And she didn’t want to be the nurse from a small community where everyone knew her name on this train journey of a lifetime. She didn’t want to be the girl next door. She wanted to be as sophisticated and glamorous as her surroundings. She wanted to dress up for dinner and drink a martini while she had worldly conversations with complete strangers.
Nursing wasn’t glamorous.
‘Oh, I’m just a public servant,’ she said, waving her hand dismissively as she grabbed hold of the first job that came to mind. She doubted it was very glamorous either but it was one of those jobs that was both broad and vague enough to discourage discourse. Nobody really understood what public servants did, right? They certainly didn’t ask them about their jobs.
Or tell them about their personal medical issues.
‘What do you do?’ Felicity asked, and relaxed as the woman, called Judy, launched into a spiel about her job of forty years, which kicked off a conversation amongst them all about their former jobs, and that segued into a discussion about the economy and then morphed again into chatter about travel.
Felicity was in heaven. She was on a train surrounded by witty and enthusiastic companions on the inside and the rugged beauty of the Blue Mountains on the outside. For twenty-four hours she was determined to be a different person.
Tomorrow afternoon she’d be back home where everyone knew her name and stopped her in the street for advice about their baby’s fever, their weird allergies or their shingles. Where everyone called her ‘Flick’ and the guys called her ‘mate’ and the older women of the town tried to matchmake her with any remotely available male.
Tomorrow would be here soon enough. Today nobody knew her and she was going to revel in it for as long as she could.
* * *
The first thing Callum noticed when he entered the restaurant at seven sharp was the sexy blonde from the café. He blinked once or twice just to make sure it was her—his vision wasn’t the best after all. Then she laughed at something her companions were saying and it went straight to his chest and spiked through his pulse.
It was definitely her.
If he’d known she was in the platinum carriage too he wouldn’t have wasted the last few hours catching up on some essential reading his new boss had emailed and insisted he read before he started work.
‘Can I find you a dining companion, sir?’ Donald asked.
‘No,’ Callum said. The beautifully dressed tables seated four and there were several spare chairs around the elegantly appointed dining car but his gaze was glued to the empty one beside her. ‘I’ve found one.’
The corner of Donald’s mouth lifted a fraction. ‘Good choice, sir.’
It took him only a few more seconds to reach the empty chair next to blondie. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. The conversation stopped as all three diners turned to look at him. ‘Is this seat taken?’
Her eyes widened slightly. They were smoky grey and fringed by sable lashes. She stared at him for long moments and he stared right back. He liked that she seemed as confused by her reaction to him as he was to her.
She’d changed into a dress, a slinky black thing that showed off her neck and collarbones and crisscrossed at her cleavage. She was wearing lip gloss. Pink. Light pink—the colour of ballet shoes. The ends of her honey hair seemed curlier or maybe that was just a trick of the overhead light.
The old guy sitting opposite welcomed him heartily. ‘Sit down, young fella. Save this pretty young thing from having her ear bent off by us old fogies.’
Callum didn’t wait to be asked twice. He wasn’t someone who believed in instalove but he sure as hell believed in instalust. He may be rusty but he knew sexual interest when he saw it.
She sure as hell wasn’t looking at him with pity, like too many women had these past couple of years.
No more pity sex for him.
‘I’m Jock, this is my wife Thelma and the odd one out is Felicity.’
Callum shook Jock and Thelma’s hand and reached for blondie’s. Felicity. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he murmured, their eyes meeting again, an awareness that was almost tangible blooming between them.
‘You were in the café,’ she said after a beat or two, sliding her hand out of his.
He let it go reluctantly. ‘Yes.’ A purr of male satisfaction buzzed through his veins. She remembered him. Had she been checking him out at the same time he’d been ogling her?
‘I didn’t realise you were in the same carriage.’
‘I had some work to do.’ Callum grimaced. ‘I shut myself away for a while. I’m in number eight.’
‘Hey, you’re in nine, right?’ Jock asked Felicity jovially. ‘You’re neighbours.’
Callum smiled at her as he sent a quick thankyou up into the universe. Things were definitely looking up for him. She smiled back and for the first time in a long time his belly tightened in anticipation. His libido had taken a real battering since the accident, so it was a revelation to feel it rousing.
‘So, what do you do?’ Jock asked.
Callum dragged his gaze off Felicity and forced his attention on the couple opposite. She wasn’t the only person on the train and this was the way these social situations worked. You ate a good meal, drank good wine and made polite and hopefully interesting conversation with strangers.
God knew, he needed something like this to get himself out of his head. But he promised himself that later he would do his damnedest to shamelessly monopolise the woman beside him. They might not end up in bed together but he intended to flirt like crazy and see where it went.
‘I’m a technical writer,’ he said.
The well-practised lie rolled smoothly off his tongue. He still wasn’t used to the real answer. Becoming a GP after being an up-and-coming vascular surgeon was taking some getting used to. And he only had to look around at the age demographic of the other passengers in the carriage to know that admitting to being any kind of doctor would probably result in an avalanche of medical questions he just didn’t want to answer.
He didn’t want to be any kind of doctor tonight. He wanted to forget about the bitter disappointments of his career and just be a regular Joe. He wanted to be a man chatting to a woman hoping it might end up somewhere interesting.
‘Oh?’ Thelma asked, as she buttered the bread roll Donald had just placed on her plate. ‘What does that entail?’
‘Just boring things like industry articles and manuals,’ he dismissed. ‘Nothing exciting. What about you, Thelma? Are you still working?’
It was a good deflection and Thelma ran with it. The conversation shifted throughout the sumptuous three-course meal and it felt good to stretch his conversational muscles, which were rusty at best. Felicity, on the other hand, was a great conversationalist and Callum found himself relaxing and even laughing from time to time.
His awareness of her as a woman didn’t let up but the urgency to get her alone mellowed.
Like him, she seemed reluctant to talk about herself, expertly turning the conversation back to Thelma and Jock or himself and more neutral topics, such as travel and movies and sport. Consequently, the meal flew by as Felicity charmed them all. It was hard to believe he’d sat for two hours and not thought once about the accident and its repercussions on his life.
That wasn’t something anybody had achieved in the past two and a half years.
He went to bed thinking about it, he woke up thinking about it, and it dominated his thoughts far more than it should during the day.
He suddenly felt about a decade younger.
‘A few of us are retiring to the lounge for some after-dinner drinks,’