Dreaming Of... Australia: Mr Right at the Wrong Time / Imprisoned by a Vow / The Millionaire and the Maid

‘I knew. Plus Mel had been a fixture in my family for a long time because of her friendship with my brother.’ He studied the digital recorder and didn’t quite meet her eyes, making her wonder if there was more to that story.

‘How does she feel about the work you do?’

Pained creases appeared above his brow. ‘It bothers her. The hours. The disruption to our routine. She’s a creature of habit.’

‘You being at such risk?’

She’d never seen eyelashes flinch, but Sam’s did. ‘She doesn’t like thinking she could be widowed. The financial uncertainty. I get that.’

The warm glow inside her responded to the misery in his voice. Defending his wife was automatic. Could he hear what he was admitting? Melissa wasn’t worried about losing him, only her husband, and apparently a large chunk of the household income. ‘You never considered giving up the Search and Rescue stuff?’

He lifted his eyes. ‘When we have kids. Yes.’

‘Which haven’t come?’

She knew it was a mistake before the words even left her mouth, but he didn’t react. Not the way he had to her suggestion his marriage wasn’t solid. This time it was totally unconscious—a deep pain in his eyes. It hurt her to see it. She shifted tangent smoothly.

‘You live in Hobart?’

He picked up the new direction gratefully. ‘Mel’s work has its head office there, so it was a necessary move for her research.’

Necessary. Word choices like that often led her to the true grit in someone’s story. If only she had the courage to pursue it. On anyone else she wouldn’t have hesitated … But every urge she had to dig into Sam’s life suddenly felt loaded and a bit wrong. She hedged instead. ‘Quite an achievement, given her young age.’

‘She was so excited the day she told me she’d been successfully promoted. It had been a long time since I’d seen her so animated.’

‘You were happy to move? Away from your family?’

The look he gave her was pointed. And conflicted. ‘We both thought it would be a good idea for us to … start our own lives. Somewhere different.’

‘Must have been tough.’ And there must have been another reason.

The plane engines were too loud to waste effort with empty words. He just nodded.

‘But you had each other. That’s something.’

His nod continued, shadows lingering around his gaze. But then they cleared as if by conscious effort. He came fully back to the present. She grew almost uncomfortable under his steady regard as his eyes lifted.

‘You’re very easy to talk to, Aimee.’

The compliment warmed her and filled her body with helium. But she wasn’t about to take it to heart. She couldn’t afford to. ‘People say that. I guess it’s because you have no emotional stake in me. Like talking to a bartender.’

He snorted. ‘You don’t go to many bars, obviously.’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘No, not many. Does that not happen?’

‘Not outside of the movies.’

‘Oh.’

‘Besides, it’s not exactly true, Aimee.’ Blue heat simmered.

‘What’s not?’

‘We’re hardly strangers,’ he said. ‘We’ve been through a lot. I … we’re friends. Aren’t we? No matter how unconventional our meeting was.’

She hesitated to speak, fearing that if she opened her mouth the echo of her hard-hammering heart would come out instead of words. She nodded.

‘So it’s not true that I have no emotional stake in you at all.’

Her breath caught around the thumping in her chest. What in the world was she supposed to say to that?

‘Plus there’s …’ His hooded gaze was crowded with every thought running through his mind as he deliberated. He reached out and turned off the mini recorder. ‘The Kiss.’

Mortified warmth flared through her whole body. Had she really expected the topic to never to come up? She’d spent a lot of time analysing that kiss these past months, reliving it. And though she’d had a hard time regretting giving in to the impulse—even once she knew about the existence of Mrs Gregory—she was sorry for the way she’d forced it on him.

But she’d never expected it to earn uppercase status in his mind. The Kiss. And she’d really never expected him to raise it so openly.

She struggled for the right words. ‘That was my fault, Sam.’

‘I wasn’t chasing an apology. But I think we need to talk about it. Get it out of the way.’

Really? She just wanted to pretend it had never happened. ‘I’m not sure examining it is going to explain it. I was overwhelmed with fear and you were the one keeping me sane. I just needed the … human contact.’

Did she get any points for half-truths? Or did she lose one for the half she was hiding?

‘Aimee, you don’t need to justify why you did it.’

She frowned. ‘Then why raise it?’

He glanced around them at the half-empty plane and then leaned in. ‘Because it’s stayed with me.’

She stared at him, her breath thinning. Her mental oxygen mask dropped down. ‘Stayed?’

‘I was on the job. You were hurting. I totally understand why you did it. But what I don’t understand …’ his blue eyes pierced hers ‘… is why I let you.’

Her tongue threatened to stick so firmly to her palate that it would be impossible to speak. She was sitting on a plane, heading for a hotel in a different city with a married man she’d non-consensually kissed, taking about said kiss….

She squirmed. ‘I didn’t really give you much option—’

‘You were tied to your seat. I could have moved out of your reach easily. Why didn’t I?’ His stare burned into her. ‘And why haven’t I forgotten it?’

It was hardly going to be uncontrollable lust—for a woman covered in blood and dirt and soaked in her own urine. She stared at him and shook her head: silent, lost.

The chief steward’s even tones streamed out of the overhead speakers, advising passengers that they were commencing their descent into Melbourne. She had no idea what he expected. So she did the only appropriate thing.

She brushed it off with a hollow laugh.

‘A mystery for the ages!’

His eyes narrowed. ‘It doesn’t bother you?’

Time to lie! ‘It bothers me that I did it. I’m embarrassed, of course.’

‘But that’s all?’

Time to run! She unclasped her seatbelt. ‘I’m just going to … Before we land. I’ll be right back.’

But before she’d made it to the next row she heard him behind her. ‘We’re going to have to talk about it at some point, Aimee.’

She fled. Down the aisle and into the toilet before the seatbelt light came on. She made the most undignified exit of her life from the most excruciating conversation of her life about the most unforgettable kiss of her life.

She slid the ‘engaged’ knob into place as if it would save her life.

Sam watched the little unisex toilet symbol flick from green to red and he sighed. Pretty appropriate, really. The little man represented him and the little woman represented Aimee. It only took one conversation to push the two of them from an amiable green to a cautionary red.

Red for embarrassment. Red for anger. Red for incendiary.

Take your pick.

The two of them existed perpetually on the edge of an inflammatory zone. His pulse was still pounding. The chemistry between them hadn’t eased off since that day at the awards ceremony. He rubbed his thigh where it tingled from pressing against hers. All that unspent tension had to go somewhere.

Even after weeks apart it was still live.

Simmering. Just waiting for an excuse to flare up.

Enough to rattle both of them. Enough that he’d forgotten himself and started a conversation that he’d have been better off not having. So why had he started it? Was he so desperate to forge a connection between them? Or was it because it was the only legitimate way he could relive that moment? The moment on the rock-face when Aimee went from being his patient to something more meaningful.

Something she wasn’t asking to be.

Something he couldn’t let her be.

But he did enjoy riling her. The colour that flared in her cheeks … The glitter of her eyes … The defiant toss of her hair …

He adjusted his position in the cramped economy seat as his body celebrated the image.

Or maybe he just regressed to being nine years old in her presence and stirring her up was the equivalent of pulling her plaits to get noticed.

Maybe he really was that lame.

Either way, he needed to get a handle on it. They had three intensive days of promotion to get through, and they weren’t going to be any easier if he kept teasing her into hiding. They were both adults, and now colleagues. This was officially a work trip. Attraction or not, if he couldn’t count on his own best judgement then he’d have to count on his professionalism to get him through.

He glanced at the little red symbol above the bathroom again.

Assuming she ever came out.

CHAPTER EIGHT

AIMEE curled up in the comfy corner of the L-shaped sofa in her hotel suite at the end of their first long day in Melbourne and let her head fall back on a laugh. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Right in the solar plexus.’

‘And she was how old?’

‘Eighty-two. She had the bone density of someone two generations younger.’

‘Sam Gregory taken out by a great-grandmother.’ A frightened, bewildered great-grandmother, who’d had to wrestle with a young bag thief until Sam intervened. ‘Can’t you go anywhere without rescuing someone?’

‘She was doing a great job of holding onto her bag against a pretty big kid. I just evened up the odds for her.’

‘And got punched for your trouble.’ She laughed again. ‘You were supposed to be walking off the craziness of the day. Not hanging out in a police station making a report.’

They’d both run from point to point like mad things since the moment they’d set foot in Tullamarine Airport that morning. Two school appearances, then out to a rescue centre at the foothills to have the same conversations, answer the same questions. To go over and over the events of that night on the A10 in excruciating detail.

‘Were you scared?’ one kid had asked.

‘Did it hurt?’ This from a young girl.

‘Was your car smashed to pieces?’ Always a boy asking that one.

She was so grateful to have him by her side, but every time Sam told the story he used words like ‘standard operating procedure’ and ‘protocol’ and ‘training’. Depersonalising the entire incident. By contrast, her contribution was all about her feelings, her fears, how much difference Sam’s presence and support had made to her.

Not unlike the whole day, really. And the two yet to come.

As an exercise in public relations it was textbook. As a tool to remind her how everyday her situation had been for Sam—how not special—it was acute.

‘I just wanted to explain why I wasn’t at dinner,’ he went on.

Reality still haunted her. ‘I don’t expect you to babysit me every minute.’

‘I know, but this is my city. My turf. I feel bad that I left you here alone on our first evening.’

Our. As if they were a couple.

‘Don’t feel bad. I had Room Service soup and then a long, hot bath. It was blissful.’ It had soaked away some of her exhaustion, but not all. She squirrelled deeper into the sofa and got comfortable on a soft sigh. ‘Is that why you called? To apologise?’

There was the slightest of pauses before he cleared his throat and continued. ‘Getting fresh air was only part of the reason I went out. Mel turns thirty next weekend and I wanted to pick her up something.’

Aimee smiled past the little twang at the mention of his wife’s name. She was going to have to get used to those twangs. ‘I’m guessing the innercity constabulary don’t offer a lot in the way of fine giftware?’

Her eyes flew to the adjoining wall as she imagined she heard his rich laugh clean through it. Until that moment Sam being next door to her in the hotel had hovered around her consciousness in a kind of abstract way. Talking by phone, he might as well have been across the country.

But that laugh brought him into pulse-racing context.

Right. Next. Door. Her heart kicked up a beat.

‘I have no idea what to get her,’ he said.

Really? His own wife? ‘None at all?’

‘Flowers? Chocolates? Something expensive?’

‘Lord, don’t use price as your primary parameter …’

‘Don’t all women like expensive gifts?’

Aimee smiled at the genuine bemusement in his voice. ‘Not if they’re in lieu of intimacy, no. We see right through those.’

‘My sister says lingerie, but—’

Her stomach curled. Oh, God, don’t ask me about lingerie for your wife.

‘—won’t she think I have an expectation of seeing it on her?’

Despite not wanting to have this conversation, Aimee frowned. ‘She’s your wife, Sam.’

‘Right, but … lingerie’s a statement. You know?’

She blinked. What kind of marriage did they have?

Before she could worry that particular bone further he went on. ‘In the same way that a toaster is a statement. Or slippers.’

‘Do not buy her slippers.’

His low, rich chuckle down the line had its usual effect on her. Every hair on her body quivered. ‘I won’t. Even I know that much.’

She blew out a breath. She owed Sam: bigtime. If gift advice for the wife she wished didn’t exist was what he needed, then so be it. She wouldn’t fail him. ‘Okay, so you want intimate, but not intimate.’

‘Right. Thank God we have this shorthand, Aimee.’

That made her frown. She stretched on her sofa. ‘And you have no thoughts whatsoever?’

‘I have heaps of thoughts, but I have no idea which is the best one.’

‘Want to throw some at me?’

Pause. Long pause. ‘Actually, I was hoping you might help me out … in person. We have a couple of hours’ down-time tomorrow.’

Her spine stiffened again, just as it had started to relax. Being together racing around the suburbs of Melbourne on business she could handle. Being on the other side of a thick hotel wall was doable. Shopping together for a gift for his beautiful, talented wife …?

She got to her feet—all the better to roam around the room.

‘Together?’

He laughed again. ‘That’s the idea. Unless you want to phone in your advice like tech-support?’

Restricting themselves to phone conversations might be the best thing all round. Though she doubted that those few degrees of separation would do much to diminish the way he invaded her thoughts—awake or dreaming—it would at least spare her the confusion and frustration and risk of sitting across a table from a man she couldn’t in good conscience touch.

Not in the way her body wanted to.

She stalled him as her mind raced for a way out of this. ‘What did you have in mind?’

‘The markets?’

Say you’re busy. Say you have to work on a transcription. Say you’re feeling fluey.

A deep shudder left her in a rush of air. ‘Okay.’

She did a shabby kind of rain-dance across the carpeted floor of her suite. Honestly! She had the self-determination of a lemming.

When it came to Sam she had absolutely none.

‘Fantastic. Thank you, Aimee. I appreciate it.’

Sure he did. Why wouldn’t he? She was at his beck and call. And that was a dangerously familiar dynamic. But she pressed her fingers to her temple and took a deep breath. It wasn’t Sam’s fault she’d reverted to the bad old days. It wasn’t his fault the gravel of his voice turned her spine to jelly and her mind to hot, long, imaginary nights.

Not seeing him in person these past weeks hadn’t done anything to reduce the thing between them. Or the fact that indulging the thing wasn’t acceptable because of his wife. Because of Aimee’s own values.

But she’d committed to helping him—she wanted to help him. To do something to even the slate. Though this really wouldn’t have been her first choice.

As had become her norm, she took shelter behind her book. ‘My price for assistance will be knocking off some more of my interview.’

‘The pleasure of my company is not reward enough?’

It couldn’t be. She couldn’t let it be. She shielded those raw, strained thoughts behind her old friend flippancy. ‘You have an unattractively high opinion of yourself, Sam Gregory.’

His smile warmed the earpiece of her phone. ‘Looks like my days of trading on your hero-worship are well and truly over.’

Aimee frowned. A lesser man might, in fact, have acted on her sycophantic adoration—wife or no wife. A lesser woman might have let him. But for all he’d tried on the plane to get her to talk about The Kiss, Sam hadn’t once exploited the complicated emotions she had about the man who’d rescued her. He just wanted to clear the air.

‘You’ll always be my hero.’ That much, at least, she could say. Hand on heart.

‘And statements like that—’ he laughed ‘—are why I have an unattractively high opinion of myself.’

She grasped the humour he threw out and used it to climb out of the dangerous place they’d just found themselves in. It was safer all round if she didn’t go back to those days. Those feelings. ‘Just a pity all that talent doesn’t stretch to gift selection.’

He groaned. ‘Thanks for pointing that out.’

‘Well, you know you can always count on me for a healthy reality check.’

‘Something to look forward to tomorrow. I’ll meet you in the lobby at nine?’ he said.

‘Make it eight. Something tells me we’re going to need all the scouting time we can get.’ A loud noise from Sam’s end of the phone made her jump. There’d been a lot of rustling, too, as they spoke. ‘What are you doing, anyway?’

‘Shaving. I’m just out of the shower. That was the bathroom cabinet closing a bit too quickly.’

Her whole body flinched. ‘Oh … Okay.’

What exactly was she supposed to say to that?

Her ears grew acutely sensitive to every little sound in the next moments. The way the acoustics changed as he left the bathroom. The pad of his feet on the carpet. The flip of the lid of his suitcase and the rustle of him pulling out some clothes. Pyjamas, presumably.

Heat suffused her.

She turned to the big blank wall that stood as all that separated them. It formed the perfect canvas for her vivid imagination to paint him sauntering barefoot and damp across a suite the mirror image of hers, a fluffy white towel slung low on lean hips, the mobile phone at his ear the only other thing adorning him.

Every bit of saliva in her mouth decamped.

‘Well,’ she croaked, ‘I’ll let you go. I have some work to do tonight. See you tomorrow.’

He sighed. ‘Yeah, I still need to call Mel. Don’t want her to worry.’ His voice dropped in timbre. ‘See you in the morning, Aimee.’

She practically tripped over her tongue in her haste to end the call, then sat with the phone pressed numbly to her head long after Sam had rung off, her ears tuned, desperately, for any further audio hints from beyond the wall.

Just out of the shower.

While on the phone to her.

She wrestled free of the heated visuals that rushed at her like a line of football players and chewed her lip at a niggling afterthought. Having a conversation with someone while you were naked hinted at a certain kind of intimacy. Husband-wife kind of intimacy. Or oldest mate from childhood.

The latter suggested she’d assumed a genderless kind of role in Sam’s mind: totally nonsexual, like a sister or an old friend. The sort of non-wife woman you wouldn’t hesitate to have a phone conversation with while wandering around a hotel room in the buff.

Aimee frowned. She didn’t want to be genderless with Sam. She didn’t want to be his sister. Just because she wasn’t actively exercising her femininity on him it didn’t mean she wasn’t keen to remain feminine in his mind. She liked how sexy she felt when Sam was around. She’d had a lifetime of feeling otherwise. A child … and then a chattel.

But the other possibilities bothered her even more—on a much deeper level. There should only be three women that Sam felt comfortable getting naked with—even telephonically. His mother, his doctor and his wife.

And she was none of those.

Her mind whirled. Did it say something that she was the first person he’d called on stepping out of the shower? Or was he just getting her call out of the way before stretching out on that king-sized bed for a longer late-night call with his wife?

That set a whole extra set of visuals flickering past her consciousness, and she shut them down hard.

One way or another Sam’s unconscious behaviour was telling her something important about the nature of their relationship. Something that had alarm bells clanging deep in her psyche. Unless she was misreading this through inexperience? Maybe it was a Mars-Venus thing? Maybe guys truly thought nothing of getting naked while they had a woman on the phone, and Sam was just keen to relax after a long and chaotic day?

She let the phone slowly slip down from her ear to rest on her straining breast.

Maybe.

Sam flopped down on the sofa in the corner of his room, folded his arms behind his head and stared at the ceiling.

It couldn’t be a good thing that he was still struggling to clear his head of an image of Aimee, all pink and soft from a hot bath, curled up in her complimentary bathrobe with papers spread all around her, working diligently on her transcription. Lifting her head as he walked into her room. Smiling and stretching up for the kiss he would place on her hairline before going back to her work and losing focus on everything but her stories. Leaving him to just … watch her.

Okay, now he was just plain fantasising.

It had been bad enough spending all day together—listening to her soft voice talking to the school kids, vicariously experiencing her fear and anxiety about the accident through the memories she recounted for them, sitting with his body pressed against hers in the compact car that his department had sent to move them around Melbourne. Working so well together as a team.

He really didn’t need to add inappropriate fantasies to the many different ways he was not helping the situation. Yeah—fantasies in the plural. This wasn’t the first that had broken through since she’d walked so cautiously back into his life across that stage all those weeks ago. Since she’d exited the café with such dignity after he’d been a jerk. Since her cheeks had flushed so hot this morning when he’d mentioned the kiss.

The harder he tried to keep Aimee out of his mind, the more often he caught her in there. It was never lewd, never disrespectful. Just flashes of her smile, the smell of her hair, the memory of a touch …

But she wasn’t here for his amusement. She was here to help out his department. It wasn’t her fault she was also the sweetest, freshest, most distracting person he’d met in …

He sighed.

… a really long time.

His mind made the immediate shift to Melissa. The only other woman that he’d ever obsessed about in quite this way. All the more because he couldn’t have her at the time. Four long years of teenage angst and hormone-driven focus until his planets had aligned and he’d had a chance with the girl he’d been secretly admiring for what felt like for ever.

By then he’d built her up to goddess status. The sun had risen and set with her. She was perfection.

How could she ever have lived up to that?

The contrast between the intense attraction he’d felt then, for the girl he couldn’t have and the beige, comfortable nothing he felt now, just a few years later for the girl he’d eventually married … Had he learned nothing since he was nineteen?

He should know all about heady infatuations.

Was that what he was doing with Aimee? Turning her into some kind of new ideal of the perfect woman for him? Since Melissa had failed to achieve it? Since they’d so miserably failed to achieve perfect couple status together?