Элли Блейк – A Night with the Society Playboy (страница 3)

Caleb tipped back onto his heels. If he’d thought his fingertips were tingly they had nothing on his bottom lip. He dragged his upper teeth over it to stave off the sense memory lingering thereupon.

‘It was a beautiful ceremony, don’t you think?’ Ava asked, turning side on, stealing away her leather strap, the V of her dress and her lips from his gaze as her eyes roved lazily over the noisily expanding crowd.

She was playing it beautifully cool, was she? Well, she’d just met the master of cool. Ready yourself for a chill, kiddo…

‘Gorgeous,’ he said, his tone glacial.

‘And have you ever seen such stars?’

‘When I have looked up. Sure.’

‘It’s such a perfect night for an outdoor reception.’ Her nose screwed up. ‘Though it will rain.’

‘Do you have a barometer tucked somewhere beneath your dress?’

Her mouth twitched. ‘Don’t need one. The patch of cloud to the east. That’s cumulonimbus cloud, the bringer of rain. But it won’t come till late tonight. My parents wouldn’t have had it any other way.’ She leaned in ever so slightly and lowered her voice as she said, ‘And did you get a load of the chandeliers?’

‘You mean the insurance nightmare,’ he shot back.

‘Yes!’ she said, turning to face him, grinning and pointing at his chest. ‘That’s just what I was thinking. They are a Phantom of the Opera intermission just waiting to happen.’

He laughed. True, it was only a soft cough kind of laugh, but it was a definite departure from cool.

Who was he trying to kid? He’d never been cool around this piece of work. What was the point? She could speak several different languages but the nuances of plain Australian cool went straight over her head.

Caleb straightened his shoulders until he felt a slightly uncomfortable warmth seep into his muscles, but it was enough to get him to start to relax. Relaxed was usually his permanent state. He never had to try this hard.

He turned his right knee toward her and leaned in. ‘Let’s hope for the wedding planner’s sake it doesn’t rain or your mother will no doubt refuse to pay while your father will hole himself up in his office for a month glad for the excuse to do so.’

Rather than getting a grin for his efforts, Ava’s answering smile was toothless, and brief. The continuous swirling of champagne was also a good sign she wasn’t feeling as bright and breezy as she was making out.

She was working as hard at this conversation as he was.

He looked away lest she figure him out as easily.

And where was the waiter with the hors d’oeuvres when he needed him?

CHAPTER TWO

‘I’M REALLY glad I bumped into you tonight before things get too crazy,’ Ava said.

‘How crazy do you think they plan on getting?’ Caleb asked.

‘The DJ is a cousin of mine.’

‘Right. So if he knows any music produced later than nineteen eighty-five we should be very much surprised.’

Ava smiled. Looked away. Looked back. ‘Damien told me you were in New York late last year.’

That was some segue, he thought. ‘That I was. It was a business trip. In and out.’

‘I can’t believe you never came out to visit. It’s a forty- minute flight to Boston.’

‘And a half-day spent at JFK. Time prohibitive.’

She nodded. Locked eyes. Swallowed. There was a husky note to her voice when she said, ‘I missed you, you know.’

And just like that, with the faintest whisper of vulnerability, Ava turned Caleb’s stoic resistance to putty. His tingling nerves burst into action, stinging the length of his fingers until he ached to reach out and touch her arm. To run his thumb over that full bottom lip. To hook a finger beneath that leather strap and slide its hidden secrets and regrets into the light.

Bad news. Little Ava Halliburton was nothing but bad news and it would pay to remember it. Just to hit the point home, through the pocket of his trousers he grabbed a pinch of leg hair and gave it a nice painful tug.

After her words had long since begun to fade into the noise around them, Ava cleared her throat and looked down at her shoes. ‘I missed all of you guys. Heaps. Seeing everyone today really hit home how long I’ve been gone. My cousin the DJ was eight when I left and now…’

‘Now he knows how to work a CD stacker like nobody’s business.’

‘Exactly.’

She glanced up at him from beneath those impossible eyelashes. He’d always thought them her best feature. But now they were running a pretty close tie with those wide smooth lips. He bit the inside of his cheek in penance.

Then said, ‘It’s nice to see you finally managed to peel yourself away from lectures and study groups for your brother’s big day.’

A glint sparked within her sky-blue eyes and her lips widened, creating soft pink apples in her cheeks. Heaven help him.

‘And just as nice to see you are no less of a buffoon than you always were. I can’t believe Damo had to ask for the ring no less than three times. It will be the story they’ll bring up every wedding anniversary for ever more.’

He gave a short bow. ‘I aim to please.’

‘Mmm,’ she said, her eyes all too easily leaving his as she surveyed the room. ‘I remember now you always were the kind of guy who liked to steal the limelight.’

She remembered now? How flattering. He said, ‘While you always preferred to run from attention as though it might burn.’

The glint in her eyes flickered. Ever so slightly. But enough he knew he’d scored a hit. It felt less satisfying than he’d thought it would.

She brought her champagne glass to her lips and his obedient eyes followed. And then he saw that her left ring finger was clean and clear.

The last he’d heard she was meant to be living with a professor double her age or some such tale. It was one of many such tales he’d heard over the years, stories of inappropriate and much older men, of subsequent broken hearts and consequential school transfers from one side of the world to the other.

He wondered if running into Ava’s ‘plus one’ was going to be his after-dinner surprise. He pictured some obscenely tall, grey-haired type with small glasses and a vocabulary built to keep ne’er-do-wells like him in their place.

At least by the look of things either the guy was a dud and hadn’t given the poor girl the appropriate bling, or she was, in fact, as yet, still single.

He was a torn man deciding which was the more deserved outcome.

When he looked up she was watching him. More than just watching him—her eyes were roving slowly and carefully over every inch of his face.

When she noticed he had noticed, she smiled. ‘I can see some things have changed. You never had stubble before.’

She reached out a hand but it stopped just millimetres short of touching him, the backs of her knuckles grazing nothing but air as she traced the contours of his face.

‘It didn’t occur to you to shave for the occasion,’ she said.

Caleb took the opportunity to run his fingers over his stubble; the sting of short, sharp hair against skin was beautifully distracting to his other senses, which were on overload.

All that soft familiar hair, soft female skin, soft clouds of perfume he couldn’t identify but knew he’d never forget; those soft pink lips he’d kissed for the last time only moments before she’d walked away… Taking any naivety he might once have had with her.

‘Nah,’ he drawled, letting his hand drop to toy with his crystal-cut glass. ‘I’m a rogue now, didn’t you know? If I shaved I’d be unrecognisable.’

‘Right. Wouldn’t want to disappoint your public.’

The side of his mouth twitched into a smile despite itself. ‘I’ve never been known to disappoint before.’

And where in the past she might have frowned, knowing there was a double entendre in there somewhere, and then blushed as she figured it out, this time her eyes slid back to lock with his.

She gave him a small smile to match his own. Then nodded, almost imperceptibly. Perhaps little Ava Halliburton had found time in her busy pencil-sharpening schedule to grow up after all.

‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘You’ll be on the business end of lots of pointing and staring and frowning if you stand next to me for too long. Your reputation will never be the same again.’

‘I’ll live.’

Caleb adjusted his stance as everything south of his thyroid felt fuel injected.

Before he had the chance to find out just how grown up she might yet be, she disregarded him in favour of looking up.

He tipped his head to see what was so great up there to find the stars were out in force, twinkling majestically through the gap between the two large swathes of white gauzy fabric that hung over the night.

Beside him Ava sighed. ‘Did you know Galileo died in sixteen forty-two, the year of Isaac Newton’s birth?’

Caleb grinned. Any other woman might have made a big deal about the romance of the stars and the moon and the colour-tinted cake frosting… But not Ava. For all their history, and for all the niggling discomfort he felt not quite knowing where they stood with one another now, he couldn’t deny she was one of a kind.