Chapter Twenty-Five
It had been six days since I’d seen Rhys and yet the heat between us was still intense.
I’d felt it in the hand he placed on my shoulder, alerting me to his arrival, and it raged like a furnace when he bent down and lightly kissed my cheek.
There was a gentle summer breeze in the air, ruffling the strands of my hair and rustling the leaves on the trees, but it wasn’t enough to cool the flames that still flickered between Rhys and me.
It was ridiculous – even molten lava would have cooled by now, but we were still burning.
‘I’m sorry I’m late. Have you been waiting long?’ he asked, pulling out one of the ornate wrought-iron chairs on the park café’s patio.
‘No. My viewing overran, so I’ve only just got here.’
Rhys leant back in his chair, slipping off his sunglasses – even though the midday sun was still high in the sky.
‘It’s good to see you again. You look nice,’ he said, his eyes warm.
‘Nice’ had actually taken three outfit changes and twice as long as I usually spent on my hair and make-up to achieve.
I really wanted to say he looked good too, but that wasn’t the direction I was intending things to go today.
But privately, I couldn’t help notice how well his black t-shirt fitted the contours of his chest, reminding me a little too vividly of what lay beneath it.
It didn’t quite meet the waistband of his jeans, which were riding low on his hips.
He’d been at the café less than two minutes, and I’d already caught several glimpses of skin as he reached for the chair, then the pitcher of water on the table, pouring us both out a glass.
I drained half of mine in a single nervous gulp.
He caught me off guard by capturing my hand when I thought he was reaching for the menu. Every nerve ending in my body screamed out in protest when after only a second or two I gently extricated my fingers from his.
His emerald-green eyes went straight to mine with a hundred questions.
Ellie?
I blinked twice. I don’t want to talk about this, mine silently replied.
What is it? Is something wrong?
Nothing is wrong, mine lied.
At least, that was my interpretation of our silent exchange. It’s possible Rhys had an entirely different transcript. Either way, he didn’t try to hold my hand again, which should have made me happy but actually had the exact opposite effect.
I switched my attention to the specials board and rambled on for a good two minutes about the merits of the café’s excellent BLT over their quiche in a voice that sounded like a parody of mine.
I could see Rhys looking at me curiously across the width of the table, and I could hardly blame him.
This wasn’t the same Ellie he’d left semi-naked in her bedroom just under a week ago.
‘I get the feeling I’m missing something here,’ he said, a troubled expression on his face as he got to his feet to place our order at the café’s outdoor counter.
I allowed my eyes to follow him as he wove past the tables to the till, wondering how it was possible to be so entranced by everything a person did.
From his easy loping stride, to the way he chatted amiably to another queuing customer, to the smile he gave the woman at the cash register.
There was nothing about Rhys that I didn’t like. And that was the problem.
I reached for my sunglasses and slipped them on, because either the pollen count had suddenly shot through the roof or I was dangerously close to changing my mind, or crying. At this point it really could go either way.
The park café had been a convenient meeting point, situated as it was halfway between my morning appointment and the property outside town that I was visiting later that afternoon.
It was only now, when I looked across the expanse of grass and saw the lightning-struck oak in the distance, that I questioned whether this had been the best location for us to meet.
It was as though I kept dropping lighted matches into a box of dynamite, waiting to see how many it was going to take before everything blew up in my face.
Rhys was making his way back to the table, carrying two cans of chilled soda, and behind the privacy of my darkly tinted glasses, my eyes softened as he paused and bent to stroke the park cat.
It was the same one his daughter had been fascinated by on our last visit, and a timely reminder of what was important here.
Rhys returned to the table and set down the cans of Coke.
‘How is Tasha?’
It was a good opener, because I wanted his daughter to be front and centre in our thoughts throughout this conversation.
‘She’s doing great.’
I already knew from his text messages that Tasha had recovered quickly from the flare-up on the night of the award ceremony. If it really was a flare-up, said a suspicious voice in my head, which sounded remarkably like Mel’s.
‘She doesn’t appear to have any after-effects at all.’
He looked down, as though pulling the ring free from his drink can required all his concentration.
‘It’s strange though, because normally the summer months are the best ones for her.
It’s not until the colder weather gets here that she tends to suffer most. That’s when things can sometimes get dicey.
‘I think,’ he continued, picking out his words carefully, as though the wrong ones could be dangerous, ‘Annalise might have jumped the gun a little the other night.’
‘I imagine that would be very easy to do. It must be terrifying watching your child struggling to breathe.’
‘It is. But we’re usually better at not panicking.’
The ‘we’ hurt. There was no point in hiding it. But it was probably exactly what I needed to hear.
‘Are we going to talk about what happened on that night, Ellie?’
I was mid-gulp, and it took all my concentration not to splutter a mouthful of fizzy drink all over myself.
‘Yes. I think we should.’
His eyes were on me, and I already knew this was going to be so much harder than it had been when I’d practised it in front of my bedroom mirror. ‘I think, maybe, getting interrupted on Friday might have been the best thing that could have happened,’ I said.
His frown told me he didn’t agree. ‘I think you and I must have vastly different opinions on the best way for a night to end.’ He shook his head.
‘Walking away from you was torture. Seeing the look in your eyes. It’s haunted me all week.
If it had been anything else, anyone else, nothing on earth could have made me leave you like that. ’
‘I think we were about to make a huge mistake.’
‘I don’t see how something that felt so right can be called a mistake.’
With just one sentence he’d conjured up the memories I’d spent six days trying my best to suppress. Once again I could feel his hands on my body and my own travelling down the planes of his stomach, inching closer to freeing him from his clothes. I shook my head, but the images refused to budge.
‘What worries me most, what I can’t get out of my head, is that when Tasha needed you the other night, you were with me. I’m afraid that I’m getting in the way of where you ought to be. I never want to be the reason that you’re not going back to Annalise,’ I said firmly.
‘Annalise is the reason I’m not going back to Annalise. If I’d thought there was even the slightest possibility of getting back together with her, I’d never have let anything happen between us that night.’
‘But you do want to be with your daughter. And she wants to be with you.’
I wasn’t playing fair, but none of the usual rules applied here.
‘She has me,’ Rhys said, leaning forward until our faces were tantalisingly close.
‘She’ll always have me. I loved that little girl before I even met her, before I held her in my arms for the very first time.
For as long as I live, until the last beat of my heart, I will love her.
’ He took a moment. ‘But the last two years have shown me that I don’t need to share her address to share my heart with her, and that maybe a dad who is happy elsewhere is better than one who is miserable right there beside her. ’
It felt like he’d reached into my chest, found every secret hope that I’d hidden away, and exposed them all. The love a father might feel for his daughter was a mystery that I’d never been given the chance to unravel. After thirty-five years it shouldn’t still hurt this much, but damn it, it did.
‘What are we doing here, Rhys? What exactly is this?’
It was hard watching some of the light slowly dim in his eyes.
‘Us?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘We’re getting to know each other.’
‘And then what?’ I was pushing, I knew that, and I could see him bristling a little uncomfortably.
‘I don’t know, Ellie. Does it have to be labelled and categorised upfront?’
‘For me, yes, I think it does.’
A stave of frown lines appeared on his brow.
‘I don’t want to pigeonhole this. I’d rather just take things slowly and see where it goes.’
I shook my head sadly. ‘That could be a problem, because I’m a big fan of pigeons and the holes they live in.’ I gave an unhappy sigh. ‘We are so different in so many ways.’
‘That’s meant to be a good thing, isn’t it? Opposites attract.’
‘Not always.’ I chewed anxiously on my lower lip.
He was quiet for a long moment, his face unreadable.
‘Something inside me changed two years ago.’
My mouth felt suddenly dry. ‘When you and Annalise broke up?’
‘When I came home and found her in our bed with Marco. When the person you trust most, the person you thought you’d grow old with, does something like that, it breaks you. And I hadn’t seen it coming. I was totally blindsided. I swore I’d never allow myself to get hurt like that again.’
‘I get that.’
‘I convinced myself that being a good father to Tasha was the only role I was interested in. Perhaps, in hindsight, I should have listened to Olly and gone to see someone professionally and talk it all through. But I thought I was coping just fine.’
‘And now you’re not?’
His lips tightened as though he wasn’t sure if he could hold back the truth behind them. ‘When you asked for a label just now, a definition of what we were, my knee-jerk reaction was to get up and walk away.’
I swallowed audibly.
‘So perhaps I’m not as well adjusted as I thought I was.’
‘At least you didn’t say it’s not you, it’s me.’
‘Don’t do that. Don’t make this into something flippant and unimportant.
Because that isn’t how it feels to me. I know you still believe it can all be explained away by science; that it’s simply something chemical, an after-effect of both getting struck by the same bolt of lightning.
It’s obvious you think that whatever this is, it won’t last, just like the marks it left on my body. ’
My eyes went to his t-shirt as though I had X-ray vision and could see through the fabric. ‘Nothing ever does.’
My words seemed to make him sad.
‘But those marks are still there, even though everything we’ve both read says they should be gone by now.’ I wasn’t sure where he was going with this. ‘So maybe what we feel isn’t going to disappear either.’
‘What are you saying? That we keep seeing each other until the Lichtenberg figures disappear?’
Something flickered in his eyes. ‘I wasn’t going to say that, but I’m happy to go along with your suggestion.’
‘I . . . what? I wasn’t suggesting that. It was just a crazy throwaway remark.’
‘Well,’ Rhys said, settling back more comfortably in his chair.
‘I actually think it’s too good a plan to discard.
Maybe we’re the exception to the rule. I’ll have marks that never fade and the connection you’re so determined to dismiss will actually turn out to be something that was meant to last. Stop thinking about what could go wrong here, Ellie . . . think about what could go right.’
Despite the voice screaming in my head that this was crazy, he must have seen I was wavering.
‘Let’s just relax, forget about giving this a label, enjoy the rest of the summer and see what happens,’ he said gently.
‘We can take the physical side of things out of the equation if that makes it easier. In fact,’ he lowered his voice to a whisper, ‘even if you got down on your knees and begged me to take you to bed, I would have to respectfully decline.’
That brought out my smile.
He held out his hand as though we’d just negotiated a tricky contract. I looked at it for a long moment before placing my palm against his.
‘One condition,’ I said, before allowing us to seal our words with a handshake.
‘Go on.’
‘Tasha comes first. You have to promise you’ll put her before me, every single time.’
There were so many questions in his eyes, but I wasn’t ready to answer any of them.
He nodded slowly and solemnly. ‘Tasha comes first.’
Finally, I smiled. ‘Okay then. You’ve got yourself a deal.’