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Max snorted in frustration. ‘The guy sounds like an idiot.’
She gave him a wan smile. ‘I was the idiot. I only found out what was really going on when I overheard a couple of the PAs laughing about it in the ladies’ bathroom.’
Her eyes were dark with an expression he couldn’t quite read now. Was it anger? Resentment? It certainly didn’t look like self-pity.
‘So you left,’ he prompted.
She took a sip of her drink and he did the same, grimacing at the claggy sweetness of the cocktail.
‘I had to,’ she said. ‘My professional reputation was at stake, not to mention my sanity. I couldn’t afford to be fired; it would have looked awful on my CV. Not to mention how upset my parents would have been. They’re desperate for me to have a successful career. They never had the opportunity to get a good education or well-paid job themselves so they scrimped and saved for years to put me through private school. It’s a point of pride for my dad in particular. Apparently he never shuts up to his friends about me working with “the movers and shakers in the Big Smoke”.’ She shot him an embarrassed grimace.
He smiled. ‘You’re lucky—my mother couldn’t give two hoots whether I’m successful or not. She’s not what you’d call an engaged parent.’
Her brow furrowed in sympathy. ‘And your father?’
‘I never met him.’ He leant back with a sigh. ‘My mother fell pregnant with me when she was sixteen and still maintains that she doesn’t know who he was. She was pretty wild in her youth and constantly moved us around the country. Barely a term at school would go by before she had us packing up and moving on. She couldn’t bear to stay in the same place for long. Not that she’s exactly settled now.’
Her gaze was sympathetic. ‘That must have been tough when you were young.’
He shrugged. ‘It was a bit. I never got to keep the friends I made for very long.’
He thought about how his unsettled youth had impacted on the way he liked to live now. He still didn’t like change, even all these years later; it made him tetchy and short-tempered. Which was something Cara had got to know all about recently.
Keen to pull his mind away from his own shortcomings, he leaned forward in his seat and recaptured eye contact with her. ‘So what happened when you handed in your notice?’
She started at the sudden flip in subject back to her and twisted the stem of her glass in her fingers, looking away from his gaze and focusing on the garish liquid as it swirled up towards the rim. ‘My boss didn’t even bat an eyelid, just tossed my letter of resignation onto his desk and went back to the email he was typing, which confirmed just how insignificant I was to him. I took a couple of weeks to get my head straight after that, but I needed another job. I’ve never earned enough to build up any savings and my landlord chose that moment to hoick my rent up. I sent my CV out everywhere and got a few interviews, but every one I attended was a washout. It was as if they could sense the cloud of failure that hung around me like a bad smell.’
‘And that’s when Poppy sent you to me.’
Wrinkling her nose, she gave him a rueful smile. ‘I told her a bit about what had happened before she went off to shoot her latest project and she must have thought the two of us could help each other out because she emailed me to suggest I try you for a job. She made it sound as if you were desperate for help and it seemed like fate that I should work for you.’
‘Desperate, huh?’ He leant back in his seat and raised an eyebrow, feeling amusement tug at his mouth. That was textbook Poppy. ‘Well, I have to admit it’s been good for me, having you around. It’s certainly kept me on my toes.’
‘Yeah, there’s never a dull moment when I’m around, huh?’
The air seemed to grow thick between them as their eyes met and he watched in arrested fascination as her cheeks flamed with colour.
Sliding her gaze away, she stared down at the table, clutching her glass, her chewed nails in plain view. He’d known it the whole time, of course, that she was fighting against some inner trauma, as her nerve and buoyancy deteriorated in the face of his brittle moods. Her increasingly ragged nails had been the indicator he’d been determined to ignore.
But not any more.
A string quartet suddenly started up on the terrace behind them and he winced as the sound assaulted his ears. He’d never liked the sound of violins and an instrument such as that should never be used to play soft rock covers. It was a crime against humanity.
‘Come on, let’s take a walk around the grounds and clear our heads,’ he said, standing up and holding out his hand to help her up from the chair.
She looked at it with that little frown that always made something twist in his chest, before giving a firm nod and putting her hand in his.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A WALK WAS exactly what Cara needed to clear her head.
She couldn’t quite believe she’d just spilled her guts to Max like that, but it was a massive relief to have it all out in the open, even if she did still feel shaky with the effort of holding herself together.
Of course, seeing the concern on his handsome face had only made her ridiculous crush on him deepen, and she was beginning to worry about how she was going to cope with seeing him every day, knowing that they’d never be anything more than colleagues or, at the very most, friends.
A twinkling light in the distance danced in her peripheral vision and she stopped and turned to see what it was, feeling her heels sink into the soft earth beneath her feet. Pulling her shoes off, she hooked her fingers into the straps before running to catch up with Max, who was now a few paces ahead of her, seemingly caught up in his own world, his head dipped as a frown played across his brow.
‘Hey, do you fancy walking to that lake over there?’ she asked him.
‘Hmm?’ His eyes looked unfocused, as if his thoughts were miles away. ‘Yes, okay.’
The sudden detachment worried her. ‘Is everything okay?’ Perhaps, now he’d had more time to reflect on what she’d told him, he was starting to regret getting involved in her messed up life.
She took a breath. ‘Do you want to head back to London? I wouldn’t blame you if you did.’
Turning to look her in the eye again, he blinked, as though casting away whatever was bothering him. ‘No, no. I’m fine.’ His gaze flicked towards the lake, then back to her again and he gave her a tense smile. ‘Yeah, let’s walk that way.’
It only took them a couple of minutes to get there, now that she was in bare feet, and they stopped at the lakeshore and looked out across the water to the dark, impenetrable-looking forest on the other side.
‘It’s a beautiful setting they’ve chosen,’ Cara said, to fill the heavy silence that had fallen between them.
‘Yes, it’s lovely.’ Max bent down and picked up a smooth flat stone, running his fingertips across its surface. ‘This looks like a good skimmer.’ He shrugged off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing his muscular forearms.
Cara stared at them, her mouth drying at the sight. There was something so real, so virile about the image of his tanned skin, with its smattering of dark hair, in stark contrast to the crisp white cotton of his formal shirt. As if he was revealing the man inside the businessman.
Supressing a powerful desire to reach out and trace her fingers across the dips and swells of his muscles, she took a step away to give him plenty of room as he drew his elbow back and bent low, then flung the stone hard across the water.
A deep, satisfied chuckle rumbled from his chest as the stone bounced three times across the still surface, spinning out rings of gentle ripples in its wake, before sinking without a trace into the middle of the lake.
He turned to face her with a grin, his eyes alive with glee, and she couldn’t help but smile back.
‘Impressive.’
He blew on his fingers and pretended to polish them on his shirt. ‘I’m a natural. What can I say?’
Seeing his delight at the achievement, she had a strong desire to get in on the fun. Perhaps it would help distract her from thinking about how alone they were out here on the edge of the lake. ‘Does your natural talent stretch to teaching me how to do that?’
‘You’ve never skimmed a stone?’ He looked so over-the-top incredulous she couldn’t help but laugh.
‘Never.’
‘Didn’t you say your parents live in Cornwall? Surely there’s plenty of opportunities to be near water there.’
She snorted and took a step backwards, staring down at the muddy grass at their feet. ‘Yeah, if you live near the coast, which they don’t. I never learnt to drive when I was living there and my parents didn’t take me to the beach that much when I was young. My dad’s always suffered with a bad back from the heavy lifting he has to do at work, so he never got involved in anything of a physical nature. And my mum’s a real homebody. She’s suffered with agoraphobia for years.’
She heard him let out a low exhalation of breath and glanced up to find an expression of real sympathy in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. That must have been hard for you as a kid,’ he said softly.
Shrugging one shoulder, she gave a nod to acknowledge his concern, remembering the feeling of being trapped inside four small walls when she was living at home, with nowhere to escape to. Going to school every day had actually been a welcome escape from it and as soon as she’d finished her studies she’d hightailed it to London.
‘Yeah, it was a bit. My parents are good people, though. They threw all their energy into raising me. And they made sure to let me know how loved I was.’ Which was the absolute truth, she realised with a sting of shame, because she’d distanced herself from them since leaving home in an attempt to leave her stultifying life there behind her. But she’d left them behind, too. They didn’t deserve that. A visit was well overdue and she made a pact with herself to call them and arrange a date to see them as soon as she got back to London.
Max nodded, seemingly satisfied that she didn’t need any more consoling, and broke eye contact to lean down and pick up another flat pebble.
She watched him weigh it in his palm, as if checking it was worth the effort of throwing it. Everything he did was measured and thorough like that, which was probably why he was such a successful businessman.
‘Here, this looks like a good one. It’s nice and flat with a decent weight to it so it’ll fly and not sink immediately.’ He turned it over in his hand. ‘You need to get it to ride the air for a while before it comes down and maintain enough lift to jump.’
He held it out to her and she took it and looked at it with a frown. ‘Is there a proper way to hold it?’
‘I find the best way is to pinch it between my first finger and thumb. Like this.’ He picked up another stone and demonstrated.
She copied the positioning in her own hand then gave him a confident nod, drew back her arm and threw it as hard as she could.
It landed in the lake with a plop and sank immediately.
‘Darn it! What did I do wrong?’ she asked, annoyed with herself for failing so badly.
‘Don’t worry; it can take a bit of practice to get your technique right. You need to get lower to the ground and swing your arm in a horizontal arc. When it feels like the stone could fly straight forward and parallel with the water, loosen the grip with your thumb and let it roll, snapping your finger forwards hard.’
‘Huh. You make it sound so easy.’
He grinned and raised his eyebrows. ‘Try again.’
Picking up a good-looking candidate, she positioned the stone between her finger and thumb and was just about to throw it when Max said, ‘Stop!’
Glancing round at him with a grimace of frustration, she saw he was frowning and shaking his head.
‘You need to swing your arm at a lower angle. Like this.’
Before she could react, he’d moved to stand directly behind her, putting his left hand on her hip and wrapping his right hand around the hand she was holding the stone in. Her heart nearly leapt out of her chest at the firmness of his touch and started hammering away, forcing the blood through her body at a much higher rate than was reasonable for such low-level exercise.
As he drew their arms backwards the movement made her shoulder press against the hard wall of his chest and she was mightily glad that he couldn’t see her face at that precise moment. She was pretty sure it must look a real picture.
‘Okay, on three we’ll throw it together.’ His mouth was so close to her ear she felt his breath tickle the downy little hairs on the outer whorl.
‘One...two...three!’
They moved their linked hands in a sweeping arc, Cara feeling the power of Max’s body push against her as the momentum of the move forced them forwards. She was so distracted by being engulfed in his arms she nearly didn’t see the stone bounce a couple of times before it sank beneath the water.
‘Woo-hoo!’ Max shouted, releasing her to take a step back and raise his hand, waiting for her to give him a high five.
The sudden loss of his touch left her feeling strangely light and disorientated—but now was not the time to go to pieces. Mentally pulling herself together, she swung her hand up to meet his, their palms slapping loudly as they connected, then bent down straight away, pretending to search the ground for another missile.
‘Who taught you to skim stones? A brother?’ she asked casually, grimacing at the quaver in her voice, before grabbing another good-looking pebble and righting herself.
He’d stooped to pick up his own stone and glanced round at her as he straightened up. ‘No. I’m an only child. I think once my mother realised how much hard work it was raising me she was determined not to have any more kids.’ He raised a disparaging eyebrow then turned away to fling the stone across the lake, managing five bounces this time. He nodded with satisfaction. ‘I used to mountain bike over to a nearby reservoir with a friend from boarding school at the weekends and we’d have competitions to see who could get their stone the furthest,’ he said, already searching the ground for another likely skimmer, his movements surprisingly lithe considering the size of his powerful body.
A sudden need to get this right overwhelmed her.
She wasn’t usually a superstitious person, but she imagined she could sense the power in this one simple challenge. If she got this stone to bounce by herself, maybe, just maybe, everything would be okay.
She was throwing this for her pride and the return of her strength. To prove to Max—but mostly to herself—that she was resilient and capable and—dare she even suggest it?—brave enough to try something new, even if there was a good chance she’d fail spectacularly and end up looking foolish again.
Harnessing the power of positive thought, she drew back her hand, took a second to centre herself, then flung the stone hard across the water, snapping her finger like he’d taught her and holding her breath as she watched it sail through the air.
It dropped low about fifteen feet out and for a second she thought she’d messed it up, but her spirits soared as she saw it bounce twice before disappearing.
Spinning round to make a celebratory face at Max, she was gratified to see him nod in exaggerated approval, a smile playing about his lips.
‘Good job! You’re a quick study; but then we already knew that about you.’
The compliment made her insides flare with warmth and she let out a laugh of delight, elation twisting through her as she saw him grin back.
Their gazes snagged and held, his pupils dilating till his eyes looked nearly black in the bright afternoon light.
A wave of electric heat spread through her at the sight of it, but the laughter died in her throat as he turned abruptly away and stared off towards the house instead, folding his arms so tightly against his chest she could make out the shape of his muscles under his shirt.
He cleared his throat. ‘You know, this place is just like the venue where Jemima and I got married,’ he said, so casually she wondered how much emotion he’d had to rein in, in order to say it.
Ugh. What a selfish dolt she was. Here she’d been worrying about what he thought of her and her tales of woe, when he was doing battle with his own demons.
It had occurred to her earlier that morning, as she’d struggled to do up her dress, that attending a wedding could be problematic for him, but she’d forgotten all about it after the incident in the kitchen, her thoughts distracted by the unnerving tension that had crackled between them ever since.
Or what she’d thought was tension.
Perhaps it had been apprehension on his part.
And then, when he’d mentioned how transient and lonely his youth had been over drinks earlier, it had brought it home to her why Jemima’s death had hit him so hard. It sounded as if she’d been the person anchoring his life after years of feeling adrift and insecure. And this place reminded him of everything he’d lost.
No wonder he seemed so unsettled.
He’d still come here to help her out, though, despite his discomfort at being at this kind of event, which was a decent and kind thing for him to do and way beyond the call of duty as her boss. Her heart did a slow flip in her chest as she realised exactly what it must have cost him to agree to come.
‘I’m sorry for dragging you here today. I didn’t think about how hard it would be for you. After losing Jemima.’
He put his hand on her arm and waited for her to look at him before speaking. ‘You have nothing to apologise for. Nothing. I wanted to come here to support you because you’ve done nothing but support me for the last few weeks. It’s my turn to look after you today.’ He was looking directly at her now and the fierce intensity in his eyes made a delicious shiver zip down her spine.
‘Honestly, I thought it would be awful coming here,’ he said, casting his gaze back towards the house again, ‘but it’s not been the trial I thought it’d be. In fact—’ he ran a hand over his hair and let out a low breath ‘—it’s been good for me to confront a situation like this. I’ve been missing out on so much life since Jem died and it’s time I pulled my head out of the sand and faced the world again.’
Cara swallowed hard, ensnared in the emotion of the moment, her heart thudding against her chest and her breath rasping in her dry throat. Looking at Max now, she realised that the ever-present frown was nowhere to be seen for once. Instead, there was light in his eyes and something else...
They stood, frozen in the moment, as the gentle spring wind wrapped around them and the birds sang enthusiastically above their heads.
It would be so easy to push up onto tiptoe and slide her hands around his neck. To press her lips against his and feel the heat and masculine strength of him, to slide her tongue into his mouth and taste him. She ached to feel his breath against her skin and his hands in her hair, her whole body tingling with the sensory expectation of it.
She wanted to be the one to remind him what living could be like, if only he’d let her.
To her disappointment, Max broke eye contact with her and nodded towards the marquee behind them. ‘We should probably get back before they send out a search party. We don’t want to find ourselves in trouble for messing with Amber’s schedule of events and being frogmarched to our seats,’ he said lightly, though his voice sounded gruffer than normal.
Had he seen it in her face? The longing. She hoped not. The thought of her infatuation putting their fragile relationship under any more strain made her insides squirm.
Anyway, that tension-filled moment had probably been him thinking about Jemima again.
Not her.
They walked in silence back to the marquee, the bright sun pleasantly warm on the back of her neck and bare shoulders, but her insides icy cold.
Despite their little detour, they weren’t the last to sit down. It was with a sigh of relief that Cara slumped into her seat and reached for the bottle of white wine on the table, more than ready to blot out the ache of disappointment that had been present ever since he’d suggested they give up their truancy from the festivities and head back into the fray.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be here exactly; it was just that it had been so much fun hanging out with him. Just the two of them together, like friends. Or something.
Knocking back half a glass of wine in one go, she refilled it before offering the bottle to Max.
He was looking at her with bemusement, one eyebrow raised. ‘Thirsty?’
Heat flared across her cheeks. ‘Just getting in the party mood,’ she said, forcing a nonchalant smile. ‘It looks like we have some catching up to do.’
The raucous chatter and laughter in the room suggested that people were already pretty tiddly on the cocktails they’d been served.
‘Okay, well, I’m going to stick to water if I have to drive to the bed and breakfast place later. I think one of us should stay sober enough to find our way there at the end of the night. I don’t fancy kipping in the car.’
She gave him an awkward grin as the thought of sleeping in such close proximity to him made more heat rush to her face.
Picking up her glass, she took another long sip of wine to cover her distress.
Oh, good grief. It was going to be a long night.
The meal was surprisingly tasty, considering how many people were being catered for, and Cara began to relax as the wine did its work. She quickly found herself in a conversation with the lady to her right, who turned out to be Amber’s second cousin and an estate agent in Angel, about the dearth of affordable housing to rent in London. By the end of dessert, the woman had promised to give Cara first dibs on a lovely-sounding one-bedroom flat that was just about to come onto her books. And that proved to Cara, without a shadow of a doubt, that you just had to be in the right place at the right time to get lucky.
Turning to say this exact thing to Max, she was disturbed to find he’d finished his conversation with the man next to him and was frowning down at the tablecloth.
‘Sorry for ignoring you,’ she said, worried he was getting sucked down into dark thoughts again with all the celebrating going on around him.
He gave her a tense smile and pushed his chair away from the table. ‘You weren’t. I overheard your conversation about finding a flat; that’s great news—you should definitely get her number and follow that up,’ he said, standing and tapping the back of his chair. ‘I’m going to find the bathrooms. I’ll be back in a minute.’
She watched him stride away with a lump in her throat. Was he upset about the prospect of her moving out? She dismissed the notion immediately. No, he couldn’t be. He must be craving his space again by now. Even though she’d loved living there, she knew it was time to move out. Especially now that her feelings for him had twisted themselves into something new. Something dangerous.
‘That’s a good one you’ve got there—very sexy,’ Amber’s second cousin muttered into her ear, pulling back to waggle her eyebrows suggestively, only making the lump in Cara’s throat grow in size.
Unable to speak, she gave the woman what she hoped looked like a gracious smile.
‘Hi, Cara.’
The voice behind her made her jump in her seat and she swivelled round, only to find herself staring into the eyes of the woman she’d been trying to avoid since spotting her in the church earlier.
Her meal rolled uncomfortably in her stomach.
‘Hi, Lucy.’
Instead of the look of cool disdain Cara was expecting, she was surprised to see Lucy bite her lip, her expression wary.
‘How are you?’ Lucy asked falteringly, as if afraid to hear the answer.
‘Fine, thank you.’ Cara kept her voice deliberately neutral, just in case this was an opening gambit to get her to admit to something she really didn’t want to say.