There was a sense that they were marking time and she was equal parts titillated and terrified. This being a whole other person thing wasn’t as easy to pull off as she’d thought but she’d never felt so alive either. So utterly buzzed.
Not even with Ned. Sure, he’d been the love of her life and being dumped by him had been crushing, but their love had grown out of friendship and a slow, gentle dawning.
This...thing was entirely different.
Was she seriously going to do this? Pick up a stranger on a train? Or let him pick her up? She might have limited experience of the whole pick-up scene but she was pretty sure that’s exactly where they were heading. When she’d booked her train ticket, meeting a good-looking stranger hadn’t been part of her plan.
But here they were with a night full of possibilities stretching ahead of them.
One by one their companions left, withdrawing to their beds, making jokes about old bones and early nights. Felicity contemplated doing the sensible thing and following them. Retiring to her bed and the moonlit landscape flying by outside her window, tuning into the clickety-clack of the wheels as they rocked her to sleep.
But she didn’t.
‘Well,’ Jock said, standing, helping Thelma up as well. ‘This is way past our bedtime and my indigestion is playing up so we’ll be off too.’
Felicity smiled at them and bade them goodnight, excruciatingly conscious of Callum’s eyes on her as she watched their companions disappear from the lounge.
And then there were two.
‘Whew,’ he murmured, his gaze brushing over her neck and mouth, a smile tilting his lips into an irresistible shape. ‘I thought they’d never go to bed.’
Felicity blushed but she didn’t deny the sentiment. She’d thought exactly the same thing.
He tipped his chin at her martini glass. ‘Another drink?’
She hesitated. This was it. This was the moment. Was she going to be the sophisticated woman on the train or the girl next door?
‘It’s only eleven,’ he coaxed. ‘I promise to have you back to your compartment before you turn into a pumpkin.’
Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. The man had a PhD in flirting. ‘Yeah. Okay. Sure.’
He grinned. ‘Good answer.’
Felicity’s mouth quirked in an answering grin. ‘Good question.’
She flat-out ogled him as he walked to the bar. She’d seen him in the café and had been struck by his presence but he’d seemed so brooding and intense, so closed off she hadn’t bothered to go there. He hadn’t put a foot wrong tonight, however.
Sure, there was still a brooding quality to the set of his shoulders and the line of his mouth, but he’d been witty and charming and great with all the oldies and, good Lord Almighty, the way he’d looked at her had been one hundred percent high-octane flirty.
Nothing brooding about it.
Even the way the man leaned against the bar was sexy. His expensive-looking charcoal trousers pulled nicely against his butt and hugged the hard length of his thighs.
And they were hard. And hot. She could still feel the imprint of them along her leg.
He’d worn a jacket to dinner but had since shed it to reveal a plain long-sleeved shirt of dark purple. The top two buttons had been left undone and about an hour ago he’d rolled up the sleeves to reveal tanned forearms covered in dark hair.
Those forearms had caused a cataclysmic meltdown in her underwear.
He turned slightly and smiled at her and Felicity sucked in a breath. The man was devastating when he smiled and it went all the way to his green eyes. It did things to his face, which was already far too handsome for any one man. Square jaw covered in dark, delicious stubble, strong chin, cheekbones that women would kill for and sandy-brown hair longer on the top and shorter at the sides.
Hair made to run fingers through.
His laughter drifted towards her as Travis handed over the drinks and said something she couldn’t quite hear. She liked how it sounded. How it rumbled out of him. She got the sense he didn’t do a hell of a lot of it, though, which was a shame. That laugh was turning her insides to jelly.
The military should employ him as a secret weapon.
He headed in her direction, his gait compensating for the rock of the train. She probably should be glued to the window, watching the moonlit bush whizzing by, and not be so obvious, but she figured they were beyond the point of being coy and, frankly, he was too damn hard not to look at with his long stride and knowing smile.
He placed her glass down and sat opposite her this time, a low table between them. She couldn’t decide if she was relieved or disappointed. Neither, she concluded as he filled her entire field of vision and everything else became pretty much irrelevant.
‘To strangers on a train,’ he said, lifting his whisky glass, that smile still hovering.
She tapped hers against it. ‘I’ll drink to that.’
FELICITY WAS CONSCIOUS of his gaze as it followed the press of her lips then lowered to the bob of her throat as she swallowed. She was grateful for the cold, crisp martini cooling her suddenly parched mouth.
‘So...what’s a young ’un—’ he injected Jock’s Scottish brogue into the words and Felicity smiled ‘—like yourself doing on a train with the cast from Cocoon? Lots more people your age down in the cheap seats. Unless... Wait, are you some kind of heiress or something?’
‘No.’ Felicity laughed at the apt description of their travelling companions and at the thought of her being some little rich girl, although she had inherited enough money from her grandfather to buy a small cottage. ‘I’m not. And you don’t look like you’re of retirement age either. You’re, what? Thirty-five?’
She’d been wondering how old he was all night and this seemed like as good an opener as any.
‘Close,’ he murmured. ‘Thirty-four. And you?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘Ah...’ He gave a long and exaggerated sigh. ‘To be so young and carefree again.’
Felicity laughed at his teasing but was struck by the slight tinge of wistfulness. ‘Oh, no,’ she teased back. ‘You poor old man.’
He grinned at her and every fibre of her being thrilled at being the centre of his attention. ‘Seriously, though,’ he said, sobering a little, ‘why the train?’
‘My grandfather was a railway man through and through. Fifty years’ service as a driver and he never got tired of trains. Of talking about them, photographing them and just plain loving everything about them. We’d go on the train into the city every day when I used to stay with them in the school holidays and he’d take me to the train museum every time without fail.’
He frowned. ‘Didn’t that get boring after a while?’
Felicity shook her head. ‘Nah. He always made it so exciting. He made it all about the romance of train travel and I lapped it up.’
‘Romance, huh?’ He raised an eyebrow as his gaze dropped to her mouth. ‘Smart man.’
Felicity’s belly flopped over. ‘That he was.’
If tonight was anything to go by, her grandfather was a damn