She stood on the spot until she heard the front door to his little cottage slam shut. Disappointment washed through her. Then she spun and marched up the path towards her car, dress swishing.
But as she got to the place where the path forked, her steps faltered.
Go home was not an answer. And she’d come for answers. She owed it to her mother to at least try to find out what had happened. To put this particular demon to rest. She stared at the path. Right led to the street and her beaten-up old car. Left led to the front door of Hayden’s secluded cottage.
Where she and her opinions weren’t welcome.
Then again, she’d made rather a life speciality out of unpopular opinions. Why stop now?
She turned left.
Hayden marched past his living room, heading for the kitchen and the hot pot of coffee that substituted for alcohol these days. But, as he did so, he caught sight of a pale figure, upright and prim on his lounge-room sofa. Like a ghost from his past.
He backed up three steps and lifted a brow at Shirley through the doorway.
‘Come in.’
Her boots were one thing when she was standing, but seated and carefully centred, and with her hands and dress demurely folded over the top of them, they stole focus, big time. Almost as if the more modest she tried to be, the dirtier those boots got. He wrestled with his gaze to prevent it following his filthy mind. This was Carol-Anne’s kid.
Though there was nothing kid-like about her now.
‘The door was unlocked.’
‘Obviously.’
She pressed her hands closer together in her lap. ‘And I wasn’t finished.’
‘Obviously.’
Less was definitely more with this one. The women he was used to being with either didn’t understand half of what he said or they were smart enough not to try to keep up. It had been a long time since he’d got as good as he’d given. One part of him hankered for a bit of intellectual sparring. Another part of him wanted to run a mile.
‘I think you should finish the list,’ she said in a clear, brave voice.
Little faker.
‘Start the list, technically.’
‘Right.’ She seemed nonplussed that he’d made a joke about it. Was she expecting him to go on the attack? Where was the fun in that when he could toy with her longer by staying cool?
Now that he looked at her, he could see the resemblance to Carol under all her make-up. Mrs Marr to everyone else, but he’d presumed to call her Carol the first time he’d sat in her class and she’d smiled every time and never corrected him.
It was Shirley’s irises that were like her mother’s—the palest khaki. He’d have assumed contact lenses if not for the fact that he’d seen them before on a woman too sensible and too smart to be sucked in by the trappings of vanity. Shirley reminded him of one of those Russian dolls-inside-a-doll things. She had large black pupils surrounded by extraordinary grey-green irises, within the clearest white eyeballs he’d ever seen, and the whole thing fringed by smudges of catwalk charcoal around her lashes. Her eyes were set off by ivory skin and the whole picture was framed by a tumble of black locks piled on top. Probably kept in place by some kind of hidden engineering, but it looked effortless enough to make him want to thrust his hands into it and send it tumbling down.
Just to throw her off her game.
Just to see how it felt sliding through his fingers.
Instead, he played the bastard. The last time he’d seen her she’d been standing small and alone at her mother’s funeral, all bones and unrealised potential. Now she was … He dropped his gaze to the curve of her neck. It was only slightly less gratuitous than staring at her cleavage.
Another thing he hadn’t touched in years. Curves.
‘Looks like you’ve been on good pasture.’
The only sign of that particular missile hitting its target was the barest of flinches in her otherwise steady gaze. She swallowed carefully before speaking and sat up taller, expression composed. ‘You really work hard at being unpleasant, don’t you?’
A fighter. Good for her.
He shrugged. ‘I am unpleasant.’
‘Alcohol does that.’
His whole body froze. A dirty fighter, then. But his past wasn’t all that hard to expose with a few hours and an Internet connection. ‘I don’t drink any more.’
‘Probably just as well. Imagine how unbearable you’d be if you did.’
He fixed his eyes on her wide, clear ones, forcing his mind not to find this verbal swordplay stimulating. ‘What do you want, Shirley?’
‘I want to ask you about my mother.’
‘No, you don’t. You want to ask me about the list.’
‘Yes.’ She stared, serene and composed. The calmness under pressure reminded him a lot of her mother.
‘How did you even know it existed?’
Her steady eyes flicked for just a moment. ‘I heard you, at the wake. Talking about it.’
He’d not let himself think about that day in a long, long time. ‘Why didn’t you add your name?’
She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t invited.’ Her eyes dropped. ‘And I didn’t even know she had a bucket list until that day.’
Did that hurt her? That her mother had shared it with strangers but not her? A long dormant part of him lifted its drowsy head. Empathy. ‘You were young. We were her peers.’
She snorted. ‘You were her students.’
The old criticism still found a target. Even after all this time. ‘You weren’t there, Shirley. We were more like friends.’ He had hungered for intellectual stimulation he just hadn’t found in students his own age and her mother had filled it.
‘I was there. You just didn’t know it.’
He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I used to hide under the stairs when you would all come over for your extra credit Saturdays. Listen in. Learn.’
What? ‘You were, what, fourteen?’
‘Actually, I was eleven when you first started coming. I was fourteen when you stopped.’
‘Most eleven-year-olds don’t have a fascination with philosophy.’
She licked her lips, but otherwise her face remained carefully neutral. Except for the tiny flush that spiked high in her cheeks. And he knew she was lying about something.
‘Ask me what you really want to know.’ And then go. His tolerance for company was usually only as long as it took to get laid.
She leaned forward. ‘Why didn’t you even start the list?’
Oh … so many reasons. None of them good and none of them public. ‘How many have you done?’ he asked instead.
‘Six.’
Huh. That was a pretty good rate, given she had been a teenager for the first half of that decade. The old guilt nipped. ‘Which ones?’
‘Ballooning, horse-riding in the Snowy Mountains, marathon—’
He gave her curves a quick once-over. ‘You ran a marathon?’ She ignored him. With good reason.
‘—abseiling, and climbing the Harbour Bridge.’