‘You don’t have to protect me. I’m not your average six-year-old,’ Libby remonstrated softly, echoing words she must have heard people use time and again about her.
The matter-of-fact tone only tugged at Anouk’s heart all the harder.
‘The point is that Mummy was ill so I’d had to do the hoovering over Christmas. I knew the presents had been there for weeks. I tried to tell Mummy but she got upset and cross with herself so I pretended that I believed her.’
‘It’s still possible—’
Libby cut her off as though she hadn’t spoken.
‘But I wanted to tell someone and I like you. I think I can trust you.’ She tipped her head on one side and eyed Anouk shrewdly. ‘I can, can’t I?’
The lump in her throat meant she might as well have been trying to swallow a golf ball.
‘You can,’ she choked out, and Libby just eyed her a little longer before bending her head back to her Father Christmas crafting and working diligently again. A companionable silence settled over them once more—as long as the little girl couldn’t hear how hard and how fast Anouk’s heart was beating for her, that was.
A good half-hour had to have passed before Libby spoke again.
‘You know there’s going to be an entertainer at the Christmas Fayre, maybe a magician or a puppet show?’
As if their previous conversation had never happened.
‘Wow.’ Anouk hoped she managed to inject just the right amount of sounding impressed but not condescending. ‘That sounds like it will be fun.’
‘It will.’ The girl nodded enthusiastically. ‘Especially when it’s a real entertainer and not just Sol and Malachi dressed up in costumes. Although they’re pretty funny, too. And so cool.’
‘You think so?’ She tried to sound chatty but her throat felt dry. Scratchy.
Libby’s unbridled adoration didn’t help Anouk in her fight not to let Sol get under her skin any more than he had already appeared to.
‘Of course—’ Libby snorted in a little-girl sort of way ‘—you could normally see it for yourself. They’re usually always here. Or at least, they used to be before they started to build our new centre.’
Picking up another face to glue, Anouk tried to sound utterly casual.
‘What makes them so cool, then?’
‘Well, everything, I guess.’ Libby looked up, her expression thoughtful. ‘They were carers, too, just like all of us, only my mummy loves me and their mummy didn’t. But they’ve still become rich and famous. When I grow up, I’m going to be just like them.’
‘A surgeon like Sol?’
It was all she could do to sound normal. Another revelation about Sol. Another description that made him seem like a world away from the commitment-phobic playboy of the hospital gossip mill.
‘Sol’s a neurosurgeon,’ Libby corrected. ‘He saves lives. Or maybe I’ll be an investor and become a millionaire like Malachi. I haven’t decided yet, but they’re both always saying that if you want something enough, and work hard enough for it, there’s a good chance that you can achieve it.’
‘Right.’ Anouk grappled for something to say.
She wasn’t sure if it was Libby’s maturity or the fact that Sol was such an inspiration to the little girl that stole her breath away the most.
‘Did you know they like to help to actually build the new centre?’
‘Sorry?’ Anouk snapped back to the present.
‘Sol and Malachi?’ Libby prompted. ‘They are actually helping to build the new Care to Play. We saw them a lot in the summer when the centre organised rounders and football matches in the park. They were carrying bags off a builder’s truck and cutting wood.’
‘They did?’ The image certainly didn’t do anything to dampen the ache that constantly rolled inside her these days.
No wonder Sol always looked so healthy. Every time she had failed to push away memories of that mouth-watering physique, slick and hot under her hands, she’d consoled herself with the knowledge that he must spend countless hours in the gym. Her mother had enjoyed enough gym-junkie boyfriends for her to know that they loved themselves more than they would ever be able to love someone else.
She’d almost convinced herself that this fact therefore detracted from how good-looking Sol might otherwise seem. So discovering now that he had achieved that honed, utterly masculine body from genuine physical labour—and not just any labour, but building a centre for young carers—only made it that much harder to pretend there wasn’t some empyreal fire to the man.