Visibly she gathered herself and turned to murmur something to her group. Then she walked briskly off to the side and waited for him to catch up. “I’m busy,” she said without preliminary. “If you could come back—”
“No, I couldn’t.”
She met his eyes for the first time, and he realized that she was working on her own head of steam. “I can’t talk to you now. I’m working.”
“I would be, too, if I wasn’t here.”
“Which brings us to why you are here,” she said. “Didn’t you get my e-mail?”
“Perhaps you could have called to check.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You expected me to call? To what—discuss how many more ways you can tell me to get lost?”
“So I could ask how you are, how you’re coping with the news. Whether there are any problems, healthwise.”
“As you can see I’m fine,” she said shortly and she started to turn away.
With a hand on her arm, he turned her back. “Are you, Angie? Are you fine?”
She drew a breath, released it on a sigh. “Yes, and I really do have work to do. I can’t do this now, Tomas. Really, I can’t.”
He cast an irritated glance beyond her shoulder and caught a curious bunch of faces watching them intently. “How long will you be?”
“Twenty minutes but, frankly, I don’t know what else there is to say…unless something has changed since last time we talked.”
And there it was, the perfect opening. His chance to say…what? Had anything changed? Other than he’d recognized the fact that he missed her?
She made an impatient sound. “Does this visit have anything to do with Alex’s wedding falling through? Or Rafe’s new bride going AWOL?”
“No. I needed to know you’re all right. With the pregnancy thing.”
“We’ve established that I am,” she said curtly, “because there is no pregnancy.”
The cold impact of those words caught him unprepared, and he missed the cue by a mile. She turned out of his hold and started walking away, each tap of her heels on the timber floor a brisk note of finality. A sick, scary feeling settled in Tomas’s gut. He’d been here before and got it all wrong, was he going to do the same again? Was he going to let the woman he loved walk away because he was too stubborn and too scared and too tongue-tied to say what needed to be said?
“It’s not only about the pregnancy,” he called out after her, and he sensed a dozen eyes fix onto his face. Not one of them was dark and luminous and fired with passion or seething with anger. The only eyes that mattered remained steadfastly turned away and she kept on walking.
“Unless you want me to shout the rest of what I have to say across the room, Angie, you better stop walking away.”
A thousand emotions pounded through Angie’s blood as she heard and barely dared to believe what she’d heard. She stopped, drew a deep breath. “This had better be good, Tomas Carlisle, and it better not cost me my job.”
“You want to keep this job?” he asked.
Slowly she turned and met his eyes. Her heart kicked hard in her chest. “It’s not my first choice.”
“The commute would be tough.”
“If I were living…?”
“With me.” He took the first steps, as slow and steady and deliberate as the blue eyes that held hers, and her heart started singing with joy. “We miss you, Angie.”
“We?”
“Manny and Rae miss you giving them nights off. Stink says you’re the only one who listens to his stories. Charlie misses the long walks.”
“And you?”
He stopped in front of her. “More than anyone.”
“What are you saying, Tomas Carlisle?”
“I want you to come home, Angie.” He touched her face with one hand. “I want to take that chance you offered me.”
“You said I deserve better.”
“I said a lot of things that day. Most of them I thought I meant, some of them I even believed.” He swallowed, shifted his feet, frowned. “I’m not good with expressing how I feel, especially with an audience—” he cast a glowering glance at the small gallery of spectators and she heard a murmur of voices and a shuffling of high heels “—but I want to be that better man you deserve.”
For a moment she was too overwhelmed by his words to speak, so she turned her face into his hand and kissed the palm. You are that man, she thought, you are. And just when she thought she might find her voice, to tell him so, he traced her lower lip with his thumb and said, “I love you, Angie.”
Not so bad, she decided when she could think again, for a man short on words to express himself. And she told him so before he kissed her, and after he kissed her she told him that she loved him, that she always had, that she always would.
“Are you sorry about the baby?” Tomas asked.
“We still have time to try again, to make sure we keep Kameruka.” He didn’t miss the we. He liked the way that sounded. Their home, their future, as partners. “Third time is supposed to be lucky.”
“No,” he said, smiling into her eyes. “I’m lucky.”
Twenty-five minutes later, after she’d dispersed her Pink Ladies and finished her working day, they walked hand in hand to the best suite in the hotel and as soon as he closed the door she walked into his arms and he got very, very lucky.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-7706-3
THE RUGGED LONER
Copyright © 2005 by Bronwyn Turner
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*Princes of the Outback
Rugged Loner Page 16
