substantial.
‘What happened?’
She watched as he picked up his tea and sipped it. ‘Like everyone else, he was banking on me winning a Grand Slam, or three. He was very ambitious.’ She shrugged. ‘They say that fathers make the best and the worst coaches.’
‘You didn’t like him very much,’ he said slowly.
His words came out of the blue. Few people would have thought it and even fewer would have dared say it. It would be easier to deny it but her chin stayed high and defiant as she met his eyes with a challenge. ‘Does that shock you?’
He gave a hard smile in response. ‘Very little in life shocks me, koukla mou.’
The soft Greek words slid over her skin, touching her at a time when she was feeling vulnerable, but she tried not to be swayed by them. She cleared her throat. ‘He did his best. He did what he thought was right. It’s just that he never really allowed me to have a normal life.’
‘So why didn’t you stand up to him?’
Recognising that his question was about more than the unbending routine of her tennis years, Jessica picked up a match and struck it to the crumpled-up paper in the grate, seeing the heated flare as it caught the logs and hoping it would warm the sudden chill of her skin. Because sometimes it was easier to be told what to do than to think for yourself. It meant you could blame someone else if it all went wrong. And it was hard to admit that, even to herself.
‘There were lots of reasons why I didn’t stand up to him, but I suppose what you really want to know is why I wasn’t stronger when it came to you. Why I let him drive a wedge between us.’ She sensed that he was holding his breath but she couldn’t look at him. She didn’t dare. Because if she removed her mask completely—mightn’t he be repulsed by the face he saw beneath?
She threw an unnecessary log onto the fire. ‘I thought we were too young to settle down and my career was very important to me.’
‘But that’s not the only reason, is it, Jess?’
There was a pause. ‘No.’ Her voice sounded quiet against the crackle of the fire. She stared into the forest of flames, losing herself in that flickering orange kingdom. ‘I was an unsettled child. My parents split up when I was very young. My dad left my mum for a younger woman who was already pregnant with his child—Hannah—and my mum never really got over that. I lived with her shame and her bitterness, which didn’t leave much room for anything else.’
She picked up her tea and cupped her hands around it. ‘When she died I went to live with my father and that’s when the tennis really kicked off. At last I had something to believe in. Something I could lose myself in. But my stepmother resented the amount of time it took him away from her and I think Hannah was a bit jealous of all the attention I got.’ She gave a slightly nervous laugh. ‘I mean, I’m probably making it sound worse than it was, but it was—’
‘It sounds awful,’ he interjected and she found herself having to blink back the sudden threat of tears, because his sympathy was unexpectedly potent.
‘I’d already learnt not to show my feelings,’ she said. ‘And that became a useful tactic on the tennis court. Soon I didn’t know how to be any other way. I learnt to block my emotions. Not to let anything or anyone in. Now do you understand?’
He nodded. ‘I think so.’
‘I didn’t want to make you any promises I couldn’t keep,’ she rushed on. ‘And marriage was an institution I didn’t trust.’
But it had been more than that. On an instinctive level she had recognised that Loukas was a man who had been in short supply of love, who needed to be loved properly. And hadn’t she thought herself incapable of that?
‘There’s something else,’ he said. ‘Something you’re not telling me.’
It hurt that he could be so perceptive. She didn’t want him to be perceptive—she wanted him to be brash and uncaring. She wanted him to reinforce that she’d done the right thing, not leave her wondering how she could have been so stupid.
‘Jess?’ he prompted.
‘I thought you would leave me,’ she said slowly.
‘Like your father left your mother?’
‘I was so young,’ she whispered. ‘You know I was.’
He looked at her and started speaking slowly, as if he was voicing his thoughts out loud. ‘I’d like to tell you that my feelings haven’t changed, but that would be strange, as well as a fabrication—because of course I feel differently eight years down the line.’
Her lips had started trembling and no amount of biting would seem to stop them. ‘You do?’
He nodded. ‘I still care about you, koukla mou. You’re still the one woman who makes my heart beat faster than anyone else. Still the one who can tie me up in knots so tight I can’t escape, and I don’t think you even realise you’re doing it.’
‘So what are you saying?’ she whispered.
Loukas opened his lips to speak, but an inbuilt self-protection forced him to temper his words with caution. Just like when you were negotiating a big takeover—you didn’t lay all your cards on the table at once, did you? You always kept something back.
‘I’m saying that it still feels...unfinished. That maybe we should give it another go. What’s stopping us?’
She put her mug down and pulled the scrunchy from her hair, shaking her head so that a tumble of hair fell loosely around her cheeks.
‘Loads of things. We live in different worlds, for a start,’ she said. ‘We always did, but it’s even more defined now. I’m a country girl with a simple life. The annual photo shoot in London was just something I did to finance this life. The rest of the time, I forget all about it.’
‘I’m not forcing you to become the global face of Lulu if you don’t want to be,’ he said impatiently. ‘That’s not what this is all about.’
‘You’re missing my point, Loukas,’ she said, and now she was gesturing to something he hadn’t noticed before, which lay on a small table in the corner of the room. A piece of cloth covered with exquisite sewing. He narrowed his eyes. It looked like a cosmic sky, with bright planets and stars sparking across an indigo background.
‘Yours?’ he questioned.
She nodded. ‘Mine.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ he said automatically.
‘Thank you. It’s something that’s become more than a hobby and I’ve sold several pieces through a shop in Padstow. I’m into embroidery and gardening and now that Hannah’s gone away, I was even thinking of getting a cat—that’s how sad I am. You, on the other hand, live permanently in a hotel and drive around in a chauffeur-driven car. You occupy a luxury suite in the centre of London and you get other people to run your life for you. We’re polar opposites, Loukas. You don’t have a real home. You don’t seem to want one and I do. That’s what I want more than anything.’ Her voice trembled, as if it hurt her to say the words. ‘A real home.’
