Chapter 10
He had not almost kissed her. That was the story Toni was sticking to anyway, especially since the other option was ruminating on how much she’d wanted him to, what a wonderfully selfish thing it would have been.
It had been difficult enough to keep her thoughts on course, hobbling back through the forest with his arm tight around her waist.
His shirt was wrapped around her leg – she had high-definition memories of him whipping it off – meaning her nose had been a few inches from his bare chest, close enough to take in the shift of his lean muscles beneath tanned skin.
She saw a lot of skin and muscle at work, on reception at the climbing gym, but it was different up close – different with Gabri, this man she knew well, but also didn’t know at all.
And he was different from Miro, the husband who was now so distant in her memory, she wasn’t sure of the shade of his skin.
Pale, certainly – much paler than Gabri’s Mediterranean tan – but there had been a time when she would have recognised the constellation of freckles on his arms.
Now he was an awkward and confusing memory, haunting these awkward and confusing moments where she was appreciating another man’s chest.
Arriving back at Gabri’s house, she was certain the cut just needed a dressing and she’d be fine, but he still looked at her as though he might call an ambulance if she so much as grimaced.
The way he’d gone pale when he’d checked her wound at the cove still showed on his face.
It puzzled her, his overreaction, but perhaps that was normal for people without her extensive experience of grazed knees and nosebleeds.
When he tried to usher her into the bathroom, she stopped him. ‘I can do it. You don’t seem very comfortable with injuries. I appreciate borrowing your shirt, though.’
He glanced at the ceiling, his expression twisting. ‘Very diplomatic of you, softening the blow. “Thanks, but I don’t need you freaking out and making everything worse,” is what you mean, though. I’ll show you where I keep everything.’
‘I do have quite a lot of experience patching up minor wounds,’ she pointed out.
‘Cillian went through a phase where he skinned his knee every other day. And did you know wounds on the head bleed more profusely than others? It’s something to do with the capillaries being close to the skin.
You don’t want to imagine the moment when your son walks into the room with blood pouring out of his mouth. ’
Gabri stumbled and groped for the bathroom door-frame to hold himself up. She nearly ran into him, he stopped so suddenly.
‘That’s horrible!’ When he glanced accusingly over his shoulder at her, his pallor was green.
‘It’s part of life,’ she explained. ‘He’d just lost a baby tooth. That’s all. Sometimes, they bleed.’
‘Oddio,’ he muttered on a tortured breath.
As she followed him into the bathroom, she tried to comfort him with the information a well-meaning nurse had passed on to her at some stage of Cillian’s childhood. ‘It always looks like more blood than it really is, especially when it’s a puddle on the floor.’
‘A puddle on the…’ He gulped. ‘Let me get you bandages.’
Although he seemed to have accepted that she’d rather doctor herself, he overcompensated by piling up dressings and swabs and an entire box of plasters.
‘Antiseptic?’
‘Wait, that’s in the fridge.’
She peered after him as he wobbled to the kitchenette and returned with a small bottle.
‘What’s this?’
‘Put a few drops onto the dressing. It’s prickly pear seed oil. Pressed last week at the co-operative in Sant’Andrea. It’s antibacterial.’
‘This island really does look after you,’ she commented as she took the bottle and sat on the edge of the bath. He turned to go, his hand gripped in his hair and his shoulders tense, but she stopped him. ‘Gabri, what’s the matter? I didn’t mean to upset you with all the…’
‘Blood?’ he prompted.
‘Well, yes.’
He leaned heavily in the doorway, propping an arm on the opposite side. He wasn’t looking at her, so she dared to unwrap the shirt. The splash of red did look like something out of a horror film, but the bleeding appeared to have stopped.
‘Don’t look just now,’ she warned him as she dampened a swab. A hiss from the doorway suggested he’d ignored her warning. ‘You don’t have to talk about it,’ she continued. ‘I’m sorry to have gone on about Cillian’s mishaps.’
‘No,’ he insisted, his voice low and rough. ‘It’s not your fault. It’s about my ex-wife.’
Toni paused with the second swab halfway along the cut. There was trauma in his tone. She recognised it. ‘What was her name?’
‘Rosa,’ he answered flatly. ‘Rosalba,’ he qualified, his jaw working. ‘She… did want children. Even though she miscarried four times and the few weeks she was pregnant were… difficult. There was a lot of—’ He couldn’t even say the word any more.
She wanted to say something, but sorry felt overused in the past few minutes. ‘I saw you were uncomfortable and I shouldn’t have said anything.’
His gaze swung to her, on her face, not dipping to the cut on her leg. His soft, twisted brow told a complicated story. ‘I’ve tried to tell myself that blood is proof of life, not death, but she was very anxious – all the time over all the years that we tried. I couldn’t…’
She wasn’t sure what he couldn’t do. It almost sounded as though he meant he just couldn’t.
‘Ecco,’ he said suddenly, straightening and reaching for the little bottle of oil. ‘Let me help you.’ It sounded like a request.
While she finished cleaning the wound, he cut a section of plaster and added the oil. Dropping to his knees, he lifted her foot into his lap and carefully pressed the dressing over the wound, smoothing down the edges.
With the clenched expression on his face, his confession suspended between them, Toni’s heart seemed to forget its usual rhythm.
His hand on her calf was firm but gentle.
When he glanced up at her, his hair fell into his eyes, making her remember the wash of gratification when he’d touched her face at the beach.
She was here to relax, to enjoy ‘me’ time, whatever that meant. But her thoughts, when they weren’t occupied with parenting paradoxes, were filled with him.
That curl over his forehead was too much to resist. She lifted a hand to brush it aside, to feel the remnants of sunshine and seawater and the warmth of his skin on her fingertips – to see his wary blue eyes turn soft at the affection.
But he was too quick. He snatched her hand, holding it for a moment, his thumb pressed into her palm. ‘I left her. I couldn’t take it and I left her. I told you I ran away, remember?’
Had she forgotten? In this haze of attraction and bad ideas, she’d been ready to excuse him. But he wouldn’t let her. He was issuing his warning – his deterrent.
I’m a widow, she’d flung between them yesterday at the marina – gosh, that had only been yesterday. And today, it was his turn: I left her.
Easing backwards to break the string pulling her closer to him, she nodded slowly. ‘That’s right. You left everything to create this life where nothing will hurt you – except strange women bleeding all over your shirt.’
He narrowed his gaze, peering up at her, and he had the audacity to look soft and inviting while he did so, with his fuzz of a moustache and expressive face. ‘Are you mocking me?’ He asked the question with half a smile.
‘I am,’ she answered around a matching smile. Lifting her chin, she continued, ‘When we think we have everything ordered and under control, that’s when life has a way of slapping us in the face.’
His smile faded. ‘Your husband.’
This time, when she lifted a hand to brush the hair out of his face, she did so swiftly, purposefully, the way she gave Cillian a quick polish at the school gate.
‘My life,’ she countered.
He insisted on cooking for them, so she allowed herself to be talked into sitting on the terrace in the slanting rays of the sun. She needed a breather anyway, a break from this relentless curiosity about Gabri. Curiosity perhaps wasn’t the right word.
He appeared again after five minutes with a glass of chilled white wine and a small plate of cheese.
Squeezing past her chair, he lingered over the bushes to one side, moving his fingertips through the leaves and breathing in.
Breaking a sprig from one bush and leaning down to pick something else, he dropped everything onto her little plate apparently carelessly, but when she looked at his handiwork, the result was rustic and perfect: soft goat’s cheese, yellow hard cheese, both drizzled with honey, a sprig of oregano and two pink clover flowers as garnish.
‘Do you need to put your foot up? Use the other chair if you do.’
She felt like telling him not to fuss, but she could still see his distant, haunted expression from earlier, when he’d told her about his ex-wife, and it stopped her. ‘It’s fine,’ she said instead.
‘Dinner won’t be long. You can practise your relaxing for a short period.’
‘I think I’ll be too busy eating cheese.’
‘Cheese is the best way to keep busy,’ he agreed solemnly, but his straight face didn’t survive the smile she sent him.
As the scent of garlic wafted through the open door to mingle with the rosemary and sage, the hint of pine in the air, she flicked through her photos, looking for a few to send to the messaging group she had with her parents.
It was called Chillin’ with Cillian, although her parents hadn’t thought it was as funny as she had.
It was difficult to believe the cove had looked so perfect today, the water turquoise to blue, waves just strong enough to make that rushing sound that spoke to the soul, a hint of a breeze but no wind.
The quality of the light had changed since they’d stumbled back through the forest, leaving the beach to the other family.
The morning had been silver, the evening gold.
She swiped to the next one and paused, zooming in on the form of Gabri out in the water, but there wasn’t enough detail to study. He was just a gangly silhouette with broad shoulders – enough that she wouldn’t be sending that one to her parents.
Snapping a shot of her wine and cheese with the azure sea out of focus in the distance, she sent it straight away, trying not to feel guilty about the curated version of her holiday she was sending home. No restless thoughts of Cillian – and Miro. No cut on her leg. No Gabri.
Definitely no Gabri. She couldn’t begin to explain the situation in this house to her mother, especially not with that packet of condoms tucked into her suitcase that seemed to be humming with the paranormal ability to remind her continually of its existence.
When her phone rang, she jumped in alarm, proving just how not-relaxing her ruminations had been. It was a video call from Daphne.
She took a deep breath and connected the call. ‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Oh my, that last photo was live! I can’t believe it’s just as wonderful as you’d hoped.’
‘Yeah,’ was all she could manage in reply.
‘And where is the mistress of the house? You haven’t sent us any photos and I’m so curious.’
At least any blush on Toni’s cheeks could plausibly be from the sun. ‘She’s cooking dinner.’
Art’s face appeared at the side of the shot. ‘We’ll be right over. What are you having?’
‘I don’t know exactly, but there’s garlic involved, so I’m not sure you’d—’
‘Lucky we’re not taking your father to Italy,’ Daphne added firmly.
‘I think dinner will be ready soon,’ Toni began, introducing the idea that this could only be a short call and trying to resist looking over her shoulder.
If Gabri appeared now, she didn’t know what she’d say.
‘They eat later here. I’m not sure how Cilli will go with that.
But he’s going to love the beaches. He’ll swim for hours. Want to put him on?’
‘Mum, I’ve got a wobbly tooth!’ he said before his face even appeared.