by Ally Blake
Angus sniffed out a breath, his eyes creasing into a smile as he ran this thumb over the drawing. Then, as if he was in some kind of trance, he turned her hand over, distractedly watching his thumb as it traced her lifeline. Or was it her heartline?
Lucinda could not breathe. She could barely think. Every nerve, cell and emotion centred on the gentle swipe of Angus’s grazing touch.
When he reached the tender underside of her wrist, it became too much and she jerked her hand away.
Hope, confusion and years of pressing her feelings deep down inside mixed into a tempest inside her, pushing her to her feet so fast her chair scraped sharply against the floor before teetering and tipping over.
She spun and crouched to pick it up, right at the same moment that Angus came round the table to do the same. Her eyes snapped to his to find them dark and bottomless.
Lucinda slowly pulled herself to her feet, her legs shaking with the adrenaline coursing through her body.
Angus stood by her, the chair in one hand. He gently placed it back down. And stayed where he was, breathing hard enough that she could see the shape of him beneath the constraint of his shirt.
“The next session starts soon,” Lucinda somehow managed to croak out.
“Right.”
“I think I’ll go freshen up before heading to...whatever it is I’m heading to.”
“Okay. I need to track down some coffee and then I’ll come back here. Keep working on this. Can I grab you a cup? To take with you?”
Now he was asking if he could get her a coffee? Lucinda really needed him to say something smug. Or arrogant. To restore balance to the galaxy.
She shook her head then leaned around him to reach her bag, holding her breath so as not to swoon as she brushed so close to him she could feel his body heat.
Somehow her feet remembered how to walk, admirably carrying her to the door. Where she stopped. Turned. She couldn’t leave with that kind of tension pulling between them or she’d not hear a word of the next session.
“Will you be okay? Doing this on your own? Because I can stick around...”
“I’m fine. This feels...good.” The warmth that lit the edges of his smile made her wonder if he was fully aware of the butterflies smacking into her ribcage. Then he said, “I’m sorry about Dr Whatsit. Truly.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.” For she was. It should have been so easy to fall for him. To fit him into their lives. Then, “And, should you have a Dr Whatsit in your life one day, you can talk to me about it, you know. Any time. Boundaries, schmoundaries.”
Something dark swirled behind his eyes. “There’ll be no Dr Whatsits for me, Luc. You know better than anyone that my mother taught me the benefits of a life of solitude. Which either makes me a very lucky man, or it’s the great tragedy of my life.”
Lucinda gave him a smile, as was expected.
All the while, as she headed back out into the hotel and walked unseeingly towards the conference rooms, her heart twisted so hard it hurt.
She’d lost loving parents while still relatively young. Her husband had left her when they’d had a beautiful thirteen-month-old boy.
And yet, Lucinda thought with a heaviness settling over her like a rain cloud, the fact that this man flat out refused to move beyond the ghosts of his boyhood might yet turn out to be the great tragedy of her life as well.
CHAPTER SIX
“WHAT THE HELL are you doing at a beauty conference in the same hotel in which your assistant is meant to be having her dirty weekend but now isn’t because she’s stuck working with you?”
Fitz’s voice rattled through the phone pressed to Angus’s ear as he leant against the cold concrete balustrade outside the Bean and Brew Bistro, watching the trees below sway in the moonlight.
He nursed the end of a strong, post-dinner coffee, one he’d begun just before Lucinda had given a good impression of a fake yawn before claiming exhaustion and heading to her room. Alone.
“Who told you?” Angus growled.
“Who hasn’t told me? I had questions. About things. And you’re not here to answer them. To stop me whinging about it, Velma informed me where I could find you. Then the lovely Cat, in a scratchy mood I must say, called to demand I do something about it. About you.”
“Me?”
“Apparently everything in the world is your fault.”
“I see. What was so important you had to track me down?”
A pause. “Can’t remember. But, now I have you, anything you need to get off your chest? About the amenities, perhaps? The chamber maids? How you and the lovely Lucinda are getting along out in the blustery wilds?”
“It’s Daylesford, not the Outback. And, like the many conferences we’ve been on together over the years, we’re getting along just fine. And trying to get a deeper insight into the industry in the hope it gives us another angle to add to the Remède rebrand.”
“Fair enough. Any highlights thus far?”
When it came to Remède? No.
As for the weekend, so far it had all the hallmarks of a roller coaster.
Dinner had been...polite. Lucinda had met him after the conference day was done. Had kept her eyes on her notes as she’d talked through a series of neatly written bullet points. Had recited a phone conversation she’d had with Sonny that afternoon, word for word. Then bolted.
Whereas in the meeting room, earlier that day...
Angus closed his eyes against the memory of Lucinda sitting before him, her brown eyes huge as she watched him trace his thumb down the soft skin of her palm, her throat working, her cheeks pinking. He’d all but seen her light up from the inside out.
He shook his head. He couldn’t possibly say what he’d been thinking. He’d seen the drawing on the back of her hand and had pulled it closer to find the endearing love stamp from her son.
As for the rest? Something had come over him when he’d felt the warmth of her hand curled beneath his. The erratic pulse beneath the skin. Something primal and deep.
But Lucinda was out of bounds.
No. She was the one person in his life with whom there were no “bounds”. She called him out when he was too demanding. Rolled her eyes when he refused to budge. She knew when to give him space. She had even more faith in him than he had in himself.
She knew him. The good bits and the bad. And she stuck around anyway.
Then there was the fact she’d let him into her family. Gifted him the friendship with her son. No limits. No rules. She trusted him to have Sonny’s best interests at heart.
For a guy like him, who pushed back against anyone who tried to get close, that was exceedingly rare.
Never in his life had a person been as important to him, to his success, to his self-worth, to his mental health.
Messing with that would be self-defeating. And Angus was no masochist.
As such, he recapped all he’d seen and heard in case Fitz saw something he didn’t.
Apparently, Fitz saw no such lightbulbs, as he said, “So, nothing to hang your hat on so far. Bar scaring Lucinda’s guy away. Probably a good thing there, right? Last thing any of us need is for Luc to turn into a love-sick muppet. The woman runs the whole ship. We’d be dead in the water without her.”
“Dead,” Charlie’s voice agreed amiably. “In the water.”
“I’m on speakerphone?” Angus asked, coming to a halt.
“Always. Now, why did I call you again?” Fitz asked.
“Heaven only knows.”
“Is Lucinda there?” Charlie’s disembodied voice asked in the background. “Can you get her? I wanted to ask her something.”
“She’s not with me,” Angus answered.
“Why not?”
Fitz piped up. “Probably avoiding him.”
“What am I missing?” Charlie asked.
“
The twenty-first century,” Fitz answered. Then, with exaggerated patience, he went on. “Okay, here’s the sordid tale in a nutshell. Angus, pipe in if I miss something. Lucinda was all set for a dirty weekend with some hot doctor. Until Angus found out and went all superhero and figured out a way to be there to save her from herself. So, though they are there together, the lovely Lucinda is not with Angus. And that, dear friends, is the issue of the day. Now, if our erstwhile hero would only man up and admit that he and our gorgeous girl are—”
Angus didn’t bother saying goodbye. He simply hung up.
* * *
Lucinda stood in her hotel bathroom, hands gripping the edge of the sink. Not feeling anywhere near as tired as she’d made out.
In fact, she felt wired. Too much cheap conference coffee? Too much Angus.
Which was ridiculous, considering the time they spent in one another’s company at work. And yet somehow this weekend she’d found the usual methods she employed to keep her feelings at bay just weren’t cutting it.
During the afternoon’s laugh-out-loud session spent guessing famous perfumes while blindfolded, then shouting out the scent ingredients that stayed with them the most, she’d managed not to think about Angus’s thumb grazing her hand. Much.
But the moment she’d walked into the bistro, seen him sitting by the large picture windows, the dusk light playing over the angles of his face, her heart had raced so hard she’d felt as if she was about to go into full-blown panic.
She’d never eaten dinner faster.
Glancing up, she caught her reflection in the mirror. The slinky black negligée she’d slipped on after the cool shower she’d taken gleamed in the down-lights. She’d also touched up her make-up. Even dabbed on a spritz of perfume in unmentionable places.
For nothing. For no one. Just because.
She turned her face this way and that. Not yet thirty, her skin was pretty good. She liked her nose. And her crooked smile. She’d always thought her eyes a little dark, but it was a good face.
She stood, turned side-on. Lifted onto her toes to see as much of herself in the bathroom mirror as she could. Having had Sonny young, there were few signs on her body that she’d ever given birth. A little roundness in the belly. A couple of stretch marks that gleamed in the right light.
She was attractive enough. Funny. She liked talking. She was a great listener. Good at reading between the lines. Working for Angus as long as she had, it was a skill that came in handy on a daily basis.
So, with all that going for her, what about her had made it so easy for Jameson to say, “No worries. Weekend away postponed. Easy-peasy”?
What made not one of the men she met at work gatherings, parties or those she passed in the fruit and vegetable aisles at the supermarket fall madly, irreversibly in love with her?
What about her had made her husband able simply to walk into the kitchen one day and say, “I can’t do this any more”?
True, she and Joe had not had an easy time of things. She’d met him not long after her parents had died suddenly. He was a man with itchy feet and little to hold him down. Everything her regular suburban life had not been up to that point. She’d fallen hard. Followed wherever he’d led. They’d married fast, a baby already on the way.
But it hadn’t taken long for him to tire of their life after she’d made them stop and put down roots. For at heart she was that kind of girl. A home girl. A stayer. A believer in for ever.
Would she ever find someone—not Jameson but someone better? A stayer, like her? Someone who made her heart race, her toes curl, her cheeks hurt from laughing, someone who made her tell Angus no?
Angus. A man to whom it was nearly impossible to say no. Whom it was nearly impossible to sway. Nearly impossible to resist.
But there was still an inner wall she’d never made it beyond.
It was that wall that made it easy for her to harbour her secret crush. She could never truly lose her heart to the man as his wasn’t up for grabs.
Realising her hands were sliding over the slinky fabric while she thought of Angus, she lifted them away, curled them into fists and walked away from the mirror, turning the bathroom light off behind her.
She climbed from the end to the head of the bed before falling in a heap on the right-hand side. She’d never migrated to the middle of the bed by habit as, after Joe had left, Sonny occasionally made his way into her room when he was sick or had bad dreams.
She lay on her back and flung an arm over her eyes. Hoped sleep might take her so the dangerous thoughts still swirling behind her closed lids could be excused as dreams.
Her phone buzzed on the bedside table.
This time she knew who it was before she even checked. When Angus’s face showed above the message he’d sent, her limbs came over all warm and her breath released on a sigh:
They have Netflix. Should I keep going with Warlock Academy or wait for you?
Knowing sleep wasn’t coming any time soon, she sent back her response.
She put her phone aside, grabbed her fluffy old pashmina and dragged it with her under the covers, pulling the blankets up to her chin and stretching out her arm for the remote.
* * *
Lucinda was in reception the next morning, struggling not to yawn as she made sure she and Angus had access to their small meeting room for the next two days, when a familiar voice rent the air.
“Mum!”
Lucinda spun nearly a full circle before she saw her boy rushing her like a whirling dervish. He leapt into her arms and she twirled him around. “Hey, baby boy! What on earth are you doing here?”
“Cat brought me. As a surprise. She said your friend couldn’t come any more so you’d be really sad. And lonely. So we came to keep you company!”
Lucinda scanned the foyer to find her sister swanning across the floor, dragging two small battered suitcases behind her. “How wonderful,” she said, while she glared at Cat for all she was worth.
“Really? You don’t sound like it’s wonderful.”
Snapping her gaze back to her son, she let him drop to the ground then took his adorable face in her hands, knowing that only this face would save her from strangling her sister. “Really. Every moment I have with you is my best moment ever.”
Sonny grinned. “Mine too.”
Lucinda held Sonny tight to her front as she straightened and faced her sister. “Kitty Cat.”
“Loosey-Lu. Sleep well?”
“Very well.” At the thought of sleep, Lucinda’s yawn could no longer be denied. Her nostrils flared from the effort at swallowing it down. She’d asked for dreams and she’d got them. Racy, lusty, hot, sweaty ones.
Cat’s smile was all too knowing.
“Go look out that window,” Lucinda said, pointing to a window seat near the front doors. “They have the most beautiful, fluffy white clouds out here. Come back and tell me what shapes you can see in them.”
Sonny bolted for the window, leaving Lucinda to turn to Cat with hands on her hips. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“Sonny already hit the high notes.”
“I’m working, Cat. I can’t hang with you guys. Does Sonny understand that?”
“We’ve made plans. Marco Polo in the heated pool. Skimming stones by the lake. Jurassic Park marathon.”
All things they could have done in and around home. So why were they...?
“Are you babysitting me?” Lucinda asked, her voice rising enough that the guy behind reception gave her a look.
“Something’s different,” Cat said. “I can smell it. I’m here to make sure you don’t do something you can’t take back.”
Lucinda’s mind went instantly to the hand-holding incident the day before. Put like that, it sounded so innocent. But it wasn’t. It hadn’t been. It was out there now. Woven into the fabric of their story.
�
��I am a grown-up person, Cat, if you hadn’t noticed. I’ve managed to survive thus far without an overseer.”
Cat glanced towards Sonny. Making the point that he was the result of a time in Lucinda’s life when her decision-making had been less than stellar. Falling for Joe, sticking with Joe, marrying Joe. Not that she’d have changed a single moment. Not when it had brought her her beautiful boy.
But she got it.
“Do you have a room?” Lucinda asked. Her mind went to her beautiful big suite, with its huge bed, lounge, desk and balcony. They could make it work. Before buying her cottage, they’d lived together in smaller digs.
“All good,” said Cat. “After I wrote that article on the place, they offered me a room for a night, so this is my chance to take them up on it. And I know you’re working, so Sonny will stay with me.” Cat moved a little closer, her eyes downcast, her foot nudging against the wheel of a suitcase. “Look, I probably shouldn’t have sprung this on you, but I felt like I had to. When I moved in after Joe left, you asked me to help make sure you never fell for someone so wholly wrong for you again. So this is me. Helping.”
Cat moved to the desk to check in, while Sonny’s footsteps slapped against the floor as he came bolting back from the window. “A chicken. A flamingo. And a pair of yellow gumboots.”
“Yellow?” Lucinda asked, her skin feeling as if it was burning at Cat’s insinuation that she was in danger of falling for Angus. Who was, according to her sister, wholly wrong for her. “How could you tell?”
Sonny shrugged. “Just could.”
“How was the drive? What’s the newsy news?” Lucinda asked.
“Traffic was bad. Cat thinks it’s going to rain, but I told her there are no cumulonimbus clouds so it won’t. And she said the S-word.”
“Did she, now?”
“She said it was okay because you can use that word in the car. When drivers are being...you know. Because they can’t hear you. And because it’s true.”