by Ally Blake
Apart from the fact that it never lasted.
Her gaze swept back to the screen and she let it trail over every inch of yum.
NJM looked like the least needy man on the planet. But could he kiss a girl so well she’d forgive him for snapping her carrots? Yeah, she thought, tingles curling into existence inside her belly, I have a feeling he could.
But that wasn’t why she clicked on the happy yellow “Why not?” button on NJM’s email. She had a job to do—a well-paying job. NJM was an anomaly in the heretofore predictability of the remainder of subjects in her study and therefore worth investigating further.
And while she had more work than she would ever have taken on at one time under normal circumstances, a girl had to eat.
* * *
Weddings did it every time.
It had taken years, diligence and dogged immovability, but Nate Mackenzie had finally trained his sisters to leave him well enough alone when it came to his confirmed bachelorhood. Until a wedding invite arrived in the mail. Then all bets were off.
He’d just hung up from his oldest sister, Jasmine, when the twins, Faith and Hope, came at him, conference-call-style.
“She’s lovely!” one of them exclaimed before even emitting a hello.
He leant back in his office chair, executed a half turn till the sunshine slashing past the Melbourne skyline and through the intimidating wall of windows nearly blinded him. “I’m fine, thanks. You?”
Ignoring his sarcasm, the twins tag-teamed. “Jasmine’s friend makes the best macaroons.”
“I’ve seen photos. She’s just your type.”
He opened his mouth to ask just what his type might be, but he snapped his mouth shut at the last second.
They were good at finding weak spots. He was better.
After all, he’d taught them all they knew: a consequence of becoming the man of the house at fifteen.
He pressed his feet to the floor and a thumb to the temple that had begun to throb. “I’m thrilled you are all so content in your own lives that you have the time to stick your collective noses into mine, but you need to focus your impressive energies elsewhere. Third World hunger, perhaps?”
“But—”
“No more set-ups. Consider that an order.”
At that, a pause. Then lashings of laughter which had his other temple throbbing in syncopated rhythm against the first.
When they shifted into a familiar tune about how his natural born charm and adorable baby blues wouldn’t get him by for ever, Nate slowly turned his chair back to face his vast office as his brain flicked through possible ways to convince them to leave the subject of finding him a good woman the hell alone. He could honestly beg work, but that was nothing new. A weekend was something other people had. He hadn’t set foot on a beach in so long he couldn’t remember how sand felt between his toes. And telling them he was only keen on bad women hadn’t stopped them before; it had merely expanded the pond from which they fished on his behalf.
“I’m seeing someone!” The walls of Nate’s vast office seemed to heave away from him as the import of the words he’d just uttered echoed into the ensuing silence. Damn twins—they were like a pair of hammers banging at an exposed nerve. It had been bound to jerk eventually.
But when the silence deepened, Nate wondered if he’d hit on something inspired. If he oughtn’t to have invented a significant other years ago—someone who travelled often, was ethically against telephones, who had lost her whole family in some tragic accident so he could therefore never subject his love to the pain of meeting his.
Caught up in his own daydreams of freedom, he realised his chance to hang up on a high a moment too late.
One twin said, “Someone who can string a sentence together without saying ‘um’?”
“What the hell do I care?” he heard himself bellow. “So long as she looks good, smells nice and goes home happy.”
“Nate,” they said on twin sighs, with familiar waves of guilt pouring down the phone line. They knew they should be nicer, considering all he’d sacrificed to make sure they were well-adjusted after their father died. Knowing didn’t make it so. They had stubborn Mackenzie genes after all.
“The worst part is I don’t think you’re kidding,” said one.
“That the perfect Nate date wants no commitment, no happy-ever-after, no way,” said the other.
“Find her for me and then we can talk,” said Nate as his office door swung open. Gabe poked his head through the gap. Done with being outnumbered, Nate waved his recently returned business partner in with a brisk flap of his hand.
One raised eyebrow later, Gabe shut the door behind him and ambled across the room to lower his huge form into a chair that would have been plenty big enough for any other man. Gabe, on the other hand, looked as if he’d need a crowbar to get out.
“I have to go,” said Nate. “My ten o’clock is here.”
“Say ‘hi’ to Gabe from me.”
Then, “Tell him if it doesn’t work out with Paige, he can always—”
Nate hung up before any more of that image made its way into his subconscious.
“The girls on the warpath?” said Gabe, as Nate once again rubbed his thumbs across both temples.
“This time, it’s your fault.”
“How’s that, exactly?”
“If you weren’t with Paige, you’d never have met Mae and Clint, who’d never have invited me to their wedding. And Macbeth’s witches wouldn’t have made it their life’s mission to find me a woman.”
Gabe’s dark stare flattened. “Are you wishing away my woman?”
“Not,” said Nate, settling back in his chair. “For years you walked around like a bear with a sore tooth. Now you’re practically cuddly.”
Gabe’s lip curled as he as good as snarled. But then the big guy seemed to soften, sweeten, and the smile that slipped through confirmed cuddly was fine, if it meant he had her.
Hell.
Thankfully Nate was spared, as Gabe’s mobile rang and he answered with a gruff, “Hamilton.”
To think, Nate mused, it felt like only yesterday that together he and the big guy had sketched out their radical dream of a maverick venture capital business on the back of a beer coaster in a pub near uni. And now that crazy dream was a shining beacon of trust, fiscal responsibility and innovation within the morass of world-wide financial tremblings.
Nate had reached the heights he’d envisioned that long ago night, and had soared higher still. He had property all over the world, a stake in some of the most successful businesses in the country, and more money than he could count. And yet the heart of that dream, the pinnacle he’d aspired to, the moment when the pendulum of success had hit its peak and he could ease back, content with his success and enjoy the spoils, had never eventuated.
Every decision, every purchase, every paperclip was still under his tight control—as though if in letting go he’d lose it all. And it wasn’t lost to him that he was nearing the age when his own hard-working father had gone to work one day and never come home.
Gabe hung up and said, “You free for lunch? The gaming guy I was telling you about is meeting me at Zuma at one, and I’m sure having us both there’ll put the requisite sparkle in his eyes to get his scrawl on the dotted line.”
Nate ran his hands over his face, pushing the mounting signs of frustration down deep. “I can swing by at quarter past.”
“Better. Keep ’em keen.” Gabe pressed himself from the chair and only when he reached the door did he look back.
“So, have you got a date for Mae and Clint’s wedding, or what?” Gabe asked.
Nate lugged his stapler all the way across the room. It bounced off the wall a foot from Gabe’s shoulder.
“I take it that’s a no?”
Then
Gabe was out through the door, leaving Nate to deal with the onset of a new range of throbs in his temples.
It was a no. And yet he’d told Faith and Hope he was seeing someone. When the actual truth was somewhere in between.
He’d get a damn date, if only to get them off his back for the next few weeks till the big day. But it wouldn’t be anyone they knew. Or even anyone he knew for that matter.
Asking a woman on a date was one thing. Asking a woman to a wedding was akin to smothering himself in catnip and taking a swan dive into a pride of lionesses. There wasn’t a kind way to tell someone with confetti stuck to her eyelashes that it was never going to happen.
But it was never going to happen.
For the six years between the day of his father’s heart attack and the day his trust fund had been opened to him he’d devoted himself to being the man in his young sisters’ lives. They’d repaid the favour by using his toothbrush, and wearing his shirts to bed. He’d asked them to stop and they’d acted out by dating his friends. And no matter how he’d managed to swallow it down, to let them do what they had to do, they’d cried themselves to sleep. He’d heard them, night after night, the sound tearing away at his insides. Until he’d become impervious to tears, to mood swings, to raging hormones and wily feminine ways. It was the only way he’d lived to fight another day.
Two hours after Mae had told him to “save the date,” he’d tagged a research team to find him a dating website. All he’d told them was that it had to boast discretion and success; they didn’t need to know why.
Since then he’d met six perfectly nice, attractive, elegant, smart women, every single one of whom had taken one look at him and sized him up for a tux, a four-bed house and a Range Rover with a reversing camera.
But time had run out.
He checked his email to find another of his “Maybes” had come back with a “Why not?”
More determined than ever, he opened the email. Her tag was Bloomin.
Favourite Pizza Topping: ham & red peppers
Favourite Music: retro grunge
If I Could Be Anywhere in the World I’d Be: right where I am
Looking for: someone to talk to
Retro grunge? What the hell was retro grunge? Sounded dire. And yet he opened her picture for a second look. And then he remembered.
After an hour of trawling the site that first night he’d hit a point where the string of women in bikinis grinning suggestively at the camera had become a blur. He’d rather have tugged out his own eyelashes than read another thing but the very next picture that had appeared on the screen had been so unexpected it had stopped him short.
A woman in her late twenties sitting in a café, with a shaggy scarf-thing around her neck, dark hair in a messy twist that just reached one shoulder, and an old felt fedora perched on top of her head.
Nate leaned his elbow on the desk and rested his chin between thumb and forefinger. With the other hand he zoomed in till her eyes filled the screen. She was attractive, in an off-beat kind of way, with her fine chin, fine nose and soft pink lips curved into an easy smile. But those eyes of hers were something else. Wide-set, the colour hovering on the edge of brown, the long dark lashes creating sultry shadows below.
But within them was the most captivating thing about her, that one thing that had eluded him for so long... Contentment.
He wasn’t sure he even knew what that felt like any more. And here, at his fingertips, was a woman who claimed to be happy being right where she was.
Without another thought he hit “Reply,” picked a time, asked her to pick the place. Even if he’d built a client base on becoming on a first-name basis with some of the best chefs in town, in this case it was far better to go somewhere atypical or it would get back to his sisters.
It always did.
And a man had to have his priorities straight.
TWO
For all its family name, Mamma Rita’s Italian restaurant in Fitzroy was dark, sensual and bohemian, a hotspot for artists and hipsters. If conversation was your bag the beer garden at the back rarely saw beer and reeked of the sweet smoke of the philosophical thinker. Saskia, though, loved it for the great food, and for a girl on a budget one decadent meal filled you up enough not to have to eat for another twenty-four hours.
Dolled up in her favourite batik pants, sandals made in Nepal and an upcycled scarf she’d made herself from an old T-shirt, Saskia sat fiddling with the piece of string she’d tied around her wrist to remind her of...something as, with scientific appreciation, she watched the man who’d just walked through the front door.
The photo of NJM hadn’t lied, though it could be accused of under-representation. He looked immaculate; his dark suit crisp, the knot of his deep red tie tight, his shoulders broad and proud. And as a waitress approached the naturally provocative curve of his mouth hooked slowly into a nearly-smile. Even from across the restaurant Saskia saw the poor girl’s knees buckle.
He really was beautiful. But, even better to Saskia’s mind, beautifully anomalous.
It didn’t make sense, and to a mathematician there was no more satisfying moment than when the seemingly senseless finally added up. Lissy dated bad boys because she wanted to drive her rich parents crazy. Ernest liked Oreos because she’d shared hers with him the day Stu had left. But why would a man who looked like that need to go online to find a date to a wedding?
Saskia ran a hand over her hair which was—by feel at least—not doing anything overly crazy. He must have caught the movement as the next moment his eyes found hers.
Wow, she thought, her lungs tightening and her tummy tripping over itself in rhapsodic pleasure, those eyes should be classed a lethal weapon.
He lifted his hand in a wave. She did the same.
Thus unfrozen, Saskia shuffled her fork as if it was important she do so at that very moment, and told herself to get a grip. This was research, not a real date. And if a chat with NJM of the blue eyes, dark suit and sinfully sensuous mouth could help her nail the angle that would take her infographic from informative to viral, then she’d just have to suffer through a date with the guy.
As her research subject began to stride her way Saskia made to stand. In pressing her hand to the table, her palm landed on her fork, sending it flying across the room.
Saskia watched, mouth agape, as it spun towards the table of a young couple, where it landed with a series of less-than-musical crashes, causing the girl to scream at the top of her lungs.
A pair of waiters in black and white zipped out to clear the mess, calm the girl, and offer free desserts.
“Need this?”
Saskia dragged her eyes from the disaster zone in the direction of a rumbling deep voice. Her eyes hit jacket button, rich red tie, jaw carved by the gods, a mouth tilted at the corners, a nose like something freed from Italian marble and smiling blue eyes that made the straight lines and curlicues flittering through her head scatter like bowling pins.
And then her focus shifted and she noticed he was holding a clean fork.
“Right,” she said, shaking her head and laughing. “Thank you. Not one of my more elegant moments.”
NJM’s mouth curved into a deeper smile. It was a mouth made for smiling, she decided, amongst other things.
“Shall we?” he said, motioning to the table.
He waited for her to plonk into her chair before he eased his large frame into the seat opposite, popping his jacket button and running a hand down his perfect tie. His nails were as neat and tidy as the rest of him. His fingers were long and graceful, yet exquisitely masculine.
She lifted back out of her chair and held out a hand, “I’m Saskia. Saskia Bloom.”
“Nate Mackenzie,” he said, his nearly smile stretching out into the real thing, taking him from beautiful all the way to heartbreaking.
<
br /> Maybe he had a third nipple. Or ate with his feet. But so far, Saskia saw no obvious reason a man like him couldn’t find love on any street corner in the free world.
“A friend and I had a bit of fun guessing what the NJM stood for,” Saskia said.
“Care to fill me in on your guesses for the J?”
Juicy, she thought. Jpeg. Junk. “Not so much.”
The smile was back, and so were the curly tingles in her belly. Charisma, she told herself. Something chemical—hormonal, perhaps, or to do with endorphins. Not her field.
“Jackson,” he proffered. “It was my father’s name.”
Her researcher’s ear pricked. “Was?”
A beat, then, “He passed away several years back.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. Mine too. I mean, his name wasn’t Jackson, but my father passed away a few years ago.” When, Nate gave her nothing, just that face, and the promise of that smile, she blundered on. “I don’t have a middle name, though. My mum died having me and it was all my father could do to name me at all. Even then it was after the doctor who’d given him the bad news. Or so went the story he told me every day on my birthday—”
Apparently she was going to blunder on till the end of time, as her research subject sure wasn’t about to stop her. To stop herself, she reached for the massive jug of iced water, but Nate got there first. Perhaps it was gentlemanly behaviour. More likely, considering the fork incident, the guy was a quick learner. She sat on her hands as he poured her drink.
“So,” she said, after managing a drink without spilling any on herself, “is this how your blind date’s normally go? A slapstick show followed by the comparison of dead parents?”
“Not so much,” he said, his smile only going as far as his eyes, which somehow didn’t diminish the effect one jot. “Yours?”
“You’re my first.”
“Ah, a virgin.”
“Noooo. Not for a looong time.” Then, as it sank in, “An online dating first-timer? Yep.”
