‘Tell me, why do you want to play detective all of a sudden?’
‘It isn’t all of a sudden,’ he muttered. ‘I wanted to know from the start.’
The irritation in his tone caught her attention. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to know, she realised, as that he had to know. He couldn’t fathom her and he was intrigued. Which meant he cared. More than he was prepared to admit.
She inhaled deeply, formed her mouth into a perfect O and blew out. Then flashed a bitter, humourless smile. ‘The ten-thousand-pound question.’
‘You stayed with him for ten thousand pounds?’ Fitz’s face twisted into a mix of expressions she couldn’t identify but which she could easily guess.
‘You could put it like that if you like.’
‘I don’t like.’ His jaw locked in irritation and it surprised her that she was beginning to recognise his ‘tells’ so easily. ‘So explain it to me.’
She sighed.
‘What would be the point? Apart from satisfying your curiosity? Would it change anything between us? Not, I realise, that there is an us.’
‘Humour me, Elle.’
She thought for a long time, then dipped her head.
‘Short version only.’
‘Whatever you prefer. For now.’
She chose to ignore that.
‘Stevie and I were childhood sweethearts. I was fourteen, he was fifteen, though we’d known each other all our lives. We were both poor kids from the worst housing estate in the area, but while his dad baled on his mum and her seven kids, my parents were the exception. I can’t remember a day when they didn’t have a laugh with each other, a joke, a hug, a tease.’
‘They never argued?’
The look in his eyes was so fleeting, so inscrutable that Elle wasn’t sure if it had simply been her imagination.
‘Yeah, they argued. Of course they did. We had no money, and that always created tension. But they always made it up. Every single night. They told us kids we should never go to bed in anger. She was so beautifu
l, my mum, deep red hair and sparkling green eyes.’
‘Like you,’ Fitz said softly.
She snorted, trying to conceal how his words affected her.
‘No, not like me. I have her basic components, but I’m not stunning like she was.’
‘Just like your mother,’ he murmured again.
He held her gaze and it took everything she had to tear her eyes away.
‘And they danced, God, how they loved to dance. They could jive and swing and lindy hop like you wouldn’t believe.’
‘You told me you couldn’t dance that night in the bar.’
She flushed, recalling the feel of Fitz’s arms around her, his fingers grazing her skin, his thigh slotted between hers. She swallowed. Hard.
‘I can’t. It was one of their greatest sources of amusement. But they could and they used to enter competitions and I’d go and watch. Stevie too. The kids around where we lived had no prospects, there was no such thing as a school night, and their idea of recreation was going around the back of the station to drink cider and take drugs...’
‘Their idea of recreation? Not yours?’
‘No. I dreamed of becoming a doctor. Don’t ask me where it came from, even my parents never knew, but apparently it started from the age of about five and it was all I ever wanted to be when I grew up. And Stevie, he had his football and he dreamed of making it his way out of that hellhole too.’