She climbed in, wanting to ask him what had caused the dis
tance between him and his mother, because she had the distinct feeling it had very little to do with her meltdown on the dance floor, but stopped herself. She’d done enough damage for one night.
He settled in the seat beside her, but as he switched on the ignition there was one question she couldn’t resist asking.
‘Why didn’t you introduce us when we arrived?’
He slung his arm across her seat as he backed the car down the driveway. Finding a place to turn round, he executed a perfect three-point turn before finally replying. ‘No particular reason. I just didn’t spot her until she joined me on the dance floor.’
He was lying, she knew it, but was afraid to call him on it. Had he maybe regretted bringing a virtual stranger to the party once they’d arrived?
As they powered down the driveway the rows of vines cast lengthening shadows on the tarmac as full dark fell.
She sank into the car’s bucket seat, the leather scent a pleasant accompaniment to the freshening wind, and studied his profile. He really was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. And so many things about him fascinated her.
Now she’d met his family—and especially his mother—he only fascinated her more. She wondered about him, what it had been like for him growing up. He was clearly close to his mother. When they had been dancing together in the lantern light, it had been obvious how close they were. But where did all the tension come from? Maybe it had something to do with his father? The pinche gringo Juana had talked about so disrespectfully. What had this man done that meant that no one in his family was even permitted to talk about him? That couldn’t be healthy surely? And was that where the distance between Zane and them came from?
All questions she had no right to ask him. But she simply couldn’t resist satisfying a little of her curiosity.
‘Why do you call your mum by her given name?’
He didn’t answer for a long time, and she wondered if he had heard her, but then he shrugged. ‘I used to call her Mom when I was a little kid. But as I got older, it got easier not to.’
‘Why?’ she asked, only more intrigued by the nonexplanation.
How the hell had they gotten onto this topic?
Zane glanced across the stick shift at the sleepy question. Iona’s wide brown eyes blinked owlishly. She looked exhausted.
‘I’m not sure I want to tell you,’ he said, hoping to stall her until she fell asleep.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’ll make me sound like a jerk.’ Which was exactly what he had been as a teenager. Selfish and volatile and immature. But there was another reason too, which he had no intention of sharing.
‘How so?’
He huffed out what he hoped sounded like a relaxed laugh. ‘All right, if you really need to know. At high school, she was much younger than the other moms, and well…’ he rapped his thumb against the wheel ‘…built.’ He stiffened at the description, and the memory of the wolf whistles and the catcalls she’d endured whenever she’d come into George Wallace Memorial High. ‘She got a lot of attention. I’d lose my temper, get into trouble and I couldn’t tell her why, because I didn’t want her to know what they said about her.’
He pumped his foot on the gas remembering the constant fights, the swollen knuckles and black eyes and split lips, and the endless journeys to the principal’s office, where he’d be forced to sit, sometimes for hours, refusing to defend or apologise for his actions. The impotent anger had boiled inside him for years—at the injustices his mother had suffered, simply because she was young and beautiful and had been forced into a life she had never wanted. But deep down there had been another anger, much blacker and more damaging, that seething, pointless self-loathing that he’d been unable to control then and didn’t want to acknowledge now.
‘Pretty damn dumb when you think about it with the benefit of maturity,’ he said. ‘If I’d been less proud and less stupid I would have ignored what they said.’
‘You were protecting her in the only way you knew how,’ Iona said, her voice thick with sleep. ‘That’s not proud or stupid. It’s very gallant.’
Zane shrugged, the pleasure at her support making him feel uneasy—and exposed. ‘Not exactly, because then I started calling her by her given name, so the other kids would think she was my older sister instead of my mom.’
Iona sighed gently. He looked across the console as the car eased to a stop at the end of the vineyard’s driveway.
‘So in answer to your question,’ he continued, ‘that’s how I came to call her Maria, and now I’m a grown man it seems kind of dumb to call her Mom again.’
He couldn’t make out Iona’s expression in the low light, but she looked straight back at him.
‘It’s astonishing, isn’t it, how cruel other kids can be, if there’s something a bit different about your family set-up?’ she murmured and he detected a note of wistfulness that made him realise she knew how it felt. ‘We’re all such horrid little conformists when we’re young.’
His shoulders relaxed at the lack of censure. ‘Yeah, I guess. But it must have been tougher for you when your mom left?’ he asked, keen to steer the conversation away from himself.
‘Aye, well, it wasn’t great.’ He felt the pinch in his chest at the weariness in the words. ‘But we got over it.’ She snuggled into the seat and yawned. ‘I guess the hardest part is the not knowing why. When you’re ten you’re just egocentric enough to naturally assume it has to be your fault.’