Appeared again. Then disappeared once more.
She’d been sitting in the guest room then, her feet crossed beneath her as she sat in the armchair in the corner of the room. She’d stared at her phone, nervously worrying her knuckle between her teeth.
Tell Dylan I say hello,came the reply, at last.
And that was all.
But it didn’t matter. Erika knew. And if Jenny let herself think about it, it was likely that Erika knew a whole lot more than the two of them had ever discussed directly. Like those moments with Dylan, taut and strange, that Jenny had been pretending not to notice for years now. And yet none of them as intense as what had happened here.
It took her two days to remember that she ought to let Conrad know where she was, too.
Have gone off to Sydney,she wrote him, feeling as stiff as the words sounded when she stared at them on her screen. I don’t expect to be gone too long.
Conrad’s reply had come swiftly.Please update my assistant with return date.
Just in case Jenny had been tempted to romanticize something that had nothing to do with romance. She told herself that what she’d felt, then, staring at his message, was peace. Relief.
She told herself that was what she felt now, too.
“What are you scowling at?” came Dylan’s low voice from behind her.
Jenny jumped, then turned that scowl on him. And immediately wished she hadn’t.
Because Dylan worked on that marvelous body of his. There was a gym in the house, where he put in at least an hour a day, but he also liked to run. He’d introduced her to the coastal walk that stretched from Bondi Beach to the north down to Brontë in the south, and Jenny had taken to walking it on fine mornings, breathing in deep. Letting the Tasman Sea breeze and the lovely Australian sunshine dance over her face like happiness. Stopping here and there to gaze at the water or take pictures from the rocky cliffs.
Dylan ran it.
She could tell that he’d been out on the run already this morning, because he wore nothing but a pair of athletic shorts, and he was...gleaming.
Sweating,she corrected herself crossly.
She should have been revolted. But he didn’t smell bad. He smelled clean. Male. And the sweat of his exertion only made him look better, somehow. It made his green eyes gleam brightly, and Jenny felt reduced to a stuttering, bumbling mess.
It happened more and more the longer she stayed here. One more reason she should leave.
“I’m not scowling,” she told him, ignoring all thatgleaming. “I was thinking about business-related things. I’m so far away I keep pretending England doesn’t exist. But it does.”
“Last I heard, yes.” He sounded amused as he went to the refrigerator, and pulled out the makings of the shake he put together every morning. Several different powders she assumed were proteins and superfoods and whatever else it was health nuts liked to put in themselves to keep up with all thegleaming.Green things and antioxidants and worthy supplements packed with vitamins. The very opposite of the full English breakfast she remembered him tucking into with gusto on hungover Oxford mornings.
There was no reason for her to be here, but she leaned against the counter, her mug of strong tea in her hands and watched. Dylan fixed himself his drink then chugged it down, tipping back his head so she could hardly help but stare at the strong column of his throat. And all the lines, planes and ridges of that body he worked so hard on almost entirely exposed to her view.
She studied the tattoo on his back, the line of Gaelic down his spine and the Celtic knot he wore over his heart. Why did she want to put her hands on him so badly? To trace those tattoos she recognized like old friends, to remind herself how well they suited him and how easily he wore them.
Because you need to go home,she told herself sternly.
“I’m headed into the office,” Dylan said. And when he looked at her, his green gaze swept over her the way it always did, after that first conversation. Friendly. Happy. Not complicated in the least.
There was no reason it should make her teeth ache, so hard that she clenched them.
“The housekeeping service will be in,” he continued mildly, though something about the way he looked at her made her unclench her teeth. “I told them to expect a guest on the premises, so don’t be put off if you wake from a nap to find someone hoovering up the place.”
“I won’t be here,” she said grandly. And without thinking it through. “I’m going to do a bit of the tourist thing.”
“And here I thought you planned to waft up and down the coastal path again.” He studied her. “You should roam about Circular Quay and the Rocks. Take the ferries all over Sydney Harbour. Get a sense of the place.”
Jenny had spent most of her life charging around doing this or that, but not since she’d arrived in Australia. All she wanted to do was stay tucked up in Dylan’s house, or lost in her own head as she wandered up and down what had to be the most beautiful walk in the world. It hugged the coastline, meandering through the beach towns and around a haunting cemetery set into the side of a cliff, over the ocean pools, up the rocks and down again. When the sun was out it could be warm enough to feel like summer while other days it was moody. She loved it either way.
But she’d announced she was off to play tourist, so that was what she was going to do.