Yes, well, she didn’t want him to propose since he didn’t tick any of her boxes but did he have to be so adamantly blunt about it? Aerin painted a smile on her face. ‘Do you know CPR?’
‘Yep, why?’
‘Because if by some miracle you did get down on bended knee, I would have a heart attack on the spot.’
Drake smiled with his mouth but not with his eyes. ‘If by some miracle you said yes, I would too.’
As it turned out, no one was all that surprised by Drake’s plan to whisk Aerin away for the rest of the weekend. The girls and their partners farewelled them as if they were indeed leaving for their honeymoon, with whoops and cheers and waves.
Drake drove through the moonlit night, glancing at her from time to time. ‘Why don’t you lay your head back and have a sleep? It’ll be an hour before we get there.’
Aerin tried but failed to disguise a yawn, quickly covering her mouth with her hand. ‘Sorry. I am a bit knackered. I don’t think I’ve danced that much in years, actually ever.’
‘Acting, too, can make you pretty tired.’
Aerin chewed his statement over for a beat or two. Had he found it trying to pretend all evening he was in love with her in front of her school friends and their partners? Had he hated every minute of it? If so, he had hidden it well. ‘Yes, it can. Was it awful for you to pretend to be in love with me for the evening? Chantal was convinced you were head over heels for me.’
It was too dark inside the car for her to see his features clearly, but she caught a glint of something in his eyes reflected off the moonlight. ‘People see what they want to see, especially when they’ve had plenty of alcohol.’
‘Yes, well, there was a lot of champagne consumed.’ She disguised another yawn and added sleepily, ‘I might just close my eyes for a bit. Wake me if you want me to take over the wheel at some point.’
‘I’m not used to letting anyone drive me. Call me a control freak but that’s just the way I live my life.’
Aerin was tired but not so tired she couldn’t hear the note of determination in his voice. She turned her head where it was resting against the headrest to glance at him again. ‘Because of the accident?’
There was a long silence. A silence that contained a strange energy, as if a ghost had suddenly joined them in the car. A shiver ran over Aerin’s skin and she pulled her evening wrap closer around her shoulders.
‘It wasn’t an accident.’ Drake’s voice was heavy, weighed down with something she had not heard in it before.
Aerin sat up straighter in her seat, her earlier tiredness falling away leaving her open-eyed and fully alert. ‘What do you mean?’
His mouth was twisted in a grimace. ‘My mother and sister didn’t die in a car crash.’
She swallowed tightly. ‘How did they die?’ Her voice came out in a shocked whisper.
Drake shifted the car’s gears to take a sweeping bend that climbed further into the hills of the countryside. He drove competently and yet there was an underlying anger in his movements, an anger she could sense he fought hard to control. ‘They were murdered.’
The words dropped into the car like a pulled grenade. Words Aerin had not expected. Words that were so shocking, so brutally shocking she couldn’t process them in her brain. It was like being stunned by a physical blow to the head. Her brain was spinning without traction, none of her thoughts finding a foothold. Drake’s family had been murdered? How had he lived with such dreadful pain? A car crash would have been tragic enough, but to have your entire family murdered by someone was just beyond bearing. How could anyone recover from such dreadful grief? Could you ever recover?
But then something did take hold in her brain as she recalled his statement:‘My mother and sister didn’t die in a car crash.’What about his father? Nothing was making sense. Everything she had been told about his family over the years—the little she had been told—was not true.
‘I’m sorry,’ Drake said after a long moment, his voice rough and heavy with regret, perhaps, she thought, even a little self-loathing. ‘I shouldn’t have told you.’
Aerin swept her tongue over her parchment-dry lips, her hands not quite steady in her lap. ‘What about your father? You said your mother and sister were...murdered...’ Even saying the word was horrifying to her. Of course one read about murders in the news every day but when you actually met someone who had lost someone they loved in such a despicable way, it made one realise the tragic enormity of such a loss.
‘Please,’ Drake said. ‘Forget I said anything. It’s not something I want to talk about. Ever. With anyone.’
‘Does Tom know?’
‘No.’
Another beat or two of silence passed. Aerin imagined she could hear her own heartbeat thumping in her chest like a drum. She could certainly feel the pulse of her blood hammering in her veins.
‘Why not? I mean, why didn’t you tell Tom? You’ve been friends for years.’
‘Because I chose not to tell anyone about what happened that day.’
And yet he had told her. Not all of it but enough for her to ache to know more.