His Until Midnight

by Nikki Logan

  Of course he hadn’t come. He’d moved on. The online gossip sheets made that patently clear. In fact he’d probably moved on by last Christmas. Whatever they’d shared here in Hong Kong was ancient history. Solstice fever. Even the restaurant had gone back to being what it was. Just a place you went to eat food.

  She glanced over towards the restaurant’s festively decorated glass wall. The smoking chair was no longer resident.

  Their chair.

  Hastily removed as a bad memory, probably. Or quite possibly a hygiene issue.

  Heat flooded her cheeks but the dragonflies didn’t much care. They went about their business, zipping around, feeding and frolicking and dipping their many feet in the crystalline water that circulated through their beautiful, make-believe world. Only a single individual battered against the corner of the terrarium, repeatedly. Uselessly.

  She knew exactly how it felt.

  Most of what she’d done this past year was useless battering. Existing, but not really living. Punctuated by insane bouts of emotional self-harm whenever her discipline failed her and she’d do the whole stalker number online and search out any clues about Oliver.

  What he was up to. Who he was up to. Whether he was okay.

  Of course, he always was.

  On her weak days, she imagined that Oliver never contacting her again was him honouring her request, respecting her, and she’d get all sore and squishy inside and struggle with the reality that it was over. But on her stronger days she’d accept the reality—that not contacting her was probably a blessed relief for a man like The Hammer and that there was nothing to really be over.

  Nothing had even started.

  If you didn’t count the wild sex.

  She’d vacillate between bouts of self-judgement for her stupidity, and fierce self-defence that she’d fallen for a man like him, convincing herself that it was possible for someone to be a pretty good guy without necessarily managing to always be a good person.

  Except that, like it or not, he’d been more than pretty good. Oliver was exceptional. In so many ways. And knowing that only made his inability to love her all the more brutal.

  What the hell was she thinking coming here? She could have done what she needed to do by email.

  Almost as she had the thought, a flurry of low voices drew her focus, through the terrarium, past the dragonflies, over to the restaurant’s glamorous entrance.

  To the man who’d just burst in.

  Oliver.

  Her whole body locked up and she mentally scrabbled around for somewhere to hide. Under her sofa. In the lush terrarium planting with the dragonflies. Anywhere other than here, with the terrified-bunny look on her face, peering at him through the glass like the coward she wanted so badly not to be.

  It took his laser-focus only a heartbeat to find her.

  His legs started moving. His eyes remained locked on hers as he powered around the outside of the terrarium and stopped just a metre away. His intent gaze whispered her name even though no air crossed his lips.

  ‘Explain,’ she gasped aloud, before she did something more ill-advised.

  Not, ‘Hello Oliver,’ not, ‘How dare you look so good after such a crap year?’; not even, ‘Why are you here?’ All much more pressing issues.

  ‘Explain what?’ he said, infuriating in his calmness. As if this weren’t the biggest deal ever.

  ‘Why my Testore trail leads to you.’

  His steady eyes didn’t waver. ‘Does it?’

  ‘Why the instrument I’ve been slowly working my way towards for two years suddenly turns up in a luggage locker at Hongqiao train station.’

  He stepped one pace closer. ‘Asia’s biggest train station. I imagine that’s not the only secret it’s harbouring.’

  Both arms folded across her chest. ‘Shanghai, Oliver.’

  ‘Coincidence.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Every word a bullet.

  He studied the dragonflies for distracted moments and when he brought his eyes back to hers they were defiant. ‘I made a few phone calls. Called in a few favours.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s not like I donated a kidney.’

  She peered at him through narrowed eyes. ‘You just happened to be owed a favour by the exact someone who knew where the Testore was?’

  He sized her up, as if trying to determine how far he could take the nonchalance. ‘Look...I called in a marker with a colleague, they called one in from someone else and it reverse dominoed all the way up to someone who knew the right people to ask.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Then I bought it.’

  ‘A million-dollar instrument?’

  ‘Can you put a price on a trafficked child?’

  Ha ha. ‘You realise you’re an accessory to a crime, now?’

  His eyes grew uncertain for the first time since he’d walked in the door and he frowned. ‘I hoped I’d get bonus points for repatriating it.’

  But she wasn’t ready to give him those points yet. ‘You perpetuated the problem by rewarding the syndicate for their crime. Now they’ll go out and steal another cello.’

  ‘Is that really what’s bothering you, Audrey? Wasn’t it more important to get the cello back into safe hands than to arrest whatever mid-level thug with a drug-debt they’d have made take the fall?’

  Did it matter how the Testore was recovered or what favours were exchanged and promises made? Or did it only matter that its rightful owner literally broke down and sobbed when it was returned to her, triggering Audrey’s own tears—tears she’d thought she’d used completely up?

  Maybe it only mattered that Oliver had cared enough to try.

  ‘What’s bothering me is why you did it.’ And by ‘bother’ she meant ‘making my chest ache’.

  ‘Because I could.’ He shrugged. ‘I have connections that you would never have had access to.’

  ‘A million dollars, Oliver.’ Plus some change. ‘Excessive, even for you.’

  ‘Not if it helped you out.’

  Blinking didn’t make the words any easier to comprehend—or believe—but this was not the time to let subtext get the better of her. ‘I’m amazed that you have any fortune at all if you make such emotionally based decisions.’

  ‘I don’t, generally. Only with you.’

  ‘Did you think I wouldn’t figure it out?’ That an anonymous key in a Christmas parcel leading her to a Shanghai train station wouldn’t be clue enough?

  ‘I knew you would.’

  ‘So did you think I’d gush with gratitude?’

  ‘On the contrary. I hoped it might piss you off enough to get on a plane.’

  Manipulated again. By the master. She shook her head. ‘Well, here I am. Hope you don’t want your million bucks back.’

  ‘Forget the money, Audrey. I sold one of my company’s nine executive apartments to raise the cash. It had only been used twice last year.’

  The world he lived in.

  ‘What if I’d just taken the cello and run?’

  That resulted in insta-frown. ‘Then I’d have been no worse off.’

  Ugh. ‘This was a mistake.’

  ‘Audrey—’ his voice suspended her flight after only two steps ‘—wait.’

  She ignored his command. ‘Thank you for doing my job for me. I’ll put a good word in with the authorities for you.’

  ‘You’re leaving?’

  ‘Yes. I shouldn’t have come at all.’

  What she should do was get back onto her ridiculously expensive short-notice flight and head back to her ridiculously expensive Sydney house. Blake’s house that she’d not had the courage or energy to move out of. The house and the life she hated.

  He stepped round in front of her. ‘Why did you?’

  Because she was slowly dying inside knowing she’d never see him again? Because she’d managed the first six months on pride and adrenaline but now there was nothing left but sorrow. Because she was addicted.

  ‘No idea,’ she gritted. ‘Let me rectify that ri
ght now.’

  He sprinted in front of her again. ‘Audrey, wait, please just hear me out.’

  ‘Didn’t we say enough at the airport?’ she sighed.

  ‘You said quite a lot but I was pretty much speechless.’

  Seriously? He got her back here to have the last word?

  ‘Ten minutes, Audrey. That’s it.’

  It was impossible to be this close to those bottomless hazel eyes and not give him what he was asking. Ten minutes of her time. In return for a million-dollar cello.

  She crossed her arms and settled into the carpet more firmly. ‘Fine. Clock’s ticking.’

  ‘Not here,’ he said, sliding his hand to her lower back and directing her towards the door.

  She stopped and lurched free of his hot touch. ‘No. Not upstairs.’ That had way too many memories. Although, reasonably, there were just as many down here.

  But at least, here, there was an audience. Chaperones.

  What are you afraid of? he’d once challenged her. Me or yourself?

  He just stared, a stoic plea in his eyes.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, fine!’ She swivelled ahead of him and marched back out into the elevator lobby then up the circular stairs off to the side. The plush carpet disguised his footfalls but she could feel Oliver’s closeness, his eyes on her behind.

  ‘You’ve lost weight,’ he announced.

  She froze. Turned. Glared.

  Yes, she’d bloody well lost weight and she really didn’t have much to spare. Now her ‘athletic’ was more ‘catwalk’ than she’d have liked. Especially for preservation of dignity. She didn’t want him knowing how tough she’d been doing it.

  His hands immediately shot up either side of him. ‘Right, sorry...keep going. Ten minutes.’

  At the top, he passed her and ran his key card through the swipe and the big doors swung open just as they had last year. She followed him into the luxurious penthouse—

  —and stopped dead just a few feet in, all the fight sucking clear out of her.

  Over by the window, over where he’d first touched her with trembling hands all those long, lonely nights ago, a new piece of furniture had pride of place overlooking the view.

  An overstuffed smoking chair.

  Their chair.

  The sight numbed her—emotionally and literally.

  ‘Why is that here?’ she whispered.

  He seemed surprised by the direction of her gaze. ‘I had it brought up here. I like to sit on it, look out. Think.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘A lot of things.’ He took a breath. ‘Us, mostly.’

  She turned wide eyes on him ‘There is no “us”.’

  His shoulders sagged. ‘There was. For one amazing night. I think about that, and I miss it.’

  Every muscle fibre in her body tightened up, ready for the ‘but’.

  He stepped closer. ‘I sit in that chair and I think about you and I miss you.’

  ‘Careful,’ she squeezed out of an airless chest. ‘I might get the wrong idea and let my feelings get away with me.’

  When had she become so angry?

  He took her hand, seemed surprised by its frigidity, and led her to the luxurious sofa circling the raised floor of the formal area. The sofa that they’d made such fast, furious love on that first time. She pulled her fingers free and crossed to the chair, instead, curling her hands around its ornate back, borrowing its strength. Using it as a crutch.

  Exactly the way her memories of it had been this past year.

  ‘I need you to know something,’ he said. ‘Quite a few somethings, actually.’

  She straightened, listening, but didn’t turn around. The Hong Kong skyline soothed her. Speaking of things missed...

  ‘I started wanting you about ten minutes after you walked into that bar all those years ago.’ The greenish-brown of his eyes focused in hard. ‘Then in the years that followed, I would have given every cent I had to wake up to you just once instead of clock-watching as midnight approached and waiting for the moment you’d flee down the stairs until the following Christmas.’

  Her breath slammed up behind the fist his words caused in her chest until she remembered that ‘wanting’ was not the same as ‘wanting’.

  One was short-term and easily addressed, apparently. Maybe that was why he’d lured her back here. Round two.

  ‘I was captivated from the first time you locked those expressive eyes and that sharp mind on me. You were a challenge because you seemed so disinterested in me and so interested in Blake and that just didn’t happen to me. And I’d sit there, enduring Blake’s hands all over you—’

  ‘Embarrassed by it.’

  ‘Not embarrassed, Audrey. Pained. I hated watching him touch you. I hated thinking you preferred his company, his touch, to mine. And that was when I realised there was more than just ego going on. That I didn’t just want you. I had feelings for you.’

  Her fingers curled into the brocade chair-back and she whispered, ‘Why did you send me the key, Oliver?’

  ‘Because you were right and because I wanted to tell you that, face to face, and I thought it would get your attention.’

  ‘Right about what?’

  ‘All of it. The Heathcliff thing. It was so much easier to be consumed with longing and never have to face the reality of what that actually meant. And then to disguise that with work and endless other excuses. You were my best friend’s wife. As unattainable as any woman could possibly be. Completely safe to fixate on.

  ‘I convinced myself that my inability to connect to women—just one woman—was about having high standards. It was easy to find them wanting and easier still to disregard them because they failed to measure up to this totally unattainable idyll I had. The idea of you.’

  He came around in front of the chair, folded one knee on its thick cushion to level their heights and met her eyes. ‘I would find fault with the relationships before they got anywhere near the point of commitment purely to avoid having to face that moment.’

  The anguish in his face wheedled its way under her skin and she itched to touch him. But discipline, for once, did not fail her. ‘Which moment?’

  ‘The moment where I realised that I wasn’t actually capable of committing to them. That I was no more capable of being true to someone than my father. So I’d get out before I had to face that or I chose women who would cheat on me first.’

  Oh, Oliver...

  ‘I counted myself so superior to him all this time—me with my rigid values and my high moral ground—but the whole time I was terrified that I had inherited his inability to commit to someone. To love just one someone.’ He lifted harrowed eyes to hers. ‘And that if ever I let myself, then I’d be exposed as my father’s son to someone to whom it would really matter.’

  He stroked her cheek.

  ‘But then I had you. In my arms. In my bed. And every single thing I’d ever wanted was being handed to me on a platter. The woman against whom every other woman I’d ever met had paled. It was all so suddenly real, and there was no good reason for us not to be together—in this chair, in this room, in this town and beyond it. I panicked.’

  ‘You told me you couldn’t see yourself loving me. You were quite clear.’ Saying it aloud still hurt, even after all this time.

  ‘Audrey.’ He sighed. ‘My father took my mother’s love for him and used it to bind her in a relationship that he didn’t have to work for. He didn’t value it. He certainly didn’t honour it. What if I did that to you?’

  ‘What if you didn’t? You aren’t your father, Oliver.’ No matter what she’d said in anger.

  ‘What if I am?’ Desperation clouded his eyes. ‘Your feelings were going to force me into discovering. That’s why I pushed you away.’

  Just twelve months ago she’d stood here, in this penthouse, terrified that she was somehow deficient. And Oliver had proven her wrong. And in doing so changed her life. Now was her chance to return the favour.

  ‘You are not broken,
Oliver Harmer. And you are as much your mother’s son as you are your father’s. Never forget that.’

  He suddenly found something in the giant Christmas tree in the corner enormously fascinating, as if he couldn’t quite believe her words were true.

  ‘Could she love?’ Audrey pressed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why can’t you?’

  Confusion mixed in with the anguish. ‘I never have.’

  ‘Have you not? Truly?’ She straightened and locked her eyes. ‘Can you think of no one at all?’

  He stood frozen.

  She kept her courage. ‘It can be easy to overlook. I once loved someone for eight years, almost without realising.’

  His skin blanched and it was hard to know whether it was because she’d used the L word in connection with him or because she’d used the past tense.

  ‘When did you realise?’

  She ran her hands across the back of the chair’s fine embroidered fabric. ‘Out of the blue, this one time, curled up in a chair.’

  He still just stared. Silence ticked on. She forced herself to remain tough.

  ‘So, was that what you wanted to tell me?’ she checked. ‘It’s not you it’s me?’

  ‘It is me, Audrey. But no, what I really wanted to do was apologise. I’m sorry I let you leave Hong Kong believing there was anything you could have done differently or anything you could have been that would have made a difference.’

  And his guilt was apparently worth a rare cello.

  Her lips tightened. ‘You know, this seems to be the story of my life. Last time it was my gender, this time there was nothing I could have done differently short of caring less.’

  ‘This is nothing like Blake.’

  ‘I’m not ashamed of my feelings. And I’m not afraid of them either. Unlike you.’

  His eyes tarnished off as she watched. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Exactly what I said. I think you are afraid of the depth of your feelings. Because feeling makes you vulnerable.’

  ‘What I’m afraid of is hurting you.’

  ‘Isn’t that my risk to take? Just as it was your mother’s choice to stay with your father.’

  Two deep lines cut down between his brows. ‘You can’t want to make that choice.’

  ‘I wouldn’t if I believed that you’ve inherited anything more than eye colour from your father. You dislike him too much. If anything I’d expect you to grow into the complete opposite of him just out of sheer bloody determination.’