‘First degree? How many do you have?’
‘Three.’
His surprise was obvious even without looking at him. She felt it in the way he shifted in his chair and in the tone of his voice. ‘Three?’
Heat flushed her skin. She ran her fingers along the stem of her wine glass.
‘No wonder you never got around to having sex. When in the hell would you have found the time?’
He laughed and she found herself laughing with him, shaking her head a little, but a moment later he was quiet, leaning forward and putting his hand over hers. Sparks flew through her veins, startling her with their intensity.
‘You’ve been teaching for a few years. It doesn’t add up.’
‘No, probably not,’ she drawled, and then words began to drop from her mouth without her conscious decision. ‘I graduated my physics degree at eleven. Maths at thirteen. I got my doctorate at fifteen then decided to study education.’ She lifted her shoulders. ‘I would have gone straight to teaching, but I was too young at sixteen, obviously, so spent a few years working with space agencies and doing some research projects.’
He was silent. When she lifted her eyes towards him he was staring at her as though she’d relayed all of this in an alien language.
‘You’re some kind of genius.’
‘I don’t really like the term genius,’ she said after a slight hesitation. ‘It’s often misunderstood, certainly misapplied, and it’s incredibly elitist. I have particular aptitudes. Where your strengths lie in business, mine are in mathematics and science. I was born being able to comprehend it and, because that’s reasonably unusual, was given unbelievable opportunities to develop that predisposition.’
‘Fine, not a genius,’ he said with a shake of his head, his beautiful blue eyes roaming her face. ‘How old were you when your parents realised you were—gifted?’
She sipped her wine, the myth of her brilliance one she’d heard her parents tell in interviews—interviews they’d been paid for, of course—so many times, she could almost repeat it verbatim. ‘I spoke in full sentences at six months of age. That’s unusual, but actually in people with extraordinarily high IQs it’s common.’ She flushed. ‘I appreciate how that must sound—’
‘It sounds like you have a nose on your face, two eyes in your head and an extraordinarily high IQ,’ he interrupted quietly, squeezing her hand. His words, and the simple acceptance of her brain’s abilities as merely something she’d been born with, filled something in her she hadn’t realised had needed filling. She nodded, just a small, involuntary movement.
‘By the time I turned one, I was reading and comprehending full books. At eighteen months, my parents had enrolled me in a monitoring programme that’s a global initiative. Children like I was are watched, tested, bench-marked endlessly. Sometimes, though it’s rare, a child can exhibit early signs of high IQ and then simply plateau. For those that don’t, the programme tracks development and finds placements that will, theoretically, stimulate cognitive skills.’
‘What kind of placements?’
‘I undertook several subjects at Walsh when I was five.’ Amelia named the American Ivy League that had been her first introduction to education. ‘From there, I spent two years in Japan, at the Nagomyaki Institute, and so on and so forth.’
‘Your family moved around a lot, then?’
‘They came with me, at first, but after a year or two they returned to their normal lives and left me at school to study.’
Amelia’s eyes met Santos’s and saw something in their depths that pulled at the fibres of her being.
‘You travelled on your own? To America?’ His frown was harsh, his disapproval obvious.
What could she say? She felt the same way, now that she was an adult. ‘America, Japan, Sweden. I was very capable,’ she offered by way of excusing her parents, even when emotionally she couldn’t really justify their actions. ‘But it was hard,’ she said on a sigh. ‘I was still a child and I think there was an expectation that emotionally I was on par with my intellectual abilities. I wasn’t. I used to get nightmares, terrible nightmares, and all I wanted was my mum.’ She shook her head a little, the maudlin thoughts the last thing she wanted to consider. ‘Anyway...’ she tapered the word off, lifting her shoulders. ‘That’s ancient history.’
He took a drink of his wine, then placed his glass between them. ‘Where do your parents live now?’
Something sharp jabbed her inside. ‘They’re in London.’ She spoke carefully but the words were still rich with emotion.
‘Do you see much of them?’
She swallowed past the lump in her throat. Six years and it was still almost impossible to accept the state of her relationship with her mother and father. ‘We’re estranged.’
‘Because they sent you around the world when you were practically young enough to be in diapers?’
Her expression lifted a little into a tight smile. ‘It’s at their choosing, not mine.’
He was watching her with obvious surprise. ‘Why?’ he prompted eventually, when she didn’t elaborate.
‘Because I opted to become a teacher. And teaching isn’t a particularly well-remunerated or regarded profession—at least, not like being a world-renowned astrophysicist.’