Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
Flora
“He’s a wanker!” I was fuming. How dare Maurizio even imply that what he saw on my doorstep was anything other than a friendly goodnight kiss. “I hate him.”
My reflection in the bathroom mirror that clearly showed my eyes preparing to overflow with tears disputed that second statement.
I didn’t hate him. I liked him, a lot. I had thought he liked me too.
I still did, kind of, but he didn’t trust me.
I understood he’d been hurt, felt betrayed by Sophie, but I wasn’t her and I refused to be punished for her mistakes.
When I’d told him that mistrust and jealousy were destructive and damaging, I’d meant it, and had been hurt by both things in the past. I refused to put myself through it again.
I just needed to get through the weekend and on Monday, go back to being the nanny. Maybe I could look at getting a flat of my own or something. I briefly recalled Bea talking about the available flat she’d had. I hadn’t really had enough time to build up savings, but I’d manage. I’d have to.
With my teeth brushed, my face washed, and a touch of moisturiser added, I climbed into bed and begged sleep to summon me, determined to move on from how awful today had proven. It wasn’t like things could get worse, was it?
A couple of hours later, I was woken from my surprisingly sound slumber by the horrific sound of a storm outside.
The sound of rain bouncing off the ground and the windows was interspersed with loud cracks of thunder, while my curtains did nothing to mask the forks of lightening illuminating the sky.
It seemed things could get worse judging by the fact that I was now sat up in bed, my knees tucked into my chest with my hands clamped over my ears while my eyes remained screwed tightly closed hoping to block out the murderous sounds that taunted me from outside and my own thoughts that were intent on slowly breaking me from the inside.
I had no clue how long the storm had been going when I found myself curled in a ball behind my front door with a blanket over me.
It hadn’t been my plan to end up there. I didn’t know that I’d had a plan, not really, but I had found it impossible to escape the sounds, sights and smell of the storm in my bed, so had gotten up, hoping to find somewhere in my home where I might feel safe.
There was nowhere. Opening my door, I had been uncertain where I was planning to go, or had I?
There was only one place I wanted to be.
In the safety of Maurizio’s arms. The last time I had felt safe in a storm had been the day my car had broken down and Maurizio had rescued me.
That thought alone saw tears coming faster and harder.
He had felt like my safe place, and now without him, I didn’t have one.
There was a loud, deafening crack of thunder that I swore was directly above me, coming for me, taunting me, planning to claim me, having missed the chance previously and that was when the small amount of self-control I had was lost. My tears and crying paused briefly as a loud and traumatic cry tore from me.
The world around me was shaking, or that might have just been me as I seemed incapable of remaining still.
My breathing was erratic and I was unsure if I could hear or feel it, maybe both.
Nausea washed over me and suddenly I felt out of control, like an inflatable dinghy lost at sea in choppy waters.
The erratic breathing I’d previously noted had changed until I was fighting for my next gasp of air.
Shit! I was falling headlong into a full-blown panic attack and I was unsure if I could fend it off.
I couldn’t even begin to muster the self-calming strategies I’d previously been taught, but then why would I?
It had probably been five years since I’d had one.
Everything was beginning to blur and as much as passing out would give me some relief from the overwhelming fear and horror I currently felt, it would also see me alone, more alone than I currently was with my thoughts of sadness, loss and grief that were momentarily keeping me company.
The pounding of my heart began to increase until I thought it might literally burst from my chest, and then, it slowed, calming as warmth enveloped me.
A sense of safety wrapped around me as the internal weight I had previously felt was replaced with the weight of arms encasing me while soft words of comfort and security washed over me.
The noise of the storm still played in the background but somehow it was being drowned out by the words I couldn’t quite make out.
Feeling limp and lax, I realised where I was, in Maurizio’s arms.
It felt as though there was a breeze blowing across my face and I was weightless.
A constant and comforting ssh sound vibrated against my head before something soft dipped beneath me a split second before the warmth and safety of Maurizio’s arms left me.
A small moan of objection sounded from my throat before he was back again, holding me, comforting me.
“It’s okay. I’ve got you. I’m not going anywhere.”
At some point I realised that I was on a bed, lying down with Maurizio as the storm continued somewhere in the distance but it couldn’t touch me, not here, not with him. Then, silence and darkness, nothing. Sleep had claimed me and once more the arms I trusted held me and kept me safe.
Wearily, I prised my eyes open as I felt something stifling me while light seemed to tempt my eyes to open.
My vision blurred slightly as I recognised my surroundings, Maurizio’s bedroom.
The events of the night before began to unfold in my memory and the unmistakable crying induced swelling of my eyes made sense.
The window nearest to me had sunlight peeking through along with the break of day and if that didn’t feel like mother nature having another little dig because of course after the hellish storm of the night before, what I really needed was a glorious sunny day to wake up to.
“Hey, how you feeling?” Maurizio’s arm that I’d only just realised was thrown over me tightened its grip around me, pulling me back so I was tightly held against his chest. He was the thing that had been stifling me in my sleep.
“Fine, yeah, good . . .” I was rambling and if I wasn’t careful I’d be well and truly lost in a sea of positive adjectives.
The bed dipped beneath me signalling him moving behind me. Before I knew it he was over me, his eyes firmly fixed on mine. “That was not a trick question and it’s okay not to be okay, last night—”
As if I wasn’t embarrassed enough by the whole debacle of the previous night, I did not need to face the most handsome of faces and perform a postmortem on the disaster it had become.
“It’s fine. I’m fine. Sorry, I should go . . . to my room and leave you to your weekend.” Any attempt to move from my prone position was futile as Maurizio moved again so that he straddled me, caging me in for all intents and purposes.
“The only way you are leaving here is with me. If you want to go back to yours, we can. If you want to go downstairs, we can, but the key to this is we. The storm last night, how distressed you were, goes beyond being a little jumpy. I saw that the day your car broke down, but last night was off the scale.”
“That’s none of your business. I am none of your business.
I ceased to be the second you accused me of being a liar and a cheat.
” Rationally, I knew we’d moved on from that, kind of.
The fact that he had come to my rescue and comforted me again suggested to me that he realised he had been the idiot I had accused him of being the night before, not that we didn’t need to have a conversation regarding accusations and mistrust, particularly if we wanted to move forward in any way that wasn’t purely employer and employee.
Did I want to move forward and continue whatever it was we had started? Stupid question, Flora.
“Flora, it’s early, let’s talk before the children wake up, please.” There was a hint of pleading in his voice, but it was unnecessary because despite my own protestations, I wanted to talk to him.
Once we arrived downstairs, Maurizio sat me in the lounge while he made tea for us both, and I was still nursing the remnants of my first cup when he broached the subject of his misunderstanding of me and Ash.
“I can’t apologise enough for what I accused you of. I saw you with Ash and not knowing who he was, I made terrible assumptions and on the back of them, I said some terrible things to you. I am sorry, sorrier than you might believe. If I could turn the clock back I would, but I can’t.”
“No, you can’t and that means it can’t happen again. We all make mistakes. Mistakes we need to learn from rather than repeat them.”
He nodded. “I should, perhaps, have put my brain into gear, much as I would at work. God! What an idiot I am. I work in facts and proof that support actual evidence every day in my professional life, and yet, last night, seeing you. . .”
I watched as he swallowed hard after his voice had dropped off.
“I suppose, but then I don’t want to be part of your working day and I don’t want to spend time with your professional persona. I want you, the man behind that who reacts on an emotional and personal level.”
He frowned his confusion that on one hand I had criticised him for reacting in a way that was emotional and not well thought out, and yet here I was rejecting the offer of an analytic reaction. His frown only served to make me smile in that instant.
“If you see me, as you did last night, I don’t mind you asking me questions, maybe even feeling a little jealous, just a little, but you don’t get to accuse me and throw unpleasant allegations around. It might be a cliché, but if we don’t have trust, we don’t have anything.”
“I just need to know that I haven’t fucked this up completely. Us.”
“No, but I’m still not sure what we’re doing Maurizio.”
His smile at my use of his name was contagious, especially judging by my own spreading across my face. “What do you want us to be doing?”
I laughed at how suggestive his question was and that laughter was soon replaced by horrification as his expression morphed into one that confirmed that he had not been thinking of sex! Neither had I and yet in that second, with eight apparently innocent words uttered, I had gone straight there.
“What I mean is, what do you want from this, from us?”
I shrugged, unsure what to say and what not to say. I wasn’t expecting promises and pledges, nor declarations of undying love, but I wanted to be more than a means to scratch an itch.
“Flora, we agreed to be discreet, and I think that remains a wise option, but tell me what you see this as. I am not looking for specific labels here, just an inkling of where you’re at with it.”
“I like you. I wouldn’t sleep with you if I didn’t. I trust you and feel safe with you, and that is a little scary considering this, is so recent, and you’re my boss.”
“Good, you should trust me and feel safe with me, and I like the fact that you wouldn’t sleep with me if you didn’t like me.” He grinned, a confident and cocky aura surrounding him.
“I can live without labels, certainly for now, but I don’t want to feel like I really am some sort of cliché; the nanny sleeping with her boss, and if I am simply a notch on your bedpost, then please, tell me now so at least I know where I stand.”
“I would also appreciate not being the cliché of a boss who sleeps with his staff. Despite what Bea may have suggested, intimated, whatever, I have never approached a staff member to pursue anything that wasn’t professional before.
” He seemed to reconsider his words and the meaning behind them.
“Bea, we, there was never anything between us. I was in a bad place after Sophie left and she helped a lot more with the children. I leaned on her more than I should have and because my mother had never been Sophie’s biggest fan, I wanted to keep her at arm’s length as much as possible, if only to keep her dislike of my children’s mother to a fairly silent contempt.
Anyway, without making excuses for my actions, I overstepped the mark and misjudged things, perhaps because Bea was taking on some of Sophie’s role, I don’t know, and as I said, I am not making excuses, but there was nothing between me and Bea .
. . obviously she was already with Seb, but there was no real interest from me, not really. Sorry if I sound like a dickhead.”
He had hit the nail on the head. He did sound like a dickhead.
That wasn’t entirely fair because there were some extenuating circumstances involved and he and Bea were still on good terms. It wasn’t exactly music to my ears, knowing those lines had blurred or whatever thought process had been behind his clumsy passes at Bea.
I watched him closely and considered how I felt.
Confused. I replayed his words, his account of events, and compared them to Bea’s version before considering my next words.