Something flared in his eyes. Something that was both savage and somehow … gratified. ‘Can’t think? There’s a reason, Evie. A reason you can’t think when I’m near you.’
And I was back in his arms, being kissed – no, it was more like being devoured.
He looked down at me, eyes glittering. ‘See?’ he asked, but he didn’t expect any answer to that. He thought he had the answer. ‘It’s not about thinking. Why won’t you get it? You can’t throw this away because you’re worried about a story that may or may not appear on a gossip site or in a newspaper at some unspecified point in the future. Or because you think a doctor is a worthier choice than an actor to add to the family collection. Nobody wants to be chosen because they’re worthy, Evie. The fact that you react to me the way you do, even though I’m apparently not worthy, has to tell you something.’
I stepped back, away from him. ‘That logic works the same in reverse, you know. Because I’m not worthy of you. I’m not in your league. I’m just a regular member of the public – whereas you’re Jackson J Stevens.’
‘I know who I am. I’ve been him for twenty-five years.’
‘And you could have anyone.’
He smiled – the quicksilver smile. ‘It seems not. Because I can’t have you, can I?’
I tucked in my shirt, ran a shaking hand over my hair. ‘You wouldn’t want me for long. And we’d be back to … then what happens?’
‘I’ve wanted you, every second of every day, for four long, lonely months, Evie.’
I shook my head. ‘That can’t be true. I only met you …’ Ohhhh. I trailed off as that thought hit home.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Figured it out? From the moment I met you. Looking like a wide-eyed doll but jabbing like a prize fighter. Irresistible. But the timing was off. You were still hung up on what had happened with Sam, even nine months after the fact. So I decided to wait.’
‘But … Monica …’
‘Work it out, Evie. What happened between me and Monica, do you think, four months ago?’
I felt my heart do a weird shuddery thing in my chest. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think. Could only stare at him.
Jack sighed. ‘And now … Well, the timing still sucks, doesn’t it? I was in there the moment I heard about your crush. On an actor. Hope.’ Short laugh. ‘But I wasn’t fast enough.’
‘You don’t understand, Jack,’ I said. ‘It’s not a matter of timing. Even if I loved you like crazy, I wouldn’t choose you.’
‘Even if …’ he said, but he didn’t finish. Just looked at me, repeating ‘Even if …’ as though he didn’t even know he was speaking. His face … it suddenly looked so lifeless.
Drew’s voice filtered through to our kitchen bubble. ‘Marcus is here, so we’re off. Everything all right in there?’
Pause. Silence. So much tension.
‘Well, in that case, Evangeline,’ Jack said, ‘I hope it all works out for you.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
I sighed as today’s floral arrangement was delivered to my shoe-box sized workstation.
This was the fourth too-large arrangement of showy flowers Lachlan had sent me in the past two weeks. I located the small card that came with the flowers. For my Cathy, it read.
Oh dear.
Last night, Lachlan had urged me to put on Wuthering Heights starring his new obsession, Guy McKinsey, as Heathcliff – hence the Cathy reference. He’d even mimicked some of the key lines, a few facial expressions – and yet, somehow, he’d never looked less like Guy McKinsey. I was obviously perverse, because the more he tried to look like Guy, the less attractive he became.
After Jack had left my house that night, Lachlan had babbled out an apology for his behaviour at Jack’s party, for leaving me high and dry at the end – an apology I felt obliged to accept, given my own post-party effort. He took my acceptance as a signal that we were now an item. And I went ahead and let him.
One: because I was stubborn – the looks, the job, the save-the-world bent all made Lachlan the perfect man for me and I was going to see where it led, goddammit.
Two: because I was scared – if he disappeared, I suspected Jack might come zooming back and I didn’t need that pressure, couldn’t trust myself to resist given the way I’d started to ooze.
And three: because I was perhaps turning out to be morally bankrupt. It weighed on my conscience that I hadn’t made a return apology for the sex-against-the-door thing, but I just couldn’t work out a way to do it without dragging Jack into the whole sordid tale, and who knew where that would end up?
I might have felt guiltier about my cowardly silence if Lachlan hadn’t couched his suddenly invigorated attraction to me in terms that indicated the ‘awesome’ people I knew was a large part of my attraction. Which suggested it was no coincidence that Lachlan’s libido had finally decided to twitch in my direction the night after I’d scored him an invitation to a star-studded party.
Not that I was getting on my high horse about it. Because it seemed ridiculously indecisive and capricious to me that after all my plotting and planning to seduce Lachlan, when he finally wanted to race me off to bed, I did not want to go there.
I tried to convince myself there was a little skerrick of conscience trying to struggle through my immoral core, telling me it would just be too base to sleep with Lachlan while my encounter with Jack remained unconfessed … But I suspected it had more to do with things like the card he’d sent with the flowers.
I picked it up again. Winced at the ‘Cathy’.
That was it. Exactly it. The key to my dwindling libido, in one little word: anyone who would ‘Cathy’ a girl had to be a class A wanker.
I’d now had two undiluted weeks of cringing in his company. The name-dropping when we caught up with just about anyone, which underscored why I was so right to keep the Jack thing a secret. The Guy McKinsey impressions. The night we’d run into Chloe and Rowan at a restaurant, and Lachlan had pitched his causes as story angles with such relentlessness, Rowan had run away. Rowan the barracuda had run away!
Lachlan just didn’t seem to know when to pull back.
In stark contrast to Jackson J Stevens.
Jack hadn’t called me, dropped by, or emailed. Nothing since those final words: I hope it all works out for you.
He’d executed a gracious exit from the competitive field.
The problem was that instead of being relieved, I had this trickling, tickling, nagging feeling that I’d stuffed up something important that night. Because it was one thing to refuse to have a sexual relationship with Jack – quite another to have him decide to have no relationship at all.
And I found myself missing him.
His absence was like a hole that my other friends couldn’t seem to fill. One they didn’t seem to want to try to fill. They just wanted to leave it there. A big, yawning gap. Baffling. They’d dragged me to lunch the day after that disastrous dinner and got the thumbscrews on about what was happening between me and Jack and I’d confessed all to them in a morass of angst.
The conversation had gone a little like …
DREW: Well, that’s that then.
ME: Yes. I guess.
CHLOE: So the doctor wins. The actor loses.
ME: Not ‘the doctor’. Lachlan.
Irritating, smug look between Drew and Chloe.
ME: The other thing, with Jack, was just a mistake.
Smug look #2.
ME: And I just want to forget about it.
CHLOE: You know you always have our support. So, we’ll help you forget.
ME: Huh? (Something didn’t feel right.)
CHLOE: Well … we don’t need to include Jack in our plans – he’s too busy, anyway. And we don’t have to talk about him, either.
DREW: God no – I have to talk about him way too much to my non-actor-hating friends.
ME: I don’t hate actors.
DREW: Whatever. It will be good to have some Jack-free conversation. Consider him persona non grata.
>
ME: He’s not persona non grata.
DREW: For our immediate purposes, he is.
ME: Oh, okay, fine. (Well really, what could I say?)
CHLOE: Lovely. Now – did you sleep with Lachlan last night?
ME: No!
Smug look #3.
ME: I’m not in any hurry, you know.
Smug look #4.
DREW: I’m having the Thai beef salad.
And that was how Lachlan became the only person to ever talk to me about Jack. Ad nauseam. Creeeeepy.
I looked at the card again. Cathy. At least he hadn’t called himself Heathcliff. My eyes rolled so hard at the thought, I was half afraid they’d stick to the back of my eye sockets, never to return to their normal position.
One of my colleagues popped her head around the corner of my workstation. ‘Evie?’
I looked up, dropping the card onto my desk.
She was fizzing with excitement. ‘When I was coming in, I overheard someone asking for you at reception.’
‘Who?’
‘It’s Jackson J Stevens,’ she squeaked.
My heart gave a quick staccato burst of beats. ‘Oh, Jack,’ I said faintly.
‘You know him? Oh. My. God.’
It felt like a barbecue had been lit inside my skull. It was like a roar of flame in there, and beads of sweat popped out along my hairline.
‘He’s the brother of a friend of mine, that’s all,’ I said, trying to calm us both.
‘Oh. My. God! Anyway, they were bowing and scraping and gawking down at reception, so I made them tuck him somewhere private and said I’d come and get him.’ She gave me a look I could only describe as begging. ‘Can I go get him? Please, please, please!’
‘Yes, of course. Bring him to … to … ah …’ Brain failure.
‘One of the meeting rooms?’
I latched onto that gratefully. ‘Yes. Meeting room … ah …’
‘Two. Meeting room two. It’s empty – I already checked,’ she said, and the second I nodded, she ran.
I pulled my compact from my handbag. Rubbed at a smudge of mascara under my left eye and dabbed some powder over the spot. Which made me look a bit patchy, so I fluffed the powder all over my face. Ugh. Damp ghost. I tried to pinch some colour into my face and ended up blotchy.
I could see Jack being led towards the meeting room. Suddenly, I remembered my hair. I’d stuck it up on top of my head, held in a wonky bun through the grace of a single pencil anchoring it against my scalp. I whipped the pencil out and corkscrew curls sprang out and down. I smoothed a hand over them, but knew that wasn’t going to bring about a miracle cure.
Giving up on all things appearance, I walked quickly to intercept Jack at the door to the meeting room. ‘Jack,’ I said, and thrust out my hand for him to shake as my colleague all but genuflected her way back to her workstation.
Jack took my hand, shook it, very businesslike. ‘Hello, Evangeline,’ he said.
The asthma thing that wasn’t really asthma had me in its grip. I opened the door, gestured for Jack to enter, then followed him in and hit the switch to frost the glass. ‘I don’t have an office, so I thought … I thought … this room. It’s more private. You’ll get asked for a thousand autographs otherwise.’
I waved Jack to a chair on one side of the table, and without thinking I took the seat on the opposite side. Ten chairs to choose from, and the two of us were sitting separated like this was a job interview. Awful.
Jack, casually propping his right ankle on his left knee, looked sexy as hell, wearing jeans, a slim-fit, navy-blue cotton shirt and brown suede shoes.
‘What brings you into the city?’ I asked, with an attempt at professional brightness.
‘A meeting with Jacinta – my Australian agent.’ Pause. ‘And I wanted to see you.’
I caught my fingers playing nervously with my shirt buttons, and forced my hand down.
Jack slid a folded piece of paper across the table towards me.
I unfolded it, scanned it. Blood test results. All clear. I looked up. ‘I didn’t really think you had anything. I mean, you said …’
‘That I hadn’t lost control like that since I was a teenager. I remember.’
Silence. Loaded.
‘And yours?’ Jack asked eventually.
‘Sorry, I should have called you. You must have been waiting.’
‘I’m not expecting you to have tertiary syphilis, Evangeline,’ Jack said sardonically.
‘No, I don’t. I’m all clear. I would have called you if … if there was anything.’
‘Would you?’
‘Of course!’
Another silence. Suffocating.
Jack broke it. ‘I saw the flowers they were sending up to you while I was being signed in downstairs.’
‘You didn’t need to be signed in. I’m sure, you know, since you’re Jackson J –’
He interrupted me. ‘I don’t do the whole “don’t you know who I am” thing. Ever.’
‘Oh. No, I guess … I guess not. I guess you don’t need to. Because everyone … everyone already …’
‘Knows who I am?’ He shook his head. Gave a short, disbelieving laugh. ‘I’m not the President of the United States, Evangeline.’
More silence.
‘So, the flowers?’ he asked when I just sat there like a lump.
I could feel my face heat up. ‘Yes.’
‘Lachlan?’
‘Yes.’
‘Things going well?’
‘You could say that.’
‘But do you?’
I found myself fiddling with my buttons again, and made some sort of strangled sound that meant nothing.
Jack pushed his chair back from the table, positioned another close to him, and beckoned me over. ‘Evangeline, come and sit with me for a moment.’ Quicksilver smile. ‘I promise I won’t maul you.’
I found myself doing a walking-dead impersonation, moving across to Jack’s side of the table and taking the seat he’d set for me. He plucked my twitching fingers from my lap and held my hand loosely in his. ‘I’m sorry.’
Big swallow – which made an actual, hideously embarrassing noise. ‘S – Sorry?’
‘For making things uncomfortable for you. That night. I was just … mad, I guess, because … Well, it doesn’t matter why. You have the right to choose who you want, for whatever reason you want. I shouldn’t have pressured you. It’s not my usual style.’
‘No. I – I mean, I know. Your usual style involves beating women off with a stick. I mean, beautiful women.’ My stomach felt like it was sinking. Down, down, down.
‘And you’re not beautiful?’
‘It’s a matter of … of … comparison.’
‘Comparatively speaking, you’re worse than beautiful.’ He looked at me, assessing. ‘The big blue eyes, the fierce eyebrows, the crushed-berry mouth, the blonde curls, that very particular blush of yours. I mean, come on – it’s so cute, it’s insane.’
Contrasting my own pocket-sized cuteness – with blush, as was happening right then – with the image of a glamorous, genie-haired, gossamer-dress-wearing Jessamyn French type, flinging herself at Jack with passionate abandon, was dispiriting.
‘Don’t knock cute, Evangeline,’ he said, as though reading my thoughts. ‘If you were a feline you’d have an Instagram fan club: the cranky kitten.’
Cranky – soooo sexy!
Jack gave a stilted laugh. ‘Anyway. The flowers. You’re happy with your choice.’ Pause. ‘Right?’
‘Um. N– No. I mean – Um, yes. I mean … I …’ Making a lot of sense.
But Jack didn’t seem to find anything amiss in my incoherence. ‘So, come to dinner at my parents’ place on Sunday. Bring Lachlan. They’d love to see you, and meet him. And it’s kind of a celebration dinner, because the play closes on Saturday.’
‘Oh – that was fast.’
‘It was a short season, because … Well, because.’
Jack was rubbing his thum
b back and forth across my palm. It was sending shivers up my arm. Delicious shivers. Oozy shivers.
‘Will you come?’ he asked.
Another one of those hideous swallows. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea.’
‘I’m not going to molest you in front of my family.’
‘It’s not that. We both know it was just a … a mistake. The … the thing that happened. It’s just – I mean – I just don’t think so, Jack.’
Jack had his head on one side, watching me make no sense. ‘I could – should – speak to Lachlan about that proposal of his,’ he said eventually. ‘I have some options to suggest and that would be the perfect time. Before I – Well, the perfect time. Think about it, anyway.’
There was another awkward silence. And then, releasing my hand suddenly, Jack said, ‘Did Chloe tell you about our date last night?’
‘Date?’
‘The date you turned me down for.’
‘Um …’ Clearly Jack didn’t know that Chloe had vowed never to mention his name to me ever again.
‘The night Stormy Sunday opened, I asked you to come with me, but you turned me down,’ Jack explained.
Enlightenment. Bluuuuush. ‘Yes, I remember. And no, she didn’t tell me. What was it?’
‘It was a dinner to raise money for schizophrenia research. I’d asked you because … well, because I wanted to.’
‘Oh.’ Another of those ghastly swallows. Guilt. Regret. Shame.
‘But also because that’s your mother’s research field. She was there, actually, so we got to have a long talk.’
‘Oh, that … that’s good.’
‘She’s a lot more down to earth than I expected.’
‘Yes, people always say that. She has nothing to prove to anyone, so she says what she wants.’
‘She doesn’t think you have anything to prove either.’
I didn’t need Jack to tell me that my inferiority complex was purely of my own making – well, mine and Sam’s. ‘No. I know that. But that just makes it …’ My shoulders did a weird half-shrug, half-slump thing. ‘It makes it harder, when your brilliant family refuses to make you feel inferior.’
Wanting Mr Wrong Page 9
