Page 75 of The Polly Principle (The Laws of Love 2)

Polly tightened her lips one more notch. “Believe it or not, it’s the truth.”

His eyebrows lifted. “Because of your mum and dad? Our parents aren’t our destiny.” She flicked her eyes up and saw that delectable sideways twist to his lips. “Otherwise I don’t give much for my chances.”

She huffed out a laugh. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”

“Ha, not only your parents. I reckon there’s more to this than you’re telling.”

Her scalp prickled. “Like what?”

“Like something—or someone else.”

Polly scoffed, way too loudly. “God, you love to dig around, Dr J.” She turned to face him on the bench and hoisted a leg up, held onto her ankle. His eyes flicked to her sheeny leggings then away quickly.

Yep, he was still interested. One up to her.

“Okay, I’ll make a deal,” she said. “You tell me your heartbreak and I’ll tell you mine.”

His chin retracted and his eyes clouded for a second. “Not sure if that’s fair. You’ve got a lot more dirt on me so far than the other way round.”

“Oh, come on, I’ve told you all about my fucked-up childhood.”

“Hardly. You’re a tightly closed book masquerading as a full-page spread.”

The obvious double meaning made her smirk and he grinned up from under his lashes. It was disconcerting how he seemed to get her, but it felt good somehow, like a pair of warm arms enveloping her.

She drew in a big breath. “Okay. The reason I left home at sixteen was, yeah, I couldn’t stand being around Dad, and partly because of a guy.”

“Knew it!”

She cast him the stink-eye. “Stop looking so smug. It’s not that incredible a deduction. Teenage girl, unhappy at home, looking for an out. Go figure.”

They grinned at each other.

“Okay, so I was pretty infatuated, I’ll admit it. Gave the bastard my virginity. I thought I was in love. He was a musician. Danny O’Dougherty; played in a band called Streets of Dublin. Irish, of course, super-cute, and did the bastard know it. I met him when his band was on a tour of outback pubs. He’d finished his tour in our town, so he stayed on for a month or two working on Dad’s farm. He basically seduced me. Told me I was his everything and, guess what? My sixteen-year-old hormonal brain believed every word. So I followed him to Perth. Only to turn up at his house to find Danny’s naked butt grooving on top of some other desperate little groupie.”

“Jesussss!”

She flicked him a glance, saw those silver eyes spark, and it made her heart do a hop and skip.

“What did you do?”

Polly pushed the hair away from her face with both hands. “In a very un-me-like fashion, I backed quietly out of the room and sat down in an alley and cried for three hours.”

He didn’t speak, but his eyes were immeasurably soft and that made a little hiccup of pain rise up in her throat. Amazing how you could plaster it all over until someone cracked you open so that all your gooey middle was ready to spill out.

“Then I went and got a tattoo.”

“The, er, one, on your…?”

“Yep, my serpent. It cost me most of the money I’d brought with me, but I didn’t give a rat’s. And then I went looking for a job. I got turned down by about twenty places and then I walked into this weird, second-hand book shop, with this big blonde woman bustling around inside. She took one look at my face, said ‘you poor little darling, in you come’… and that was it… that was my new mummy hen.”

“That’s whose house you live in now?”

Polly nodded, swirled the ice in her glass. “Rowena Montgomery. And Alice, her daughter, is my very best friend.”

“And she’s the one in England with her fiancé, who you—”

“Yes, but that’s a long story.”

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