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Her pen paused mid-sentence, and everything about her tensed before she seemed to make herself relax with some effort. The table was barely a foot wide and this close he could see every flicker in her eyes, reminding him of embers in a fire. He saw her debate whether to answer him or not and then saw the end of the fight.
‘No, I don’t think they ever have understood me really. Alan is a retired inventor with several successful patents under his name and Carol is a retired housewife.’
It wasn’t that her voice had gone cold, Mateo realised. It was that it had become...clipped. As if compartmentalising as she went. Careful. But there was no warmth, no mess or anecdotes. He felt as if he had been formally introduced to her parents at a cocktail party, without the cocktails or the parents. If he’d been asked about his own mother? He’d probably have complained about a million different things, but all with a smile and all with the knowledge of love, no matter what. That was blisteringly absent from Evie in that moment. And as if by that very absence he heard what they hadn’t given her.
‘You weren’t happy with them?’ he asked before he could stop himself.
Evie bit her tongue against the surprising desire to reply honestly. She would always have been truthful, but to bethat? Honest? About something so personal? The urge was strange and unfamiliar.
‘They gave me so much more than I could have ever asked for,’ she replied genuinely. ‘But they are unaccustomed to...’ Torn between loyalty to the people who had taken her in when her birth parents hadn’t, and to herself, she simply struggled to find the words for how painful it had been to grow up without the comfort of easy affection. ‘They are not the kind of people who eat meals in their kitchen and laugh at daily anecdotes. They are not the kind of people who call weekly and invite you round for dinner at the weekend,’ she said, suddenly aware that she was describing things that she’d always wanted from them. ‘They care for me, I know that, but showing their feelings isn’t something that comes naturally to them,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. ‘It’s not personal to me, because they are the same with everyone.’
‘Evelyn, you are not everyone. You are their child,’ Mateo insisted gently.
She didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to read the sympathy in his eyes that would remind him of his father. The Professor had tried to keep his feelings to himself about her parents, but had often failed spectacularly. The thought softened the hurt radiating out from the bruise she had felt born with, deep in her heart. His defence of her had warmed and soothed in a way she’d never experienced before. But when she did finally meet Mateo’s eyes, the fierceness of his gaze, the burning heat of his anger on her behalf made her feel something else entirely. It made her feelseen.
‘They give me what they are capable of giving and I know and understand that—I know and understand their limits. There simply wasn’t any “more” to ask for from them.’
‘Did you ever want to look for your birth parents?’ he asked hesitantly, as if he was aware he was bashing around the fragile contents of her life and smashing them accidentally.
Evie looked out into the dark beyond the train’s window, remembering the sessions she’d had when she was younger with her therapist. Remembering how she’d first been so bewildered by the idea that wanting to be wanted, wantinglove, wasn’t something to be ashamed of. That there wasn’t something needy or grabby or desperate within her as she reached again and again for things that weren’t there for her. It would have been logical then, perhaps, to search for her birth parents—as Mateo himself had seemed to wonder. But she’d spent years putting words to her feelings and understanding to her emotions, and she’d known then, just as she did now, that she just hadn’t been able to face the idea that the people who had given her up for adoption might not want to know her. Might never have regretted their decision. What if, every day, they were thankful that she hadn’t reached out to find them? The thought bloomed fresh blood on an old wound and she knew she couldn’t risk it. She had stored up her hurt and the room it was locked in was full. There was no more space for her to ache.
Evie exhaled hurt and looked up to find him watching her closely. Instead of answering his question, she asked one of her own. ‘Why did you stop speaking to your father?’
His body’s reaction was almost imperceptible. Almost. But she’d seen the emotional flinch that had braced his features, the hitch in his breath, the tightening of his shoulders. ‘Because I couldn’t wait for him any more. I couldn’t...’ He nodded slowly, understanding and equally unable to put into words the hurt of a child who couldn’t trust that they would get what they needed. And it was a need. A need that if not met, it would have been devastating.
‘But Evie,’ he said, reaching for her hand, laying his over hers in a gesture of comfort that, rather than startling her, she wanted. Welcomed.Needed. ‘I regret that so much. I regretted it even before you told me about him being at the IPO launch. I regret that I will never get the chance to make peace with him.’
But you still have time, his words whispered.
‘You shouldn’t let fear hold you back from the things you want to know, Evie.’
She shook her head at his words, as if she could avoid them from finding a painful landing spot on her heart. Avoid the possibility that he might be right. Because...
‘If I discovered that my birth parents still didn’t want to know me, that they never regretted giving me up for adoption, if their lives are better off without me in it... I don’t think... I don’t think that I could survive that much rejection,’ Evie confessed in the smallest of voices.
When I’ve already survived so much.
Evie had been so good at pushing aside this hurt, but she suddenly felt it hit her now like a tsunami. It had made her feel vulnerable and ashamed to admit her feelings. And she pushed back at the wave of the other smaller rejections that snowballed in her heart. The boy from Cambridge, the academics that should have supported her.Him.
She silently whispered the promise she’d made years ago.
I won’t beg to be loved by anyone ever again.
It was a promise that taunted her now as she looked at Mateo, the glasses he wore framing eyes that saw too much and too deeply. But it was precisely the depth of those feelings that made that promise so important even now.
Unable to hold the intensity of his gaze, she looked out of the window. It was late, but they hadn’t eaten yet, and even though she wasn’t remotely hungry they would need to eat at some point. ‘I was going to get some food from the service counter.’
‘I’ll go,’ Mateo offered, getting up quickly, clearly forgetting the tight space he was in, and must have hit the table across his thighs,hard, from the wince in his features.
She nodded, not even able to find humour or sympathy in his need to escape. She should be using this time to look at the research on Isabella and Loriella, not in a getting-to-know-you session with Mateo Marin. She barely spared him a glance as he squeezed out into the hallway, her gaze blurred by tears, staring at words she couldn’t see, hoping that she could at least hold them back until the door closed behind them.
Mateo cursed himself all the way to the food service counter and back again, ignoring the funny looks he got from his fellow passengers. He should never have asked her that question. And for what? To satisfy his own curiosity? To help shore up his own defences at the expense of hers? That was a low point, even for him. And as much as he hated to admit it, hadn’t he already rejected her too? He couldn’t lie to himself. He’d seen it in her eyes in the hotel. He’d known what she’d wanted and he’d backed away, and in trying to protect her he’d quite possibly done more harm than good. He prised the door to their cabin open with one hand, while he juggled a mound of unhealthy packaged food in the other, only to discover that Evie had fallen asleep. Head resting upon her arm, which was stretched out across a notebook with a pretty sloping scrawl, she looked serene in comparison to the high emotions that had driven him from the cabin.
He sighed, and sat down beside her. He couldn’t leave her like that, she’d feel awful in the morning. He had intended to lift her up and place her properly down on the bunk, but the moment he had her up, she drifted against him and settled there. His only option was to remain like a statue and crick his own neck in the morning, or lean back against the cabin wall and let her sleep against him. His body knew what it wanted, and for the first time since he’d met her, Mateo gave in to the path of least resistance.
He toed his shoes off and, holding her with one arm, managed to slip out of his tuxedo jacket and pull his shirt from his trousers to make himself as comfortable as possible. Giving up, he leaned back against the wall and arranged her as comfortably as possible. Her hand slipped around his waist, while her cheek rested against his chest, and as much as he wished to curse himself to hell and back, he decided that it was the least he deserved. He could undergo a few hours of the sensual torture of having a beautiful woman pressed against him. From here, he could pick out the red and gold strands that took her hair from dull brown towards auburn. Assured that she was asleep, he picked up a lock of the soft threads and ran them between his thumb and forefinger. Smooth and silky.
In his mind, he plunged his fingers through her hair to scrape gently against her scalp and she leaned her head back into his touch, exposing her neck to his lips, and on his tongue he remembered the taste of citrus and heat and...
