Chapter 11
“THERE YOU ARE.”
As a matter of fact, Skye didn’t know where she was. She’d dozed off, the grass under her back so soft and the sun so gently warm, that it had been impossible not to surrender to the suffocation of alcohol and serenity. “Yeah, well,” she sat up, trying to rally her thoughts, but her brain was still foggy. “You would be too if you’d just gone three rounds with that woman.”
That pulled Matthieu up. He frowned, his expression immediately showing concern. “What did she say to you?”
Skye reached to her side and collected the empty champagne flute, standing inelegantly as one leg was flooded by pins and needles. “Nothing important,” she muttered, shaking her head.
“I don’t believe you.”
Skye stared at him, her earlier anger resurgent. “That’s because I’m lying,” she muttered.
Surprise etched his features. “What did she say?”
“It doesn’t matter what she said, it’s what you didn’t say,” she jabbed a finger into his chest. “You should have told me—,”
“What?” He demanded, his voice flattened.
Skye frowned, her brain almost too foggy to grab hold of her thoughts properly. “Sorry, I don’t usually drink and I drank a lot,” she hiccoughed.
He stared at her. “Because of my aunt.”
“Well, yeah. She’s a real piece of work,” Skye said, then looked over her shoulder, cheeks flushing with guilt. “I know I shouldn’t say that, she’s your aunt –,”
“That doesn’t change the fact she is as you describe her.”
“She has strong opinions about me.”
“They’re not about you, they’re about me, and my life,” he corrected.
“Yeah, well, they felt a little bit about me.”
“I’m sorry. She has no right –,”
“She thinks she’s looking out for you.”
“By arguing with my fiancé?”
“I’m not really your fiancé,” Skye reminded him.
“What did she say?”
She dragged a hand through her hair, but as Matthieu’s eyes lifted, chasing the gesture, her heart kicked up a gear. “Everything is so complicated. Your family, your ex, you should have told me all this. I had no idea what I was walking into.”
His lips formed a flatline and something shifted in his expression, his handsome features contorting for a moment with a dark emotion she couldn’t comprehend. “Would you have agreed if you’d known?”
She gaped at him. “So you’re admitting you lied, to earn my cooperation?”
“I told you it wouldn’t be easy.”
“You told me I’d be dragged through the media and, by the way, I have been.”
“I know. I saw.”
Her cheeks grew pink. Somehow, imagining Matthieu reading the same comments she had filled her body with butterflies. “But I can cope with that,” she waved an angry hand through the air. “It’s just faceless nobodies wasting time online. That’s neither here nor there. But your aunt seems to want to hate me, and your grandmother—,” she broke off, shaking her head.
“What about her?”