‘I like driving, unless you want to?’
She shook her head.
‘So what did your brother think of our arrangement?’ Being a brother himself, his opinion of a man who allowed his sister to fight his battles was not positive.
‘I don’t ask my brother’s approval for my decisions.’
Neatly dodged, he thought, observing her neat, peachy behind as she bent, ignoring the passenger door and getting into the back seat.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me where we’re going?’
She had been about to, but she responded to a perverse impulse and said instead, ‘One register office is much the same as any other.’
She saw his eyes narrow in the rear-view mirror. ‘Life is going to be a lot easier if you lose the victim act,’ he drawled.
Not replying, she turned her head and looked out of the window.
‘The silent treatment works for me. It’s peaceful, but I’ve never known a woman who can keep it buttoned for more than five minutes.’
Mari clamped her lips over a retort and contented herself with slinging him a fulminating look of dislike in the rear-view mirror.
‘Fifteen, I’m impressed,’ Seb admitted as he drew up in front of a red-brick building.
She ignored him and looked up at the building. ‘So this is it, then?’
He glanced over his shoulder. ‘We’re five minutes early. I can drive around the block once more if you like?’ he suggested, fighting the impulse to apologise.
It was convenient, but had he realised that the office was situated on a road where most shop windows were either boarded up or smashed, he would have added a few miles to their journey.
Mari shook her head and took a deep breath. Not waiting for him to come around and open the door, she flung herself out, gasping, ‘No, I’m fine.’
She had actually never been this far from fine in her life!
Seb came to join her. ‘It’s probably better inside.’
It was actually much worse, but Mari barely noticed. It wasn’t the place that made her heart feel like a stone; it was exchanging words that were meant to mean something. She felt a hypocrite saying them—making a mockery of something that she considered sacred left a bad taste in her mouth.
Mari felt like a cheat.
As they walked through the swing doors, Seb pulled Mari out of the way of a boisterous crowd. At the centre of the laughing group was a bride whose white minidress did nothing to disguise her large pregnancy bump and a groom who didn’t look as if he had started shaving yet.
Mari turned her head for one last look as the loud group left the building.
‘They looked so happy.’
Seb didn’t know if it was the wistful look on her face when she said it, or the fact he had fully expected her to make some catty remark about the other woman giving birth before she got to exchange vows, but as they headed towards the ceremony room Seb found himself wishing he had bought her some flowers.
THE MOMENT MARI got out of the car, even though it was almost midnight, the Spanish summer heat hit her. She focused on the physical impressions and tried not to think beyond them to the lump of apprehension she was carrying around like a stone in her chest for the entire journey.
It was utterly still; the air was heavy and stickily oppressive. For the last mile or so they had driven through what seemed to be a pine forest, and warm air carried the green smell of the trees.
She got out her mobile and texted goodnight to her brother.
‘I imagine he is much as he was the past ten times you texted him.’ While Seb was exploiting the sisterly devotion, her inability to see that she was being used by her brother was really beginning to irritate him. So was her frigid, tight-lipped silence.
She had not said anything the entire journey; not to him anyway—she had been charm itself to the steward on the flight. The boy had been positively salivating. ‘And you’ve proved your point. Some women can keep quiet.’
He had hardly said a word the entire way, so now he broke his moody silence to criticise her!
‘If you’d spoken to me I’d have replied. And texting my brother, that’s called caring,’ she snapped back, choosing not to inform him that the texting exercise had been pretty one-sided.
He turned his head briefly to scan her profile in the darkness. ‘Would he be grateful if he knew what you’ve done for him?’
‘You’re the one who is paying for his treatment. This was my choice.’
‘So why didn’t you tell him?’
‘Mark has got enough on his plate without feeling responsible... What’s that meant to mean?’ she asked in response to his harsh laugh.
‘Is it a happy place, this little fantasy world you inhabit?’
Mari shot a look of simmering dislike at his patrician profile. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand.’
‘Try me.’
Taken unawares by the unexpected offer, Mari found herself answering, ‘I love him. He’s my brother.’ She could have left it there but for some reason she heard herself say, ‘I know he’s not perfect but he’s not had an easy life, rejected by his mother.’
‘Is that the way you feel about it—rejected?’
Too close to the truth. She ignored his interruption.
‘Two foster homes that didn’t work out, and the children’s home—’
‘Weren’t you in those same places?’
She shook her head. ‘You don’t understand—he was there because of me. He would have been adopted straight away when we were babies if they had allowed us to be split up, but they didn’t.’
‘Why him and not you?’
‘People want pretty babies. Mark had blond curls and dimples—he was adorable. I was not an attractive baby.’ It was a matter-of-fact statement with no self-pity he could detect, and all the more poignant because of it.
‘Aren’t all babies pretty?’
‘Not me. I was allergic to pretty much everything. I had asthma, that wasn’t so bad, but my skin was awful—eczema. It took hours every day putting on and washing off my treatments...and when it flared up...’ She gave a little shudder at the memory. ‘People do not want to push around a scabby baby, and not many want the responsibility of looking after a kid with a chronic skin condition.
‘Mark got left on the shelf with me, and when we did get fostered my red-headed temper—well, you’ve seen that—got us sent back both times. So, you see, without me Mark could have had a very different life.’
‘Is that how you think of yourself—left on the shelf...?’
‘Actually it was a doorstep.’ To abandon your own babies that way you had to be pretty desperate...but maybe if there had only been one...?
She heard him swear and then, anxious that he didn’t think she was playing for the sympathy vote, added quickly, ‘It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though, in our teens. We got fostered by Sukie and Jack, and they are the most inspirational couple you can imagine,’ she enthused, her voice filling with warmth.
‘Are you coming?’
He knew it was irrational of him to be angry with her for not being