‘I think you use sex as a distraction,’ she declared.
‘Is that so?’
‘Yes.’ Clearly warming to her subject, she drew herself a little taller and eyed him determinedly. ‘I think you use sex as a distraction to stop you from getting too close to anyone.’
Anger and something else—something someone who didn’t know him might have categorised as fear—spread through his mind.
‘This idea that you’re not cut out for relationships, or love is nonsense.’
‘Careful, zoloste, you’re wandering into precarious territory.’
A lesser woman would have backed away at the dangerous edge in his voice.
But then, Anouk wasn’t a lesser anything.
‘Someone has to,’ defiance laced her tone.
‘Why? Because you want me to tell you that I love you?’
‘No!’ she actually looked horrified. ‘Not me. Of course not. That’s...insane.’
‘Of course it’s insane,’ Sol couldn’t pinpoint what charged through him in that millisecond. He didn’t want to. ‘Because I’m not a man who believes in ‘love’. I certainly can’t offer it.’
‘I think you are capable of love.’ The panic was gone and her defiance was back again. ‘The way you are with your patients, and those young carers, and even your relationship with your brother Malachi. You care, in everything that you do.’
He hated the way she thought he was a better man than he was. It only made it more apparent to him that he wasn’t that man.
‘You’re trying to make me into something I’m not to suit your own agenda, zolotse,’ he gritted out, suddenly angry. Because anger was easier than these other emotions that threatened to churn inside him. ‘Because you hate yourself for a one-night stand with me and you want to make yourself feel better by claiming I can be more than that. But that isn’t me. I’m not built that way, Anouk. I don’t want to be. I warned you about that.’
She hated hearing those words; he could see it in her stiff stance, and the belligerent tilt of her head.
‘That isn’t what I’m doing, Sol,’ she snapped. ‘I’m telling you that I think you’re a different man from the image of yourself you put out there, and I don’t know if it’s because you want others to believe that’s all there is to you, or if you actually really do believe it’s the truth. But, whatever the truth is, that’s for you to know. It has no bearing on me, either way.’
‘Your eagerness to change me suggests otherwise.’
If his cereal had contained broken glass, it couldn’t have shredded him inside any worse. But Anouk didn’t reply straight away. She just watched him, a solemn expression in those arresting blue eyes.
He couldn’t help wishing he knew what she was thinking.
‘Did I ever tell you that the reason I came to the UK was to find my father?’ she asked, just as he was about to give up thinking she was going to speak again.
They both knew the answer to that. Her eyes were too bright, too flitting. He doubted she’d ever told anyone, expect maybe Saskia. Still, he could play the game for her, if that was what she needed.
He realised his previous anger had begun to dissipate.
‘No.’ He feigned a casualness. ‘I don’t think you did.’
‘Just before my mother...died...’ she faltered ‘...she told me that she had once received a letter from my father.’
‘You hadn’t known him?’
‘Not at all. Only the story she’d told me about him not wanting to be around for us.’ Her strained tone suggested that wasn’t all there was to it, but Sol didn’t press her on it. It was shocking enough that she was telling him this much. ‘I didn’t know he’d ever contacted us. Her. Me.’
‘What did he say?’
‘I don’t know.’ She looked angry for a moment, but then smoothed it away quickly, efficiently. ‘Apparently she’d thrown it on the fire in a pique of temper. By the time she’d changed her mind, most of it was gone. She just about managed to retrieve part of an address.’
‘To his home in the UK?’