Dylan sat there across from her, and suddenly the sweet sea air between them was taut. And his gaze changed, the green of it shaded with a certain glittering thing she couldn’t understand.
But she felt it. And she felt naked, suddenly.
Because the actual reason she’d come here was so clear to her, then.
All the fuss and noise she kicked up around it, telling herself this lie and that lie as she’d gotten on the plane, all the many hours she flew, and then when she’d come to find him, too. Telling herself she was safe and she wanted his advice and she wanted to talk.
So many lies, and all of them boiled down to this. Here. Now.
That look in his eyes like she wasn’t the only one imagining things she shouldn’t.
Jenny didn’t want his advice.
She wanted him to show her.
And he was sitting so still, so intent, that she had the distinct impression he knew it.
Her heart pounded in her chest, so hard she was certain it had to have bruised her ribs.
But she couldn’t look away.
And her mouth was so dry.
Everything inside her was tied in a knot, pulling tighter and tighter and tighter, daring her to open her mouth and say the thing she wanted even if it meant changing them forever—
And that was the thing she couldn’t do.
She couldn’t.
“I’m not leaving a review or asking a question,” she managed to say, though there was a bitter taste in her mouth. “It’s an enthusiastic observation, that’s all. I hear they’re all the rage.”
Across from her, Dylan didn’t seem to move. But he changed, again. That tension dissipated. And she couldn’t help but imagine she saw a shade of disappointment in those green eyes of his.
She told herself she had to be imagining it. That she had to be imagining all of this. Because the alternative was that he was no longer Dylan and she was no longer Jenny, and that meant there was no them—and she could do almost anything. She could make anything work, as her engagement proved.
But she couldn’t lose Dylan. She could survive anything but that.
“I think you should eat something,” he said, quietly. Years could have passed, for all she knew, tangled up as she was inside. “Have a bit of a kip. Maybe even shower off the plane ride. What do you reckon?”
And for the first time in as long as she’d known him, when he smiled at her she thought it might break her heart.
But she couldn’t have said why.
Because you don’t want to say why, something in her retorted.
Either way, she didn’t say it. Jenny only nodded, didn’t quite meet his eyes again and let him lead her back into his house.
* * *
Later, Jenny was sure she’d imagined all that tension. Those strange moments out in the bright winter sunlight on the bottom of the world. They all seemed lashed together like a dream, green eyes and the memory of Dylan’s smile, none of it making any sense when she tried to recapture them or think it all through.
Better to forget and move on, she told herself staunchly.
Dylan’s guest room was on the back side of the house. It had its own bit of a balcony, so she could wake in the mornings and bask in all that lovely Australian sunshine. Outside her room she could inhale the fragrance of all the flowers and pretty green things as she peered down the side of the building to see the sea, like a beckoning wall of blue.
She fetched herself a cup of tea from the kitchen and sat out on her balcony quietly. In the space between the buildings, she could imagine she lived here when, of course, she didn’t. And couldn’t. Her life was in England.
Though you’ll be living in France soon enough, the voice inside her pointed out. Still sounding entirely too much like Erika. Conrad’s base is in Paris.
Several days into her impromptu stay in Sydney’s lovely eastern suburbs, Jenny found herself pondering that potential reality. Conrad’s business took him all over the world. Just because he liked to call Paris home didn’t mean she needed to do the same...did it? The automatic relocation expected when people married wouldn’t be expected of an arranged wife, surely. She glared down at the rock on her hand as if it might have the answers, but it was as quiet and overlarge as ever.
And thinking about Conrad and Paris and the rest of the marital decisions she couldn’t quite face made her feel a bit too close to wobbly. She decided she was too restless to stay on the little balcony off the guest room, spiraling into her own unfortunate thoughts, so she padded out into the rest of the main floor of the house instead. It was organized so that the rooms were stacked one in front of the next, with a hallway down the middle that opened up into the streamlined chef’s kitchen. Beyond that, the vast lounge with its spectacular view of the ocean outside ambled out to the deck. And up above, taking over the whole of the top floor, was the master bedroom.
Dylan had showed it to her not long after she arrived as part of his general tour of the house. And maybe it had something to do with those strange moments she was already forgetting, but she’d found it...unsettling up there. That big, wide bed with its four sturdy posters and what looked like wrought iron at the head. And windows all around, floor-to-ceiling high in some places, letting in what felt like the whole of this stretch of the coast and the sweep of the Tasman Sea, until it seemed as if anyone in the room was a part of the sea itself. Or the man who lived there.
She preferred her little balcony downstairs. Or the neutrality of the kitchen, where she headed now. She put the kettle on, and found herself staring out the window, in that half a dream state that seemed to accompany any proper gaze at all that deep, changeable blue.
Jenny should head straight back to England. She knew that. After she’d slept, eaten and showered as ordered that first day, she’d sat down and sent off a raft of emails to explain her absence to all and sundry. She told the charity she needed a bit of personal time, and laid out all the reasons why she thought her second-in-command was more than capable of stepping into the role. She wrote her second-in-command, apologizing for the short notice, but making sure the woman she’d handpicked knew that it was her very competence that had made Jenny so sure she could slip away.
It was true, she’d realized as she wrote it all out, even though she might not have thought it through before she’d gotten on that plane.
She emailed her father—or rather, his personal secretary—and felt badly about the relief she felt because she didn’t have to have an actual conversation with him. Because she already knew what he’d say. Or rather, how he would sound while he said it. And he was far too good at triggering her guilt. That it was unintentional on his part, and always motivated by concern, somehow always made her feel more guilty.
The truth was, Jenny didn’t feel guilty at the moment. She didn’t want to feel guilty.
I’ve decided to take a little break, she had texted Erika.
I support this move completely, her best friend had fired back. I hope a beach is involved. Cabana boys and cocktails.
More or less, Jenny had replied. And it had still been that first night, so that strange fear had washed over her, gripping her tight. I’m in Sydney.
And she’d stared down at her mobile, watching as the three dots that indicated Erika was typing appeared. Then disappeared.
Appeared again. Then disappeared once more.
She’d been sitting in the guest room then, her feet crossed beneath her as she sat in the armchair in the corner of the room. She’d stared at her phone, nervously worrying her knuckle between her teeth.
Tell Dylan I say hello, came the reply, at last.
And that was all.
But it didn’t matter. Erika knew. And if Jenny let herself think about it, it was likely that Erika knew a whole lot more than the two of them had ever discussed directly. Like those moments with Dylan, taut and strange,
that Jenny had been pretending not to notice for years now. And yet none of them as intense as what had happened here.
It took her two days to remember that she ought to let Conrad know where she was, too.
Have gone off to Sydney, she wrote him, feeling as stiff as the words sounded when she stared at them on her screen. I don’t expect to be gone too long.
Conrad’s reply had come swiftly. Please update my assistant with return date.
Just in case Jenny had been tempted to romanticize something that had nothing to do with romance. She told herself that what she’d felt, then, staring at his message, was peace. Relief.
She told herself that was what she felt now, too.
“What are you scowling at?” came Dylan’s low voice from behind her.
Jenny jumped, then turned that scowl on him. And immediately wished she hadn’t.
Because Dylan worked on that marvelous body of his. There was a gym in the house, where he put in at least an hour a day, but he also liked to run. He’d introduced her to the coastal walk that stretched from Bondi Beach to the north down to Brontë in the south, and Jenny had taken to walking it on fine mornings, breathing in deep. Letting the Tasman Sea breeze and the lovely Australian sunshine dance over her face like happiness. Stopping here and there to gaze at the water or take pictures from the rocky cliffs.
Dylan ran it.
She could tell that he’d been out on the run already this morning, because he wore nothing but a pair of athletic shorts, and he was...gleaming.
Sweating, she corrected herself crossly.
She should have been revolted. But he didn’t smell bad. He smelled clean. Male. And the sweat of his exertion only made him look better, somehow. It made his green eyes gleam brightly, and Jenny felt reduced to a stuttering, bumbling mess.
It happened more and more the longer she stayed here. One more reason she should leave.
“I’m not scowling,” she told him, ignoring all that gleaming. “I was thinking about business-related things. I’m so far away I keep pretending England doesn’t exist. But it does.”
“Last I heard, yes.” He sounded amused as he went to the refrigerator, and pulled out the makings of the shake he put together every morning. Several different powders she assumed were proteins and superfoods and whatever else it was health nuts liked to put in themselves to keep up with all the gleaming. Green things and antioxidants and worthy supplements packed with vitamins. The very opposite of the full English breakfast she remembered him tucking into with gusto on hungover Oxford mornings.
There was no reason for her to be here, but she leaned against the counter, her mug of strong tea in her hands and watched. Dylan fixed himself his drink then chugged it down, tipping back his head so she could hardly help but stare at the strong column of his throat. And all the lines, planes and ridges of that body he worked so hard on almost entirely exposed to her view.
She studied the tattoo on his back, the line of Gaelic down his spine and the Celtic knot he wore over his heart. Why did she want to put her hands on him so badly? To trace those tattoos she recognized like old friends, to remind herself how well they suited him and how easily he wore them.
Because you need to go home, she told herself sternly.
“I’m headed into the office,” Dylan said. And when he looked at her, his green gaze swept over her the way it always did, after that first conversation. Friendly. Happy. Not complicated in the least.
There was no reason it should make her teeth ache, so hard that she clenched them.
“The housekeeping service will be in,” he continued mildly, though something about the way he looked at her made her unclench her teeth. “I told them to expect a guest on the premises, so don’t be put off if you wake from a nap to find someone hoovering up the place.”
“I won’t be here,” she said grandly. And without thinking it through. “I’m going to do a bit of the tourist thing.”
“And here I thought you planned to waft up and down the coastal path again.” He studied her. “You should roam about Circular Quay and the Rocks. Take the ferries all over Sydney Harbour. Get a sense of the place.”
Jenny had spent most of her life charging around doing this or that, but not since she’d arrived in Australia. All she wanted to do was stay tucked up in Dylan’s house, or lost in her own head as she wandered up and down what had to be the most beautiful walk in the world. It hugged the coastline, meandering through the beach towns and around a haunting cemetery set into the side of a cliff, over the ocean pools, up the rocks and down again. When the sun was out it could be warm enough to feel like summer while other days it was moody. She loved it either way.
But she’d announced she was off to play tourist, so that was what she was going to do.
“I’ll drive you in then,” Dylan said, with a grin.
And that was how, scarcely forty-five minutes later, she found herself sitting in an outrageously flash sports car, prowling through the morning traffic toward the Sydney Central Business District.
“I have to make a confession,” she said as they waited at a light. She glanced over at him, dressed in his usual uniform of jeans and a T-shirt—which should have looked ratty and casual and student-y, but didn’t. Not the way he wore them. “I had no idea you worked this hard. You underplayed it.”
Dylan laughed. “Maybe I wanted you to think it was effortless.”
“You work all the time,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know when you sleep. No matter what time I wake up, jetlagged and victimized by the time change, you’re always awake. You take phone calls night and day. And yet you still have time to go on runs and toss weights around in your gym. I thought I was busy, but you’re a right superhero.”
“I do run a company, Jenny,” he said, in a tone of mock reproach. But she was caught up in the way he propped his arm up on the steering wheel, and it was difficult to tell which was more powerful, the car or the man. “It can’t run on its own.”
“It’s just so...”
“Surprising?” Dylan supplied.
And he laughed when he said it, but she didn’t think he was kidding.
“Impressive,” she corrected him. “I was going to say it was impressive.”
The look he threw her way was unreadable, but then traffic surged forward, and he put his attention back onto the road. And then, before she could ask him something, or say those things she kept biting back, his mobile rang the way it always did. And he answered it the way he always did, because he was far busier than she’d ever imagined, and he launched himself back into another business conversation.
Jenny told herself she’d imagined her reaction to him when he pulled up to a curb on a city street some time later, told her to walk straight ahead and indicated that she should get out. But when she reached over to open the door, his hand grabbed her arm, stopping her.
It made her feel jagged inside. Scraped up. His hand was big and hard over her forearm and his eyes were so green. And something about Dylan looking at her so intently made her think she might shake. She wanted to, anyway.
“I’ll meet you later,” he told her, gruffly. “At the Opera Bar at the Opera House. Eight o’clock.”
“It’s a date,” she said, brightly.
And immediately regretted her choice of words.
But she didn’t have time to stammer about it, or take it back. Or even qualify what she’d said.
Because Dylan smiled, and it was an edgy thing, wired directly into that jaggedness within her. “I’ll see you then.”
And Jenny found herself out on the street, then walking, oblivious to her surroundings. Because all she could see was that look on his face.
Which is why it took her a moment, after she’d walked down the block and under a rail overpass the way he’d told her to, to realize where she was.
He’d dropped her
a block away from a walkway that led around to the iconic opera house itself. And the Sydney Harbour Bridge. And the gleaming, beautiful water of the harbor itself, cut through by the green-and-yellow ferries. And sailboats catching the wind.
It was like standing in a postcard.
And later, Jenny couldn’t have said which one of those things made the tears begin to stream down her face. Only that she cried, and she couldn’t believe that a place she’d seen on television a thousand times was far more beautiful than she ever could have imagined.
And that somehow, even though she was standing there on a bright winter morning, crying her eyes out in the middle of the streams of Sydneysiders and tourists, so very far away from England and the world she knew, she had never felt quite so at home in her life.
CHAPTER FOUR
DYLAN HAD RESIGNED himself years ago to the fact that he clearly loved a hair shirt. He liked to suffer, obviously. What other explanation was there for a hopeless, unrequited love that stretched on past hope, past reason, and insinuated itself into every interaction he had with other women?
Aren’t you just a fecking martyr, his older brother Dermot had sneered at him, there in their grotty flat in the tower block of the estate—now happily demolished—when Dylan had announced that he was going up to Oxford. He might as well have said he was going to the moon. Oxford made about as much sense to his sprawling, vicious family hunkered down poor and addicted in the land of saints and scholars. The more you suffer, the better you feel about yourself.
Dermot had talked a metric ton of shite, but that particular dig stayed with him.
And if he’d ever had any doubt, that was gone now. Because there was carrying a torch, which Dylan had done for years now whether he liked to admit it or not. And then there was Jenny in his house. Living under the same roof. Jenny looking soft and sleepy, shuffling around his kitchen. Jenny lost in thought, gazing out over the rail on his deck.
When they’d been at university together, he’d known things about her. Intimate things that could only come from daily interaction. That she worried a lock of her hair around and around one finger while she studied. Or when she was nervous, she worked a knuckle between her teeth. The way she hummed beneath her breath, always off tune, when she was happy. The awkward, yet endearing, way she danced to the endlessly cheesy music she liked.
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