She paused, but couldn’t stop.
‘You know what middle children are supposed to be? Like, their defining characteristic? Peacemakers. I mean, come on? How boring is that?’
She was staring at the laptop screen and all the photos of cherubic child-sized Hugh.
‘You’re not boring,’ he said.
April blinked, hardly believing he’d been paying attention.
‘Thank you,’ she said. She rotated the latest photo on the screen and dragged it over to the folder she’d created.
‘I can see the peacemaker thing, too. Just not when it comes to my old school photos.’
April grinned. ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘Especially when I wish I had photos like this. My mum worked really hard when we were growing up. She was often already at work when it was time for us to go to school.’
‘What did she do?’ Hugh asked.
She swallowed. ‘She worked in an office in the city,’ she said vaguely. As CEO of Australia’s largest mining company. The words remained unsaid.
Thankfully, Hugh just nodded. ‘My mum had lots of different jobs when I was growing up. We didn’t have a lot of money, so she often juggled a couple of jobs—you know, waitressing, receptionist...she even stacked shelves at a supermarket for a while, when I was old enough to be alone for a few hours at night.’
This was the longest conversation they’d ever had.
‘I do that!’ April exclaimed. ‘After I get home from this job.’
‘Really?’ he asked. ‘Why?’
April shrugged. ‘So I can get out of the awful shared house I live in in Shoreditch.’
His gaze flicked over her—ever so quickly. April ignored the way her body shivered.
‘Aren’t you a bit old to live in a shared house?’
She narrowed her eyes in mock affront. ‘Well, yeah,’ she said. ‘I’m thirty-two. But I made some dumb decisions with a credit card and I need to pay it off.’
She was choosing her words carefully, keen to keep everything she told him truthful, even if she wasn’t being truly honest with him.
But then, her family’s billions really shouldn’t be relevant. That, after all, was the whole point of this London ‘adventure’. Even if it had made a dodgy flatshare detour.
‘What kind of dumb decisions?’ he asked.
The question surprised her. She hadn’t expected him to be interested. ‘Clothes. Eating out. Rent I couldn’t afford. No job. That kind of thing.’
He nodded. ‘When I first moved out of home I rented this ridiculous place in Camden. It was way bigger than what a brand-new graduate needed, and my mum thought I was nuts.’
‘So you racked up lots of debt, too?’
‘No. I’d just sold a piece of software I’d developed for detecting plagiarism in uni assignments for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, so the rent wasn’t a problem,’ Hugh replied. ‘But I did move out because all that space was really echoey.’
April laughed out loud.
‘And—let me guess—you didn’t move into a shared house?’
His lips quirked upwards. ‘No. I can’t think of anything worse.’
‘You do realise your story has nothing in common with mine, right?’
He shrugged. ‘Hey, we both made poor housing choices.’
‘Nope. No comparison. One of my housemates inexplicably collects every hair that falls out of her head in the shower. Like, in a little container that she leaves on the windowsill. I...’
‘I’ll pay off all your credit card debt if you stop your sentimental junk crusade.’
It wasn’t a throwaway line. He said it with deadly seriousness.
April tilted her head as she studied him. ‘I know—and you know—that if you really wanted this stuff gone it would already be gone. Some random Aussie girl nagging you about it wouldn’t make any difference.’
He slid off his stool, then walked around to the other side of the kitchen bench. She watched as he filled the kettle, then plonked it without much care onto its base. But he didn’t flick the lever that would turn it on.
He grabbed April’s mug from the sink, and another from the overhead cupboard, then put both cups side by side, near the stone-cold kettle.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she asked. She could only guess at whatever was swirling about in his brain. His attention was seemingly focused on the marble swirls of the benchtop.
His head shot up and their gazes locked.
‘No.’
‘Cool,’ April said with a shrug. ‘I don’t need to know.’
Although she realised she wanted to know. Really wanted to.
April slid off her stool, too. She skirted around the bench, terribly aware of Hugh’s gaze following her. She didn’t quite meet his gaze. She couldn’t. Even as thoughts of discovering what was really going on in Hugh’s head zipped through her mind, other thoughts distracted her. About discovering how Hugh might feel if his lovely, strong body—hot as hell, even in jeans and jumper—was pressed against hers. If, say, he kissed her against the pantry door just beside him...
Stop.
This was Ivy and Mila’s influence, scrambling her common sense. It wasn’t how she really felt. She’d never felt like this.
She reached past him, incredibly careful not to brush against him, and switched on the kettle.
She sensed rather than saw him smile—her gaze was on the kettle, not him.
‘Let me help you,’ she said. ‘Stop trying to convince yourself you want something you don’t actually want. At all. Stop pretending.’
Too late, she realised the error of her ‘help him with the kettle the way she’d help him with his stuff’ metaphor. She’d ended up less than a foot away from him.
Or maybe it hadn’t been an error at all.
‘Okay,’ he said. His voice was deep. Velvety.
April looked up and their gazes locked.
It was like the stripy blouse moment all over again. But more, even.
She was suddenly unbelievably aware of her own breathing—the rise and fall of her chest was shallow, fast. And the way her belly clenched, the way her nails were digging into her palms to prevent herself from touching him.
‘I’ll stop pretending,’ he said.
His gaze slid to her lips.
She closed her eyes. She had to, or she couldn’t think.
The way Hugh was looking at her...
‘April...?’ he said, so soft.
Was that his breath against her lips? Had he moved closer so he could kiss her?
She refused to find out.
Instead, she stepped away. Two steps...three.
‘Good!’ she said. ‘Great! Let’s make time to go through the stuff I find each couple of days, okay?’
Hugh wasn’t thinking about the boxes. ‘What?’