For some, home was bricks and mortar. For others it was family. For Gabe it was where the work was. And wherever in the world he got wind of an exceptional business idea in need of someone with the guts and means to invest, that was where he sent his bed. And his pillow—flattened to the point he probably didn’t even need the thing. And his mattress with the man-shaped dint right smack bang in the middle that fitted his spreadeagled body to perfection.
Moments before he fell asleep on his feet the lift deposited him neatly at his floor. Exactly as it was made to do.
Gabe yawned till his ears popped, fumbled for the keys to the apartment he’d never seen. The apartment he’d bought to shut Nate up, when Nate had maintained he needed a place in Melbourne considering the company they jointly owned was based there.
He stood in the open doorway. Compared with the bare-bones hotel room that had been home the past few months it was gargantuan, taking up the entire top floor of the building. And yet somehow claustrophobic with its dark colour palette and the huge grey windows along one wall that matched the drizzly grey world outside them.
‘Well, Gabe,’ he said to his blurry reflection, ‘you’re certainly not in Rio any more.’
He slid the carry-on and laptop bags from his shoulder onto the only piece of furniture in the whole room, a long L-shaped black lounge that cut the space in half. Only to be met with a loud ‘Arghuraguragh!’
Jet lag and/or vertigo gone in an instant, Gabe spun on his heel, fists raised, heart thundering in his chest, to find a man reposing on his couch.
‘Nate,’ Gabe said, bent at the waist, hands on his knees as he dragged his breath back to normal. ‘You scared me half to death.’
Gabe’s best mate and business partner sat up, his hair sticking up at the side of his head. ‘Making sure you got here in one piece.’
‘Making sure I arrived at all, more like.’ Gabe stood, cricked his back. ‘Tell me you went one better and filled my fridge.’
‘Sorry. Did get doughnuts though. They’re on the bench.’
Gabe glanced at the familiar white box as he passed it on the way to the silver monolith of a fridge, opening it to find it was empty bar the maker’s instructions. A frisson of disquiet skittered down his spine. If that wasn’t ready …
He strode across the gargantuan space towards the great double doors he could only assume led to the bedroom, whipped them open to find—
No bed.
Swearing beneath his breath, Gabe ran his hand up and down the back of his neck so fast he felt sparks.
Nate’s hand landed upon his shoulder a half-second before his laughter. ‘Your couch looks a treat but it’s not in the least bit comfortable.’
‘You didn’t seem to mind a moment ago,’ Gabe growled.
‘I can power-nap anywhere. It’s a gift born of chronic insomnia.’
Gabe slowly and deliberately shut the bedroom doors, unable to even look at the space where his bed ought to be.
‘Hotel?’
‘The thought of going back out into that cold is making my teeth ache.’
‘I’d offer my couch, but it’s my decorator’s cruel joke. Godawful leather thing with buttons all over it.’
‘Thanks, but I’d be afraid I’d catch something.’
Nate grinned and backed away. ‘I have seen with my own two eyes that you’re here, so my work is done. Catch you at the office Monday. Remember where it is?’
Gabe’s answer was a flat stare. He was lucky—or unlucky more like—to end up in Melbourne once every two or three years, but he knew where his paychecks came from.
Nate clicked his fingers as he wavered at the front door. ‘Almost forgot. Need to make a right hullabaloo now you’re back. Housewarming party Friday night.’
Gabe shook his head. He’d be long gone by Friday. Wouldn’t he?
‘Too late,’ said Nate. ‘Already in motion. Alex and some of the old uni gang are coming. A few clients. Some fine women I met walking the promenade just now—’
‘Nate—’
‘Hey, consider yourself lucky. I’m so giddy you’re here I contemplated dropping flyers from a plane.’
And then Nate was gone. Leaving Gabe in his dark, cavernous, cold, empty apartment. Alone. The grey mist of Port Phillip Bay closing in on his wall of windows like a swarm of bad memories, pretty much summing up how he felt about the possibility that he might still be there in a week’s time.
Before he turned into a human icicle, Gabe tracked down the remote for the air-con and cranked it up as hot as it would go.
He found some bed linen in a closet, then, back in his bedroom doorway, looked glumly at the empty space where his bed ought to be. He stripped down to his smalls and made a pile with blankets and a too big pillow and lay down on the floor, and the second he closed his eyes fatigue dragged him into instant sleep.
And he dreamt.
Of a cool feminine hand stroking the hair at the back of his neck, a hot red convertible rumbling beneath his thighs as he eased it masterfully around the precarious roads of a cliff face somewhere in the south of France. When the car pulled into a lookout, the cool owner of the cool hand slid her cool blonde self onto his lap, her sweet sharp scent hitting the back of his mouth a half-second before her tongue followed. Gabe’s dream self thought, Hitchcock, eat your heart out.
That night at The Brasserie—one of a string of crowded restaurants lining the New Quay Promenade—when Mae told her fiancé, Clint, about Paige’s little purchase, he choked on his food. Literally. A waiter had to give him the Heimlich. They made quite a stir, ending up with the entire restaurant cheering and Paige hunching over her potato wedges and hiding her face behind both hands.
Clint recovered remarkably to ask, ‘So what happened between us pouring you into a cab after drinks last night and this morning to have cured you of your no-marriage-for-Paige-ever stance? Cabbie give you the ride of your life?’
Paige dropped her fingers to give Clint a blank stare. Grinning, he put his hands up in surrender before smartly returning to checking the footy scores on his phone.
She didn’t bother telling him there had not been any curing her doubt as to the existence of happily ever afters. But she neglected to say that there had been one ride she couldn’t seem to wipe from her mind. A ride in a lift with some kind of tall, dark and handsome inducement that got a girl to thinking about all sorts of things she wouldn’t admit out loud without the assistance of too many cocktails.
She dropped her hands to her belly where she could still feel the hum of his deep voice.
As she’d done a dozen times through the day, she brought her thoughts back to the fluoro white bag covered in hot-pink writing currently hanging over the back of her dining chair.
The fact that Gabe Hamilton had got his flirt on while she was carrying a wedding dress made him indiscriminate at best. And the kind of man she wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Fidelity meant a great deal to Paige. She’d worked for the same company since uni. Had the same best friend since primary school. She’d drive twenty minutes to get her favourite Thai takeaway. She’d watched her own mum crumble before her very eyes as her father confirmed his own disloyalty again and again and again.
‘Humona humona,’ Mae murmured, or something along those lines, dragging Paige back to the present. ‘Move over, Captain Jack, there’s a new pirate in town.’
Clint glanced up. Whatever he saw was