“I was going to say sweat. Why, what we’re you thinking?”
She blushed. “Of something that looks a little like the yoghurt.”
Max laughed again, and he looked so ridiculous, sitting there with his dripping white smile, that she couldn’t help but laugh too. Max sat back with a self-satisfied and smug grin, before leaning forward to wipe a drop of yoghurt from her skin. “There’s that smile I love,” he whispered, and Bo couldn’t help herself, pulling him towards her and kissing him deeply. Max answered her kiss hungrily, and soon both the yoghurt and her tiredness were forgotten.
Their dinner burned on the stove, but neither she nor Max cared.
Afterwards, when she was ordering them food from Uber Eats, the picture of them from earlier flashed up on her screen.
“I’d send it to you, but your Nokia 3310 would probably explode,” she remarked drily, and Max gave an easy shrug.
Maybe he didn’t care, Bo worriedly thought. Maybe she was the only one troubled by whatever the hell it was she was feeling. Maybe she was the only one invested inthem,or in this, whatever this now was.
“Max?” she queried suddenly, rolling onto her side. “Did you love Nacressa?”
If Max was surprised by the sudden change in topic, he didn’t let on. Instead, he inhaled for a long moment, before exhaling just as deeply.
“I guess I couldn’t have,” he decided, the words identical to how he’d spoken about Raphaella weeks before. “If I had, we’d still be together. She was sweet though,” he added. “But then I guess young love always is. We broke up a year after we graduated. She married a hedge fund manager, in the end.”
There was a bittersweet tinge of melancholy to his voice, and inexplicably, Bo couldn’t bear the thought of him being sad. She reached up to lay a soft hand on his cheek, tracing his jaw with the pad of her thumb.
“I bet he doesn’t make her Génoise sponge cake,” she whispered, and Max laughed, hugging her to him.
“No. I bet he doesn’t.”
There it was again, sharp within her. That ache of want. That ache of longing. That sense of belonging, sure and absolute. It was an adult emotion born of adult feeling, and Bo, uncertain and inexperienced, was temporarily blinded by it.
“Bo—” Max suddenly began, but Bo, still reeling, rolled away from him, hugging her arms around her stomach.
They had an arrangement, she reminded herself. She needed to stick to it.
Chapter Eighteen
Bo was working in the garden, tending to Madelief. It was a rare day off for her, one where she wasn’t needed in Ida’s flower shop, and she was determined to enjoy it. She’d changed into her oldest, most awful gardening clothes. She’d made a coffee and poured it into her best thermos. She’d pulled out her kneepads and settled into a particularly deep patch of mint which was threatening to spread into her raised beds. She worked for hours in the sunshine, clipping and trimming and ruthlessly pulling at weeds, and she only stopped when a shadow fell over her, blocking her light.
“Hey,” she complained, peering up at Max, who was illuminated by the sunshine. “I’m too Australian for you to steal my warmth like that.”
He chuckled. “And I’m too British not to want to know what my neighbour is up to.”
She gestured to the soil around Madelief’s stem. “What does it look like I’m up to?”
“For all I know you could be burying the body of your last lover.”
“He’d deserve it,” Bo commented wryly, thinking of Oliver and his wandering eye, before shaking her head. “I’m not burying anything; the opposite, in fact. I’m pulling up weeds. This is a Japanese rose, a Pearl Maxwell to be specific. It’s a rare camellia. They’re hardy but picky plants, and she needs to be protected from ice, frost and full sun, as well as from creeping weeds like this apple mint.”
“She?” Max looked confused.
“Oh.” Bo frowned. “Umm, yeah, I call her she. She was Geoffrey’s favourite, you see. He named her Madelief.”
Max nodded slowly. “For the woman he loved the most.”
He remembered what she’d told him about Madelief previously, not that Bo was surprised. She was almost certain Max still had questions about Geoffrey, curiosities about what life events had made him into the kind of man who would abandon both a lover and their child. She wasn’t sure the story of Madelief and Geoffrey would help Max; wasn’t certain it would give him any of the answers he was clearly still looking for, but all the same, she understood why he wanted to know.
Bo looked down, away from the sun-soaked outline of Max and back to Madelief. “Yes. The woman he loved the most.”
“What happened to her? To Madelief?” Max asked, and Bo shrugged.
“I don’t know. Neither did Geoffrey. He looked for her though. For years and years.”
