They stared at each for what felt like an eternity. His dark eyes probed hers, looking, trying to see, trying to understand.
“Do you remember how often we used to swim in here?” He said finally, his smile contemplative.
She nodded. “Where else could we go without attracting attention?”
“You were just lucky I could hold my breath for so long. Remember when Olivia came to talk to you that time?”
She laughed despite her swirling emotions. “And you duck dove under the water for, like, five minutes?”
“I think it was closer to a minute, but yes,” he grinned. “I thought she’d never leave.”
“And I thought you were going to bubble up and ruin the secret.”
He laughed. “No chance. It was too much fun sneaking around.”
She shook her head with a growing sense of nostalgia. “We were such kids back then.”
“It was only three years ago,” he pointed out with a sobering of his expression. “Three long years for you, I suppose.”
“A year’s a year,” she demurred, spreading her arms in the water and pulling herself towards the edge. “And I have to get back now.”
He watched as she swum away from him with an increasing weight of frustration. He told himself, as she strode out of the water and shook her hair over her shoulder, that he felt desire for her. That desire was confusing him. That his need for her physically was making him overlook behaviour that he could never, in good conscience, justify. On paper, what she had done was hateful. To have concealed his daughter from him was heinous and wrong. But faced with what they shared, and the way his body seemed to want to touch hers constantly when they were together, it was more and more difficult for him to remember that.
Ava turned slowly, her eyes hesitant to meet his. “I’m going to put the tree up today. Do you want to … I mean … it’s something special. And Milly will really get what’s going on this year. Do you want to …”
He narrowed his eyes, and pushed down anything he was feeling for her. It was desire. That was all. Lust. Physical want. Nothing more.
“Yes, Ava?”
Ava was not prone to blushing but her eyes darted self-consciously from him to the house. “You’d be welcome to join us,” she said awkwardly, as if already regretting having made the offer.
“I have work to do,” he said with an air of unconcern.
But it caught Ava’s attention. “Work?” She prompted quickly, her breathing shallow.
“Yes, work. If I am to stay in the area, I will want to find work.”
“But … where? What are you doing?”
He scooped water into the palm of his hand and let it drizzle back to the dam’s surface with a splashy splash sound. “The Berries have asked me to coordinate with them on a Shiraz – basket pressed, using French oak. It would be interesting.”
“Are you going to do it?”
He shrugged. “I’m considering my options.”
Cristiano Barata was world-famous and award winning. Any wine he crafted was guaranteed to attract international attention. But she would never ask him to work at Casa Celli. It would reek of using their personal history and shared future to involve him in her professional life. And so she smiled politely. “I’m sure that will be excellent.”
His laugh was softly mocking. “I’m sure it will be too.”
She turned away from him and began to move towards the house. Far from having cooled off though, her temperature felt like it had spiked several points of degree.
Cristiano had always had that effect on her. When first she’d met him, it had been similarly hot. Though at the tail-end of Summer, the relief of Autumn was still in the distance. But one look from him made her feel as though she’d stumbled into Dante’s inferno.
Had she known from that first moment that it was love? She frowned, and teased her damp hair with her fingers as she walked.
No, she remembered with clarity, and a small sound of surprise for the strength of the memory. She had fought that initial feeling, and put it down to attraction.
Because she had still believed then that she loved Angus.