In other words, she didn’t feel like herself.
Lex stood on the small veranda off the lounge of Addi’s and her cottage, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, the laughter of her sisters drifting in from where they were gathered in the kitchen. As they did every few minutes, her thoughts drifted back to what might’ve happened in the hotel room. Alone with Cole, she’d been oblivious to anything but him, entranced by the desire in his warm eyes, desperate to feel his mouth on hers, his big hands moving over her body.
When he looked at her, he made her feel powerful. Feminine. Lovely.
After she’d walked away from him, and when her heart rate had dropped to a pace where she thought it wasn’t about to explode, she’d left the lift and taken a slow walk through the hotel to where the valet had delivered the SUV, hoping that the freezing wind would cool her burning cheeks and shock her back to reality. It hadn’t, and for the rest of the day she’d been less than useless.
And she’d completely forgotten about the cupcakes... Snow and Nixi were still unimpressed.
Lex sighed, pulled her blanket tighter around her shoulders and sat down on the sofa tucked under the eaves. She pulled her legs up and rested her cheek on her knee, feeling both tired and, oh, so wired. Up until today, she hadn’t known how intense physical attraction could be, how it could cause one to act irrationally. If she’d had any warning of the way Cole would flip her inside out, she would’ve run a mile, because she was very familiar with the effects of unbridled desire: she’d been living with the fallout of it all her life.
Her mother Joelle was a very sensual woman, someone who never hid the fact that she loved men, loved the way they made her feel and that she was built for excitement, not monogamy. Joelle ran from man to man, chasing that constant sexual high. If what Lex had experienced with Cole was the same high Joelle chased, then she sort of got it. Why wouldn’t she want more of that as often as she could get it?
Lex didn’t have a problem, per se, with how Joelle lived her life. She couldn’t care less how many men she had, who she slept with and why. It was her body, her life, her choice...
But Lex hated the fact that she and her sisters were the random casualties of her mother’s war against societal norms, being sexually constrained and being expected to stay in one place with one man. As young girls, she and Addi had been introduced to so many men and shunted into the spare bedroom of Joelle’s latest boyfriend’s flat, house or hovel. They’d keep their heads down and pretend to be invisible but within a few weeks, sometimes a few months, they’d be on the move again.
Only Storm’s dad, Tom, bless him, had managed a few years before he’d called it quits with Joelle, taking Storm with him. After their split, life had continued as normal—a series of strange houses and strange men—until their mid-teens, when Joelle had convinced her Aunt Kate to allow Addi and her to stay with her for the long summer holidays, telling her aunt she had work in Thailand.
Joelle hadn’t returned in the New Year and had only come back six months later. It was hard to tell who’d been happier—she and Addi, or Joelle—when Aunt Kate had informed Joelle that the sisters had a permanent home with her. But, thanks to years of instability and having experienced Joelle’s rapid and impulsive decisions to move them on, Lex had known that anything and everything could change and had refused to get her hopes up only to have them come crashing down again.
It was only when she and Addi had inherited this, Aunt Kate’s, house on her death shortly after Lex’s twenty-first birthday that she’d felt that they had a permanent base and security, a place that was theirs. Nobody would ever again force them to move, kick them out or throw their stuff onto the pavement. They would never again be at the mercy of someone’s charity, used as a bargaining piece to stay:‘You can’t kick us out! I have children!’Nor would they be blamed for the demise of another of Joelle’s relationships:‘If I didn’t have you two, he’d still love me.’
Of course, history had repeated itself when Joelle had returned five years ago with two more daughters in tow.
Lex often thought about Joelle, how easily promises, plans and words of love tripped off her tongue.
The words came as freely as a stream flowed down a mountainous slope, yet she always walked away, every single time. Despite doing everything she could to become what Joelle wanted, from changing her hair colour and covering her freckles, her mum always walked away.
And, if her mother couldn’t love her enough to stick around, how could she trust anyone else to?
‘Lex? Are you okay?’
Lex lifted her head to see Addi standing in the doorway to their sitting room, her ultra-short blonde hair ruffled. She carried a wine glass and handed it to Lex, before sitting down next to her. Lex pulled the blanket from her shoulders and draped it across their legs, snuggling up to her older sister. They’d spent their childhood like this, cleaved together, standing up to a world ruled by volatile adults and trying to follow rules they didn’t understand.
‘Are the girls watching TV?’ Lex asked.
‘Yes,’ Addi answered. ‘Are you okay? You’ve been out here for a while.’
‘I...’ Lex started to tell Addi about the almost-kiss, but stopped when she realised she was drinking alone. Sharing a glass at the end of a day was what they did, a tradition.
‘Are you okay?’ Lex asked. Now that she looked closely, Addi looked exhausted. She had blue circles under her eyes, her pale skin was tight across her cheekbones and her normally quick-to-smile mouth was full of tension. ‘Have you heard anything about your job?’
Addi shook her head and Lex could see she didn’t want to discuss her work situation. ‘You know I’m not that worried if I get retrenched, Lex. Just last month I had two calls from companies wanting to headhunt me. I’ll pick up something very quickly. Let’s not talk about that now, okay?’ Addi rested her temple on Lex’s shoulder. ‘Storm called and she wanted to know how we felt about her taking the girls with her to visit Hamish and Callie at a beach house they’ve rented in Durban for the upcoming winter holidays.’
Hamish was Storm’s older half-brother by her father Tom’s first marriage and was married to Nixi’s and Snow’s paediatrician. They had two sons, roughly the same ages as Nixi and Snow.
‘And how do you feel about that?’ Lex asked her.
‘I think they should go,’ Addi told her. ‘Durban is divine in winter, so much warmer than here. The kids will have a blast. And who better to look after them than an orthopaedic surgeon, a paediatrician and their sister, who is an experienced au pair? And you need a break, Lex. You are exhausted.’
She was, and the thought of not having to worry about the girls for three weeks made her feel both guilty and thoroughly over-excited. ‘I’m okay with them going,’ she told Addi.
Lex placed her glass on the table next to her, not really in the mood for wine, trying to think of a way to introduce Cole Thorpe into their conversation. For some stupid reason she didn’t understand, she wanted to know whether Addi had met Cole yet and what she thought of him.
‘So I picked the big boss up earlier...’ she said, silently cursing herself. Why was she torturing herself like this? She should just put him out of her mind. ‘I tossed my coffee over him.’
Addi looked horrified. ‘Oh, Lex! Please tell me you’re joking?’