seemed like practice sessions leading up to this moment—and he was thoroughly glad of the training.
How he wished he could do something to ease her pain. It was so raw. Perhaps if he held her long enough, tight enough, something of him she needed would seep through the damp layers between them in a kind of osmosis. He wanted to make up the missing parts of her. Loan her his uncanny ability to shield himself from everything, to feel nothing he didn’t want to.
His fingers stilled in her curls as he thought what a poor exchange it would be. He had nothing to give her, really. She could teach him so much more. Her determination, her ability to say what she felt whether she wanted to or not. She knew how to live, while he only knew how to dazzle.
The sky turned to lavender-grey as afternoon retreated. Mark let the thump of his heart beat away the minutes as Ellie became motionless against him, pulling in deep breaths. She peeled her face from his chest, the ridge marks of the wool knit embedded on her hot cheek, half blinded by the thick tears clogging her eyelashes. Mark held her face tenderly in his palms and looked deep into her pink-rimmed eyes, desperate to soothe away the tempest he didn’t understand.
Ellie stared back at him.
He could see weariness, despair, the ragged depths of her soul, but also a glimmer of something else. Her eyes were pleading with him, asking him to give her hope.
His voice was soft and low. ‘Tell me.’
It was not a demand, but a request. Ellie’s lips quivered and a tear splashed onto his hand. Never taking his gaze from her, he led her to the passenger door and sat her on the edge of the leather seat, crouching to stay on her level, keeping her hands tight between his.
Ellie let out a shuddering sigh as she closed her eyes. Her top lip tucked under her bottom teeth. He could see she was searching for words. Her pale green eyes flipped open and looked straight into his.
Her voice was low and husky from crying. ‘It was just a panic attack. I get them sometimes…Sorry.’
He wasn’t sure he was buying this. A forgotten voice inside his head—his conscience, maybe?—poked and prodded him and dared him not to let this slide. Whatever she needed to say was important. And it was important she said it now. So he did the only thing he could do. He waited.
For a few minutes no one spoke, no one moved, and then she dipped her head and spoke in a low, hoarse voice. ‘My husband and daughter were killed in a car accident on a wet day like this,’ she said, looking down at their intertwined fingers.
‘I’m so sorry.’
Well, that was probably the most inadequate sentence he’d ever uttered in his life, but it was all he could come up with. Lame or not, it was the truth. He was sorry for her. Sorry for the lives that had been cut off too early. Sorry he hadn’t even known she’d been married. He squeezed her hands tighter.
‘It was almost four years ago now. We were driving home from a day out shopping. I’d bought Chloe a pair of sparkly pink party shoes. She never even got to wear them…’
There was nothing he could say. Nothing he could do but let her talk.
‘The police said it was joyriders. They’d been daring each other to go faster and faster…There was a head-on collision at a sharp bend on a country lane. Nobody could stop in time—the road was too wet.’
How awful. Such a tragedy. He wondered how she’d found out. Had the police come knocking at her door? A word she’d muttered earlier came back to haunt him.
We?
He rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb. ‘You were in the car too?’
She sniffed and hiccupped at the same time, then looked at him, a deep gnawing ache in her eyes. ‘I was driving.’
Mark pulled her back into his arms. He could feel her salty tears on his own cheek, smell her shampoo as she laid her head on his shoulder. He closed his eyes and drank in her gentle fragrance. Her soft ringlets cushioned his face, a corkscrew curl tickling his nose.
‘Feel,’ she said. At first he didn’t understand, but she pulled his hand away from her back and placed it on the right side of her head. Where there should have been smooth bone beneath skin and hair there was a deep groove in her scalp. Mark stroked the hair there too. Gently. So gently.
‘The police told me there wasn’t anything I could have done,’ she said quietly. ‘But I don’t remember. And it’s like having a huge question mark hanging over my life. I’m never going to know that for sure. What if I could have reacted a split second faster or turned the wheel another way?’
She drifted off into silence again.
His voice left him. He’d never imagined…
And he realised how stupid he’d been now. He should have curbed the adolescent urge to show off around her, racing his car down the winding lanes. All this was his fault.
Ellie sighed and relaxed into him. It felt perfect, as if she’d been carved to fit there. In recent weeks he’d not been able to stop himself fantasising about holding her close like this, kissing her brow, her nose, her lips. Well, not exactly like this. But he knew if he gave in to the fierce pull of his own desire now he would desecrate the moment, and he knew it would never come again.
She stirred, pulling back from him slightly to drag her hands across her face in an effort to mop up the congealed tears.
‘I’m sorry.’ Her voice was so faint it was barely a whisper.
‘No. I’m sorry. For starting all this in the first place…’
‘You couldn’t have known.’ All the fizzing, spitting irritation she’d held in her eyes every time she’d looked at him since the night of the party was gone.
‘Well, I know now. And I am sorry. For anything—everything—I did to upset you. You must know I would never do that on purpose, however much of an idiot I may seem sometimes.’
Her mouth curved imperceptibly and her eyes never left his. He felt a banging in his chest just as hard as when she’d been thumping on it with her fist. He stood up and rested his hand on the door to steady himself.
‘Let’s go home.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
NO LIGHTS were on in the drawing room. The firelight flickered, playing with the shadows on the wall. Mark sat in his favourite chair and savoured the aromatic warmth of his favourite whisky as it smouldered in his throat. The only sounds were the cracking of the wood on the fire and the laborious ticking of the antique clock in the corner. Ellie had gone to bed early, and he was left to relentlessly mull over the events of the afternoon.
They had driven back to Larkford in complete silence, but it had been different from the combustible atmosphere of their outward journey. The calm after the storm. He hadn’t wanted to jinx the easy comfort by opening his big mouth. He hadn’t been sure if Ellie was lost in the recent past, or plumbing the depths of earlier memories, and it hadn’t felt right to ask.
