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Would sheeverhave the courage to stop avoiding and start embracing?
She looked back at the child on her lap, unable to hold Vic’s satirical gaze. Katerina banged at the piano again, captured by the joy of making musical sounds. But like all toddlers, she soon lost interest and clambered off Addie’s lap to explore the room.
‘Is it okay for her to play in here?’ she asked Vic.
He looked at Katerina playing peekaboo behind the skirts of the floor-to-ceiling curtains with a wistful expression on his face, as if he was looking back in time and seeing himself do the very same thing as a young and carefree and uninhibited child. It was a moment or two before he looked back at her. ‘Of course. This used to be my favourite room as a child.’
She shifted slightly on the piano stool so she could study his expression. ‘Who played the piano? Your mother?’
A shadow passed through his gaze. ‘My father.’
‘Do you play?’
His lips moved in a rueful twist. ‘I haven’t played in years.’
‘Why?’
He gave a shrug of one broad shoulder. ‘No time.’ He ran a hand over the closed lid of the piano and then let it hang by his side. ‘To be good at something, you have to put the time in. I use my limited free time in other ways.’
The gossip columns were full of what Vic did in his free time and she didn’t want to be reminded of it. For years she’d read all about his sexual conquests—the hot dates with beautiful women, the flings that never went anywhere because he was not the settling down type. Why was she crushing on someone so out of reach? Was she recreating her childhood fantasy of wanting to be loved, but because of the emotional wasteland of her early years, she had set her sights on someone who, like her mother, couldn’t love her back?
Addie kept an eye on Katerina who was now playing with the foot switch of the standard lamp, giggling when she was able to turn it on and off. Addie rose from the piano stool and went over to hold the stem of the lamp steady in case it toppled over. She looked back at Vic who was still standing near the piano, looking down at it with an unreadable expression on his face.
‘Vic?’
His eyes met hers across the distance of the room. ‘The answer is no.’
She frowned. ‘You don’t even know what I was about to ask.’
His mouth grew tight. ‘I do because I know how your mind works.’
Yikes. He had better not be able to read her mind otherwise she was going to be seriously embarrassed. ‘What was I going to ask, then?’
‘You were going to ask me to play the piano.’
She let out an uneven breath. ‘Actually, I wasn’t,’ she lied. She wrinkled her nose and glanced at Katerina who was now in a squatting position with a look of fierce concentration on her little face. Her little primal grunts could mean only one thing. Eek! She had a phobia when it came to kid’s nappies. Babies, she could handle. Toddlers not so much.
Vic frowned. ‘Does she need—?’
‘Yes, she needs changing.’ She swallowed and tried not to breathe through her nose. ‘Can you do it? I—I have a weak stomach.’
His eyebrows arched upwards. ‘But you’re a vet nurse.’
‘I can handle animals, but humans are another thing.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘I know, but I can’t help it.’
‘What are you going to do when you have children of your own?’ he asked.
She stared at him blankly for a moment. She hadn’t even had a lover, how was she ever going to have children? She wasn’t even sure if she wanted them. She hadn’t had the easiest of childhoods, what if she didn’t turn out to be a good mother? She hadn’t had a great role model. What if she repeated her mother’s mistakes without even meaning to? Wasn’t that the story behind generational trauma? People did what was done to them because of social modelling. It took an enormous effort and conscious control not to fall into the same patterns of behaviour.
‘I—I haven’t thought about it that much,’ she said, smoothing her damp hands down her pyjamas. ‘Anyway, I’d have to find a husband first.’
Katerina straightened and waddled over to play with the tassel on a cushion, seemingly oblivious to the change of atmosphere her little body had caused in the room.
‘I’ll get Lucia to see to it,’ Vic said and turned for the door.