Get them back on a conversational footing. Keep a distance between them.
Look but do not touch.
Listen. Converse. Keep a distance.
This tactic had worked in the pizzeria, proving a mostly effective way of blocking out the crazy surges of lust that kept flushing through him.
He’d been surprised by how much he enjoyed her company. Aislin had such an entertaining way with words that their time in the pizzeria had flown by.
She cleared her throat. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Tell me about your friends. Boyfriends...’ A thought occurred to him, one he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought to ask before. ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
‘I wouldn’t be here if I had one.’
The cynical part of him almost snorted his disbelief but he held it back as he remembered that Aislin was not of his world. Her world was not motivated by money.
Aislin’s world was motivated by family.
His eyes drifted back to her. She looked comfortable and secure in the hammock, ankles hooked together, russet hair spilled messily all around her head.
‘I’ve only had one boyfriend,’ she confessed, her gaze fixed on the darkening sky.
He almost snorted in cynical disbelief again. ‘Just the one?’
‘Yes. One boyfriend. Patrick. I met him in my second year at uni.’
‘Was it serious?’
‘I thought so.’ There was a strange mixture of anger and defeat in her tone when she said this. ‘He cheated on me.’
Dante didn’t know how to respond to this unexpected confidence.
But this was Aislin and, as he’d also learned in their short time together, she said what was on her mind. His question about a boyfriend had clearly taken her mind back to the man who had cheated on her.
‘He promised me the world,’ she said quietly. ‘I had so many doubts about him—he was a player like you—but he convinced me I was the woman he’d been waiting for and that I was special to him. We’d been together for six months when Orla had her accident. Two weeks after it happened, one of the nurses very kindly told me that I smelt and needed to go home and get a change of clothes.’
‘You spent two weeks at the hospital without a change of clothes?’ Amazement at her words overrode the uncomfortable stab in his guts at her blasé way of saying her cheating ex was a player like him.
‘Orla was in a coma in the intensive care unit. Finn was clinging to life in the neonatal unit. I couldn’t leave. It was hard enough dividing my time between the two wards. I even asked if they could be put together but it was impossible. It was an awful time. I felt like I was being split in two. I left the hospital only once in the first eight weeks and that was to pack a load of clothes for myself. I called Patrick to come and get me, but he didn’t answer, so I got a taxi home. I was sharing a house with three other women. Patrick’s car was parked outside. I found him in bed with Angela.’
Dante rubbed a hand over his mouth, at a complete loss at what to say.
‘He knew what I was going through.’ Anger rang through the rich brogue. ‘He knew I needed support. He knew my mother had no intention of coming home—she’s been living in Asia for five years, and when Orla had her accident she sent a few messages, but that was it from her. All I wanted was someone to hold my hand and share just a fraction of it with me. I’d begged him to come to the hospital but he made all these pathetic excuses. In the back of my mind I knew something was wrong but I didn’t have the emotional capacity to deal with it.’
‘What did you do?’ His question came from a throat that felt strangled, his brain whirling to think how scared and alone she must have felt.
‘Told them I never wanted to see either of them ever again, shoved a load of clothes into a bag and left.’
‘That was it?’ He’d imagined screams and smashed crockery.
Now she twisted her head to look at him. ‘I was exhausted, Dante. I hadn’t slept more than a few hours in two weeks and was living on my nerves. There was nothing left in me. All I wanted to do was get my stuff and get back to the hospital. It took a long time for me to even feel the betrayal of what they’d done.’
He didn’t have to imagine the devastation she’d gone through; Dante was living through his own version of it. The betrayal of those you loved was the worst of all deceits.
Aislin had been betrayed by the man she’d loved and abandoned by the woman who’d given
birth to her at the time she’d needed them most.