The Wedding Proposal

by Sue Moorcroft

  Elle prowled closer. ‘Naked man,’ she breathed.

  He drank her in, those cool blue eyes almost predatory beneath her fine blonde brows. The tops of her breasts rose where the fabric of her dress crossed over and narrowed into straps, blue and green and all the colours of the sea. He had to swallow before he could speak. ‘Care to join me?’

  ‘Love to.’ The corners of her mouth lifted slightly but there was no laughter in her eyes. Instead there was wonder, tenderness. Hunger.

  Slowly, she reached under her dress and pulled down her underwear, stepping from the white thong and dropping it to the floor. Then she stretched behind herself and tugged until he heard the soft hiss of a descending zipper. Dropping her arms, she shrugged, and her dress began to slide south. The colours seemed to shimmer as the fabric caught briefly on her breasts, or maybe it was Lucas’s vision that shimmered. He did seem to have stopped breathing.

  The dress slithered to the floor.

  Lucas wasn’t sure who reached out first but in an instant hot naked woman was jammed up against him and his only recognisable thought was that he must get inside her.

  Elle knew it was unlikely that she’d die of pleasure but when there was so much of it, it was difficult not to at least cry out as if wounded. After the initial urgency, Lucas had created a breathtaking rhythm, pulling oh-so-slowly out of her, to pause, then push urgggggh-so-slooooowly back in. Another pause until she was grinding against him, then he started all over again.

  The intensity, the concentration, was ferocious. Despite the air conditioning, the cabin pulsed with heat.

  She gasped as he pulled out of her. ‘This would be almost frightening’—he slid back inside her and she groaned—‘if it didn’t feel so good.’

  Sweat shone on his cheeks. He screwed up his eyes. Then his control broke and the urgency flooded back and Elle couldn’t make her breathing sync with her heartbeat to even say his name.

  If it were possible to die of pleasure, she realised, she didn’t care.

  Slowly, their breathing calmed. Lucas had rolled onto his side, done the gentlemanly thing with the condom and pulled Elle against his skin, holding her as their sweat dried.

  Elle’s phone chirped. She’d abandoned it with her purse on the floor by the door. She managed to open her eyes. ‘That might be Charlie or Kayleigh. They’re off for a romantic dinner but they asked us if we’d go for a drink first.’

  ‘Right.’ Lucas’s eyelids flickered but didn’t completely open. ‘Are we going?’

  Elle stretched. ‘A drink does sound good. Then we could come back to the boat for dinner. I bought the food.’ She hoped she sounded normal, but her heart shivered. Over dinner. That’s when she had scheduled telling him the rest of the Ricky story. She’d even put the romantic meal idea into Charlie’s head to try and prevent him and Kayleigh turning up at the boat or suggesting that they all ate together.

  Although she was bone-deep thankful to have at least this one time with Lucas, she repeated, ‘A drink does sound good,’ creating a reason to get out of bed. Once she was no longer tangled in the sheets with him, it wouldn’t be so tempting to put off the conversation she was dreading. But if she put it off once she’d put it off again and again and sooner or later the indecision would come back to bite her rear end.

  ‘Better shower, then.’ He pulled her a little higher up his body so that he could kiss her.

  Elle was trying not to dwell too much on the evening before them. But it was hard not to let various scenarios run through her head. ‘Do you m-mind—’ She took a breath. ‘Do you mind if we don’t tell Charlie anything, just for now?’

  Lucas looked faintly surprised.

  She pressed an apologetic kiss on his neck. ‘I’d just rather not have to face a barrage of questions about this.’

  He tipped her face up, frowning into her eyes. ‘Before you understand what “this” is?’

  ‘I suppose so. I know you don’t like secrets, but—’

  After a thoughtful stare, he shrugged. ‘But you’d be more comfortable keeping our business as our business?’

  She smiled, gratefully. ‘At least for now.’ And if ‘this’ was all over by the end of the evening, then it would be a hell of a lot less embarrassing not to have accepted Charlie and Kayleigh’s congratulations and exclamations. Especially for Lucas.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Lucas loved his brother. He’d loved him since he’d visited his mother on the maternity ward and she’d shown him the baby in the plastic cot. ‘This is your brother.’

  He’d taken the ‘your’ part of that sentence seriously and spent the next years alternately ordering Charlie around and looking after him. They’d grown up close.

  Two days ago, if someone had told Lucas that his little brother would turn up in Malta and they’d be able to sit around a table in the last of the evening light, drinking beer and talking, he would have been delighted. If he could have held Elle’s hand and fended off Charlie’s jokes and hoots because Lucas and Elle had got it together again, he would still have been delighted.

  As it was, Charlie and Kayleigh were the ones holding hands, while Lucas and Elle occupied individual spaces.

  Any idea he might have had of protesting against Elle’s request that they keep a lid on what was going on between them had died when he’d looked into her eyes and seen her uncertainty. What he’d been chewing over had crystallised forcibly.

  Elle was acutely uncomfortable when she was pushed into revealing things she’d rather keep to herself, and just because he liked everything out in the open didn’t give him the right to expect her to feel the same. She was a private person. So what? That was allowed.

  In the past, maybe he’d been blinded by his white-hot need to possess. It had taken a while but now he was finally beginning to see that ‘your brother’ would always be your brother, but ‘your girlfriend’ was only yours for as long as she wanted to be.

  A lot of past aggro had been created by allowing his suspicions to feed on Elle’s natural inclination towards reserve. That didn’t make him particularly proud of himself.

  So he went along with Elle’s wishes, keeping to his own space while she updated them on her mother’s condition.

  Even after Charlie and Kayleigh headed off to a romantic restaurant on the bastions of the silent city of Mdina he strolled back to the Shady Lady decorously at Elle’s side as if nothing had changed between them.

  They prepared dinner together and he nibbled her neck a couple of times, rewarded by her relaxing, laughing, rubbing her curves against him in the confined area.

  But when they went up to the flybridge to eat in public view, he did no more than let his bare leg rest discreetly against hers beneath the table as they dined on cheese with Maltese bread and big dark red tomatoes, and all the leafy stuff that she seemed to like so he went along with.

  As the rapid twilight descended and the lights began to cast their golden squiggles in the creek he watched her take a draught of wine. And then that tight, shut look stole across her face again. His heart dipped.

  So when she put on a smile and said, ‘It seems only fair to give you part two of the Ricky saga,’ he found himself shaking his head.

  She stopped, confusion bringing down her blonde brows.

  ‘You’ve probably told me enough,’ he said, gently. ‘I’ve been thinking it over all day and come to the conclusion that we can leave most of it behind us.’ Relief blazed in her eyes and he congratulated himself on making the right decision.

  He knew everything he needed to know. Except for— A vision rose in his mind: Elle standing very still in the street outside her office, a man almost as close to her as he could get, talking vehemently into her upturned face. Seconds had passed, five, ten, then Elle had spun on her heel and disappeared back through the revolving door. The man had stared after
her. And smiled. Lucas had found his breathing coming so hard that it blurred his vision, making him unsure how to interpret what he’d seen.

  He reached across the table for Elle’s hands. ‘There’s only one thing I do need to know. Something that would affect the present.’ He kept his gaze on her, letting her read his eyes. ‘It might not be fair to ask and I probably shouldn’t, but I’ve grown up enough to know my own frailties. If I don’t ask it, the question will always fester. Is it OK to ask you?’

  Her face was very still. Then she nodded, jerkily, her gaze fixed on his.

  He drew in a breath. ‘Were you seeing anyone else when you were with me?’

  Visibly, new tension entered her body. Her voice emerged huskily but her gaze never wavered, blue and true. ‘Are you asking if I cheated? Not once, not to any extent!’

  A mixture of relief, joy and regret made his heart beat heavily. ‘So I just fucked everything up by viewing what were obviously your wedding issues as suspicious. I saw you outside your office building talking to a guy I didn’t know, and somehow turned that into you having an affair.’

  Her hands gripped his as if she were clinging on to wreckage in the middle of a large and hostile ocean. ‘We fucked everything up,’ she countered, fiercely. ‘Neither of us dealt well with the pressures caused by needing to get married to go to America. But back up. You say you don’t need to know about my past – but don’t trust me enough to believe I could speak to a man you don’t know without cheating? If you want me to tell you about that, now’s definitely the time—’

  ‘No!’ She jumped at his vehemence, but he’d just seen sickeningly clearly that he could have spent the past four years with Elle, rather than without her, and all he wanted now was to find a way to go forward. ‘You’ve told me the only thing I need to know. Let the rest go, Elle. And I will, too. I apologise for not trusting you. I’m sorry that I used to get in your face. I’m working on respecting your way of doing things rather than trying to manoeuvre you into my way.’

  It took several moments for her to soften a degree or two. She managed a tiny smile but it looked like an effort. ‘Do you mean I have to get used to you not saying exactly what you’re thinking?’

  He gave a twisted grin, relieved to see the relaxed Elle breaking through. ‘I’m not sure I’d go as far as that.’

  Her eyes glittered in the lights from the quay and she opened her mouth as if she were going to say more. Much more. As if truth was going to bubble out of her like molten lava.

  Instead, she leaned over the table and kissed his mouth, long and deep. She didn’t seem to care who saw her do it, either.

  Welcoming the passion, the heat, he silently reaffirmed his decision not to ask for more. Definitely. As it was, he’d almost asked one question too many.

  But … what the hell had she been going to say?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Elle felt as if she’d spent the last years encrusted in concrete. But last night had blasted it to smithereens. She’d made an honest attempt to explain what else had happened with Ricky and Lucas had stated that he didn’t need to know. Apart from having her fidelity questioned, which she was trying hard to make allowances for, uncomfortably aware of her secrets, she could float as high as the Maltese sky.

  Her euphoria wasn’t even dimmed by the kind of morning at Nicholas Centre that would usually have made her doubt her suitability for volunteering.

  The two ‘children’ in question, both bigger than Elle, were the swearing duo from the previous day. Elle understood that their behaviour probably cloaked self-esteem issues or fear and that the troubled and vulnerable used challenging behaviour to disguise their real feelings. But it still wasn’t fun to be shouted at and a perfectly good keyboard slammed to the table over and over as anger blazed in the bigger lad’s eyes.

  The trigger was that Elle had addressed him in English.

  It was only a friendly, ‘So, tell me what you’re doing?’ designed to encourage the boys to interact with her rather than disrupt the whole room. But it was met with a hail of Maltese and only a few words intelligible to her – several swear words, which she’d picked up pretty quickly over the last weeks – and ‘English!’ accompanied by emphatic spitting on the floor.

  Turning to three other lads who were huddled blamelessly around another computer, she repeated her casual enquiry and was relieved to receive a more courteous response. ‘We’re playing a sim, Football Manager.’

  Her ‘That’s great, can I watch for a while?’ was almost drowned out by fists hammering on desks and heels drumming on the floor from the other end of the island layout. Not a promising situation, considering she was soon supposed to begin a workshop on designing posters and flyers.

  ‘Can we keep the noise down a bit?’ and ‘Is there something I can help you with?’ seemed only to increase the ferocity of the drumming. Elle felt the first stirrings of alarm. When the noise brought Joseph upstairs, she even found herself glad to see Oscar strolling up behind him.

  However, in the genial way that somehow produced co-operation, Joseph simply asked the two boys to come back tomorrow. With one last bang of keyboard on desk they were gone, clattering down the stairs, shouting something that Elle didn’t mind not being able to understand.

  Oscar went to chat reassuringly to the boys playing on the football sim. Joseph caught Elle’s eye and she joined him at the machine the boys had been using.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll just take a look at what they’ve been doing.’ The screen displayed a networking site she wasn’t familiar with but she didn’t like what she saw. She put the site name into a search engine. ‘Great,’ she groaned as she signed in as an admin. ‘Looks as if this site has recently been involved in cyberbullying. I’ll add it to the blocked list.’

  ‘Good catch,’ said Joseph, making Elle feel better about not making headway with the rowdiness of the boys. He lowered his voice. ‘No recurrence of the undesirable images being downloaded?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not so far. I’ve been keeping an eye out for it.’

  She searched the browsing history and blocked another site she didn’t like the look of and Joseph and Oscar drifted back to whatever they’d been doing before the ruckus.

  Elle prepared to begin her intended workshop, feeling slightly shaken. Because of the disruption, she ‘stepped back from her expectations’, as Joseph would put it, and the session ended up being more about creating random clashing nonsense images than planning posters. At least it gave the participants plenty of practice at using the various tools, and the half-dozen kids who turned up seemed to enjoy it.

  The session ended at noon but Elle had stowed a sandwich lunch in the kitchen fridge. She was due to sit in on the Bubblemaker discussion at two-thirty but, more importantly, she hadn’t seen Carmelo since Saturday and hoped that he’d put in an appearance if she hung around. Yesterday, she’d only been able to hang on for ten minutes before she’d had to leave to get to Seadancer. It wasn’t quite enough time for Carmelo to make it from school to the centre – supposing he’d been to school.

  Today, her patience was rewarded. Carmelo panted into the room at twenty past twelve. His face lit up when he saw Elle and he arrived at her side with a bounce. ‘Finished!’ he announced, dramatically. ‘School is finished. I am in holidays now.’

  ‘Fantastic!’ Elle was delighted to see him so happy. Actually, just delighted to see him. ‘School’s great, but we probably learn better when we’ve had a break from it.’

  Carmelo didn’t argue with her optimism, he just perched his skinny frame on the chair next to hers. ‘I will look at YouTube today.’

  ‘OK, you’d better use earphones. The room’s filling up and if you all begin to watch YouTube or play games it’ll be too noisy.’ At peak times, the computer room could be like a teenage party on a sugar rush.

  Instantly
, Carmelo changed tack. ‘I look at cars.’ It was obvious that he didn’t want the earphones to interfere with a chance to talk to Elle. He began happily to browse through the Top Gear site, lingering over the sleekest, brightest and most expensive miracles of automotive design, chattering constantly about what he saw. She felt a tug at her heartstrings as he ogled Ferraris and Lamborghinis that seemed cruelly out of his grasp.

  She moved around the room, checking out activity, offering help, showing interest without interfering. Most of the kids were happy to share what they were doing on Instagram or Pinterest, or what video they were giggling at on YouTube.

  At one o’clock Aileen arrived and Elle went down to the kitchen for lunch. Carmelo followed, taking the seat beside her and swinging his legs as he told her about the visiting priest who had said end-of-term mass at his school that morning. If Carmelo was dissatisfied at making a meal out of tap water, it didn’t show, though several other children and Axel shared the big table with them and all ate or drank something more sustaining.

  Maria was in the room, too, with fizzy drinks, fruit, crisps, cereal bars and fruit on sale.

  Sandwich eaten, Elle bought a pomegranate and a large lush orange with telltale red blotches on the skin. She began to peel it, but then halted. ‘What on earth is this?’

  ‘Larinġa tad-demm,’ said Carmelo, helpfully.

  ‘It’s red.’ Using a piece of kitchen towel from the middle of the table, she pulled aside the segments distrustfully. ‘Oranges are supposed to be orange.’

  Carmelo looked at her in puzzlement. ‘Larinġa tad-demm is a bit red. It’s good.’

  Maria glanced over. ‘Blood orange,’ she translated. ‘They’re grown here in Malta.’

  Cautiously, Elle bit the end off a segment. Lovely. But she manufactured a grimace. ‘Hmm.’ And put the orange down on the kitchen paper.