Now, behind that carefully guarded expression, he would be livid and she felt terrible about that.
‘I’m afraid that if I laugh it all off my mum will be distraught, even if she did a job of hiding it, and I’m afraid for her health—both mentally and physically.’
‘And for good reason, from what you’ve told me.’
‘I’m very sorry about this,’ she said in as controlled a voice as she could muster. ‘I’ll have to... Of course, things will be sorted and the truth told...’
‘Well, not entirely the truth.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There may have been some colourful exaggeration as to the gravity of our relationship, but wewerelovers.’
Ellie reddened. Heat coursed through her body, setting every nerve ending alight and rousing a vivid imagination she had spent the past couple of days trying to extinguish.
She squirmed, the breath catching in her throat, and once again she was helplessly aware of the thoughts leaving her head in a rush while her body kicked in with gusto.
‘Yes, well, I obviously won’t... I mean, that’s all over now, so there would be no point... The fact is that I wanted to go and see Mum so that I could explain everything face to face.’ She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘I know this must be just awful for you,’ she said quietly. ‘If you would wait just a bit before you say anything to the press, then I would be so grateful. Mum would be so confused if she were to be let down by reading another gaudy headline.’ She sighed. ‘I can’t bear to imagine what’s going through her head now. What must she think of me?’
‘Why would she think anything differently of you?’
‘She knows that this...thispersonwho went off and had some fling with her boss on a tropical island isn’t the girl she brought up. If you knew my mother, you’d understand what I’m saying.’
She had never been a risk taker. She had been brought up in a loving and careful way. You could never have a guarantee when it came to matters of the heart, but with James there was only ever going to be one outcome. Sleeping with her boss had been like jumping from an aeroplane without a parachute. In a life where Ellie had had to deal with pain, she had foolishly courted yet more of it without meaning to, and now this horribly contorted situation had come down to this—a situation where it wasn’t justshewho wasaffected.
James looked at that soft, vulnerable face, a face she had always been so careful to conceal, and something twisted painfully inside him.
She would suddenly have found herself besieged by slings and arrows on every front. He marvelled that, not only had she not jumped on the phone and demanded he sort things out, but she was here, clearly upset and yet still trying hard to put a brave face on it.
‘You could be wrong.’
‘I’m not. Trust me.’ She smiled wanly. ‘I was an only child. You wouldn’t believe how protective they were of me, both my parents. They worried all the time when I wasn’t around.’
‘You’re very lucky,’ James heard himself say, to his surprise. ‘My parents were largely noticeable by their absence. Perhaps not with Izzy. She got the best of them because she was so much younger, but certainly Max had no real idea who they were, and neither, to a large extent, did I.’
He shot her a crooked smile, slightly embarrassed at that confession, and even more astonished that he rather liked that she had been the recipient. ‘When you have all the money in the world, and the freedom to do whatever you want with it, without any parental control or discipline or interest, you’d be surprised how pointless it all seems.’ He paused. ‘Your mother has never met me. What she knows about me is what she’s read in those lurid gossip articles...’
‘I know. Again, I’m very sorry this isn’t going to be as straightforward as you’d probably predicted.’
He waved down her apology. ‘Stop telling me how sorry you are. You shouldn’t be. If you’re afraid that your mother will be disillusioned when she finds out what happened, then don’t you think it’s important that she meets me?’
‘Meets you?’ Ellie’s mouth dropped open. Meet James Stowe? She tried to picture her anxious, diminutive mother, thrust into the presence of this over-the-top dynamic guy with the sharp, restless brain and the ridiculous good looks, and she visibly shuddered. ‘Why would that help anything?’
‘Think about it,’ James murmured, one hundred percent of his attention focused on her. ‘If you tell her that it was all a complete fabrication, then chances are she’s not going to believe you. Even if she pretends to. You know what they say about no smoke without fire. Then she’ll wonder why you might be lying and, whatever conclusion she reaches, she’ll be disappointed.’
‘Yes, well...’ Ellie looked at him, a little flustered, because she had no great urge to give him a minute-by-minute rendition of what she intended to say to her mother, largely because the conversation was still a work in progress in her head.
‘If you tell her the truth...that you and I were lovers...then from what she will have read in the gutter press, from what Naomi has managed to convey, she will assume that you were taken advantage of by me. How do you think she will feel about that?’
He didn’t give her time to formulate an opinion on what he had just said, but seamlessly moved on. ‘She’ll either be heartbroken that her baby girl has let herself be seduced by a big, bad wolf, or else she’ll be worried that your taste in men might be heading in the wrong direction. Or both.’
‘I hadn’t actually got as far as considering what...’
‘You don’t want any unintentional stress being put on her shoulders, do you?’
‘Of course not!’ The wretched man had a point, and it wasn’t one she had considered. Her mother worried. Would she end up more worried after a frazzled explanation about what had actually happened? Disappointment that there would be no wedding bells after all was one thing. The fear that she, Ellie, might somehow have decided to abandon the moral code she had always lived by would be something altogether more difficult for her to deal with. Wouldn’t it?
‘Then here’s what I suggest.’
