‘And yet your uncle, the General, he’s one of the most responsible, straight-down-the-line men I know.’
‘Yes.’ A fond smile leapt to her lips. ‘He was the typically duty-bound older brother. He had a younger brother who died as a baby—cot death, I think. When my mother came along within the year—another new baby and a girl to boot—I think my grandparents were overly protective.’
‘So, as she grew up, your mother got away with a lot?’
‘If you listen to her then no; her father was a military man too, and she bemoans the fact they were suffocating in their strictness. But if you ask my uncle, he’ll say she was given a lot of leeway. Yet the more she got, the more she demanded. She became known as a bit of a whinger, whilst my uncle was always expected to be the big brother and pick up the slack. He carried that with him when he followed in my grandfather’s footsteps into the Army. It’s what’s made him the General, I suppose.’
‘And you’re like him. Always striving to do the right thing,’ Ash mused.
He was certainly beginning to understand her better. He and Fliss had more in common than he would have believed.
‘But it doesn’t make you boring, or dull.’
‘I just think I was looking for someone I could trust. A man with the same qualities I see in my uncle. But I couldn’t love them the way they deserved to be loved. That isn’t me. I confused solid and reliable with boring and disconnected.’
‘Why? Why are you so afraid to let go, Fliss?’
She offered a helpless shrug. ‘I don’t want to be like my mother. She only thought about herself, about what she wanted. Did I tell you that we didn’t start off alone? That she only dragged me away from my grandparents’ house when I was four? And that was because she wanted to push me into all the dancing lessons she wished that she had taken, but her parents hadn’t allowed her to?’
Ash shook his head. ‘Did you like dancing?’
‘I hated dancing. But she said I was being selfish. That I owed her that much. I’d taken away her dream of dancing, so the least I could do was try to be half the dancer she felt she had been. It took my uncle four years to track us down. We were squatting in a house with about twenty others. We had no heating, no food because all the money she had went on sparkling new dresses so she could push me onto the circuit.’
He’d seen and heard a little about pageants over the years.
‘They can be quite cut-throat, can’t they.’
‘That’s an understatement.’
He could virtually see the nausea, the fear rising in her.
‘So you loathed it,’ he confirmed.
She bounced her head, unable to answer him for a moment. ‘Every single second of the humiliation. My mother would scream and bawl at me for missing a pivot or split. I was five, Ash. Five. I should have been playing on the swings, or being taught how to ride a bike. Having fun, laughing. Being loved.’
His throat constricted. He knew exactly how that felt. The loneliness, the despair, the rejection.
‘My uncle found us backstage after one of those competitions. I was on the floor, sobbing over something or other, when he walked in and I thought he looked like the biggest, bravest, most heroic man I’d ever seen.’
‘That was when he gave her the ultimatum.’ Ash drew his lips into a thin line.
She stopped abruptly, dropping her eyes from his, but he could see that, even now, her pain was still as intense.
‘Fliss?’
‘When my mother refused to leave with him—’ her voice dropped to a whisper ‘—she told him I was useless anyway and that she was better off without me. Then she dragged me off the floor and threw me across the room to him. She told him if he wanted to look after a worthless baby like me, then he could have me. Finally she walked out.’
Anger rushed up inside of Ash, along with something else. A fierce protectiveness. A need to ensure that no one hurt her or made her feel so worthless ever again.
He knew it wasn’t his place to feel that way but he couldn’t curb it; it refused to be pushed aside.
‘Ash, I don’t want to talk about this any more.’
Nodding grimly, Ash pulled his wallet out and thrust a generous pile of notes at the delighted server and pulled Fliss gently from her chair. Right now, she needed to be reminded of the better side of life. And he was determined to be the one to do that for her.
‘Come on, Fliss. Time to get out of here.’