Her Favorite Temptation

by Mayberry, Sarah

  What a pity she’d already made a bad first impression with him with the whole talking-out-loud-to-herself thing last night. If she hadn’t, she could go out, introduce herself, and they could—

  Excuse me. I don’t mean to interrupt this truly excellent flight of fancy, but exactly who are you supposed to be in this scenario? Leah Mathews in an alternate universe?

  She set her empty plate on the coffee table. The truth was, even if her new neighbor hadn’t busted her enjoying a soliloquy last night, she wouldn’t have the first idea how to casually introduce herself to such an attractive man. She was hopeless with man-woman stuff, always had been. She’d been too busy with her head in a book to learn how to flirt in high school, and by the time she got to university, it seemed that the possibility of ever doing so had evaporated forever. The three men she’d had intimate relations with in her lifetime had all been fellow students or colleagues, and, down to a man, they’d been the ones to initiate things. She’d simply gone along for the ride.

  Another cowardly custard medal to add to your collection. You should seriously consider getting a cabinet to display them all.

  She frowned. It had never occurred to her to view her reticence with the opposite sex as a form of cowardice. She’d always made excuses for herself—lack of experience, lack of confidence. But neither experience nor confidence was going to miraculously appear in her life without her making an effort to acquire them. The truth was, she hadn’t made much effort to be brave where men were concerned, just as she hadn’t made much effort to be brave where her parents were concerned, either. For a long, long time, she’d simply devoted herself to doing what she was good at—learning—and let almost everything else fall by the wayside. All the things she’d found challenging—men, asserting her independence, fashion, friendships—had been conveniently sidestepped because she’d been too busy training for her “brilliant future.”

  Her mother’s words, not hers.

  Was it any wonder she’d found it so harrowing to inform her parents of her decision last night? She’d spent so long doing what was easy, following the path of least resistance in almost every aspect of her life, that she was woefully out of practice with forging her own path.

  She stared at the blank TV screen. Maybe she was being too hard on herself, but it seemed to her that she made a pretty pathetic thirty-year-old. She suspected there were teenagers who had a greater sense of self and a stronger spirit of independence than she did.

  For the second time in as many days, her thoughts shifted to her sister, Audrey.

  Audrey was strong. She was strong to the bone. Titanium strong. If they were close, the kind of sisters who shared each other’s lives, Leah could have picked up the phone right now and asked her how she’d done it, how she’d forged that iron-straight spine of hers.

  But they weren’t close. Not by a long shot.

  So. If Leah intended to start stretching herself and moving out of her comfort zone in more than one area of her life, it was up to her. Which was probably as it should be.

  Okay. Put your money where your mouth is. Go talk to Guitar Hottie.

  Everything inside her cringed at the thought, but she forced herself to seriously consider the idea. They were neighbors, after all. It was perfectly legitimate that she might want to introduce herself to someone whose life was separated from hers by a few inches of brick, wood and plaster. Certainly it didn’t automatically mean that she found him attractive or was hitting on him or anything like that. It simply meant she was being friendly.

  She stood. Then she sat again.

  If he was on the balcony again tomorrow, she’d say hello. He was clearly busy playing his guitar right now. She didn’t want to intrude.

  Pathetic. Maybe you should ring Mummy, tell her you’re going to be a surgeon, after all.

  She shot to her feet again. She wasn’t sure where the opinionated, sarcastic bitch voice in her head had come from, but she was getting old, fast. Teeth gritted, Leah went to the bathroom to check her hair. It was doing what it always did, with minor variations—hanging down her back and framing her face in a more or less orderly fashion. The tiny swipe of mascara she’d applied this morning was long gone, and lipstick had been but a memory since lunchtime.

  Well. It would have to do, because she wasn’t about to put on makeup just to introduce herself to her new neighbor. Even she, with her woeful track record with men, knew that that would send all the wrong signals.

  She tugged at the bottom of her taupe linen shirt, tossed her hair over her shoulder, then turned toward the door.

  She was going in. Or, more accurately, out.

  Whatever. She was doing this.

  CHAPTER TWO

  WILL PLUCKED AT the strings of his guitar, enjoying the pull of taut nylon against his fingertips. He’d had this Epiphone guitar for more than half his life; it was the first “proper” one he’d bought himself once he’d mastered the basics on his uncle’s old Yamaha acoustic.

  The varnish was worn to bare wood beneath the sound hole, and the once-glossy finish was scuffed and scarred by thousands of hours of play. It wasn’t the best or most expensive of his guitars, but it was the one that felt most at home in his arms. Old Faithful. Which was probably why he’d chosen to bring it with him for this trip to Melbourne, comfort being thin on the ground in his life right now.

  All on their own, his fingers formed a chord, and then another. He smiled, feeling the rightness of the song his body had chosen. “Waking Up Lonely” was Galahad Jones’s first single and an eventual sleeper hit, and still one of his favorites. A good choice to wind up tonight’s session.

  He was about to launch into the first verse when a woman stepped onto the balcony next door. The Shakespearean soliloquist, dressed in a rumpled-looking shirt and equally rumpled-looking pants. She walked to the railing and gripped it, gazing at the building opposite.

  He stopped playing, not wanting to encroach on her personal space. He’d been out here making noise for over an hour, more than long enough to test his neighbors’ patience.

  The moment he stopped, she swung to face him, her face a picture of dismay.

  “You’re not stopping because of me, are you? Please don’t.”

  “I didn’t want to hog the space.”

  “You’re not. I mean, you weren’t. It was nice.” She frowned, then abruptly strode to the nearest edge of the balcony and stuck her hand across the space that separated them. “I’m Leah, by the way.”

  It took Will a moment to catch up with what had happened. He stood, leaning across to shake her hand.

  “Will,” he said.

  Her hand was cool and surprisingly strong, her grip firm and no-nonsense. Up close, he could see that her clear, pale complexion owed nothing to makeup or good lighting and that she had beautiful eyes, a warm golden color that reminded him of good cognac.

  “I really liked that song you were playing earlier. The one about the streets at night. Did you write that?” she asked.

  He blinked, once again caught off guard. Clearly she hadn’t recognized him, but not to be familiar with a song that had sat at number one on the Australian music charts for weeks last year took a special kind of cultural blindness.

  “Um, yes. I did. Me and a friend,” he said.

  He couldn’t stop himself from smiling; it was such a novel situation. When he and Mark had won three Grammy Awards earlier in the year, their faces had been splashed across the front page of every Australian newspaper. These days, it was rare that he went anywhere without someone recognizing him, and he’d been convinced that his days of being comfortably anonymous were long gone.

  It was nice to be proved wrong.

  “Well, I really liked it. Do you play full-time? I don’t mean that as an insult, but I know a lot of musicians have to have other work to get by, so I was jus
t wondering if being a musician is, I guess, your career, or a hobby...?”

  She was very nervous for someone who didn’t know who he was. He decided it was pretty damned cute. One of the side effects of success was the endless stream of sycophants it brought to his door. Women who wanted to sleep with “a star.” Old school friends who wanted to borrow money. People who looked at him and saw nothing but opportunity for themselves.

  But Leah-of-the-rumpled-shirt didn’t know who he was, which meant she was nervous for other reasons. Like the fact that she was talking to the guy who’d moved in next door, for example.

  Definitely cute.

  “I’ve been pretty lucky. I get by,” he said.

  “That’s great. Really fantastic to be able to do something that you love for a living. Which you obviously do, I could tell from hearing you play. Not that I’m an expert or anything. The opposite, in fact. I spend most of my days up to my elbows in someone’s chest cavity. Really, I know zip about music.”

  He didn’t bother hiding his surprise. “Wow. That must be...messy.”

  “That didn’t sound too great, did it? Let me reassure you—I’m a doctor, not a serial killer.”

  “Phew. I was getting a little sweaty there for a minute.”

  It took her a moment to understand he was joking. Then she smiled, and her whole face lit up. It hit him that she was very beautiful. Not in an in-your-face way. There was nothing showy about her small nose. Her cheekbones weren’t runway-model severe or her mouth lipstick-commercial pouty. She was more quietly, delicately beautiful, like one of painter J. W. Waterhouse’s famous Pre-Raphaelite water nymphs.

  And yet she didn’t come across as delicate. Not with that handshake. And while her body was tall and willowy-slender, she didn’t seem fragile.

  “I should probably let you get back to your practicing or whatever it is you’re doing,” she said. “But it was nice meeting you.”

  “Good to meet you, too.”

  She turned toward the door, then swung to face him. “I forgot to ask, have you moved in permanently or just for a few weeks? We get a pretty high turnover around here.”

  “A few weeks.”

  “Oh.” Her tone was flat. Maybe even a little disappointed.

  He couldn’t help being flattered. What single, straight, red-blooded man would object to a beautiful, smart woman signaling interest in him?

  “I live an hour or two away, outside of Barwon Heads,” he explained.

  “A really nice part of the world. Lucky you.” She gave him a small goodbye wave before stepping into her apartment and closing the door.

  He looked at the strings on his guitar. He wasn’t sure why he’d added on that bit about being only an hour or two away.

  To let her know that even if he wasn’t moving in permanently, he wasn’t completely out of reach?

  Maybe.

  He smiled, a grim little twist of his lips. Sometimes it amazed him how good he was at the nothing-to-see-here-please-move-on routine he’d developed in recent weeks, even if only in the privacy of his own mind. Sometimes he really, genuinely forgot that in a few days’ time, he might not be in a position to flirt with pretty female doctors.

  He might not be in a position to do anything.

  Fear trembled through him, a small-scale seismic wave that had become all too familiar lately. He bowed his head and tightened his grip on the neck of the guitar, concentrating on the way the taut steel-wrapped nylon cut into his fingers, and the rush of air in and out of his lungs, and the steady thump-thump of his heart instead of the maelstrom of what-ifs whirling around in his head.

  This was real, right now. This moment. He was alive, he was whole. What might happen wasn’t something he had any control over. And he refused to spend the next few weeks cowering beneath some self-imposed cloud of doom, worrying about all the terrible possibilities.

  There was now. Only now. And he was making the most of it. He was going to play his guitar and remember all the great and not-so-great moments associated with each song, each lyric. And if Leah happened to step out onto her balcony again, he would talk to her, try to make her smile again, and he would enjoy it for what it was—a small, perfect moment of connection.

  Nothing more, nothing less.

  He would not think about tomorrow, or the day after.

  Not until he absolutely had to.

  * * *

  LEAH WENT TO bed with one of Will’s song rattling inside her head. She wasn’t sure what was so catchy about it—the lyrics, the chorus, the man who’d been singing it—but the song was the last thing she thought of before she fell asleep and the first thing to enter her mind the following morning.

  If she saw Will again, she would tell him the song had stayed with her and encourage him to record it. Although maybe that was one of those patronizing things people always said to musicians, as though recording a song and releasing it was as easy as washing your socks and hanging them out to dry. Maybe musicians got sick of having people tell them how to run their careers.

  She had no idea, since all her friends worked in the medical field—an occupational hazard when you spent most of your time in scrubs or a white coat.

  She stretched her arms over her head, pointed her toes, then snuggled into her pillow, allowing herself a few minutes of pure self-indulgence to remember the sheer hotness of her new neighbor. Just because she could.

  From a distance, she’d decided he was good-looking, but up close he’d taken her breath away. Thinking on it, she had no idea how she’d managed to form coherent sentences while they were talking last night. She closed her eyes, remembering the glimpse of firm chest she’d caught when he’d leaned across the railing to shake her hand, and the rich, deep blue of his eyes....

  Oh, yeah.

  The whole time she’d been talking to him, she’d been mentally undressing him, wondering what his chest looked like, his belly, his...thighs. She’d never done that with a man before, but she’d never met a man like Will before, either.

  She opened her eyes and sighed. The reality was, she’d probably never see him again, and even if she did, she would hardly be his cup of tea. Gorgeous, guitar-playing love gods did not hanker after slightly geeky, socially inept doctors. That was simply not the way the world worked.

  More was the pity.

  Her alarm clock sounded, a timely reminder that the day awaited. She threw off the covers, leaving the comfort of her bed and her illicit fantasies behind as she headed for the shower. It wasn’t until she was brushing her teeth that it hit her that she had only three days left of being a cardiothoracic surgeon.

  A pretty amazing concept. Despite her anxiety regarding her parents’ response to her big decision, she couldn’t deny the buzz of excitement she felt at the prospect of starting the next phase of her medical career—this time in a specialty she found compelling and fascinating.

  There was also the fact that she had eight weeks of downtime between exiting the surgical program and starting her new training. Eight whole weeks to herself.

  She stared in the mirror before bending to spit and rinse. What on earth would she do? She hadn’t taken a holiday in... She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a holiday. That wasn’t a great sign.

  Maybe she should go somewhere exotic. Maybe she should get a tan and drink cocktails from a glass made from a coconut shell and have an inappropriate fling with a sexy stranger.

  A moment from last night flashed into her mind—her hand springing out like the world’s most awkward jack-in-the-box as she introduced herself to Will.

  She grimaced. The odds of her picking up an inappropriate sexy stranger in an exotic, far-flung locale were pretty slim. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t do something constructive or adventurous with her time off.

  She mulled over her options during the dri
ve to the hospital but pushed holiday thoughts aside as she got sucked into the day. Once again it was a long one, with two complicated surgeries and lots of follow-up appointments in the afternoon. She ignored no fewer than three phone calls from her mother throughout the day, refusing to fall into yesterday’s trap again. The last thing she needed was her mother’s negativity bouncing around inside her head while she was replacing someone’s aortic valve.

  Knowing her mother as well as she did, perhaps Leah shouldn’t have been surprised to find her waiting by her car in the parking garage next to the hospital when Leah left that night. Her steps slowed when she spotted her mother’s slim, straight figure standing guard by her SUV. Then she tucked her chin into her chest, girded her loins and forged ahead.

  The ensuing conversation was, in a word, horrible. First the pleading, then the recriminations and, finally, the blame. Leah stomached as much of it as she could before getting in her car and driving home.

  Once again, her hands were trembling on the steering wheel, her stomach churning. She kept telling herself that she was doing the right thing, that eventually her mother would have to come around, and by the time she let herself into her apartment she’d managed to regain some of her equilibrium.

  At least their conversation hadn’t been as fiery and angry as the night she’d first dropped her bombshell. If her mother had been at ten on the freak-out scale then, tonight was maybe an eight. Possibly even a seven. After six months or so, she might even be approaching a two or one.

  Something to look forward to.

  As usual, she threw her bag onto the kitchen counter and reached for the freezer door in one smooth, well-practiced move. She hesitated for a moment over choosing the honey-mustard chicken versus the spinach-and-ricotta ravioli, and opted for the former. She’d finished delivering several puncture wounds to the packaging and whacking it in the microwave when a knock sounded at the door.