Was he thinking how much she had changed since she had seen him last? Her honey-brown hair was longer now; she had gone from the urchin look of her early twenties to a more sophisticated shoulder-length style that was easy to manage given the long and often unpredictable hours she worked. She was certainly thinner than seven years ago. Her approach to exercise had been very ad hoc in the past. Now she was an addict, or so her mother kept telling her. Mikki didn’t necessarily agree or disagree. She exercised to keep her demons at bay and the pay-off was a figure she had longed for and had never achieved until now.
‘Hello, Mikki.’
The deep, smooth bass of his voice with its hint of a London accent brought her head up and her heart rate beyond anything it had ever done in a spin cycle class. Mikki looked into those Antarctic eyes and felt the cold breeze of his disdain blow holes in her chest like a volley of bullets. ‘Hello, Lewis,’ she said, pleased her voice sounded so cool and composed when for a moment she had thought it might not work at all.
His eyes moved over her face, pausing for an infinitesimal moment on her mouth, before coming back to her gaze. ‘How are you?’
‘Um—fine, and you?’ Mikki felt her facade slipping. Why had he looked at her mouth like that? That one brief glance had set off a chain reaction beneath the surface of her lips. They felt dry and tingling and she desperately wanted to moisten them with her tongue but somehow fought the urge.
She drank in his features in one quick slurping glance: his dark brown hair had only a few strands of grey in it, although he was now thirty-six years old; and his body, although lean, was well muscled, suggesting he also spent a bit of time in the gym. His sensual mouth was deeply grooved either side with vertical lines that in a lesser man would have been aging but in Lewis’s case gave him a distinguished, knowledgeable and eminently commanding air. He still had a prominent scar over his right eyebrow, the result of a fight when he had been a teenager. He had never told her the circumstances of it; he had said it was a part of his past he was not proud of, and in spite of her probing had refused to be drawn on it.
‘Dining alone this evening?’ he asked, glancing at the empty chair opposite.
‘No, I’m…’ She hesitated, wishing she was meeting one of her colleagues at the very least, or a date. A date would have been better. Much, much better. ‘I’m having dinner with my mother. She’s running late.’
One of his dark brows moved upwards ever so slightly. ‘Please give her my regards,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose she has forgotten me?’
How could anyone ever forget you? Mikki thought with a pang that felt like a tiny fish hook in her heart. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘I told both my parents you were coming to St Benedict’s to join the neurosurgical team. They were interested in how well your career has gone.’
‘Surprised would be more appropriate, don’t you think?’ he asked with that same mocking lift of his brow.
Mikki reined in her temper behind a cool impersonal smile, holding back emotions that were straining at the leash of her control. There was no way she was going to show how much seeing him again had rattled her. ‘You were always going places, Lewis. No one could have doubted that.’
‘Ah, darling, I can’t believe I’m so late,’ Heloise Landon said as she came in on a cloud of perfume and the rapid tattoo of click-clacking designer heels. ‘You would not believe the traffic, and Rashid, my driver, had trouble starting the car— Oh!’ She gave a little shocked gasp. ‘It’s not Lewis, is it? Lewis Beck?’
Lewis held out his hand, hardly a muscle moving on his face. ‘Heloise. You’re looking well.’
Heloise’s perfectly manicured hand fluttered back to her neck once he had released it. ‘My goodness,’ she said. ‘How long has it been?’
‘Seven years,’ he said with an expression as unreadable as stone.
‘Yes, of course,’ Heloise said. ‘Well, this is rather a coincidence, I must say. Fancy running into you like this! I’ve heard all about your appointment at St Benedict’s. It was in the paper and, of course, Michaela confirmed it. Not that she’s let too many in on the secret, mind you. I had to drag it out of her and I’m her mother.’ She gave Lewis a you-know-what-she’s-like look. ‘But, then, I don’t suppose it is de rigueur to go brandishing about the news of one’s ex-fiancé’s imminent arrival just because you’re going to be working with him every day now, is it?’
Mikki wished the floor would open up and gulp her down whole. She chanced a glance at Lewis’s expression but it remained inscrutable, although she thought she saw a glint of something hard in his eyes as they briefly encountered hers. Again, she kept her own expression cool and composed, although it was taking more of an effort than she could ever have imagined.
Heloise was undaunted. ‘Won’t you join us? You can tell us all about your stellar career. That would be lovely and civilised, don’t you think, darling?’ She addressed the latter comment breezily to Mikki.
Mikki had grown to dread her fortnightly dinner sessions with her mother, and would ordinarily have jumped at the chance of diluting her company, but the thought of sharing a meal with Lewis was beyond her capabilities right now. ‘I am sure Lewis has other arrangements for this evening,’ she said a little tightly.
‘Yes, I have, actually,’ Lewis said, nodding towards the young woman who had just been led to his table. He encompassed Mikki and her mother in one look that was polite but indifferent, and added, ‘Maybe some other time.’
The hook in Mikki’s heart dragged a little bit further when she saw him greet the gorgeous young woman who had been shown to his table. His arms went around the young woman’s slim figure, almost lifting her off the floor as he held her to him. Mikki knew it was ridiculous of her to be feeling so wretched at seeing him with someone else. Of course he would have someone else by now. He would have had many someone elses over the last few years. She should have prepared herself better for a situation like this. She had been concentrating on the work part, the professional, not the personal, when the personal was the thing that hurt the most. It shouldn’t, but it did, even after all this time.
Mikki turned away before she saw his mouth go down on that pretty rosebud mouth. ‘So, how are you, Mum?’ she asked.
‘Michaela,’ Heloise said, leaning forward conspiratorially, ‘did you see that girl he has with him? Why, she’s barely out of her teens, I’m sure of it.’
‘Yes, well, he always did go for the young innocent type,’ Mikki said as she examined the wine list with studious intent.
‘Darling, you were twenty-two,’ her mother said, ‘hardly a babe in the woods.’
Mikki brought her head up from the wine list and sent her mother a wry look. ‘I thought you and Dad said I was too young to know what I was doing and I was just about to throw my life away on my first real love affair.’
Heloise pursed her mouth before she spoke. ‘He’s done very well for himself, hasn’t he?’
‘What are you saying, Mum?’ Mikki said as she began perusing the wine list again. ‘That I made the biggest mistake of my life in leaving him when I did?’
There was a tense little silence.
Heloise let out a frustrated breath. ‘Michaela, you’re always so defensive. Of course you did the right thing in leaving him. You had nothing in common with him.’
Mikki put the wine list down and met her mother’s gaze. ‘I loved him, Mum. I thought that was all the common ground one needed.’
‘But, darling, did he love you?’ Heloise asked. ‘There’s a very big difference between lust and love, you know.’ She took one of Mikki’s hands across the table and stroked it gently. ‘I know losing the baby was hard but in the end it worked out for the best, didn’t it?’
‘Yes, yes, it did.’