“That bad?”
“Baby blue eye shadow and white lipstick immortalized together, forever.” She raised her glass in a mock toast. “Top that.”
“I share this with no one, so repeat it and I’ll disavow any knowledge of this conversation before I hunt you down and—”
“Not a word.” With two fingers, she made a zipping motion across her lips.
“I had my hair permed so I could style it like Donnie Wahlberg from New Kids on the Block.”
Her laughter bubbled up and escaped, peal after peal. Nothing tempered her reaction as she considered this man first in perm rods, then with perm solution dripping around his hairline and, finally, using a plastic hair pick to gently tease out the curls of his new hairdo. “A...perm...”
“Oh, it gets worse.”
“Worse?”
He grimaced. “The band was an American sensation, not so well known in the UK, and my step-mother’s stylist didn’t know who he was. First time around, I ended up looking quite like Weird Al. I believe it’s called a bouffant?”
That did it. Ella handed him her wineglass before rolling onto her side and, clutching her aching stomach, laughing until she cried.
Liam set the glasses down on the side table, retrieved a cloth napkin and handed it over. “You mock me?”
“I don’t need to,” she gasped. “I’m sure your friends did quite well on their own.”
He grinned and chuckled. “They took the mick out of me, that’s for sure.”
“Why in the world did you use your mother’s hairdresser?”
“I could hardly go to a salon, now could I? All of thirteen and wanting to be cool. What if a girl from the area had seen me or, God forbid, been in having her hair done as well? Mum’s hairdresser came to the house, so I had the privilege of being attended privately.”
“And after? When she’d finished with your hair?”
“I may have been single-handedly responsible for the introduction of the ball cap into British society.”
Ella flopped onto her back and dropped one arm over her face. She’d laughed so hard her belly hurt, grinned so wide her cheeks ached. “I can’t imagine you like that. You’re so polished now. SoGQin all the right ways.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment and respond simply by saying a good stylist goes a long way in making the man fit the mold.”
Dropping her arm, she rolled her head to the side. “What mold?”
This time he didn’t look at her when he answered. “The one my father expected I shoehorn myself into.”
She rolled onto her side again, curling her knees so her feet tucked up behind her, her head resting on one arm. “He had expectations, I guess. Given that you came from society.”
“Not just society, but high society. My lineage has been charted since the 1400s. My family tree has been propagated by arranged marriages and pruned by a pragmatic hand when things weren’t just so. I was the only son, so my father was determined from my first breath that I’d carry on the Baggett legacy, and he raised me, groomed me, with that singular goal in mind.”
“And if you didn’t want to be a financial investment guru?” She waggled her hand at his quizzical look. “Or whatever it is you do.”
The bed shifted slightly as Liam rolled onto his back and stared at the star-saturated night sky. “I was never given the option, Ella. Had I gone to him and said I wanted to be a teacher, he would have simply told me, ‘Baggetts do not engage in common occupations.’”
“Teaching is far from common,” she said a bit tartly. “My mom’s a teacher.”
“I’m not demeaning the occupation by any means.” The short laugh that followed was decidedly bitter. “I had him to do that.”
“So what did, or does, being a Baggett mean?”
“I was raised to understand that it meant loyalty at all costs. Behaving honorably, but ‘honor’ was measured by the outcome of one’s choices, not by any bourgeois definition. Carrying on tradition no matter the cost. Carving out the most direct path to your success no matter whom you had to cross, run over or destroy to get to that end goal.” He sighed. “It meant doing your duty even at the cost of extinguishing your desire.”
To hear him speak so calmly of a household with such dogmatic, patriarchal values simply crushed her. She wanted to comfort the child he’d been before the worst of the rules were instilled in—or inflicted on—him. He never had a chance to just be a boy, to get his Sunday clothes dirty, put frogs in his pockets or build forts out of cardboard boxes. Ella might not have had siblings, but she’d had friends. She had been encouraged to run and play and discover and dream, to figure out who she was and where she fit in the world. Happiness had been her parents’ end goal for her. Nothing else had mattered. Certainly not to the extent that they would’ve robbed her of free will, enforced antiquated expectations on her contemporary lifestyle or forced her to follow in the footsteps of ancestors who were long since dead.