‘Three and a half hours, in fact.’
They both laughed.
He seemed nice, Candace decided. The kind of well-mannered yet easygoing Australian male she’d heard good things about and seen—in somewhat exaggerated form—in various movies over the years. Three and a half hours, plus a stop for a snack, maybe. This shouldn’t be any kind of a penance…
And it wasn’t. Far from it.
They talked for a while, about the obvious things. Her journey. The city of Sydney. She commented on its red-tiled roofs, bright in the March morning sunlight, and all the aqua blue ovals and rectangles of the swimming pools she’d seen from above in the sprawl of suburban back yards as the plane had come in to land.
Then they left human habitation behind and crossed the wild, wind-scoured terrain of a national park. Steve Colton stopped asking questions and giving out helpful tourist information. Candace pretended to sleep.
She had been doing a lot of that lately—lying in bed with her brain buzzing and the shrill whistle of tinnitus in her ears, totally exhausted, miles from sleep and not fooling herself for a second.
Todd was sleeping with Brittany for six months and I never knew.
He said our marriage was empty long before that. Was he right? If there hadn’t been that electrical problem at the hospital that day, and they hadn’t cancelled elective surgery…If I hadn’t actually walked in on them, naked together in our marital bed…How long before I’d have found out? How long before he would have drummed up the courage to leave? Coming home to find them in bed was bad enough, but having them announce Brittany’s pregnancy before our divorce was even finalised was even worse.
I guess in a way I’m glad Maddy decided not to come to Australia with me—although that hurts, too, to think she’s so positive that she’ll be fine without her mother—because at least, out there, I’ll be able to be alone. I won’t have to pretend.
And here she was, pretending already.
Much easier to pretend to a newly met male colleague than to an emotional fifteen-year-old daughter, however. By hook or by crook, Candace wasn’t going to ruin Maddy’s relationship with her father. She had no right to do that—to deprive her daughter of something very precious and necessary in Maddy’s life purely in order to enact revenge on Todd, when maybe…probably…the blame wasn’t all on his side. She had to behave rationally, not let Maddy see quite how deeply ran her sense of betrayal.
But, oh, that huge, glowing and healthily advanced pregnancy of Brittany’s hurt! She was due in just a few weeks…
The car slowed. It stopped. Then there was silence. She opened her eyes. Dr Colton was watching her. No, Steve. She couldn’t possibly call him Dr Colton! He had to be a good five or six years younger than she was, and she had been told that Australians were informal people.
‘Are we here?’ she asked vaguely. She had no idea how long her mind had been churning while her eyes had flickered behind their closed lids.
‘No,’ he said, ‘But I thought it was probably hours since they gave you breakfast on the plane. It was a toss-up between letting you sleep and getting you fed. Did I pick the right one?’
‘I wasn’t asleep,’ she admitted, finding it easier to be honest with him than she had expected. ‘Just thinking.’
‘That can give you an appetite.’
She smiled. ‘It has. Or something has.’
‘Rightio, then.’
Rightio? Weird word! Cute, actually. The difference, the newness of it in his easy accent, blew across the raw-burned surface of her soul like a gentle puff of wind, and she was still smiling as she got out of the car.
He hadn’t gone so far as to open the door for her. She might have mistrusted that degree of chivalry. But he was standing there waiting, and he reached out a hand to steady her as she stood up.
The kerb was unexpectedly high. She held onto him, closing her fingers around a forearm that was bare and warm and ropy with muscle, while his hand remained cupped beneath her elbow.
‘Oh-h! The sidewalk is going up and down,’ she said.
‘Having your own personal earthquake?’
‘No, it’s more gentle than that. A kind of quavery undulation.’
He laughed. ‘It’s that long flight, and the beginnings of jet-lag. What time is it now in Boston?’
‘Um…’
‘Let’s see…’
They both began a mental calculation.
‘Sydney is sixteen hours ahead,’ she supplied. ‘Which means…’
He got there first. ‘Yesterday evening, then. Around sevenish. You probably are hungry in that case, and an empty stomach wouldn’t be helping.’
‘No,’ she agreed, although this wobbly sidewalk was probably more the result of months of stress and inadequate sleep than a mere sixteen-hour time difference and a few hours without food.
‘Shall I let go?’ he asked cheerfully.
‘Not yet.’
It seemed like a long time since she’d had a man’s physical support, and it felt better than she could have imagined. He wasn’t in a hurry. He didn’t have an agenda. He was polite and steady, and she felt very safe.
‘OK,’ he said, tightening his grip a little.
Their eyes met and held for a moment before they both looked away. He was very good-looking. She hadn’t taken in this fact until now. It was in the shape of his face—the square forehead, the strong cheekbones and chin. It was in his easy, even smile, too, and in what that smile did to his blue eyes. They twinkled and softened, and looked a little wicked.
But this wasn’t just about looks, she realised. This was about—
Dear heaven, we’re going to have an affair!
The thought sliced into her mind without a shadow of warning, leaving her breathless. She could almost see it—the alluring progression of it—laid out before her like the squares on a life-sized Monopoly board, improbably perfect. A sizzlingly hot, totally heedless, carefree, life-affirming, fabulous affair, which would come to a painless, mutually-agreed-upon end some time before she was due to head home to that much chillier place called Real Life.
She dropped his delicious, masculine forearm like a live snake, her heart pounding.
This doesn’t happen to me. The whole idea is ridiculous. I don’t have intuitions like this. I’m scared. Would I really want something like that? No! Surely I wouldn’t! And surely I’m wrong! Of course I’m wrong!
‘I’m starving,’ she said aloud.
Wow.
Say it again.
Wow.
Don’t let it show on your face, Steve.
This woman is…No, she’s not gorgeous. Not even pretty. Something much better, and much more interesting. She’s magnetic, womanly, responsive.
He hadn’t felt it at first. He had been too busy thinking about the last time he’d been at Sydney airport, several months ago, seeing Agnetha off on her flight back home to Sweden.
The memory was like a splinter in his thumb. Yes, sure, he knew it wasn’t a major wound, but that didn’t stop it from hurting. And it had preoccupied him more than he’d wanted it to, during his wait for the visiting American doctor.
Did I even consider getting serious, asking Agnetha to marry me? No!
If she’d asked me to go to Sweden with her, would I have gone? No!
So