The Real Romero(60)
That fleeting glimpse of him sadly had been yet more fodder for her very active imagination.
If only this stupid charade had done what it should have done and exposed his failings. At this point in time, shouldn’t he have morphed into an arrogant bore with too much money for his own good? Shouldn’t the impact of his good looks have done her a favour by diminishing?
She sighed and peered a little more closely at her reflection. The hair looked wilder than usual but she had given up trying to tame it. Was this the look she really wanted to go for? Wild hair and a strappy dress, and high-heeled sandals that were so not her thing?
She and Lucas, at his mother’s urging, were going to have a supposedly romantic dinner out tonight. She had given Milly a stern talk on buying something pretty for the occasion, because she had not been shopping, and had managed to use what she had brought with her: jeans; T-shirts; more jeans; jogging bottoms.
So, despite lots of protests, she and Antonia had spent much of the day out. There had been no need to venture further afield into Madrid because Salamanca boasted designer shops for every taste. These were just the sort of things that were undermining the ‘cracks in the relationship’ that should have been happening by now.
Every crack Milly tried to break was papered over by Antonia, who seemed to think that her outspokenness was a charming and refreshing change from all the limpets who had cluttered her son’s life before.
And in the meantime, while all this was going on, she was seeing sides to Lucas that chipped away at her defences.
He was ferociously intelligent and, whilst he was good at listening to other sides of an argument, he liked to win. Over dinner—which was usually when she saw most of him, because his days were spent working to make up for the fact that he wasn’t actually in his office or on a plane going to meetings somewhere or other across the globe—they talked about everything under the sun. Antonia might generate the topic, but they would all contribute. And the topics flowed from one to another, from what was happening in the news to what had happened in the news, sometimes years previously.
He was a loving son without being patronising. He was very good at teasing his mother, and Milly’s heart always constricted when she witnessed this interplay between them.
Of course, she and her grandmother were very close, as she had insisted on telling them a couple of nights ago, but it was still something to have grown up without a mother figure. Or a father figure, for that matter. She might have had a sip or two too many at this point, Milly recalled uncomfortably. She had held the floor for far too long and she might even have become a little tearful towards the end. She shuddered thinking about it.
He was also funny, witty and downright interesting. He had travelled the world. It helped when it came to recounting fascinating anecdotes about faraway places.
Her heart picked up speed as another treacherous thought crept into her head like a thief in the night: she looked forward to his company. She spent her days in the grounds, sometimes by the swimming pool reading her book, often in the company of his mother. But, when five o’clock came, she always felt a stirring in her veins, as though her body was beginning to wake up and come alive.
And that wasn’t good.
In fact, it frightened her because, face it, Lucas was as distant as he had promised. Yes, when they were in each other’s company he was warmth and charm itself but, the second his mother wasn’t around, a shutter dropped and he became someone else. Someone cool, controlled and somehow absent.
Now, she noticed, he had stopped sitting quite so close to her on the sofa and the physical shows of affection...the little touches on her shoulder, her cheek, her arms...had dropped off.