‘What’s wrong?’ he asked immediately.
‘Nothing,’ she said, tight lipped.
Nothing. Why did women always say that when something was clearly wrong?
‘Then why did you stare at your watch like it was about to explode? Is it connected to a bomb somewhere?’
That brought a twitch to her lips. ‘I wish.’
She lifted her eyes from the watch. Her gaze was steady. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but right at this very moment Jason—my...my former boyfriend, partner, live-in lover or whatever you like to call him—is getting married.’
Sandy with a live-in boyfriend? She’d said she’d had a partner but had it been that serious? The knowledge hit him in the gut. Painfully. Unexpectedly. Stupidly.
What he and Sandy had had together was a teen romance. Kid stuff. They’d both moved on. He’d married Jodi. Of course Sandy would have had another man in her life.
But he had to clear his throat to reply. ‘And that’s bad or good?’
She laughed. But the laugh didn’t quite reach her eyes. ‘Well, good for him. Good for her, I guess. I’m still not sure how I feel about coming home one day to find his possessions gone and a note telling me he’d moved in with her.’
‘You’re kidding me, right?’ Ben growled. How could someone treat his Sandy like that. His Sandy. That was a slip. She hadn’t been his for a long, long time.
‘I’m afraid not. It was...humiliating to say the least.’ Her tone sounded forced, light. ‘But, hey, it makes for a great story.’
A great story? Yeah, right.
There went sunny Sandy again, laughing off something that must still cause her pain.
‘Sounds to me like you’re better off without him.’
‘The further I get from him the more I can see that,’ she said. But she didn’t sound convinced.
‘As far away as Melbourne?’ he asked, finding the thought of her so far away unsettling.
‘I’m not running away,’ she said firmly. Too firmly. ‘I need change. A new job, a new—’
‘Your job? What is that?’ he asked, realising how little he knew about her now. ‘Did you study law like your father wanted?’
‘No, I didn’t. Don’t look so surprised—it was because of you.’
‘Me?’ No wonder her father had hated him.
‘You urged me to follow my dreams—like you were following yours. I thought about that a lot when I got back home. And my dream wasn’t to be a solicitor.’ She shuddered. ‘I couldn’t think of anything less me.’
He’d studied law as part of his degree and liked it. But he wasn’t as creative as he remembered Sandy being. ‘But you studied for years so you’d get a place in law.’
‘Law at Sydney University.’ She pronounced the words as though they were spelled in capital letters. ‘That was my father’s ambition for me. He’d given up his plans for me to be a doctor when I didn’t cut it in chemistry.’
‘You didn’t get enough marks in the Higher School Certificate for law?’
‘I got the marks, all right. Not long after we got back to Sydney the results came out. I was in the honour roll in the newspaper. You should have heard my father boasting to anyone who’d listen to him.’
‘I’ll bet he did.’ Ben had no respect for the guy. He was a bully and a snob. But he had reason to be grateful to him. Not for ruining things with him and Sandy. But for putting the bomb under him he’d needed to get off his teenage butt and make himself worthy of a girl like Sandy.
‘At the last minute I switched to a communications degree. At what my father considered a lesser university.’
‘He must have hit the roof.’
Sandy’s mouth tightened to a thin line. ‘As he’d just been outed as an adulterer he didn’t have a leg to stand on about doing the right thing for the family.’
Ben smiled. It sounded as if Sandy had got a whole lot feistier when it came to standing up to her father. ‘So what career did you end up in?’
‘I’m in advertising.’ She quickly corrected herself. ‘I was in advertising. An account executive.’
On occasion he dealt with an advertising agency to help promote his hotel. The account executives were slick, efficient, and tough as old boots. Not at all the way he thought of Sandy. ‘Sounds impressive.’
‘It was.’
‘Was?’
‘Long story,’ she said, and started to walk towards the rocks again.
‘I’m listening,’ he said, falling into step beside her.
The wind had dropped and now the air around them seemed unnaturally still. Seagulls screeched raucously. He looked through narrowed eyes to the horizon, where grey clouds were banking up ominously.
Sandy followed his gaze. She wrinkled her cute up-tilted nose. ‘Storm brewing,’ she said. ‘I wonder—’
‘Don’t change the subject by talking about the weather,’ he said, stopping himself from adding, I remember how you always did that.
He shouldn’t have let himself get reeled in to such a nostalgic conversation. There was no point in dredging up those old memories. Not when their lives were now set on such different paths. And his path was one he needed—wanted—to tread unencumbered. He could not survive more loss. And the best way to avoid loss was to avoid the kind of attachment that could tear a man apart.
He wanted to spend his life alone. Though the word ‘alone’ seemed today to have a desolate echo to it.
She shrugged. ‘Okay. Back to my story. Jason and I were both working at the same agency when we met. The boss didn’t think it was a good idea when we started dating...’
‘So you had to go? Not him?’
She pulled a face. ‘We...ell. I convinced myself I’d been there long enough.’
‘So you went elsewhere? Another agency?’
She nodded. ‘And then the economy hit a blip, advertising revenues suffered, and last one in was first one out.’
‘That must have been tough.’
‘Yeah. It was. But, hey, one door closes and another one opens, right? I got freelance work at different agencies and learned a whole lot of stuff I might never have known otherwise.’
Yep, that was the old Sandy all right—never one to allow adversity to cloud her spirit.
She took a deep breath. He noticed how her breasts rose under her tight-fitting top. She’d filled out—womanly curves softened the angles of her teenage body. Her face was subtly different too, her cheekbones more defined, her mouth fuller.
He wouldn’t have thought it possible but she was even more beautiful than she’d been when she was eighteen.
He wrenched his gaze away, cleared his throat. ‘So you’re looking at a franchise?’
Her eyes sparkled and her voice rose with excitement. ‘My chance to be my own boss, run my own show. It’s this awesome candle store. A former client of mine started it.’
‘You were in advertising and now you want to sell candles? Aren’t there enough candle stores in this world?’
‘These aren’t ordinary candles, Ben. The store is a raging success in Sydney. Now they’re looking to open