Pride After Her Fall

‘Stick shift.’ She giggled as if she’d never heard anything funnier.

As he’d lost control he’d been listening not to Lorelei’s tears but to her helpless, happy laughter as she came and came, and like a bolt of lightning it hit him hard. With this woman, only with Lorelei, he felt like a conquering king.

* * *

Lorelei leaned across and gave Nash a lick of her ice cream.

She was sitting on the high sea wall and he was leaning against it between her legs, his back to her, his head just above her knees.

Beyond, fishermen were casting nets in the sea and local children ran splashing in the shoals, their happy voices punctuating the shriek of gulls, the occasional backfiring of a scooter, which seemed to be a popular method of transport, and the general hum of tourists and locals as the summer season ran out its course.

They had been exploring the tiny fishing village of Trou d’Eau Douce here on the east coast all morning, and lunch lay ahead, but Lorelei would have been perfectly content to stay exactly where they were. In the moment.

‘This tourist route must be boring for you,’ she said cheerfully, not sounding at all sorry.

‘Yeah, I’m bored out of my mind,’ Nash responded, giving her the benefit of a relaxed grin.

Lorelei didn’t think she’d ever seen him this relaxed. They were supposed to be on a yacht with his friends, but this morning Nash had cancelled.

‘Don’t you have meetings? You haven’t been going to them. Isn’t that the point of why we’re here?’ She had felt obliged to ask those questions, but her heart had been beating like hummingbird wings.

‘The point is spending time with you,’ he’d responded as if it were natural, and Lorelei had suddenly felt the world opening up around her into a thousand possibilities, all of them leading back to Nash.

He had forced secrets from her the other night, pushed past her fears and something important had cracked open in her, and instead of darkness only light had poured out.

He had made love to her all through the night until her body had felt like a map of Nash’s voyages, each one leaving her feeling weightless and oddly free.

It was as if being here with him these last few days had unlocked those shackles of family and the past she’d been dragging around for so long. The thought of going back to how she had been seemed impossible now.

She was falling in love with him, and there could be no coming back from that. And if love was a voyage they were sailing into uncharted waters this morning.

Last night he had taken her hands and shown her the secrets of his body, almost intimidating in its muscular perfection but, like hers, telling stories.

He was marked all over with nicks and cuts, old scars from his years on the track that weren’t always obvious until she touched him, ran her palms and fingertips over his back and hip, the long developed muscle of his quadriceps, and right there she had felt the groove in his flesh where he’d told her he’d had cartilage removed after a smash in Italy.

‘Got adventurous on a corner and ended up upside down,’ as he’d casually put it, ‘with some wreckage in my leg.’

Yet last night on the beach outside a restaurant, when she had tried to ask him about himself, what drove him, he’d diverted her by hitting her most touchy subject: Raymond. In bed he had diverted again, by leading her directly to his physical scars, deftly hiding what lay beneath.

She wondered if he was always like this with women—stripping them bare of their secrets but managing to keep his own wound up nice and tight.

But she found she didn’t want to think about other women, his past, because it didn’t matter to her. She wanted only to be in the moment, because she could trust that. Looking beyond, not knowing what was coming, instinctively frightened her.

‘My grandmaman never let me buy ice creams when I was a little girl,’ she confessed, licking the final scrap off the inner rim of the cone. ‘She said ice cream should be eaten in a bowl with a spoon at a table. Preferably without your elbows touching any surfaces.’

‘She sounds like an old dragon.’

‘Non, she was always very sweet, just set in her ways. She raised me, you know, from when I was thirteen and started boarding school. I always came home to her in the holidays. She made it her mission in life to improve me.’