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‘I really am not sure if that is totally in the spirit of the thing at all. Your father has my energy drink. I’ll save you some.’
‘God, let me die now.’
‘Your mother looks well, you look less...’
‘She trained. I didn’t.’ She gave a tremulous little sigh, hating that part of her wanting to beg him to stay, beg him never to leave her again.
Butshehad left and it was the right thing to do. The right thing felt absolutely mind-bogglingly miserable.
‘What are you doing here, Marco?’ she asked, rising to her full and not very impressive height. What she lacked in aches she made up for in imperious disdain, and Lycra made her feel taller.
He was impressive though, another scale of impressive—his sheer physicality made her stomach muscles lurch. She felt like a recovering addict coming face to face with her drug of choice.
‘Your mother is well?’
Kate nodded.
Her mother had taken the warning to heart. She had turned into a health zealot. Kate had her every mouthful critiqued for nutritional value. She knew more about ketogenic deficit, good fats and the benefits of a Mediterranean diet, the last being the only fun part of the whole re-education process.
There had been a lot of education going on. For the first time, Kate had pushed through her hurt and asked questions about her adoption, and then listened to the answers.
They hadintendedto tell her, they’d explained, but the perfect moment had never arrived and they had been afraid that she would feel rejected and different. Kate found she could accept they had been trying to protect her. How could she stay angry with people who loved her so much? Nobody made the right choices all the time. She had made some massive wrong choices of her own.
‘Very well, thank you.’ Aware that her face had to be shiny with sweat, she surreptitiously dabbed her upper lip with her sleeve and drank him in. The vibrancy of his skin, the razor-blade sharpness of his cheekbones, the silver grey of his eyes and the beautiful sexy outline of his sensual lips.
‘Why are you here, Marco?’
He looked around. ‘Is there somewhere a little more private we can talk?’
‘No.’ The last thing in the world she wanted was to be alone with Marco. It was also the thing she wanted most in the world as well.
The guarded expression in her beautiful eyes made him realise how much he had hurt her; his levels of self-disgust rose. ‘Fair enough, but...’ He glanced around and saw a bench set under a large horse-chestnut tree. ‘Can we sit?’
He waited for her to step ahead of him and they walked across to the shady bench and sat down.
‘Is Freya all right? Nothing is...’
‘She misses you, but she is well. You and your parents, your brother...?’
‘We have talked and it is...better. It’s not an overnight process but we are working through it...’
And Kate had realised that to save Freya a moment’s pain, a child who she had not given birth to, she would have lied her head off, that had been the game changer.
‘Why are you here, Marco?’ she asked, studying his face with hungry eyes, seeing the lines bracketing his mouth that seemed deeper and the dark smudges under his eyes.
‘I missed you.’
She blinked. ‘You did?’ she said cautiously, damping down her ridiculous optimism. The last awful two weeks ought, if she had a brain cell in her head, to have killed her optimism stone dead.
‘I want... Well, first I want to correct a few misconceptions. Firstly...’
‘That is not necessary.’ The last thing she needed was to be told how he was right and she was wrong. ‘I know you like the last word, but—’
‘Stop talking!’
‘What?’
‘I... My marriage to Belle, it was not a great love match and I am not a tragic hero. Belle and I were... We watched our respective parents’ marriages go down the drain. We made a youthful vow never to fall in love.’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘We were friends. I cared for her, valued her as a friend.’
