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‘Where do you want to go?’ Max’s usually laughing brown eyes were dark with concern.
‘Back to Sydney,’ she said. ‘Away from here. I want to go home.’
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_f82ef936-b2d4-5ad3-9e50-e1ed81e6f034)
WALKING away from Logan that Saturday night at the cocktail party wasn’t the hardest thing Evie had ever done. Staying sane the following week was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Sane when Max looked at her sideways and kept his mouth firmly shut. Sane as she worked on project proposals and tried not to wonder what Logan was doing and what he was thinking, and whether she’d ever see him again.
How she could have handled things better.
What she might have done to make Logan stay.
‘What?’ she demanded in exasperation as Max walked into her office unannounced for about the tenth time that morning.
‘Touchy,’ he said.
‘Bite me.’
‘Not my buzz,’ said Max, and placed a sheet of paper on top of the drawings in front of her. ‘You’d be wanting my brother for that.’
He wasn’t wrong. ‘I’m working,’ she said and picked up the sheet and held it out for Max to take back. ‘Whatever it is, you deal with it.’
‘Read it,’ he insisted, so Evie turned it back around with a sigh.
A bank deposit notice, but not a bank she regularly dealt with. Max’s personal account, by the looks of it. With deposit into it yesterday of ten million dollars.
‘Trust fund?’ she asked.
‘Logan.’
Evie’s heart skipped a beat. ‘Terms?’
‘Three per cent below market interest rate.’
‘Handy.’
‘You don’t mind?’ asked Max.
‘Do you?’
‘He stole my fake fiancée and messed with my business plan,’ said Max dryly. ‘I’ll take his money.’
‘Yay for brotherly love,’ said Evie. ‘As long as the loan is between you and Logan and the money comes into the business through you alone, I have no objections.’
‘That’s how it’ll work.’
‘Lucky MEP.’
‘Any other questions?’ asked Max.
Evie shook her head.
‘You don’t want to know where Logan is? What he’s been doing lately?’
She did want to know where Logan was and what he’d been doing lately. But she sure as hell wasn’t going to ask.
‘PNG,’ said Max, as if reading her mind. ‘Sorting out the mess some mining company has made of their operation there. Sometimes Logan troubleshoots for others. For a hefty fee.’
‘The devil will have his due.’
‘He’s a good man, Evie.’
‘I know that, Max.’
‘You should call him. Might improve your mood.’
‘There is nothing wrong with my mood.’
‘Carlo would beg to disagree.’
‘Carlo ordered twenty-eight thousand dollars’ worth of reo we don’t need,’ she said curtly. ‘He’s lucky I let him keep his job.’
‘And Logan thinks you meek,’ muttered Max beneath his breath. ‘God knows why.’
Evie knew exactly why. ‘Was there anything else?’
‘Could be Logan will need a place to stay for a few days when he returns at the end of the week and before he heads back to London. Could be I’m thinking of offering up my apartment for him to use while he’s here.’
‘Why? You think he’s short of cash?’ asked Evie dryly.
‘What I think, said Max with admirable restraint, ‘is that if you want to see him again, you shouldn’t wait for him to call you. Call him. Arrange something. Don’t assume that he knows what he’s doing when it comes to relationships, especially important ones, because he doesn’t.’ Max plucked the bank note from her fingers and waved it in front of her face. ‘This, for example, might as well have “Evie, I want to see you again” written all over it.’
‘But it doesn’t,’ she countered sweetly, and Max sighed and dug his mobile out of his pocket and started in on the touch screen before handing it to her with a flourish.
‘Tell him you’ve been mooning over him all week and want to see him again.’
‘I will not.’
‘All right. Then tell him I want my chief engineer’s head back in the game and that I’m blaming him for the fact that it’s not.’
Evie glared at Max’s hastily retreating back, silently wondering just how many problems she’d solve if she brained Max with his phone. Probably not that many.
‘Tell him I said thank you,’ added Max.
‘Tell him yourself,’ she yelled after him, and then put the phone to her ear just in time to hear the man who currently inhabited most of her dreams—sleeping and waking—say his brother’s name.
Which necessitated some sort of reply.
‘Um … hi. It’s not Max,’ she said awkwardly. ‘It’s Evie. Evie on Max’s phone. How much did you hear?’
‘Everything from “thank you” onwards.’
‘Oh,’ she said, more than a little relieved. ‘Good. Because that about covers it. Your bank transfer came in and Max’s just showed it to me and we wanted to say thank you. Which I’m sure Max will do in person when he sees you next. Thank you, that is.’ And if Max said anything else to his brother about Evie’s recently distracted state she’d strangle him. ‘And I’d like to thank you too. The money’s going to help the civic centre bid’s chances a lot, and Max’s set on winning it and can take it from here, and I can get on with the rest of the work and let the prima donna do his thing … so thank you.’
‘You often make business phone calls like this?’ asked Logan.
‘Never.’
‘Good to know,’ he murmured.
‘Bite me.’
Silence after that, heavy and waiting. Evie took a deep breath. ‘Max tells me you’re flying into Sydney later this week, and I was thinking.’
Evie had no idea what she was thinking.
‘… I was thinking that Max probably wants to invite you into the workplace so you can look around. Which would be fine by me. If you wanted to, that is.’ Evie closed her eyes, leaned back in her chair and thumped her head repeatedly against the headrest, scrabbling for confidence in the face of Logan’s silence and coming up empty. ‘I was thinking you might need to be picked up from the airport. I could do that. Take you wherever you wanted to go.’ Excellent. Now she was officially babbling. ‘How’s PNG?’
‘Hot, sticky and politically messy,’ he said. ‘Largely bereft of plain speaking.’
Evie was largely bereft of plain speaking too.
‘Would you like to have dinner with me while you’re here?’ she asked with her eyes closed tightly shut, and figured it for as plain spoken as she was going to get. ‘I know some good casual eating places. Nothing fancy. But the food’s good.’
Asking a man out on a date was hard. Harder still, when the man in question said a whole lot of nothing in reply.
‘This is the part where you say yes or no,’ she prompted quietly.
‘I don’t get into Sydney until late Friday night,’ he said finally. ‘There’ll be a hire car waiting for me.’
Of course there would.
‘And I don’t need the workplace tour.’
Of course he didn’t. ‘Let me just find Max for you, shall I?’
‘Dinner on Saturday evening I could do.’
‘Pardon?’ Evie was halfway to the door. She probably hadn’t heard him correctly.
‘Dinner,’ he said. ‘Saturday night. Something low-fuss and easy. That I could do.’
‘There’s a place called Brennan’s in Darlinghurst. It’s a bar and grill. Very casual.’
‘I’ll meet you there at 6:00 p.m.,’ he said. ‘Evie, I’ve got to go. I’m meant to be in a meeting.’
Interrupting his work. Not exactly a high priority in his life. He couldn’t have made it any clearer if he’d tried. But he’d said yes to seeing her again, although God knew why.
‘Bye, then,’ she said. And hung up before he could, and went to tell her meddling business partner that her head—far from being back in the game—was now officially screwed.
Served Max right.
Saturday came and Evie spent the bulk of it trying to forget that she’d ever asked Logan out in the first place. She went to Coogee Beach and swam in the surf and then in the rock pool with a uni friend she often caught up with on weekends. They walked the cliff walk round to Bondi and had an ice cream and then she caught the bus home. Which still gave her three hours to fill in until six and her dinner with Logan. She put on a movie and steamed through her ironing basket and did a fast tidy-up of her apartment. And then she hit the shower and saw a slightly sunburned domestic goddess, which wasn’t all bad because now she could turn up at the grill looking as if she’d been enjoying her weekend, rather than just waiting for six o’ clock and Logan to come around.
No woman in her right mind would pin too many hopes on Logan.
So it was well-worn jeans and a white cotton top that gathered at the hip with a multicoloured scarf that she wore to meet him. Add to that an inexpensive blue-bead necklace, half a dozen thin silver bangles, sunglasses perched on her head and Evie figured herself plenty casual as she walked into Brennan’s at five to six. If Logan didn’t show … if he’d changed his mind about seeing her again … well, there was food here aplenty and she wouldn’t go thirsty.
But Logan was already there when Evie arrived, sitting by himself in a corner booth with a half empty beer in front of him and lines around his eyes that told of fatigue, but he smiled when he saw her and hell if she didn’t melt at the sight of it. She’d never seen him in jeans and scuffed work boots before and he wore them just as easily as he wore a custom-made suit. His shirt was black, and seemed to suck in the light and women watched him from the corner of their eyes. Watched him because he was black-eyed and beautiful and sexuality clung to him like a second skin.
He stood as she approached. He took her hand and leaned closer and kissed her cheek and then withdrew. ‘First date,’ he murmured. ‘Easy as. That’s what I’m aiming for,’ he added and sat back down after she sat, and placed an elegant square box, about the size of her hand, on the table between them. ‘I couldn’t find any black-eyed daisies or paper parasols.’
The lid came off and the sides of the box folded down to reveal a life-sized origami hummingbird sipping from a bell-shaped flower.
‘It’s beautiful.’ Evie leaned closer for a better look, not game to touch it, so delicate was the detail. ‘Exquisite. But you didn’t get this from Papua New Guinea.’ This was a museum-quality offering, not a last-minute little something from a handy airport gift shop.
‘No.’ He gave a small shrug. ‘I got it today. I know I cut you short on the phone the other day, Evangeline. It was unavoidable. I know I should have called you back. I just didn’t know what to say.’
‘It’s okay, Logan. I don’t know what I want from you either.’ And it was far easier to say that in person than on the phone. Evie boxed the gift back up with gentle fingers and set it on top of her handbag in the far corner of the bench seat, far away from where the food would be placed. ‘Thank you for your gorgeous gift.’
Logan shrugged, shrugging it off. Don’t make such a fuss over it, he might as well have said. Doesn’t mean I care.
He’d seemed that way with his mother too, and Max to a lesser extent. Desperately trying not to care about them too much. If you didn’t care, they couldn’t hurt you. Oh, Evie knew that defence. She knew it well.
‘How was business in PNG?’
‘Unpredictable,’ he murmured. ‘In need of a strong hand.’
‘So it suited you,’ she countered, and he smiled that lazy wicked smile of his, the one that made her blood heat and her pulse quicken.
‘Yes.’
Hard not to admire a man who worked to his strengths. ‘Are you rich?’ He had to be wealthy in order to slip Max ten million so quickly, but exactly how wealthy was a question Evie hadn’t yet asked and Logan hadn’t yet answered.
‘You want a monetary estimate?’ he asked, and she nodded, and he named a figure that made her sit back and blink. ‘I inherited money early,’ he said. ‘My mother handed over every last cent of my father’s wealth the minute I turned eighteen and I took it and put it to work. The money doubles on a regular basis and that’s the way I like it.’
‘Because you never want to go hungry again?’ she asked.
‘Because I’m addicted to power and the wielding of it.’
‘Wow,’ she murmured. ‘A man who owns his flaws. That’s really rare.’
‘I wouldn’t call them flaws,’ he murmured with a crooked smile. ‘Exactly. What about you, Evie? Are you rich?’
‘Not at all, compared to you. I own my own apartment. I can sometimes afford an expensive treat but I don’t make a habit of it. As far as family goes, my father’s respectably well-off but not effortlessly wealthy; probably because he’s on his fifth wife. My mother was wife number three. I have twelve half siblings, no full siblings, and my mother’s now on husband number three. Max thinks I have no strong ties to family and no respect whatsoever for the institution of marriage. He’s probably right.’
‘So if a man wanted to marry you …’
‘I’d take some convincing.’
