by Ally Blake
Her eyes cut to his.
“Such a little thing, with so much fight in you.”
“It’s not fight. It’s passion. Verve. Joie de vivre.”
One eyebrow slid north. If she’d had a bow and arrow and any kind of athletic skill she’d have shot him between the damn things.
“Nate,” she said, her hands out in supplication. Give me a sign. Give me a break!
He caught her hands to him and didn’t let go. “Cards on the table.”
Her heart stopped. From one beat to the next—nothing. Then she curled her fingers into his and her blood began to race. “Fine. You first.”
He laughed, the sound soft, raw, the loveliest sound in the entire world. “You started it, sweetheart. Tell me what you came here to say. It’ll be okay. I promise.”
Saskia breathed out hard. The man had more charm in his little finger than the rest of the population of Melbourne combined. Maybe she could tell him that.
He looked into her eyes. She’d never felt him more present, never seen the real him so clearly in the beautiful fathomless blue.
“I’m just a man, Saskia. Flesh and blood and instinct. I don’t know what you want unless you tell me.”
She could tell him. She could. It was simple after all.
Name: Saskia Bloom
Age: twenty-eight
Looking for: a way to tell the man sitting before her that she’s in love for the first time in her life
She took a breath. Tried to still the centrifuge in her mind. To forget herself. And it was like one of those dreams where she felt a scream rising inside her but no matter how wide she opened her mouth no sound came out.
Nate’s eyes flickered between hers, then they softened. He turned her hand over in his and lifted it to his mouth, kissing one palm and then the other before letting her go. “Just as I thought. You’re no more ready for this than I am.”
No! she screamed inside her head. I’m ready! I’ve been ready. For ever and always!
It was just after Stu’s awful visit, and Lissy being dumped, and the surfeit want, the need, the desire—it was all a big mess inside her head. A big mess with a solid centre. When it came down to it the thought of laying her heart on the line and being rejected was more than she could bear.
A tear plopped down her cheek before she’d even felt it well in her eye. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, but another followed.
“Don’t cry,” Nate said.
It was the closest to begging she’d ever heard from the man.
“I can’t do tears.”
Which only made her cry more.
With an oath, he pulled her into his arms. She struggled against him, knowing if she softened she was gone. And she was all she had.
“Hush,” he said, his breath against her hair.
A second later, maybe ten, the effort of keeping herself strong crumbled.
He kissed her on the forehead and then, as if it simply wasn’t enough, lifted her face with a finger beneath her chin and pressed his lips to hers. The silken heat of his touch flowed through her, even while her whole body was rent with tension.
His kiss was lush, lovely, lost in time. Her mind was a whirl of sensation and sadness.
With a groan she slid off the stool, threaded her hands through his hair and sank against him, imprinting herself on him, and him on her, as if it might be the last chance she’d have to commit him to memory, pouring every ounce of love she felt into that kiss in the hope he’d feel it, know it and understand it without having to be hit over the head with it.
When he pulled away the tears kept on coming.
Love me, she thought, love me, love me, like I love you.
Smiling—smiling!—he pressed her hair from her cheeks. “You’ll be just fine, Saskia Bloom. I know it. I knew the first moment I saw your picture. You’re content. You have your house, your dog, your work, your friends. Your life is in a groove that’s made for you. I envy you that.”
“I want...more,” she said, as close to admitting anything as she’d come.
He shook his head once, then, looking her right in the eye, said, “When you told me what you wanted in a relationship, back at The Cave that night when you refused to come home with me...?”
Saskia nodded, astounded that it felt like such a long time ago.
“You talked about meeting a guy, moving in together, getting married?”
She nodded again, knowing as she pictured all those things that even then she’d imagined those things with him.
“You never once mentioned being in love.”
Saskia stopped nodding. The glorious self-pity fled and she shook her head a little as she tried to unearth that memory in its entirety. “Of course I did.”
“No,” Nate said. “You didn’t.”
But she did. She wanted to be in love and loved with so much of herself her lungs tightened to fists at the very thought. And yet she couldn’t open her mouth and say so.
But he was the one with the walls, not her. She wanted him, she loved him—couldn’t he damn well stop talking rubbish and look at her? It was pouring out of her!
But with a kiss to the end of her nose he extricated himself from her embrace and stepped back, then another step and then he moved around to the other side of the bench to check his pasta sauce and it felt as if he’d walked a mile.
And his words finally came through. You’ll be just fine, he’d said. Meaning she’d be just fine without him.
She stood on shaky legs and collected her things. She waited until her throat wasn’t so tight she could barely swallow, then said, “Nate?”
He turned, faced her across the kitchen. And she wondered if he knew what she was going to say before she did.
“I don’t see how... I’m so sorry, but I can’t go to Mae’s wedding with you.”
“Yeah,” he said, frowning at his shoes before looking back at her, all dark and impenetrable, his thoughts kept from her behind the deep, dark tunnel of his eyes. “I wondered about that too.”
She just looked at him in silence. Her throat a dry wasteland where words could apparently no longer pass.
“Consider this my breaking off our agreement.”
He lifted his hands and tore the air and her heart snapped right in two. She heard it. Ping and crack. And then a swoosh as air filled the crevasse.
“Thank you,” she said.
He’d broken her heart and she’d thanked him. She might not have pressed charges on Stu, but she’d never thanked the guy! She was clearly way more screwed up than she’d thought.
Nate said, “It’s been my absolute pleasure.”
And with that she turned and walked away.
As she drove off in her newly fixed old car she was glad it seemed to know the way home because her mind was anywhere but on the road.
Reliving every second, every nuance, every touch, every glance, she felt as if Nate had known why she’d come, and he’d carefully turned her about until she no longer knew what she was thinking.
Before she’d gone over there it had felt so much like love. Now it hurt like love, it burned like love, but with her genetic make-up—a transient femme fatale and a shut-in who pined his life away—who the hell was she to know?
TEN
Nate sat on the couch in his office in battered old track pants and a tank, trainer-clad feet on the coffee table, head resting on the back of the couch. His yoga mat remained curled up in the cupboard, along with his free weights and a folded-up rowing machine, while the sun set over Melbourne, sending long shadows across the room and turning his blue-and-white office a dreamy pinkish-gold.
Nate nudged his shoes off by the heels and slowly lowered his feet to the carpet. It was even softer than it looked. No wonder it had cost a mint.
Hitching his pants, he curled his toes into the pile and closed his eyes.
And not for the first time in the past few days, behind his closed lids he saw Saskia.
This time it was barefoot, not five metres from where he sat, the sun shining through her unassuming clothes, revealing a figure you’d never guess would be hidden underneath that op-shop exterior.
Then he saw her lying back in his bed, dark tousled hair splayed out on his pillow, eyes sleepy and sensual as she looked up at him, hooked a hand behind his neck and pulled him down to make love to her.
He saw Saskia, her eyes fierce as she told him to loosen up, to open up, accept ruffling, to be a human being.
He saw Saskia, her face mottled with tears as she told him it was over.
“Here you are.”
Nate looked up to see Gabe, laptop bag over his shoulder as he prepped to head home for the day.
“Where else would I be?” It was meant to be a joke, but in the beat of silence both were all too aware it was the blatant truth of Nate’s life.
“Beer?” Nate asked.
“Don’t have to ask me twice.” Gabe dropped his bag and liberated two bottles from the bar below Nate’s bookshelves. He snapped the tops off the bottles, sank down on the other end of the couch and said, “So, out with it.”
Nate finished a mighty swig, then said, “With what?”
“The reason you’re sitting here pouting like a little girl.”
No point denying it. “Saskia and I broke up.” Knowing it was one thing. Saying it out loud made it feel real. Right behind his ribs. He took another swig.
“She with whom you were never actually going out?”
“Seems we were in the end.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“How’s that?”
“Gut told me. And Paige confirmed it. According to her, you’re seriously cute when you’re in lurve.”
“I’m not in...anything. As evidenced by the fact that I am no longer seeing her.”
“Lady’s choice?”
Nate thought back to their conversation a few nights before. Okay, so he’d thought it over a lot. Over and over. The twists and turns, the moments when he’d felt as if it was about to fall the other way before it flipped again, leaving his chest tight. He’d thought clinching an impossible investment deal was a rush, but being with Saskia was that times a thousand.
Had been, he reminded himself. Then took another swig.
“Yeah.” Gabe answered himself, giving Nate a thump on the shoulder. “Man, I’m sorry. I liked her. Paige liked her. Mae was on the verge of asking her to be another bridesmaid. Now, that woman is off her tree. If she wasn’t Paige’s best friend...”
“Poor Clint,” they said in unison.
Laughter followed and Nate knocked his bottle against Gabe’s. Friendship healed. And it felt good. A relief, even. A need met.
Even while he told himself he needed nothing but the business he’d built, the independence he’d earned, life was better with Gabe in it.
In fact life had been better these past weeks than he remembered it being in a long time. Simpler. Lighter. Easier. He’d seen more of his family than he had in months. His circle of friends—not merely acquaintances but actual friends—had grown without him even realising it, and it felt good.
And he’d had Saskia to thank for it all.
“Wedding’s Saturday, remember? So who’s the lucky girl you’ll be taking now?”
Nate sat forward, rubbed his hands over his face. “No one I guess. I’ll go alone.”
“Don’t say it too loud. The Mackenzie women will hear.”
“Tough luck. I’m done.”
“No more breaking hearts and taking names? Love her, don’t you?”
Beyond feigning ignorance as to whom Gabe was referring, Nate moved his gaze to a spot in the middle distance. “I like her. I like being with her. I think about her when I’m not with her. She’s bossy, and I like that. But...” The fight seeped out of him as the truth seeped in. “Not that I have anything to compare it to.”
“Comparison’s not the point, mate. You don’t love her or you do.”
The sun must have dropped below the horizon because the sensor lights in his office flickered on, casting a cool glow over the room. “Not that it makes any difference. As much as we drive each other crazy...we’d drive each other crazy.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
It was messy, challenging, a fight he couldn’t always win. It was full-on, distracting, time-consuming. It was emotional, painful, exhilarating. It was anything but bad. It was the most fun he’d had his entire adult life.
“Welcome to the club, mate; your pass and monogrammed towel are in the mail,” said Gabe.
“Too bad I spent my last hour with her carefully convincing her there was nothing between us then.”
“Ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”
“So why do I get the feeling I’ve turned up at the opera house a day late and a dollar short?”
Gabe gave Nate a pat on the back and curled him into a bear hug that thumped the breath from his lungs. Then, clearing his throat, pressed to his feet with a speed that belied his size. “You’re coming Saturday.” It wasn’t a question.
“I think the best gift I could give Mae and Clint would be my not coming.”
With a final slap on the cheek, like an old Italian mamma, Gabe left Nate to his misery. To the knowledge that he loved a woman who didn’t love him. Or, by the dawning realisation in her eyes, didn’t love him enough.
He sank his head into his hands and rubbed at his temples. Damn her big brown eyes. She’d turned him soft and then sent him off into the world a great big marshmallow.
Only it didn’t make him feel soft. He felt strong with it. As if he’d been running on quicksand his whole life and now the ground beneath his feet had solidified, letting him slow down, see the world as it happened not as a blur as he chased the future.
Saskia. Sweet, interfering, dogmatic, stubborn, gorgeous Saskia. Who’d lived her life on quicksand too. He wondered if she knew it. If she felt it. If that was what she’d seen in him. A like soul. Her match. His complement.
Yet still she’d walked away.
And he’d let her go.
* * *
It was the night before the wedding and, as Nate tended to do, he leant in the doorway while the women in his life took over his mum’s lounge room—Jasmine with her eyes flicking to her twin boys, playing with his old train set, making sure they weren’t hatching plots for world domination, Hope reading an eBook with her legs hanging over the leg of the couch, Faith flicking channels on the TV so fast it made Nate’s head spin.
When his temple began to throb he did something about it, grabbing the remote out of Faith’s hand and switching off the damn TV.
Faith’s “Hey!” got everyone’s attention.
Good. He had something to say.
They wouldn’t like it. In fact they might all turn on him. But he couldn’t not say it. He’d not said quite enough things the past few days, and it was eating him from the inside out.
“I have a confession.” With that four sets of sharp feminine Mackenzie eyes swung his way.
Jasmine spoke first and, grinning, said, “Do tell, oh, brother mine.”
“It’s about Saskia.”
“I knew it!” Faith said, her squeal near breaking the sound barrier.
Hope, meanwhile, gave him a small smile, a tilt of her head, encouraging him to go on.
“Saskia and I were never actually dating.” No, not exactly true. And this was a time for truth. The idea of anything else made him feel more exhausted than a man with his youth, stamina and ripping good health had a right to feel. “Not in the way we made you believe we were.”
>
“I don’t understand,” his mother said as she came to sit on the arm of the chair nearest him, her forehead creased with concern, her heart in her eyes.
The threat of emotion swarmed over him, but rather than pressing it back, pretending it didn’t exist, he merely held it at bay, letting it lift and subside like a lunar tide.
“I found her online with the express purpose of taking her to Mae’s wedding as my date, merely to keep you lot from finding one for me.”
Silence stretched to the outer reaches of the big room, broken only by the click and whir of the old wooden train set, whose batteries were winding down.
“I don’t understand,” said his mother.
“It was fake,” Faith said, as if trying to make sense of it herself. “The relationship. The affection. The attraction. All of it.”
Not all of it, no. But he knew them well enough to know any flicker of hope would be fanned into a flame. So he chose his words carefully.
“We made a deal that was mutually beneficial to us both.”
“Good God, you paid her?” Faith asked, incredulous.
“Don’t say it like that,” he bit out, turning on Faith so fiercely her eyes bugged out of her head. He reined himself in a notch. “Don’t even think it. The details of our agreement are none of anybody’s business but our own. But, since we involved you in the ruse, it’s fair that you know the only reason she went along with it as long as she did was because she had this crazy compulsion that I needed her help.”
“If anyone needs help it’s you, brother.” That was Hope.
Nate puffed a laugh from his nose, grateful she was in the room. Grateful they all were, to tell the truth, and that he could finally say what he had to say. And by the way they were listening they would know he meant it.
“I wasn’t thinking anything bad about her, Nate,” Faith said, drawing his eye. “I’ve met her, remember? She’s way too cool for you. But I am flabbergasted that my darling, dashing big brother actually thinks any woman would need an inducement to be with him.”
God, was that a tear? He couldn’t take tears.
“Faith, you’ve missed the point. I went miles out of my bloody way to find a woman to not be with me.”
