Daydreamer

Felix

“What the bloody hell are you doing?” I barked, and Lucy jumped in her seat. She was wrapped in a huge blanket which was bunched up around her ears. Only her hand was visible from the folds, holding a pen poised over a large piece of paper on my desk. Around the desk were loads of other sheets, full of complicated diagrams and small, tightly packed writing. Lucy dropped the pen and spent a good while and some considerable effort fighting her way free of the blanket.

“Oh, hi,” she said breathlessly as she scrambled to gather all the sheets together. I walked over to the desk and reached down to one of them that had slipped onto the floor, but before I could read it she’d snatched it out of my hand.

“What’s all this?”

She bit her lip. “Oh, just something I’m working on.” She rolled all the bits of paper together and then clutched them tightly to her chest. Clearly, she did not want me reading them. Working? What possible work could she be doing on blotting paper in my office?

“Lucy, why are you hiding in my office?”

“Oh, er… I just popped in here for a bit. I was about to come and find you to say bye. Got a bit… distracted.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and raised my eyebrows. “It’s two in the morning. I last saw you at eight. What have you been doing for the last six hours?”

Her eyes went wide. “Ooh. Wow, that’s a record, even for me.”

“What do you mean?”

She made an eek face, and I tried not to let myself consider how unbearably cute that was. I was annoyed with Lucy. I’d been looking for her all evening. I’d tried ringing her phone, which I now saw was lying on the armchair across the room. When I found her coat, scarf and hat still in the hallway, I knew she wouldn’t have gone out in the cold without them. The last of the guests left an hour ago, and I’d torn the house apart trying to find her. Now she was telling me that she got distracted? Who does that?

“Well, I tend to zone out a bit sometimes. I can lose time.”

“I told your mum that I’d take you to a party to meet some people,” I said with what I thought was a fair amount of patience. “You have to actually make an effort, Luce. I can’t do all the heavy lifting for you.”

Lucy started fiddling with the sleeves of her jumper. It was a nervous habit that I recognised from childhood, and was the reason that so many of her jumpers had frayed cuffs. “Your mates are all a bit intimidating, Felix. I’m not so good with parties like this. You said it was a house party. I assumed you meant sharing a takeaway with a few peeps.”

“Lucy, this is a party where you make connections. Where you network, it’s an opportunity.”

“Oh, right,” she said. “Networking.” She made networking sound akin to being tortured on a rack. “Yeah, I’m not sure that that’s my thing to be honest.”

“God, you’re impossible.”

“Listen,” Lucy snapped, angry colour flooding her cheeks now. “I never said I wanted to network. You try turning up somewhere looking like a right numpty compared to everyone else, absolutely starving, only to be offered tiny, weird food and fizzy wine, which I hate; then be cut adrift and expected to just cope. I’m starving and pissed off. Your parties suck. You suck, Felix Moretti.”

I blinked. Tiny, weird food? The canapés were from one of the best Michelin-starred restaurants in London. And fizzy wine? That champagne was three hundred pounds a bottle. Her stomach chose that opportunity to grumble, highlighting how inadequate my tiny, weird food had been, and I clenched my jaw in annoyance.

“Fine, I snapped. “Come with me.”

The sight of Lucy plastered up against my Aga with a slice of Marmite toast in her hand gave me a sweeping sense of déjà vu. How many times had I seen her in the exact same pose, holding the exact same snack back in Hetty’s kitchen in Little Buckingham?

After the stomach grumble and the tiny food remark, I’d marched Lucy through the house to the kitchen, given her a bottle of cider I had in the fridge and made her Marmite toast – her favourite. Maybe this party was an unmitigated disaster, but I was not going to be accused of starving her to death.

“I knew you’d like Marmite eventually,” she said through another bite.

I rolled my eyes. “You lot wore me down.”

Eating Marmite was almost a religion in the Mayweather family, and I had been berated daily about my failure to accept it as the superior spread. Truth was, I never got into Marmite until after I left the village behind me. At uni I’d seen it on the shelf of the supermarket one day, and my chest had tightened with acute homesickness for that cosy kitchen. I’d shoved the jar in my basket on autopilot and eaten toast with it on back in student digs, fully expecting to hate it. But Marmite was one of the few things in my life that I’d really been wrong about. If you get the Marmite-to-bread ratio correct, there’s no better nirvana of taste combination. Any pro-Marmite Brit will tell you that they themselves have to do the spreading or risk an imperfect balance: too thick and you’re in a salty nightmare; too thin and there’s not enough to satisfy. I took Marmite very seriously now.

“Hey, what’s happened to your fingers?” I was just noticing that Lucy was eating the toast with her left hand while her right hand was pressed up against the Aga. Two of her fingers were completely white from the knuckles down.

“Oh,” she said, waving the offending hand in the air for a moment before pressing it back against the Aga. “Yeah, my hands like the cold even less than me. Raynaud’s. I’ve always been cold intolerant, but I developed Raynaud’s a few years ago. Your home office is a bit brass monkeys, and I had to have my right hand out to write. It just takes a bit of time to rewarm, then the colour will come back.”

“Jesus,” I muttered, covering the distance between us in a couple of strides whilst I focused on her poor delicate hand. I’d had a good amount of champagne that evening, not to mention a couple of shots with a client that I didn’t feel I could turn down, and I was just that little bit buzzed, just slightly disinhibited. So I didn’t think as I reached for her freezing hand and held it between my own, engulfing it in my warmth. Lucy’s eyes widened as she took in a shocked breath.

“You weren’t kidding when you said you feel the cold.” The toast she was holding tipped to the side as her grip on it loosened. I grabbed it from her before it could drop to the floor, took a bite and then put it down on the Aga. Colour rose in her cheeks. This close, I could see every freckle across the bridge of her nose, could see the flecks of green in her blue eyes as her pupils dilated.

“You ate my toast,” she whispered, and my gaze dropped to her mouth. She bit her lip again, those perfect white teeth digging into her naturally pink bottom lip. That small freckle next to the corner of her mouth became more prominent.

“You weren’t eating it,” I muttered, moving in so close now that I could smell her delicate floral shampoo. A lock of her dark hair had fallen out of her ponytail. I reached up and tucked it behind her ear, grazing the side of her cheek with my fingers. She blinked and inhaled a short, sharp breath. When I looked back up at her eyes, I realised our faces were only a few inches apart. She was so beautiful. I felt my gut tighten with need so acute that I could feel my control slipping. The tequila was still pumping through my system. All I could focus on was how much I wanted her.

“Felix, I⁠—”

Her uncertain voice was like a splash of cold water. God, what was the matter with me? This was Lucy – Hetty’s daughter, Mike’s sister. Hetty and Mike trusted me. I forced myself to take a step back, dropping Lucy’s hand. She blinked up at me in confusion, the flush of desire still staining her cheeks, her pupils still huge. She looked so young standing there in my kitchen in the exact same pose as when we were kids. Mike would kick my arse if he knew what I almost just did to his sister. Taking advantage of an employee was lower than low, and it was not my style. Taking advantage of a Mayweather was completely unacceptable.

But there was a small voice in the back of my head asking me why. Why couldn’t I have Lucy? I was rich enough, and I’d worked hard enough to have what I wanted, surely? However, the most prevalent voice (the one that sounded suspiciously like my father’s) questioned whether I deserved Lucy. What could I really offer her? It certainly wasn’t a meaningful relationship – not with my track record and inability to trust anyone. And did I want to risk my relationship with my best friend and my surrogate mum?

“Right,” I said briskly, crossing my arms over my chest and pulling away from Lucy altogether. “Better get you home. I’ll call my car for you.”

I watched as Lucy’s shoulders slumped just a little. Better a small disappointment now than the heartbreaking kind later. At least, that’s what I told myself.