They sat in a comfortable silence. After a while he reached over and took her feet and brought them to rest in is lap. She had taken her shoes off. He rubbed her ankles, then slipped off her socks and massaged her feet.
“I too am a bastard.” A crooked smile acknowledging her use of his own word. “I mean I’m illegitimate. My mother got pregnant when she was fifteen but I don’t know my father; he didn’t do what your father did. She had me alone, then left me with her mother and ran away to join some travelling dance group.”
“And your grandmother brought you up?”
She laughed. “If you can call it that.”
“Wasn’t she a good grandmother?”
“Put it this way, she could toast bread by breathing on it. Mostly she allowed me to live in her house so she could tell me what a waste of space my mother, and by extension I, would always be. Her favourite words were,You’ll never amount to anything, andyou’re as useful as a chocolate teapot. If the laws in England hadn’t made it compulsory to send children to school, she’d have kept me at home so she could tell me what she thought of me all the time. But as it was, she had to store her bile for when I came home. That’s why I joined every homework club I could find so I could delay my return home.”
“What a bitch.”
“No, it’s ok. I left when I was sixteen and have never asked her not even for a penny. One day, I will be a big success and I will pay her back for her nastiness.”
“By slapping her face?”
“Something much worse.” She wrinkled her nose. “I plan to tell her how she did me a favour forcing me to be independent.Thatwill really upset her.”
“It’s funny. In a way, we are both a result of our upbringing.”
“Because we’re both trying to compensate for the tragedies in our past?” she leaned back and stared at the ceiling.
It made him very aware of her figure, reminded him how her body felt in his arms. He stroked her toes. “Has anyone ever told you that you have beautiful feet?”
“I must have got them from my father because my grandmother – and my aunt – had feet like a monkey puzzle tree.”
He chuckled. “I was trying to say something sexy.”
“I know, but you seem to have forgotten that we have no condoms.”
“Yes, but I thought you were a dab hand at improvising things with yellow kitchen gloves.”
“Eew.” She put a hand to cover her eyes. “That image has just ruined your chances of ever sleeping with me.”
He gave her feet a squeeze. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise.” He had to clear some husk from his throat. “If you don’t mind that I’m not a commitment kind of man.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The baby was makinghappy noises against his mother’s breast. Tirana herself, however, was grimacing because her nipples hurt. Rovena kept trying to soothe her by singing softly in Albanian. She promised that the nipple sensitivity will pass in a few days.
A few days would be too much if Tirana’s pained expression was anything to go by.
Laura felt completely out of her depth. What was she supposed to do? Where the hell was Adam?
After spending the rest of the night in Rovena’s bed. Chastely side by side, holding hands and talking then falling asleep for a couple of hours before daylight woke them. He got up saying something about finding a pharmacy.
She’d arched her eyebrows at him making him laugh. “Not to buy condoms,” he’d assured her. “The baby needs things.”
“What things?”
He’d shrugged. “Things. Baby and mother need lots of things and this being an unexpected birth, they had nothing in place.”
Laura had insisted on giving him her credit card in case the ‘things’ cost more than the cash he had on him. Rovena had given him directions to the village, twenty minutes’ walk away.
It was now two hours later and there was still no sign of him.
She couldn’t even make tea because they’d run out of milk thanks to her over enthusiasm with kettle and teapot the night before.
