He pushed his body off the door. ‘What the—? What do you think you’re doing?’
‘What I should have done in the first place.’ Her finger hit the Enter key and emptied the Recycle bin.
* * *
The full enormity of Evie’s betrayal hit Adam like a punch to the stomach. He stumbled back to his bedroom, his body reeling from the blow. He couldn’t think straight. Holding his head between his hands, he collapsed onto the bed. This couldn’t be happening.
His chest heaved from gulping in air, and if the excruciating pain around his heart was any indication of its current state, it had simply busted apart. Blown to shreds. How ironic that he’d asked Evie only last night if her heart had truly been broken, never having experienced it himself. He knew how it felt now.
He wished he didn’t.
A gut-deep sob escaped his throat, echoed around the room, and left in its wake an almost unbearable sense of emptiness. Where his heart had been was now a vacuum. How could Evie have done this to him? Hurt and humiliated him. Made him feel like a pathetic idiot. And as for telling him she loved him—lies, all lies! To call what had happened between them ‘lovemaking’ was a travesty. It had meant nothing to her.
And that’s what hurt the most.
To him it had meant everything.
The sound of enraged shouting rang through the hall, penetrating even this far corner on the other side of the house. Shaken from the depths of his misery, Adam glanced up at the figure silently slipping into his room.
‘Neil’s not happy,’ Chrissy observed. She closed the door and leaned her back against it. ‘Poor Evie.’ Her tone belied the words.
He didn’t need this. ‘What are you doing here, Chrissy?’
‘I was worried about you. You were upset and I thought—’ She smiled an expectant smile. ‘I hoped there might be something I could do to help. What Evie just did to you was—’
‘I’d rather be on my own.’ He didn’t want to hear her words. Just wanted to be alone, to hide here and lick his wounds.
‘Don’t push me away. Please, Adam. You know I care about you.’ She played with the strap of her skimpy singlet, letting it fall revealingly from one shoulder as she approached. ‘Let me show you how much.’
The top clung to her body like damp tissue paper, was almost as transparent. To his annoyance, his body responded immediately. He really didn’t need this.
He searched for a tactful response. ‘I’d be taking advantage of you if I let you stay, and I won’t do that.’
‘Maybe I want to be taken advantage of.’ She kept coming towards him, her hips swaying provocatively in the tiny pyjama shorts.
Directness was the only thing left. ‘You shouldn’t be here. It’s against the rules.’
She reached out and pressed a finger to his lips, enveloping him in clouds of too-sweet vanilla. ‘Shhh. No one needs to know.’
Wrong! There’d been enough lies and secrets for one day. The emotion bottled up inside him was about to explode. He jumped up before she could position herself properly on his lap.
‘I’d know.’
The silence was painful as she regarded him with a stunned look.
‘But you kissed me, back there.’ A tetchy edge had entered her voice.
‘No, you kissed me.’
‘Who initiated it doesn’t matter. We both enjoyed it.’ She flashed him a steamy smile. The switch from petulance personified to flirty vamp happened so quickly it momentarily took him aback.
‘I’m sorry, that’s not the way I saw it, Chrissy. It was wrong of me to let it go on for as long as it did. I was angry and I lashed out at Evie the only way I could.’ He’d been maddened by the need to hurt Evie as much as he had been hurt, and attack was the best form of defence.
A flicker of irritation crossed her pretty face. ‘Evie, Evie, Evie. If I ever hear that name again it’ll be too soon.’ The tight pursing of her pink-glossed mouth gave away the depth of her annoyance. ‘The woman’s ambitious and she played you for a fool. I’d never do that. I’m not like her.’
An overwhelmingly desolate feeling swelled up from his chest to constrict his throat. Yes, Chrissy was different to Evie, in the same way every woman he’d ever met was different to her. He’d hoped—believed—she was the one who’d be that missing part of him, the part that left him less than whole. He’d thought her special.
But what did he know? Scratch the surface of almost anything and it’s not what it appears. Sadly, he was no exception to the rule himself.
‘Someone recently tried to tell me appearances can be deceiving. I didn’t credit it at the time but I’m beginning get it now. Everyone has sides to them they’d prefer to keep hidden, including me. I’m not the man you think I am.’
‘So you had a tough childhood.’ She shrugged her slim shoulders. ‘It doesn’t make you any less of a man to me.’
Just how long had she been standing outside the editing room? Obviously long enough to have overheard at least part of his taped confession. Why hadn’t she shown herself before she did? In fact, why was she even there in the first place?
‘What were you doing down there in the middle of the night?’
Chrissy twisted a strand of honey-blonde hair around one manicured finger. ‘I couldn’t sleep. I was going to read but I didn’t want to disturb Meg by turning on the light, so I headed for the lounge. I heard voices and I followed them.’
It was a perfectly reasonable answer but something didn’t sit right. Chrissy certainly hadn’t made a habit of taking Meg’s welfare into consideration prior to tonight, and who wore perfume and a full face of makeup to roam the house in the early hours of the morning? Unless …
‘Were you on your way to my room all along? Be honest with me.’
The hesitation was only slight. ‘… Yes. Yes, I was. There’s something you have to know. It’s important.’ She stared up at him through big blue eyes. ‘I’m in love with you, Adam.’
He turned and walked away from her. With his whole world crumbling into pieces these were not words he wanted to hear at the moment. Not from Chrissy. Not from anyone. Love was nothing but a four-letter word of the worst kind.
His skin contracted as, soundlessly, Chrissy manifested beside him, moulding her curves against his body. She gazed up at him, a single tear running down her cheek.
‘Please say something.’
Her unexpected vulnerability caught him off-guard. Agitation shrivelled into sadness. He felt like a complete bastard.
She curled her hands around his neck to draw his face down to meet hers, clung tighter at the sound of fevered knocking, and attached her lips to his.
‘Adam, I need to explain—’ The door pushed open and Evie stood there. She took one look and turned on her heel.
Chrissy had paused only momentarily. ‘Now, where were we?’ She latched onto his lips again.
It was hard not to shove her away. The conflicting emotions surging through him left him struggling for control. Why was guilt ripping him apart? He owed Evie zilch; she’d violated his trust and manipulated him shamelessly. So why this agonising feeling of remorse? It was as if she had some absurd grip on him that destroyed logical thought.
He breathed in deeply. And he wasn’t having any of it. Not anymore.
‘You should go.’ He turned Chrissy around, took her shoulders and pushed her away from his bed. Her presence had become disturbing. Ignoring her indignant protests, he closed the door on her.
Chrissy was, naturally, angry with him. But she couldn’t be as angry as he was with himself for letting Evie get through to him. Big mistake. One he’d never make again. He hardened what was left of his heart against her.
The woman he thought he loved had laid bare his deepest secret. Deception of that magnitude would never—could never—be expunged. She didn’t deserve his consideration or apology, and the sooner she left, the sooner he’d forget her. Having nothing more to do with her, never seeing her face again, was the only way it could be.
CHAPTER
23
Evie’s apartment, Perth
April 15
The old stick-your-head-in-the-sand trick wasn’t how Evie usually coped with problems, but she’d been acting out of character in a lot of ways in the two weeks since she’d arrived back home.
Home. Where the city noise that had once lulled her to sleep now hammered at her forehead. Where the brightness of day and the moon’s light barely penetrated between high-rises. Back where the only wide-open spaces—the parks, the beaches—were packed with people kidding themselves that what they were enjoying was true freedom.
She’d been one of them … once.
She sighed. The sun wasn’t even up yet but Perth was stirring and she should too—lying in bed mourning for your life didn’t get bills paid. She started to rise but the weight of self-pity dragged her back. A few more minutes couldn’t hurt. She buried her face in the pillow and pulled the blanket up over her head. Desperate for some peace, some quiet, she covered her ears with her hands, as much to still the whirring of her brain as the Monday-morning traffic sounds outside.
Regret was such a debilitating emotion, and her regrets were monumental. The hardest thing she’d ever had to do in her life was leave Paradise. She missed the briskness of the sea breeze against her skin, the tang of salt on her lips, the slower pace of life in the Kimberley. She missed Ad—no! Don’t go there! A tear escaped as she forced herself to regroup; it trickled down her cheek unchecked.
What she missed was feeling more alive than she ever had before.
She shoved off the covers and stared up at the darkened ceiling. ‘Home’ was definitely not the same place she remembered. But then, she wasn’t the same girl who’d left here five weeks earlier.
Three weeks on the pearl farm, together with a number of things that had happened in the last fortnight, had changed her irrevocably.
The first week she’d spent holed up in her apartment like a wounded animal, ignoring emails, not answering calls, refusing to see anyone. A week of soul-searching in which sleep evaded her and unstoppable tears dogged every waking moment.
The yearning for Adam had been unbearable, so strong that everything inside her chest hurt. Her body had ached for him—dammit, it still did! For the caress of his fingers on her skin, for the sweetness of his lips on hers, the delicious desire he aroused in her with as little as a look her way.
Her utter anguish at the scene in his room, when she’d gone to speak to him one last time, determined to explain what had really happened, had been soul-destroying. She’d gone there to tell him how truly sorry she was that Neil had learned his secret. To convince him that it had been a matter of bad luck and ill-timing, and not the deliberate deception he’d taken it for. To let him know she’d deleted the footage, hoping it might in some small way help to ease the pain she’d caused.
Finding him in another woman’s arms was devastating, the ultimate comeuppance for what she’d brought on herself. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to erase the picture of him entwined with a half-naked Chrissy, but the image seemed to have been seared into her eyelids. Would anything ever erase it?
Why couldn’t it be as simple as reaching for the remote and changing the channel? Now that was something she’d had a lot of practice with over the last week. For good reason.
The extreme isolation of the farm and the fact that Neil was the only one privy to what was going on in the outside world had shielded the rest of them from the full extent of the popularity of Perfect Mate. Early in the piece, before their falling out, her former mentor had confided to her that the show was a success, but just how successful was incomprehensible.
Apparently it had been years since a debut series opened so strongly. It had pulled in over a million viewers and continued to do so, week after week. The media frenzy surrounding it made it impossible to turn on the TV, go online or check Twitter without being bombarded with speculation about Adam, Chrissy and Meg. Who would the handsome farmer choose?
Evie knew.
It broke her heart.
She sat upright and swiped at the hateful tears coursing down her cheeks. Correction: it had broken her heart, until realisation hit that an existence spent in the grip of self-pity was nothing more than living in limbo. So over the last few days she’d been trying wholeheartedly to come to terms with the mess she’d made of her life.
With the crystal-clear clarity of hindsight she knew now she’d been fool enough to mistake physical attraction for love. Again. Fallen for another good-looking man who didn’t love her as much as she loved him. How much heartache before that lesson was finally learned? She was too trusting, too willing to take everyone at their word. In fairness, Adam had never actually said the word. But if he had truly loved her, as she’d believed, he could never have questioned her loyalty, her honesty. He would have given her a chance to explain.
And he would not have succumbed to Chrissy’s charms so willingly, and within only minutes of the climactic events in the editing room.
The blatant reminder of broken trust brought her up short. Reality kicked back in with a bite. The man she thought she’d loved was with Chrissy now. Her dreams of a future together with him were just that. Their relationship was done. Finished. There was no point in even thinking about him.
Yeah, right.
She closed her eyes, dropped her head to her chest, and her arms crept up to hug her shoulders. Despite her best efforts, for a treacherous few seconds she recalled how safe, how … loved she had felt within Adam’s strong arms. The sudden sense of loss filled her throat and she let out a sob. It was over. There’d be no more secret, smouldering looks her way. She’d never know the breathtaking sensation of his touch again.
She knuckled away the wetness at the corners of her eyes then fell back into the sanctuary of bed, pulling the blanket up to cover her head. She would not allow herself to think of the shattering consequences of her reckless actions again. Ever.
It was called sticking your head in the sand. It was the only way to cope.
* * *
Paradise Pearl Farm pontoon
April 15
‘You can’t hide out here for the duration of the shoot.’ Cam paused to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the back of a rubber-gloved hand. ‘You do know that, don’t you?’
Standing by the high table on the deck of the pontoon, Adam turned his attention to chiselling at a particularly stubborn barnacle on the oyster shell he held. ‘Why not?’ He had no interest in pursuing this conversation, and spoke only to acknowledge the other man breaking the silence.
‘You know why.’
‘Do I?’
‘Come on, mate, don’t play games,’ the cameraman warned.
‘Is that what you think I’m doing?’
Cam dropped the stiff-bristled brush he’d been using onto the table then flicked a spray of water at him from the bucket. ‘Geez! No wonder Neil and the new guy are tearing their hair out. You can’t respond to everything with a question.’
Adam ignored the attempt at playfulness. ‘Can’t I?’
The cameraman groaned and made a play of tugging out a section of his sun-bleached blond hair by the roots. The frazzled look and the clumsiness of the bright-yellow gloves created a ridiculous sight and Adam almost grinned. It was only a slight turning up of the corner of his lips, but it was the first spark of humour he’d felt for over two weeks.
In the aftermath of Evie’s forced departure he’d found a surprising ally in Cam. It wasn’t that they’d become best buddies or anything—more a case of a united dislike for Neil Blake—but they had managed to reach a level of mutual respect, a friendship of a sort. The cameraman was far more circumspect than Adam about his disaffection with Neil. As he’d said, one person had already been sent home from this shoot; he didn’t want his to be the next head to roll.
Adam couldn’t give a rat’s what the editor thought of him.
‘Is this some sort of subtle reminder from your bo
ss of my obligations? If it is, you know what you can do with it.’
Cam grinned. ‘You sure do know how to press the boss’s buttons.’
Yeah, he did. And he took a perverse kind of pleasure in it. Neil had taken on the task of interviewing during the several days it took the replacement PA to arrive from Perth, and the animosity between them had escalated daily. Mainly it was due to Adam’s consistent refusal to answer any questions about his past; he’d decided it was better to say nothing than to have his words spliced inappropriately then used against him. Everything needed was already on that tape. Why the man wanted more from him he could only guess—wasn’t the usual reason for rubbing salt into a wound to make it sting more?
He’d spent that first week in emotional shutdown, the only way he knew to cope with the unbearable pain of Evie’s betrayal. There was no one he could talk to. He’d been contractually forbidden to contact his mother until production ceased and he couldn’t bring himself to discuss the whole catastrophe with either Chrissy or Meg, for obvious reasons. Who knew a house filled with people could be so empty?
Work was a godsend. Retreating to the peace of the pontoon for most of his waking hours had helped him ride out the storm of the editor’s explosive anger. Life out here was predictable, with everything under his control; out here he could push his body so hard that his brain didn’t function.
It worked … for that first week. But then the monotony of the chores began to lose its numbing effect and his mind began to wander down tracks he couldn’t tread without hurt following. It didn’t do to think too much. He was almost grateful when Cam was ordered to accompany him.
‘I’m done.’ The cameraman emptied a slime-filled bucket of water over the side of the pontoon. ‘Pass me a chisel?’
Cam had surprised Adam when, after the daily obligatory filming, he’d started helping out with some of the jobs. While they hosed and scrubbed and de-barnacled shells the two men occasionally chatted. To begin with it was about the ins and outs of pearl farming, but today the conversation had turned uncomfortably personal.
The Farmer's Perfect Match Page 25