He looked at her, bemused. ‘Now why the hell would I want to do that?’
‘I saw the look on your face as you were doing the Grand Prix down your street. All that weaving in and out. How do I know you weren’t trying to throw me from the car? Or make me throw up?’
‘What? And further ruin my leather seats?’
Ava swiped her still damp hair back from her face and stared down at her fingernails instead of meeting his eye. A rush of embarrassment overcame her. No matter how hard she cleaned them, they always bore traces of her work. A thin line of brown dirt stubbornly worked its way into the quick, like a dirty half-moon, and stained her cuticles. She tried lemon juice to clean up, and every gritty cleaner there was on the market, but she had gardener’s hands.
A worker’s hands.
She glanced out the window to her left. The dirty four-wheel drive didn’t look right in this pristine garage. It looked like a work car, like something she would drive as she hauled supplies and tools and plants from one job to another. ‘What’s with the other vehicle?’
He leaned forward and looked past her. ‘I inherited it from Chris. It’s not exactly baby friendly and he wanted to get rid of it. I took it off his hands. It’s come in quite handy lately.’
‘Is that what you drive when you don’t want to be recognised? When you’re trying to be incognito on the mean streets of Sydney?’
He chuckled. ‘No-one expects someone like me to be driving something like that. It means the paparazzi leave me alone.’
Ava lifted her chin. ‘I know which one I’d prefer.’ All his wealth and privilege didn’t impress her at all. And she felt obliged to remind him of that as often as possible.
Callum exhaled loudly and it fogged a patch on the car window. ‘Look. You’ve made it perfectly fucking obvious that you’ve got a problem with me, Ava.’
‘You think?’ she muttered.
‘You know what I thought? I thought we might … oh, forget it. How about you just fake it, huh? How about you just pretend we’ve never met before? Total strangers.’
‘Total strangers,’ she echoed. ‘What a bloody good idea.’ Ava grabbed her handbag from the space she’d tucked it by her feet and opened her door swiftly, twisting her legs and planting them on the ground, moving fast to stand. She opened the back door and swept her hand in to retrieve his jacket from the floor. It was luxurious to touch: even the lining seemed to be silk.
Then there was another door slamming and footsteps. Callum was next to her, lifting his jacket from her hand. ‘I’ve got this,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry about your suit. I’ll take it to the dry cleaners.’ She tugged a sleeve but he refused to let go.
‘The hell you will.’
She tugged again. ‘I’m the one who sat my wet butt on it. Who knows what that’s done to the silk lining. I’m guessing it’s silk. Does silk shrink? Probably. Anyway. I ruined it and I’ll pay for it.’
Callum glanced down at her ass. ‘Your butt didn’t do that much damage. It was wet before. It’s only a damn suit, Ava. I’ve got dozens hanging upstairs.’
Of course he did. Probably identical ones hanging on gold-plated hangers, perfectly spaced in a walk-in robe that was bigger than her whole house. She let it go.
Callum nodded towards a set of stairs at the front of the garage, muttered gruffly, ‘Follow me,’ and then turned and walked off.
Ava watched him stride off in front of her, all long-limbed and surly, and when he took the steps three at a time she simply stared. The things that did to his butt should be studied in an anatomy class at university, she thought. When the view disappeared, she checked her watch, wondering how long it would be before the others arrived. Please God make it soon.
She steeled herself and ascended the stairs. The smooth silver handrail was cool to the touch, and underfoot the warm-toned timber on the treads softened the sound of her footsteps. With every step the light was brighter and when she reached the top it was as if she’d stepped into the ocean. Honey-coloured floorboards led her eye to enormous floor-to-ceiling windows and to her wonderment, the ocean filled them—cliffs and houses in the distance and treetops and the blue ocean and the still dramatic Sydney sky as far as the eye could see. Her gaze was usually much closer to the ground, focusing up close in the brown dirt and the tropical green humidity of Sydney’s gardens, and the magnificence of the view took her breath away. For a moment, she didn’t move. She fluttered her eyes shut and let herself indulge in the fantasy. What would it be like to walk up those stairs at the end of every day and call out, ‘Honey, I’m home!’? What would it be like to be in his life, as his lover? As his best friend. As the woman he’d chosen to spend his life with. As The One.
Then she opened her eyes and shut all those thoughts away. It hurt too much to realise that dream would never be real.
Ava slipped off her flat shoes, feeling the cool clean of the floor on her bare feet. She walked across the minimally furnished space to the windows and almost pressed her nose up against the glass. It was so quiet. There wasn’t a sound in the house, save for her breathing. Callum had disappeared somewhere and she hoped he stayed that way for a while longer so she could take this all in. While Sydney bustled and bristled twenty-four hours a day, and Bondi did too, none of that could be heard from this eyrie, set into the cliff. The dark clouds that had brought the rain an hour earlier, were now moving off in the distance, and patches of blue were breaking out in the sky above. That blue Sydney sky was as blue as Callum’s eyes, Ava realised.
‘Welcome to my home.’
She hadn’t heard his footsteps. She turned and tried not to stare, as if she was entirely accustomed to seeing Callum walking towards her looking like he’d just got out of bed. He too was barefoot, having changed out of his wet business suit into an old pair of jeans and a soft grey T-shirt. Half of his hair was still standing up on end, as if he’d towel dried it in a hurry. He smelled of soap. He wasn’t looking at the view, but at her.
‘What do you think?’ he asked, nodding to the view.
What did she think? She was standing in what was probably one of Sydney’s best beachside homes and he knew it. ‘It’s nice,’ she answered. Did he want her to be impressed? She didn’t want to be and hid it with a shoulder shrug and a flat expression.
‘Nice?’ He chuckled. ‘I didn’t pay for nice.’
‘No, I’m sure you didn’t.’
The intensity of Callum’s gaze rattled Ava. She’d spent years avoiding his eyes, averting hers whenever he looked her way. She’d been so scared that he’d be able to read her too easily; that he would see the humiliating longing in her eyes that she’d tried so desperately to hide all these years. He was a smart man, as well as a sexy one. Of course, all that hiding hadn’t done a damn thing to change her feelings for him. If anything, they’d grown even more complicated once he and Lulu had broken up. Because now he was no longer married to her sister. Lulu had moved on with Michael and Callum was free. Technically available. She hadn’t seen any gossip in Sydney’s notorious columns about who he might be dating, or if in fact he’d actually been seen with anyone vaguely eligible. There hadn’t even been a whisper or a rumour about a model or a soap star, or a colleague or any other woman, in fact. Not that Ava had paid much attention to such things. Like hell she hadn’t.
But at the end of the day, all that was irrelevant.
He was a man she could never look at in that way because, no matter how hard she tried not to think about it, Callum Malone had hurt her sister and, by extension, her family. He’d callously ended their marriage, eventually lining up with his father who had always believed that a waitress from the wrong side of town would never be good enough for a Malone man.
The eldest of the Malone twins moved next to her to join in admiring the view. They stood side by side, looking through the glass to the sky and the sea. He was so close that his elbow had brushed against her shoulder as he’d crossed his arms. God, they were great arms.
&n
bsp; ‘Nice,’ he repeated under his breath.
His proximity and the fact that they were all alone made Ava skittish and snarky. That mask she relied on to hide behind had slipped right back over her eyes.
‘C’mon, Callum. You know it’s gorgeous and stunning. Incredible. Enviable. The whole of Sydney is jealous of your view. What other words do you want? I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how perfect it is.’
He glanced down at her with a wry smile before turning his attention back to the ocean. ‘Everyone in Sydney’s obsessed with a view. The Harbour. The beach. You know what I want from this place?’
A bachelor pad, she wondered. Somewhere to bring all those starlets and supermodels and socialites. ‘What would that be?’
Callum thought for a long moment, rubbed his chin and then turned to her. ‘Peace and quiet,’ he said. ‘Privacy. A place to come home to where I can leave all the shit behind. That’s what I saw when I found this place.’
‘Oh,’ Ava said on a breath. Some of the tension left her shoulders, a tightness she’d been carrying since she’d got into his car back at the cemetery.
She understood what he meant. Not only had he lived almost his whole life in the public eye—the son of one of Sydney’s establishment families, their business successes, the analysis of his family fortune, his marriage to a waitress making front page news in the papers—but when the news of his and Lulu’s divorce had leaked, they’d both been hounded by the media. Ava had no idea how Callum had handled it all, if it was anything like the attention Lulu had endured. She’d been hunted by the paparazzi like she was someone famous instead of the ordinary person she was and had always been proud to be. She’d married someone well-known, but had never wanted the spotlight or the attention for herself. Lulu had never said much to Ava about it, preferring to keep her own counsel as she always had, but on one occasion they’d been having lunch at a cafe in Bondi and the hounds had descended. And it wasn’t just one of them: it felt like a hundred, like a pack of dogs baying for blood. And then other diners whipped out their smartphones, wondering if the sisters were famous, and took photos just in case, and the whole thing felt horrid and invasive and downright abusive. And then there were the questions, shouted out aggressively to get a rise out of Lulu.
‘You gonna sue Malone for half of everything?’
‘Is it true you caught him shagging another woman?’
‘Or was it another bloke?’
‘Is that your girlfriend? Have you turned, Lulu?’
Ava didn’t know how she’d done it, but Lulu had kept a calm expression behind her big sunglasses and held Ava back from wanting to punch each and every one of the bastards who’d spent weeks stalking her little sister. After that incident, Lulu had left the city and driven up to the Blue Mountains to stay with a friend for a couple of weeks. She had laid low until some other scandal caught the media’s eyes and they turned their attention to the next poor unfortunate soul.
There was something about Lulu that had always been sensitive and delicate and Ava knew what that did to men. They adored her, worshipped her, and her fragility inspired in the men who loved her an almost primal instinct to protect her. And when the shit had hit the fan, Callum hadn’t been able to protect her from the lies and the innuendo, the rumours and the gossip, all of his creation. In Ava’s eyes, that only made his betrayal worse.
‘Can I get you anything?’
‘Pardon?’
‘A coffee, maybe? A glass of wine?’ Callum uncrossed his arms and shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, his gaze remaining focused on the waves and the distance. ‘God knows, I need one. Or three.’
‘No, not at the moment,’ Ava managed to say, trying so, so hard not to let her voice hitch in her throat. ‘But thank you anyway.’
And in that moment, she remembered why she was with him today, next to this beautiful man in his beautiful house. He’d buried his father. And what had she done? She’d been so caught up in protecting herself, about keeping her shield of emotional armour wrapped tightly around her own heart, that she’d hadn’t thought that his might be hurting. Whatever he’d done, today he was a man who was grieving.
‘Callum.’ Ava turned to face him and reached a hand out, rested it on his arm.
He glanced down where her fingers splayed on his forearm and then met her eyes, his own dark and full of gloom.
Oh God.
The realisation struck her like a slap to the face.
She was a horrible person. She hadn’t said it. She hadn’t said any words to him of sympathy or given him any acknowledgement that she understood what he was going through and she had to say it now, before the others arrived. Her mask slipped. Tears welled and she swiped them away, as embarrassed by them now as she had been her whole life.
‘I didn’t say …’ Ava could feel a sob growing and bit the inside of her lip to hold it at bay. ‘I’m so sorry about your father.’ Without thinking, she took a step closer to him, wanting to be a comfort to the man who had just lost his only surviving parent. ‘I know this must be a hard day for you.’
The sound of a doorbell echoed in the house and the noise of it broke the moment.
When he stiffened, she pulled her fingers back abruptly.
‘Thank you.’ His reply was formal suddenly. ‘I’ll go answer the door.’
Chapter Four
‡
Five minutes later, Callum’s house was filled with sombre people and muted conversations. Chris was watching over Ellie protectively as she relaxed into one of the grey designer sofas, looking more than relieved to be taking a load off her feet. Cooper was in the gleaming white and stainless steel kitchen, on the phone again, and Lulu and Michael were admiring the large pieces of modern artwork that adorned the walls. Bottles of white and red wine sat on the expansive marble island bench, along with eight crystal wine glasses, four tumblers and a bottle of scotch. Once Ava had poured herself a substantial and fortifying glass of white, she’d slipped through the glass doors out to the balcony and to the view she’d longed to see without the windows in the way.
Out on the balcony, the air was fresh and crisp and a light breeze blew just enough that she could feel it tangle with her still damp hair. She sipped her wine, a perfectly chilled Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc, and looked out over the cliff tops in the distance.
‘This is some piece of real estate, huh?’ It was Ellie.
‘It sure is,’ Ava smiled. She’d only met Chris’s wife for the first time that day, but had immediately liked her friendly smile and even friendlier attitude.
‘Although it would be better if there was somewhere comfortable out here to sit down.’ Both women looked around. There was nothing on the balcony, not even a potted plant. ‘Come to think of it, it would be better out here if there was anything. Do you think he ever comes out here to look at the view, Mr Serious Chief Executive Callum Malone?’
‘Not by the look of this.’ Ava asked quietly, ‘Has he just moved in or something?’
Ellie came closer, as close as she could get with a baby bump that managed to arrive everywhere five minutes before she did. ‘About twelve months ago, I think, just after he’d sold the place on the Harbour he lived in when he was married to Lulu. Such a shame but that’s what happens when—’ She clasped a hand over her mouth. ‘God. Sorry, of course you know that. I hate that whole baby brain excuse thing that women use, but it’s real. And it’s also now responsible for the foot I have firmly wedged in my mouth.’
Ava shrugged. ‘Please, don’t worry. Things happen. We’re just the ones watching from the sidelines, right?’
Ellie smiled. ‘That’s true. And we shouldn’t let it come between us. Who knows what happens between two people, the whys and wherefores of why things go wrong? All I know is that he’s been hit hard. I just feel so bad for him, you know? It’s hard to see someone so miserable and not be able to do anything about it.’
That tension instantly returned to Ava’s shoulders. He des
erved to be miserable, didn’t he? And even if he was, why should she care?
Which was of course why she asked in a hushed voice, ‘Callum is miserable?’
Ava felt a tightening in her chest. Was Callum still in love with Lulu? Is that why he was miserable? Had he realised that he’d been a dick and was now trying to win her back?
Ellie waved towards the ocean view. ‘He may have all this, the huge house and a ridiculously fancy car, but I think he misses—’
‘What are you doing out here, my gorgeous wife?’ Chris’s booming voice was carried into the wind and Ellie turned to her husband.
‘I’m having girl time with Ava away from all that Malone testosterone.’
Chris looked at her so lovingly that Ava was jealous of it. ‘Last time I checked, you loved all that Malone testosterone.’
‘It got me into the position I’m in today,’ Ellie smiled. ‘Which is why I need a chair.’
‘Leave it with me.’ Chris disappeared back inside.
‘When are you due?’ Ava asked.
‘Officially two weeks.’ Ava wasn’t sure if Ellie realised she was doing it, but she brought both hands to her belly and smoothed her fingers over it protectively. ‘And damn, I want this baby out. I have to pee every five minutes and I feel like a whale and—’ Ellie laughed and waved a hand at Ava. ‘Do you have children?’
‘Me?’ Ava asked in shock. ‘No, no children. I’m still a swinging single.’
‘Sorry. This must be so boring to you. It’s what happens, unfortunately. For eight months you can’t think about squeezing the baby out and then, when you get to this heffelump size, you become obsessed with it. I’m officially telling myself to shut up now. So what about you, Ava? Tell me something about you. I already know how you know the Malones but tell me, what do you do?’
Ava tucked her hands behind her back to hide her fingernails. ‘I’m a landscape designer.’
The CEO (The Millionaire Malones Book 2) Page 3