This is what he did, Ellie thought. It was all part of his huge personal magnetism. His charm wasn’t just superficial, it was bone-deep, because it was rooted in genuine interest. When he asked a question and looked you in the eye, he sincerely wanted to hear the answer.
‘She couldn’t cope.’ Ellie tried to inject some crispness into her voice but there was a tell-tale wobble there that she couldn’t control. ‘She started drinking and the drinking got a little out of hand. It took some time for that to be ironed out, and I’m happy that she’s no longer dependent on alcohol, but she’s very much prone to depression. She felt like my dad’s death took away her reason to live. Since he died, she’s had a couple of minor strokes, enough for me to worry about what might happen if another occurred. Right now, she seems to be down again. I could hear it in her voice when I spoke to her at the weekend.
‘So there. That’s the story. I’d planned on visiting so that I could check the situation for myself—cheer her up, maybe arrange for her to come to London.’ She laughed, but it sounded more like a croak, and she ended up clearing her throat.
‘Don’t you have any other family members who could help you, Ellie?’
‘I’m an only child. My parents were only children. There’s just me.’ She looked down quickly so that he couldn’t detect the glimmer of tears in her eyes.
‘You must have been...just a kid when your father died.’
‘I was sixteen. Old enough to look after Mum.’
‘Like I said. Just a kid.’
James looked at her, at the defensive set of her mouth. She was trying so hard to be brave and he imagined she’d spent all those years trying hard to be brave. He knew what it felt like to lose a parent when you were still a teenager. He’d lost both of his. Sometimes in the dead of night thoughts of what that had felt like would surface like eels crawling out of hiding places...dark thoughts about the loss and confusion he had felt all those many years ago.
The truth was that, while Max had taken on the role of caretaker, and while his sister had been swamped with attention from everyone, he had floundered. There had been no one there for him. Not really. No one who could understand the void left. So he had filled the void with friends, activity and a dazzling social life. He had used the tactics of distraction to build a wall around his loss and to seal himself off from dealing with the hurt and sense of helplessness.
James rarely dwelled on a past he couldn’t change, but thoughts came at him from nowhere. He remembered that feeling of exclusion, of standing on the outside looking in. He’d been about to go to university, and of course he had, but he had been vulnerable—neither wrapped up in protective cotton wool, as his younger sister Izzy had been, nor fuelled with the necessity to hold things together, which had been his older brother Max’s role.
From out of the blue, like a clap of thunder on a cloudless day, he remembered how he had fallen for a ridiculously glamorous older woman who had worked at an art gallery in the centre of Cambridge. She had been bowled over by his accent, by the designer clothes and the fast car—possessions he had always taken for granted. He had been the youthful idiot mistakenly seeking to fill that aching, empty space with the love of a good woman. When he’d told her that he had no idea if he would be able to afford his next meal now that his parents were gone, she’d begun backing away.
He’d been joking, even though he really hadn’t known the state of the family finances, only that Max had intimated they weren’t as healthy as they should have been. She’d taken him seriously, and even now he wasn’t sure just how shocked he’d really been when he’d caught her in bed with his much richer friend. Short, bespectacled, plump Rupert had been over the moon with his conquest.
James had learnt lessons then that had stayed with him for ever. He was very happy to shower money on the women he dated but his heart was something he had no intention of ever giving away. He had rashly given it away once and he wasn’t going to make that mistake again. Never again would he allow himself to get emotionally wrapped up with any woman to the extent that he could end up being hurt. No way.Build your walls, he had concluded,and make sure they’re impregnable.
Impatient with his trip down an unpleasant memory lane, he shook his head and focused.
‘A lot of responsibility for you at that age,’ he mused quietly. ‘Especially if you had no one to share the burden with you.’
‘I coped.’
‘Coping isn’t exactly a great way to wile away your teenage years.’
‘Some of us don’t get given a choice.’
‘No truer word has ever been spoken. Yes, of course you can have a couple of days to visit your mother.’ He paused and their eyes met. ‘If there’s anything I can do, I want you to promise me that you’ll let me know.’
‘Sure.’ She stood up and looked at him. ‘I’ll start sorting out the details now, if you don’t mind, and I’ll make sure that there’s good cover for me when I’m out of the country.’
‘Of course you will.’
Letting his guard slip was all well and good in an office in Shoreditch, but no way was it going to happen on a tropical island in the Caribbean...
CHAPTER THREE
ELLIEWASHIGHLYefficient when it came to James’s travel arrangements. She’d had plenty of practice, given his frenetic, country-hopping schedule, and she could book a five-star hotel, in just the right place for whatever meetings he had lined up, with her eyes closed. She knew the kind of thing he wanted wherever he happened to stay. A luxury penthouse, because he liked a lot of space, and nothing near the ground floor because he enjoyed the peace of looking down on a city at night. And wherever in the world he happened to be, he had to have instant access to the double espressos he lived on when he was working flat out.
She didn’t knowhowshe knew that. She just did. Which meant he must have told her at some point, or perhaps it was just information that had filtered through by osmosis after so long working together.
Barbados was an anomaly, being a business trip as well as a mini-holiday, so the requirements had been rather different. Her job had been made easier because Naomi had chosen the hotel, simply leaving Ellie with the task of securing just the right suite of rooms for them in the eye-wateringly expensive boutique five-star.
Her passport hadn’t left the top drawer in years, so looking at images of sand and sea had been a vicarious taste of a paradise she’d thought she’d never get to see with her own eyes.
But now there was no Naomi on the scene. Instead,shewould be the one staying at the fancy hotel in the tropical paradise, and it felt unnatural to be booking a room for herself in a hotel his ex-girlfriend had picked out. Her needs were infinitesimally less complex than his but that made no difference because the price of even the cheapest room was astronomical. When the booking had been confirmed, she’d actually closed her eyes, breathed in deeply and felt giddy at the thought of staying at a luxury hotel in Barbados.
She’d thought that a couple of days with her mother would bring her back down to earth with a healthy reality check. In fact, she’d expected Angie Thompson to be aghast at the thought of her going away when she was grappling with depression and might have wanted her to be around. But, to Ellie’s astonishment, her mother had perked up at the news that her daughter would be heading off to paradise.
