Briefly, the rows had stopped.
He stared at the horizon.
They’d stopped permanently when his mother had left. It had been all right for a while, and then his dad had basically moved in with his new girlfriend, Cathy, and he and Cam had been left to raise themselves.
In those years before his brother had left too, he and Cam had gone on ‘road trips.’ Of course, that had been just something Cam had called them, to make it sound cool.
They hadn’t gone anywhere special—just far enough away to make it feel as though they had left themselves behind.
But he knew better now. He knew that it didn’t matter how fast you drove, how many miles you put between yourself and the person you blamed for the dark cloud spreading inside your chest, you never left yourself behind.
As what had happened in the cottage with Nia had so gut-wrenchingly proved.
He thought back to that moment when he had stepped towards her.
Or had she leaned into him? He couldn’t remember. Memory required a functioning brain, and his had melted into his heartbeats the moment he had looked into her eyes and seen—
Seen what?
He swore softly.
Seen what he’d wanted to see. Or, more precisely, seen what his body had wanted to see. Nia’s eyes…those beautiful soft brown eyes…misty with desire.
But it had been a mirage. An illusion. A teasing, flickering slideshow made up of memories and wish fulfilment.
Gritting his teeth, he pushed up the revs.
He understood wish fulfilment better than most of the population. As a film director he produced movies that were designed to satisfy people’s conscious and unconscious desires.
His mouth twisted.
Clearly, though, he should have been concentrating on satisfying his own—then maybe he wouldn’t have found himself standing inches apart from his ex with what could only be described as a hard-on.
He still couldn’t quite believe it. Walking back to Lamington afterwards he had felt as if his body had betrayed him. Nia had broken his heart. It made no sense for him to feel anything for her but hostility and resentment.
Okay, she was still a beautiful woman, and they’d been alone, and they had a history, but surely her crime should have stifled his desire. Why, then, had his body reacted in t
hat way?
But he knew why.
It had been an instinctive response. Like reaching for something when you saw it fall. Automatic, unthinking. Foolish.
He had come so close to kissing her…so close to pulling her body against his and giving in to the sharp pull of desire.
The fact that he hadn’t done so was less to do with will power and more to do with a chance encounter between a fox and a vixen.
A soft, expensively restrained ringtone filled the car’s cabin and gratefully he pulled his mind away from Nia’s soft lips.
‘Answer phone,’ he said curtly.
‘Farlan.’
It was Steve, his producer. He had noticed a missed call from him yesterday, and had been meaning to get back to him.
‘Steve—sorry, man. I was going to call you—’
He glanced at the clock on the dash. It was barely six a.m. in Los Angeles, but it didn’t surprise him that Steve was already up and making business calls. Most people he’d met in the movie industry seemed to work all hours of the day and night, and he was no exception, only today it had slipped his mind.