A Night with the Society Playboy

She bit her lip and looked around her, sure that the strange guilty pleasure of it was written all over her face. But once she was sure nobody gave a hoot about the practical stranger in their midst, her eyes slid back to him.

The years had been good to him. Better than good. They’d given him shoulders a tailor would kill to dress. A mien of haughty condescension that oozed power and privilege. He wore his tuxedo with such authority and ease he could have given James Bond a run for his money.

He now had a jaw that she’d barely been able to keep from tracing. His ash-brown hair was cut short, hiding any evidence of its natural curl. And his dark hazel eyes, which had always been fuelled by a mischievous glint, were now lit by a very different fire. Confidence? Experience? Or a play-by-play photographic memory of their night together?

She closed her eyes tight on the reminiscence.

All that had been a long, long time ago. Eons. A lifetime. Yet a funny kind of energy skidded down her bare arms.

When she opened her eyes, she watched him chat with someone she didn’t know. He smiled his killer smile and her chest tightened.

And she wasn’t even a woman who was usually struck by so much obvious male beauty any more. She liked men who were…seasoned. Men whose suits bore elbow patches rather than designer labels. Men whose beards had grown in rather than men whose stubble made them appear downright wicked.

Her current man was of a generation that meant it had been some time since he’d had the kind of knockout rear view that made a girl happy to see him walk away.

Her man? Ha! For a moment she’d forgotten she was now all alone in the world with no man to speak of. In fact, she wasn’t sure she’d ever had a man in her life long enough to call him her man. Lucky for her she was smart enough to know why.

If her mother had been less interested in where she lived, how she dressed, and who knew about it, then she and her father would never have separated, their divorce would not have been as vicious and unexpected, and Ava would have gone out into the world feeling more safe, more secure, and less likely to run from every situation in which she felt herself getting sucked into any scenario even vaguely resembling a relationship.

Feeling like a wallflower, and one in need of a therapist if she didn’t get her head sorted and fast, Ava began a slow weave through the space, hoping she at least looked as if she knew where she was going.

She smiled benignly at others she didn’t know. People obviously important in her brother’s life. It made her more than a little sad that she’d spent so much time away, and less than sure she’d made the right move in coming back.

To Stonnington Drive. A row of thirty homes, no more, but a stronghold all the same. It was the last bastion of the provincial old-fashioned good life to be found in what was now a relatively cosmopolitan city.

Stonnington Drive men wore suits long after they’d retired from high-powered jobs in the city. Stonnington Drive women believed in gin, tennis, and boarding school for the kids.

Ava believed it a suffocating, pulverising existence. The pressure to keep up with the Joneses, and the Gilchrists for that matter, had broken down her parents’ marriage in the most vociferous, public, ravaging way. The run-on effect had left her searching for guidance wherever she could find it. And every day she’d been away from the place she’d thanked her lucky stars she’d managed to get out when she had.

For who knew at nineteen how strong one’s principles really were? Another year there, another reason to stay, who knew…?

She glanced over to her brother to find Caleb had joined him. Damien had survived their childhood and made good. But he’d been older. Stronger. Luckier.

The two men put arms around one another as they ducked heads and talked. Best friends, even after all these years. As close as brothers. Closer even, considering her father had always treated Caleb like the second son he’d never had.

No wonder.

He was the perfect by-product of his upbringing: rich, good-looking, arrogant, lackadaisical. So she ought to have felt ambivalent in his company, despite their friendship all those years ago.

So why, now, couldn’t she shake him off?

Because this place was insidious. It had a way of drawing people in with its luxury and its easy living and never letting them go. She felt her back teeth grinding and had to click her jaw open wide in order not to let it bother her.

Damien wrapped his arms around his bride and herded her towards the photographer, who was standing by a massive ice sculpture of a mobile phone. Ava felt a twinge of remorse that she had no idea what circumstances had led to what must have been some kind of crazy in joke in her brother’s life.

Damien and Chelsea began to kiss, and didn’t let up. It was so sweet. So romantic. Her stomach twisted. She had to look away.

A pair of hazel eyes snagged hers. Caleb again.

Guests’ heads bobbed between them cutting off her view, but every few seconds that hot hazel gaze sliced through the air, unreadable at that distance, yet aimed directly at her.

She hadn’t needed his earlier warning to take heed where he was concerned. It had taken no more than a second in his company to see that, just as she’d changed over the years, the boy she’d known, in all his varied incarnations, was no more.

There was apathy in his overly relaxed stance, arrogance in the angle of his chin, and the glimmer of barely restrained sensuality radiating from those disarming hazel eyes.

And despite the distance, despite the string quartet playing the perfectly respectable ‘Clair de Lune’, and despite the two-hundred-odd elegant party guests chatting up a storm between them, under his watch she began to feel warm and restless all at once.

She ought to have looked away. To have let her eyes slide past his as though she hadn’t even noticed.

But after the month she’d had, having a man who looked like Caleb Gilchrist looking at her as if she were some kind of exotic dish he’d once tasted, and now was deciding if he wanted to go back for seconds, was like an elixir. Like a balm to the great gaping wound in her own self-worth she was trying her best to conquer.

She cocked her head in question. A leisurely smile lit his eyes. The heat of it leapt across the marquee and burned her cheeks.

She hadn’t heard from him in nearly ten years. Yet she’d often wondered if he thought of that night fondly or with regret, or if he thought of it at all. Right then her question was answered; her old friend was not reminiscing about pulling her plaits.

Her heart responded, thumping hard and steady against her ribs, making her feel soft and breathless and interesting, not the great big loser with bad judgement in her past and big trouble in her future who’d jumped on the plane in Boston because spending time with her unhinged family had felt like the lesser of two evils compared with the situation awaiting her back at Harvard.

He made her feel as if her blood were so much lemonade. Always had. And it was the exact kind of feeling she needed right now.

She licked her suddenly dry lips and Caleb’s smile grew until she could see a pair of pointy incisors. It was the slow, easy, sure smile of a predator who knew exactly what his prey was thinking. Ava was almost glad somebody did as right then she had no idea.

The hand holding the champagne glass shook ever so slightly. Enough so she sought out a table and placed the half-empty flute out of reach.

She turned away, ran her damp palms down the sides of her dress, spotted a gap in the crowd and went for it.

She hit the edge of the lavish white marquee and kept on walking, as fast as her low heels would carry her through the lush grass. She lifted her skirt, jogged up the steps at the rear of her parents’ house and slipped inside.

And while everything outside had steadily made her feel as if she’d stepped into the Twilight Zone, inside the house was like déjà vu.

The walls were still panelled white below, pale striped wallpaper above, the floor still shiny blonde wood. Moonlight spilled in from discreetly angled skylights in the three-storey-high ceiling.

Memories swarmed over her, good and bad. But at least at last, for the first time since she’d left American soil the day before, she felt as if she was able to breathe again.

Coming home, even if only for a few days before she had to return to Harvard to front the Academic Review Committee, was the right decision.

Home was surely the only place to come to sort out her head, and her mess of a life, because this was where it had been all screwed up in the first place. It hadn’t occurred to her that Caleb Gilchrist might play a starring role in the sorting. But if that’s the way the fates wanted to play it, then who was she to argue?

CHAPTER THREE

CALEB glanced towards the big house. He’d last seen Ava heading that way. And any kind of conversation with her would be preferable to the one he was having right now.

Damien, Chelsea, Kensey and her husband Greg were talking about window treatments. Seriously, fifteen straight minutes of Caleb’s life had been spent listening to the advantages of curtains versus wooden blinds.

Enough was enough. If he didn’t get out of there and soon he might develop a tic. He’d already twitched every time the word ‘shrinkage’ had been uttered.

He clapped a hand on Damien’s shoulder. And he bit down hard.

Damien ducked out of his grasp and turned with a frown. ‘Whoa, buddy, you aiming to lame me just before my honeymoon?’