by Jessica Hart
‘Oh, Lex.’ Without thinking, Romy put her hands on his shoulders, and just for a moment Lex let himself lean back against her. Then he remembered that she was leaving and straightened.
‘What about you? How did it go with Freya’s father?’
‘Fine.’ Romy let her hands fall and moved away to the window, too restless to sit down. ‘It was fine,’ she said again. ‘Michael was a bit stunned at first, understandably, but once he’d got used to the idea and met Freya he was quite chuffed. He said he’d like to get involved in her life.’
Lex raised his brows at her lack of enthusiasm.
‘That’s good news, isn’t it? Most single mothers would welcome some support from the father.’
‘I know.’ With a sigh, Romy threw herself down on the sofa. ‘I’m going to take Freya down again in a couple of weeks.’
‘To stay with him?’ Jealousy sharpened his voice, but she didn’t seem to notice.
‘No. Michael’s back with his fiancée and they’re getting married next year. Obviously he wants her to meet Freya, so I’ll stay with Jenny again, and we’ll have what I imagine will be quite an awkward get-together. But Michael seems to think Kate-that’s his fiancée-will be OK about it once she meets me and sees I’m no threat.’
‘And then what?’ asked Lex harshly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What happens once you’ve established a cosy relationship with this Michael and his oh-so-understanding fiancée?’
‘I come back here and we see out this farce we’ve started,’ said Romy. ‘Jo should be back from maternity leave soon, and then I’ll have to decide. I might move to Somerset. It’s a lovely area, and it would be cheaper than London. And if Michael does want to see Freya regularly, that would work quite well.’
‘Oh, I can see that would be the perfect set-up for you,’ said Lex, bitterness threading his voice. ‘Then you’d have everything you wanted, wouldn’t you, Romy? Freya’s father there for when you need him, but he’s nicely tied up with his fiancée so there’s no danger he’ll try and get too close to you. No danger that you’ll lose your precious independence!’
‘You’ll have everything you want too,’ Romy pointed out, caught unawares by the animosity that was suddenly crackling in the air. ‘You’ll have your precious deal and your nice, quiet life. What’s the problem?’
‘No problem.’ Lex pushed back the piano stool and got abruptly to his feet. He was going out. He didn’t know where. Just out. ‘No problem at all.’
Aren’t you going out tonight?’
Lex was thrown when he let himself into his apartment the following Friday to find that Romy was sitting on the sofa with Freya, reading a story-or, rather, counting caterpillars while Freya smacked the pages. He had been coming home later and later that week, to avoid spending too much time with Romy, but that night he had expected her to be at the acquisition team’s celebration dinner.
‘I’m not going,’ said Romy, looking up from the caterpillars. ‘It’s too difficult with Freya.’
Lex hung up his jacket and went back into the living room, frowning as he unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. ‘You should be there,’ he said. ‘You were an important part of the team, and if it hadn’t been for you they might not have had anything to celebrate.’
Now he said it!
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Romy managed a careless shrug, hoping to conceal her disappointment. She really liked everyone in the team, and it promised to be a fun evening. They had all been dismayed when she said that she wouldn’t be able to make it.
‘I can’t leave Freya,’ she said. ‘If I’d been at home, I could have asked my neighbour’s daughter to babysit, but I don’t know anyone I could trust around here.’
‘You know me,’ said Lex, and she stared at him, the book forgotten in her hands.
‘I can’t ask you to babysit!’
‘Don’t you trust me?’
‘Of course I trust you, but… I couldn’t ask you to do that.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Lex said. He sat down on the sofa opposite her and there was a squeak. Leaning to one side, he pulled out a much-chewed teddy bear.
Freya gave a cry of recognition and held out her hands for it.
‘We’ve been looking for him,’ said Romy as Lex leant over and handed the teddy back to Freya, who immediately stuffed its arm in her mouth.
‘I’m just going to be here working,’ he went on. ‘As long as you put her to bed before you go, we’ll be fine.’
‘She doesn’t usually wake up,’ Romy agreed, weakening. It had been a long time since she’d been able to go out on her own, and she could already feel a lightening of her mood at the prospect. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t mind?’
‘If I minded, I wouldn’t have offered,’ said Lex brusquely.
So Romy got to go to the celebration dinner after all. Barely had the door closed behind her than Freya woke up. Lex tried to settle her in her cot, but nothing would console her, and in the end he succumbed and lifted her out. He had seen Romy walking her around, rubbing her back and humming soothingly, so he tried that, and it seemed to work.
Until he tried putting Freya back in her cot. She screamed and screamed and only stopped when Lex picked her up again and set off round the apartment once more.
Romy rang from the restaurant. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked anxiously.
Lex was holding Freya in one arm, and the phone in his other hand. He craned his neck to peer at the baby, who was snuggled into his collar. Ridiculously long lashes, still damp with tears, lay across her flushed cheeks. She seemed to be all right. If he admitted that she’d been crying, Romy would come home and miss the dinner after all. There was no point in both of them listening to Freya cry.
‘Everything’s fine,’ he said.
Lex didn’t even get to open his briefcase that night. Freya categorically refused to go back into her cot and he spent the entire evening walking her round and round the flat. He hummed and he sang and he rocked her gently, and at last, worn out, he stretched out on the sofa and let Freya sprawl on his chest, where she promptly dropped into a deep slumber.
When Romy came back, she found them both sound asleep. Held securely by Lex’s large hand, Freya lay flopped across his body, rising and falling with his chest.
Romy stood looking down at them, and her throat felt very tight. In sleep, Lex’s stern features relaxed, and he looked younger and infinitely more approachable than when those piercingly pale eyes were open and he had himself under rigid control. The normally hard mouth was slightly ajar, and a soft whistling sound came out with every breath.
I don’t want to fall in love with you, he had said. I just don’t want a baby.
And yet he had looked after Freya all night, just so that Romy could go out and enjoy herself. Very lightly, she touched his hair.
Was she doing the right thing in running away from any thought of commitment? Romy wondered. It would be so easy to slip into a relationship. If she had said yes when Lex suggested that they continue to sleep together, she would have saved herself all the itchy, prickly, churning frustration of not being able to touch him. She would have been able to take it for granted that Lex would look after Freya when she went out. Romy had clung to her independence for so long, it was second nature to her now, but, still, there were times when even she could see how appealing it would be to have someone else to share the responsibility, someone else you could rely on utterly.
The trouble was, she could also see how painful it would be when that someone decided they didn’t want to be with you any more. Romy’s thoughts went round and round in familiar circles. She and Lex might be sexually compatible, but a relationship needed more than great sex. It needed more than Romy could give. It needed trust.
At one level, she trusted Lex completely. He would never betray her with another woman. He wasn’t like her father, who had revelled in his double life. Lex had an almost old-fashioned sense of integrity. He
might be short on the social skills in which his brother excelled but he was completely trustworthy in that sense.
No, Romy wasn’t afraid he would leave her for another woman. What she feared was his inability to compromise. He would hate the mess and unpredictability of family life. He would hate not being able to control life with a baby, with a child, even with a woman.
And if he couldn’t compromise, they couldn’t live together, and they would split up. Romy wouldn’t-couldn’t-face being abandoned again. She couldn’t trust that it wouldn’t all go wrong and end in exactly the pain and mess that she was so determined Freya shouldn’t suffer. She couldn’t bear Freya to feel what she had felt when her father left.
No, better to keep her distance, Romy decided, and carry on as they were, but it was difficult to stay distant with Lex when they were living together. They walked into the office together in the morning, but after that first time he never again kissed her in Reception. Once there, they went their separate ways. Lex was far too senior for Romy to have any professional dealings with him. Rather to her surprise, her colleagues seemed to have accepted the idea of her being in a relationship with their chief executive.
‘He’s a behind-closed-doors kind of guy,’ Romy had said to explain why Lex ignored her in the office. She wasn’t sure whether the others believed her or not, but if they were baffled they kept any speculation to themselves.
It was surprising, too, how quickly she and Freya had adjusted to a completely new routine. Romy collected Freya from the crèche when it closed at five thirty and took her home. No, not home, she corrected herself and rewound her thoughts. She took Freya back to Lex’s flat, gave her supper and a bath, and by then Lex was usually home.
Freya loved to sit on his lap at the piano while Romy tidied up the worst of the mess. Lex was stiff with her at first, but Freya was irresistible when she put her mind to it. Romy wondered if Lex realised how much he had changed. She liked to listen to him talking to Freya. He made no concessions to the fact that she was a baby, but talked to her as if she were an adult.
‘That’s F sharp,’ he would say, pressing a key. ‘And this one here is E. Now listen to this chord… And then if I do this, see what happens…’
Conversation wasn’t a problem when Freya was around, but there was always a pool of silence once she was in bed. Occasionally Lex had some function to go to, but, if not, Romy usually prepared a meal for them to share.
‘You don’t need to cook for me,’ Lex had protested, but Romy didn’t like the prepared meals he was happy to cook straight from the freezer.
‘I’m cooking for Freya anyway,’ she said. ‘Besides, I enjoy it.’
It was true, and it gave her something to do in the evenings. Something that wasn’t remembering how sure, how warm, his hands had been. That wasn’t reliving that night at Duncardie. Something that wasn’t wishing that she had said yes instead of no, so that she could stand behind him and massage the tension from his neck and shoulders. If she could do that, she could press her mouth to his throat, trail kisses along his jaw until he turned his head to meet her lips with his own, let him pull her down onto his lap…
No, cooking was a much safer option.
CHAPTER NINE
AFTERWARDS she would pretend to read while Lex worked, but what Romy liked best was when he sat at the piano and forgot that she was there at all. During the day, he held himself rigid and guarded, shutting out the rest of the world, but at a piano his whole body seemed to relax and he swayed instinctively with the music while his fingers drew magic from the keys.
Her book would fall unheeded into her lap, and she would tip her head back and close her eyes. Romy had never had much of a feeling for music before, but when Lex played it felt as if he were strumming a chord deep inside her, and an intense feeling swelled in her chest and closed her throat.
‘You should play professionally,’ she said to him one night when he paused.
‘I don’t want to,’ said Lex. ‘And I don’t have time. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve got a company to run.’
On the sofa, Romy tipped her head right back on the cushions until she could see him behind her. ‘You could let Phin run the company.’
‘Phin?’ He gave a bark of laughter. ‘Phin would give away all our assets and spend all our profits on staff development!’ He was only half joking. ‘Gibson & Grieve would never recover!’
‘He’s not as irresponsible as you think he is,’ said Romy, leaping to the defence of her old friend. She and Phin had been close long before she had thought of Lex as anything more than Phin’s intimidating older brother. ‘Everyone I know thinks very highly of him.’
‘Of course they do. Everyone likes Phin.’ Resentment he hadn’t even known he felt splintered Lex’s voice. ‘He’s one of the most successful people I know. He goes his own sweet way, and because he makes people laugh, he gets away with it.
‘Our father wanted him to join Gibson & Grieve when he left university, but you didn’t catch Phin knuckling down and doing what he was supposed to do. Oh, no, Phin was off, drifting around the world, doing exactly what he wanted to do! He never cared about responsibility or the family or putting something back into the company that had paid for everything he had.’
Romy twisted right round so that she could look at him over the back of the sofa. ‘Is that what you’ve been doing all these years?’
‘Someone had to.’ Lex closed the piano lid. ‘I was the eldest. I suppose it was inevitable that I was expected to be the sensible one. Phin just clapped me on the shoulder, told me not to let it get me down, and took off.’ His mouth twisted in a humourless smile at the memory. ‘My parents were beside themselves, but Phin didn’t care.’
‘He came back when your father had a stroke.’
‘Yes, he did. He’s the golden boy now that he’s married Summer and settled down. Talk about the prodigal son!’
‘You sound like you resent him,’ said Romy carefully.
‘I do, don’t I?’ Lex got to his feet and prowled over to the long, glass wall. He could see the lights along the Embankment and the dull gleam of the river.
‘I think I envy him more than resent him,’ he said at length. Everything seems to come easily to Phin. He’s never cared half as much about our father’s opinion as I do, but he’s got his approval by doing exactly what he wanted.’
He turned back to face Romy. ‘And I’ll admit, he hasn’t been quite such a disaster as a director as I feared he would be. Mind you, I think that’s mostly down to Summer. Marrying her was the most sensible thing Phin ever did. But he hasn’t got the dedication to run Gibson & Grieve, even if he wanted to.’
‘There must be other directors who could take over as Chief Executive,’ Romy pointed out. ‘It’s not as if you need the money.’
‘It’s not about money,’ he said curtly.
‘Then what is it about?’
Lex hunched a shoulder, wishing Romy would stop asking awkward questions. ‘It’s about my career. It’s what I do. What I’ve always done. What I am. If you think I’ve spent my life wishing I could have been a musician instead of going into the family firm, forget it. Music is just…an escape.’
Romy looked up at him with her great dark eyes. ‘Escape from what?’ she asked softly.
Lex didn’t answer immediately. He went back to the piano, laid his hand on the smooth mahogany. Even silent, he could feeling the piano’s power strumming through the wood, calling to something inside him.
‘We all make choices,’ he said finally. ‘I made mine, and I don’t regret it. Do you regret any of the choices you’ve made?’
Romy thought about hot wind soughing through palm trees. About desert skies and coral reefs and drinking beer at a roadside warung while the tropical rain thundered down. And then she thought about Freya and the friends she had made at Gibson & Grieve and this crazy pretence she and Lex were engaged in. She had chosen them all.
‘No,’ she said in low voice. ‘The only choi
ces I regret are the ones that were made for me. I wasn’t allowed to choose whether my father stayed or not, and nor was my mother. We just had to live with the consequences of a choice he had made.’
She looked at Lex, still smoothing his hand absently over the piano. ‘I learnt from that,’ she said. ‘I learnt to never give anyone else the power to make a choice for me, and I never will.’
Freya was crying again. Lex squinted at the digital display on the clock by his bed. Three seventeen.
She had been restless the night before as well. Teething, Romy had said. This was the fifth time he had heard Romy get up tonight, and Lex couldn’t stand it any more. Pulling on a pair of trousers, he went to see if he could help.
Romy was walking Freya around the living room, just as he had done the night she had gone out to celebrate with the acquisitions team. She was barefoot, and wearing a paisley-patterned silk dressing gown that she had bought from a charity shop. The merest glimpse of it was usually enough to make Lex’s body tighten with anticipation, imagining the slippery silk against her skin, but tonight it was a mark of how exhausted Romy looked that his first thought was not what it would be like to pull at the belt and let the dressing gown slither from her shoulders, but to wonder how best he could help her.
He rubbed a tired hand over his face. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
Romy felt as if there were lead weights attached to her eyelids. The effort of putting one foot in front of another was like wading through treacle. And yet it seemed there were enough hormones still alert enough to stir at the sight of Lex’s lean, muscled body. His hair was rumpled, his jaw prickled with stubble, and the pale eyes shadowed with concern. She must look even worse than she felt, Romy realised. And that was saying something.
‘I’m sorry-’ she started but Lex interrupted her.
‘Don’t be sorry,’ he said. ‘Just tell me how I can help.’ He moved closer, craning his neck to try and see Freya’s face. ‘What’s the matter? Are you sure she’s not sickening for anything?’