“If I wasn’t looking forward to meeting your family so much, I would say, hell, let’s get on that boat. I’ve never been to Holland.”
“There’s no need now you’ve been to Norfolk. It’s pretty much the same.” He grinned at me then sharply turned his head back to the road. I could practically see the mental chiding he was giving himself. Apparently, Nathan had decided that smiling in my direction was a bridge too far. “And don’t be too excited to meet the Coves. You might be disappointed. Or at least shell-shocked. There’s a lot of noise involved when all five of us are back. I’m used to it and it still takes a little adjustment from living on my own.”
I shrugged. I was looking forward to seeing where Nathan came from—the kind of family that raised someone so successful. “You didn’t grow up around here though, did you?”
“No, we grew up in Battersea.” His lips assumed that familiar straight line and he gripped the steering wheel a little tighter. “Both my parents were in London teaching hospitals, so we had to be close by.”
I put my hand up as if I was telling traffic to halt. “Wait. Beau is a doctor. Your other brother. And your parents? They’re doctors too?”
“Yup. All my brothers.”
“All of them? And you didn’t want to be a medic?” There must be a huge reason he didn’t follow the same path. The journalist in me sat to attention, but another part of me—the part that had heard the resignation in Nathan’s voice just now—hoped the reasons for his changed course weren’t too painful to recall.
“I think I did at one point. I started down on that road.”
“You trained as a doctor?”
“Originally, when I went to Oxford to study medicine.”
Well, that was news. “And what, you didn’t like it?”
He sucked in a breath and then exhaled, but stayed silent. Whatever explanation had been on the tip of his tongue had evaporated in the tense air between us.
Why had he not gone into medicine when he had the perfect start at one of the best universities in the world? Perhaps he didn’t want to be in his parents’ shadow. I understood that. “It’s a certain type of pressure, following in your parents’ footsteps,” I said. “My mum’s a journalist.” I was hoping he’d open up if I did the same thing. I was tempting fate; I couldn’t risk Nathan finding out exactly who my mother was. He might not even slow down the car when he threw me out.
“I didn’t know that,” he said, shooting me a glance.
“Yeah. I have my dad’s surname, so most people don’t know, not at first anyway.” Somehow everyone always ended up finding out who I was related to. My mother had been in the business a long time and knew everyone who was anyone. She was never hesitant to reveal our familial connection, though I’d done my best to keep that information private. “We had different goals and aspirations in the industry so . . . it’s better to keep separate.”
He stayed silent, concentrating on the road as if he were negotiating traffic around the M25 and not on an abandoned A-road in East Anglia.
“Is that why you gave up medicine?” I prodded him. “You didn’t want to follow in their footsteps?”
“Not sure about that.” He grinned. “I told you, you’re looking at the black sheep.”
I knew Nathan well enough to know he was trying to make me laugh—and pivot us to a new topic in the process—but it was a cover. He was hiding something. “Yes, it must be terrible to feel such a failure when you’re the youngest CEO ever in the FTSE 100, you’ve made gazillions before you were thirty, and keep thousands employed and thriving.”
He didn’t reply straightaway and when he did, he said simply, “I suppose that depends what your family values most.”
“What does that mean?”
Before I could question him further, he snapped on the indicator. “Here we are.”
There was a gap in the hedgerow and we turned in, past open, white wooden gates onto a gravel drive. Nathan pulled up in front of a red-brick, higgledy piggeldy house that looked as if bits had been bolted on to it at various points over its life. A flowerless wisteria covered the walls around the white front door and stretched entirely across one section of the facade.
“It’s so pretty,” I said.
“Yeah, they bought it about five years ago when they retired.”
“Do you miss them being in London?”
“I still see a lot of them,” he said, turning off the ignition. “You ready?”
I nodded. Did he think I was nervous? It wasn’t like I was here to meet my boyfriend’s parents. I was on the clock.
Before we’d stepped out of the car, the glossy white front door was flung open to reveal a woman wearing a mile-wide grin, her blond hair piled on top of her head, and an apron with a thousand pictures of a man’s face printed on it. She held out her arms and met Nathan as he slid out from the driver’s seat.