‘I WOULDN’T WORRY about it, darling; it’s for the best. You were never going to be able to hold onto a man like that, anyway.’
Fliss turned, the exultation in her mother’s expression like a slap on the face. But she was already reeling from everything Ash had said.
He loved her?
He loved her?
It had sounded too incredible to be true. The ground had pitched and shifted beneath her feet and all she’d been able to focus on had been staying upright as she’d tried to work out how her entire world had now changed.
He’d told her she was worth more. Told her that she deserved more. And she’d thought talk was cheap, but he’d proved it to her by telling her he loved her. It had been like watching a fireworks display—the Army kind her uncle had taken her to where they’d used up all the end-of-year pyrotechnics for a display that surpassed anything in the civilian world. Just like being with Ash surpassed any other relationship she’d ever known in her life.
She understood why he’d said he couldn’t be around her if she couldn’t even stand up for herself. She’d known all evening that his iron control was slipping but she hadn’t been able to help him, because that would have meant helping herself. And she hadn’t thought she was good enough for that.
Ash had proved to her she was, and she’d been so stunned that she hadn’t reacted fast enough.
And now she’d lost him.
But he’d still left her with a choice of her own. To accept her life as it was, her relationships as they were, or to finally stand up for herself. The least she could do was ensure that losing him wasn’t for nothing.
She turned to her mother, determined to find out whether the chasm between them had ever stood a chance of being bridged or whether Ash was right, and her mother would never change.
‘Do you really hate me that much?’
She could feel the chill hit the room.
‘Don’t start believing your little lover’s words now,’ her mother warned, her voice so sharp that it could have cut through Fliss deeper than any physical wound.
And it would have. Before Ash.
‘Do you hate me?’ She advanced on her mother, a tiny sliver of her old self returning with each step.
In an instant, her mother’s face twisted into a smile that was too ugly to be anything but loathing.
‘You ruined my only chance at happiness the day you were born.’
‘You knew your dancing was over when you realised you were pregnant.’ Fliss wasn’t trying to antagonise, but it was something she’d always wondered about and never understood.
‘Why didn’t you get rid of me if you felt that strongly? Why have a child only to put it through such utter hell?’
‘You think that isn’t what I tried to do?’ her mother spat, the truth embedding itself into Fliss’s very being.
‘Why did you change your mind?’ she whispered.
There was no regret, no empathy, no love in her mother’s reply. The scornful tone like applying heat to a burn.
‘I didn’t change my mind. I was more than happy to go through with it. But then your grandfather turned up, stormed in and frog-marched me out. White gown and all. There was no way he and your grandmother were ever going to allow me to do something that would shame them even more than they already were by my pregnancy.’
Rushing blood roared in her ears as she clawed at the edge of nothingness with her fingernails, just to try to find a purchase.
‘I’d made a mistake, yes, I’d got pregnant. But the obvious solution to get rid of it wasn’t even a consideration for them. That would be letting me off too lightly; in their eyes I was going to have to live with the consequences.’
‘So because they’d trapped you into a miserable life, you made mine even worse?’ Fliss cried.
‘I tried to get out of there, I took you with me so that you wouldn’t be brought up with the same restrictions I’d had. But the first chance you got, you went running back to them. You chose them over me,’ her mother raged, her face inches away from Fliss’s.
‘I was eight!’
‘You threw everything I did for you back in my face.’
‘You did nothing for me,’ Fliss argued, standing up to her mother for the first time in her life. ‘Except make my life more wretched than it needed to be.’
It was almost too much to take in. Feeling for a chair, Fliss backed up and sat down. Ash had been right. Nothing she could say or do would make a difference to her mother. She was craving affection which was never going to come.
Repeating the cycle would only hurt more people. She’d been hurting herself, and she’d definitely been hurting Ash. They deserved better than that.
Maybe it wasn’t too late.
Standing up on shaky legs, Fliss fixed her mother with a calm, firm stare. Her major’s stare.
‘I think it’s time you left.’
Her mother snorted, deliberately turning her back.
Fliss inched her way to the door, fumbling with the catch as she hauled it open. It felt heavy, almost too heavy, but she gritted her teeth. ‘I said, it’s time you left.’
Her mother gave a bark of laughter. ‘I don’t think so, Felicity.’ She didn’t sound as sure of herself as usual.
‘I’m asking you nicely. Don’t make me do this the other way.’
The words were out before she could stop them. And, to her disbelief, they sounded strong, confident, forceful.
Enough that her mother bit back the retort which was on her lips.
For several long moments the two women faced off against each other. It took everything she had, but Fliss refused to back down. Not this time.
‘You will regret this.’
‘No.’ Fliss shook her head. ‘The only thing I regret is not doing this sooner.’
Perhaps then she wouldn’t have lost someone as special as Ash from her life.
* * *
Ash had no idea where he was heading. He’d been driving in circles for the last two hours without seeing anything. He’d left Fliss’s house intent on driving back home, sorting his kit out and leaving early for the next posting. Anything to get his mind off Fliss. But his heart had known what his head hadn’t yet been ready to accept.
However hard he tried, he couldn’t shake her from his head. Her desperate, ravaged face, or her defeated stance. Everything about her marked her as a different person to the Major he’d been instantly attracted to. The woman he’d fallen in love with. It killed him to see her allowing herself to be pulled down as she had tonight, but he couldn’t have stayed. He’d tried to help her see the truth but she hadn’t wanted to listen.
Pressing his foot on the accelerator, Ash tried to ignore the voice in the back of his head. But, however fast he drove, he wasn’t going to outrun it.
The control he’d kept tonight, not for himself but for Fliss, told him how far he had come in less than a month. And that was down to her. If he loved her the way he claimed to, shouldn’t he be prepared to fight for her? Shouldn’t he try for longer than one evening, to help her to fight for herself?
And he did love her. He loved her intelligence, her focus, her dry sense of humour, her hidden sense of adventure, as much as he loved her lips, her body, the way she always broke apart in his arms.
Checking the road around him, Ash felt a rush of adrenalin surge through his system and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the slick, if illegal, U-turn he had just executed in the last turning lane of the dual carriageway.
By the time he got back to her house it was bathed in darkness.