‘That was before you kissed me again.’
He sighed and rammed his hand through his hair, and she began to feel sorry for it.
‘The kiss was nothing,’ he said shortly, ‘you know that, you said so yourself. And I’m sorry it upset you. It just seemed—right. Natural. The obvious thing to do. We were playing, and then there you were, right under the mistletoe, and—well, I just acted on impulse. It really, really won’t happen again. I promise.’
She didn’t challenge him on that. He’d promised to love her forever, and he’d driven her away. She knew about his promises. And hers weren’t a lot better, because she’d promised to love him, too, and she’d left him.
What a mess. Please, please thaw so we can get away from him...
She reached for a sandwich and bit into it, and he sat forward, pouring the wine and sliding a glass towards her.
‘You didn’t tell me what you thought of this wine at lunch.’
‘Is it important?’
He shrugged. ‘In a way. I’ve got shares in the bodega. It’s a good vintage. I just wondered if you liked it.’
‘Yes, it’s lovely.’ She sipped, giving it thought. ‘It goes well with the goose and the cranberries. It is nice—really nice, although if it’s fiendishly expensive it’s wasted on me. I could talk a lot of rubbish about it being packed with plump, luscious fruit and dark chocolate with a long, slow finish because I watch the television, but I wouldn’t really know what I was talking about. But it is nice. I like it.’
He laughed. ‘You don’t need to know anything else. You just need to know what you like and what you don’t like, and I like my wines soft. Rounded. Full of plump, luscious fruit,’ he said, and there was something in his eyes that made her catch her breath and remember the gaping towel.
She looked hastily away, grabbing another sandwich and making a production of eating it, and he sat back and worked his way down a little pile of them, and for a while there was silence.
‘So,’ he said, breaking it at last, ‘what’s the plan for your house? You say you can’t sell it at the moment, but what will you do when you have? Buy another? Rent?’
‘Move back home.’
‘Home? As in, come back and live with your parents?’
‘Yes. I’ll have childcare on tap, they’ll get to see lots of Josh and I can work for my boss as easily here as I can in Huntingdon.’
He nodded, but there was a little crease between his eyebrows, the beginnings of a frown. ‘Wouldn’t you rather have your independence?’
She put down the shredded crusts of her sandwich and sighed. ‘Well, of course, and I’ve tried that, but it doesn’t feel like independence, really, not with Josh. It’s just difficult. Every day’s an uphill struggle to get everything done, hence watching the television when I’m too tired to work any more. There’s no adult to talk to, I’m alone all day and all night except for the company of a two-year-old, and after he’s in bed it’s just lonely.’
The frown was back. ‘He’s very good company though when he is around. He’s a great little kid.’
‘He is, but his conversation is a wee bit lacking.’
Sebastian chuckled and reached for his wine. ‘We don’t seem to be doing so well, either.’
‘So what do you want to talk about? Politics? The economy? Biogenetics? I can tell you all about that.’
‘Is that what you do?’
‘A bit. I don’t really do anything any more. I just collate stuff for them and check for research trials and see if I can validate them. Some are a bit sketchy. It’s an interesting field, genetic engineering, and it’s going to be increasingly useful in medicine and agriculture in the future.’
‘Tell me.’
So she talked about her work, about what her professor was doing at the moment, what they’d done, and what she’d been studying for her PhD before she’d had to abandon it.
‘Would you like to finish it?’ he asked, and she rolled her eyes.
‘Of course! But I can’t. I’ve got Josh now. I have other priorities.’
‘But later?’
She shrugged. ‘Later might be too late. Things move on, and what I was researching won’t be relevant any longer. Things move so fast in genetics, so that what wasn’t possible yesterday will be commonplace tomorrow. Take the use of DNA tests, for example. It’s got all sorts of forensic and familial implications that simply couldn’t have been imagined not that long ago, and now it’s just accepted.’
His heart thumped.
‘Familial implications? Things like tracing members of your family?’ he suggested, keeping his voice carefully neutral.
‘Yes. Yes, absolutely. It can be used to prove that people are or aren’t related, it can tell you where in the world you’ve come from, where your distant ancestors came from—using mitochondrial DNA, which our bodies are absolutely rammed with, most Europeans can be traced back down the female line to one of a handful of women if you go back enough thousands of years. It’s incredible.’
But not infallible. Not if you didn’t know enough to start with. And not clever enough to give a match to someone who’d never been tested or had their DNA stored on a relevant database. He knew all about that and its frustrations.
Tell her.
‘So, tell me about this bodega,’ she said, settling back with a slab of fruitcake and a chunk of cheese, and he let the tension ease out of him at the change of subject.
‘The bodega?’
‘Mmm. I’ve decided it’s a rather nice wine. I might have some more when I’ve finished eating. I’m not sure it’d go with cake and cheese.’
‘I’m not sure cake and cheese go together in the first place.’
‘You are joking?’ She stared at him, her mouth slightly open. ‘You’re not joking. Try it.’
She held out the piece of cake with the cheese perched on top, the marks made by her even teeth clear at the edge of the bite, and he leant in and bit off the part her mouth had touched.
He felt something kick in his gut, but then the flavour burst through and he sat back and tried to concentrate on the cake and cheese combo and not the fact that he felt as if he’d indirectly kissed her.
‘Wow. That is actually rather nice.’
She rolled her eyes again. ‘You are so sceptical. It’s like ham and pineapple, and lamb and redcurrant jelly.’
‘Chalk and cheese.’
‘Now you’re just being silly. I thought you liked it?’
‘I do.’ He cut himself a chunk of both and put them together, mostly so he didn’t have to watch her bite off the bit his own teeth had touched.
Hell. How could it be so ridiculously erotic?
‘So—the bodega?’
‘Um. Yeah.’ He groped for his brain and got it into gear again, more or less, and told her all about it—about how he’d been driving along a quiet country road and he’d broken down and a man had stopped to help him.
‘He turned out to be the owner of the bodega. He took me back there and contacted the local garage, and while we waited we got talking, and to cut a long story short I ended up bailing them out.’
‘That was a good day’s business for them.’
He chuckled.