Unfortunate? Regrettable? Her stomach tumbled in sudden confusion. How could he say that? Last night had been wonderful.
‘I beg your pardon?’ She prayed he wouldn’t repeat it. She prayed she’d heard him wrong.
He held her gaze. Unlike her, he didn’t flinch. He looked cold, hard … alien. ‘This time I believe you heard what I said. And that you understand exactly what I mean.’
The room spun. She gripped the edge of her chair and hung on tight, praying her sense of balance would return and halt this sensation of endless freefall.
A denial sprang to her lips as the room and Alex swam back into her line of sight. He was wrong!
She released her iron grip on her chair. ‘Let me get this right.’ Her hands trembled. Perspiration gathered beneath the collar of her shirt, beneath the underwire of her bra. ‘You’re saying you wish last night never happened?’ The perfectly monitored air-conditioned air chilled the skin at her throat, at her nape, of her bare-but-for-nylons legs. She resisted the urge to chafe her arms. ‘That you … regret last night?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’
She stared into his face—cold, hard, the face of a stranger—and greyness leached in at the edges of her consciousness, swamping her joy, blanketing her in a thick fog that her mind struggled to think through.
The air conditioning chilled a layer of ice around her heart, numbed her brain and robbed her eyes and mouth of all natural moisture. She’d never realized before how much she hated air conditioning.
Beyond Alex, through the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window, morning light glinted off the white sails of the Sydney Opera House with an absurd gaiety that was reflected in a thousand different points of light in the water of the harbour.
How had she read this man, this situation, so wrong? She lifted her hands to massage her temples. She wasn’t some doe-eyed schoolgirl easily seduced.
No hot-blooded woman would deny Alex’s all-male magnetism, and last night she had most definitely been hot-blooded.
But not doe-eyed!
A demon of panic clawed at her throat. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end. He couldn’t deny this connection that existed between them.
She dragged her gaze from the sight of the harbour, alive with yachts and ferries, to the man on the other side of the desk. He leaned towards her and she forgot to breathe. What would he do if she leaned across the table too and pressed her lips to his? She’d bet her bottom dollar it’d drive the deep freeze from his eyes.
He jerked back, folded his arms. His face became even more stony and unreadable. ‘It can never happen again.’ He must’ve registered her shock because he added, ‘Not that I’m denying it was enjoyable, pleasurable.’
His eyes darkened, as if in memory of the amazing things they’d done together last night, and everything inside her clenched.
‘Nevertheless, it cannot happen again.’
‘Why not?’ The question slipped out of her like the air from a slowly deflating party balloon. She knew it wasn’t what he’d wanted her to say. She hitched up her chin. Why shouldn’t she ask? It wasn’t as if she had anything to lose.
Except a good job.
Well, okay, it was a great job.
And maybe some pride.
She pushed her shoulders back. Who gave two hoots about pride at a time like this? And good jobs were a dime a dozen to someone with her qualifications. ‘Why not?’ she repeated, louder this time.
‘Because you’re the best damn secretary I’ve ever had!’ He slammed his hand down on the desk, the force half spinning him in his chair. He glared at the wall to her left. ‘And I don’t want to ruin a great working relationship by sleeping with you.’
Why were men so afraid to call it making love? She stared at him, willing him to meet her eye, silently urging him to unsay his words and to put this right. When he didn’t she said, ‘From memory, there wasn’t much sleeping involved.’
She cleared her throat and leaned towards him. ‘And, for the record, I don’t think it was unfortunate and I certainly don’t regret it.’ So there. All his square-jawed, broad-shouldered, tight-buttocked masculinity could take that!
One of his superb shoulders shifted, its power barely disguised by the impeccable cut of his suit. She recalled the feel of the firm flesh of those shoulders beneath her fingertips, the crisp whorls of hair on his chest, and her mouth went dry. She recalled the silky hardness of him and her body’s delight at his touch with a clarity that made her insides tremble. She would never forget her soul’s delight at a night of lovemaking that had blown her apart and put her back together again both at the same time.
He pushed out of his chair. ‘It can’t happen again.’
Oh, yes, it could. And so, so easily.
He shoved his hands into his pockets and pinned her to the spot with his dark, frigid eyes. ‘And it won’t happen again, Katherine, because I don’t do long-term, I don’t do marriage and babies, and I certainly don’t do happy families.’
He’d called her Kit last night, not Katherine.
‘And if I continue to sleep with you you’re going to eventually realize I’m telling you the truth and that you can’t change me. Then you’ll get hurt and angry, there’ll be ugly scenes and recriminations and then you’ll up and leave without giving me so much as a week’s notice.’
It took a moment for the actuality of his words to sink in. When they did, her jaw slackened. He had to be joking, right? These couldn’t be his actual thought processes.
His dark hair glinted almost black to the Opera House’s white. She stared at him and her stomach billowed with an inexplicable emptiness as the scales finally fell from her eyes. For the last eleven months she’d been in love with a lump of rock.
Alex Hallam was a lump of rock.
Not something light and porous like limestone either, but something hard and impenetrable.
Like granite.
CHAPTER ONE
‘KATHERINE MERCER?’
The receptionist glanced up expectantly as Kit pushed through the door. Kit nodded and tried to find a smile. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Dr Maybury is almost running on time. If you’d take a seat, she shouldn’t be too much longer.’
Kit smiled her thanks. The surgery had managed to fit her in for the last appointment of the day and the waiting room was deserted.
She sat. She crossed her legs and bounced her foot. She glanced at her watch. She shifted on her seat, glanced around the waiting room, glanced at her watch again and finally seized a magazine. It wasn’t that doctors’ surgeries made her nervous. It was just—
The magazine fell open to a celebrity wedding spread with the bride and groom in a variety of cheesy but romantic poses—arms wrapped around each other, staring deep into each other’s eyes, feeding each other wedding cake. For a moment all Kit could do was stare. And then she slapped it shut and shoved it back into the magazine rack.
All that giddy happiness.
She closed her eyes and pulled in a breath. It was three months almost to the day since Alex had so brutally ended their … She could hardly call it a relationship, and still there were images—like the ones in that magazine—snatches of conversation, a scent, that could hurtle her back in time and remind her of her stupidity. Remind her of the ridiculous dreams she’d woven about a man who hadn’t been worth a single one of them. Reminded her of her appallingly bad judgement.
It