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‘What?’
When he didn’t reply, she shook her head. ‘You are a weirdo sometimes, O’Reilly.’
Dark eyes watched as she moved around the end of the huge bed. It was a fairly long walk so he had plenty of time to look. She hesitated when she got to ‘her side’.
One dark eyebrow rose. ‘There’s plenty of room, Mary Margaret.’
Not enough though.
She lifted the cover and got in, keeping as close to the edge as she could without falling out. She tried closing her eyes, inviting sleep to take her.
‘You going to sleep?’
‘Yes.’
‘No bedtime story?’
‘Oh, I’m listening. You can start any time.’
Sean moved over, lying on his side with his head propped on his elbow so he could study her face. He smiled as her mouth pursed into a thin line, then her nose wrinkled and she sighed, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘When we got here I was wiped. Now I can’t sleep.’
He was still smiling when her eyes opened.
She smiled back, then turned to face him across the huge divide. ‘So talk to me.’
‘What do you want to know?’
The thought of actually getting to ask whatever she wanted made her even more awake than she already was from the way he’d looked at her when she came out of the bathroom. His eyes had positively burned her from the huge bed he was occupying. And the sight of his broad naked chest above the covers had woken her up pretty quick.
Trying hard to ignore the sight of that chest within an arm and a half’s reach, she tried to decide what to ask first. ‘How can you be happy doing what you’re doing now?’
‘Maybe it’s the company I keep.’
She blinked at him with large eyes.
He smiled a smaller smile and let his eyes rove up to her hair, the faint smell of her shampoo making it all the way across to him. He liked that smell. Then his eyes met hers again. ‘It’s simpler, less soul-destroying. I guess I just needed this right now.’
Maggie stared deep into his eyes, searching. Searching for evidence that he was being honest when her heart already told her he was.
‘Something to make you smile again, huh?’ Her voice was low, all the more intimate in their present surroundings. ‘You didn’t smile a whole lot when I first met you.’
‘No, I guess I didn’t.’ His voice dropped to a similarly intimate level. ‘Maybe you just brought that out in me.’
She was being sucked in by the moment. Any second she fully expected there to be violins in the background and they would move across the great divide and—
She shook her head.
He laughed. ‘What?’
‘It’s just nice to know that when you looked through that lens the sight you saw was so amusing. I’m flattered.’ She smiled a small smile to let him know she was teasing.
‘You had your moments.’
Her mind turned for a small moment, then she propped her elbow and raised her hand so she could lift her head and rest it there. ‘So is it enough for you?’
‘Looking at you through a lens every day?’ He managed to hold his smile even as he realised it was precisely enough for him. He loved looking at her. Had been doing more and more of it recently, and not just through a lens. Had she noticed that he’d stopped dating recently? Because he was only just discovering why it was he’d stopped.
‘You can quit that, I know what you’re doing.’
‘I thought I was flirting with you.’
‘You are. But you’re only doing it to distract me.’
‘Is it working?’
Yes. ‘No.’
‘Damn.’
She laughed and watched as his eyes sparkled in response. ‘Tell me something else.’
‘You’re the reporter, you ask the questions.’
‘Will you stay?’ Her breath caught when she spoke the question aloud as soon as it entered her head. It was something she really needed to know. ‘Or is this just a break for you?’
Dark lashes brushed against his skin once, twice, as he blinked at her. ‘I’m not going back there, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Never?’
‘Never again.’ He shook his head. ‘I guess you could say I’m burned out when it comes to overseas work. I want to make a life here now. I just needed to come home, that’s all.’
‘Does it help?’
His nod was slow. ‘It does now that I have this new friend.’
The answering smile was warm and sincere. ‘I’m glad.’
Sean watched as she set her head back down on the pillow, her eyes closing again. ‘You want to sleep now?’
‘I think I have to, I’m sorry.’ Her eyes flickered open and she glanced up at him. ‘I’ve still a lot to ask, though.’
‘We have time, Mary Margaret, don’t worry.’ His eyes glowed across at her in the soft light. ‘Sweet dreams.’
CHAPTER TWO
SOMETHING changed.
Sean couldn’t narrow it down to a precise moment in time or some circumstance in particular. But something changed. And the fact that it changed around the time he was finally admitting he had a thing for Maggie didn’t help his inner turmoil any.
She was hiding something from him.
The first thing he’d noticed was how she would turn her eyes away from him. It was one of the things he’d always liked about her. She would look a person straight in the eye when she talked to them, would let them know they had her full attention. And it was a great trait for a reporter. People trusted that she was listening, that what they said mattered to her.
But now she would look down, her lashes hiding the windows to her soul when she spoke to him. And sometimes she even seemed to struggle to look him directly in the lens. Probably because she knew he might see something there.
Then there was the sadness. Not that she didn’t hide that pretty well. Every day she would smile, crack jokes with her workmates, laugh. But as a connouiseur of her laughter he knew that even that was missing something. It took a lot of careful scrutiny for him to spot the sadness, but it was there. In the unguarded moments when she thought no one was looking or for a split-second before she turned her eyes away.
Something had changed.
When she jumped the day that he crept up behind her in the office he smelt a rat. She was quick to flick the screen of her computer off before she fobbed him off with something about his not having yelled ‘boo’ and how she had been writing a personal e-mail. But that was a lie, Sean knew, because she looked away as she said it and she had been jumpy as all hell for the rest of the day.
It took a lot of investigative work for him to get to the bottom of it. But he got there. Eventually.
And when he did he couldn’t have been more knocked sidewards.
With determined steps he walked across the lawn of the big old country manor that had been turned into luxury apartments. Apartments where he and Maggie lived.
It was a gorgeous summer’s day and a great place for a birthday barbeque for one of their neighbours. But Sean wasn’t thinking about the celebrations. Or the food. Or even the beer clutched in his hand.
He was thinking about Maggie. And her latest brainwave.
‘Fancy meeting you here.’
He grinned, immediately recognising her smile for what it was. A front specifically for his benefit.
‘Yeah, fancy that.’ He took a swig of beer and stood by her side, his feet set slightly apart, claiming the piece of ground he was standing on while he looked at the small crowd and glanced occasionally at Maggie from the corner of his eye. ‘Don seems to be having a good time.’ Maggie looked over at their neighbour. ‘Yeah, he does.’ With a safe topic to discuss she immediately slipped into the easy role that until a few months ago had been so natural to her, leaning a little closer to Sean and nudging her shoulder against his upper arm. ‘You see the way he keeps looking at Rachel?’ Sean leaned his head a little closer to hers and dropped his voice conspiratorially. ‘She keeps looking at him too, when she thinks he can’t see her.’ The subject of the octogenarian love affair was one they frequently talked about. Maggie smiled and tilted her head to look up into dark eyes, her voice low. ‘You think they’ll ever get it together? Or is that still too much of a stretch for you into the realms of believing good things can happen?’ Sean’s eyes locked with hers and he stared at her for a long moment. ‘I’m learning to stretch some. So, maybe it might happen yet. They’ve been friends a long time though.’ ‘Yes, they have, but you only have to see the way they are together to know there’s more there.’ He blinked slowly and smiled.
Maggie searched his eyes, looking from one to the other. She tilted her head to the other side and searched again, then an eyebrow quirked and she asked, ‘What?’
The smile remained. ‘What?’
She stared back at him. ‘You have a look.’
‘Do I?’ He continued smiling his usual self-assured smile, his eyes giving nothing away.
It bugged the hell out of Maggie that he had the ability to do that and that he still felt the need to do it around her. He was just so controlled sometimes that she wanted to smack him silly. He held everything inside, guarded from the world so that in the brief instances he did open up it made it all the more of a gift to whoever was allowed in. But he still didn’t completely trust her, did he?
The fact that she’d had to hold back so much from him of late made the realisation almost hurtful. She hated that a relationship that had come to mean so much to her had got to this point.
He searched her eyes in a similar way to how she’d just searched his. ‘What?’
She mimicked his answer. ‘What?’
‘That mind of yours works in mysterious ways.’
‘At least I have a mind.’
‘Meaning I don’t?’
She only had to search for the briefest of seconds to find the spark in his eyes. ‘Not you, but possibly some of those other women you keep company with…’
‘At least they have brains enough to see what an amazingly sexy, damned good-looking, generally all-round great guy I am.’
What would usually have been taken as one of their usual ‘sparring type’ answers was imparted with a somewhat huskier tone of voice than Maggie was used to hearing from him. But as she searched his eyes again he turned his head and looked back over the crowd, raising his bottle to his mouth.
Maggie’s eyes automatically followed the bottle, watched as his mouth fitted around the lip, saw his throat contract as he swallowed. She hated that she noticed but she did.
‘I already know what a great guy you are.’ The words were spoken with sincerity, even though she didn’t have to point out that she hadn’t agreed with the other descriptions of his ‘assets’.
‘Do you, now?’ He studied the last of the liquid in the bottle, swirling it around against tinted glass.
Maggie felt her heart miss a beat at his question. He had an uncertainty in him she’d never seen before. Sean was just always so confident on the outside. Everything he did, the way he held himself, it all spoke of a complete lack of self-consciousness. Until now. What had her sister said to him during the long conversation they’d been having on the far side of the lawn?
‘OK, what’s going on?’
He didn’t look at her. ‘You’re the one who seems to think that any woman interested in me might not have a brain in their head.’
Maggie frowned. ‘I was kidding.’
‘Were you?’ He glanced at her, then away again.
The question astounded her. For crying out loud she had even introduced him to a couple of the women he had dated way back at the start. That was, until she’d learned better than to get involved in all that would inevitably follow. Now she guarded her single friends with the ferocity of a lioness guarding innocent cubs.
But those earlier women most certainly had not been brainless. They had been smart, successful, pretty women. Like anyone he had been even remotely interested in. So what was with the sudden concern? It wasn’t as if he’d even done that much dating of late. She’d noticed that.
The thought then crossed her mind that maybe he had met someone he had more than a passing interest in. She’d certainly been less aware of him being with anyone new but that didn’t mean there wasn’t somebody. Maybe he was serious about someone and having those feelings was making him insecure. Wasn’t that what happened with something that important?
The idea made her stomach churn ridiculously and she had to take a deep breath when she looked away from his profile. God only knew she wanted him to be happy, to learn about real love and to have all the things he hadn’t quite completely admitted out loud he wanted for himself down the line. A woman to love, to love him back. A family of his own. Children who would look just like him.
Maggie wanted those things for him.
But that didn’t mean that losing something of the friendship and the closeness they had wouldn’t hurt. Even the thought of it already hurt. Because in her own way she was already taking the initial steps that would distance her from him.
Clearing her throat, she looked down at the ground and then back at his profile. ‘Did you meet someone new?’
His eyes shot round to meet hers and he wanted to ask her if it would matter. But the words got stuck. He smiled to ease the tension. ‘Me?’
She smiled back at him, her composure in place. ‘Yes, you, unlikely and all as that may be. You tend to go through women faster than most.’
‘No, I didn’t meet someone new.’ He said the words softly and watched for her reaction. To see if she looked at all relieved. But when she just continued to smile at him he jumped right on in with both feet. ‘But then I haven’t advertised myself anywhere or felt the need to, funnily enough. Unlike someone I could mention.’
Her smile faltered. So that was it, then. Her sister had told him about that during their little tête-à-tête on the other side of the lawn. She straightened her spine again and moved a couple of steps away from his side.
‘I may as well have announced it on the news.’
He continued to study her intently before she turned her face from him. ‘What’s going on?’
