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She bit down on her lower lip. ‘I can’t imagine how you must feel—’
‘No, you can’t,’ he said, more abruptly than he’d intended, and was ashamed at the flash of hurt that tightened her face. ‘No one could. But I’ve put it behind me...’
Her eyes—warm, compassionate—told him she knew he was lying. How could he ever put that terrible day of helpless rage and despair behind him? The empty, guilt-ridden days that had followed it? The years of punishing himself, of not allowing himself to feel again?
‘Your hands,’ she said softly. ‘Is that how you hurt them?’
He nodded, finding words with difficulty. ‘The metal door handles were burning hot when I tried to open them.’
Fearsome images came back—the heat, the smoke, the door that would not give despite his weight behind it, his voice raw from screaming Jodi’s and Liam’s names.
He couldn’t stop the shudder that racked his frame. ‘I don’t talk about it.’
Mutely, she nodded, and her eyes dropped from his face. But not before he read the sorrow for him there.
Once again he felt ashamed of his harshness towards her. But that was him these days. Ben Morgan: thirty-one going on ninety.
His carefree self of that long-ago summer had been forged into someone tougher, harder, colder. Someone who would not allow emotion or softness in his life. Even the memories of a holiday romance. For with love came the agony of loss, and he could never risk that again.
She looked up at him. ‘If...if there’s anything I can do to help, you’ll let me know, won’t you?’
Again he nodded, but knew in his heart it was an empty gesture. Sandy was just passing through, and he was grateful. He didn’t want to revisit times past.
He’d only loved two women—his wife, Jodi, and, before her, Sandy. It was too dangerous to have his first love around, reminding him of what he’d vowed never to feel again. He’d resigned himself to a life alone.
‘You’ve booked in to the hotel?’ he asked.
‘Not yet, but I will.’
‘For how long?’
Visibly, her face relaxed. She was obviously relieved at the change of subject. He remembered she’d never been very good at hiding her emotions.
‘Just tonight,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way to Melbourne for an interview about a franchise opportunity.’
‘Why Melbourne?’ That was a hell of a long way from Dolphin Bay—as he knew from his years at university there.
‘Why not?’ she countered.
He turned and started walking towards the rocks again. Automatically she fell into step behind him. He waited.
Yes. He wasn’t imagining it. It was happening.
After every three of his long strides she had to skip for a bit to keep up with him. Just like she had twelve years ago. And she didn’t even seem to be aware that she was doing it.
‘You’re happy to leave Sydney?’
‘There’s nothing for me in Sydney now,’ she replied.
Her voice was light, matter-of-fact, but he didn’t miss the underlying note of bitterness.
He stopped. Went to halt her with a hand on her arm and thought better of it. No matter. She automatically stopped with him, in tune with the rhythm of his pace.
‘Nothing?’ he asked.
Not meeting his gaze, swinging her sandals by her side, she shrugged. ‘Well, my sister Lizzie and my niece Amy. But...no one else.’
‘Your parents?’
Her mouth twisted in spite of her effort to smile. ‘They’re not together any more. Turns out Dad had been cheating on my mother for years. The first Mum heard about it was when his mistress contacted her, soon after we got home from Dolphin Bay that summer. He and Mum patched it up that time. And the next. Finally he left her for his receptionist. She’s two years older than I am.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
But he was not surprised. He’d never liked the self-righteous Dr Randall Adams. Had hated the way he’d tried to control every aspect of Sandy’s life. He wasn’t surprised the older man had intercepted his long-ago letters. He’d made it very clear he had considered a fisherman not good enough for a doctor’s daughter.
‘That must have been difficult for you,’ he said.
Sandy pushed her windblown hair back from her face in a gesture he remembered. ‘I’m okay about it. Now. And Mum’s remarried to a very nice man and living in Queensland.’
During that summer he’d used to tease her about her optimism. ‘You should be called Sunny, not Sandy,’ he’d say as he kissed the tip of her sunburned nose. ‘You never let anything get you down.’
It seemed she hadn’t changed—in that regard anyway. But when he looked closely at her face he could see a tightness around her mouth, a wariness in her eyes he didn’t recall.
Maybe things weren’t always so sunny for her these days. Perhaps her cup-half-full mentality had been challenged by life’s storm clouds in the twelve years since he’d last seen her.
Suddenly she glanced at her watch. She couldn’t smother her gasp. The colour drained from her face.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked immediately.
‘Nothing,’ she said, tight lipped.
Nothing. Why did women always say that when something was clearly wrong?
‘Then why did you stare at your watch like it was about to explode? Is it connected to a bomb somewhere?’
That brought a twitch to her lips. ‘I wish.’
She lifted her eyes from the watch. Her gaze was steady. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but right at this very moment Jason—my...my former boyfriend, partner, live-in lover or whatever you like to call him—is getting married.’
Sandy with a live-in boyfriend? She’d said she’d had a partner but had it been that serious? The knowledge hit him in the gut. Painfully. Unexpectedly. Stupidly.
What he and Sandy had had together was a teen romance. Kid stuff. They’d both moved on. He’d married Jodi. Of course Sandy would have had another man in her life.
But he had to clear his throat to reply. ‘And that’s bad or good?’
She laughed. But the laugh didn’t quite reach her eyes. ‘Well, good for him. Good for her, I guess. I’m still not sure how I feel about coming home one day to find his possessions gone and a note telling me he’d moved in with her.’
‘You’re kidding me, right?’ Ben growled. How could someone treat his Sandy like that. His Sandy. That was a slip. She hadn’t been his for a long, long time.
‘I’m afraid not. It was...humiliating to say the least.’ Her tone sounded forced, light. ‘But, hey, it makes for a great story.’
A great story? Yeah, right.
There went sunny Sandy again, laughing off something that must still cause her pain.
‘Sounds to me like you’re better off without him.’
‘The further I get from him the more I can see that,’ she said. But she didn’t sound convinced.
‘As far away as Melbourne?’ he asked, finding the thought of her so far away unsettling.
‘I’m not running away,’ she said firmly. Too firmly. ‘I need change. A new job, a new—’
‘Your job? What is that?’ he asked, realising how little he knew about her now. ‘Did you study law like your father wanted?’
‘No, I didn’t. Don’t look so surprised—it was because of you.’
‘Me?’ No wonder her father had hated him.
‘You urged me to follow my dreams—like you were following yours. I thought about that a lot when I got back home. And my dream wasn’t to be a solicitor.’ She shuddered. ‘I couldn’t think of anything less me.’
He’d studied law as part of his degree and liked it. But he wasn’t as creative as he remembered Sandy being. ‘But you studied for years so you’d get a place in law.’
‘Law at Sydney University.’ She pronounced the words as though they were spelled in capital letters. ‘That was my father’s ambition for me. He’d given up his plans for me to be a doctor when I didn’t cut it in chemistry.’
‘You didn’t get enough marks in the Higher School Certificate for law?’
‘I got the marks, all right. Not long after we got back to Sydney the results came out. I was in the honour roll in the newspaper. You should have heard my father boasting to anyone who’d listen to him.’
‘I’ll bet he did.’ Ben had no respect for the guy. He was a bully and a snob. But he had reason to be grateful to him. Not for ruining things with him and Sandy. But for putting the bomb under him he’d needed to get off his teenage butt and make himself worthy of a girl like Sandy.
‘At the last minute I switched to a communications degree. At what my father considered a lesser university.’
‘He must have hit the roof.’
Sandy’s mouth tightened to a thin line. ‘As he’d just been outed as an adulterer he didn’t have a leg to stand on about doing the right thing for the family.’
Ben smiled. It sounded as if Sandy had got a whole lot feistier when it came to standing up to her father. ‘So what career did you end up in?’
‘I’m in advertising.’ She quickly corrected herself. ‘I was in advertising. An account executive.’
On occasion he dealt with an advertising agency to help promote his hotel. The account executives were slick, efficient, and tough as old boots. Not at all the way he thought of Sandy. ‘Sounds impressive.’
‘It was.’
‘Was?’
‘Long story,’ she said, and started to walk towards the rocks again.
‘I’m listening,’ he said, falling into step beside her.
The wind had dropped and now the air around them seemed unnaturally still. Seagulls screeched raucously. He looked through narrowed eyes to the horizon, where grey clouds were banking up ominously.
Sandy followed his gaze. She wrinkled her cute up-tilted nose. ‘Storm brewing,’ she said. ‘I wonder—’
‘Don’t change the subject by talking about the weather,’ he said, stopping himself from adding, I remember how you always did that.
He shouldn’t have let himself get reeled in to such a nostalgic conversation. There was no point in dredging up those old memories. Not when their lives were now set on such different paths. And his path was one he needed—wanted—to tread unencumbered. He could not survive more loss. And the best way to avoid loss was to avoid the kind of attachment that could tear a man apart.
He wanted to spend his life alone. Though the word ‘alone’ seemed today to have a desolate echo to it.
She shrugged. ‘Okay. Back to my story. Jason and I were both working at the same agency when we met. The boss didn’t think it was a good idea when we started dating...’
‘So you had to go? Not him?’
She pulled a face. ‘We...ell. I convinced myself I’d been there long enough.’
‘So you went elsewhere? Another agency?’
She nodded. ‘And then the economy hit a blip, advertising revenues suffered, and last one in was first one out.’
‘That must have been tough.’
‘Yeah. It was. But, hey, one door closes and another one opens, right? I got freelance work at different agencies and learned a whole lot of stuff I might never have known otherwise.’
Yep, that was the old Sandy all right—never one to allow adversity to cloud her spirit.
She took a deep breath. He noticed how her breasts rose under her tight-fitting top. She’d filled out—womanly curves softened the angles of her teenage body. Her face was subtly different too, her cheekbones more defined, her mouth fuller.
He wouldn’t have thought it possible but she was even more beautiful than she’d been when she was eighteen.
He wrenched his gaze away, cleared his throat. ‘So you’re looking at a franchise?’
Her eyes sparkled and her voice rose with excitement. ‘My chance to be my own boss, run my own show. It’s this awesome candle store. A former client of mine started it.’
‘You were in advertising and now you want to sell candles? Aren’t there enough candle stores in this world?’
‘These aren’t ordinary candles, Ben. The store is a raging success in Sydney. Now they’re looking to open up in other towns. They’re interviewing for a Melbourne franchise and I put my hand up.’
She paused.
‘I want to do something different. Something of my own. Something challenging.’
She looked so earnest, so determined, that he couldn’t help a teasing note from entering his voice. ‘So it’s candles? I don’t see the challenge there.’
‘Don’t you?’ she asked. ‘There’s a scented candle for every mood, you know—to relax, to stimulate, to seduce—’
She stopped on the last word, and the colour deepened in her cheeks, flushed the creamy skin of her neck. Her eyelashes fluttered nervously and she couldn’t meet his gaze.
