Her long dark hair hung from a centre part just as it had when she was nineteen, and it was still, oh, so sexily mussed, as though she’d spent hours running agitated fingers through it. Her blue eyes were luminous in a round face that had always made her look younger than she was. A naturally wide smile hovered cautiously upon her mouth and her cheeks were flushed.
The champagne glass between her fingers exposed fingernails bitten to the quick. She wore a shapeless, sleeveless dark pink lace dress that stopped square below her knees. It was offbeat, slightly too big and not quite formal enough for the occasion.
She hadn’t changed a bit.
A distant relative of some sort appeared from nowhere to capture Ava’s attention. She shot Caleb a quick ‘I’m sorry’ with her eyes before she turned towards much pinching of cheeks and ‘I knew you when you were this big’ remarks.
Caleb took a step away, towards the bar, where he put down his glass and gladly took the reprieve.
Ava Halliburton. It had been some time since that name had made him curl his fingernails into his palms.
At twenty-two, confused and smitten, and only hours after the most raw, tender, surprising night of his young life, he’d followed her to the airport, and five minutes before she was due to check in and fool that he was he’d asked her to stay for him.
And he’d been serious. In that crazy moment he’d been prepared to throw away the thought of ever being with another woman if he’d been able to have just her.
Because in her warm, willing arms he’d thought for the first time in his young life he’d truly glimpsed happiness.
Yep, happiness, that old chestnut.
And it had taken her about, ooh, half a second to refuse and take flight.
He braced himself to suffer the onrush of unbearable frustration he’d associated with her memory for a long time after she’d left him standing there in the middle of the airport terminal.
But the onslaught never came.
While she looked as if she’d stepped out of her high- school yearbook, the intervening years had changed him so much he was a different man. For one thing he was far less easily moved by things like loveliness and sweetness and sky-blue bedroom eyes.
If he were in the mood for romanticising things he might think she’d made him immune to all that, made him seek out the company of women who didn’t have a chance in hell of touching him in that way. But he wasn’t in such a mood. Therefore he decided that in the past ten years he’d been lucky to experience enough lovely, enough sweet, enough feminine eyes of every colour not to be so impacted as he had been by her, and by her leaving, ever again.
That was until Ava’s spare hand, the one not swirling champagne hypnotically in its flute, reached up to finger a strip of thin brown leather at her neck.
A long thin strip of brown leather. One that looked a heck of a lot like one that once upon a time had accommodated a chunky wooden locket he’d given her as a birthday gift.
He’d put his photograph inside as a joke. She’d left it in there. For years.
The last time he’d seen the locket was on that night, the one night they’d spent together. Lying bundled up in a pile of clean towels and thermal blankets in a suspended shell of a canoe in the Melbourne University boat shed on a cold winter’s night, basking in one another’s afterglow, he’d opened it. Seen his picture. And his future. Or so he’d thought.
The idea that she might have yet to remove it dug in its claws and refused to be displaced.
Caleb’s eyes remained riveted to the fingers playing with the leather strap. It lifted gently away from her creamy décolletage and then slid back against her. He wondered if the leather had been warmed by all that soft female skin.
The tips of his fingers began to tingle.
He followed the line of the necklace to find it dipped beneath the V of Ava’s dress. There was no way of knowing what she kept there now, nestled between her breasts.
He allowed himself a moment to ponder the thought. Especially since in the past ten years little Ava Halliburton had filled out a little more than he’d initially realised. Even though he knew it a self-destructive thought he sent up a small prayer of thanks to the god who decided such things.
The cousin thrice removed moved on and Ava turned back to Caleb, remnant smile lingering upon her wide mouth. Suddenly her necklace didn’t hold anywhere near as much fascination as those lips, which at some point in the conversation with Cousin Whoever had been moistened.
Caleb tipped back onto his heels. If he’d thought his fingertips were tingly they had nothing on his bottom lip. He dragged his upper teeth over it to stave off the sense memory lingering thereupon.
‘It was a beautiful ceremony, don’t you think?’ Ava asked, turning side on, stealing away her leather strap, the V of her dress and her lips from his gaze as her eyes roved lazily over the noisily expanding crowd.
She was playing it beautifully cool, was she? Well, she’d just met the master of cool. Ready yourself for a chill, kiddo…
‘Gorgeous,’ he said, his tone glacial.
‘And have you ever seen such stars?’
‘When I have looked up. Sure.’
‘It’s such a perfect night for an outdoor reception.’ Her nose screwed up. ‘Though it will rain.’
‘Do you have a barometer tucked somewhere beneath your dress?’
Her mouth twitched. ‘Don’t need one. The patch of cloud to the east. That’s cumulonimbus cloud, the bringer of rain. But it won’t come till late tonight. My parents wouldn’t have had it any other way.’ She leaned in ever so slightly and lowered her voice as she said, ‘And did you get a load of the chandeliers?’
‘You mean the insurance nightmare,’ he shot back.
‘Yes!’ she said, turning to face him, grinning and pointing at his chest. ‘That’s just what I was thinking. They are a Phantom of the Opera intermission just waiting to happen.’
He laughed. True, it was only a soft cough kind of laugh, but it was a definite departure from cool.
Who was he trying to kid? He’d never been cool around this piece of work. What was the point? She could speak several different languages but the nuances of plain Australian cool went straight over her head.
Caleb straightened his shoulders until he felt a slightly uncomfortable warmth seep into his muscles, but it was enough to get him to start to relax. Relaxed was usually his permanent state. He never had to try this hard.
He turned his right knee toward her and leaned in. ‘Let’s hope for the wedding planner’s sake it doesn’t rain or your mother will no doubt refuse to pay while your father will hole himself up in his office for a month glad for the excuse to do so.’
Rather than getting a grin for his efforts, Ava’s answering smile was toothless, and brief. The continuous swirling of champagne was also a good sign she wasn’t feeling as bright and breezy as she was making out.
She was working as hard at this conversation as he was.
He looked away lest she figure him out as easily.
And where was the waiter with the hors d’oeuvres when he needed him?
CHAPTER TWO
‘I’M REALLY glad I bumped into you tonight before things get too crazy,’ Ava said.
‘How crazy do you think they plan on getting?’ Caleb asked.
‘The DJ is a cousin of mine.’
‘Right.