Page 12 of Coming Home to Roseford Villas
‘I wasn’t sure which one would be long enough,’ he said, ‘so I thought I’d bring them both up with me and let you decide.’
Rory selected the one she thought would work best, and then, at Leo’s invitation, sat down at the scrubbed oak kitchen tableand watched Leo make her a latte. As he did so, they exchanged pleasantries, but Rory still felt as though they were two passengers who just happened to be sitting on the same table in a train carriage. There was something carefully measured about their words, as if neither of them wanted to broach the subject of their shared past. And the longer it went on, the more frustrated Rory felt that they were ignoring the large elephant in the room.
Leo eventually passed her a generous cup of latte, and as she took it, their fingertips brushed. She was too tense to feel anything from the gesture, but the sight of his hands did bring back memories, warm, tingling memories, of the way they’d once touched her. She fought to smother those thoughts: they weren’t helping the awkwardness of the situation at all.
‘So, have you had a productive morning?’ Leo asked as he took a seat at the table, to one side of her.
‘Very,’ Rory replied. She hesitated, wondering if she should elaborate on what she’d found out about Edmund Treloar. Finally, she added, ‘It’s great to finally have time to get to grips with the ideas I’ve been thinking about for so long.’ Briefly, she filled him in on her morning spent perusing the letters in the Roseford Hall archives.
‘Oh, yes?’ Leo raised an eyebrow. ‘Have you discovered anything interesting? Or scandalous?’ His eyes twinkled.
‘I’m not completely sure yet,’ Rory replied, ‘but I’m hoping Stella might be able to help me decide.’
‘Well, when you’re ready to share, I’ll be all ears!’ Leo replied.
As they sipped their coffee and talked some more, Rory began to relax. Leo’s genuine interest in her research felt flattering, and pleasing, and although she didn’t divulge too many details, she liked talking to him about it.
Eventually, though, when they were nearly all the way down their coffee cups, the conversation began to flounder. There it was again, the thing that neither of them seemed able to discuss.And Rory knew, if she didn’t broach it soon, it was going to become a huge distraction for her, and probably for him, too. She wasn’t the kind of person who could just park things safely away in little mental boxes: she needed to face things head on, and the longer she and Leo did this crazy dance where they both pretended as though they hadn’t ever been intimate, just for the sake of a quieter life, the more frustrating it was going to be.
‘So,’ she said, gathering up her courage as she gulped down the last of her latte, ‘are we ever going to talk about when we were sixteen, or what?’
When she saw the look of shock on Leo’s face, she wondered if it would have been better just to remain frustrated.
16
Leo gulped so hard at Rory’s matter-of-fact question that he accidentally ended up inhaling his coffee instead of swallowing it. As his eyes filled with tears, and drops dripped from his nose, a flush of mortification spread over his cheeks.
‘Christ!’ Rory said, putting her own coffee cup down on the kitchen table and springing to Leo’s side. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you!’ Leo felt the slap on his back and he shook his head, coughing to dislodge the last of the fluid from his throat. Swallowing hard, he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
‘It’s all right,’ he croaked. ‘I’m fine, honestly.’
Leo looked up into Rory’s distinctly amused face. Now she was seemingly sure he wasn’t going to choke to death on her, a grin was plastered over her features.
‘I’d never have been so direct if I knew you were that reluctant to talk about it,’ she said, still smiling. ‘I mean, was it really that triggering?’
Leo found himself smiling back through the spluttering-induced tears. ‘Not triggered,’ he reassured her, ‘I just wasn’t quite expecting you to be so, er, honest. The Rory Henderson I knew at sixteen wasn’t into confrontation, or straight questions.’
Rory sat back down at the table. ‘Well, fourteen years in a classroom has taught Rory Dean a lot about when to be diplomatic and when to just come straight out with it!’
‘I can see that,’ Leo replied. ‘Whereas, in my line of business, we’re used to couching things in rather more complex terms.’
‘So, what’s it to be?’ Rory asked him. ‘A straightforward discussion or something more, er, complicated?’
Leo let out a sigh. The coughing fit had, thankfully, subsided, and now he was just left to answer the questions Rory had posed. ‘The honest answer is that I didn’t know how to broach it with you, Rory. I mean, what can I say? I’m sorry I broke your heart? I’m sorry I never kept in touch? I’m sorry I didn’t try harder to come back to you? Does that about cover it?’
Was that a head toss of exasperation he was observing from Rory? He waited for her response.
‘Well, Leo,’ she said eventually, ‘it’s like this. Yes, you did break my heart, but that wasn’t your fault, was it? I mean, you can’t tell me, with twenty years of hindsight, that it would have ended up any differently. We were a world apart, for heaven’s sake!’
‘I know that,’ Leo said softly. ‘But, for what it’s worth… I missed you, and I’m sorry.’
‘For what?’ There was definitely a trace of annoyance in Rory’s voice now, and Leo was struggling to understand why. ‘I’m not sorry… for any of it. We’ve both had lives, good lives, away from each other.’
That’s debatable,Leo thought, thinking of the mess of his own situation. But he could, at least, feel pleased that Rory seemed satisfied with the way her own life had turned out, and he did have some sort of hope for his future. ‘OK,’ he said, realising that Rory was waiting for some kind of a response from him. ‘So, we grew up and did all right. What else is there to talk about?’
‘Oh, how about the fact that we’re living barely a hundred yards from each other at the moment, and you’re my landlord for the summer? That’s quite a power dynamic.’ Rory sounded deadpan, but Leo noticed a familiar twinkle in her eye, downplaying her bald statement. He loved – hehadloved – that about her.
‘Well, I promise not to abuse that power in any way,’ Leo replied. ‘And, strictly speaking, I’m not your landlord. My Aunt Vi and Uncle Bryan are. They still own the place, even if I’m running it for the time being. So, I’m kind ofin loco avunculi et amitae, if you will.’
