving him of the opportunity to know his son. The rationalisation that he’d done it in good faith no longer worked, not since he had looked into his daughter’s face and realised that blood reallywasthicker than water.
Guilt was his constant companion, and it was eating away at him, depriving him of a single moment’s peace. It was sending him to the gym, where he’d worked himself into a sweat-soaked state of exhaustion in the hope of gaining some respite that deep down he didn’t think he deserved.
What if he was as bad a father as he was a brother? His own father hadn’t been a badfatheras such, but he’d had little time for his sons because he had poured all the love he had to give on his wife. Or at the very least, it was his version of love—but it had been the kind of poisonous, stifling, controlling, jealous love that had made it a relief when she had finally summoned the courage to leave.
He wouldn’t be like his father, that was the most important thing. So ever since he’d discovered Ellie, he’d read everything he could on the subject of parenting. He’d immersed himself in it, had pored over what people who were considered experts wrote about what made a good or bad parent until, frustrated by all the conflicting opinions, he had put the research aside.
Sometimes there was no replacement for hands-on experience, and he was about to be thrown in at the deep end. His eagerness was counterbalanced by a fear of failure that he had never encountered in his life before.
It was a new feeling for him and not one that he liked. Also, he could see no rational reason why he felt this way. It wasn’t as if he didn’t regularly put himself in positions outside his comfort zone. He believed in pushing himself to avoid becoming smug and stale, and he generally thrived on the exhilaration of new challenges.
All this attitude required was a belief in yourself, and Rio did. It didn’t mean he didn’t mess up on occasion, but he never stressed over the chance of this happening ahead of time, and if and when it did he never made the same mistake twice.
The problem was there were generally no second chances with parenthood and you weren’t dealing with figures on a spreadsheet. He knew that many would consider that there was pressure involved when a wrong move could wipe billions off a share value, a bad investment could make your brand toxic.
But those consequences paled into insignificance beside the possibility that something you did could harm your child.
‘We’re done!’
Finally! He relaxed his shoulders as Gwen appeared in the doorway, holding the toddler by the hand. She was wearing pale blue jeans that clung in all the right places, emphasising the long, sinuous length of her legs. Her tee shirt, tucked into a narrow red belt that emphasised the narrowness of her waist, was white with an abstract colourful print on the front.
The sunshine caught her chestnut hair, which she wore tied back from her face by a bright blue silk scarf, bringing out the incredible cobalt of her eyes.
‘Oh, sorry, I forgot to check the fridge!’
He watched in disbelief as she opened the door, vanishing inside—again!
His teeth clenched as he silently counted to ten before crossing one shiny booted ankle over the other. He leaned against the gleaming paintwork of the low-slung limited-edition model and secured the open passenger door with his hand as a gust of wind caught it.
He glanced inside the car. The child seat now fitted in the back was not what he would have termed intuitive but he had eventually figured out the mechanism. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t had time. He flicked back his cuff to check out the watch on his wrist, beginning to wonder if she had some form of OCD... After all, how hard could it be to grab a suitcase and get a two-year-old out of the door?
‘That’s it, we’re all set.’
Rio knew better this time and didn’t get his hopes up.
Gwen revisited her mental checklist before she walked out of the front door, Ellie, clutching a plastic bucket in one hand and a spade in the other, trailing one step behind her.
‘Beach now?’ the little girl said for the tenth time in as many minutes.
Gwen tried very hard to be truthful with her daughter but this was not the time for a temper tantrum. So instead of correctly saying no, she smiled and opted for a distraction rather than a fib that would undoubtedly come back to bite her down the line, thanks to her daughter’s very good memory.
‘Oh, my, isn’t that a big shiny car?’ Gwen knew zero about cars but she knew what this wasn’t and that was a family car. However, it was extremely shiny and no doubt eye-catching—much like its driver—to people who cared about such things.
It had probably cost as much as a small family house. Rio knew as little about the life normal people lived as he did parenting. She felt a tiny pang of guilt for taking some pleasure from the impatience he was struggling to disguise.
Ellie looked unimpressed. ‘Want a twactor.’ She turned to look at Rio, who was standing beside an open door concealing his impatience very badly. ‘A pink one, or wed.’
