by Amy Andrews
‘So, what do you do?’ Jock asked.
Callum dragged his gaze off Felicity and forced his attention on the couple opposite. She wasn’t the only person on the train and this was the way these social situations worked. You ate a good meal, drank good wine and made polite and hopefully interesting conversation with strangers.
God knew, he needed something like this to get himself out of his head. But he promised himself that later he would do his damnedest to shamelessly monopolise the woman beside him. They might not end up in bed together but he intended to flirt like crazy and see where it went.
‘I’m a technical writer,’ he said.
The well-practised lie rolled smoothly off his tongue. He still wasn’t used to the real answer. Becoming a GP after being an up-and-coming vascular surgeon was taking some getting used to. And he only had to look around at the age demographic of the other passengers in the carriage to know that admitting to being any kind of doctor would probably result in an avalanche of medical questions he just didn’t want to answer.
He didn’t want to be any kind of doctor tonight. He wanted to forget about the bitter disappointments of his career and just be a regular Joe. He wanted to be a man chatting to a woman hoping it might end up somewhere interesting.
‘Oh?’ Thelma asked, as she buttered the bread roll Donald had just placed on her plate. ‘What does that entail?’
‘Just boring things like industry articles and manuals,’ he dismissed. ‘Nothing exciting. What about you, Thelma? Are you still working?’
It was a good deflection and Thelma ran with it. The conversation shifted throughout the sumptuous three-course meal and it felt good to stretch his conversational muscles, which were rusty at best. Felicity, on the other hand, was a great conversationalist and Callum found himself relaxing and even laughing from time to time.
His awareness of her as a woman didn’t let up but the urgency to get her alone mellowed.
Like him, she seemed reluctant to talk about herself, expertly turning the conversation back to Thelma and Jock or himself and more neutral topics, such as travel and movies and sport. Consequently, the meal flew by as Felicity charmed them all. It was hard to believe he’d sat for two hours and not thought once about the accident and its repercussions on his life.
That wasn’t something anybody had achieved in the past two and a half years.
He went to bed thinking about it, he woke up thinking about it, and it dominated his thoughts far more than it should during the day.
He suddenly felt about a decade younger.
‘A few of us are retiring to the lounge for some after-dinner drinks,’ Jock said as he placed his napkin on the table. ‘I hope you’ll both join us.’
‘Of course,’ Felicity said, smiling at their companions before turning that lusciously curved mouth towards him. ‘You up for that? Or do you...have more work to do?’
Callum wanted nothing more than to invite her back to his compartment for some private after-dinner drinks. Their gazes locked and her cheeks pinked up and he wondered if she could read his mind. She was a strange mix of eagerness and hesitancy and Callum didn’t want to push or embarrass her.
But he could see in those expressive grey eyes that she didn’t want him to lock himself away again either.
‘I’d love to,’ he said, resigning himself to sharing her for a bit longer, to go slowly, to drag out a little more whatever it was that was building between them.
Anticipation buzzed thick and heavy through his groin.
* * *
Felicity found it hard to concentrate for the next couple of hours, aware of Mr Tall-Dark-and-Handsome sitting beside her in a way she hadn’t been aware of a guy in a long time. Every time he spoke or laughed it rumbled through his big thigh pressed firmly against hers and squirmed its way into her belly.
There was a sense that they were marking time and she was equal parts titillated and terrified. This being a whole other person thing wasn’t as easy to pull off as she’d thought but she’d never felt so alive either. So utterly buzzed.
Not even with Ned. Sure, he’d been the love of her life and being dumped by him had been crushing, but their love had grown out of friendship and a slow, gentle dawning.
This...thing was entirely different.
Was she seriously going to do this? Pick up a stranger on a train? Or let him pick her up? She might have limited experience of the whole pick-up scene but she was pretty sure that’s exactly where they were heading. When she’d booked her train ticket, meeting a good-looking stranger hadn’t been part of her plan.
But here they were with a night full of possibilities stretching ahead of them.
One by one their companions left, withdrawing to their beds, making jokes about old bones and early nights. Felicity contemplated doing the sensible thing and following them. Retiring to her bed and the moonlit landscape flying by outside her window, tuning into the clickety-clack of the wheels as they rocked her to sleep.
But she didn’t.
‘Well,’ Jock said, standing, helping Thelma up as well. ‘This is way past our bedtime and my indigestion is playing up so we’ll be off too.’
Felicity smiled at them and bade them goodnight, excruciatingly conscious of Callum’s eyes on her as she watched their companions disappear from the lounge.
And then there were two.
‘Whew,’ he murmured, his gaze brushing over her neck and mouth, a smile tilting his lips into an irresistible shape. ‘I thought they’d never go to bed.’
Felicity blushed but she didn’t deny the sentiment. She’d thought exactly the same thing.
He tipped his chin at her martini glass. ‘Another drink?’
She hesitated. This was it. This was the moment. Was she going to be the sophisticated woman on the train or the girl next door?
‘It’s only eleven,’ he coaxed. ‘I promise to have you back to your compartment before you turn into a pumpkin.’
Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. The man had a PhD in flirting. ‘Yeah. Okay. Sure.’
He grinned. ‘Good answer.’
Felicity’s mouth quirked in an answering grin. ‘Good question.’
She flat-out ogled him as he walked to the bar. She’d seen him in the café and had been struck by his presence but he’d seemed so brooding and intense, so closed off she hadn’t bothered to go there. He hadn’t put a foot wrong tonight, however.
Sure, there was still a brooding quality to the set of his shoulders and the line of his mouth, but he’d been witty and charming and great with all the oldies and, good Lord Almighty, the way he’d looked at her had been one hundred percent high-octane flirty.
Nothing brooding about it.
Even the way the man leaned against the bar was sexy. His expensive-looking charcoal trousers pulled nicely against his butt and hugged the hard length of his thighs.
And they were hard. And hot. She could still feel the imprint of them along her leg.
He’d worn a jacket to dinner but had since shed it to reveal a plain long-sleeved shirt of dark purple. The top two buttons had been left undone and about an hour ago he’d rolled up the sleeves to reveal tanned forearms covered in dark hair.
Those forearms had caused a cataclysmic meltdown in her underwear.
He turned slightly and smiled at her and Felicity sucked in a breath. The man was devastating when he smiled and it went all the way to his green eyes. It did things to his face, which was already far too handsome for any one man. Square jaw covered in dark, delicious stubble, strong chin, cheekbones that women would kill for and sandy-brown hair longer on the top and shorter at the sides.
Hair made to run fingers through.
His laughter drifted towards her as Travis handed over the drinks and said something she couldn’t quite hear. She liked how it sounded.
How it rumbled out of him. She got the sense he didn’t do a hell of a lot of it, though, which was a shame. That laugh was turning her insides to jelly.
The military should employ him as a secret weapon.
He headed in her direction, his gait compensating for the rock of the train. She probably should be glued to the window, watching the moonlit bush whizzing by, and not be so obvious, but she figured they were beyond the point of being coy and, frankly, he was too damn hard not to look at with his long stride and knowing smile.
He placed her glass down and sat opposite her this time, a low table between them. She couldn’t decide if she was relieved or disappointed. Neither, she concluded as he filled her entire field of vision and everything else became pretty much irrelevant.
‘To strangers on a train,’ he said, lifting his whisky glass, that smile still hovering.
She tapped hers against it. ‘I’ll drink to that.’
CHAPTER TWO
FELICITY WAS CONSCIOUS of his gaze as it followed the press of her lips then lowered to the bob of her throat as she swallowed. She was grateful for the cold, crisp martini cooling her suddenly parched mouth.
‘So...what’s a young ’un—’ he injected Jock’s Scottish brogue into the words and Felicity smiled ‘—like yourself doing on a train with the cast from Cocoon? Lots more people your age down in the cheap seats. Unless... Wait, are you some kind of heiress or something?’
‘No.’ Felicity laughed at the apt description of their travelling companions and at the thought of her being some little rich girl, although she had inherited enough money from her grandfather to buy a small cottage. ‘I’m not. And you don’t look like you’re of retirement age either. You’re, what? Thirty-five?’
She’d been wondering how old he was all night and this seemed like as good an opener as any.
‘Close,’ he murmured. ‘Thirty-four. And you?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘Ah...’ He gave a long and exaggerated sigh. ‘To be so young and carefree again.’
Felicity laughed at his teasing but was struck by the slight tinge of wistfulness. ‘Oh, no,’ she teased back. ‘You poor old man.’
He grinned at her and every fibre of her being thrilled at being the centre of his attention. ‘Seriously, though,’ he said, sobering a little, ‘why the train?’
‘My grandfather was a railway man through and through. Fifty years’ service as a driver and he never got tired of trains. Of talking about them, photographing them and just plain loving everything about them. We’d go on the train into the city every day when I used to stay with them in the school holidays and he’d take me to the train museum every time without fail.’
He frowned. ‘Didn’t that get boring after a while?’
Felicity shook her head. ‘Nah. He always made it so exciting. He made it all about the romance of train travel and I lapped it up.’
‘Romance, huh?’ He raised an eyebrow as his gaze dropped to her mouth. ‘Smart man.’
Felicity’s belly flopped over. ‘That he was.’
If tonight was anything to go by, her grandfather was a damn genius.
She stared into the depths of her frosty glass as her fingers ran up and down the stem. ‘He spent his entire life saying that one day he was going to take my grandmother on the Indian Pacific for a holiday of a lifetime. Then, after my grandmother died when I was twenty, he used to tell me one day he and I would go on it together. He died last year, having never done it, but he left me some money so...here I am.’
The backs of Felicity’s eyes prickled with unexpected tears and she blinked them away.
‘Hey.’ His hand slid over hers. ‘Are you okay?’
‘God, yes,’ she said, shaking her head, feeling like an idiot. Way to put a downer on the pick-up! ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to get so maudlin. I’m stupidly sentimental. Ignore me.’
‘Nothing wrong with that.’ He smiled, removing his hand. ‘Better than being cold and hard.’
Felicity returned his smile. She appreciated his attempt to lighten the mood. Sometimes, though, she had to wonder. If she was a little more hard-hearted she probably wouldn’t fret so much about her patients or become so personally involved. It would make it much easier to leave it all behind at the end of the day.
‘What about you?’ she said, determined to change the subject. To get things back on track. ‘Why the train?’
‘I guess I’m a bit like your grandfather. Always loved trains. Doing all the great train journeys of the world is a bucket-list thing for me and when I had to travel to Adelaide I thought, Why not?’
It was stupid to feel any kind of affinity with a man—this man—because he was a train guy. Especially when up until about eight hours ago she hadn’t even known him. But somehow she did. Her grandfather had always said train people were good people and, even though he’d been biased, right at this moment Felicity couldn’t have agreed more.
Callum was ticking all her boxes.
‘So...’ He took a sip of his whisky. ‘Felicity...’
Goose-bumps broke out on her arms and spread across her chest, beading her nipples as he rolled the word around his mouth. She’d never heard her name savoured with such carnal intensity. It sure as hell made her wonder what it would sound like as he groaned it into her ear when he came.
Lordy. Another box ticked.
‘Is that a family name?’
She cleared her throat and her brain of the sudden wanton images of him and her twisted up in a set of sheets. ‘Nope. My mother just liked it, I think. And I don’t really get called that anyway.’
‘Oh?’ He frowned. ‘You get Fliss?’
Felicity grimaced. ‘Flick, actually.’
‘Flick.’
He rolled that around too but it didn’t sound quite the same as when he’d used her full name. She didn’t hate the nickname, she’d never known anything else, but she didn’t want to be a Flick tonight.
Tonight she wanted to be Felicity.
She shrugged. ‘My cousin couldn’t pronounce my full name when she was little and it stuck.’
He lazed back in his chair, his long legs casually splayed out in front of him, the quads moving interestingly beneath the fabric of his trousers. ‘You don’t look much like a Flick to me,’ he mused.
Felicity’s pulse fluttered as she suppressed the urge to lean across and kiss him for his observation. The sad fact was, though, in her everyday life she did look like a Flick. Her hair in its regulation ponytail, wearing her nondescript uniform or slopping around in her jeans and T-shirt.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured, raising her glass to him and taking a sip.
‘My brother calls me Cal.’
Felicity studied him for a moment. ‘Nope. You definitely don’t look like a Cal.’
‘No?’
Felicity smiled at the faux wounded expression on his face. ‘No.’
‘What do Cals look like?’
‘Cals are the life of the party,’ she said, happy to play along. ‘They’re wise-cracking, smart-talking, laugh-a-minute guys. You’re way too serious for a Cal.’
He laughed but it wasn’t the kind of rumbly noise she’d come to expect. It sounded hollow and didn’t quite reach his eyes. Crap. She’d insulted him somehow. Way to turn a guy off, Flick.
She had to fix it. Fix it, damn it!
‘Anyway,’ she said, hoping like hell she sounded casual instead of panicked. Nothing like ruining their evening before it had progressed to the good bit. ‘I like Callum. It’s very...noble.’
A beat or two passed before he laughed again, throwing his head back. It was full and hearty with enough rumble to fill a race track. It rained down in thick, warm droplets and Felicity wanted to take her clothes off and get soaking wet.
The laugh
ter cut out and he fixed her with his steady gaze. ‘Just so you know, I’m not feeling remotely noble right now.’
Felicity’s belly clenched hard and she swallowed. Eep! This was really going to happen. He downed his whisky and put the glass on the table. ‘Would you like to come back to my compartment?’
She cursed her sudden attack of nerves. But this wasn’t her. She didn’t do this kind of thing. Could she pull it off?
‘Hey,’ he said, leaning forward at the hips and placing his hand over hers. ‘We don’t have to. I just thought...’
Yeah. He’d thought she was interested because she’d practically done everything but strip her clothes off and sit in his lap. God, she must look like some freaked-out virgin. Or some horrible tease.
Felicity could feel it all slipping away. She didn’t want to pass this up, damn it, but she hadn’t expected to feel so...conflicted about it when it came to the crunch.
So she did what she always did in lineball calls. She picked up her phone.
He quirked an eyebrow at her. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m asking Mike what he thinks I should do.’
A bigger frown this time. ‘Mike?’
‘Yeah. You know, the guy in my phone who talks to me and tells me stuff like why the sky is blue and where the nearest hairdresser is.’
He chuckled. ‘Yours is a dude?’
She shrugged. ‘You can choose and Mike sounds like Richard Armitage so it was a no-brainer.’
‘And do you always let your phone decide such things?’
‘Sometimes. It’s the modern-day coin toss, right?’
He chuckled again. ‘Well, this ought to be interesting.’
Felicity grinned as she pushed a button and brought her phone up closer to her mouth. ‘Mike, should I go back to Callum’s?’
The phone gave an electronic beep then a stylised male voice spoke in a sexy English accent. ‘Is he good enough?’
They both laughed then he grabbed her wrist and brought the phone closer to his mouth. Her pulse point fluttered madly beneath his fingers as their gazes locked. A smile played on his mouth again as he spoke into the microphone, his eyes firmly fixed on her. ‘He’s very good, Mike.’
