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didn’t have the heart to ask why she hadn’t planned it better. ‘Go back on to the motorway,’ he said. ‘We’ll get a takeaway back in London.’
‘I’m so sorry. Still, at least we can keep the roof down and enjoy the sun on the way home,’ Claire said.
Which was clearly all she needed to say to jinx it, because they were caught in a sudden downpour. By the time she’d found somewhere safe to stop and put the car’s soft top back up, they were both drenched. ‘I’m so sorry. That wasn’t supposed to happen,’ Claire said, biting her lip.
‘So we were literally going with the flow. Of water,’ Sean said, and kissed her.
‘What was that for?’ she asked.
‘For admitting that you’re not always right.’ He stole another kiss. ‘And also because that T-shirt looks amazing on you right now.’
‘Because it’s wet, you mean?’ She rolled her eyes at him. ‘Men.’
He smiled. ‘Actually, I wanted to cheer you up a bit.’
‘Because today’s been a total disaster.’
‘No, it hasn’t. I enjoyed the sea.’
‘But we didn’t get to the Pavilion, we missed out on a cream tea, I couldn’t find anywhere for dinner and we just got drenched.’ She sighed. ‘If I’d done things your way, it would’ve been different.’
‘But when I planned our date, we ended up rushing and that was a disaster, too,’ he said softly. ‘I think we might both have learned something from this.’
‘That sometimes you need to plan your personal life?’ she asked.
‘And sometimes you need to go with the flow,’ he said. ‘It’s a matter of compromise.’
‘That works for me, too. Compromise.’ And her smile warmed him all the way through.
On the way back to London, he asked, ‘So are you seriously going to buy this car?’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Apart from the colour? I was thinking, it’s not very practical for transporting wedding dresses.’
‘I don’t need a car for that. I’m hiring a van for the wedding show,’ she said.
‘So why don’t you have a car?’ he asked.
‘I live and work in London, so I don’t really need one—public transport’s fine.’
‘You needed a car today to take us to the seaside,’ he pointed out.
‘Not necessarily. We could have gone by train,’ she said.
‘But then you wouldn’t have been able to sing your head off all the way to Brighton.’
‘And we wouldn’t have got wet on the way home,’ she agreed ruefully.
‘We really need to get you out of those wet clothes,’ he said, ‘and my place is nearer than yours.’
‘Good point,’ she said, and drove back to his.
Sean had the great pleasure of peeling off her wet clothes outside the shower, then soaping her down under the hot water. When they’d finished, he put her clothes in the washer-dryer while she dried off. And then he had the even greater pleasure of sweeping her off her feet again, carrying her to his bed, and making love with her until they were both dizzy.
Afterwards, she was all warm and sweet in his arms. He stroked her hair back from her face. ‘You were going to tell me how come you’re not a doctor.’
‘It just wasn’t what I wanted to do,’ she said.
‘But you applied to study medicine at university.’
She shifted onto her side and propped herself on one elbow so she could look into his face. ‘It was Dad’s dream, not mine. It’s a bit hard to resist pressure from your parents when you’re sixteen. Especially when your father’s a bit on the overprotective side.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Luckily I realised in time that you can’t live someone else’s dream for them. So I turned down the places I was offered and reapplied to design school.’
He frowned. ‘But you were doing science A levels.’
‘And Art,’ she said. ‘And the teacher who taught my textiles class at GCSE wrote me a special reference, explaining that even though I hadn’t done the subject at A level I was more than capable of doing a degree. At my interview, I wore a dress I’d made and I also took a suit I’d made with me. I talked the interviewers through all the stitching and the cut and the material, so they knew I understood what I was doing. And they offered me an unconditional place.’
He could see the pain in her eyes, and drew her closer. ‘So what made you realise you didn’t want to be a doctor?’
‘My mum.’ Claire dragged in a breath. ‘She was only thirty-seven when she died, Sean.’ Tears filmed her eyes. ‘She barely made it past half the proverbial three score years and ten. In the last week of her life, when we were talking she held my hand and told me to follow my dream and do what my heart told me was the right thing.’
Which clearly hadn’t been medicine.
Not knowing what to say, he just stroked her hair.
‘Even when I was tiny, I used to draw dresses. Those paper dolls—mine were always the best dressed in class. I used to sketch all the time. I wanted to design dresses. Specifically, wedding dresses.’
He had a feeling he knew why she tended to fight with her father, now.
Her next words confirmed it. ‘Dad said designers were ten a penny, whereas being a doctor meant I’d have a proper job for life.’ She sighed. ‘I know he had my best interests at heart. He had a tough upbringing, and he didn’t want me ever to struggle with money, the way he did when he was young. But being a doctor was his dream, not mine. He said I could still do dressmaking and what have you on the side—but no way would I have had the time, not with the crazy hours that newly qualified doctors work. It was an all or nothing thing.’ She grimaced. ‘We had a huge fight over it. He said I’d just be wasting a degree if I studied textile design instead, and he gave me an ultimatum. Study medicine, and he’d support me through uni; study textiles, and he was kicking me out until I came to my senses.’
That sounded like the words of a scared man, Sean thought. One who wanted the best for his daughter and didn’t know how to get that through to her. And he’d said totally the wrong thing to a teenage girl who’d just lost the person she loved most in the world and wasn’t dealing with it very well. Probably because he was in exactly the same boat.
‘That’s quite an ultimatum,’ Sean said, trying to find words that wouldn’t make Claire think he was judging her.
‘It was pretty bad at the time.’ She paused. ‘I talked to your mum about it.’
He was surprised. ‘My mum?’
Claire nodded. ‘She was lovely—she knew I was going off the rails a bit and I’d started drinking to blot out the pain of losing Mum, so she took me under her wing.’
Exactly what Sean would’ve expected from his mother. And now he knew why she’d been so insistent that he should look after Claire, the night of Ashleigh’s eighteenth birthday party. She’d known the full story. And she’d known that she could trust Sean to do the right thing. To look after Claire when she needed it.
Claire smiled grimly. ‘The drinking was also the worst thing I could have done in Dad’s eyes, because his dad used to drink and gamble. I think that was half the reason why I did it, because I wanted to make him as angry as he made me. But your mum sat me down and told me that my mum would hate to see what I was doing to myself, and she made me see that the way I was behaving really wasn’t helping the situation. I told her what Mum said about