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She affectionately scolded her daughter. ‘The time is over for you to be Little Miss Secretive! You’re not keeping this dashing young man under wraps a minute longer!’
And Mateo allowed himself to be swept along, down the bank of shallow steps and away from the house, straight into the thick of things.
All the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle were beginning to fall into place. One glance at Maude’s mother had answered a lot of questions. Maude had quite simply grown up somehow thinking that she was a disappointment because she wasn’t like her mum—she towered over the tiny blonde.
The plus-one conundrum...why? Who would be desperate enough to entice someone into pretending to be their partner for a situation that should have been well within their comfort zone? That had puzzled him, to start with.
As Maude had explained uncomfortably, a thirty-two-year-old woman who needed to convince her parents that she wasn’t about to end up gathering dust on a shelf, bereft of all options, as thirty-two turned into forty-two and then fifty-two...
Which still begged the question...why did a grown woman have to explain her choices to her parents? Why the need for approval? That was something Mateo genuinely didn’t understand.
He had no parents. His mother had jumped ship when he’d been a baby, leaving him with his father. He had no memories of her whatsoever. He had no anecdotes about her at all. The only received information he had was that she had bailed for someone richer. She’d never looked back.
His father had done the best he could and, in return, he had gained his only son’s fierce loyalty. There had not been much money to go round, but that had been fine, because impoverishment had been an excellent teacher. Mateo had learnt that the only thing that counted in life was hard cash, and his father had made sure to move mountains so that his son could get an education to give him a head start.
The worst time of his life had been when his father had died. Eighteen at the time, Mateo had hurt in places he hadn’t thought possible. In the very moment of hurting, he had made his one and only mistake and had given his heart to a woman who had seemed so right at the time and had ended up proving so wrong.
Like his mother, she had not been bowled over by the proposition of having no money long-term, even though he’d told her that he was going to make it big. When someone with a bigger bank balance had blown in six months after they’d become lovers, temptation had proved irresistible. She had walked away and, if Mateo hadn’t been hardened enough by lessons learnt in his childhood, that experience had hammered the final nail in the coffin of any lingering illusions he might have had about love.
Mateo thought he had consigned those memories to a safe place from which they could never escape, but for no reason, as he listened to Felicity chattering merrily next to him as he was absorbed into a crowd of family and friends on a balmy summer evening, they crawled out of their prison to show him all the things he had never had.
And that was when he really understood why Maude had wanted her plus-one. Not only was Felicity the polar opposite of Maude—diminutive, blonde, impeccably groomed and every inch the bubbly socialite—but it was clear that she absolutely adored her daughter, whatever concerns she might have about the path she had chosen.
He glimpsed the swirling complexities of an insecure Maude, raised in a middle-class background for a future she didn’t want, defensive about the route she had chosen but compelled through love to try and please her mother. And, on this big occasion, the easiest way had been to conjure up a boyfriend that would make her parents happy.
She didn’t want to disappoint. Next to her mother, she felt ungainly, too tall, not polished enough...a disappointment. And Mateo felt an odd sense of pain on her behalf, which was ridiculous, but did make him realise that this arrangement wasn’t quite as business-like a situation as perhaps either of them had imagined.
When he glanced at Maude by his side, reaching with nervous hands for a flute of champagne from a passing waitress, on impulse he reached out to link his fingers through hers, giving them a brief, reassuring squeeze while Felicity chattered away on the other side, dragging them along with breezy confidence to meet yet more of her friends.
‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered to Maude with a smile in his voice. ‘You wanted your plus-one? Trust me, you won’t be disappointed...’
CHAPTER TWO
HEWASHOLDINGher hand.
Her ear tingled from where he had leant into her, whispering and reassuring. How had he known that she was nervous? He must have sensed something because, truthfully, shewasnervous. Did the man have X-ray vision, enabling him to see what was going on in her head?
This was the first time she had ever brought anyone to her family home for an event like this, where so many family members and old friends were present. Sure, she’d had some passing dates in the past, and her parents had met one of them—a guy called Steve with whom she had had a half-hearted six-month fling until the whole thing had devolved into them being good friends.
But this? This was different and shewasnervous. She was very much aware of the glances in their direction. Her mother was in her element. No guest was left unbothered. If there had been a Tannoy system in operation, Maude was convinced her mother would have used it to bulk-introduce him to everyone there in preparation for face-to-face meetings.
‘Sorry,’ she whispered, en route to yet another cluster of people—this time family from Yorkshire who had packed their bags and as they’d laughingly put it, headed off for ‘those foreign shores calledDown South’for the weekend.
‘What are you apologising for?’
‘I didn’t expect all of this, and I don’t suppose you did either.’
‘All of what?’
‘The attention.’ She was on her fourth glass of champagne. Fortunately, food was also doing the rounds, soaking up the alcohol.
‘What were you expecting when you arranged to bring the original plus-one?’
‘Less of all of this,’ Maude confided truthfully. She grinned and waved at some childhood friends, who made lots of gestures about wanting to meet her, whilst vigorously pointing at Mateo and mouthing questions.
‘Why?’
The conversation was put on hold while the Yorkshire faction was introduced by a beaming Felicity. As the evening wore on, Maude was a little alarmed that Mateo seemed to be morphing from plus-one boyfriend to, ‘Darling, is there another engagement on the cards?’boyfriend. She would patch that up later with her parents, make it clear to them that this was no more than a fling.
