by Kara Isaac
“Not horrible. Not great. I’m due to have some more scans soon. That will tell us more about when I can get back into training.”
She noted his use of “when.” But she kept her mouth closed. The guy was an elite athlete. He had to have some of the best sports doctors in the country giving him advice. He didn’t need to hear any more of hers.
“Enough about me. Let’s talk about you, Miss Mason. Starting with, what were you called back home?”
“Sorry?” She was thrown by the sudden change in topic.
“Emelia. It’s beautiful, but at four syllables, I can’t believe it didn’t get shortened.”
She drew a deep breath. “Mia. Most of the time I was called Mia.”
He studied her, but nothing in his gaze made her think he was connecting the dots. “You don’t like it?”
The urge came over her to pour out her entire gritty past right there in a decrepit pub in Oxford, but she tamped it down. She’d tell him one day, but not tonight. After the ball. She wasn’t going to ruin this.
“I never felt like Mia.” That was as close as she could get to telling him the truth. And it was true. There was a reason she’d picked Mia Caldwell as her byline. Because then, in some way, she could separate herself from her alter ego.
“What about Emmy?”
She actually jolted that time. It would have been easier to dodge the question, but she was tired of doing that. She wanted to give him something. A piece of her that was true. That mattered. Emelia sucked in a breath. “My mom used to call me Emmy. I haven’t let anyone else call me that since she . . .” She choked up, unable to get the final word out. Emmy had died the day her mom did. She hadn’t let anyone call her it since. “My mom died when I was six.”
Peter’s hand tightened around her waist, and she found herself cradled between his arm and his chest. He didn’t say anything, his breath whispering across her cheek.
Slowly, she relaxed into the music, his strength, and their steady steps across the worn carpet. After a few more seconds, she lifted her head to find his green eyes focused on her. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not trying to make it okay.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
Whatever her response was going to be, it faded as she realized that at some point in the last few minutes her fingers had slid up his shoulders and were tracing the nape of his neck.
“I concede defeat. You win.” Peter leaned down and whispered the words in Emelia’s ear. She leaned back, tilting her head and peering up at him from under her lashes.
“I win what?”
“The band. We should hire them. We’ll just have to make sure we get everyone’s donations first.” He gave her a grin.
For a second disappointment flooded through her but she masked it. She looked at the four pensioners, a smile coming to her lips.
“You’re probably right. It is a ball about second chances, after all.”
“Is that what you’re in Oxford looking for? A second chance?” Peter gazed at her like he could see all her secrets and didn’t hate her. Which was how she knew it was just a fantasy.
Emelia shook her head. “I don’t believe in looking for something I don’t deserve.” She pushed off from his chest and stepped away. “We should go. We’ve got what we came here for.”
Twenty-Seven
CRICKET. POSSIBLY THE MOST BORING game in the world. Peter hadn’t mentioned that at any point. As far as Emelia could work out, a guy ran up and threw a ball, and a guy at the other end hit the ball. Other players in the field tried to catch it or pick it up and throw it at some sticks that were behind the batter. And so it went on. For hours. Occasionally punctuated by players throwing their hands up in the air and yelling something indecipherable.
Emelia stifled a yawn as she surveyed the grounds at Oxford’s historic University Parks. She could now add this game to her list of things that only the English understood. They’d sold out of tickets weeks ago, even though the setting meant that people could just wander up and watch for free if they so desired. Apparently the appetite in this town for anything that featured the historical Oxford–Cambridge rivalry was pretty much insatiable.
She breathed in the warm summer air. Somehow, every member of both squads had committed to play. Along with a few of the coaching staff to make up numbers. Even though some of the guys had already finished their exams and had left their respective universities for summer, they’d come back for this.
As much as Emelia hated to admit it, it was all thanks to Sabine again. The two of them had given each other a wide berth but she’d seen her talking to Peter a few times. They’d certainly looked more friendly than most exes she knew.
“You look like you’d rather be watching paint dry.”
She looked up to see Peter walking toward her. His blue fitted T-shirt highlighted his muscular physique, the strapping tape poking out from underneath one of the sleeves displaying the reason he wasn’t on the field for Oxford.
He lowered himself down beside her on the grass. After doing her last set of rounds to check on refreshments for the teams, she’d found herself a spot at the far end of the field, where spectators were sparse.
“Do you wish you were out there?” She nodded toward the pitch.
Peter shook his head. “Nah. Cricket’s not really my thing.”
“Oh, thank goodness.” The words burst out of her. “I don’t think I’ve seen such a boring game in all my life.”
Peter let out a snort of laughter. “I wouldn’t go saying that too loudly. We English are quite protective of our national sport.” He grinned at her and the air crackled between them. They hadn’t really seen each other since the evening at the pub. Emelia had been busy with final details for the match—thank goodness that had required zero knowledge of the game—and Peter had, well, apart from the rowing beginners’ courses he’d mentioned teaching, she actually had no clue what he did with most of his time now that the Boat Race was over.
Not that it mattered. Not that he could matter. Knowing he was Anita’s cousin. Knowing that at any second Victor could decide to renege on their deal. That day had been a game changer. Any foolish fantasies she might have harbored that there could ever be something between them were well and truly destroyed. The dancing at the pub had been a mistake. She’d let herself get carried away and now was taunted by the memory of being in his arms when it couldn’t be allowed to ever happen again.
She searched for something neutral to say. “Oh. I finally finished the book about the brothers who rowed in the Boat Race.”
If he was surprised by her abrupt change in topic, he didn’t show it. “What did you think?” Peter leaned back on his good arm.
What did she think? She thought it was the craziest thing she’d ever read. Ever heard of. “In the first bit. That guy. Seb. Is that true? Did he really pass out?”
“He did indeed. Cost Cambridge the race.”
“He was unconscious!” Emelia was offended on the guy’s behalf. Even if it had been over a decade ago. She’d reread the first chapter over and over, trying to understand what it was that would make someone not even stop rowing when they were passing out.
“That’s how it works. You leave everything on the water.” Peter looked back to the field at the cracking sound of the bat hitting the ball.
“Is that how you felt on the water? When you were rowing?” After finishing Blood over Water Emelia felt like she had a small understanding of what might drive him to risk everything to get to the top again. But she wanted to hear it from him.
“Yeah.” He looked back to her, his face contemplative. “Those guys, they were closer to me than my own brother. You’d do anything not to let the team down. All of us would. When I came to in hospital that night in Italy, one of my first thoughts was, At least it didn’t happen in the boat. If I had to get injured, at least I didn’t fail the team.”
“How old were you when you started?” This was safe territo
ry. She could talk to Peter about rowing all day without worrying about her secrets trying to escape.
“Fourteen.” He laughed. “Poor Mum. If she’d had a clue how bad I was going to get the bug, she never would have promised to be there to cheer me on at every race.”
“Your mom was at every race?” But if he’d become an elite athlete, surely that must have been . . . hundreds?
“Every one in England. Rain, sleet, or sun. I let her off the hook for the overseas ones. Though my parents did manage to make it to a couple of world champs.” He shook his head. “I can still see her like it was yesterday. Every race. There she was with her blanket and thermos of tea.”
“That’s so—” Without warning, Emelia found herself choking up. She coughed and tried to finish her sentence like a normal human being but found herself unable to speak past the boulder in her throat.
She didn’t even get why this mattered so much. She’d been fine without a mom. Sort of fine. Managed to pave her own way in the world. Then suddenly she’d gotten exposed to a stupid ordinary Peter story about his mother and all she wanted to do was curl up and cry for years.
“Are you okay?” He leaned a little closer but not enough to touch. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed.
“I’m fine. I’m sorry. I feel like such a dork.” Emelia swiped at her cheeks, mortified to find them damp. The poor guy must have been wondering what kind of drama queen she was.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
“It’s so stupid. That story about your mom. I guess I just suddenly really missed mine.” She picked up a couple of blades of grass and rolled them together between her fingers. “Most of the time I don’t even think about it. And then sometimes, like today, it just kind of sneaks up on me that I don’t have one. I just wonder what she would have been like.”
“Can you tell me about her?”
Emelia sneaked a glance sideways to find him looking right at her. She didn’t know what to say. Most of the time when people found out she was motherless, they hurried to change the subject, move the conversation along, as if somehow her bad familial luck might rub off on them. No one, not ever, had asked about her.
And now that someone had, it was like a balloon had blown up in her chest, ready to burst if she tried to squash it. “She was very beautiful. But then I guess all six-year-old girls think their mom is the most beautiful woman they’ve ever seen. She loved Narnia more than anything in the world.” More than the world itself, in the end.
Emelia drew in a breath. “I used to come home from school and we’d play our favorite parts in the books. We would pretend that the dining room table was the Dawn Treader and we were sailing for the Eastern Islands. Or that our garden was the woods in between and we’d jump in the puddles and move between the worlds.” Where play ended and the mental illness began, Emelia would never know. She hadn’t even realized until she was a teenager that most kids didn’t have mothers who forgot about things like dinner and homework because they were too busy living in a land of make-believe.
“So you got your love of Narnia from her.”
“I did.” She cracked a smile. “She’s also to blame for why I can’t even microwave popcorn. She was a terrible cook. Couldn’t even boil an egg. But for some weird reason, she could make the best waffles in the world. That was it. We probably would have lived on waffles if it wasn’t for cereal and takeout. And she had a heart as big as the Atlantic. She hated to see anyone in need.”
“She sounds like a great woman.”
Peter was close enough that she could smell his musky scent. It was an act of will not to reach up and run her hand along his jaw, which hadn’t seen a razor in a few days. She forced her gaze to go over his shoulder. “She wasn’t perfect, but she was mine.”
“What about your father?”
The perfect topic to ruin the moment. Emelia huffed out a breath of air as she tore up some more grass. “He might as well be dead.”
He might as well be dead. A gust of wind caught Emelia’s caustic words and threw them back in her face. It wasn’t true. A live, but uninterested, parent was definitely better than two dead ones.
“I’m sorry, that’s a horrible thing to say.” Emelia dropped her decimated blades of grass onto the ground between her feet and kept her focus there, not wanting to see the judgment that she was sure had to be written across his face. “I’m sure he did his best.”
“But it wasn’t enough?”
She chanced a look up. Searched his gaze for condemnation but found only concern. Emelia shrugged her shoulders. “We’d been close. At least I feel like we had. Then, when my mom died, it was like he couldn’t be around me. I look a lot like her. Maybe I reminded him of too much. So, I became the ward of after-school programs and summer camps. The occasional trips to see his parents, who had no idea what to do with me either. They’d had children quite late, and so they were already older by the time I was born. My aunt did her best to help but she had her own family and didn’t live close.”
“What about your mother’s family?”
She tucked a piece of wayward hair behind her ear and looked anywhere except at him. “My mom was an only child. My grandfather died of a heart attack when I was a baby and then my grandmother died not long after my mom from cancer.” She laughed mirthlessly. “Great set of genes I’ve got.”
Peter didn’t say anything for a few seconds, no rushing to fill the void with pointless platitudes. It made her like him even more.
She forced her gaze away again. Focused on his gray flip-flops, which showcased feet so white today had to be the first time they’d been let out in public this summer. His second toes were longer than his big toes. She’d finally discovered a part of him that wasn’t attractive. If she could hold every conversation looking at those for the next few months she’d be fine.
The silence stretched until eventually she couldn’t stand it anymore. “What are you thinking?”
He sighed. “I was thinking about how I felt like I’d been robbed when I had to give up my dream of rowing at Rio. But that doesn’t even come close to being robbed of a parent. Feeling like you’ve lost two. Then I was thinking what a terrible human being I was that I could even compare rowing to what you’ve been through.”
“You’re not a horrible human being. Far from it.” She should know. She’d crossed paths with more than a few of them. Become one herself.
Peter’s fingers brushed against hers and she sucked in a breath. Let herself look up and be captured by his intent gaze. “I’m sorry your father doesn’t realize what an amazing daughter he’s missing out on.”
How could he know that her fear was her father knew exactly what he was missing out on? Emelia swallowed. “Thanks.” She just managed to get the word out. Time to get this conversation back onto neutral ground.
Peter nodded toward the field, like he knew what she was thinking. “So, this looks like it’s all going pretty much perfectly. Hopefully we’ll make a decent chunk of change off it.”
The university had kindly donated the use of the grounds, so SpringBoard’s biggest expenses were in printing tickets, advertising, and hosting a reception after the event. That had been her idea after seeing at the ball how some girls totally lost their heads around Boat Race rowers. Host a reception for both teams and charge a hundred quid a head for a select number of groupies to get to be in the same room as their idols. Though she was going to hazard a guess, from the perfect hair, sultry gazes, and skimpy sundresses she’d seen around, that most of them would be gunning for far more than that.
Emelia stretched out her legs in front of her. “Well, I guess that’s the upside of it being the most boring game in the world. The opportunities for it all to go badly are very limited. If all goes well we should make almost twenty thousand pounds off this.”
Not even close to what they needed to save the charity, but it was still something. And since the row-off there had also been a slight uptick in potential donor int
erest, reversing the trend of the last six months.
“You’re doing a great job.”
“Thanks. I couldn’t do it without you.” Emelia smiled up at him, the late-afternoon summer sun setting a halo behind his hair. The green of his eyes seemed to darken as his gaze held hers. Emelia caught her bottom lip in her teeth. You couldn’t deny the chemistry between them any more than you could deny gravity.
“So—”
“I—”
Whatever they were both about to say was cut short by shouts from the field. Jerking her head toward the commotion, Emelia gasped as she registered what she was seeing. On the field the teams looked to be slugging it out, while spectators wearing the two universities’ blues were streaming onto the pitch, some fists already flying.
A brawl. She was pretty sure this would count as going very badly.
Twenty-Eight
EMELIA SHRANK BACK INTO THE comfort of darkness. All the better to not see the papers she held in her hands, resting between her torso and wedged-up legs.
She pushed some clothes away from her face, the hangers scratching along the rail, and breathed in the smell of laundry detergent and her own fear.
Peter was right. She never should have taken this job. Because of her, SpringBoard was worse off than it had been six months ago. Not only wasn’t she going to save it, she was going to be the final nail in the coffin.
A tear meandered down her cheek and she swiped it away. She deserved no one’s pity. Not even her own.
Voices echoed from outside on the landing. Allie’s New Zealand accent came first, then a deeper one. English. Her pulse kicked up a notch. She hadn’t seen Peter since he’d bolted into the fray of the brawl. Hadn’t responded to any of the messages he’d left in the ten days since.
It had all been over ten minutes later, the appearance of the police enough to calm even the most rabid of spectators down. But ten minutes was all it took to destroy everything she was trying to save.
“I don’t think she’s home from the office yet.” Allie’s voice. A knock at her door.