just staring at the priceless piece of horticulture brought him some kind of peace, but not today. He studied the bowl. The idea that something as enormous as a tree could be clipped and contained into a size small enough to keep on a man’s desk had always appealed to his dark sense of humour. But he realised that he also enjoyed the element of control essential for successful bonsai care. Conditions needed to be monitored daily, with nothing left to chance. Any sign of rampant growth needed to be ruthlessly cut away. It was man controlling nature. And it was a representation of how he liked to live his life.
Until now.
Now he was discovering that not everything could be controlled. With a heavy sigh he sat back in his chair and thought about Erin. She had meant it when she’d turned down his proposal of marriage. He couldn’t quite believe it at first, but she had. There had been no wavering or sign she might be softening—not during the flight back from Moscow or the journey at the other end, when he’d dropped her and Leo off at the café.
She had made him feel...
What?
He swallowed. She had made him feel powerless. For the first time in a long time, he had come up against someone who would not be moulded to his formidable will, no matter how many enticements he offered her.
He had tried telling himself she was right. Much better that he had as much contact with his son without risking the messy emotional fallout of sharing his life with another person. He’d returned from Russia determined to seek his pleasure elsewhere and had flicked through the stack of invitations which were waiting for him.
But all he could think about was a pair of green eyes and a woman who only smiled when she wanted to.
He thought about the things she’d said and his eyes focused on the Foemina Junipers again. Had she been trying to tell him that the conditions essential for maintaining a successful marriage needed to be right, just as with the bonsai? Just as you couldn’t grow a tiny tree in barren soil, neither could a relationship flourish properly without love and care and commitment? Was that what she had meant?
Damn her.
He waited two days for her to change her mind and come running and he waited in vain. His days seemed drawn-out and tedious and the nights were even worse. He hadn’t slept this badly since the time he’d cut out vodka. Saturday morning dawned and, after a largely sleepless night, he drove himself round to the café, where he sat outside the citrus-decked exterior in his big car—half expecting Erin to come storming out and demand to know what he was doing there. Or perhaps send Leo out to talk to him, because wouldn’t that have been an easy way to break the stand-off which had sprung up between them?
But nobody came. He could see her sister behind the counter—her eyes big behind her owl-like spectacles—but she didn’t wave at him to come in.
He got out of the car and locked it, his heart pounding as he pushed open the café door. It was warm and crowded with customers, with mothers and fathers and little children as well as a couple wearing party clothes who didn’t appear to have been to bed. Several people looked up as the jangling bell announced his arrival, and stayed looking.
Walking straight over to the counter, he smiled at the woman who stood there, drying coffee cups.
‘It’s Tara, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’m Dimitri.’
‘I know who you are,’ she said flatly. ‘And Leo’s at Saturday morning football, I’m afraid.’
‘It isn’t Leo I’ve come to see. It’s Erin.’
There was a slight pause as she looked around before lowering her voice, as if she didn’t want to put her livelihood at risk by engaging in some kind of showdown with the tall man who had just walked into her café.
‘Erin doesn’t want to see you.’
‘Well, I’m not leaving here until she does. So perhaps you’d like to pour me a cup of coffee and I’ll wait over there while you tell her that? Black, no sugar, please.’
Tara’s mouth opened and closed, before she disappeared into the back behind some sort of curtain and Dimitri walked over to a table near the window and sat down. A woman who was sitting on her own at a nearby table smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back. He didn’t feel like smiling—least of all to some bottle blonde who might as well have had the word ‘available’ tattooed across her forehead.
A shadow fell over the table and he looked up to see Erin standing there. Over her jeans and sweater, she was wearing an apron which emphasised her tiny waist—but she didn’t look great. In fact, she looked terrible. Her face was pale and her green eyes were dark and shadowed.
‘Perhaps you’d like to drag your attention away from that woman for a moment,’ she said tightly, ‘and tell me what you’re doing here?’
‘You haven’t brought my coffee.’
‘You’re not getting any coffee.’ Pulling out the chair opposite him, she sat down and leaned across the table and began speaking in a low voice. ‘Look, you’re welcome to come and see Leo any time you want—I already told you that—but you really have to give me some warning before you do. I can’t just have you turning up here out of the blue like this.’
‘Why not?’
‘You know why not. Because it’s too...disturbing. We have to try to learn to be...’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t know. If not exactly friends, then certainly two parents who can interact amicably with each other.’
He nodded, his eyes not leaving her face. ‘But I thought we were friends, Erin. More than friends. Don’t you know that I’m closer to you than I’ve ever been to anyone else?’
‘I don’t want to hear this—’
‘And let me tell you something else,’ he interrupted. ‘Something I’ve never told you before. Something which happened when you came round to my apartment, to tell me about the baby.’
‘You mean when I found you hungover, with the naked woman and the porn films?’
‘And you looked down your nose at me,’ he said slowly. ‘Just like you’re trying to do now, only this time you aren’t making such a good job of it. But back then you didn’t like what you saw and you told me so in no uncertain terms. You told me a lot of home truths that day, Erin. You blasted me and my lifestyle and left me feeling dazed. Because nobody had ever spoken to me like that before. And then you handed in your notice and walked away.’
‘I don’t understand what this has to do with anything,’ she said. ‘We already know this.’
‘But you don’t know what I did next,’ he said. ‘At first I tried to convince myself I was glad you’d gone and that you had no right to judge me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the things you’d said. And the more I thought about them, the more I realised they were true. You left me feeling bad about myself and I had to ask myself what I was intending to do about it. So I went away and cleaned up my act. I quit the booze and the gambling and the women.’ He saw her face and shrugged. ‘Well, maybe not all the women, but I started to be more discriminating about it. And I got off that merry-go-round of self-destruction you’d highlighted so accurately.’ He leaned across the table towards her. ‘You were the catalyst which made me examine my life and turn it around.
