Никки Логан – Dreaming Of... Australia: Mr Right at the Wrong Time / Imprisoned by a Vow / The Millionaire and the Maid (страница 24)

Immediately his mind was filled with thoughts and images that she’d have been horrified to know he harboured. He shook them loose and disguised them with a laugh. ‘Interesting technique.’

Above, Sam wound his hawk in tight circles around the eel, trapping it in the spiral of the twin-tails, but she broke free and let herself soar high above him, before circling back around and down to meet him from the side. He dodged away and twisted back, to race the eel through the sky.

The two of them moved in parallel, tightly synchronised, and Sam’s glance ping-ponged down to see what Aimee’s hands were going to do next before shooting back up to watch his hawk respond.

Where she ducked, he dived. When she turned he was right there with her, mirroring her every move.

Her radiant gaze grew large as the beauty and sensuality of the airshow overtook her. Her lips fell open and she sighed. He felt it in his gut more than heard it. Sam took his chance, tightening his strings and bringing the headstrong hawk back under tight control, curling close around the eel but never quite tangling with it. The two kites danced in dreamy synchronicity across the blue canvas sky.

Wild, open, limitless. A place where anything, any future, was possible. His breath grew short.

For one brief moment he raced the hawk ahead of her, hovered in space as her eel caught up, and then twisted in freefall to touch it in a slow-motion aerial kiss before falling away in a showy controlled dive.

Beside him, Aimee gasped.

He steered the hawk back into an ascent and his focus flicked to her, met her gaze head-on. Wide-eyed. Flushed.

Utterly dismayed.

He fumbled his climb, and the strings were yanked meanly from Aimee’s hands as the two kites tangled, tipped, and plummeted in a twisted mess to the hard ground in the distance, their sensual skirmish terminally interrupted.

I’ll take whatever you’ll give me.

That was what he’d said back at the little cafeteria, and he’d meant it to be kind. Some sort of compromise between what he wanted—to really get to know her—and what she needed—to keep a safe emotional gulf between them. But all it did was hurt and mirror her own patheticism back to her. Not even a real word—but it summed her situation up perfectly so she was going with it. She was taking whatever he would give her.

How had she found herself in this situation—again? She marched resolutely back towards the car, her chest balled tight around her anger and pain.

Anger at herself.

Pain because he’d never be able to touch her for real.

What was she prepared to give him? Everything. But she wanted everything in return. Not a friend. Not a shopping buddy. She wanted someone she could curl up with at night, see the wonders of the world with, and whose brain she could mine for useless information. She wanted someone to admire and appreciate and get jealous over. She wanted someone to wander the markets with or sail a boat or fly a kite. Or cheer for at an awards ceremony. All perfectly legitimately.

She wanted someone like Sam. She deserved someone like Sam. And it was a bit of a first in her life to be thinking that way. But all those things were way, way more than he was free to give.

And so Sam playing kissing-kites had done nothing but mess with her head and cut her deep down inside where she never let anyone go.

‘Aimee … Stop.’

‘Someone will steal your kites,’ she threw back over her stiff shoulder, picking up pace as the park got smaller behind them.

‘They’ll have to untangle them first.’

Her smile stretched her skin tight. Even his sharp wit got up her nose. Why couldn’t he be an egotist? Or as thick as two planks? Was he not even the slightest bit muddled by what had just happened back in the skies? By that little aerial seduction?

Did he not even have the decency to be vaguely rattled?

‘Aimee. Please.’

Her feet slowed. Shuffled. Stopped. But she didn’t turn around. Either he’d see how mad she was or he’d see the confusion in her eyes, and she didn’t want either. She clenched her fists. ‘I’ve got somewhere to be, Sam. I’m not at your disposal all day.’

‘You’re angry with me.’

Her eyes drifted shut and she turned slowly, marshalling her expression. ‘I’m not angry with you. I’m just angry at …’ The universe. The timing. ‘… this whole situation.’

‘It was nothing. It wasn’t supposed to be anything.’

That meant he knew it was something. Her mouth dried up.

He lifted his hands either side of him. ‘I just wanted you to have the chance to fly a kite.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you never have. That seems wrong.’

‘Why is it your job to fix the ills of my past?’

He frowned. ‘Because …’ But his words evaporated and his shoulders sagged. ‘I don’t know, Aimee. I just wanted to see your face the first time you got the kite up. I wanted to give you that.’

She stared at him. It was a nice thing to do, and it was just kites. But then it wasn’t. ‘So what was with the kite foreplay?’

It was a risk. She watched his face closely for signs of total bemusement, for a hint that this was all in her head and totally one-sided and she’d just made a complete fool of herself. Or for the defensiveness of a man caught out.

She got neither.

‘I don’t know,’ he murmured, frowning and stepping closer. ‘It just happened. And it was kind of …’ She tipped her head as he grasped for the right words. ‘Beautiful. Organic. It didn’t feel wrong.’

It had been beautiful and it had started so naturally, but it was wrong. It had felt too good so it had to be wrong. She shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her sweatshirt and took a deep, slow breath. ‘This is how we’re always going to go, Sam. Even something ordinary like flying a kite becomes—’ loaded ‘—unordinary.’

He ruffled long fingers through his hair and stared at her. ‘So maybe that’s just us? Why don’t we just … allow for it?’

Allow for it? ‘How?’

He stopped in front of her, looking down with deep, calm eyes. ‘It is what it is, Aimee. Neither one of us is going to act on it, so do we really need to stress about it? We could just accept that there’s an … attraction … between us, and then just move past it.’

Her lips twisted along with the torsion in her gut. ‘You make it sound so simple.’

‘I’m sure we’re not the first two people who have accidental chemistry.’

Except it wasn’t just chemistry for her. Her mind was involved. Her heart. And that made it very complicated.

‘What just happened with the kites …’ he started. ‘I feel comfortable around you, Aimee. Relaxed. It just happened. I’ll be on my guard from now on so that it doesn’t happen again.’

Her chest hurt. ‘What kind of friendship is that going to make? If we’re both constantly guarding our words and actions?’ Our hearts.

His broad shoulders lifted and fell, but she couldn’t tell if it was a shrug or a sigh. ‘Our kind.’

Sam’s defeat was contagious. Her eyes dropped to the ground.

‘Come on. We have an hour before we’re due back. Let’s go rescue the kites and then go back to the café for that interview.’

The interview. Did either of them believe that excuse any more? But the pages of her book were already established neutral territory between them, so it was good to have it to retreat to.

Just accept the attraction …

Aimee shook her head. He was so easy to believe. He was so certain that this was a good idea. Sam had no doubt that he could put aside whatever this was simmering away between them, and maybe he could.

But could she?

CHAPTER TEN

AIMEE re-read the opening to the oral history spread out on the hotel table before her and stared at the words as though they were prophecy.

She’d first met Coraline McMahon as an elderly woman from the suburbs of Melbourne, but the Cora she was meeting now was fifteen, beautiful, running barefoot and wild in her home on the Isle of Man. Cora had set her cap at tear-away Danny McMahon from a very early age—a young man idolised by the boys, dreamed of by the girls, and tsked about by their parents alike, which had only made him all the more desirable. Dark and bold and charismatic. She’d fallen hard and irrevocably for Danny, but he’d left her behind when he’d enlisted in the Second World War.

Broken-hearted. Fifteen.

Pregnant.

Within weeks a shamed Cora had been married off to Danny’s younger brother Charley: the responsible one, the tolerant one, the one willing to raise his brother’s child to avoid a family scandal.

They’d had a sound sort of marriage, living in the McMahon household while the war raged on, until the day Danny got a foot blown off and limped home to a hero’s welcome.

‘Ugh.’ Aimee dropped the sheets of her transcribed story onto the tabletop and slid down further on her chair to study the ceiling.

Every day.

Every day Cora had struggled with wanting a man she couldn’t have. Living under the same roof. Watching him making a slow life for himself. It had broken Charley’s heart, watching her try to hide it. She’d never so much as touched Danny again, but breathing the same air as him had tarnished her soul and her husband’s—even after he’d packed them all up and shipped them to Australia to escape his older brother’s influence.