A Night with the Society Playboy

It never had. And it seemed it never would.

Ava gave a little curtsy, ducked her chin and smiled before jogging upstairs without looking back. It wasn’t until she was halfway up that he came to his senses and followed.

She didn’t even glance at the several other doors they passed, she just kept walking until they hit the third door from the end. It was closed. Her chest lifted and dropped before she grabbed the handle, turned and opened the door.

‘Was I right?’ Caleb asked.

She shot him a quick glance, and the smile that lit her face was as stunning as it was surprised. ‘Not even close.’ And in she went, leaving the door open for him to join her.

If he’d thought his body temperature was adversely affected by her before, now it was skyrocketing far too quickly out of his control for his liking.

One of the many things Caleb liked about himself was the fact that he was never out of control. Whether entertaining clients at a gentlemen’s club, risking millions of dollars on one single stock market trade, or in the presence of a beautiful woman, he never let himself forget where he was and what he wanted from the situation.

All he could think to account for his current state was that he had not one single clue what he wanted from Ava Halliburton…

Her soft hands sliding around his waist. Her warm lips opening up beneath his. Her cool, naked body wrapped around him. The two of them joining. Sultry, hushed, tender joining. And all the pressure and hope and expectation that sat upon his shoulders each and every day stilled…

He shook his head to shatter the avalanche of memories overcrowding common sense.

You are two old friends, he told himself. This has nothing to do with the last twenty-four hours you spent together; it has everything to do with the several years before that. Or the ten years since. You are both simply being pleasant. Re-forging ancient ties. For Damien’s sake. Damien your business partner and best friend.

Ava poked her head back out the door and curled a saucy finger at him, then disappeared back into that which Caleb had once seen as the promised land.

If he truly believed they were simply being pleasant he was some kind of fool. And if he gave in to the invitation in Ava Halliburton’s sultry blue eyes then he was an even greater fool. On a thousand different levels.

Nevertheless he turned the corner and followed her into the bedroom. Her bedroom. Kept neat and tidy and exactly as it had looked the day she left.

There Ava’s bonhomie faltered. She glanced from him to the bed, which stood out like an albatross in the middle of the near wall. Then she shot to the other side of the room to open the bay windows, putting as much distance between them as she could.

Once the breath of cool night air took some of the edge off the heat simmering like a mirage between them, she relaxed again. And soon became engrossed in the hundred- odd books filling her childhood bookcase.

Caleb sauntered over to her dressing table, picked up a powder brush and sniffed. The scent was overwhelmingly familiar. Powdered make-up and orange blossoms.

It brought back a dozen memories. A hundred moments. It was sweet. Clean. And irresistible. It was her.

No other woman in the world smelt quite like that. Like innocence and loveliness and spring and whimsy. He’d been with enough of the female population to be quite sure. Not that he’d been keeping score.

He put the brush back where he found it and turned to find Ava picking out a book, opening the first page and beginning to read. He knew the rest of the world, including him, had slipped away the instant the first word on the page had sunk into her consciousness. She’d always been that way. Wholly engaged. Greedy for knowledge. Smartest in the room by a Melbourne mile.

He ambled away from the dressing table, sparing a longer glance at the frilly pink bed taking up the bulk of the room before his gaze shifted back to her, and he wondered how close he might be able to get before she remembered he was even in the room.

Her bedroom. Alone. With her. And that cruel, sweet, intoxicating scent.

She grabbed a hunk of hair, twisted it into a knot and held it atop her head and he wondered if he sank his nose into the skin below her right ear whether she might feel as soft and sexy as she looked.

The longer he spent watching her, the more he realised that he’d been kidding himself. The tousled, gangly dilettante of years past was no more.

Arcing smile lines book-ended the corners of her soft pink mouth and the frown lines above the bridge of her nose never completely went away. While the best curves now curved all the more, overall her figure had fined down as the last of her puppy fat had been eaten away by cold winters of the northern hemisphere.

And where the old Ava had curved self-consciously into herself, this Ava stood straight, shoulders back, hip cocked, sure of herself in a way Caleb wasn’t certain he wanted to identify.

The Ava he’d known so briefly and lost so quickly all those years before had been exceedingly smart, but mostly a scared and stubborn girl.

This Ava was all woman.

Music from the marquee below filtered up through the night and wafted into the room. Shuffling cymbals, a moody piano, and a breathy male voice singing of foolish lovers.

She looked up from her book, blinked, stared for a moment through the bay windows, then smiled a sad smile. A smile heavy with experience. Innocence and whimsy suddenly didn’t belong anywhere near the airless atmosphere of her bedroom.

Caleb realised his heart was thumping far too loudly in his chest for comfort.

‘I love this song,’ Ava said, her voice unnaturally husky.

She turned from the waist and looked his way, her smile soft and warm, her eyes hooded dreamily as she looked him in the eye with half her attention on the hazy melody echoing across the lawn.

Caleb didn’t look away. He couldn’t. Hell, he didn’t want to. He simply let himself drink in the sight of her. Those piercing blue eyes. That fringe of sooty lashes. The heavy dark hair cascading over her shoulders.

Until that moment, Caleb didn’t even know there was such a thing as perfect shoulders. Hers were lean, shapely, pale as porcelain with curves and crevices in all the best places.

She sucked her wide lips between her teeth, looked down at her hands, only then remembered the book she was holding, and furrowed her brow ever so slightly. She shut the book with a loud snap, then reached around to slide it back into place on the bookshelf, angling her head so that Caleb realised that her neck was pretty damned near perfect too.