KIM LAWRENCE: Santiago's Love-Child

Lily’s thoughts drifted back to the occasion three weeks earlier. Rachel had unexpectedly arrived when she had been halfway through showing the prospective purchasers around. Her friend had taken one look at her, and had calmly informed the startled pair that they would have to come back another day. She had then proceeded to escort them firmly off the property.

Rachel had then packed Lily a bag, arranged a sitter for the cat and asked a neighbour to water the plants. Lily had just sat there and watched her. She supposed her listless inertia had been a symptom of whatever Rachel had seen in her face.

The break had served its purpose, but now, despite the tears this afternoon, Lily was feeling less fragile. She no longer felt so…disconnected. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not. Being grounded was painful, you had to think about things you’d prefer not to and make decisions…For months now, she realised, she’d just been drifting. She hadn’t even begun to look for somewhere to live. All she’d done was sign everything that Gordon’s solicitor had sent her.

Yes, it was definitely about time she stood on her own feet.

Rachel didn’t agree.

‘You can’t go home yet. I’ve got things planned.’

Lily, who didn’t like the sound of ‘things’ frowned suspiciously. She really wished that her friend hadn’t taken on the role of social secretary with such zeal. ‘Things…?’

Rachel acted as if she hadn’t heard. ‘God, but these shoes are murder,’ she complained, picking up the culprits, stilettos with black and pink bows.

‘Then don’t wear them.’ It seemed the obvious solution to Lily, who liked clothes but wasn’t as much of a slave to fashion as her friend.

‘Are you kidding? They make my legs look hot.’

Lily looked at the legs in question and observed honestly, ‘Your legs would look hot in wellingtons, Rachel.’ She glanced down at her own legs, currently concealed under denim. They were pretty good as legs went, but they weren’t in the same class as Rachel’s, which stopped traffic on a regular basis.

‘Yes, they would, wouldn’t they?’

Lily smiled. There was something oddly endearing about her friend’s complacent vanity.

‘But enough about my legs.’ With a little pat of one taut, tanned thigh through her short summer skirt, she turned her attention to Lily, who in turn looked wary, an expression her friend had observed always appeared when the conversation got even faintly personal.

Such tight-lipped reserve was something Rachel found hard to understand. If she had been through hell and back like Lily, she would have wanted to get it off her chest, but all her attempts to encourage Lily to let it out had failed miserably.

‘Don’t you think you’d feel a lot better if you talked about it?’

They both knew what ‘it’ was: Lily’s divorce—the ink was still wet on that—and her miscarriage earlier that year.

FOR a split second Lily was tempted to tell Rachel; the urge quickly passed.

Rachel didn’t know half the story and the truth was so shocking that she couldn’t predict how even her broad-minded friend would react to the unvarnished version.

Besides, the habits of a lifetime were hard to break and ‘sharing feelings’ had been encouraged during Lily’s childhood about as much as spontaneous hugging!

If she had let her feelings show, her grandmother’s impatient response had been, ‘Nobody likes a whiner, Lily.’ Lily had learnt not to whine. Her crying had always been done behind closed doors.

‘Nothing to talk about.’

‘Nobody does the stiff upper lip these days, you know, Lily. All that being reserved does is give you an ulcer.’

‘My stomach feels fine.’ Lily placed her hand against the curve of her belly and discovered with a sense of surprise that she had lost a lot of the soft, feminine roundness she had always hated.

The softness that Santiago had professed to find sexy and feminine.

She knew from experience that there were times when fighting the flashbacks did no good, that it was easier on those occasions just to go with the flow. Lily, dimly conscious of Rachel’s voice in the background, felt her eyelids grow heavy as she allowed the bitter-sweet memories to wash over her.

She had perfect, total, painful recall of the heat in his incredible eyes as he had tipped her face up to his and smiled a slow, sexy smile as he had drawn her against him, fitting his hard angles into her softer curves and murmuring throatily in her ear.

A woman should be soft and round, not hard and angular.

It was humiliating, but a full twelve months after that first scorching kiss and she still couldn’t think about it without getting palpitations.

‘Well?’

Rachel’s impatient voice acted like a lifeline back to the present. Lily grabbed it and held on. While she was fixated on the past the chances of her rebuilding her life were nil.

She dabbed her tongue to the beads of sweat along her upper lip and gave a strained smile as she rubbed her damp palms against her jeans.

‘Sorry, I…’ Am pathetic and living in the past? Can’t get it into my thick skull he never loved me? All of the above?

‘You weren’t listening. I could tell…’ Rachel considered her friend’s flushed face. ‘You look a bit…?’

‘I’m fine.’ Smile fixed, Lily pushed the intrusive images away without acknowledging them or his presence in her head.

‘What you need is a nice glass of wine,’ Rachel decided. ‘Just don’t move,’ she said, padding over to the big stainless-steel fridge in her bare feet. A moment later she returned with a bottle of Chardonnay and two glasses, which she filled.

‘A nice night in…yeah, I can live with that,’ she conceded, handing Lily her glass. She curled up comfortably on the sofa and reached for the newspaper. ‘I wonder what’s on the telly tonight?’ Turning over the pages, she suddenly stopped and lowered the broadsheet to the table. ‘Now there,’ she observed with a lascivious smile, ‘is something I wouldn’t mind finding in my Christmas stocking.’

‘I thought you were in love with your delicious Dan.’ Lily laughed, looking over her shoulder to see what hunk her friend was drooling over.

‘I’m in love, not blind. Now, there’s a man who doesn’t use a shoebox to file his returns. Look at that mouth and those eyes…’ she enthused.

‘You can tell about his filing system from his mouth?’ Lily teased.

‘No, that I can tell by the attention the financial pages give him on a regular basis. I wonder if he’s that sexy in real life?’ She slung a comical look of entreaty over her shoulder. ‘And please don’t spoil it by saying it’s just good lighting. You’re such a disgusting cynic.’

Lily went cold as she looked at the half-page photo showing an unsmiling, dark-eyed man. It was a standard moody black and white shot of an incredibly attractive man. Lily knew that the lighting couldn’t begin to do justice to just how sexy the man was in real life. It didn’t reveal the aura of raw sexuality he projected like a force field.

Aware that some sort of response was expected of her, and hyperventilating wasn’t it, Lily cleared her throat. ‘He does have something,’ she admitted, reading the headline above that pronounced MORAIS LEAVES THE OPPOSITION COUNTING THE COST AGAIN.

Me too, she thought.

‘Something!’ Rachel squealed. ‘He is off-the-scale gorgeous. That man,’ she said, poking the page with her finger, ‘not only looks like he could be quite deliciously bad in bed—’

Never again will I mock Rachel’s instinct, Lily decided. Of course, Rachel’s instinct only told part of the story—as well as being deliciously bad he could also be breathtakingly tender and passionately unrestrained. Lily pressed her hands to her stomach as the muscles deep inside tightened.