Page 15 of Marriage Bargain with His Innocent
But he’d never been her type and—especially after Robbie and the way she’d been dumped—she had sworn off men. If someone came into her life—someone solid and stable, with a dash of creativity...someone she could envisage sharing her life with—then all well and good. But she would never again be drawn to someone inappropriate.
Robbie had been inappropriate. He had always expected her to bow to his greater knowledge and compliment him on his achievements. He’d been smart and well-read and intellectual, and she hadn’t stopped to look any further because she’d been in love with the idea of being love.
* * *
The drive down to Cornwall was not the awkward situation she had anticipated.
Matias, confirming what he had said to her, worked for much of the journey, only surfacing when they were a matter of twenty minutes away from his mother’s house, at which point he briefly quizzed her on what, exactly, she had told her mother.
‘Not a huge amount,’ she admitted. ‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing and I came to London almost immediately to see you.’
‘I still find it difficult to credit that you could have made such a monumental decision on the spur of the moment,’ Matias murmured.
‘Don’t you do anything on impulse?’
‘What doyouthink?’
‘I think it’s really strange. Your parents must be the most impulsive couple I’ve ever known, especially compared to mine, and yet you’re completely the opposite. Look at the way they embarked on their organic farming...and the way your mother took up Reiki...and then there was the whole horses for the disabled business...such a shame that crashed and burned.’
‘And yet anyone could have predicted that that would be a mistake.’
His knew his voice had cooled somewhat. He could remember his mother passing round her cut-priceReiki at Homebusiness cards to some of the parents at his boarding school at the end of term, having rocked up in their brightly painted camper van, much to the hilarity of all the boys in the entire school.
‘I certainly did and I was barely out of my teens at the time. As for doing anything on impulse? They’re a successful argument foravoidingimpulsive behaviour.’
What Georgina saw as romantic and glamorous, he saw as a regrettable handicap.
‘Maybe,’ Matias continued, ‘if they’d started with the organic farming from the very beginning and specialised in it, it might have gone further than it did. But instead they got waylaid by anything and everything, and naturally a Jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none will always be destined to fail.’
‘They werehappy. They didn’tfail.’
Matias grunted, disinclined to continue a conversation that was going nowhere. ‘So, no stories we need to tally?’ He brought the conversation back to the matter at hand. ‘No eyes meeting across a crowded dance floor? Good. The fewer lies, the less room for complications.’
‘And the quicker the inevitable end to our relationship?’
Georgina marvelled at his ability to see everything in black and white. No surprise there, but once again it made her realise how different they were. For some reason that was a reassuring thought, and she held on to it because it stopped her disobedient imagination from getting out of hand.
‘Should we plan that out now?’
‘No need to muddy the waters just yet. You can leave that to me. Like I said, I’ll take the hit.’
They were approaching Rose’s house, much to Georgina’s surprise, because the drive seemed to have been completed in the blink of an eye. They had already passed the turning that led to her parents’ house, which she was looking after and living in rent-free while they were in Australia. The houses had given way to open fields on one side and on the other a distant view of the sea.
Rose’s house sat on a hill, and Georgina felt as if she was seeing for the first time just how little enthusiasm the older woman now had for the fields she and Antonio had spent years cultivating. The crops looked vaguely straggly and ill-kempt. There was even a feeling of dilapidation about the house, as they approached it, although that shouldn’t be the case because a lot of money had been spent on it over time, thanks to Matias.
‘It looks tired,’ Matias pointed out, reading her mind. ‘I’ve tried persuading my mother that it would be in her interests to move to something more manageable but she won’t be budged.’
‘Many happy memories within those four walls,’ Georgina murmured, surprising Matias, because that emotional explanation would never have occurred to him.
His brain just didn’t function along those lines. He didn’t see the house in the same way at all. He’d been out of it for such a long time that when he looked all he saw was concrete and glass and a bunch of problems waiting to happen.
Rose was waiting for them when they pulled up outside. A semi-circular courtyard fronted the property and the front door was open, framing Rose, who was beaming from ear to ear.
She was a slightly built woman, with soft fair hair that she was allowing to turn grey. She had enormous blue eyes and the sort of delicate features that had once made her startlingly pretty but now made her look fragile and breakable, as though a single gust of wind might blow her off her feet and whip her away.
But she was still smiling as she hurried forward, peppering them with questions, then standing back to look at them both with excitement and satisfaction. She moved to embrace Matias—a proper tight hug of an embrace—and Georgina noted the way he stiffened before returning the embrace with awkward sincerity.
He’s not used to such shows of affection, she thought, startled. But then she wondered why she was surprised, when she knew how distant the relationship between them was—when she had seen with her own two eyes the awkward way they circled one another, almost as though they had forgotten how to interact as mother and son. It seemed, with that spontaneous hug, that it was a chasm Rose was trying to close.
