Rainy Day Sisters (17 page)

Poppy's happy chatter dominated dinnertime, and afterwards Bella disappeared upstairs again and Poppy went to watch TV in Alex's bedroom; he told Lucy it was the only TV in the house because he didn't want it overtaking their lives. Lucy, who had a secret passion for reality TV, the more obscure the better, had simply nodded.

Now she stacked the dirty plates in the dishwasher, conscious that she should head home and yet not willing to end the evening.

“You don't have to clean up,” Alex said as he came into the kitchen, tossing the empty chip cartons into the bin. “You've done so much already.”

“It's not a big deal.”

He watched her for a moment, his hip braced against the counter. “Coffee?” he finally asked, and Lucy looked up, fully intending to tell him no, she needed to go home, it had been a lovely evening, and so on.

“Yes, please.”

Mentally she shook her head at herself. She finished loading the dishwasher while Alex made them both coffees, and then took them into the sitting room, which was a surprising oasis of quiet and calm. Distantly from upstairs Lucy could hear Bella's music and Poppy's television program.

“This room isn't too much of a mess,” Alex said with a rueful glance at the overstuffed sofa, which had only a few of Poppy's stuffed animals scattered across it. “Mainly because we hardly ever use it.”

“It's a lovely room.” A coal fireplace with a painted tile surround took up one wall, and French doors overlooked the untidy garden in the back.

“Yes, I always liked this room,” Alex agreed. He'd joined her on the sofa, and although there was an entire seat cushion between them, Lucy still felt conscious of him: his body, his heat, his whole presence. Charlie had lumbered in after them and now he threw himself down at their feet with a theatrical groan of contentment.

Lucy curled up on the cushions, cradling the coffee mug in her hands, striving to make the scene seem normal. And it did seem normal, in a hyperaware sort of way. “It must be hard, to keep things going all the time on your own,” she said. “I don't know how single parents do it, really.”

Alex gave a little grimace. “Neither do I.”

“You mentioned grandparents? Are those your parents?”

“No.” He spoke rather flatly. “Anna's parents. They live down near London, but they like to see the girls as often as they can.”

Lucy nodded, noting the way he'd spoken about them wanting to see the girls, not him, and wondering if that was significant. “And what about your parents?”

“They're both dead.”

“I'm sorry.”

He shrugged, his gaze sliding away from her. “What about you?” he asked after a moment. “This famous artist mother of yours?”

Lucy shrugged. She'd rather talk about anything than her mother. “That's all there is to say, really.”

He turned back to look at her with a faint smile. “Surely not. Is she very famous?”

“In certain circles.” She hesitated, then said, “Her name is Fiona Bagshaw. Have you heard of her?”

He gave her a quizzical look and shook his head. “Can't say that I have. Should I have done? I'm a bit of a Philistine when it comes to modern art.”

“Thank goodness for that,” Lucy answered, and then felt stupidly disloyal to her mother. It wasn't as if her mother had been loyal to her. “She does sculptures and installations for museums and public parks, stuff like that. She also tends to be quoted in articles and on TV, at least in America. If a newspaper wants a controversial opinion, they generally ask her.”

Alex nodded slowly. “I see.” He paused, his gaze sweeping over her. “And let me guess. Your artistic endeavors are a little different from hers?”

“You could say that.” She gave him a crooked smile, even though her mother's scathing contempt for her work still burned. Still
hurt
. “Twee watercolors, she called them. Distinctly uninspired and amateurish.”

“Ouch.”

Lucy shrugged. “She was probably right.”

“You can't say that.”

“Neither can you, since you haven't seen them.”

He stretched his legs out, resting one arm along the back of the sofa, his fingers only inches from her shoulder. “Still, I think I like the sound of them, at least compared to whatever it is your mother does.” He arched an eyebrow, waiting, and Lucy managed a smile.

“She started out sculpting breasts. Huge, lumpy ones.”

Alex winced and a little giggle escaped her. She was glad
someone
wasn't taking her mother's art seriously. “What has she moved on to, then?” he asked.

“Oh, well. Um . . . the male anatomy.”

“I think I definitely prefer the watercolors.”

“Even if you haven't seen them?”

“Even so. What are they of, exactly?”

“I do nature scenes. Wildflowers, mostly.” The antithesis of what her mother did, essentially, although whether she'd set out to be her mother's opposite, artistically anyway, Lucy didn't know.

“They definitely sound like more my kind of thing.” He held her gaze then, or perhaps she held his; and suddenly she was intensely aware that the arm he'd stretched out along the back of the sofa was quite close to her. If she leaned back and tilted her head to one side, his fingers would brush her hair, maybe even her cheek.

She had no intention of doing that, of course.

Just thinking about it. Quite a lot.

“So what happened to make you leave Boston?” Alex asked. He broke their locked gazes, shifting in his seat, the second's worth of intensity now sliding into awkwardness. “If you don't mind me asking.”

Amazingly, she didn't mind. She'd wanted to keep it secret, or at least separate from her life in Hartley-by-the-Sea, but she felt Alex might understand, maybe even sympathize, which was an incredible thought, considering a week ago she'd thought he was an ass.

“You don't have to tell me,” Alex continued when Lucy hadn't said anything. “It's not really my business. . . .”

“It's going to sound kind of lame,” Lucy said. “Or maybe ridiculous. I don't know.”

“Now I really am curious.”

“I was working as a barista in this gallery café, like I told you before. It was just a way to pay the bills and get a toe into the art world.”

“Didn't your mother give you a toe in?” Alex asked, and Lucy made a face.

“That was part of the problem.” She felt a familiar tightness in her chest. It had been over a month since this had happened and yet it still hurt to remember. “I didn't want to succeed because of who my mother was,” she explained. “Is. I wanted to do it on my own. So I worked at the café and spent every spare waking minute working on getting a portfolio together, something I could show galleries.” She took another breath, let it out slowly. In the distance she heard a burst of staccato laughter from the television. It sounded like gunfire.

“And did you get a portfolio together?” Alex asked after a moment.

“Yes, and the gallery where I worked agreed to show it. My boss said he thought I had promise. But it turned out he'd only agreed so my mother would come to his gallery. She had—has—that kind of pull. I told him she would come because, well, she's my mom. I thought she would come for me.”

“She didn't come,” Alex stated flatly.

Lucy let out a laugh. “That would have been bad enough, I suppose, although I think I could have handled it. I hope I could have. But she did more—or less, depending on how you look at it. She wrote an editorial about it—about me—in the Boston newspaper.”

“What?” Alex lurched upright, and even in her remembered misery Lucy smiled to see him look so indignant on her behalf. “What about, exactly?”

“It was titled ‘Why I Will Not Give My Daughter a Free Ride' and it was all about how genuinely terrible my work was and how she couldn't support it simply because I was related to her by blood. How endorsing such”—she made her hands into clawlike quotation marks—“
tedious mediocrity
would compromise her artistic integrity, and encourage other, similar would-be hacks to pick up a paintbrush.” She practically had the whole, awful editorial memorized, which was pretty sad in itself.

Alex swore under his breath and Lucy forced a smile. “Of course, when my mother makes a statement in the press, everyone takes it up and runs with it. She thrives on being controversial. So for a while every blog and gossip site seemed to have it. Someone found a photo of one of my paintings and that went up too.” Along with the thousands of comments Lucy couldn't keep from reading; so many of them had been in a similar vein as her mother's editorial, and although her friends had told her not to pay attention to Internet trolls, it had still hurt. A lot.

“That must have been pretty terrible,” Alex said quietly.

“My boss withdrew the offer of the showing. The bad press was simply too much, he said.” She thought about telling Alex about Thomas, about how he'd said all the media attention was “bad for the boys,” and how Lucy had tried the cheapest, oldest trick in the world and threatened to break up with him, just so he'd beg her to stay.

He hadn't.

But she'd told Alex enough of her sob story. So instead she just shrugged and leaned her head back against the sofa. “Yeah, it all pretty much sucked.” She made a face. “Sorry.”

Alex frowned. “For what?”

“Bella said you don't let her say that word.”

He smiled then, that lovely little quirk. “You're not Bella. And in any case, you just heard me swear. I'm a bit of a hypocrite.”

“You're allowed.”

“Am I?” His smile disappeared then and for a second he looked so sad that Lucy wanted to put her arms around him, just for a hug. Okay, and yes, maybe to feel that wonderfully hard chest against her one more time. She was only human, after all.

“Solo parenting has got to be really challenging,” she said, willing her gaze to move upwards from his hard chest to his face. Although looking at his face made her think of other ways she wanted to touch him. Her thumb against his lips. Her palm cradling his cheek
.

“It is. And I'm doing a crap job of it, to be honest.” He smiled wryly, but his eyes were still dark and bleak.

“You're doing the best you can, Alex. That's all anyone can do.”

“And my best is crap.”

“Keep saying that and you might need to put some money in the naughty jar.”

He raised his eyebrows. “The naughty jar?”

“A jar you put money in every time you say a bad word.”

“Did you have one of those growing up?”

“Yes, but funnily enough it was my idea. My mother had no limits on language, or on anything really. She was all about pushing boundaries, indulging whims.” Her own, at least.

“So making a naughty jar was your way of creating limits,” Alex filled in thoughtfully, and Lucy made a face.

“That's a neat bit of psychoanalysis.”

“True, though?”

She nodded slowly. “Maybe.” She'd certainly wanted the typical, normal childhood, the dog and the picket fence and definitely the dad. Fiona had scorned all those things, and believed Lucy should too.
I'm raising you to be a freethinker, Lucy, to be free of the shackles of a patriarchal society that insists you believe the lie that is domestic slavery.

“So did your mother ever put money in the naughty jar?” Alex asked, and Lucy shook her head, her cheeks heating, because a naughty jar suddenly sounded . . . well,
naughty
. And she was starting to think some definitely naughty thoughts.

The silence lengthened between them, stretching tautly as they stared at each other again.

Another burst of laughter sounded from the television upstairs, and they both jumped, and then laughed nervously. If there had been a moment, and Lucy wasn't entirely sure there had been, at least outside of her fantasies, it was well and truly broken now.

Alex glanced at his watch and she rose from the sofa, nearly tripping over Charlie, who let out a contented groan.

“It's getting late, isn't it?” she said, practically babbling in an effort to sound normal. “Really late. You'll want to put Poppy to bed. I should leave you to it.”

He rose too, and as he moved, she breathed in the clean scent of soap that lingered on his skin. “Thank you, Lucy,” he said, “for all you did today.”

“It wasn't really that much.”

“It was. I was clueless about what was going on with Bella, and I needed you to point it out. I'm very grateful.”

“Will you talk to her?”

“About her purchases? I don't know. I don't think she'd want me to.”

Lucy thought of how defensive and lonely Bella had seemed this afternoon, when they'd had hot chocolate. “She might not admit it, but I think she would.”

He grimaced. “Maybe, but I'm not much good at that kind of thing.”

“Talking?” Lucy teased, but he took her seriously.

“Pretty much. If it's not work related, if I can't put on my head teacher hat, I'm kind of hopeless.” He smiled, but Lucy knew he believed what he'd said.

“A head teacher hat. What does that look like? I wonder.”

“Bulletproof helmet. And invisible, of course, since head teachers are superheroes.”

“You have to be, to manage a whole school. I can barely manage the reception area.”

“You're doing well out there.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Card stock and disconnected calls aside?”

“I never said there wasn't room for improvement.”

“Oh!” Teasingly, thoughtlessly, Lucy punched his shoulder, and in an equally unthinking reflex Alex caught her hand.

Lucy stilled, her breath coming out in a rush as she felt his large, dry hand encase her much smaller one. This time she didn't think she was imagining the pulse of attraction between them.