Burning Up

by Sarah Mayberry

  “We both knew what this was,” he said. “I warned you I wasn’t a one-woman guy. I made it very clear that I don’t do commitment.” He sounded defensive—probably because that was how he felt.

  “I get that. But the least you owed me was a conversation. A little bit of consideration. Is that too much to ask?”

  It wasn’t, but it was. He stared at her, wanting to comfort her, to apologize, but knowing that he had nothing to offer and that her anger was going to be the best cure for her feelings for him.

  “It scares you, doesn’t it? Me loving you?” she asked quietly. “The fact that I can be honest and up-front about it. I bet if I took your pulse right now it would be through the roof.”

  Ignoring the fact that she was right and his heart was pounding against his rib cage and his palms were sweaty, Lucas bristled.

  “Listen, I’m sorry things haven’t worked out the way you wanted. I like you, Sophie. I think you’re great. But that’s all,” he said.

  “And what about your nightmares? They don’t mean anything, as well, I take it?”

  Jesus, they were back to this again.

  “Spare me the psychobabble,” he said. “This is not about me.”

  “Isn’t it? Let me tell you just how much this is about you, Lucas. You’re a grown man who experiences the same nightmare from his childhood over and over yet refuses to deal with it. You’re a man who has deliberately avoided making a home for himself anywhere in the world or forming meaningful connections with people—you even hate your own manager, for Pete’s sake. You make a living by pretending to be other people. And when I have the temerity, the gall, to tell you that I love you, your first response is to create a situation where I will be so repulsed, so hurt that I will retract my offering and retreat. This is so much about you it’s not funny.”

  Perhaps it was the mention of his nightmares, or maybe it was the crack about him being afraid of intimacy. Whatever—he saw red.

  “I’m sorry, Sophie, but it’s not my fault that you wasted the last fourteen years of your life with Mr. Bland because you were freaking out over your sister,” he said. “Don’t try to pin any of this on me. I didn’t ask for you to fall in love me.”

  She stared at him. “Why are you being so cruel?”

  He couldn’t hold her eye.

  “You’re the one who made this messy, Sophie.”

  “Because I fell in love with you? What a crime,” she said, then she turned on her heel.

  “You can cook your own lunch,” she said over her shoulder as she exited.

  Lucas stood alone in the kitchen, staring at the blank wall for a long time.

  It was done. Time to move on.

  16

  SOPHIE COULDN’T BELIEVE that the same man who had tenderly washed her feet last night had just flirted with some topless bimbo right in front of her. And she couldn’t believe that he’d made that crack about her and Brandon. Alone in the caretaker’s lodge, Sophie paced, needing to find an outlet for all the anger bubbling up inside her.

  He was so closed off, so self-protective. While she understood why a kid growing up the way he did might find it necessary to guard himself like that, it made her so mad when she thought about what he was turning his back on.

  And she wasn’t only thinking of her own love for him. She was thinking about all the other ordinary connections with human beings that he denied himself all the time, using his playboy persona to keep the world at a distance. Over the past few weeks he’d let his guard down and allowed her to see the real Lucas. It was why she’d fallen deeply, profoundly in love with him. But he hated being that vulnerable. And he refused to let love into his life.

  And the best, the most stellar thing about all of it was that he was so famous that even if she never saw him again in the flesh, she’d be confronted by his image on billboards, in magazines and on cinema screens for the rest of her life.

  Sophie slumped onto the couch and put her head in her hands.

  What made her saddest of all was the fact that she would never get the chance to chase the shadows out from behind his eyes. She wanted to care for him, help him heal, love him. She wanted to wake up with his body curled around hers, his breath on the back of her neck. She wanted to hear him laugh every day, and beat him at Scrabble and do a hundred thousand more crosswords with him.

  Four weeks was not enough. It was never going to be enough—something she’d known instinctively right from the start. Something she now had a lifetime to regret.

  The tears came then. Body-racking sobs that made her stomach and chest hurt. She wound up on the bed, curled into her knees, howling like a bereft child. It was such a loss—to have found the special man beneath all that surface charm, only to lose him just as she was beginning to finally understand him. It seemed profoundly unfair. And it hurt—it hurt with a physical ache in her heart.

  She loved Lucas Grant, and he did not or could not love her in return.

  Dinnertime came and went. She figured they could order in food if they wanted to eat. Eventually she fell asleep, and the face that greeted her the next morning was pale and puffy-eyed.

  Great. Now she had to make breakfast for the beautiful people looking like a slit-eyed goblin. Joy to the world.

  She was surprised to find a thick pall of smoke hanging over the estate when she exited the lodge. The bushfires had obviously grown worse in the night. Her step brisk, she headed for the radio in the kitchen.

  She stopped in her tracks when she saw the stack of luggage just inside the door from the terrace. Since it was large and expensive-looking, she figured it was Lucas’s. Continuing through to the kitchen, she found him leaning against the counter eating a bowl of cereal.

  “You’re leaving.”

  “We all are. They’re issuing warnings for this area now. The wind changed overnight and the fire is into the state forest.”

  Sophie nodded. “I see. Well, that makes it easy then, doesn’t it?”

  She could feel his gaze on her, and she wished for her pride’s sake that she didn’t look as though she’d been crying her heart out half the night.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. She could hear the reluctance in his tone, and it made her toes curl. The last thing she wanted was his pity.

  “I’m fine,” she said, busying herself at the fridge. If they were evacuating, she needed to dispose of any perishables.

  “You don’t look fine,” he said.

  “Thank you. I’m aware of that.”

  He hovered for a few more minutes, but she ignored him. Only when he turned his back did she look at him, her eyes mapping the width of his shoulders, the length of his legs as he exited the kitchen.

  He was so handsome, so appealing. And she was such a fool for falling for him.

  By the time she’d filled two cartons with fresh produce and given the kitchen a quick clean, Derek, Adele and friends had gone and only Lucas was left. He caught up to her as she lugged the first of the produce boxes to her car. His Porsche was sitting in the driveway, the roof up in deference to the smoke haze.

  “Let me take that,” he said, reaching for the box.

  She twisted her hips, jerking the box from his grasp. “I can handle it.”

  Spine straight, she marched around the back of the garage to where she’d parked her faded green Volkswagen.

  “How much longer are you going to be?” Lucas asked from behind her, and Sophie dropped the carton into the trunk of her car with a thump.

  “You know, you should just go,” she suggested. “I need to pack up my stuff and make sure I didn’t leave anything up in your room.”

  “I’m asking because I think the smoke is getting thicker, not because I’m hassling you,” he said.

  “If things were that dicey, the police would have come knocking to clear us out. I grew up in the country,” she said. “I know the drill.”

  He eyed her uncertainly, his gaze shifting over her shoulder to consider the smoke haze. Staring up at his strong, hands
ome face, she was overwhelmed by a pathetic, weak urge to throw herself at his feet and beg him to at least give them a chance.

  “Be careful, Lucas. Any more of this and I might get the idea that you care or something,” she said, mostly because she wanted him to go before she did or said something irredeemably feeble. “I can look after myself, you know.”

  “Fine. If that’s what you want,” he said. He slid his sunglasses on, and she found herself staring at a warped, double reflection of her own face in his lenses and had to look away from the pain she saw there.

  “I had a good time, Sophie,” he said quietly.

  “Sure.” The single word was all she could manage. She was too busy swallowing stupid tears to muster anything else.

  He hesitated a moment, then walked away.

  She waited until she heard the sound of his car engine firing before she headed toward the house.

  Goodbye, Lucas. It was nice loving you.

  LUCAS PUT HIS FOOT to the floor and took the turns in the mountain road way too quickly.

  He felt like shit. He’d hurt Sophie. He’d left her alone to close up the house. He hadn’t had the courage to say any of the things that he wanted to say to her. Such as, if ever he was going to take the risk of loving someone, it would be her. And he missed her laughter. And he would never forget her or the time they’d spent together.

  “Damn it,” he swore, thumping the steering wheel with a closed fist.

  He slowed, tempted to pull onto the verge and execute a U-turn. It felt wrong to be driving away from her like this.

  But if he went back, what was he going to say to her? What did he have to offer?

  He couldn’t ask her to continue their relationship on a casual basis, no matter how much he was going to miss her, no matter how much he wanted to be near her. She loved him, which meant she was out of bounds. He would only hurt her further if he selfishly pursued his own desires.

  He thumped the steering wheel again as he thought about the things she’d said to him last night about his nightmares and his career choice and his lifestyle. He was a successful guy. He had money, fame, power. Yet she’d made him sound so small and hollow.

  Which just went to show how little she knew about him, and how dangerous a little psychological double-speak could be in the wrong hands.

  One thing she’d said kept niggling at him, however: that he was afraid of intimacy. Her implication that he surrounded himself with people he didn’t really like or trust had gnawed at him all night. Especially because she’d cited Derek as an example.

  Because it was true. Lucas didn’t like his manager. He and Derek didn’t share the same values, or the same sense of who Lucas was as an actor. They didn’t even have the same vision for his career. He’d told himself over and over that he tolerated Derek’s greed, insensitivity and slick insincerity because having a manager in Hollywood was a necessary evil, and Derek was no more or less sleazy than the next guy or gal.

  But it wasn’t true, and he knew it. So why did he tolerate the relationship?

  And why had he not missed a single one of his “friends” while he’d been sequestered in the mountains with Sophie for almost a month? When he was in Sydney or L.A. or New York, he could be busy every night of the week if he so chose. So why hadn’t he felt the itch to make contact with any of his usual social circle?

  And perhaps most tellingly, why did a beautiful girl like Camilla—a woman he’d been hot for less than a month ago—leave him cold now that he’d experienced the warmth of having Sophie in his world?

  His foot pressed harder on the accelerator as he tried to outrun his thoughts. He’d get over her. It had just been four weeks of fun, after all.

  The words rang hollow, even to him, but the sound of sirens distracted him. He edged the Porsche closer to the side of the road as three huge fire trucks raced past, heading up the mountain. Slowing even more, Lucas watched them disappear into the smoke haze in the rearview mirror. Flicking on the car radio, he roamed around until he found Radio National. He was drumming his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel, waiting for a bushfire update, when he rounded a hairpin turn and found himself driving toward a roadblock.

  The two police officers staffing it waved him through, but Lucas braked to a halt and let his window down.

  “Hey. What’s going on back up the mountain?” he asked.

  The cop’s eyes widened as he recognized him.

  “Wow. Hi,” he said, his mouth twisting into a goofy smile.

  Lucas sighed. “Up the mountain?” he prompted again, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

  “Yeah. Right. The fire’s jumped the breaks again. We’re evacuating everything west of here.”

  “Where’s the fire front?” Lucas asked, his gut tightening.

  Sophie was still back up there somewhere.

  “Coming through Faulconbridge and Linden, last we heard.”

  Both only twenty minutes by car from the Jenkinses’ estate. Bushfires could travel quickly, he knew from watching decades of news reports. Which meant Sophie could be trapped back there, either at the house or on the road.

  He didn’t stop to think, he just acted. Slamming the car into reverse, he executed a swerving three-point turn. The cop raced forward, a frown on his previously starstruck face.

  “Lucas, mate, what are you doing?” he asked, grabbing the car door as though he could physically prevent Lucas from leaving.

  “I’ve got a friend back up there,” Lucas said.

  “You can’t go back. The fire crews are up there. We’ll radio them and tell them to be on the alert,” the cop offered.

  “Not good enough,” Lucas said.

  And it wasn’t. Not when Sophie was in danger. He wasn’t leaving her up there to face a raging bushfire on her own. Ignoring the cop’s shout of protest, he gunned the motor and the car sprang forward. Within seconds the roadblock behind him had been swallowed by the smoke haze.

  Flicking his high beams on, Lucas took the first corner at speed. Reaching for his cell, he found Julie Jenkins’s number. She answered on the first ring.

  “Julie, it’s Lucas Grant. I need Sophie Gallagher’s cell number. Do you have it?” he asked, not bothering with social niceties.

  “Lucas—I was just about to call you. Please tell me you and Sophie have evacuated the house,” she asked.

  “I’m on my way back there right now, but I don’t know if Sophie’s left,” he explained.

  Julie was a smart woman, and she didn’t waste another second of his time as she reeled off Sophie’s number. He ended the call with a brisk thanks and punched in Sophie’s number. When it went straight through to voice mail, he swore.

  “Sophie, if you’re still at the house, stay there. The front is coming through. Stay indoors, and find a room where you can protect yourself from smoke,” he instructed.

  Throwing his phone onto the passenger seat, he concentrated on the road. The smoke was getting thicker and thicker, and twice he passed cars speeding in the opposite direction. Neither of them was Sophie’s green Beetle, and he gripped the wheel harder as he tried not to think about why she would have been so delayed in following him off the mountain.

  His answer came soon enough. Cresting a rise, his headlights picked out a dark shape in the eddying smoke up ahead. He eased back on the gas as he made out the distinctive curved shape of her car. A small figure was hunkered down beside it, working furiously to change a flat tire.

  “Jesus,” he swore under his breath. Thank God he’d come back.

  Swerving his car onto the verge, he pulled the car into a sharp U-turn and parked it, pointing down the mountain, ready for a fast exit. Leaving the engine running, he shoved open the car door and ran across to where Sophie was standing, squinting at him through the smoke.

  “Get in the car,” he said. “The fire’s coming through.”

  “I know. I saw the trucks.”

  He grabbed her arm, urging her toward the Porsche.

  “I can
’t. My car…” she said, digging her heels in.

  “I’ll buy you a new one,” he said, his only thought to get her to safety.

  “No, wait!” she said, tugging her arm free from his grasp and spinning back toward the Beetle.

  He leaped after her, but she already had the car door open, and he saw she was collecting a carton from the passenger seat. Lord help him, but if she was trying to save the groceries, he was going to shake her till her teeth rattled!

  Then she straightened and he saw the curled form of a baby wombat nestling in among Sophie’s chef’s clothes and recipe folder.

  “I found him wandering on the road,” Sophie said, her big eyes anxious. “I couldn’t leave him up there. If the fire didn’t get him, he’d probably get squished by a truck.”

  Only Sophie could risk life and limb for a ball of fur with an oversize nose.

  “You are unbelievable,” he said. “Come on.”

  They’d barely taken a step toward his waiting car when they heard it—an intense roaring like a jet airplane about to take off. A surge of intense heat hit them, and they both began to cough as the smoke around them became thick and dark.

  The fire front was on them. Sophie gave a start of fright as a big red kangaroo burst from the bush nearby, racing for its life as the fire chased it.

  “Down!” Lucas yelled over the roar, shoving Sophie back toward her car. The Porsche was only meters away, but even that was too far under the circumstances. There wasn’t even time to get inside her car and roll up the windows. Instead, he thrust Sophie to the ground in the lee of her car, snatching her chef’s coat from the wombat’s box and covering her head and face with it. She slid the box as close to the car as possible, curling her body around it, and he lay over top of her, covering as much of her as he could.

  Then it hit them. A roaring, crackling, searing monster that leaped the narrow roadway with voracious hunger. He didn’t dare lift his head. All he could do was hope that the car afforded them enough shelter to outlast the intense heat of the front as it passed. In theory, with a canopy fire like this one, that should only take a matter of seconds, maybe minutes.