‘So, when did you learn to fly?’ she asked, deciding to lead the conversation down the ‘needless luxury’ route.
‘Years ago, for research. Flying lessons were one of the first gift experiences I decided to market, along with luxury driving days,’ he answered, handing her some headphones as they approached the runway.
It was genius, Libby realised, for the first time contemplating how he’d made his money. He’d recognised other people’s dreams and found a way of offering them neatly packaged in a box. But then that had always been what he did best—it was what had once persuaded her father to promote him from valet to salesman to showroom manager. He’d always known exactly which element of an Ashworth motor to push, depending on the customer and their body language. Speed and performance for men on the brink of a mid-life crisis; style and sex-appeal for the computer geek who’d just earned his first million; an investment opportunity for the retired banker and safety features for his anxious wife.
But did his customers ever really get everything they’d dreamed of? Or was the reality quite different? Libby thought bleakly, unable to help making a comparison with their marriage as they took off.
Marrying Rion had been her dream from the very first day she’d seen him—when she’d taken her father some papers he’d forgotten and caught Rion looking up at her from the 1964 Ashworth Elite he’d been polishing with those devastating liquid brown eyes. She’d been so infatuated that it hadn’t occurred to her that neither of them were ready for marriage, full-stop.
And it was no wonder she had felt that way really, she thought as they soared above Athens, the Parthenon shrinking to the size of a hotel on a Monopoly board below them. Because not only had he looked so different from the suitors her father had kept forcing her to meet, but when the furtive looks between them had eventually turned to snatched conversation on the days when her father was off-site, she’d discovered he was different. So unpretentious, and so exciting. He hadn’t spent their conversations praising her father or calculating the acreage of the Ashworth estate; he’d talked to her about the travel books she liked to read, about the customs in Greece—which had seemed the most exotic place in the world to Libby, who’d never left Surrey, and whose long, monotonous days had been spent walled up inside Ashworth Manor and its grounds.
Libby felt a tightness around her wrists and her ankles at the memory of how her father had deemed even a walk to the village shops too much autonomy, even in her late teens. How her mother, plagued by the guilt her husband had made her feel for never producing a son, had enforced every rule he created.
And so her conversations with Rion had become a ritual, however infrequent, which she’d survived on for the duration of her teenage years. And though the details they’d actually shared with one another during those conversations had been sparse—he’d rarely spoken about his childhood, and never mentioned any family other than his mother, who’d brought him to England when he was in his early teens—at the time she’d only seen that lack of information as a positive. He’d obviously had no wish to discuss what must have been a difficult period in his life, and she had understood that, because she’d had no wish to talk about her childhood either.
The whole appeal of their conversations had been that they’d offered an escape from that—a freshly created world where nothing that had gone before mattered. And, although she’d never really been able to see a way in which marriage to him might be possible, nor imagine exactly how it might be if it was, she hadn’t stopped dreaming about living in that world all the time.
Until one January day, not long after her nineteenth birthday, when she’d passed the showroom accidentally-on-purpose and found him actually waiting for her. He’d had a smile on his face so uncontainable that remembering it made her heart flip over even now.
‘Rion, what is it?’
‘Your father—he’s promoted me. I’m going to be the showroom manager.’
‘That’s fantastic!’ She beamed and threw her arms out, but just stopped short of embracing him, suddenly afraid that she might have imagined the significance of their conversations. Until he reached out and took her hands in his for the first time, and looked her straight in the eye.
‘It means that I’m going to be on a really decent salary.’
She nodded enthusiastically, her hands shaking.
He took a deep breath. ‘There’s something I want to ask you. That I’ve wanted to ask you for a long time. Before I didn’t think…but now…’