Chapter Ten
At least he could leave in the morning knowing he’d tried to get his precious closure.
Tried and failed, but still.
He hoped Gina didn’t push him for an explanation for his staying an extra night at Poerava because he had no idea what he could say. Well, it was a long flight to London, he’d think of something.
Something that did not involve food, because there Zoe went again “—I saw this scallop dish on the room service menu, not that I ever order room service, oh, I don’t mean tonight because this is an interview—” her tenth, twentieth, thirtieth bridge-over-troubled-water comment across the table.
Maybe inane food talk was his penance for forgetting the lesson he’d learned that night at the hospital: to stop rushing into situations with all guns blazing. It hadn’t been an easy lesson because he’d been more impatient than ever after that night. Restless, edgy. Ravenous—not for food, although he’d often been hungry for that too, but for an unnamed more from his endlessly hopeless life.
During that one summer with Zoe, as she’d shared her frustrations and dreams, he’d envisaged a different future. The hope of that had calmed him, somehow. Remembering now how she’d snatched all hope from him that fateful night, knowing she chose not to remember that he’d offered his heart to her—ripped it out, beating like a suddenly freed wild thing, only for her to tell him to stuff it back in his chest, aching and bleeding, and keep it to himself—made him want to grab the table and throw it in the pool.
Now that would be all guns blazing. She’d be out the door in a nanosecond, rushing to safety.
But it would still be more satisfying than the way he’d handled tonight’s fraught moment, the oh-so-diffident invitation to talk about that searing memory.
He should have just spat it out: Hey, Zoe, remember when I told you I’d do anything for you and you sicced your parents onto me?
“Remember that scallop pie they used to serve at the Crab Shack?” she asked. “I never understood why people ordered that instead of the grilled scallops with the—”
“You’ve got coconut milk on your chin,” he interrupted because he could not take any more inconsequential talk about food when they were supposed to be talking about them, dammit!
Down went her fork, up came her hand, scrubbing at the exact spot, the spot where the sauce always landed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I just did.”
“You know what I mean.”
She stared at him. He stared back.
And they burst out laughing at the same time, and he thought, I give up, let this be how I remember you when I leave tomorrow.
She picked up her fork again, speared a piece of chicken, shoved it in her mouth and deliberately let the sauce dribble onto her chin.
“You still eat like a pirate,” he said.
“Hey, my appetite is tiny! You know I’ve never been very interested in food.”
“For someone with a tiny appetite who’s not interested in food you’ve been talking about it a lot tonight. And my pirate comment still stands. I don’t think you’ve tasted one thing, you’ve been so busy shoving it down.”
“And you’ve hardly eaten a thing. But then, you were always into self-denial.”
“Self-denial? Me?”
“Hmm, maybe I mean self-sacrifice. Kind of...monk-like.”
He was speechless. He’d slept with half the girls in the village by the time he was eighteen and a good portion of the other half by the time he was twenty and she called that monk-like?
“In a way,” she said, and blushed. “Not that way. Obviously.”
Not that way. Heat crawled up the back of his neck, even though he didn’t know what he had to be embarrassed about. He’d wanted her to know he was sleeping his way around Hawke’s Cove in those two years after that summer; had made sure she knew, hoping she’d take the hint and steer clear. Why feel chastened now?
And hang on, not in that way? Then in what way? He certainly wasn’t going to ask.
“You know,” she went on, intent on telling him what way even though he didn’t want to know. “Abstemious.”
Abstemious?
“Like the way you made sure you didn’t eat all of the food from the free meals we were given at the Crab Shack. Only half your portion. Sometimes not even that. You always said you weren’t hungry.”
“Because I wasn’t,” he said, as the heat crept around from the back of his neck and across his face.
She gave him the tremulously inviting smile she’d given him once upon a time across the salt shakers, and just like that he was back in Devon. Eighteen years old and hungry, always hungry. And there was Zoe, insisting the two of them combine those on-the-house lunches, claiming she was full after only a bite or two, packing what was left in takeaway containers because Ewan would be offended if they didn’t eat it all and would blast them if they threw it away, and although her parents had been invited out to dinner that night/they were throwing a party/she was on a diet, or some other made-up excuse, maybe Finn would find his appetite later?
The memory was so sweet it stole his breath, but it was only a moment before he was shoving it aside, ruthless. If she could pick and choose what to remember, so could he. “It had nothing to do with being abstemious or self-denying.”
Her smile faded. “No, it didn’t. It was just you, looking after your mother, because that’s the kind of son you were.”
He hoped she couldn’t see what that insight did to him.
He hadn’t thought about those hungry days for ten years but he’d known, of course he had, that it hadn’t been a game they were playing back then—him pretending he wasn’t hungry, her pretending to believe him, stealing those takeaway containers like naughty children and hiding the leftovers at the back of the fridge in the kitchen, even though Ewan wouldn’t have cared, would himself have packed whatever meals Margaret Doherty needed if Finn’s pride had allowed him to ask for them.
Finn tried to swallow whatever it was that was stuck in his throat. How could she do it still? Reach inside him and see him, understand him, make him yearn for what he didn’t have?
“It’s amazing, really,” she went blithely on, as though she hadn’t just grabbed his heart and squeezed it, “how much you’ve...well, grown, I guess is the word. Good amazing. You were too skinny back then.”
Skinny. Yes, he’d been skinny enough for his ribs to show through his skin. Quite a contrast to Brad Ellersley who—although not as tall as Finn—had weighed a lot more, all of it hard muscle, bursting with outdoorsy health. Prince Perfect.
“Enough that you don’t have to give me half your meal anymore,” he said.
She looked at the plates on the table, then reached for the serving utensils. “OK then, even though I’m already full I’m going to eat exactly half of everything while you tell me this mysterious, exclusive, personal story. Does it start, perhaps, in Devon and end in French Polynesia, with a stop at the Maldives along the way? It must be satisfying. I mean, I know travel was my dream, not yours, but two resorts in ten years? Wow!”
Five resorts in seven years. The words trembled on his tongue, but no. No! You have nothing to prove, remember? It would be pathetic. He would be pathetic. A rescue dog begging for a pat on the head: good boy, look how far you’ve come from that old horrible life, now someone can love you.
Still, he brooded over the word “satisfying” and came up...unsatisfied.
Owning a business had never occurred to him before he’d met Zoe. Even when he’d visited her in hospital his head had been full of fulfilling her dreams. The “how” of it had been only a vague notion of working to support her in whatever job came along because that’s what his life had been. Odd jobs, all jobs, any job, supporting his mother.
He should be satisfied with what he’d achieved, proud even.
It came as a shock therefore to realize that the same discontent that had gnawed at him all through his teenage years was still gnawing at him. That it had gnawed at him all through his marriage. Through every deal he’d done. That it was gnawing at him as he sat in his jewel-in-the-crown resort with the one person he thought he’d never see again, the person he’d deliberately not thought about, been careful not to ask after, for ten years.
No, he wouldn’t tell Zoe his story. Not ever. If she wanted his story let her do what he’d done to learn hers—look it up.
“It’s not my story you’re getting, it’s Kupe Kahale’s,” he said. “You know that prince you always wanted to plonk in a story? Well, Kupe swears he’s a descendant of the royal family of the Kingdom of Ra’iātea.”
She leaned forward eagerly, eyes gleaming. “Royal family?”
“French Polynesia was once divided into four kingdoms, each with its own flag, laws, government, and royal family. But it’s Ra’iātea that’s considered the spiritual heart of Polynesia.”