Читать книгу The Billionaire From Her Past - Leah Ashton, Leah Ashton - Страница 12

CHAPTER THREE

‘KNOCK, KNOCK!’

The familiar female voice floated through to Mila’s shop and was promptly followed by an impatient rattling of the workshop’s back door.

‘Mila!’ Ivy called out. ‘Could you hurry, please? I really need to pee.’

Mila grinned as she hurried to greet her sister. Her nephew, Nate, was fast asleep in his pram on the other side of the fly screen, looking exactly as angelic as Ivy said he was not.

‘Mila? I mean it. I have about fifteen seconds.’

Mila dragged her gaze away from Nate to glance at her sister.

‘Maybe ten,’ Ivy clarified.

Quickly Mila flicked open the lock, and Ivy sprinted past her to the small powder room in the corner of the workshop used by Mila’s students.

‘You’ll understand one day,’ Ivy said as she slammed the toilet door, muttering something about eight-and-a-half-pound babies.

Mila stepped outside, then squatted in front of Nate’s pram. There wasn’t much space behind Mila’s shop—enough for Mila’s car, her bins, and a large collection of enthusiastically growing pot plants—all planted in an eclectic mix of pots and vessels that Mila had decided unfit for sale after firing.

Nate held Mila’s mail in his chubby fist, collected by Ivy from the letterbox beside the rear courtyard gate. Nate loved junk mail, and he was happily gazing at the lurid colours of a discount store brochure with intent.

She wasn’t exactly sure how old Nate was—nine months, maybe? He’d just started crawling, anyway, and talking in musical meaningless tones. He was so beautiful, with long eyelashes that brushed his cheeks and thick, curly blond hair. Both from his father, apparently—although Mila couldn’t yet see even a hint of Ivy’s hulking SAS soldier husband in delicate, picture-perfect Nate.

Ivy had taken to dropping by regularly—a result of Nate’s unwillingness to nap in his cot and, Mila thought, a latent ‘big sister’ instinct for Ivy to check up on her that had begun just after Steph had died. Originally it had taken the form of daily phone calls from Ivy’s office at Molyneux Tower, and had only metamorphosed into actual visits when Nate had come along and so adamantly refused to sleep.

Mila had always been close to both her sisters—but she hadn’t seen workaholic Ivy so often since they were kids living at home. And for that Mila figured she owed Nate one.

She leaned in closed to kiss his velvety cheek. ‘Nice work, kid.’

‘You know what I wish?’ Ivy asked a few minutes later, when they were settled with cups of tea on the old wooden church pew that edged one wall of the workshop. ‘That I could have banked all those hours of time I wasted over the years so I could have them now. Because, honestly, I don’t know how I ever thought I was busy before. This mum stuff is nuts.’

Mila raised her eyebrows. ‘You didn’t have any spare time to bank,’ she pointed out. Her big sister had always been the high-flying, high-achieving child in the family—groomed practically from birth to take over the Molyneux mining empire.

Ivy shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

Mila smiled. Ivy had never been good at acknowledging her obsession with work.

Her sister leant closer and spoke in a hushed tone. ‘This is going to sound terrible, but I’m really enjoying being back at work a few days a week. I can actually get stuff done. Yesterday I committed Molyneux Mining to a joint venture project with a British conglomerate. Today I’ve discovered that Nate no longer likes peas.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Mila said with a grin. ‘There isn’t actually a Mum Police.’

Ivy sighed. ‘Yeah, I know. There is definitely Mum Guilt, though.’

‘Hey,’ Mila said, catching Ivy’s gaze. ‘Don’t feel bad for enjoying the career you loved before Nate came along. He knows you love him.’

‘Words can’t describe how much.’ A long pause, then a wobbly bottom lip. ‘Oh, God, I’m going to blub. Now I can’t even blame breastfeeding hormones.’

Mila scooted closer to her sister so she could press her shoulder against Ivy’s as they sat together quietly with their now empty teacups.

‘Cake?’ Mila asked. ‘One of my students baked—’

The tinkling sound of the shop door being opened had Mila on her feet, giving a vague gesture towards the small fridge in the workshop kitchenette as she hurried out of the room.

‘Good morning—’ she began, then stopped. It was Seb. ‘Hi!’ she said, with a wide smile. Mila still wasn’t sure if reconnecting with Seb was a good idea—but she couldn’t deny that she was pleased to see him.

Seb lips quirked as he glanced at the forgotten teacup in her hand. ‘Busy day?’ he teased.

Mila shrugged. ‘I’ve had a flood of online orders this morning, actually, after one of my pieces was used in a feature in the latest Home + Home mag.’ She’d swallowed her pride over a year ago and accepted her sister April’s offer to feature one of her indoor planters on her hugely popular lifestyle blog. The subsequent interest from stylists and interior decorators hadn’t abated. ‘The store makes up a pretty small amount of my income,’ she continued, pointedly, ‘leaving plenty of time for guilt-free tea.’

‘That’s my favourite type of anything.’ He grinned. ‘And, really? “A pretty small amount”?’

‘Eighteen point two-three per cent. Down one point nine per cent from the previous quarter.’

‘There you go. Mila and her numbers.’

‘I had to be halfway decent at something at school, otherwise Mum would’ve completely disowned me.’ She hadn’t had much interest in anything other than maths, and had been truly terrible at pretending.

‘She probably wouldn’t have, you know.’ Ivy leant casually against the workshop doorframe, her eyes sparkling with curiosity as she glanced between Mila and Seb. ‘Probably.’

A pause, and Mila knew her sister had taken in Seb’s unfamiliar work clothes. ‘I didn’t realise you were visiting Perth. It’s good to see you.’

Under better circumstances. It went unsaid, but the fleeting reference to Stephanie still made Mila’s heart ache.

‘Not visiting,’ Seb said. ‘Back. For good.’

Those last two words he directed at Mila, and her awful, disloyal heart flipped over.

No. In the same minute her throat constricted at the memory of her friend. She was not allowed to get all fluttery about Sebastian. She crossed her arms in front of her chest, but that was completely ineffective. Instead, while Seb filled Ivy in on his new business venture, she deposited her teacup on the counter, then needlessly wiped a cloth over the vases in shades of teal and grey that were silhouetted like a skyline in her shop window.

‘Mila?’

She didn’t even look up at Seb’s voice, instead focusing her attention on a non-existent mark on a blue-green glaze.

‘I’m sorry—now isn’t really a good time,’ she said. Maybe if she appeared suitably busy he’d go away—and so would her inappropriate heart-flipping.

‘For what?’

She straightened to face him, once again crossing her arms. Aware that Ivy was watching, Mila didn’t really know what to say. What could she say? It’s not a good time for me to still be attracted to my best friend’s husband?

Accurate, but never, ever to be articulated.

At her continued silence, Seb leant a little closer. That didn’t help anything.

‘I thought you were okay with us being friends again?’

‘I am,’ she said. And she was. It wasn’t Seb’s fault she had faulty hormones—or whatever it was inside her that just would not quit when it came to Seb Fyfe.

Seb needed her right now. But she needed space. More time, maybe? To recalibrate to a world where she co-existed with Seb without the fact of his being her best friend’s husband to stall any heart-flipping or tingling of skin.

He will always be Steph’s husband.

She’d been a terrible friend to Steph for too long. That stopped now.

‘Do you still play tennis?’ she said, a bit more loudly than she would have liked.

‘On occasion.’

‘Great!’ she said, even louder. Dammit. ‘Let’s hire a court later this week. Have a hit.’

This was a genius plan. Physical distance. Smacking of objects.

‘Sure...’ he said, sounding a little confused.

‘Great!’ she repeated. ‘Great!’

Then finally he left, with a tinkling of the doorbell, and from Mila a significant sigh of relief.

Ivy marched over, every inch the billionaire businesswoman demanding to know exactly what was going on. But before she could open her mouth a low, sleepy cry reverberated from the workshop.

‘Later,’ Ivy threw over her shoulder as she jogged back to Nate.

Seemed Mila owed Nate another one: Nice work, Nate.

Now she had time to work out something to tell Ivy—to explain whatever her sister had thought she’d witnessed. Because Ivy had never known about Mila’s unrequited teenage crush. Nor April, for that matter.

And no one was ever going to find out about this silly adult version either.

* * *

Seb propped his shoulder against the front wall of his shop. Inside, the sounds of building activity thumped and buzzed through the open door, and a lanky apprentice chippy carted rubble in white plastic buckets to the large skip that hunkered at the kerb.

His meeting with the foreman had gone well. So well, in fact, that Seb knew it wasn’t even close to necessary that he checked in with the man each day. Richard had thirty years’ experience and knew exactly what he was doing. He knew more than Seb, actually—although to be perfectly honest that wasn’t particularly hard for anyone in the construction industry.

This bothered Seb. He’d known from a very young age that he would one day own his father’s company. Just like for Mila’s older sister Ivy it had been his destiny, and he’d done everything in his power to be worthy of following in his dad’s footsteps.

That had included actually knowing what his staff did.

He’d graduated with honours in his Computer Science degree so he could write code like his developers. Then he’d done an MBA as he’d begun taking over from his father. And he’d attended each and every course before he’d sent his staff—whether it be marketing, customer service, project management or system development. He’d known that he didn’t get to stop learning just because he was the boss, and he hadn’t been about to waste his team’s time on a course he wasn’t prepared to do himself.

He hadn’t pretended he could do every job in his mammoth company—and he hadn’t needed to—but he’d figured he should be able to walk into any meeting, at any Fyfe office in the world, and not feel as if his staff were talking in a foreign language.

He still had a long way to go when it came to his new venture.

It bothered him that he didn’t know enough about joists and sub-floors and ceiling-fixing and roofing and I-beams and...

In fact, his entire prior experience in the building industry involved demoing the bathroom of the London flat he’d owned with Steph prior to its—outsourced—renovation, a disproportionate interest in power tools for a man who didn’t have a shed—or a back garden to put one in—and many good intentions to attend a tiling/carpentry/plastering workshop one day.

He’d always been interested in tools and building things. He’d just funnelled it in a technological direction. Steph had encouraged him to take some time off—to do a weekend course, to paint their home rather than having professional decorators return three separate times to get the flawless finish he’d demanded. But that was the problem with being a work-obsessed perfectionist—he hadn’t been about to take time off from Fyfe.

Nothing had been worth that. Certainly not a bit of DIY.

‘Not me,’ Steph had told him more than once. ‘Not even me.’

Seb drained the last of his coffee, his fingernails digging ever so slightly into the takeaway cup’s corrugated cardboard outer shell. He stared at nothing—at the sky, at the passing traffic—and finally at the stencilled company name on the side of the battered skip, letting his gaze lose focus.

He’d read somewhere—or heard, maybe, on a podcast or something—that grief hit you like a wave. At first the waves just kept on pounding. Pounding you down and down, with barely a breath of air before you were sucked back under again. But then, over time, the gaps between the waves would grow. They would still hit just as hard—and be just as shocking—but in between you could begin to breathe. To exist again.

Sometimes you even got better at handling the waves, at bracing yourself and swimming back up to the surface. Not every wave though. Some would always sneak up on you and drown you as brutally as the first.

Every memory of Steph...every reminder of his many mistakes...what he could have done...should have done... It wasn’t getting easier.

Seb had discovered that the waves didn’t stop coming. He had just got better at swimming.

Footsteps drew his attention back to his surroundings. He looked up to see Mila striding along the footpath, her gaze on the screen of her phone. Her eyes flicked upwards as she approached, and the moment her gaze locked on his it skittered away again.

It was just like yesterday: that same unexpected and suddenly closed expression. He had absolutely no idea why.

But then her gaze swung back, as if she was really looking at him now, and her long strides came to a halt in front of him.

‘I didn’t see you there,’ she said.

He had a feeling if she had she would have exited via the rear of her shop. The realisation frustrated him. Why was she keeping her distance?

But now she was studying him carefully, as if attempting to translate what the sum total of his face and posture actually meant.

He pushed away from the wall and rolled his shoulders back, uncomfortable with whatever Mila might have thought she’d seen.

‘Are you okay?’

He nodded sharply, not quite meeting her eyes. ‘Of course.’

‘You don’t look okay,’ she said—which shouldn’t have surprised him. Mila wasn’t one to accept anything at surface value.

She took a step closer, trying to catch his gaze.

He knew he was just being stupid now, but for some reason he just couldn’t quite look at her—the knife-edged echo of Steph’s remembered words was still yet to be washed out to sea.

She reached out, resting her fingers just above his wrist. Her hand was cool against his sun-warmed skin.

‘Last night,’ she said, as he focused on the deep red shade of her nail polish, ‘do you know what I did? I found that photobook Steph made after our trip to Bali when we were about twenty. Remember? Our first holiday without our parents. We thought we were so grown-up.’

He nodded. They’d gone with a group of his and Steph’s friends from uni. Mila had just dropped out of her umpteenth course, but that had been back when she and Steph had done everything together. There’d never been any question—of course Mila would go with them.

‘Do you remember that guy I met? From Melbourne?’ She laughed. ‘Oh, God. What a loser.’ She shook her head. ‘Anyway, last night I wanted to see Steph—see her happy—with you and...uh...me, of course.’

Her words had become a little faster, and he was finally able to drag his gaze to hers. She must be wearing boots with a heel, as she looked taller than he’d expected—actually, simply closer to him than he’d expected.

‘It made me smile,’ she said. ‘And cry.’

Her hand was still on his arm, but she’d shifted her fingers to grip harder—as if she was desperately holding on.

‘What I’m trying to say,’ she said, her big blue eyes earnest and unwavering, ‘is that I get it. These moments. Minutes. Hours.’

‘Days...’

But he stopped himself saying the rest: weeks, months... Because he’d realised it wasn’t true. Not now.

Mila realised it too—he could tell. They stood there on the street, staring at each other with a strange mix of sadness for the beautiful, smart, funny, flawed Stephanie they so missed and relief that their lives continued onwards.

‘Are you okay?’ Mila asked again.

He nodded. The ocean had stilled. The wave of grief and guilt and loss had receded.

She still gripped his arm. They both seemed to realise it at the same time. Her touch felt different now. No longer cool or simply comforting. Her fingers loosened, but didn’t fall away. She didn’t step back—but then neither did he.

Her gaze seemed to flicker slightly, darting about his face to land nowhere in particular.

When they’d been about fifteen, Mila had successfully dragged Steph into her Goth phase. Seb couldn’t remember what the actual point of it all had been, but he did remember a lot of depressing music and heavy eyeliner.

‘You have incredible eyes,’ he said, without thinking.

Those incredible eyes widened—and they were incredible...he’d always thought so—and Mila took an abrupt step back, snatched her hand away.

‘What?’

He instantly missed her touch—enough that it bothered him. Although he couldn’t have explained why.

‘I was thinking of all that eye make-up you used to wear towards the end of high school. I hated it. You look perfect just like this.’

Mila’s cheeks might have pinkened—it was hard to tell in the sunlight—but her eyes had definitely narrowed. ‘I didn’t ask for your approval of my make-up choices.’

He’d stuffed up. There it was—that shuttered, defensive expression.

‘That wasn’t what I meant. I—’

‘Look, I really have to go.’ She’d already taken a handful of steps along the footpath.

‘See you at tennis?’ he said. They’d organised it via text for the following evening.

Mila didn’t look back. ‘Yes,’ she said, sounding about as excited as if he’d reminded her of a dental appointment.

Sebastian tossed his empty coffee cup in the skip, then headed back to the building site. He might not need to be here daily to speak to the project manager, but he could find other ways to make himself useful—ideally in usefulness that involved swinging a sledgehammer.