He’d needed to escape.
Two full days with his Irish fox, listening to her lyrical brogue, watching her eat, drink, laugh, smile, frown, argue...catching a glimpse of the pain she carried in her...had built up in him.
As hard as he had tried to keep his thoughts platonic and his body in neutral, there seemed to be an override in his control where Aislin was concerned.
Her throat had moved as she’d drunk a glass of water during their dinner and the sudden urge to press his mouth to her neck had sent a charge rocketing through him that had sucked the air from his lungs. For a moment, all he’d been able to see was Aislin spread naked beneath him, a sensory image so strong he’d been on the verge of sending his staff back to their apartments on the ground floor. Only the ringing of his phone had stopped him.
Forget his teenage years. This was a hundred times worse.
He’d snatched the chance for escape, only to return to find her in his pool. He was painfully aware that, submerged beneath the glimmering surface, Aislin wore a swimsuit.
He pulled one of the terrace seats over and ignored her question.
‘Orla and I found it hard to go into our nan’s home after she died,’ she said softly into the silence, those compassionate eyes not leaving him. ‘She lived next door to us and her home was our home. Going into it in the months after she’d died and seeing all her possession still there...it was hard. I kept expecting her to call out from the kitchen asking if we wanted a cup of tea and a biscuit.’ Her lips tightened and she breathed out and smiled sadly. ‘It took a long time before her death felt real.’
He took a long drink.
‘It still doesn’t feel real,’ he admitted. ‘I go in that house and I see him everywhere. He’s there, and I want to talk to him, but he’s gone.’
Talk to him and demand answers, starting with why the hell he’d kept a sister’s existence from him.
The secret cut like the deepest of betrayals. It felt like losing him all over again.
He drained the bottle and signalled to Ciro for another, guilt that Ciro had had a date lined up for that evening adding to the combustible mix of anger and desire curdling in him.
Furious anger at his dead father.
Heady desire for the woman submerged semi-naked in his pool whose eyes were fixed on him, shadowed under the emerging moonlight.
‘I always knew my father was a liar,’ he said into the silence. ‘He was an addict. Addicts lie. But he never lied to me. He could always come to me. I never judged him. I was his son. I knew his faults but that never stopped me loving him and wanting to help him. And now I find he did lie to me. He kept from me the worst secret a father could keep from a child.’
‘Orla?’
‘Sì. Orla. It makes me think, what else did he lie to me about? Who was the man I thought I knew so well?’
There was movement in the water as Aislin pushed away from where she’d been resting, swam to the edge closest to him and folded her arms on the side.
‘Have you asked your mother about it?’ she asked.
‘No.’ He took the fresh bottle from Ciro with a grim nod of thanks. ‘If my mother knows about Orla, then that means she’s complicit in the lie.’
He drank deeply and gazed into the distance, looking anywhere but at Aislin. It disturbed him that, even with the heavy weight of his mood and emotions, he could still feel her stare upon him, lasering through his skin, his body charged with awareness for her.
‘Parents often lie to children if they think it’s a subject they won’t understand, or to protect them,’ she said quietly. ‘It doesn’t mean your father lied to you about anything else.’
‘It doesn’t mean he didn’t,’ he snapped.
She rested her cheek on a slender forearm and sighed. ‘When I think of Finn and all the struggles he’ll have throughout his life, it makes my heart hurt so badly that if I could swap my body for his I would do it gladly. I love that boy and his mother so much, I don’t think there’s anything I wouldn’t do to protect them.’
‘Even lie?’
‘There’s many things I never thought I was capable of doing that I’ve since done,’ she answered softly. ‘It’s only when you’re in a specific situation that you can appreciate the depths you would go to or the heights you would climb for someone you love.’
He thought of her hovering by their beds in the hospital, alone without a change of clothes for two weeks. He thought of her fighting to be recognised as Finn’s guardian and taking care of everything for both of them until her sister had recovered enough to do those things for herself.
Dante could not comprehend from where she had found her strength.
He tried to lighten the heaviness engulfing them. ‘Like breaking into my cottage to get my attention?’