by Andrews, Amy
Marcus sat beside her, facing the wide paved walkway, and watched the ebb and flow of human traffic for a few minutes. He was conscious of their arms brushing occasionally and of the weight of the ring in his palm and the hum deep in his loins as his mind wrestled with the possibilities.
Did this mean the engagement was off? ‘What happened?’
She sighed. ‘Simon and I split up.’
Marcus couldn’t tell from her voice whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. But she’d obviously been crying so she must be upset. Despite the delicious potential, Marcus had an unexplainable urge to go and find her too-busy ex-fiancé and punch him on the nose.
‘Want me to beat him up?’
She laughed, the humour in his voice making it sexier than ever, and the urge to rub herself against him intensified. She looked at her hands instead, desperately trying to banish the serpent’s whisper and not think about rebound sex when they were talking about a serious issue. ‘Actually, we split a couple of months ago.’
‘Oh?’ Marcus frowned. So, all this time he’d been lusting after an engaged woman and she hadn’t been?
‘I’ve been in denial.’
He looked at the bling in his hand and again thought what a fool Simon was to have ever let Maddy get away. He turned side on. ‘I told you he was an idiot.’
She smiled. ‘No. He did us both a favour. We were together for all the wrong reasons. We didn’t love each other. Not like we should have. I just didn’t realise it until he came back this afternoon and wanted to reconcile.’
‘How did he take it?’
She shrugged. ‘Quite well. He knew, too. Deep down, he knew. Although – ’ She gave a half laugh. ‘I’m sure he hasn’t spend an hour crying about it like I have.’
Marcus nodded. ‘So, if it’s all over and has been for a while, why the tears?’
She shrugged. ‘We’ve been together for a long time and now it really is over. It feels a bit like he’s died, I guess. These things need to be mourned. Trust me, I’m an expert on mourning.’
And, Marcus supposed, tossing the ring was the funeral. Picking her hand up off her lap, he placed the ring in her palm. ‘Do it. Closure’s important.’
Madeline looked at him through suddenly glassy eyes, warmed by his support.
Rebound sex.
She shut her eyes and ignored the whisper as she closed her hand around the flashy piece of jewellery and tossed it long and hard at the pliant river. There was too much noise to hear it plop but she opened her eyes in time for them to both watched it hit the surface and disappear.
‘C’mon.’ He nudged her arm with his after a few moments. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’
She eyed him dubiously, his bare, flat abdomen tantalising in her peripheral vision. ‘You’re not exactly dressed,’ she pointed out.
‘This is South Bank.’ He shrugged. ‘No one cares.’
She did. The way she was feeling at the moment, if he didn’t cover that delicious chest she was afraid the temptation would become too great and at some stage she would lean over and run her frosty glass down his perfect abs.
Marcus saw a flare of desire heat her green eyes and the hum in his loins kicked up to a buzz. ‘I’ll button up,’ he said. ‘I’ll even put on some shoes.’ He swung a backpack off his shoulder and brought out a pair of Birkenstock slides.
‘Come on.’ He held out his hand to help her off the wall.
She took it then dropped it immediately her feet hit the ground. ‘Where to?’
‘There’s a good pub. It’s got a great menu. I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry.’
Madeline faltered and was thankful she was no longer touching him. She was absolutely famished, and he looked totally edible. She suppressed the urge to lick her lips and lean in to gnaw on his neck. ‘Famished,’ she said.
Marcus heard the husky quality of her voice and noticed the flare again, and began to think that being with Maddy tonight, fresh from her break-up, was maybe not the best idea. There’d been something between them from their first meeting and she was a free agent again.
Fair game.
But he knew how she felt about relationships and even if he hadn’t, just one look at the delicious Maddy was enough to know that she didn’t do casual.
And he didn’t do permanent.
Not to mention how coming on to her two hours after her long-term relationship had broken up was just plain icky.
They walked without talking. Fitness freaks jogged around them, power walkers paced past them, families with toddlers and prams dodged them and the sun slowly set around them. They pushed their way through the crowds thronging the night markets and made it to the pub before the beer garden had filled up for the night. They got a table and Marcus left to get them a drink.
The music Madeline had heard earlier was coming from a band inside the pub and the music drifted out, creating a pleasant atmosphere. She could smell beer and peanuts and steaks cooking and felt surprisingly good. The laid-back vibe of the pub was just what the doctor ordered.
‘One chardonnay,’ he said, placing her drink on a coaster.
Or was Marcus the remedy? He sat opposite her, gave her a sexy dimpled grin and took a long swallow of his beer. He licked the froth from his lips and she almost groaned out loud.
Suddenly, she was hot all over, and she shrugged out of her navy pinstripe jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. When she turned back she noticed he was looking at her.
Intently.
‘What?’ She lifted her arms, checking her crisp white figure-hugging shirt, wondering if she’d spilt something down her front. It was one of those new stretch fabrics and it pulled tautly across her cleavage, the button struggling to keep in place. Maybe a button had popped?
Marcus wondered how much longer the button could stay in the hole and hoped he was around when it finally gave up the battle.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nice...shirt...’ He sounded pathetic, even to his own ears, and he took another long pull of his beer.
Madeline stilled as she watched his lips press against the frosty glass. Had he just checked her out? She felt as if a finger had stroked across her pelvic-floor as those muscles clenched involuntarily.
Maybe she wasn’t the only one with a serpent in her head.
She leaned back in the chair and noted how his gaze followed the straining button. Interesting. Very interesting.
‘So,’ Marcus said, placing his beer glass back down and blinking a few times to clear the haze that had descended when he’d thought about what kind of bra she might be wearing underneath. ‘Do you want to talk about Simon or get drunk and forget him?’
She laughed. ‘That doesn’t seem like the right thing to do.’
‘Do you always do the right thing, Maddy?’
She thought about it and thought about how she so didn’t want to do the right thing tonight. How she wanted to throw caution to the wind, down her chardonnay in one mouthful, grab his hand and demand he take her home to his bed.
She swallowed. ‘Pretty much.’
He nodded thoughtfully as he kept one eye on that teasing little button. No surprises there. The waitress came and took their order and he was pleased for the distraction. He ordered a T-bone. She ordered pasta.
‘OK, so no Simon.’
‘No, we can talk about him. I promise I won’t burst into tears.’
‘Really?’ Marcus had three sisters and his mother was on her fourth husband. He’d been privy to more than one bust-up in his life. In his experience women tended to cry for days.
‘Sure. You can test me if you like,’ she said, and laughed self-deprecatingly. She noticed Marcus’s gaze wander back to her chest as her breasts bounced with her laughter. She shifted slightly in the chair and felt those muscles contract again as his gaze followed her movement.
‘No tests, I promise. You said you were together a while?’
She nodded. ‘Ten years.’
Marcus had to refrain from spitting his mouthful o
f beer all over her. A decade! He swallowed the ale then whistled instead. He couldn’t even begin to contemplate being with someone that long.
She laughed at the rank incredulity on his face. ‘How long were you and your ex together?’
‘Three years. Married for two.’
‘Yeah, I guess it is a long time.’ She shrugged, staring into her wineglass, one hand twirling the stem, the other pushing into the knot of hair at her nape and absently massaging. ‘We’ve actually known each other since kindergarten but got really close after his mother died. My mum had not long gone either so I understood what he was going through.’
Mutual grief? Didn’t sound like the best basis for a relationship. Marcus was surprised it had lasted a year. ‘What happened with your parents?’
‘My dad died in a car accident. I was just starting grade twelve. And my mum was diagnosed with breast cancer two months later and lasted nine months. I’m sure her broken heart hastened her end.’
Marcus heard the anguish hidden behind her controlled delivery. His first instinct was to pull her into his arms and comfort her. His second was to run like hell. He took a sip of his beer, acknowledged the dangerous zone he was entering and took a mental step backwards.
He was buying her a drink and a meal and seeing her home. That was it.
But then she sighed loudly and pulled the pins securing her hair out, throwing them on the table as she raked her hands through to free the curls. He watched, fascinated, as her body moved, as her neck twisted from side to side, as her breasts jiggled with each arm and shoulder movement. And the button maintained its precarious hold.
Dear God. He couldn’t run now if he wanted to. He had a sudden vision of that hair spread on his pillow, wrapped around his hand, trailing across his body, and tried to remember why hitting on a woman who had just ended a relationship was a bad idea.
‘Sorry, this must be depressing the hell out of you,’ she said, shooting him a sad smile as she picked up her wineglass and sipped the dry white appreciatively.
He shook his head. ‘Nope.’ He pointed to her nearly empty wineglass and even though he shouldn’t ask, he did. ‘Another?’
Madeline hesitated. For a second.
Rebound sex.
‘Sure why not?’ The wine was giving her a pleasant buzz that, combined with Marcus’s obvious appreciation, was quite exciting. She deliberately adjusted her collar and noted Marcus pause as he rose, his eyes widening as his gaze followed the path of her fingers as they lingered near the holding-it-all-together button at her cleavage.
He departed to buy another round but not before Madeline had seen the bob of his Adam’s apple and the flash of desire glitter in his eyes. She smiled to herself.
So this was sexual power?
How could she get to her thirties and not know how heady it was?
Rebound sex.
God damn it. All right. All right!
Marcus approached her warily from behind, praying that he had himself together now. There was something different about her tonight that trebled her sexiness. Even from behind she stood out from the crowd. Her gorgeous crop of lush red ringlets falling to her shoulders separated her from every other woman in the pub.
‘Thanks,’ she said, as he put her wine down.
He smiled and they both tasted their drinks. She crossed her legs and brushed her foot against his bare calf. ‘Oh, sorry,’ she apologised, smiling at him over the rim of her glass.
Marcus almost choked on his beer. The contact had been too slow to be accidental. It had lingered a little too long. He gave her a searching look and she held his gaze steadily.
He’d seen that look before.
Great! He was going to be rebound sex? Not that he had anything against it per se. Hell, he’d been used on more than one occasion on the rebound and had enjoyed himself immensely. But he remembered not that long ago he had stupidly been rebound guy for his ex and it hadn’t been his wisest moment.
Maddy was emotional and he didn’t want her to confuse his intent. He would probably see her most days — it would be smart to keep things between them strictly business.
‘Tell me more about Abby,’ he said, grabbing the first thing that popped in his head and then wished he hadn’t. ‘Sorry, no, bad choice. I’m supposed to be cheering you up.’ He just needed to get her off track. Because if she came on to him, he wasn’t sure how good his powers of resistance would be.
‘It’s OK, I don’t mind talking about her.’
‘You blame yourself for her death?’
She sucked in a quick breath. How had he had seen so deeply inside her on such short acquaintance? ‘Of course,’ she said in a small voice, and shrugged. ‘I was her older sister. I was supposed to be looking after her. Just before my mother died she said to me, “Look after Abby, she’s impulsive, she’ll need you.” For God’s sake, I was practically a doctor. I should have been able to save her.’
‘What happened?’ he asked gently.
‘She’d been gone for a few days. We shared a flat close to campus, she often stayed over at her boyfriend’s unit. I wasn’t concerned.’
‘What was she studying?’
‘She was doing an aromatherapy course,’ Madeline said. ‘She was always a bit alternative. You would have loved her.’
He laughed and took a swallow of his beer waiting for her to continue. She was leaning forward on the table again, her elbow bent, her palm cradling her chin. He could see the creamy rise of her cleavage.
‘Then late one night Nathan, her boyfriend, came to my door, with Abby in his arms. He was really upset. She was sick, he said, and strode past me, laying her on the lounge.’
Madeline stopped for a moment and took a sip of her wine. She could still see her sister’s face and feel the horror when she had realised Abby had been desperately ill.
‘She was burning up, barely rousable. Nathan told me they’d taken her to a psychic surgeon earlier in the day and he’d removed her appendix and given her some white powder for the pain. She’d been asleep most of the day but had woken feverish and doubled over. The autopsy showed her appendix had ruptured and she’d had raging peritonitis.’
‘Nasty,’ Marcus said quietly.
She nodded. ‘I was furious but there was no time to rant and rave at them. Call an ambulance, I said. I tried to rouse her but couldn’t. And I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t have any oxygen or a doctor’s bag or anything. I had nothing to help her. Nothing. All I could do was wait and pray that the ambulance would make it in time.’
Her despair felt as raw today as it had five years ago. ‘Did they?’
‘Nope. She arrested a few minutes later. But just prior to that her eyes flicked open. She was trying to say something and I had to get right up close to her mouth to hear it. She said, “Don’t be mad, Maddy, you’ve been the best sister.”’
Madeline stopped and swallowed, trying to control the emotion that had risen in her chest. ‘I think she knew she was dying.’
Marcus saw a tear track down her face and she dashed it away. He leaned closer with both his elbows on the table and covered her hand with his. ‘Did she die in the flat?’
She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. She took a deep breath before answering. ‘Officially, no. She died en route to hospital but she’d been in full arrest for five minutes before the ambulance got there and they spent another half-hour working on her. I don’t know how many times they shocked her but I wouldn’t let them give up. She’s septic, I kept saying like a demented idiot, ‘She needs fill. Fill her up, fill her up.”’
She stopped again, surprised as ever how raw the pain still was sometimes. Marcus’s hand on hers was comforting and the one thing that was keeping her anchored in the present. Without it she would have been sucked totally into the past and that terrible day.
Marcus sat quietly, stroking his thumb across her knuckles, letting her remember, her story incredibly moving. ‘You said there was an autopsy?’
She n
odded and cleared her throat. ‘Her organs had already started to shut down. She was in DIC.’
‘So...there wasn’t anything you could have done that would have changed the outcome? Even if you’d had every medical knick-knack and machine that went ping?’
She smiled and slowly withdrew her hand. ‘No. And I know that, rationally. But in my heart, deep in my gut...she was my sister. My little sister, you know? It’s wrong that I couldn’t do a thing.’
Her eyes pleaded with him to understand and he did. When love was involved, right and wrong blurred and blame always came into play.
‘And then I get angry with her sometimes and I feel guilty about that, too. I mean, why on earth would she go to a psychic surgeon? That’s taking alternative a bit too far, right? And Nathan said she’d insisted that he bring her to me instead of the hospital. Wouldn’t let him call an ambulance. Why? How stupid was that?’
Fairly stupid, but Marcus chose his words carefully. ‘She did make some unwise choices,’ he agreed.
‘It was just so unnecessary,’ she said. ‘Such a waste of a life.’
He nodded. ‘Yes, it was.’
‘It was awful. I was in my final year of med school. Simon was amazing. So supportive. I don’t think I could have got through that time without him. He’s the only one who knows how bad it was. It bonded us.’
‘I’m pleased he was there for you,’ Marcus said, and meant it. Maddy had been through a lot of tragedy in her life. It just didn’t seem right that one person had to shoulder so much. He was pleased that Simon had served a purpose, even if it meant they’d developed an unhealthy codependency.
‘Sorry I came on so strong at you in the beginning. I guess now you know why. It just makes me so angry sometimes.’
‘Understandable,’ he dismissed quickly. ‘What happened to the...er...psychic guy?’
‘Nothing. A slap on the wrists. He didn’t actually operate on her, just made her think he had, so he couldn’t be charged with her death.’
That made Marcus angry. Alternative medicine struggled so hard to be recognised because people like that quack constantly destroyed their credibility.
Their meals arrived then and they were both pleased to have their conversation interrupted. They ate for a while, savouring the food, Madeline grateful to take a break from talking about herself. ‘So, now you know all my deep dark secrets. What about you?’