Out of his depth, floundering with what to do, what to say, he took the bag from her hand and put it down outside the door. “Hey,” he said gently, awkwardly. “It’s okay.”
“Don’t.” She sucked in a shaky breath, thick with those brimming tears. “You’re only making it worse.”
“Making what worse?”
“This. Tears. Bloody hormones.” She made a low growly sound in her throat, a sound of struggle and exasperation that kicked him hard in the gut like that ton of cleanskin bull. And when he reached for her, when his hands closed over her shoulders, she walked into his chest and buried her face under his chin.
Being Angie, she didn’t just let go and cry. Her breath rasped hard as she struggled for control. Her shoulders were stiff with her inner battle and he smoothed his hands over them, rubbed her back, stroked her hair and shifted his feet because he was uncomfortable in too many ways. She sniffed a wet apology, then rubbed at the moisture with the flat of her hand.
“If that’s supposed to be a mop up,” he murmured, “it’s not helping.”
“A shirt would have helped.”
With one hand he shrugged out of his undone shirt and shoved it into her hand. “There you go.”
A laugh hiccupped through her tears, but she took it and used it to mop at his chest. For too long. His body’s response was completely inappropriate, entirely male, irrationally intense. And the only way he could deal with it was by remembering what had started this.
“You ready to answer my question yet?”
Her gaze snapped to his, wide-eyed and still bright from the tear-storm. She swallowed, moistened her lips, but then answered with a quick shake of her head.
“No, you’re not ready or no, you haven’t?”
Her gaze fell away, down to where her fingers clutched tightly at the balled-up shirt in her hands. Probably answer enough, but Tomas needed to be sure. With a finger under her chin, he tipped her face back up.
“Tell me, Angie.”
“No, I haven’t,” she said, and something uncoiled deep in his gut. He didn’t want to call it relief, didn’t want to call it anything but concern for her and whatever had caused this outburst of emotion. “Then what was all this about?”
“I did a test this morning.” She straightened her shoulders and met his eyes. “It was negative.”
“Isn’t it too early to be accurate?”
“I should have left it a couple more days, to be sure, but I couldn’t.”
“Impatient as ever?”
“I wanted to know.”
Yeah, he could see that in her glistening eyes. He could hear it in the wobble in her voice. She wanted to know and she wanted the result to be positive.
Looking at her face now, he remembered in the night when she’d placed his hand on her belly, remembered the sensations roaring through his body, too many, too fast, too intense. Remembered fighting his way out of that drowning sensation and his relief when she’d reached out and touched him. When his responses turned primal, sexual, elemental. That he could understand and deal with, but not the undertow of emotion he saw in her eyes now. Reaching out, dragging him down to a place he never wanted to go again.
“I so wanted—”
He touched her mouth with his thumb. “Be patient, Angie. You said yourself it might be too early. Do you have another test kit?”
“Several.”
“But you’ll wait two days before you do another?”
She sighed softly. “Two days. Okay. I will.”
When Tomas had to leave the next day on an overnight trip to his western-most station, he almost invited Angie along. A distraction, he’d thought, so she wouldn’t run through those several test kits one after the other. He thought about her traveling beside him in the plane, thought about her sharing his bed, thought about her company and the interest she was taking in his business.
Thought about being with her when she read that test result, when her eyes looked up at his, all dark and luminous with—
No. He shut the gate on that thought-track with brutal speed. And he flew west alone, the way he was used to, the way he liked it, the way it would always be.
Thirty-six hours later he returned the same way.
By now she would know. He didn’t let himself imagine one outcome or the other, didn’t allow himself anything other than an urgency to find her and to know the result. By the time he tracked her down at the waterhole, his edginess had escalated to an acute tension that held his backbone and shoulder muscles rigidly straight.
“Mau said I’d find you here.” A fitting location, the waterhole, seeing as this is where it all started. Where she’d looked him in the eye and said she would have his baby. Today, however, her eyes were fixed on the surface of the water that glistened gold in the late-afternoon sun.
“Did she tell you about Rafe?”
“Getting married? Yup.” He hadn’t wanted to talk about his brother’s out-of-nowhere Vegas wedding with Mau, and he sure as hell didn’t want to discuss it now.
He squatted down beside her, intent on telling her so until she slanted him a guarded look across her shoulder. “The pressure’s off then. With Alex’s wedding next week and now Rafe doing his bit.”
Tomas went completely still. “What are you saying, Angie? Yes or no?”
“I don’t know. I still don’t have my period, but the second test was negative.” Tomas swore softly, and she huffed out a breath. “My sentiment exactly.”
“Are these home tests reliable?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never had cause to use one before.”
He stared at her a moment, unsure what to make of her frame of mind. “What now?” he asked.
“I suppose I’ll have to see a doctor.”
“You don’t sound very happy about the prospect.” In fact she sounded downright reluctant, and that rubbed the rough edges of his mood. “What if there’s something wrong? You said yourself your cycle is regular—” his eyes narrowed “—or was that a stretch of the truth?”
“Is that what you think?”
“No.” He let his breath go on a relenting sigh. “No, I don’t. You sounded so…reluctant.”
And he sounded so worried that Angie’s umbrage turned to instant mush. “I’m fine. Really, I am.”
“Is there a doctor in Sydney you’d prefer to see?” he asked, obviously unconvinced.
“Not really, but—”
“I’ll ring Alex tonight. He’ll know someone.”
“You think Alex sees a gyno?”
Not the right time for making jokes, Angie decided as she watched his mouth set in a tight line. But she’d felt the need to grasp at something, anything—including bad humor—before the decision about her immediate future and everything she longed for slipped away.
Okay. No more jokes, no more evading. Moment of truth, sister.
Drawing a deep breath, she slowly turned her head and looked into his eyes. Flat, hard, unyielding. Her heart skipped. “I’m not reluctant about seeing a doctor. I do want to know what’s going on. I want to know.”
“What is the problem then?”
“I don’t know that I’m ready to leave here.”
“That’s what we agreed, Angie.”
And if she was leaving, if this was over, then why hold back? She had nothing to lose in laying everything bare, everything she’d struggled to hold inside these last weeks. Everything that brimmed in her heart.
“That’s what we agreed—” she said softly “—before we made love the other night.”
Something flared in his eyes for a split second before he set his jaw in that stubborn, uncompromising line. But that minute reaction was enough to set Angie’s resolve to match. Oh, no, Tomas Carlisle. It’s time to stop hiding. It’s time to find out what you really think.
“At least that’s what I did. I made love to you, with my body and my heart and my soul.” Resistance, strong and hard flattened his expression and she leaned closer, placed her hand on his a
rm. “I’m sorry if you don’t want to hear this, but I need to tell you. I can’t not tell you.”
“I didn’t promise you anything,” he said tightly.
“Oh, I know that. You never promised me anything way back when I fell in love with you, either, but that didn’t stop me.”
“You were a kid.”
“I was eighteen and grown up enough to know what I wanted. That’s never changed, Tomas. I’ve loved you a long time—probably forever—but it really hit hard after you met Brooke.”
That muscle ticked in his jaw again, but now she’d started there was no way she would stop, not until she’d told him everything.
“Even then, I thought it might be an envy thing—my friend getting what I wanted so badly. And then I wondered if it was more about losing you as a friend, because the way I felt I couldn’t talk to you any more. “
“I didn’t ever cut you off, Angie.”
“I know you didn’t, not deliberately, but I felt cut off.” Smiling sadly, she shook her head. “You were so besotted and always flying off to the city to see her, and when I did see you together I felt like my heart was being ripped out. I was afraid what I might say to you or Brooke.”
“From memory, you did have your say.”
“Down here? Yeah, I guess I did have a bit to say that night.” She huffed out a breath, remembering. “It was a long time coming, though, because I kept questioning my motivation. What right did I have to caution you about marrying another woman when I wanted you for myself? Not that it stopped me.”
She expected his agreement, some wry comment on her always saying her piece, but instead he looked steadily into her eyes and asked, “Is that why you didn’t come to our wedding?”
“I couldn’t,” she said, and her voice shook with emotion. “I couldn’t watch you together. I couldn’t smile and play happy bridesmaid and catch the bouquet and pretend. The way I felt, Lord knows what I might have yelled out when the minister asked if anyone could show just cause.”
Neither of them smiled. The atmosphere felt too intense, too grave, at complete odds with the perfect spring evening with its promise of a magical outback sunset.
“That’s why you went away?” he asked.
She nodded. “And that’s why I stayed away and why I didn’t come home for Brooke’s funeral. I felt too much of a hypocrite. I know that doesn’t say much for me as a person or as a friend, but that’s the truth.”
He didn’t say a word for a long, long while and despite the warmth of the sun, Angie rubbed her hands up and down her arms to ward off the sudden chill of his silence. She didn’t have a clue what he was thinking. He picked up several pebbles from the ground at his feet and ran them through his fingers, and despite the intensity of the moment she couldn’t stop watching the play of his hand, the slow stroke of his thumb.
“I can’t give you what you’re asking for, Angie.” His voice, low and taut, shivered over her skin.
“Because of Brooke?”
“Yes.” He studied the pebbles another second, then tossed them into the water. Angie watched the disturbance of their entry ripple across the water in ever-increasing rings until they disappeared altogether. And when he looked up again, Tomas’s eyes were as mirror flat as that silver-blue surface. “You were right, Angie, what you said down here that night.”
It took a moment for his meaning to gel, it was so unexpected. Angie swallowed hard—she had to in order to speak. “About Brooke fitting in?”
“She tried,” he said after a beat of pause. “But she hated the time I spent away. Hated being alone, the isolation. The lack.”
He didn’t need to elucidate on that. Brooke had been a city girl through and through, slightly spoiled, not used to a lack of anything.
“You couldn’t find some compromise?” she asked carefully. “A job she could do from—”
“She got a job,” he said curtly. “In Broome. She’d applied, interviewed, without telling me. A done deal.”
A surprise, Angie guessed, and why he didn’t much like them.
“She told me the day she died.” He looked up, and although his voice was flat, even, controlled, the look in his eyes was raw. “I can’t go through that again, Angie. I don’t have anything left to give.”
“I’m not asking for anything.”
“You are, Angie. I see it in your eyes and I hear it in your voice.”
“No.” Adamant, needing him to understand, to see into her heart, she leaned forward and made him look at her. “I only want you.”
He stared back at her a moment. “Tell me you don’t want to be my wife.”
“I can’t,” she breathed, and in that moment she knew that her honesty would cost. Knew it would be her undoing.
“I can’t marry you, Angie.”
“I’m not asking for that commitment. I just want to stay, to live here with you.” Her voice shook with the depth of her emotion. “I know about the isolation, I know how hard you work, and none of that fazes me. Give me a chance, Tomas, a chance to prove that this is the only place I want to be. Give me a chance to love you, that’s all I want.”
“I can’t love you, Angie, and you deserve better than that.”
Tomas made an appointment for her to see a doctor recommended by Alex—or Alex’s secretary—the following week. Not a good time for him to be away, but he rearranged his schedule so he could go with her. She argued about whether that was necessary, but he stood his ground.
“It’s my baby, too. I’m going to be there.”
“Are you going to be there when he first starts to move? When she kicks? When he’s born? Her first day—”
She’d made her point and he walked away. He wouldn’t fight with her—what could be gained? The next day he flew to Brisbane to meet with some Japanese buyers, and when he returned three days later she was gone. He picked up the note she’d left in the middle of his bed, and scanned the words again.
I know you don’t like surprises, so I am leaving this note. I want to see the doctor alone—if that’s the way it will be in the future, then that’s the way it should be now. I’ll let you know when I have any news, either before or after the appointment. Love always, Angie.
He tried not to notice the quietness of a house without her vibrant presence, the loneliness of his dinner table, the skip of his pulse when he walked in the door half expecting to see her before he remembered…
She was gone, and wasn’t that what he’d wanted all along?
Fourteen
The e-mail arrived the day before the doctor’s appointment he’d made on her behalf, catching Tomas completely unprepared. He stared at the screen for five, ten, fifteen seconds while a herd of wild emotions stampeded through his system. When the thunder of his heartbeat receded to a bearable level he clicked on her name and opened the message.
It was short and to the point: she wasn’t pregnant. She was very sorry she hadn’t been able to help him, in any way. She wished him all the best.
No explanation of how she knew; no hint of how she’d taken the news; no sign that she felt anything like the hollow clenching disappointment in his gut.
Did she really think that a cold, unemotional e-mail was all he wanted from her? Hell, she hadn’t even tempered the tone with a personal salutation. He stared at the signature line. Angelina Mori, Corporate Conference Center, Carlisle Grande Hotel.
She hadn’t wasted any time asking Rafe for a new job. So much for her passionate I-love-the-outback vows. Evidently she’d slotted right back into the city. Clearly she didn’t have time to call and tell him the news person to person. Obviously she had no idea how mad that would make him…or how worried because of all she hadn’t said.
He didn’t bother closing the e-mail or turning off the computer. He had a trip to plan.
By the time he arrived at the Carlisle Grande late that afternoon, Tomas had built up a full head of resentment, all of it justified. He was also tired, cranky, and edgy as a bullock in a branding race. It didn’t
help that Angie wasn’t in her office, that he’d been led on a merry goose-chase through three levels of hotel facilities in an attempt to track her down. It didn’t cross his mind to stay put and send a message. Sitting down was not an option.
He was a man on a mission, and when he stepped off the elevator—the fifth time—and caught sight of her at the far end of the ballroom he was in no mood for niceties.
The staff member who stepped into his path obviously was. “May I be of assistance, sir?”
“I’m here to see Angie,” he said shortly.
“Do you mean Ms. Mori?”
Tomas ground his teeth. “Forget it, I’ll go tell her myself.”
“Is she expecting you?”
“I doubt it.”
She was wearing the Ms. Hotel Management outfit, he noticed as he strode toward her, and looking all city-sleek and so damn beautiful that he had to work overtime to maintain his rage. Luckily it was a huge room. Luckily she was engrossed in conversation with a small cluster of pink-suited women and didn’t notice his approach.
Then he heard the soft chuckle of her laughter and the impact of that sound caught thick in his chest. She was laughing? He’d dropped everything and rushed here because he was afraid for her emotional state after that terse un-Angie-like e-mail and she was laughing?
His temper seethed on the brink of control as he came to a halt several yards away, his gaze fixed on her smiling profile. He saw her stiffen slightly a second before she turned his way. Whatever she’d been saying froze on her lips and so did her smile. He was vaguely aware of the other women turning too, of all the chatter gradually fading into an intense, electric silence.
Only vaguely, though, because so much of his attention was focused on her face, on her full lips as they silently mouthed his name, on the surge of emotion that rocketed through his body. On stopping himself from walking over there, picking her up as he’d done that day in his bedroom, and carrying her off someplace private where he could rail and yell and then kiss her senseless.
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