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The driver drove away with a generous tip in his pocket and Gwen put her key in the lock. The slight musty smell she had got used to made her nose twitch as she stepped inside, and it felt a lot smaller than she remembered.
She put Ellie down and walked across to a vase of wilted roses that she had missed during her rushed packing. The murky brown water in the bottom explained the smell.
‘Right,’ she said brightly to Ellie. ‘We’re home. Isn’t that lovely? How cosy. We’re going to have a wonderful summer together.’
‘Swim?’ Ellie said hopefully.
Gwen felt a stab of guilt. Was she being selfish in taking Ellie away from Rio? Shouldn’t she be prepared to compromise to give her daughter the chance of a better life? She glanced out of the window where the gathering grey clouds seemed to echo her mood. It felt as if she were depriving Ellie of a life of sunshine and pools and... Her glance slid to the bin, where dead flower heads pushed at the lid, and she wanted to sit down and cry.
Instead she straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin and halted the creeping guilt and gathering self-pity. Her uncertainty vanished as she decided she had done the right thing—and Rio must have agreed with her because he’d not tried to stop them leaving. In fact he’d facilitated their departure.
Her determined smile was tinged with bitterness but she knew there was more to a happy child than swimming pools.
‘I’ll blow up the paddling pool,’ she told Ellie, who didn’t hear. She had tipped out a tub of building blocks and was sitting in the middle of them all, announcing her intention of building a beach house.
Later that afternoon Ellie was down for her nap, meaning it was the perfect time to unpack, but somehow Gwen could not work up the enthusiasm for the task. Instead, remembering her promise, she went to the small shed where a motley collection of garden tools and children’s toys were stored. loz.
She found the small plastic paddling pool she had bought during the sales last year, in the optimistic hope that they might have a heatwave before Ellie got too big to fit into it. There was no sign of the foot pump she had bought at the same time.
She took it outside and unfolded it, shaking the dust off it before choosing a spot in the shade of a flowering cherry that was no longer flowering.
Right. She took a deep breath and fitted her lips to one of the valves in the rim—how hard could it be? It wasn’t exactly a big paddling pool.
There were reminders everywhere of their recent occupation. The toys, the bright mobile, the smell... Rio wandered into the bedroom where, ridiculously, she had stripped the bed, and found his nostrils flaring at the evocative scent of the light floral soap Gwen used.
Por Dios!He strode outside, taking big gulps of fresh air, but somehow the scent of wild thyme on the breeze couldn’t get that scent of Gwen out of his nose, or the rest of her out of his head.
He hung onto his anger and reminded himself that he’d done the right thing letting her go, but somehow the statement didn’t carryquitethe same ring of conviction as it so recently had.
She was the one who had talked about trust but when it came down to it, and trust was needed, she had none for him. She hadn’t been willing to listen to any explanations.
Did you even offer her any?
He frowned darkly at the unhelpful contribution of the voice in his head. She should not have needed any.
The same way you wouldn’t have needed any if the situation had been reversed? Wasn’t she right about that? Wouldn’t you have gone into full Neanderthal chest-beating mode if you’d seen her alone with a nearly naked man? Doesn’t being in love come with some insecurities and primitive responses?
His internal dialogue came to an abrupt halt as a look of amazed realisation spread across his face. He’d been running away from love all his life, believing that it was the cause of his mother’s hellish years, but that hadn’t been love, it had been a perversion of it.
Love was the way Gwen looked at Ellie; love was what he felt when he... He groaned. Had he just let the best thing in life walk away from him? No, he had actually arranged the transport for her, just because he was a coward who thought it was better to be lonely than take a risk on love, better to be alone than let history repeat itself.
But Gwen had crept into his heart despite himself. There, he’d admitted it, even though he knew it was a mistake to admit, even to himself, that he wanted a family and love, because admitting it laid you wide open to all this pain he was feeling right now.
Gwen paused, her head spinning dizzily from her efforts to inflate the sad-looking paddling pool. She dropped it and heard the hiss of air escape, leaving it looking pretty much as she felt.
Tears of self-pity pushed hotly against her eyelids and she blinked.
‘You are being totally ridiculous,’ she told herself.
‘There’s a lot of it going about.’
She spun around in the direction of the slow, deep, familiar drawl, her hair following her a second later, heart kicking against her ribcage drawing a loud gasp from her open mouth.
‘You...here? How...? Why...?’
‘In order: yes, I’m here. How: I chartered a jet because you had mine. And why: because I want to bring you home.’
Her face lost what little colour it had, and the wariness didn’t leave her eyes; she was not about to misread this situation. ‘You don’t have to do that. I’m not going to try and stop you seeing Ellie and I’ve been thinking about it. The house-next-door thing; I’ll do it,’ she declared. It would hurt like hell to see his comings and goings with the beautiful women who drifted in and out of his life, and even more horrifying to contemplate the one that might eventually stay there with him. But what right did she have to deprive Ellie of a father as a constant in her life just because Gwen couldn’t have him as one in hers?
