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‘Honest about what?’
Mateo gazed at the faces turned towards them. He had always been cool, collected, utterly in charge, but he could feel himself getting hot under the collar. He could feel Maude’s tension flowing from her shoulders to his fingers like the buzz of an electric current.
This was for her.
He’d corralled her into following him but seeing her...watching what she saw and what she had always expected, all the things he had never really had a clue about...had done something to him. He had felt the twist of a knife in his gut and however determined he had been to get what he wanted, to drive the situation in the direction he felt it should take, that sick feeling he’d had watching her accept her dreams disappearing had changed everything.
‘Honest about what?’
‘Honest about the fact that, when I came here the first time, I didn’t come in the capacity of Maude’s boyfriend, which you were led to assume.’
‘What are you saying? Whatishe saying, Maude, darling? I simply don’t understand.’
In an unwitting show of unity, her parents had edged closer together and were now standing side by side, arms touching, while Nick and Amy hovered on the periphery, as bewildered as Felicity and Richard.
Maude and Mateo both rushed in, their voices overlapping. Maude could detect the high edge of hysteria in her voice and she fell silent, listening as Mateo calmly took over the monologue.
His voice was low and soothing, making everything sound so rational.
From start to finish. The arrangement made way back when...an optimistic solution to two problems. The problem of Maude not wanting to show up without an escort but facing the prospect of that because her plus-one had bailed on her. And Mateo’s problem with his ex which had become an ongoing saga, drifting into the dangerous territory of her becoming a stalker, leaving him the unpleasant option of having to take hostile steps to deter her.
‘It seemed straightforward at the time,’ Maude said to a silent, open-mouthed audience. When her mother apologised for making her feel that she was somehowlackingbecause she hadn’t followed the expected path, Maude felt tears prick the back of her eyes.
‘I never thought...’ her mother said. ‘I should have been a little more thoughtful. Darling, I so hope you can forgive me. You know I’ve only ever wanted the best for you.’
Mateo’s jaw tightened. The family love around him was a stark reminder of what he had not had, and he kept focused on that, focused on powering past the desperate urge to do whatever it took to hang onto Maude, to build the life he wanted to build.
Without the love. Because he was incapable of loving anyone. He was too tough, too cold. Those doors had been firmly shut a long time ago.
Hadn’t they?
Something shifted inside him and for a few seconds he lost the power of speech.
He felt his hand tighten on her shoulder and had to make an effort to loosen his grip. But he just couldn’t remove his hand because he wanted to carry on touching her.
Maude and her mother were smiling patchily, half-laughing and sighing, going over old ground, talking about misunderstandings, both knowing that those misunderstandings were trivial in the great scheme of things because there was sufficient love between them to more than make up for them.
Mateo heard Maude pick up the thread of the conversation, returning to the charade they had cooked up between them. He noted the way she said almost nothing about Cassie. There was no hint of criticism of his ex who had been responsible for escalating the situation.
‘She’s a bit fragile, I guess,’ Maude said vaguely, when pressed for details of how a fake engagement had come about, conjured up from thin air, or so it seemed. ‘And you know how it is...she decided to be a little naughty, I’d say.’
Smart, sassy, soft as marshmallow underneath, kind, generous...
Mateo felt the steady beat of his heart and his pulses quickened.
He wasn’t interested in relationships. He was interested in fun, in sex. In ships that passed in the night. Those were things he had made absolutely clear to Maude from the start, as if they hadn’t been clear already.
She knew his history. She knew that staying power wasn’t in his remit. Besides, it was self-evident that he wasn’t her type and never had been. She’d more or less told him as much herself.
What they had should have been straightforward, so how was it that he was standing here, his heart was thumping and he was perspiring and in the grip of the disconcerting feeling that he was suddenly standing at the top of a very perilous precipice, looking down into an abyss?
‘Cassie was one of my more monumental mistakes,’ he cut in, moving to sit next to Maude and keeping the chair close to hers, although she didn’t look at him as he did so.
Tension radiated from her in waves and he badly wanted to reach out and hold her hand but he wasn’t sure how she might react. A lot of water had flowed under the bridge and they were here now facing a situation neither had anticipated, spilling the beans to the very people he knew she had hoped would never find out about her deception.
‘She sounds very vindictive. All of this... I guess things might have been worse...’
That from Amy, who then proceeded to marvel at the train of events that had led them to a phoney engagement and a world of coincidences while Nick watched her indulgently and affectionately.
