A Night with the Society Playboy
Ally Blake
In bed with the best man!Once Ava Halliburton shared a tender night of passion with Caleb Gilchrist. Next day she hopped on a plane to Boston – not to return for ten years… But now she’s home for her brother’s wedding. And Caleb’s the best man: richer than ever, sexier than ever, with a reputation for fast cars and faster women.Caleb still wants her. But she walked out on him all those years ago and he’s no gentleman. One night, and then he’ll be the one to walk away…
He lifted her so that her legs wrapped around him.
Her eyes locked with his as he walked her to the front of the car. Then he sat her upon the still hot hood.
‘Hot! Hot!’ she cried out.
‘Tell me about it,’ he murmured, and the car had nothing on the temperature of her skin.
‘I meant the car,’ she managed to breathe. ‘It’s scorching.’
He frowned. Whipped his T-shirt and sweater over his head in that sexy back-to-front way men had of doing so. Silly the way that small move made Ava’s already weak knees begin to quake.
He laid them on the hood, slid his hands beneath her backside, lifted her, then set her back upon his clothes.
‘Better?’
She smiled, running hands over the tight, hard muscles of his bare arms. ‘My hero,’ she purred.
His neck pinkened. ‘Don’t go getting any ideas, Ava. I’m no gentleman.’
When Ally Blake was a little girl she made a wish that when she turned twenty-six she would marry an Italian two years older than her. After it actually came true, she realised she was onto something with these wish things. So, next she wished that she could make a living spending her days in her pyjamas, eating M&Ms and drinking scads of coffee while turning her formative experiences of wallowing in teenage crushes and romantic movies into creating love stories of her own. The fact that she is now able to spend her spare time searching the internet for pictures of handsome guys for research purposes is merely a bonus!
Come along and visit her website at www.allyblake.com
Ally Blake also writes forMills & Boon Romance™ series!Don’t miss HIRED: THE BOSS’S BRIDE,on sale this month!
Recent books by the same author:
Modern Heat™
STEAMY SURRENDER
THE MAGNATE’S INDECENT PROPOSAL
Mills & Boon® Romance
FALLING FOR THE REBEL HEIR
Dear Reader
This book is a very special one for me. It was a book I truly wondered if I would be able to write. It was the first book I wrote after the birth of my little girl.
As you can imagine, having a new little person in my home and in my life has been the most wondrous experience. Her smiles, her goos and gahs, and every new milestone reached have made for much beautiful time wastage. I mean, who can possibly write when they have a digital camera permanently attached to the end of their arm?
That said, a writer writes. And with this charming bad boy and the girl who got away mulling about in the back of my mind, the day came when they would no longer be denied their love story.
So there I sat, night after night, strapped to my computer, while my hubby had our little angel all to himself for a couple of hours. Okay, I admit, I did step out to give her a cuddle or a kiss or a tickle several times a session. Even thus happily distracted, the book came together. It was really a lot of fun to write, and now I know how very lucky I am to have the two best jobs in the world: romance author and mum. Pinch me now!
Ally www.allyblake.com
A NIGHT WITH THE SOCIETY PLAYBOY
BY
ALLY BLAKE
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To my urban family, Chris, Sheree,
Tom and Ben Breasley: the ones who have
made my time away from home feel like home.
CHAPTER ONE
‘WILL you, Damien Halliburton, take Chelsea London to be your lawful wedded wife?’
The minister’s words blurred into one long onerous drone as Caleb, acting as best man to his mate and business partner, fidgeted inside his tux, stifled a yawn, and pretended as best he could to pay attention.
‘I do,’ Damien said, his voice deep and true, his eyes all for his admittedly scrumptious new bride.
Though he couldn’t deny that Damien had seemed happier since Chelsea appeared on the scene, Caleb had long since decided that that kind of indiscriminate happiness was for chumps. Not only was it fleeting, once gone it invariably took a little piece of you with it.
And Caleb liked himself and all his pieces. Quite a bit in fact.
He enjoyed his privileged life. He adored the pursuits that came with it: tennis, sailing, golf, drinks at the club. The capacity to spend the occasional weekend basking on a private beach somewhere didn’t go astray.
And he thrived on his work. He took great pleasure in doing whatever it took to land ostensibly ungettable clients for Keppler, Jones and Morgenstern day traders. Others in the biz thought him ruthless in his tunnel-visioned pursuit of the big fish. But the simple fact was he’d always found it too easy to make people say yes.
He’d been told by a former weekend getaway companion it had everything to do with a distracting glint in his eyes. It blinded people to the fact that he never switched off, he was always, always silently working out a way to come out on top.
To her credit it had taken him several seconds to realise she hadn’t meant it as a compliment, or in fact a come- on, and by that stage she’d walked out his door never to darken it again.
Caleb glanced across the altar and caught the eye of Kensey, a bridesmaid, who also happened to be Chelsea’s older sister. She was dark where Chelsea was fair, and he had always preferred brunettes.
He glinted for all he was worth.
Kensey’s eyes grew wide before she flipped her left ring finger at him from beneath her bouquet. A gold wedding band flashed his way.
His smile only widened as he offered a shrug by way of apology, but as he moved his gaze away the smile twisted into a grimace. Was the whole damn world getting married?
He gave himself a mental pat on the back for deciding not to bring a date to this thing. Weddings stirred up all sorts of irrational emotions in people. He’d seen it before. Perfectly level-headed gents cut down by a giddy mix of floral scents, blinding amounts of pink satin, and over-indulgence in cake frosting.
Finding that scrunching his toes in his shoes wasn’t proving distracting enough to keep him from yawning again, Caleb looked over the extensive crowd that filled the elegant city church.
He called upon his well-tuned affluence radar to decide which unsuspecting guest would be signing on the dotted line as a client by the end of the night.
The groom’s divorced, but friendly, parents sat in the front row weeping all over one another. If they didn’t end up renewing their vows by the end of the month he’d eat his shoes. But they were already Damien’s clients so they didn’t count.
His own parents, the estimable Gilchrists, a couple who had taken the ‘till death’ part of their own wedding vows so seriously he wouldn’t be surprised if they one day throttled one another, had naturally wangled the next best seat in the house: row two, on the aisle. They were no doubt the filthy-richest pair in the room, but they had never forgotten the year he’d lost all his pocket money running a secret Spring Racing betting ring while in middle school and thus wouldn’t part with a cent of their precious dough. Talk about the ungettable get.
Damien’s Aunt Gladys gave him a little finger wave from the fifth row. Caleb winked back and she all but fainted on the spot. He knew without a doubt she would have given him a perfume-scented cheque within five minutes of him courting her. But where was the thrill in that?
Masses of other faces he’d never seen and never particularly wanted to again soon passed him by in a Technicolor blur.
Until his brain slowly caught up with his eyes and he realised halfway down on the left side he’d passed over a swathe of long brunette waves, the immobilising combo of soft blue eyes fringed by impossibly long dark lashes, and the kind of soft, sweet, wide, pink mouth any sane man would kill for. Would die for.
Ava…
Her name launched itself smack bang in the centre of his unsuspecting consciousness from somewhere deep inside like a guided missile gone astray.
His eyes retraced their journey over the colourful crowd, sweeping across row after row, even though he knew it couldn’t have been her.
Well, logically it could. She was Damien’s sister. But the groom had never once mentioned his sister was coming home from Boston for the wedding and for the first time in nearly a decade. If he had it was not the kind of crumb of information that would slip Caleb’s mind.
But he saw nothing but a sea of unfamiliar faces, none of which made his stomach clench as hers did. Or more precisely as hers had. Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away…
The last time he’d laid eyes on her he’d been a twenty- two-year-old business school graduate who’d been perfectly happy to bank on his family name to get where he was going. While she’d been a nineteen-year-old humanities wunderkind prepared to go to the far end of the earth to find a place where nobody knew her family name.
They’d been friends since high school, combatants just as long, and lovers for just one night, the day before she’d left to take up a scholarship at Harvard, the first of several top- class schools she’d flitted between since, and never looked back.
Never written a postcard, nor a letter, nor an email. No carrier pigeons had been employed by her, nor telephones rung on his behalf.
He frowned and curled his toes into his new black leather shoes until they hurt. He’d searched every pew and couldn’t find the brunette waves, the smoky blue eyes, or the wide pink mouth. He must have imagined her after all. Great hulking fool he had always been when Ava Halliburton had been the subject of discussion…
‘Caleb?’
Caleb looked at the groom blankly as a ripple of laughter washed over the crowd.
‘You’re on, buddy,’ Damien said.
‘On what exactly?’
‘The ring?’ Damien said, loaded smile playing about his mouth telling Caleb it wasn’t the first time he’d been called.
‘Right,’ Caleb said. ‘Apologies. I was a million miles away.’
And a million years ago.
‘Not the kind of thing I want to hear right now.’ Damien’s smile didn’t slip a millimetre but Caleb had known the guy long enough to know his patience was thinning.
Caleb slid a finger into a tiny side pocket of his waistcoat and pulled out a skinny white gold band encrusted with diamonds. He summarily dropped it into Damien’s upturned palm lest it rub some of its unwelcome romance upon him.
From there the wedding zoomed to a brisk conclusion.
The kiss was the best part. Damien grabbed Chelsea around the waist, dipped her halfway to the floor and planted one on her that had the two-hundred-strong crowd whooping it up in the aisles.
That’s my boy, Caleb thought, glad his friend wasn’t becoming a complete sap now that he was locked down.
Caleb followed the couple down the aisle, arm in arm with Chelsea’s sister, who he could see out of the corner of his eye was grinning at him. He feigned boredom as he stared blankly towards the bright light of a video camera at the end of the aisle.
‘I was afraid you might be about to faint on us there for a moment,’ Kensey said.
He let his mouth kick into half-smile. ‘Me? Faint? Simply not in me, honey.’
‘So you’re a fan of big white weddings, then?’
‘Nowhere I’d rather be on a Saturday night.’
‘Really? Must have been the way the light was hitting your cheeks that made you look like someone had walked over your grave.’
‘Must have been,’ Caleb said.
Though he couldn’t help but look to the left in search of a pair of pretty sky-blue eyes and long dark hair.
Damn fool.
After a good long hour of photographs taken around the iconic Brighton beach huts, Caleb finally stepped out of his limo in front of the Halliburtons’ house at the upper end of Stonnington Drive.
He stretched his arms overhead, let out an accompanying groan, and once the other groomsmen, Chelsea’s brother-in-law and one of Damien’s cousins, had moved on through into the house, he let his gaze swing straight to the second-floor window, third from the right.
Ava’s bedroom window.
Between two beats of his heart he went from thirty-two year- old man of enviable experience to twenty again, riddled with wild hormones and unable to help watching the sway of cream curtains flapping gently at the window, wondering if Ava was up there sleeping, studying, getting dressed, getting undressed…
Today the window was closed. No lights were on. His mind eased.
His hormones were another matter.
He jogged around the side of the massive house, hoping the exercise might relieve some of the tension he’d carried with him from the church.
The Halliburtons’ manicured back lawn had been overtaken by two massive white brightly lit marquees. They draped languidly across the yard like decadent Bedouin tents. A ten-metre gap between them left a makeshift cork dance floor open beneath the stars. Fat pale purple bows were wrapped around the two-hundred-odd antique bronze chairs and the round tables were heavy with white roses, crystal glasses and gleaming silver cutlery.
He reminded himself not to stand directly below any of the dozen chandeliers. He was no engineer but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how the outrageous things wouldn’t bring the whole deal crashing down upon their heads.
He took a deep breath, tucked his hands into his tuxedo trouser pockets and sauntered inside, familiarising himself with all exits, making instant friends with a passing waiter so he’d get first look in at the hors d’oeuvres, before making a beeline for the nearest bar.
He ordered something heavy and straight up. The burning liquid had barely touched his lips when an all too familiar female voice from behind him said, ‘Caleb Gilchrist, as I live and breathe.’
His glass clinked against his teeth as he swallowed more than was entirely sensible on an empty stomach.
‘Well, if it isn’t little Ava Halliburton. In the flesh,’ he said as he turned, a nonchalant smile already planted steadfastly upon his face.
And, oh, what a choice of flesh.
Her long dark hair hung from a centre part just as it had when she was nineteen, and it was still, oh, so sexily mussed, as though she’d spent hours running agitated fingers through it. Her blue eyes were luminous in a round face that had always made her look younger than she was. A naturally wide smile hovered cautiously upon her mouth and her cheeks were flushed.
The champagne glass between her fingers exposed fingernails bitten to the quick. She wore a shapeless, sleeveless dark pink lace dress that stopped square below her knees. It was offbeat, slightly too big and not quite formal enough for the occasion.
She hadn’t changed a bit.
A distant relative of some sort appeared from nowhere to capture Ava’s attention. She shot Caleb a quick ‘I’m sorry’ with her eyes before she turned towards much pinching of cheeks and ‘I knew you when you were this big’ remarks.
Caleb took a step away, towards the bar, where he put down his glass and gladly took the reprieve.
Ava Halliburton. It had been some time since that name had made him curl his fingernails into his palms.
At twenty-two, confused and smitten, and only hours after the most raw, tender, surprising night of his young life, he’d followed her to the airport, and five minutes before she was due to check in and fool that he was he’d asked her to stay for him.
And he’d been serious. In that crazy moment he’d been prepared to throw away the thought of ever being with another woman if he’d been able to have just her.
Because in her warm, willing arms he’d thought for the first time in his young life he’d truly glimpsed happiness.
Yep, happiness, that old chestnut.
And it had taken her about, ooh, half a second to refuse and take flight.
He braced himself to suffer the onrush of unbearable frustration he’d associated with her memory for a long time after she’d left him standing there in the middle of the airport terminal.
But the onslaught never came.
While she looked as if she’d stepped out of her high- school yearbook, the intervening years had changed him so much he was a different man. For one thing he was far less easily moved by things like loveliness and sweetness and sky-blue bedroom eyes.
If he were in the mood for romanticising things he might think she’d made him immune to all that, made him seek out the company of women who didn’t have a chance in hell of touching him in that way. But he wasn’t in such a mood. Therefore he decided that in the past ten years he’d been lucky to experience enough lovely, enough sweet, enough feminine eyes of every colour not to be so impacted as he had been by her, and by her leaving, ever again.
That was until Ava’s spare hand, the one not swirling champagne hypnotically in its flute, reached up to finger a strip of thin brown leather at her neck.
A long thin strip of brown leather. One that looked a heck of a lot like one that once upon a time had accommodated a chunky wooden locket he’d given her as a birthday gift.
He’d put his photograph inside as a joke. She’d left it in there. For years.
The last time he’d seen the locket was on that night, the one night they’d spent together. Lying bundled up in a pile of clean towels and thermal blankets in a suspended shell of a canoe in the Melbourne University boat shed on a cold winter’s night, basking in one another’s afterglow, he’d opened it. Seen his picture. And his future. Or so he’d thought.
The idea that she might have yet to remove it dug in its claws and refused to be displaced.
Caleb’s eyes remained riveted to the fingers playing with the leather strap. It lifted gently away from her creamy décolletage and then slid back against her. He wondered if the leather had been warmed by all that soft female skin.
The tips of his fingers began to tingle.
He followed the line of the necklace to find it dipped beneath the V of Ava’s dress. There was no way of knowing what she kept there now, nestled between her breasts.
He allowed himself a moment to ponder the thought. Especially since in the past ten years little Ava Halliburton had filled out a little more than he’d initially realised. Even though he knew it a self-destructive thought he sent up a small prayer of thanks to the god who decided such things.
The cousin thrice removed moved on and Ava turned back to Caleb, remnant smile lingering upon her wide mouth. Suddenly her necklace didn’t hold anywhere near as much fascination as those lips, which at some point in the conversation with Cousin Whoever had been moistened.
Caleb tipped back onto his heels. If he’d thought his fingertips were tingly they had nothing on his bottom lip. He dragged his upper teeth over it to stave off the sense memory lingering thereupon.
‘It was a beautiful ceremony, don’t you think?’ Ava asked, turning side on, stealing away her leather strap, the V of her dress and her lips from his gaze as her eyes roved lazily over the noisily expanding crowd.
She was playing it beautifully cool, was she? Well, she’d just met the master of cool. Ready yourself for a chill, kiddo…
‘Gorgeous,’ he said, his tone glacial.
‘And have you ever seen such stars?’
‘When I have looked up. Sure.’
‘It’s such a perfect night for an outdoor reception.’ Her nose screwed up. ‘Though it will rain.’
‘Do you have a barometer tucked somewhere beneath your dress?’
Her mouth twitched. ‘Don’t need one. The patch of cloud to the east. That’s cumulonimbus cloud, the bringer of rain. But it won’t come till late tonight. My parents wouldn’t have had it any other way.’ She leaned in ever so slightly and lowered her voice as she said, ‘And did you get a load of the chandeliers?’
‘You mean the insurance nightmare,’ he shot back.
‘Yes!’ she said, turning to face him, grinning and pointing at his chest. ‘That’s just what I was thinking. They are a Phantom of the Opera intermission just waiting to happen.’
He laughed. True, it was only a soft cough kind of laugh, but it was a definite departure from cool.
Who was he trying to kid? He’d never been cool around this piece of work. What was the point? She could speak several different languages but the nuances of plain Australian cool went straight over her head.
Caleb straightened his shoulders until he felt a slightly uncomfortable warmth seep into his muscles, but it was enough to get him to start to relax. Relaxed was usually his permanent state. He never had to try this hard.
He turned his right knee toward her and leaned in. ‘Let’s hope for the wedding planner’s sake it doesn’t rain or your mother will no doubt refuse to pay while your father will hole himself up in his office for a month glad for the excuse to do so.’
Rather than getting a grin for his efforts, Ava’s answering smile was toothless, and brief. The continuous swirling of champagne was also a good sign she wasn’t feeling as bright and breezy as she was making out.
She was working as hard at this conversation as he was.
He looked away lest she figure him out as easily.
And where was the waiter with the hors d’oeuvres when he needed him?
CHAPTER TWO
‘I’M REALLY glad I bumped into you tonight before things get too crazy,’ Ava said.
‘How crazy do you think they plan on getting?’ Caleb asked.
‘The DJ is a cousin of mine.’
‘Right. So if he knows any music produced later than nineteen eighty-five we should be very much surprised.’
Ava smiled. Looked away. Looked back. ‘Damien told me you were in New York late last year.’
That was some segue, he thought. ‘That I was. It was a business trip. In and out.’
‘I can’t believe you never came out to visit. It’s a forty- minute flight to Boston.’
‘And a half-day spent at JFK. Time prohibitive.’
She nodded. Locked eyes. Swallowed. There was a husky note to her voice when she said, ‘I missed you, you know.’
And just like that, with the faintest whisper of vulnerability, Ava turned Caleb’s stoic resistance to putty. His tingling nerves burst into action, stinging the length of his fingers until he ached to reach out and touch her arm. To run his thumb over that full bottom lip. To hook a finger beneath that leather strap and slide its hidden secrets and regrets into the light.
Bad news. Little Ava Halliburton was nothing but bad news and it would pay to remember it. Just to hit the point home, through the pocket of his trousers he grabbed a pinch of leg hair and gave it a nice painful tug.
After her words had long since begun to fade into the noise around them, Ava cleared her throat and looked down at her shoes. ‘I missed all of you guys. Heaps. Seeing everyone today really hit home how long I’ve been gone. My cousin the DJ was eight when I left and now…’
‘Now he knows how to work a CD stacker like nobody’s business.’
‘Exactly.’
She glanced up at him from beneath those impossible eyelashes. He’d always thought them her best feature. But now they were running a pretty close tie with those wide smooth lips. He bit the inside of his cheek in penance.
Then said, ‘It’s nice to see you finally managed to peel yourself away from lectures and study groups for your brother’s big day.’
A glint sparked within her sky-blue eyes and her lips widened, creating soft pink apples in her cheeks. Heaven help him.
‘And just as nice to see you are no less of a buffoon than you always were. I can’t believe Damo had to ask for the ring no less than three times. It will be the story they’ll bring up every wedding anniversary for ever more.’
He gave a short bow. ‘I aim to please.’
‘Mmm,’ she said, her eyes all too easily leaving his as she surveyed the room. ‘I remember now you always were the kind of guy who liked to steal the limelight.’
She remembered now? How flattering. He said, ‘While you always preferred to run from attention as though it might burn.’
The glint in her eyes flickered. Ever so slightly. But enough he knew he’d scored a hit. It felt less satisfying than he’d thought it would.
She brought her champagne glass to her lips and his obedient eyes followed. And then he saw that her left ring finger was clean and clear.
The last he’d heard she was meant to be living with a professor double her age or some such tale. It was one of many such tales he’d heard over the years, stories of inappropriate and much older men, of subsequent broken hearts and consequential school transfers from one side of the world to the other.
He wondered if running into Ava’s ‘plus one’ was going to be his after-dinner surprise. He pictured some obscenely tall, grey-haired type with small glasses and a vocabulary built to keep ne’er-do-wells like him in their place.
At least by the look of things either the guy was a dud and hadn’t given the poor girl the appropriate bling, or she was, in fact, as yet, still single.
He was a torn man deciding which was the more deserved outcome.
When he looked up she was watching him. More than just watching him—her eyes were roving slowly and carefully over every inch of his face.
When she noticed he had noticed, she smiled. ‘I can see some things have changed. You never had stubble before.’
She reached out a hand but it stopped just millimetres short of touching him, the backs of her knuckles grazing nothing but air as she traced the contours of his face.
‘It didn’t occur to you to shave for the occasion,’ she said.
Caleb took the opportunity to run his fingers over his stubble; the sting of short, sharp hair against skin was beautifully distracting to his other senses, which were on overload.
All that soft familiar hair, soft female skin, soft clouds of perfume he couldn’t identify but knew he’d never forget; those soft pink lips he’d kissed for the last time only moments before she’d walked away… Taking any naivety he might once have had with her.
‘Nah,’ he drawled, letting his hand drop to toy with his crystal-cut glass. ‘I’m a rogue now, didn’t you know? If I shaved I’d be unrecognisable.’
‘Right. Wouldn’t want to disappoint your public.’
The side of his mouth twitched into a smile despite itself. ‘I’ve never been known to disappoint before.’
And where in the past she might have frowned, knowing there was a double entendre in there somewhere, and then blushed as she figured it out, this time her eyes slid back to lock with his.
She gave him a small smile to match his own. Then nodded, almost imperceptibly. Perhaps little Ava Halliburton had found time in her busy pencil-sharpening schedule to grow up after all.
‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘You’ll be on the business end of lots of pointing and staring and frowning if you stand next to me for too long. Your reputation will never be the same again.’
‘I’ll live.’
Caleb adjusted his stance as everything south of his thyroid felt fuel injected.
Before he had the chance to find out just how grown up she might yet be, she disregarded him in favour of looking up.
He tipped his head to see what was so great up there to find the stars were out in force, twinkling majestically through the gap between the two large swathes of white gauzy fabric that hung over the night.
Beside him Ava sighed. ‘Did you know Galileo died in sixteen forty-two, the year of Isaac Newton’s birth?’
Caleb grinned. Any other woman might have made a big deal about the romance of the stars and the moon and the colour-tinted cake frosting… But not Ava. For all their history, and for all the niggling discomfort he felt not quite knowing where they stood with one another now, he couldn’t deny she was one of a kind.
He leant his backside against the bar and crossed one ankle atop the other and asked, ‘So how is school?’
After a few last lingering moments gazing at the dark sky, she dragged her eyes back to him. ‘School’s fine.’
‘And what’s your major? I can never keep up.’
‘I’m nearing the end of my doctorate in Social Anthropology.’
‘Meaning next time we see one another I’ll have to call you Dr Halliburton? Marvellous.’
She didn’t answer, just gave an indecipherable smile.
‘And what does a doctorate in Social Anthropology entail exactly?’
‘My paper is on consumption, gender and economic status among Manhattan adolescents.’
‘Buying patterns of New York kids?’ he asked.
Her smile was flat. ‘It’s not quite that simple. It’s a study of ethnicity, family structure, peer pressure, needs versus desires, and identity.’
Spin it however she pleased, after her fancy-schmancy degree was finished little Ava Halliburton would be wanted by any American company that bought and sold goods and had a clue. Clever girl.
‘So that answers my next question. You are still teacher’s pet.’
Some unnamed emotion flashed across her eyes like quicksilver, but she lifted her chin and it was gone. ‘If your memory stretches back far enough I’m sure you’ll remember I was never the teacher’s pet. I ask far too many obnoxious questions, which I’ve since discovered nobody really likes.’
Caleb laughed through his nose. And at the same time he felt muscles stretching that hadn’t been used in years. Jousting muscles.
For a guy who had things come all too easily to him all his life, Ava Halliburton had always been hard work. She’d never backed down from an argument. Never given an inch when she could take a mile. She was a challenge. And there was nothing Caleb liked sinking his teeth into more.
Down, boy.
‘Have you seen your parents yet?’ he asked.
She glanced down at her drink. ‘I’ve so far managed to avoid that little reunion.’
He didn’t half blame her. Since her parents’ divorce she and her father had barely spoken, and her mother, though a delight to sit next to at a dinner party, was a Stonnington Drive cliché: ten per cent plastic, ninety per cent self- absorbed, and the last kind of creature who should ever have been allowed to be in charge of nurturing another living soul.
‘And how are yours?’ she asked. ‘Merv and Marion still as surly as ever?’
‘My mother has taken up pole-dancing.’
Ava’s jaw dropped while her bright eyes danced. ‘She has not!’
‘That she has. Her doctor suggested it would be good for her blood pressure. As to my dad’s blood pressure? I’d put money on the fact she gave that little to no thought whatsoever.’
Ava ducked her chin and smiled into her drink. When she looked back at him her head was cocked, that wide warm smile of hers was out in force, and Caleb felt the years just slip away.
‘Are you staying here?’ he asked, when the real question he wanted answered was would she be staying long.
‘Hotel,’ she said, shaking her head, thick dark hair cascading over her shoulders.
Caleb shoved his hands deep into his trouser pockets to stop from reaching out and brushing her hair back so that he could better see her face. She did always have such a charming face.
She glanced up towards the big house perched magnificently atop the great lawn. ‘You know this is the first time I’ve set foot in this place in near on ten years.’
Nine years and four months. Caleb gritted his teeth until his jaw hurt, hating the fact that he knew that.
He’d lived more, bigger, harder, better in those nine years and four months than most men lived in a lifetime, yet the fact that Ava had not seen a day of it still left an indent somewhere deep beneath his ribs.
Out of the corner of his eye Caleb saw Damien waving frantically at him from the other side of the marquee. He was miming taking a photograph.
‘Then I reckon you have a lot of catching up to do with a lot of people,’ he said. ‘I should stop monopolising your time.’
He squared his shoulders and took a step backwards, disentangling himself from the heady mix of cloying memories and Ava’s faint but memorable scent. ‘And it seems my best- man duties have barely begun. Are you sticking around?’
‘Until the death,’ she said, raising her glass to him.
‘Fine. If I don’t see you again before you go, it’s been swell.’
‘The swellest.’ She smiled serenely, not giving away any kind of clue as to whether ‘until the death’ meant she was flying out at midnight or if she was back to stay.
Caleb shook his head to stop the ridiculous guessing games. It mattered to him not a lick either way.
He’d seen her. He’d talked. He’d been within touching distance. And he’d survived. He’d more than survived. He’d remained blissfully untouched.
Well, as untouched as a man in the company of a beautiful woman could ever hope to be.
He leaned in to give her a kiss on the cheek. She lifted her face to him, a small smile lighting her features.
In the moment before his lips touched her cheek he felt as if he’d been smacked across the back of the head with a mallet as the close up image of long dark eyelashes fluttering against warm golden skin covered in the palest smattering of tiny freckles stamped itself upon his consciousness…
Waxing his boat late one evening. A sound. The scrape of a shoe on concrete. Turning. Ava, a shadow in the doorway. Tears glistening on those same cheeks.
And then the kiss. Their first kiss. Their first everything.
Her slim pale arms in the air, so trusting, as he slid her Greenpeace-emblazoned T-shirt over her head. The depth of feeling in her large eyes as she unclasped her bra. All that beautiful pale skin revealed just for him. Only for him.
Ava…
Once again her name shot through him, though this time it came to him like the first summer breeze: surreptitious, lingering, and a herald of delights yet to come.
He closed his eyes, rested his lips upon her cheek for the barest amount of time and did his best not to breathe through his nose. But the second it occurred to him he couldn’t help himself.
With his first breath she smelled faintly of soap, of powdered make-up and of orange blossoms.
With his second he got schoolroom chalk, old library books, and the fresh-cut grass at that spot by the Yarra where they’d gone every day one summer holiday to play backyard cricket.
And finally, most strongly, miles of freshly vacuumed carpet beneath his feet as he’d stood in Melbourne Airport’s International Terminal, completely stunned to realise that she was really leaving him behind and leaving his broken heart trampled beneath her feet.
He pulled away and the delicious scent of powder and orange blossoms returned, leaving him wanting more.
And for a man who wanted for nothing, that was something. His was a life of wealth and success, of fast cars and fast women. Of the best of everything money could pay for. It was a life lived loud and hard, no apologies to anyone.
He should have thanked her. His drive, his detachment, his determination to win at all costs had sprung from the ashes of that long-ago day.
Ava Halliburton had made a man of him.
Yet as Caleb turned his back on her he hoped she had an airline ticket burning a hole in her purse.
Ava stood alone in the middle of the big white puffy wedding marquee, her heart pounding so loudly in her ears she was surprised she’d heard a word Caleb had said.
Coming home had been nerve-racking enough knowing she was set to confront those in her immediate family whom she hadn’t spoken to in a long time. So she’d deliberately put Caleb to the back of her mind.
Caleb Gilchrist. The boy she’d hero-worshipped since she was fourteen. The boy who’d always pulled her plaits, had coined the nickname Avocado, which had stuck all through high school. Her brother’s best friend. The devil on her shoulder. The thorn in her side.
Her first.
It was a good thirty seconds before she realised she was still watching him walk away.
She bit her lip and looked around her, sure that the strange guilty pleasure of it was written all over her face. But once she was sure nobody gave a hoot about the practical stranger in their midst, her eyes slid back to him.
The years had been good to him. Better than good. They’d given him shoulders a tailor would kill to dress. A mien of haughty condescension that oozed power and privilege. He wore his tuxedo with such authority and ease he could have given James Bond a run for his money.
He now had a jaw that she’d barely been able to keep from tracing. His ash-brown hair was cut short, hiding any evidence of its natural curl. And his dark hazel eyes, which had always been fuelled by a mischievous glint, were now lit by a very different fire. Confidence? Experience? Or a play-by-play photographic memory of their night together?
She closed her eyes tight on the reminiscence.
All that had been a long, long time ago. Eons. A lifetime. Yet a funny kind of energy skidded down her bare arms.
When she opened her eyes, she watched him chat with someone she didn’t know. He smiled his killer smile and her chest tightened.
And she wasn’t even a woman who was usually struck by so much obvious male beauty any more. She liked men who were…seasoned. Men whose suits bore elbow patches rather than designer labels. Men whose beards had grown in rather than men whose stubble made them appear downright wicked.
Her current man was of a generation that meant it had been some time since he’d had the kind of knockout rear view that made a girl happy to see him walk away.
Her man? Ha! For a moment she’d forgotten she was now all alone in the world with no man to speak of. In fact, she wasn’t sure she’d ever had a man in her life long enough to call him her man. Lucky for her she was smart enough to know why.
If her mother had been less interested in where she lived, how she dressed, and who knew about it, then she and her father would never have separated, their divorce would not have been as vicious and unexpected, and Ava would have gone out into the world feeling more safe, more secure, and less likely to run from every situation in which she felt herself getting sucked into any scenario even vaguely resembling a relationship.
Feeling like a wallflower, and one in need of a therapist if she didn’t get her head sorted and fast, Ava began a slow weave through the space, hoping she at least looked as if she knew where she was going.
She smiled benignly at others she didn’t know. People obviously important in her brother’s life. It made her more than a little sad that she’d spent so much time away, and less than sure she’d made the right move in coming back.
To Stonnington Drive. A row of thirty homes, no more, but a stronghold all the same. It was the last bastion of the provincial old-fashioned good life to be found in what was now a relatively cosmopolitan city.
Stonnington Drive men wore suits long after they’d retired from high-powered jobs in the city. Stonnington Drive women believed in gin, tennis, and boarding school for the kids.
Ava believed it a suffocating, pulverising existence. The pressure to keep up with the Joneses, and the Gilchrists for that matter, had broken down her parents’ marriage in the most vociferous, public, ravaging way. The run-on effect had left her searching for guidance wherever she could find it. And every day she’d been away from the place she’d thanked her lucky stars she’d managed to get out when she had.
For who knew at nineteen how strong one’s principles really were? Another year there, another reason to stay, who knew…?
She glanced over to her brother to find Caleb had joined him. Damien had survived their childhood and made good. But he’d been older. Stronger. Luckier.
The two men put arms around one another as they ducked heads and talked. Best friends, even after all these years. As close as brothers. Closer even, considering her father had always treated Caleb like the second son he’d never had.
No wonder.
He was the perfect by-product of his upbringing: rich, good-looking, arrogant, lackadaisical. So she ought to have felt ambivalent in his company, despite their friendship all those years ago.
So why, now, couldn’t she shake him off?
Because this place was insidious. It had a way of drawing people in with its luxury and its easy living and never letting them go. She felt her back teeth grinding and had to click her jaw open wide in order not to let it bother her.
Damien wrapped his arms around his bride and herded her towards the photographer, who was standing by a massive ice sculpture of a mobile phone. Ava felt a twinge of remorse that she had no idea what circumstances had led to what must have been some kind of crazy in joke in her brother’s life.
Damien and Chelsea began to kiss, and didn’t let up. It was so sweet. So romantic. Her stomach twisted. She had to look away.
A pair of hazel eyes snagged hers. Caleb again.
Guests’ heads bobbed between them cutting off her view, but every few seconds that hot hazel gaze sliced through the air, unreadable at that distance, yet aimed directly at her.
She hadn’t needed his earlier warning to take heed where he was concerned. It had taken no more than a second in his company to see that, just as she’d changed over the years, the boy she’d known, in all his varied incarnations, was no more.
There was apathy in his overly relaxed stance, arrogance in the angle of his chin, and the glimmer of barely restrained sensuality radiating from those disarming hazel eyes.
And despite the distance, despite the string quartet playing the perfectly respectable ‘Clair de Lune’, and despite the two-hundred-odd elegant party guests chatting up a storm between them, under his watch she began to feel warm and restless all at once.
She ought to have looked away. To have let her eyes slide past his as though she hadn’t even noticed.
But after the month she’d had, having a man who looked like Caleb Gilchrist looking at her as if she were some kind of exotic dish he’d once tasted, and now was deciding if he wanted to go back for seconds, was like an elixir. Like a balm to the great gaping wound in her own self-worth she was trying her best to conquer.
She cocked her head in question. A leisurely smile lit his eyes. The heat of it leapt across the marquee and burned her cheeks.
She hadn’t heard from him in nearly ten years. Yet she’d often wondered if he thought of that night fondly or with regret, or if he thought of it at all. Right then her question was answered; her old friend was not reminiscing about pulling her plaits.
Her heart responded, thumping hard and steady against her ribs, making her feel soft and breathless and interesting, not the great big loser with bad judgement in her past and big trouble in her future who’d jumped on the plane in Boston because spending time with her unhinged family had felt like the lesser of two evils compared with the situation awaiting her back at Harvard.
He made her feel as if her blood were so much lemonade. Always had. And it was the exact kind of feeling she needed right now.
She licked her suddenly dry lips and Caleb’s smile grew until she could see a pair of pointy incisors. It was the slow, easy, sure smile of a predator who knew exactly what his prey was thinking. Ava was almost glad somebody did as right then she had no idea.
The hand holding the champagne glass shook ever so slightly. Enough so she sought out a table and placed the half-empty flute out of reach.
She turned away, ran her damp palms down the sides of her dress, spotted a gap in the crowd and went for it.
She hit the edge of the lavish white marquee and kept on walking, as fast as her low heels would carry her through the lush grass. She lifted her skirt, jogged up the steps at the rear of her parents’ house and slipped inside.
And while everything outside had steadily made her feel as if she’d stepped into the Twilight Zone, inside the house was like déjà vu.
The walls were still panelled white below, pale striped wallpaper above, the floor still shiny blonde wood. Moonlight spilled in from discreetly angled skylights in the three-storey-high ceiling.
Memories swarmed over her, good and bad. But at least at last, for the first time since she’d left American soil the day before, she felt as if she was able to breathe again.
Coming home, even if only for a few days before she had to return to Harvard to front the Academic Review Committee, was the right decision.
Home was surely the only place to come to sort out her head, and her mess of a life, because this was where it had been all screwed up in the first place. It hadn’t occurred to her that Caleb Gilchrist might play a starring role in the sorting. But if that’s the way the fates wanted to play it, then who was she to argue?
CHAPTER THREE
CALEB glanced towards the big house. He’d last seen Ava heading that way. And any kind of conversation with her would be preferable to the one he was having right now.
Damien, Chelsea, Kensey and her husband Greg were talking about window treatments. Seriously, fifteen straight minutes of Caleb’s life had been spent listening to the advantages of curtains versus wooden blinds.
Enough was enough. If he didn’t get out of there and soon he might develop a tic. He’d already twitched every time the word ‘shrinkage’ had been uttered.
He clapped a hand on Damien’s shoulder. And he bit down hard.
Damien ducked out of his grasp and turned with a frown. ‘Whoa, buddy, you aiming to lame me just before my honeymoon?’
Caleb said, ‘Did I mention I just ran into your sister?’
Damien had the good grace to look sheepish. ‘You’ve seen Ava.’
‘Unless you have another sister I didn’t know about. Of course I’ve seen Ava! I know you have just had the biggest wedding this town has ever seen, but it was still pretty likely I’d notice your long-lost sister had made an appearance. It didn’t occur to you to give me some kind of heads up?’
Damien slid Chelsea’s champagne from her grasp, took a gulp, then his nose screwed up as the bubbles tickled his throat. He slid the glass back into her grip and she just kept on talking to her sister without noticing a thing. ‘I don’t know why I did that.’
‘I do. You’re avoiding the topic at hand.’
‘Which was…?’
‘The prodigal daughter has returned.’
‘Right. Well, the truth is I wasn’t sure if she was coming.’
Caleb left a big gaping hole of silent disbelief between them.
‘It’s true,’ Damien said. ‘She wasn’t sure she could get away from school. She’s smack bang in the middle of her doctorate, you know.’
‘Yeah,’ Caleb said. ‘So I heard.’
‘Well, then, what’s the big deal? You had to assume she’d been invited.’
‘Not good enough,’ Caleb said, still finding it hard to simmer down. Especially after that long hot look he and the woman of the hour had shared across the crowded room. He hadn’t imagined it. The electricity between them could have shorted out the dozen Swiss designed watches in between.
‘Fine,’ Damien said. ‘The truth is, after what you told me I didn’t want to get your hopes up. That afternoon at the bar just before I proposed to Chelsea—’
Caleb held up a hand to stop his friend from saying any more. He remembered full well what he’d admitted to Damien in a unseemly fit of empathy brought on by a mix of hay fever medication, a week of late nights covering for his love-struck business partner, and a rearing of the ugly head of some random lone romantic gene life hadn’t yet managed to quash.
He hadn’t thought it wise to tell his best friend that he and the guy’s sister had done the horizontal tango in a canoe in the University of Melbourne boat shed the day before she’d fled the country. But he had admitted that he’d had feelings for her a long, long time ago.
In case Caleb was feeling particularly forgetful Damien added, ‘If not for my screwball parents setting such a bad example of what a real relationship should be like you and I could be related.’
Caleb’s hand moved close enough to Damien’s mouth he had to lean back away from it. ‘Thanks for the recap.’
Damien grinned. ‘Any time. So how did the big reunion go? Did violins play, hearts dance, angels weep?’
‘It was peachy. Not exactly as exciting as root canal, but more fun than test cricket.’
Damien’s eyes narrowed. ‘Like that, is it?’
Caleb smiled; no teeth, no humour.
‘I go on my honeymoon in three days’ time. Between now and then I’m going to need you around and I’m going to want her around. So promise me you’ll play nice.’
Caleb took a stuffed mushroom from a passing waiter and said nothing.
‘It’s taken some kind of convincing to make my new bride believe not all families are as screwed up as hers. I don’t need you two going at each other as you always did and spoiling the illusion for me, all right?’
Instead of dignifying Damien’s comments with a response Caleb stared at a point in the middle of his forehead, turned up the volume of his voice and asked, ‘Are you wearing make-up?’
Damien’s chin dropped and his eyebrows disappeared under his dark fringe. ‘Are you kidding me?’
At her husband’s raised voice Chelsea stopped talking and turned to join their little gathering. Kensey formed the last edge of the circle. And both women turned to look hard at Damien.
Caleb popped the mushroom in his mouth, grinned at his friend and walked away. Out of the marquee and towards the house.
‘Play nice!’ Damien called out from behind him. ‘For my sake, play nice.’
Caleb gave a small wave over his shoulder and made no promises.
Caleb rounded the corner of the Halliburtons’ large foyer and found Ava sitting on the winding staircase, her legs drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her knees, her ankles turned so that the toes of her silver Mary-Janes kissed.
Even though she had an empty stubby of beer dangling from one hand she couldn’t have looked more like a little kid dressed up in her elder’s finery if she’d tried.
When she saw him there she smiled.
‘Hi,’ she said, tilting the beer his way.
‘Hi,’ he said, pulling up short and tucking his hands into his trouser pockets.
Her smile, if anything, widened. And if she was any other woman, he would have thought by the coquettish look in her eyes the bottle in her hand swinging back and forth meant she was contemplating replacing one vice for another.
‘We have to stop meeting like this,’ she said.
‘Ten years and not a word. Now twice in ten minutes. If I didn’t know better, Ms Halliburton, I would think you were following me.’
‘Hey, I was here first.’
‘So you were.’
He smiled. She smiled some more. It was all far too civilised. It couldn’t last.
‘Any particular reason you’ve chosen to snub the festivities?’ he asked.
Her soft mouth slowly grew wider and wider until her face was all about killer cheekbones and eye sparkles, and Caleb decided it best not to say anything remotely nice or amusing in the hopes she’d save that debilitating smile of hers for someone else.
‘I’m hiding,’ she said.
‘From whom?’
‘Family, basically.’
‘Right. So have you caught up with your father yet?’
She bit her lip and looked straight through him for several seconds before blurting out, ‘Aunt Gladys. I’m mainly hiding from Aunt Gladys. She’s cornered me three times already with the aim of setting me up with her nephew Jonah. The fact that Jonah is also my cousin seems to have escaped her.’
‘That’s a tad alarming, even for Aunt Gladys.’
‘I’ll say. I figure if I stay out of sight she’ll find some other poor sap to coerce.’
‘Sounds like a plan.’
Caleb wondered why she hadn’t just told Aunt Gladys she was with someone. The image of the lanky grey-bearded professor, who no doubt thanked his lucky stars daily for whichever man in her past had sent her into the arms of someone of his ilk, popped unwittingly into his mind. He mentally stuck out his foot and smiled inwardly as the figure tripped over his large shoes and fell face flat on the floor.
After that diverting little thought he figured now seemed as good a time as any to find out what the situation was.
‘You didn’t think to bring a date along to ward off randy family members?’ he asked. ‘Just in case I run into Aunt Gladys I’d love to be fully informed so that I can help you out any way I can.’
Ava blinked and her eyes suddenly seemed darker. ‘I only arrived this morning. Not much time to rustle up a date. There was a guy washing windows at an intersection on the way from the airport. If only I’d been more on the ball.’
‘If only.’
If only she would give him a straight answer.
Maybe what she needed was a straight question.
‘So where’s this professor of yours Damien told me so little about? Back at the hotel? Past his bedtime? Or did he not want to give up his nightly malted milk by the fire with his cat at his feet to come across the pond?’
‘Yep,’ she said, not looking at him. ‘Something like that.’
She lifted herself off the step and wobbled a tad. Caleb wondered if that had been her first beer.
‘So,’ she said, head down, hair falling in a waterfall over her face as she scuffed her shoe against the step, ‘which of the bevy of beautiful blondes out there under the stars is your arm candy for the evening?’
‘Who says I have any interest in arm candy?’
She lifted her chin, her mouth twisted as she pinned him with her trademark flat, discerning, too-smart-for-her-own- good gaze. ‘There is such a thing as email, you know. And from what I hear from those who’ve used said email to tell me things about home, these days you’re a regular hound dog.’
Caleb laughed. The sudden explosive release of tension was such a surprise he let it rumble through him a good deal longer than he’d normally bother.
And it felt good. Really good.
It was enough to make him glad he’d sought her out again. For one thing she didn’t seem to have an inordinate interest in Roman blinds. And for another he was definitely enjoying her attempt at being sassy. She honestly had no idea she looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
‘And what makes you think you can trust such stories?’ he asked.
‘The source.’
He glanced her way, eyebrow raised.
‘My brother.’
Caleb laughed again. ‘You can’t be quoting your brother, I’m sure.’ Damien would have used far less ambiguous language.
‘I am,’ she said. ‘Or I think I am. He may have put things another way and I simply extrapolated that meaning. So you’re not a hound dog?’
The minx actually looked disappointed.
‘Honey, I’m not sure any man has been a “hound dog” since the nineteen fifties.’
‘But—’
‘But I understand your meaning. And he was quite wrong. I’m perfectly discriminating,’ he said with a devilish smile.
‘How’s that? No blondes after Labour Day?’
‘I said I was discriminating, not an imbecile.’
This time Ava laughed. Her eyes brightened, her hair shimmied, and those lips… Damn, but she was one gorgeous creature.
Caleb’s extremities stirred as he wondered how long it might take for butter to melt anywhere else on her body.
‘So anyway,’ Ava said, before he could sink too deeply into that fantasy, ‘I was thinking of heading up to my old bedroom for a nose around. See if my mother turned it into an aquarium, or a gift-wrapping room, or a yoga studio. What do you reckon?’
‘Knowing your mother I’d say…trophy room.’
Ava clicked her fingers. ‘Right. Of course it is. So, do you want to come see if you’re right?’
Caleb waited for the other shoe to drop, but she merely blinked at him, all ingenuous blue eyes.
Ava was inviting him up to her old bedroom.
It didn’t mean what the sudden surge of adrenalin throughout his body indicated it meant. Or did it?
Only one way to find out for sure…
He placed his right foot on the bottom step and leaned in towards her, thus crowding her personal space to the point where he could see flecks of silver and navy in her irises.
And he waited for her to lean away. Or frown. Or run as she had run before.
But she didn’t move an inch. She just blinked back at him until he could tell that an extensive array of wheels whirred madly in her head.
Every look, every move, every word that had come out of her mouth had been entirely deliberate. She knew exactly what she was doing. She’d done it all before…
Her arms in the air, so trusting, as he slid her Greenpeace-emblazoned T-shirt over her head. Her small hands tugging his T-shirt from his jeans. Her soft hands sliding around his waist…
Caleb’s temperature began to soar.
Ava reached out and ran a hand over the carved sphere balanced on the end of the banister and said, ‘You coming?’
He had never in his life wanted to be an inanimate lump of wood more. He waved a hand up the stairs. ‘After you.’
Damien had asked him to play nice, after all.
Damien…
He shunted that particular name from his mind. This had nothing to do with his best friend and business partner. Nothing to do with the guy who’d taken him in and made him feel a part of a family the moment he’d realised Caleb’s own family were as warm as a meat locker.
It never had. And it seemed it never would.
Ava gave a little curtsy, ducked her chin and smiled before jogging upstairs without looking back. It wasn’t until she was halfway up that he came to his senses and followed.
She didn’t even glance at the several other doors they passed, she just kept walking until they hit the third door from the end. It was closed. Her chest lifted and dropped before she grabbed the handle, turned and opened the door.
‘Was I right?’ Caleb asked.
She shot him a quick glance, and the smile that lit her face was as stunning as it was surprised. ‘Not even close.’ And in she went, leaving the door open for him to join her.
If he’d thought his body temperature was adversely affected by her before, now it was skyrocketing far too quickly out of his control for his liking.
One of the many things Caleb liked about himself was the fact that he was never out of control. Whether entertaining clients at a gentlemen’s club, risking millions of dollars on one single stock market trade, or in the presence of a beautiful woman, he never let himself forget where he was and what he wanted from the situation.
All he could think to account for his current state was that he had not one single clue what he wanted from Ava Halliburton…
Her soft hands sliding around his waist. Her warm lips opening up beneath his. Her cool, naked body wrapped around him. The two of them joining. Sultry, hushed, tender joining. And all the pressure and hope and expectation that sat upon his shoulders each and every day stilled…
He shook his head to shatter the avalanche of memories overcrowding common sense.
You are two old friends, he told himself. This has nothing to do with the last twenty-four hours you spent together; it has everything to do with the several years before that. Or the ten years since. You are both simply being pleasant. Re-forging ancient ties. For Damien’s sake. Damien your business partner and best friend.
Ava poked her head back out the door and curled a saucy finger at him, then disappeared back into that which Caleb had once seen as the promised land.
If he truly believed they were simply being pleasant he was some kind of fool. And if he gave in to the invitation in Ava Halliburton’s sultry blue eyes then he was an even greater fool. On a thousand different levels.
Nevertheless he turned the corner and followed her into the bedroom. Her bedroom. Kept neat and tidy and exactly as it had looked the day she left.
There Ava’s bonhomie faltered. She glanced from him to the bed, which stood out like an albatross in the middle of the near wall. Then she shot to the other side of the room to open the bay windows, putting as much distance between them as she could.
Once the breath of cool night air took some of the edge off the heat simmering like a mirage between them, she relaxed again. And soon became engrossed in the hundred- odd books filling her childhood bookcase.
Caleb sauntered over to her dressing table, picked up a powder brush and sniffed. The scent was overwhelmingly familiar. Powdered make-up and orange blossoms.
It brought back a dozen memories. A hundred moments. It was sweet. Clean. And irresistible. It was her.
No other woman in the world smelt quite like that. Like innocence and loveliness and spring and whimsy. He’d been with enough of the female population to be quite sure. Not that he’d been keeping score.
He put the brush back where he found it and turned to find Ava picking out a book, opening the first page and beginning to read. He knew the rest of the world, including him, had slipped away the instant the first word on the page had sunk into her consciousness. She’d always been that way. Wholly engaged. Greedy for knowledge. Smartest in the room by a Melbourne mile.
He ambled away from the dressing table, sparing a longer glance at the frilly pink bed taking up the bulk of the room before his gaze shifted back to her, and he wondered how close he might be able to get before she remembered he was even in the room.
Her bedroom. Alone. With her. And that cruel, sweet, intoxicating scent.
She grabbed a hunk of hair, twisted it into a knot and held it atop her head and he wondered if he sank his nose into the skin below her right ear whether she might feel as soft and sexy as she looked.
The longer he spent watching her, the more he realised that he’d been kidding himself. The tousled, gangly dilettante of years past was no more.
Arcing smile lines book-ended the corners of her soft pink mouth and the frown lines above the bridge of her nose never completely went away. While the best curves now curved all the more, overall her figure had fined down as the last of her puppy fat had been eaten away by cold winters of the northern hemisphere.
And where the old Ava had curved self-consciously into herself, this Ava stood straight, shoulders back, hip cocked, sure of herself in a way Caleb wasn’t certain he wanted to identify.
The Ava he’d known so briefly and lost so quickly all those years before had been exceedingly smart, but mostly a scared and stubborn girl.
This Ava was all woman.
Music from the marquee below filtered up through the night and wafted into the room. Shuffling cymbals, a moody piano, and a breathy male voice singing of foolish lovers.
She looked up from her book, blinked, stared for a moment through the bay windows, then smiled a sad smile. A smile heavy with experience. Innocence and whimsy suddenly didn’t belong anywhere near the airless atmosphere of her bedroom.
Caleb realised his heart was thumping far too loudly in his chest for comfort.
‘I love this song,’ Ava said, her voice unnaturally husky.
She turned from the waist and looked his way, her smile soft and warm, her eyes hooded dreamily as she looked him in the eye with half her attention on the hazy melody echoing across the lawn.
Caleb didn’t look away. He couldn’t. Hell, he didn’t want to. He simply let himself drink in the sight of her. Those piercing blue eyes. That fringe of sooty lashes. The heavy dark hair cascading over her shoulders.
Until that moment, Caleb didn’t even know there was such a thing as perfect shoulders. Hers were lean, shapely, pale as porcelain with curves and crevices in all the best places.
She sucked her wide lips between her teeth, looked down at her hands, only then remembered the book she was holding, and furrowed her brow ever so slightly. She shut the book with a loud snap, then reached around to slide it back into place on the bookshelf, angling her head so that Caleb realised that her neck was pretty damned near perfect too.
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