Terms Of Their Costa Rican Temptation

‘Not particularly. Though...the headline about the sisters... No. Actually, I don’t want to know,’ she said, laughing as she reached for the glass of wine on the table. It tasted dry but fruity on her tongue and she wondered whether it was just because he had an exquisite wine collection or he’d chosen it for her.

‘What about your parents?’ Benoit asked, studying her gently over the rim of his own wine glass. ‘You said your mum is a free spirit?’

‘Yes. The full package—tie-dye flowing skirts, flowers in her hair, the festival circuit. Her head is in the clouds but her heart is bigger than anyone’s I’ve known,’ she said, smiling at the memory of Mariam Soames dragging them out of school to play with them in a wildflower

field, but feeling sad that she hadn’t been able to fully enjoy it because she’d been too worried. About what the teachers would think. About what her father’s new wife would think. She had been so torn. She ached to think of what she had missed. If only she’d been able to fit in with her mother and sisters just a little more.

‘And your father?’

‘A professor.’

‘Of...?’

He clearly wasn’t going to let her get away with one-word answers.

‘English Literature. They met at university in London and had a passionate affair before Mum decided that “university education was riddled with the not always unconscious bias of male upper-class oppression”.’

‘She too doesn’t like the patriarchy?’ Benoit teased.

‘Etymologically, patriarchy means a structure of rulership distributed unequally in favour of fathers,’ Skye explained, slightly wincing at the tone of her own voice, but unable to stop. ‘So I’m with Mum on this; universities are not skewed in favour of fathers, so I didn’t mean patriarchal.’

His smile at her response hit her square in her chest. ‘Where did you go to university?’

‘I didn’t,’ Skye said, frowning and pulling at the thread on the beautiful throw covering her lap. She really shouldn’t, she told herself. It might completely unravel.

‘Really? Why not?’ The surprise in Benoit’s voice stung as much as it pleased. She liked that he’d thought she’d gone to university.

‘We didn’t have the money.’

‘A university professor couldn’t put his daughter through school?’ He sounded half confused, half outraged.

‘Dad remarried and he and his wife wanted to...decided that...’ She hated that she was stumbling over words. It shouldn’t be this hard just to say it. ‘They put their money towards their son’s education.’

‘What?’

‘It’s fine,’ she said to him in the same way she’d said to her mother, and to her father when he’d told her that he wasn’t able to help. Even though he was able to; he and his wife had just chosen not to.

‘It’s not. What kind of mother is she?’

‘Good, from what I can tell,’ Skye replied honestly. ‘She’s a loving, perfect, stay-at-home mum who was on the PTA. The kind of mother who packed her son’s bag the night before school, never forgot lunch, helped him with his homework and always remembered indoor shoes as well as outdoor ones.’

‘Did you spend much time with them, growing up?’

‘Some,’ she said, remembering the way it would make her feel when she would leave home to spend the weekend with her father and then the way it would make her feel to come back home. Awful, awkward and not fitting in at either house. ‘I didn’t exactly make the best first impression. I was a bit of a wild child, running around naked, making a mess and ruining things. Margaret, Dad’s wife, couldn’t handle it and, no matter how much I tried to be the kind of daughter she might have in her house, it didn’t seem to help.’

‘Why bother?’ Benoit demanded arrogantly, full of the self-assured confidence she’d never possessed.

‘Because I wanted to spend time with my father?’ she replied hotly. ‘Because I would have liked to have got to know my brother? Because there’s half a family out there that is mine and I’m cut off from them? It’s not as simple as not caring what other people think, Benoit,’ she said, fearing that the tears she felt pressing against the back of her eyes might escape.

She could feel the weight of his gaze on her face, on her skin, warming it, and then it cooled, as if he’d looked away.

‘So is that what you’ll do with the money?’ Benoit asked, purposely changing the subject. They might need to get to know each other, but he didn’t want to press any further than he had already. Because there was something about the way she had described being cut off from her family, the hurt there that called to his own, to the way he felt without Xander in his life.

‘From the jewels?’ she asked, as if needing clarification at the giant shift in conversation. ‘No. I think I’m too old to go to university.’

‘Oh, I didn’t realise that they refused to allow people to attend university after the age of what, twenty-five?’

‘Twenty-six.’