style="font-size:15px;"> His shoulders shifted almost imperceptibly again. ‘With difficulty. After we moved I was sent to boarding school, so there was only really the holidays, but by then my mother had a new baby—my half-brother, Oliver—and my father had remarried so everyone had got other stuff going on.’
Everyone but me.
She heard the unspoken end to his sentence, could picture the lonely, confused six-year-old Aristo, who would have looked a lot like their own son.
A muscle flickered in his jaw. ‘After a couple of years it sort of petered out to one visit a year, and then it just stopped. He used to call occasionally—he still does.’ He looked away, out of the window. ‘But we don’t really have anything to say to one another.’
He hesitated.
‘I dream about him sometimes. And the crazy thing is that in my dreams he wants to talk to me.’ His mouth twisted. ‘Probably the longest conversation I actually had with him was when he signed the business over to me.’
He fell silent and, her heart thudding, she tried to think of something positive to say. ‘But he did give you the business. Maybe that was his way of trying to show how much he cared.’
‘I hope not.’ Aristo turned to meet her eyes, his mouth twisting—part grimace, not quite a smile. ‘Given that he was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. The company was a wreck and he was up to his neck in debt—he hadn’t even been paying the staff properly.’
‘And you turned it around,’ she said quickly. ‘He could have just walked away, but I think he had faith in you. He knew you’d do the right thing.’
Her chin jerked upwards, and he watched her eyes narrow, the luminous green like twin lightning flashes.
‘You’ve worked so hard and built something incredible. I know he must be proud of you.’
Teddie stared at him, her heart thudding so hard that it hurt. At the time of their marriage she’d hated his business, resented all the hours he’d spent working late into the night. But this wasn’t about her or her feelings, it was about Aristo—about a little boy who had grown up needing to prove himself worthy of his inheritance.
She felt a little sick.
Was it any surprise that he was so intently focused on his career? Or that success mattered so much to him. He clearly wanted to prove himself, and felt responsible for saving his father’s business—that would have had a huge impact on his character.
She felt his gaze, and looking up found her eyes locked with his.
‘I don’t expect you to understand how I’m feeling,’ he said eventually. ‘All I want to do is be the best father I can possibly be. Does that make sense?’
She bit her lip.
‘The best father I can possibly be.’
His words replayed inside her head, alongside a memory of herself on the night that George had been born. Alone in her hospital room, holding her tiny new son, seeing his dark trusting eyes fixed on her face, she’d made a promise to him. A promise to be the best mother she could possibly be.
‘I do understand.’
She was surprised by how calm and even her voice sounded. More surprised still that she was admitting that fact to Aristo. But how could she not tell him the truth when he had just shared what was clearly such a painfully raw memory of his own?
‘I felt exactly the same way when I was pregnant. And it’s what I wake up feeling most mornings.’
Hearing the edge in her voice, Aristo felt something unspool inside his chest. She looked uncertain. Teddie—who could stand in front of an audience and pluck the right card out of a deck without so much as blinking. He hated knowing that she had felt like that, that she still did.
When he was sure his voice was under control he said carefully, ‘Why do you feel like that?’
It seemed irrational: to him, Teddie seemed such a loving, devoted mother.
She shrugged. ‘My mom struggled. And my dad was…’
She hesitated and he waited, watching her decide whether to continue, praying that she would.
Finally, she cleared her throat. ‘My dad was always away on business.’ The euphemism slipped off her tongue effortlessly, before she was even aware that she was using it. ‘And my mom couldn’t really cope on her own. She started drinking, and then she had an accident. She fell down a staircase and smashed two of her vertebrae. She was in a lot of pain and they put her on medication. She got addicted to it, and that’s when she really went downhill.’
Even to her—someone who was familiar with the whole squalid mess that had been her childhood—it sounded appalling. Not just tragic, but pitiful.
Breathing out unsteadily, she gave him a tiny twist of a smile. ‘After that she really couldn’t cope at all—not with her job, or the apartment, or me…with anything, really.’
He frowned, trying to follow the thread of her logic, aching to go over and put his arms around her and hold her close. ‘And you thought you would be like her?’ he asked, careful to phrase it as a question, not a statement of fact.
She pulled a face. ‘Not just her—it runs in the family. My mum was brought up by foster parents because her mother couldn’t cope with her.’ Her lips tightened.
‘But you do cope,’ he said gently and, reaching out, he took her hand and squeezed it. ‘With everything. You run your own business. You have a lovely apartment and you’re a wonderful mother.’
Abruptly she pulled her hand away. ‘You don’t have to say those things,’ she said crossly, trying her hardest to ignore the way her pulse was darting crazily beneath her skin like a startled fish. ‘You can’t flatter me into marrying you, Aristo.’
Dark eyes gleaming, he leaned forward and pulled her reluctantly onto the bed beside him.
‘Apparently not. And I know I don’t have to say those things,’ he added, his thumbs moving in slow, gentle strokes over her skin. ‘I said them because I should have said them before and I didn’t. I’m saying them because they’re true.’
Releasing her, he reached up, his palms sliding through her hair, his fingers caressing then tightening, capturing her, his touch both firm and tender.
‘So could I please just be allowed to say them? To you? Here? Now?’
Teddie blinked and, lifting her hand, touched his face, unable to resist stroking the smooth curving contour of his chin and cheekbone. She felt her fingertips tingling as they trailed over the graze of stubble already darkening his jawline.
Somewhere in the deepest part of her mind a drum had started to throb. She wanted to pull away from him—only not nearly as much as she wanted to feel his skin against hers, to lean into his solid shoulder.
‘I suppose so.’
His thumb was stroking her cheek now. It was tracing the line of her lips and she could feel her brain
