Chapter Twenty-One
Lucas loved his brother. He’d loved him since he’d visited his mother on the maternity ward and she’d shown him the baby in the plastic cot. ‘This is your brother.’
He’d taken the ‘your’ part of that sentence seriously and spent the next years alternately ordering Charlie around and looking after him. They’d grown up close.
Two days ago, if someone had told Lucas that his little brother would turn up in Malta and they’d be able to sit around a table in the last of the evening light, drinking beer and talking, he would have been delighted. If he could have held Elle’s hand and fended off Charlie’s jokes and hoots because Lucas and Elle had got it together again, he would still have been delighted.
As it was, Charlie and Kayleigh were the ones holding hands, while Lucas and Elle occupied individual spaces.
Any idea he might have had of protesting against Elle’s request that they keep a lid on what was going on between them had died when he’d looked into her eyes and seen her uncertainty. What he’d been chewing over had crystallised forcibly.
Elle was acutely uncomfortable when she was pushed into revealing things she’d rather keep to herself, and just because he liked everything out in the open didn’t give him the right to expect her to feel the same. She was a private person. So what? That was allowed.
In the past, maybe he’d been blinded by his white-hot need to possess. It had taken a while but now he was finally beginning to see that ‘your brother’ would always be your brother, but ‘your girlfriend’ was only yours for as long as she wanted to be.
A lot of past aggro had been created by allowing his suspicions to feed on Elle’s natural inclination towards reserve. That didn’t make him particularly proud of himself.
So he went along with Elle’s wishes, keeping to his own space while she updated them on her mother’s condition.
Even after Charlie and Kayleigh headed off to a romantic restaurant on the bastions of the silent city of Mdina he strolled back to the Shady Lady decorously at Elle’s side as if nothing had changed between them.
They prepared dinner together and he nibbled her neck a couple of times, rewarded by her relaxing, laughing, rubbing her curves against him in the confined area.
But when they went up to the flybridge to eat in public view, he did no more than let his bare leg rest discreetly against hers beneath the table as they dined on cheese with Maltese bread and big dark red tomatoes, and all the leafy stuff that she seemed to like so he went along with.
As the rapid twilight descended and the lights began to cast their golden squiggles in the creek he watched her take a draught of wine. And then that tight, shut look stole across her face again. His heart dipped.
So when she put on a smile and said, ‘It seems only fair to give you part two of the Ricky saga,’ he found himself shaking his head.
She stopped, confusion bringing down her blonde brows.
‘You’ve probably told me enough,’ he said, gently. ‘I’ve been thinking it over all day and come to the conclusion that we can leave most of it behind us.’ Relief blazed in her eyes and he congratulated himself on making the right decision.
He knew everything he needed to know. Except for — A vision rose in his mind: Elle standing very still in the street outside her office, a man almost as close to her as he could get, talking vehemently into her upturned face. Seconds had passed, five, ten, then Elle had spun on her heel and disappeared back through the revolving door. The man had stared after her. And smiled. Lucas had found his breathing coming so hard that it blurred his vision, making him unsure how to interpret what he’d seen.
He reached across the table for Elle’s hands. ‘There’s only one thing I do need to know. Something that would affect the present.’ He kept his gaze on her, letting her read his eyes. ‘It might not be fair to ask and I probably shouldn’t, but I’ve grown up enough to know my own frailties. If I don’t ask it, the question will always fester. Is it OK to ask you?’
Her face was very still. Then she nodded, jerkily, her gaze fixed on his.
He drew in a breath. ‘Were you seeing anyone else when you were with me?’
Visibly, new tension entered her body. Her voice emerged huskily but her gaze never wavered, blue and true. ‘Are you asking if I cheated? Not once, not to any extent!’
A mixture of relief, joy and regret made his heart beat heavily. ‘So I just fucked everything up by viewing what were obviously your wedding issues as suspicious. I saw you outside your office building talking to a guy I didn’t know, and somehow turned that into you having an affair.’
Her hands gripped his as if she were clinging on to wreckage in the middle of a large and hostile ocean. ‘ We fucked everything up,’ she countered, fiercely. ‘Neither of us dealt well with the pressures caused by needing to get married to go to America. But back up. You say you don’t need to know about my past — but don’t trust me enough to believe I could speak to a man you don’t know without cheating? If you want me to tell you about that, now’s definitely the time—’
‘No!’ She jumped at his vehemence, but he’d just seen sickeningly clearly that he could have spent the past four years with Elle, rather than without her, and all he wanted now was to find a way to go forward. ‘You’ve told me the only thing I need to know. Let the rest go, Elle. And I will, too. I apologise for not trusting you. I’m sorry that I used to get in your face. I’m working on respecting your way of doing things rather than trying to manoeuvre you into my way.’
It took several moments for her to soften a degree or two. She managed a tiny smile but it looked like an effort. ‘Do you mean I have to get used to you not saying exactly what you’re thinking?’
He gave a twisted grin, relieved to see the relaxed Elle breaking through. ‘I’m not sure I’d go as far as that.’
Her eyes glittered in the lights from the quay and she opened her mouth as if she were going to say more. Much more. As if truth was going to bubble out of her like molten lava.
Instead, she leaned over the table and kissed his mouth, long and deep. She didn’t seem to care who saw her do it, either.
Welcoming the passion, the heat, he silently reaffirmed his decision not to ask for more. Definitely. As it was, he’d almost asked one question too many.
But . . . what the hell had she been going to say?