they, your mum and dad, I mean, they were at the wedding?’ And presumably had filled Granny in on the scandalous proceedings, and just when she thought the situation could not get weirder or more awkward.
‘My parents are presently enjoying a world cruise. They were not at my wedding and will not be here.’
The undercurrent in his voice made her say, ‘I’m sorry.’
He flicked her a look, opened his mouth and closed it again. She was lifting her shoulders and rolling them to stretch the kinks that tied up her spine after the journey. Seb was struck by the almost feline quality in the sinuous way she moved. He took a deep breath as heat seared through his body, as merciless as a blade. Then he launched into a response designed to dampen her empathy.
‘My grandparents on both sides played a larger part in my life than my parents.’ He clenched his jaw and taunted softly, ‘Aren’t you going to say, well, at least you had parents?’
‘I had parents. Everyone does. The difference is I could walk past them in the street and not know them. They wouldn’t know me. I look sometimes and wonder if... When I was little I told people my dad was a war hero and my mother was a nurse.’ She stopped, hit by the sheer strangeness and odd intimacy of this encounter, standing in the dark with this man—a man she barely knew but was married to, a man who she had considered her enemy before she knew his name—talking about families.
A subject she knew little of, she thought, ignoring the knot of longing in her chest so familiar she barely acknowledged its presence. She had Mark and he had her; they were a family. Her mother and her reasons for deserting them, which she had trained herself not to think about...mostly.
It seemed like a long time before he responded. His voice coming out of the darkness made her jump. ‘You stopped.’
‘The teacher found out and made me apologise to the class for lying.’
‘Sensitive soul. I hope you are a better teacher.’
‘I am.’ It was not a subject she had any false modesty on. She’d be a better parent, too, than his, who had better things to do than attend their son’s wedding.
When her children, the ones Mari dreamed of one day adopting, had their red-letter days she would be there with bells on!
She tilted her head back, squinting, just able to make out the shape of the tiled roof.
‘I can’t imagine anyone, let alone an elderly lady, choosing to live here.’ Unsure if he had even heard her, she followed the sound of his crunching footsteps because if she lost him she didn’t have a clue where she was going.
When he responded Seb’s deep vibrant voice came from a little way ahead. ‘It is a lot less intimidating in daylight when the bats are asleep.’
Trotting in earnest to catch up, she fought the urge to duck and cover her head. ‘That’s a joke, right...?’
‘Bats are perfectly harmless creatures, more frightened of you than you are of them.’
‘Want to bet?’
His low laugh was so attractive that she had to fight a responsive grin. She had to fight a few other responses, too. She was familiar with the notion that opposites attracted and that sexual attraction was indiscriminate, but this was her first real experience of how overwhelming it could be when you encountered the sort of intense physical magnetism that Seb possessed. It made what she had felt for Adrian pale into insignificance.
If he had any redeeming features beyond a fondness for his grandmother she might have been in danger of making a fool of herself and maybe enjoying it, because there was no doubt in her mind that he’d be a good lover. His hands, she mused dreamily, his mouth... Her stomach flipped.
‘You can relax.’
Shocked by the direction of her thoughts, Mari realised that was one thing she couldn’t do, not around this man with his powerful aura of masculinity.
‘My grandmother’s home is actually quite civilised, and she is a very young eighty-two. Obviously she doesn’t live here alone—a couple live in and there is a gardener and a couple of maids who come in from the village.’
‘Cosy set-up,’ she murmured, staring at the looming building and not really caring if he got her sarcasm or not, just glad he had no inkling of her previous thoughts. ‘I didn’t see any village on the way.’ Even with her having taken the precaution of turning her back to him, his nearness made the nape of her neck tingle.
‘There are two accesses to the place. We took the north road—the village is on the south side of the mountain.’
The geography of the area made little sense to Mari, and her thoughts turned to her brother. What if something had happened? He hadn’t replied to her last text.
She slipped her phone out of her pocket, but before she could begin to punch in Mark’s number it was snatched from her grasp by Seb before she had even registered his presence.
She turned, eyes blazing. ‘Give that back!’
Seb looked at the phone and tucked it into his own pocket. Mari, her hands clenched, watched him and went white with rage. ‘Does he always need you to hold his hand?’
Her chin lifted in reaction to the scorn in his voice while in the distance the owl called. ‘The support is mutual.’
A slug of anger that on one level Seb knew was irrational slipped past the cool objectivity he struggled to maintain whenever he thought of the man he had judged to be a selfish waste of space. Any sympathy he might have felt for the younger man’s present situation was negated by the cynical way he used his sister and played on her irrational guilt.
And you’re not...?
Cynical, or using her?
Both. The answer came a second before he closed down this line of internal dialogue.
The situations were not comparable; she was not losing out and this was a fair exchange. Eighteen months with him was preferable to a life spent looking after a brother for whom nothing she ever did would be enough—and that was what would happen if he didn’t fully recover.
Recognising a masterful piece of rationalisation when he heard one, he buried the knowledge beneath a layer of anger.
‘You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you? But you’re really not that stupid, are you, Mari?’
Mari was grateful for the dark when his soft suggestion made her face flame. She compressed her lips over a defensive retort, resenting his insinuation while recognising there was more than a grain of truth in it. While she wasn’t blind to her twin’s faults, it was something else to hear another person criticise him.
‘Didn’t you read the literature on The Atler?’
Her face was just a blur, but he imagined her teeth gouging into the soft plump fullness of her lower lip. She’d done that several times on the plane. At one point there had been pinpricks of blood, and he had wondered what she would do if he’d dabbed them away with his tongue...
The question still remained, as did the frustrated ache.
She was grateful for the change of subject, but it took Mari a moment to react to the abrupt question, to connect the name with the clinic that specialised in the rehabilitation of injuries like Mark’s—the expensive clinic.
She felt resentment she was uncomfortable acknowledging stir. If she had told Mark what she was doing would he have discouraged her? Her resentment was directed not towards her brother but towards the man who had made her think about it.
‘I didn’t know there was an exam,’ she countered, unwilling to admit that she had read the first page half a dozen times before she had finally given up. She’d had other things on her mind at the time, such as getting married.
Seb, drawn by the scent of her perfume—or