Chapter Three #2
Leo’s harsh, mocking laugh brought an angry flush to her cheeks. Partly because of the guilt she felt at not having been there, not in a way that counted, when her father had needed her. She’d been too angry with him to guess the level of his desperation.
Leo responded with an infuriating languid half smile as he walked over to the mantelpiece above the electric fire and peered at the photos that lined it.
‘So you haven’t always been afraid of horses,’ he said, picking up one of a curly-haired child sitting on top of a chunky pony, holding a rosette. ‘You used to be a lot fairer.’
Her hand went automatically to her hair, despising that she cared what she looked like in this moment.
‘No, that’s not me, and I’m not afraid of horses.’ She loved horses but the bargain had been that she was allowed to help out at the stables, but she must never get on a horse.
Having lost one daughter in a riding accident, the ban had not been that surprising.
Amy had understood why her parents were overprotective, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept the restrictions.
Restrictions that had made her the odd one out growing up, because it hadn’t just been the horse-riding her parents had deemed dangerous; there were so many other things she’d never got to do either, no sleepovers, no camping trips.
The list of things she had not been allowed to do had seemed endless.
She hadn’t told Leo about Alice back then, about why she’d felt she had to be the perfect daughter. Good enough for both herself and the child they’d lost.
But, of course, she never had been. Had Alice been perfect? Would it have been different if her sister had grown up, become a rebellious teen first? But Alice hadn’t. She’d never flunked a maths test, never had a teenage strop or an unsuitable boyfriend.
Long before she’d met Leo, Amy had stopped competing with the perfect ghost of her sibling, and stopped trying to make her parents proud, recognising it wasn’t possible.
Leo, of course, was an excellent horseman. One of the first times she’d seen him he’d been on horseback, and she’d been riveted. Watching the tall stranger, as he’d been then, on the frisky half-schooled mare.
Her stomach flipped and quivered as she recalled the shocking impact, the visceral reaction she had experienced. Sexual attraction that she had been too inexperienced to hide.
She snatched the picture from his hand and replaced it on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s not me—it’s my sister, Alice,’ she said, straightening the photo frame.
‘You have a sister?’ The furrow between his brows deepened. ‘Older, I’m assuming?’
‘She would have been.’
An alert expression slid into his eyes. ‘She died.’
It was a statement, and one she didn’t respond to.
‘You miss her?’
‘I never knew her.’ Reacting to what might have been pity in his voice—pity she didn’t want or need—she responded more sharply than she’d intended.
Softening it, she added, ‘It happened ten years before I was born. My parents were no longer young when I was born; for the first six months she was pregnant with me, Mum thought she was experiencing the menopause.’
‘You never mentioned you had a sister.’
Amy felt a wave a guilt, remembering how good it had felt to be with someone who didn’t bring her dead sister into the conversation at every opportunity, who didn’t compare her with the ghost.
‘I’m sure there were things you didn’t tell me.’ There were a lot of things she hadn’t told him, and then suddenly there had been nothing to tell him.
No baby.
Nine years later and the thought of her miscarriage still came with the same pain. She ignored the tight feeling in her chest and the dull ache.
Revisiting the past wouldn’t help anyone. Least of all her.
‘You weren’t just passing, Leo, so what’s this all about?’
‘So how old was your sister when she died?’
She sighed out her frustration when he ignored her question.
‘She was ten.’
She glanced at another photo of a curly blonde cherubic smiling baby. ‘They thought I might get fairer as I got older, but I never did. I got darker, except for—’ She touched the blonde streak that sprang from her forehead that no one ever believed was natural.
‘So where are you?’ he asked, scanning the gallery line-up of photos, seeing the same child at various ages, but none of a dark-haired child.
‘Oh, no one prints out their online photos these days.’ Especially if you never quite lived up to expectation, she thought, dodging his eyes, determined not to allow him to spotlight her insecurities. He was no longer twenty, no longer in love with her. He didn’t get to know about her insecurities.
Suddenly, she felt every month of her twenty-eight years, and it was hard to think that she’d ever been so happy, living in the moment and never thinking ahead.
It wouldn’t have worked.
It couldn’t have worked.
Unbidden, the memory of Leo standing outside her family home, his hand reaching out to her, drifted into her head. For a split second she was back on that emotional ledge, wanting to take his hand and knowing it was impossible.
The look on Leo’s lean face…the expression in his dark eyes under his long messy fringe had been so intense and real as he’d willed her to take the hand he held outstretched to her…was spotlit in her memory, every detail frozen in time.
She shook her head and she saw the realisation of what she’d been seeing in her mind’s eye slide into his gaze in the shift of muscle as his jaw clenched.
She took a deep breath and dragged herself back to the present. ‘Look, we have established you were not just passing. That’s not to say I’m not grateful you got me out of that situation, but really…’
‘You realise the more you tell me how grateful you are, the less grateful you sound?’ he observed, sounding amused.
‘Why, Leo? If you are here to see how the mighty have fallen, well, that’s fair enough.
I suppose I deserve that, but not Dad. He’s an old man trying hard to rebuild his life.
So if you’re just here to tell me how great your life is going, that’s fine.
You’re about to be married… You’ve won the lottery…
Whatever it is, good luck for the future, and goodbye. ’
Not that he needed luck, from what she had read.
She held open the door, anxious for this farce to be over.
‘Actually, I’m here to offer you a job.’