‘I know you’re changing, Beth. I’ve watched you.’ His eyes glazed over, a deep russet brown, and skimmed her, head to toe. She’d never been more aware of the changing shape of her body. Then he sneered, ‘I just never expected you’d change into such a cliché.’
‘I’m just … I just need some space. We’ve lived in each other’s pockets for so long we don’t even know how to be around anyone else. Or who we are if we’re not together.’
Lies, lies …
His snort was ugly. ‘Don’t dress this up as self-discovery. This is about the school jock making a play for the school tomboy. And you’re falling for it hook, line and sinker.’ He slammed two hands either side of her face and leaned into her.
She flinched and her heart raced at his closeness. No, this is about your mother asking me to cut you loose. Begging me to. She wanted to scream it into the face that she knew as well as her own. But she couldn’t. It would kill him to discover what his only surviving parent thought he was worth.
‘You could be anything you want, Marc. You don’t need me to be it with you. There’s a whole world for us to discover.’
He leaned in further. The tightening in her body where he touched it wasn’t fear. Marc was the only person on the planet she trusted implicitly never to hurt her.
‘What’s wrong with us discovering that together?’ he ground, his chest heaving with restraint. ‘We have history. A bond. What does McKinley have that I don’t have?’
No rock-tight bond. No complicated history. No parents pressuring her to put some distance between them.
‘I’m only asking for space, Marc. What’s wrong with that?’
His face twisted and he swore. ‘I’ve been giving you space for two years, Beth. Maybe if I’d done this back then I wouldn’t be standing here now getting the brush-off from my best friend.’
And then suddenly his mouth was crushing down on hers, his body pressing her into the hard limestone of the library wall behind her. Shock stiffened her against the hardness of his chest as his hands slipped down to tangle in her hair and hold her face still for the assault of his lips. She swam in his scent, in his angry heat, in his perfect, practised kiss. The unfamiliar slide of a blazing hot mouth over her own and the furious press of his body. And then the dizzying sensation of their flesh melding into one, his enormous hands sliding around to protect her head from the lumpy wall behind her, his mouth shifting and softening on hers.
And then—somehow—she was kissing him back. Her own mouth moved tentatively against his and her body pressed forward. A choked whimper cracked deep in her throat and Marc worked his tongue past her uncertain lips coaxing them open. His furnace-hot tongue twisted and danced around hers, intensity pooling around her, engulfing all. Her body whoofed to flaming life, hormones tangling and exploding like kindling around them.
Overwhelming and unfamiliar, something she’d never allowed herself to dream. To want.
Marc.
Suddenly Beth was free and Marc staggered back against the force of her desperate shove. She held up a shaking hand to stop him coming closer. His face darkened as he looked at her.
‘Does McKinley know you kiss like that?’ His chest heaved.
How could he know? They’d never kissed. She’d never kissed anyone. Until today.
She dragged her fist across her lips. ‘Don’t ever—’ do that again, make me feel that again ‘—touch me again.’ Her voice was husky and low and appallingly unfamiliar.
‘Beth …’
A world of emotions surged up and spilled over. ‘Don’t speak to me … again.’
His frown doubled. ‘You don’t mean—’
She lifted tortured eyes to him. ‘Why does it have to be all or nothing with you? I just wanted some space, Marc. Room for us both to discover who we are. That’s all. Did you think you could keep me all to yourself for ever?’
‘I know who I am. And I thought I knew who you were. But I guess not. ‘ He crossed the little clearing in two steps. ‘You want space, Elizabeth? Fine. Take as much as you need. If you’re that desperate, then have a good life with McKinley.’
And then he was gone.
Her best friend.
Like a kite in a wild wind, she’d tried to give him some rope, some height, but instead he’d ripped completely free and was gone. Her fingers trembled as they touched her swollen lips and she slid down the rough library wall until she huddled in a tearless, emotionless, empty heap.
Ten years later, south coast, Western Australia
WHO knew silence came in so many shades?
There was the deep, black silence late at night, under the West Australian stars, miles from anywhere. The earthy green silence of Beth’s shambolic warehouse studio, only broken by the splashes of colour from her latest artworks. There was the newly discovered, beige-coloured silence inside her head, where voices and thoughts used to clamour but had now all eased into a comfortable hum.
And there was this one …
The simmering red silence of a man who was not particularly pleased to see her. Not that Beth had imagined he would be. It was why she’d put this off for so long. The awful sound of nothing echoed through the heartbeat thumping past her eardrums. She cleared her throat.
‘Marc.’
He may have been half a house larger than the boy she remembered, but Marc Duncannon had two trademark giveaways and one was the way he stood when he was on guard, legs apart as if readying himself for a physical assault.
Muscular arms stole up to cross in front of a broad chest as he continued to stare wordlessly at her. Twisted humour raced in to fill the aching void inside where she wasn’t letting herself feel. While he’d grown a kick-butt chest in ten years, she was no bigger in that department than when he’d last seen her. Yet another disappointment for him.
Coming here suddenly seemed like a spectacularly bad idea. ‘Are you not even going to say hello?’
He nodded briskly, his lips tight, resenting opening at all. ‘Beth.’
One stony word, but loaded with meaning and breath-stealing in its timbre. More than she’d had from him in over a decade. A total contrast to the way he used to say her name. Beth. Betho. Bethlehem. They’d had their short lifetimes to come up with stupid nicknames for each other. He’d only called her Elizabeth once. The day he’d kissed her.
The day she’d ripped out his heart.
She swallowed past the lump threatening her air supply. Past the welling excitement that she was here—with Marc—again. ‘How are you?’
‘On my way out.’
Okay … She’d prepared herself to be unwelcome but it still felt so foreign radiating from him. ‘I just needed … I’d like a couple of minutes. Please?’
His hazel eyes darted away briefly but the miracle of any part of him moving seemed to thaw the rest of him out. His whole body twisted and he resumed loading equipment into his four-wheel drive. Beth risked closing the gap, but her breath got shorter with her distance from him, until she either stopped advancing on him or took her last living gasp.
Seeing him again would almost be worth it.
He threw words