‘But,’ he said, ‘I have an alternative to suggest—almost as good a view, too. I’ll come and get you now.’
And that was how Lane found herself walking across the Sydney Harbour Bridge at car level. It was funny to think that she’d lived her whole life in Sydney but until the past month with Adam, she hadn’t actually lived in Sydney—she’d only resided there. How had she never realized there was a pedestrian walkway over the Bridge that anyone could walk over at any time? It didn’t matter that they weren’t on top of the world on the summit, because they didn’t lose much when it came to the view. There was a gap in the wire safety mesh along the walkway specifically positioned to give pedestrians an unfettered vista of the Harbour, which was laid out for them like a scattered collection of blue, green and white gems.
The Sydney Opera House looked like a white bird about to take off over the sparkling waters. It was a beautiful sight—and even more beautiful was the sense that with Adam behind her, his arms around her, she could imagine soaring skywards too, pulling him with her into the bright blue heavens. Lesson Number Sixteen. Imagination can spur you on. Yes, yes it could.
‘You know why this is more fun than the official climb?’ Adam said, and kissed the side of her neck. ‘Because here I might feel a little bit crazy, but at least I don’t feel like a tourist attraction, when I do this.’ He released her so he could take her hands and spread her arms wide on either side of her. ‘You have to own it, Lane, or it won’t work,’ he said, and she somehow knew what he wanted from her, and she laughed, threw out her chest and flung back her head. ‘Perfect, you’re perfect and so is this moment,’ he breathed into her ear, and then he took a deep breath and yelled at the top of his voice, ‘I’m the King of the world!’
‘Me too!’ she yelled right after him, in the general vicinity of the Opera House.
Lane was still laughing as Adam turned her slowly to face him, and her heart turned over at the look in his eyes. Admiration, tenderness. He looked at her like she was more beautiful than anything in the whole Harbour, the whole world.
‘Better than Titanic, right?’ he said, and kissed her as though he’d never stop.
Adam had parked the car in The Rocks, close to the southern end of the Bridge, and as he pulled away from the kerb, Lane could see the paying BridgeClimb customers in their blue-and-grey jumpsuits commencing their tour.
‘Have you done the official one?’ she asked.
Adam hesitated. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘And it’s good?’
‘It’s great, it really is.’
‘You could have just told me you’d done it already.’
‘But you wanted a Bridge experience.’
‘And so you gave me a version I didn’t have to pay for.’
Adam said nothing—just darted a look at her, and she thought there was a hint of a warning in it.
‘You know,” she said “if you want to get all Lesson Six on me, I can do it in reverse and tally up all the petrol you’ve paid for driving me around, and the wear and tear on the jeep—’
‘If you’re going to be obsessive about money—’
‘It seems to me that you’re the one being obsessive about it, Adam.’
His jaw hardened. ‘You’ll see what “obsessive” looks like if you offer me petrol money, Lane.’
‘I’m not going to do that. That would be ridiculous. I’ve said before it’s stupid to argue over money.’
‘Good. Great, in fact. That means you’re not going to complain when I pay for dinner, are you, Lane?’
‘What dinner?’
‘Dinner at the Harbour Brasserie, tomorrow night. It’s something of an AQHP tradition when we win a big job.’
‘You won the hotel job?’
‘We won the job.’
‘That’s so good! Congratulations.’
Adam took her hand, and held it on his thigh. ‘Lesson Number Twenty, Lane: words are cheap.’
‘What— What does that mean?
‘It means that if you really want to congratulate me, and if money really isn’t an issue, you’ll come to the dinner and let me pay for you. Uh-uh, Lane.’ As she tried to take her hand back. ‘I’m telling you flat out that my ego won’t take it if you whip out your credit card in front of everyone and insist on paying your share.’
Lane left her hand in his, but her fingers had gone stiff and cold. ‘It’s not about the money, Adam, it’s about the dinner.’
‘What about it?’
‘I don’t belong there.’
Adam released her hand then, and put both of his on the steering wheel, driving without saying anything for a moment. And then: ‘It’s just dinner with my top two executives. One’s married and will be bringing his wife; the other’s engaged and will be bringing his fiancée, and I need to take someone,’ he said.
‘I don’t belong there, Adam. They’re work people.’
‘Sarah!’ he said. ‘Sarah always comes, and she doesn’t work for me. Plus she’s … er … bringing that new boyfriend of hers, Patrick or whatever the hell his name is—if you can call a guy you’ve been seeing for a week a boyfriend—and he doesn’t work for me either. You’ve got nothing against dinner with those two, have you? You can even ask Erica and that guy of hers along if you need reinforcements—because I know she wants another chance to check me out.’
‘Adam …’ She searched for words. ‘The confidentiality clause is there for a reason.’
‘But Sarah and Erica already know about the contract.’
‘Yes, but Jeremy, Patrick and your staff don’t.’
‘They don’t need to know. We’re not going to have sex on the table in front of everyone. It’s not an orgy or a buck’s night. And I’m not acknowledging you as my partner or anything.’
‘No, but—’
‘Okay listen, the fidelity clause is the thing I’m really worried about.’
She frowned at him. ‘I’m not following you.’
‘The guys from work will think it’s strange if I come on my own and from a confidentiality perspective, it will be better if I take someone—it’ll stop them asking pointed questions about who I’m seeing.’
‘I don’t know why they’ll ask any questions at all. You can’t always have a girl to take to dinner can you?’
He pounced on that. ‘Yes, Lane, I can, and I do, and they’ll ask questions if I don’t and God knows what Sarah will blab and the shit will really hit the fan if she says the wrong thing, so if you’re worried about confidentiality—’
‘Can’t you just take someone else?’ she asked, and tried to ignore the horrible stab of jealousy that accompanied those words.
He gave her a blinking sideways look. ‘You wouldn’t mind?’
‘Well, no …’ she said, and actually had to sit on her hands to make sure they didn’t give her away.
Pause. It seemed he was digesting that, considering the option. And then: ‘Here’s the thing, Lane,’ he said. ‘If I take someone else, she’ll expect me to take her to bed afterwards.’
Lane swallowed. ‘I see.’ And then she shook her head. ‘No I don’t. Does every woman you take out end up in bed with you?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Oh. I— Oh.’
‘And that will mean the fidelity clause is shot to hell. So can you do us both a favour and just say yes?’
She sighed. ‘Okay, yes.’ Another sigh. ‘Yes, all right.’
‘Great,’ Adam said. ‘Just … great.’
But he didn’t talk to her for the rest of the drive, and he barely grunted a goodbye at her when she got out of the jeep, and Lane was left wondering if he really wanted her at the dinner or if he didn’t.
***
‘I don’t see what the problem is,’ Erica said to Lane the next night, as she positioned a last curl of Lane’s hair and stood back to see the effect.
‘The problem is that we’re not supposed to be dating,’ Lane said.
‘That’s not what’s it’s looked like to me this past month. I feel like a nomad wandering in search of a bed every night, I’ve been booted out of here so often.’
‘It’s made Jeremy happy, at least.’
‘Yes, well making Jeremy happy isn’t my principal goal in life, funnily enough.’
‘And the booting out is so I can have sex without suffering performance anxiety; it’s got nothing to do with … with date-ish things.’
‘I’ve detected no performance anxiety on the mornings after, Lane, just mind-boggling satisfaction levels. Although if you don’t stop fiddling with the neckline of that dress, I might go in search of some Valium for you.’
‘It’s too revealing. Look at my boobs!’
‘Get used to it. I foresee an evening full of boob watching, they look so good. And there you were thinking you’d never get to wear that dress for Adam.’
‘I’m not wearing it for Adam. I’m wearing it because we’re going to a fancy restaurant.’
‘Oh for God’s sake. Talk about denial.’
‘It’s going to cost a fortune,’ Lane said gloomily, staring in the mirror at her perfectly made-up face and seeing nothing but trouble. ‘I should never have agreed.’
‘So stop thinking about it in terms of his spending money on you and start thinking about it in terms of him spending time with you.’
‘Then you must be valuable, because I’m spending my time with you,’ Lane murmured, as Adam’s words that night at Benedetto’s came back to her. She looked at Erica. ‘He said that to me.’
Erica was looking fascinated. ‘Did he indeed?’
‘But he didn’t mean it. It was just … just something to say.’
‘I … see. Well, do I? I don’t know.’
‘You will see. Tonight.’ She gripped Erica’s hands. ‘You have to help me tonight, Erica.’
‘How?’
‘Just … just listen to what he says. He’s … he’s nice, you know? Kind. He says things to build my confidence.’
‘Hmm, “nice” and “kind” aren’t the words I’d use to describe Adam Quinn, so if he’s like that with you—’
‘But that’s just it! I could be wrong about the nice and kind. I’ve probably been reading too much into what he says. Just because the sex is … is good, and he seems to … to enjoy it … Well, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything more, right? Guys say things to girls all the time at such moments, don’t they?’
‘Some guys, yes. But it sounds to me like he might be saying nice things at other times, too. Is that right, Lane?’
‘Yes, but what do I know? That’s why I need you to assess what he says, how he is towards me, and later, you can help me put it in perspective.’
‘What do you want the answer to be, Lane? That he likes you? What about David, in that case?’
‘No, Adam doesn’t like me. At least, not romantically. Remember what Sarah said. He’s a total unrelenting tart. A womanizer, a philanderer, a Casanova. She’s had lots of friends fall in love with him and they’ve all had their hearts broken. There’s no way he’d ever fall for me. In fact, he as good as told me that if I didn’t go tonight he’d have to take someone else and if he took someone else, he was almost guaranteed to break the fidelity clause in our contract.’
‘That sounds suspiciously like blackmail to me.’
‘I think it’s just the truth.’
‘Then I’m not sure what you want from me, Lane. If you’re so sure he doesn’t like you, as in like you, does it really matter how nice he is? Let him be nice. God knows, you could do with some guy being nice to you after that prick DeWayne.’
‘Yes, but I want you to stop me.’
‘Stop you?’
‘From … from falling for him.’
Erica looked at her for a long, long moment. ‘Are you sure I’m not too late for that?’
Lane shook her head, then abruptly let go of Erica and covered her face with her hands. ‘I can’t do it, Erica. I won’t. It will make things awkward and the lessons … the lessons won’t work, and then Sarah will look at me and tell me she warned me how it would be, and that will be awkward too.’ She dropped her hands, and gripped Erica’s again. ‘Help me!’
Erica sighed. ‘Okay, I’ll help you any way I can; you know that. But first, I hate to tell you this since you fidgeted so much when I was putting that make-up on you, but you’ve just smudged your eye shadow, your mascara and your lipstick, so I need to work on those again before we go to work on your heart.’
‘Not my heart. Just my common sense.’
‘Okay your common sense.’ Erica rolled her eyes. ‘Sure thing.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Lane had insisted to Adam that she’d meet him at the restaurant, so Jeremy called for her and Erica in a taxi. Sarah, who didn’t have a car, was catching a taxi separately, and because she had a phobia about dragging guys over the Harbour Bridge to her flat in Mosman, she’d told Patrick (or as she’d christened him in line with her usual name-the-date protocol, Passionate Patrick) to meet her at the restaurant.
By the time Lane, Erica and Jeremy arrived, simultaneously with Sarah whose taxi dropped her off mere seconds after their own, Adam, his colleagues, their partners, and Patrick were all seated and drinking champagne, and Adam was casting unfriendly looks at a squirming Patrick.
‘God,’ Sarah muttered to Lane, after one glance at the table, ‘he’s going to be unbearable just because Patrick didn’t collect me!’
And unbearable was what he was. What the whole night was, Lane soon decided. Adam’s colleagues’ partners took one look at Erica and clutched their men a little more closely, blocking every attempt at a group conversation by chatting only to each other. Jeremy kept making proprietorial fusses over Erica every time one of the other men at the table addressed a remark to her. Adam was constantly curling his lip at Patrick, who kept checking his phone and then laughing at whatever he was seeing. In between, Adam listened like a hawk to everything his colleagues said to Lane and glowered at her if she so much as smiled.
Sarah was valiantly trying to keep the peace and make everyone happy—which was a specialty of hers—but as the main meal was being cleared away, she darted a loud-and-clear ‘save me’ look at Lane and Erica and got to her feet, and all three girls fled post-haste to the bathroom, where they closed the door, looked at each other in silence for a long moment … and then burst out laughing.
‘Dear God!’ Sarah said. ‘Is there a back door we can escape through?’
‘I’m going to kill Jeremy,’ Erica groaned.
‘He’s just defending his patch,’ Lane said.
Erica dug into her evening bag for her lipstick. ‘Against whom? One of those men is married, one’s engaged, and the other two are dating my best friends. As if I’m going to be interested even if any one of them is.’
‘Adam and I aren’t “dating”.’
‘So … what?’ Erica asked. ‘Are you saying I can have a crack at him?’
Lane blinked, then swallowed. ‘Well … The contract doesn’t finish until the 3rd of July—it’s a full three months, not twelve weeks you know—but after that—’
‘Oh, Lane, you idiot, as if I’d go there,’ Erica interrupted, swiping on a layer of lip gloss without even looking in the mirror. ‘And as if he would. I think it’s quite clear where his interest lies.’
‘For seven more weeks,’ Lane said, as though setting that in stone for all of them.
‘Shut up, Lane, and come here so I can fix your face,’ Erica said, and positioned her for a quick make-up refresh.
‘Seven weeks,’ Sarah said, and sighed. ‘Which is six weeks longer than Patrick and I are going to last.’
Erica recapped the lipstick she’d used on Lane. ‘How do you know?’
‘My curse,’ Sarah said simply. ‘I’m visiting Dumspville just after the one-week mark these days. Which means sometime after dinner tonight, I’ll get the fond go
odbye.’
‘I don’t see how you can be so sure,’ Lane said.
Sarah pulled out her own lipstick and turned to the mirror. ‘Believe me, Lane, I know the signals by now. Used to be every three weeks, then every two. And now it’s a week. It’s very demoralizing. Although when I think about it, a week or two is on par with most of Adam’s liaisons.’ She layered on some brick red. ‘He says we don’t have the genetics for long-lasting relationships.’ The lipstick went back into her bag as she looked at Lane via the mirror. ‘Maybe that’s why he’s been scowling at you all night, Lane. He must be feeling the strain after—what is it, six weeks? —with the one woman.’
Lane sighed as she looked to Erica. ‘Which makes our earlier conversation moot.’
Sarah smacked her lips together and turned to face them straight on. ‘What conversation?’ she asked suspiciously.
Erica shrugged. ‘I had a feeling Adam had some ulterior motive in asking Lane to dinner tonight.’
‘Like what?’ Sarah asked.
‘Like maybe he likes her. As in likes.’ Pause, during which Erica and Sarah looked at each other. Then: ‘Lane insists he doesn’t,’ Erica went on, ‘even though apparently he’s being very “nice” to her.’
Sarah was shaking her head slowly. ‘“Nice”? Adam? Look, I’m not saying he’s not fantastic, because he is. He’s strong and protective and loyal and decent and … and everything amazing, but in a brother. As a partner, not so much.’ She stopped there, and frowned thoughtfully. ‘Not “nice” enough to ask a girl he’s sleeping with out to a work dinner, for example. And never nice enough to ask her friends along.’
‘But you always come to these dinners,’ Lane said, and then as Sarah let out a crack of laughter: ‘Don’t you always come to these dinners?’
‘If Adam says I do, then I do. But now I think I need to give this situation more consideration.’
‘All you have to think about is that he glared at me for half the night,’ Lane said gloomily, and yanked her suddenly annoying hair back as though she’d tie it in a ponytail. ‘And yes, house prices are insane in Sydney, but that’s not my fault.’
Erica smacked Lane’s hands away from her hair. ‘What have house prices got to do with it?’
Kiss Don't Tell Page 19
