Ruby turned her face up to the sun as she remembered fixing lunch together and making sweet, tender love afterwards. She barely recognised herself in Sam’s presence. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this relaxed, and there wasn’t a yoga pose in sight. Instead there was just him. Sam and his magic hands that knew just how to touch her, Sam with his gentle manner and infinite patience when he discovered Kong had treated his new shoe as a chew toy, and Sam with his intelligent conversation and broad, broad shoulders it would be so easy to lean on for a while.
Right from the beginning Sam had been able to strip away the guardedness she’d carried with her for ever, and sleeping with him, being like this with him, only seemed to make it harder to keep things in perspective. How much harder would it be if she actually fell in love with him?
In love with him?
This wasn’t about love. Sam wouldn’t want that from her and neither one of them had mentioned anything about emotions, or indeed, any of this going beyond the long weekend. In fact, Ruby knew that it couldn’t go beyond the weekend because, regardless of what Sam thought, continuing to sleep together would definitely complicate their working life.
Ruby’s heart thumped hard as her phone beeped a text message and, desperate for the distraction, she fished it out of her pocket as if it were a hundred-pound gold nugget she was trying to scratch out of the dirt.
‘It’s a text from my mother,’ she said, sitting up so abruptly that Sam’s fingers tangled in her hair.
Gently disentangling the strands, he scanned her face, which had grown pale as she read the long message.
‘Something wrong?’
Ruby blinked, her brain trying to make sense of her mother’s text. ‘No. Yes. My mother is getting married!’
Sam looked at her, one arm behind his head, his brows knitted together as he watched her. ‘You don’t seem very happy about that.’
‘I’m not. I mean, I am, but...’ She shook her head. ‘Honestly, I don’t know what I feel.’ Apart from agitated and unsettled. She jumped to her feet, instinctively needing to put space between her and Sam. ‘My mother has this eternal optimism when it comes to relationships and it’s so alien to me I find it hard to relate to.’
She paced over to the edge of the property and stared out at the bay beyond the trees. She felt Sam come up behind her, stiffening in case he tried to touch her.
‘I don’t follow.’
‘My mother doesn’t make very good decisions when she’s in a relationship.’ She turned towards him, hugging her arms over her stomach. ‘She gets very needy and then it all goes wrong.’
‘Is that what happened between her and your father?’
‘In some ways.’ She gave a hollow laugh. ‘They used to fight all the time and sometimes it got so bad I would find Molly hiding under her bed and I’d read to her to help block it all out.’ She glanced towards the bay again. ‘I never understood it. My father never seemed happy and yet my mother had given up her career for him, which she later regretted when he left her for a work colleague.’
‘That’s tough.’
‘It was. It took my mother a long time to recover and nothing I could ever say made her feel better about it.’
Sam frowned, his hands in his pockets as he watched her. ‘Why was it your job to make her feel better about it? You were only a child.’
‘I don’t know. I think she became depressed and I was the only one available to help. Honestly, I would have done anything to make her happy back then.’
Sam gave her an astute look. ‘So you were the rescuer of the family.’
‘Rescuer?’ Her short laugh was more an embarrassed cough. She couldn’t believe that she’d just blurted out her family secrets like that. This weekend was about sex, not some lame therapy session. ‘Hardly.’ She made to move away from him but he stopped her, clasping her arms gently and drawing her resistant body closer.
‘How old were you when your father left?’
‘I was fourteen and—’ She swallowed heavily, unsure how to switch topics without being obvious. ‘It was the best thing really.’ Apart from her mother going into a deep depression for a couple of years. ‘Well, not the best, but it was certainly more peaceful after he left. Calmer. Only...’