One Night With Her Ex: The One That Got Away / The Man From her Wayward Past / The Ex Who Hired Her

She stripped off her dress and her underwear and tossed them over the edge of the bath. She headed for the shower and turned it on hot and hard and stood and let the water wash away the stench of cowardice that clung to her skin.

‘Walk away, Evie,’ she whispered, and set her palms to the wall in front of her and her face to the spray to wash away the sting of tears. ‘Run.’

And then the shower door behind her opened and Logan stepped in, fully dressed, and reached for her and she went to him without hesitation, wanting to comfort and be comforted, wanting his touch more than she wanted anything in this world. Riding that slippery slope of obsession and longing as the water poured down on them both and he pressed a condom packet into her hands and pushed her back against the wall and started kissing her.

Rough was the wrong word for what he wanted. Intense was a better word. All-consuming, as she helped him shed his clothes and laid hands to him, learning him all over again. Condom on and then Evie on as she put shoulders to the tiles and locked her legs around Logan’s waist and he was slow and forceful as he entered her, and the skin on his jaw tasted salty and a little bit rough, but his movements weren’t rough, not rough at all. His movements spoke of worship and wonder and a slamming, heartbreaking need as he claimed her body and offered up his own for her pleasure.

His touch was deft and agonisingly sensual as he cupped her and tilted her just so against him. Such tenuous control once passion came to play, and Evie was no help whatsoever, because wherever Logan led she went willingly.

He wanted her mindless to everything but his touch; and he succeeded.

He wanted her convulsing against him, with her mouth on his shoulder her only tether to this earth; and he succeeded.

She wanted him with her and this time he came when she did, eyes blazing, and his body straining, matching her gasp for gasp, with his mouth on hers, but only just, and his hand on the back of her neck as if he would never let her go.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered when his breath had slowed enough for speech. ‘Angie, I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be.’

‘For the mess I made of my time with you. For the mess I’m still making.’

‘Don’t be.’

She unlocked her legs from around him and set toes to the floor and he held the condom on and slipped out of her and turned away. No words of affection for her, no smile of reassurance, just a need he couldn’t voice and old fears made new again.

She stepped on his clothes on her way out of the shower. Looked at them and looked back at him. ‘Impulsive,’ she said with the tiniest of smiles.

‘Always.’ As he cut the water and she handed him a towel. ‘Around you.’

‘I try to control it,’ he said gruffly, a moment later. ‘I need to control it.’

‘Yes, I guess you do.’ An indirect reference to his past. The history that had shaped him. This had been controlled for Logan. He could get way more lost in desire than that. ‘Lots of baggage, Logan.’

‘More than you can handle?’

‘Are you asking me to have a relationship with you?’ Evie wiped her face down with the towel and started in on her dripping hair.

Logan said nothing, just slung the towel around his hips and stepped from the shower, avoiding the question, avoiding her eyes so Evie figured that for a no, and wasn’t surprised. He’d retreat now, he always did, and she should have felt used and confused, but she didn’t. Instead she felt sad as she let her gaze wash over his naked form. Sad for him. Sad for herself. But not abused.

She didn’t even know how he came to have a body like that. What sports he played, what he did to blow off steam. The list of things she didn’t know about this man seemed endless. And the list of things she did know about him was short and anything but sweet.

‘Do you play sports?’ she asked, and when he lifted his eyebrow at the inanity of the question she shrugged and tried not to be too distracted by the thin line of hair that ran south from his belly-button and disappeared beneath that low-slung towel.

‘I climb,’ he said. ‘Snow and water ski whenever I get the chance. Sail catamarans competitively.’

That’d do it.

‘Does this have anything to do with the amount of baggage I can carry round?’ he asked with the ghost of a smile.

‘No,’ she replied with a rueful smile. ‘I just wanted to know a little more about you, that’s all. Something little. Something …’

‘Normal?’ he offered.

It was as good a word as any. ‘I don’t know what to do. From the moment I first saw you again, I haven’t known what to do.’ Truth, and if it signified weakness on her part then so be it.

‘You need to call off this wedding, Evangeline.’

‘I know that, Logan.’ Evie glanced towards the shower. ‘Is that what the sex was all about? A demonstration of my weakness when it comes to your touch? Because if it was, it wasn’t necessary. I already knew.’

‘It wasn’t that.’ Logan turned away to pick up his soggy clothes and wrung them out. ‘It was need.’

And there was the appeal of this man and the danger in him. That stinging, searing, all-consuming need—and his fear of it.

‘What if we start again?’ she offered quietly. ‘I call off this wedding, MEP finds some other way to finance the civic centre bid and you and I, we start again. Clean slate. You might, for example, come to Sydney one weekend and ask me out on a date. We might see a movie or go for coffee in the park. You could bring me a bunch of black-eyed daisies or a paper parasol. I might feed you chocolate-cherry mud-cake with my fingers by way of thank you.’

Logan’s eyes had darkened again.

‘Easy as,’ she said lightly. ‘And your call.’ She wasn’t the one carrying a dead father and a battered mother around. ‘What kind of cocktail party does your mother throw? Fairly formal?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you planning to attend?’ she asked next.

‘Are you?’

Evie nodded. ‘Got to try and explain my engagement to Max away somehow.’

‘Just tell them my mother made a mistake. Tell them you’re celebrating a business milestone rather than a personal one.’

‘Yes. Something like that.’ She eyed him steadily. ‘We could use your help to sell it. You could aim for civilised.’

‘Yes,’ he said with a smile she didn’t trust at all. ‘I could.’ And handed her back the towel and stalked from the bathroom and then from her room without another word.

‘So what happened between you and Logan?’ asked Max for the umpteenth time as Evie plucked a midnight-blue gown from a clothing rack and flattened it against her body.

‘We talked,’ she said calmly. ‘Too formal?’

‘No,’ said Max. ‘Does he still want you to go live in Antarctica?’

‘Probably,’ said Evie, and withdrew a sleek little black dress from the rack. ‘But he knows he can’t make me, so he’s just going to have to learn to live with disappointment. Too severe?’

‘Yes.’

Evie draped it across her arm of potential dresses anyway. Little black dresses could be deceptive. A deceptively demure black-and-caramel-coloured dress caught her eye next. Demure could be deceptive too. ‘What about this one?’

‘Evie, just pick one,’ said Max.

‘Or I could take an early flight home and forget about your mother’s cocktail party altogether,’ said Evie. ‘As long as we’re talking contingency plans, I’m liking that one a lot.’

‘No,’ said Max steadily. ‘We ride this one out together. Kill the speculation stone dead now.’

‘Maybe you can tell them I’m gay,’ murmured Evie.

‘They wouldn’t believe me. Not if Logan’s anywhere in the room.’

‘Okay, then. You can be gay.’ Evie eyed a plum-coloured gown with a plunging neckline and a thigh-high side split speculatively. ‘What about this one?’

‘Evie, just pick one.’ And then Max looked at the dress. ‘But not that one.’

Evie slid it back on the rack. ‘I vote we tell your mother’s friends that we’re celebrating the success of our business partnership and hopefully the beginning of bigger and better things for MEP. We smile and shake our heads and say we’re sorry people got the wrong idea but we’re not engaged and not about to be. We keep it simple. Deny everything.’

‘You really think that’s going to fly?’

‘Put it this way,’ she said. ‘You got a better idea?’

The cocktail party was every bit as awkward as Evie thought it would be. Elegant, wealthy people, all set to welcome Evie into their lives at Caroline’s behest, and politely puzzled when it became clear that they didn’t have to.

Civilised. It was all so very civilised, but no midnight-blue cocktail gown in the world could shield her from Logan’s powerful presence as she stood by Max’s side and talked business goals and achievements with strangers.

Logan didn’t approach her. He stuck to his side of the room and Evie stuck to hers. She didn’t watch him out of the corner of her eye. Instead she stuck to finding him in reflections in mirrors, of which there were plenty. In the shine of tall silver vases. How could one man assault her senses the way he did, just by being in a room? One man, dressed in black tie, just like every other man in the room.

‘Evie, stop fidgeting,’ said Max.

‘I’m not fidgeting.’

She was fidgeting, so with a smothered curse she stopped.

‘And swearing,’ murmured Max, highly amused. ‘You could stop that too.’

‘I’m not—damn!’ Evie swore rather than add chronic lying to her list of sins too. ‘How much longer do we have to stay here?’

‘Until the bitter end,’ said Max cheerfully. ‘I’m guessing around midnight.’

She’d been sticking to mineral water until now. Maybe it was time she swapped over to something with a little more kick. Then again, the argument against alcohol was a strong one. She’d already been quite uninhibited enough today.

‘You could marry someone else,’ she told Max during a moment they had to themselves—just business partners sharing a quiet moment out on the patio, drinks in hand and smiles at the ready. ‘A childhood friend. Someone who knows this life and how to live it. Someone who’d be happy to accommodate you for two years and then move on.’

‘Absolutely not,’ said Max with a shudder. ‘I’m over marriage for the time being. I might try being in love with the person next time. Just a thought.’

‘How are we going to get the money for the civic centre bid?’

‘Overdraft for some of it,’ said Max. ‘I’ll put my place on the market.’

‘I’ll put mine on,’ Evie said with a sigh. ‘We’re still going to come up short.’

‘Business loan,’ said Max bleakly. ‘Here, before I forget.’ He fished in his pocket and pulled out something small and round and silver-coloured, those bits of it that weren’t a dazzling, glittering blue. It was a sapphire ring the size of Texas. Evie didn’t understand. ‘My mother wants you to have this as a memento of our engagement. Something about payment for your trouble.’ He held it out towards her.

‘No.’ Evie took a hasty step back. ‘Whatever your mother’s opinions are, just … no. I’m all for forgetting we were ever engaged.’

‘I told her you’d say that.’ Max reached for her right hand and slipped it swiftly on her middle finger. Not her ring finger, not even the proper hand. ‘She seems to think I owe you a ring. That we were engaged, however briefly, and that you deserve some kind of compensation. Wear it. Flog it. I don’t care. Just take it. I’m a man in search of family harmony and my mother wants you to have it.’

‘I don’t want it,’ muttered Evie, tugging the ring off just as swiftly as it had gone on. It was too bulky anyway. Too much the reminder of bad decisions too hastily made. ‘Please, Max. Just give it back to her. Tell her I don’t want it.’

But Max’s attention had drifted to a point just over her shoulder, his eyes narrowing fast, and Evie knew, even before she looked over her shoulder, that Logan was heading their way. ‘Take it,’ she said, trying to push the ring into Max’s hand, only he wasn’t having it, and then Logan was upon them and Max automatically moved to make room for him.

‘Change of heart?’ murmured Logan, looking at the ring, and shock flared deep in his eyes; right before those same eyes turned bitter and then carefully blank.

‘This isn’t what it looks like.’ Max’s words came low and fast. ‘It’s not an engagement ring. We’re not engaged. The wedding’s off and it’s staying off. You know that.’

‘Where’d you get the ring?’ asked Logan, and didn’t wait for Max’s answer. ‘She give it to you? Our mother? She tell you to give it to Evangeline?’

‘Yes.’ Max looked uneasy. Evie was uneasy.

‘Take it,’ said Evie urgently. ‘I don’t want it. Would someone please just take it back?’

But Logan wanted no part of it. He knew that stone, the ocean-reef-blue of it. He’d seen it before. He looked towards the small crowd of people in the adjoining room. Those who hadn’t drifted out onto the patio or into the gardens and his mother was one of them. What was she doing? What the hell was she thinking giving Evie this particular ring? She had that look about her; the one that said I’m worried about you and I’m scared of what you’ll do and he wished to hell she’d just stop looking at him like that! Look to her own flaws, for once, and not only to his.

‘Logan?’ said Evie, and put her hand to his forearm to draw his attention, and something twisted deep in his gut. ‘Logan, what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Bull,’ she snapped, calling his bluff. ‘You’re hurt.’

‘No. It’s her ring. What do I care what she does with it?’

‘Logan, who gave your mother this ring?’ Evie asked tightly.

But Logan refused to answer her.

‘It’s the one your father gave her, isn’t it?’ said Evie.

‘No,’ said Max.

‘Doesn’t matter.’ He wouldn’t let it matter.

‘Logan, this can’t be that ring,’ continued Max doggedly. ‘She wouldn’t do that.’

But she had.

Max wouldn’t recognise it; she’d never worn it in front of him. Different lifetime. Different family. Caroline Carmichael had got it right the second time round. A gentle, supportive husband and a loving, well-balanced child.

Max thought their mother was wonderful.

And then the bitter blackness spewed forth, and, for the second time that day, Logan let it engulf him.

‘She likes to remind me of him whenever she thinks I’ve gone too far.’ He sought Evangeline’s gaze. Evangeline in the midnight-blue gown that accentuated her flawless skin and slender curves. The same skin he’d put mouth to not so long ago. The same curves he wanted to caress again with an intensity that bordered on obsession. ‘Have I gone too far, Evangeline?’

‘No,’ she said slowly as her fist clenched around the ring. ‘It’s not you who’s gone too far.’

And before Logan had any notion of what she was about to do, Evie twirled and flung his mother’s ring into the shadowy garden, into the shrubbery far, far away.

The pregnant silence that followed threatened to engulf them all.

‘Good arm,’ said Max finally.

‘It was given to me,’ she said raggedly. ‘And I’ve done what I wanted with it. No one needs that kind of reminder in their life. No one.’

He couldn’t cope. Logan stared at her, his every defence shattered, and something passed between them, something dark and sticky and breathtakingly savage. He didn’t cope well with emotion; his mother was right. Sometimes his feelings just got too big for him to hold.

‘Excuse me,’ he muttered, before he did something unforgivable like drag her from the room, lock her in his arms and never let her go. ‘Excuse me, I have to go.’

Evie watched him leave, her heart so full of lead she was surprised she was still standing up. ‘I did the wrong thing,’ she whispered to Max. ‘Said the wrong thing.’

‘No,’ said Max and his arms came around her comfortingly, urging her to turn and focus her stricken gaze on something other than the door Logan had just exited through. ‘You did exactly the right thing. He’s feeling too vulnerable, that’s all. He never stays when he gets that way.’

Evie didn’t want to stay either. Not that she wanted to run after Logan, because she didn’t. Assuming she even caught up with him, what would she say? How was she supposed to heal hurts inflicted so long ago? If they hadn’t healed by now, chances were they never would.

‘Max, may we leave early too?’ she asked shakily. ‘I’ve had enough. I really have.’ Of the assault on her senses and on her mind. Of the impossible situations that just kept coming, and of the helplessness she felt in the face of this family’s hidden pain. ‘I want to go upstairs and pack, then call a taxi.’

‘Where do you want to go?’ Max’s usually laughing brown eyes were dark with concern.

‘Back to Sydney,’ she said. ‘Away from here. I want to go home.’

CHAPTER FIVE

WALKING away from Logan that Saturday night at the cocktail party wasn’t the hardest thing Evie had ever done. Staying sane the following week was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Sane when Max looked at her sideways and kept his mouth firmly shut. Sane as she worked on project proposals and tried not to wonder what Logan was doing and what he was thinking, and whether she’d ever see him again.

How she could have handled things better.

What she might have done to make Logan stay.

‘What?’ she demanded in exasperation as Max walked into her office unannounced for about the tenth time that morning.

‘Touchy,’ he said.

‘Bite me.’

‘Not my buzz,’ said Max, and placed a sheet of paper on top of the drawings in front of her. ‘You’d be wanting my brother for that.’

He wasn’t wrong. ‘I’m working,’ she said and picked up the sheet and held it out for Max to take back. ‘Whatever it is, you deal with it.’

‘Read it,’ he insisted, so Evie turned it back around with a sigh.

A bank deposit notice, but not a bank she regularly dealt with. Max’s personal account, by the looks of it. With deposit into it yesterday of ten million dollars.

‘Trust fund?’ she asked.

‘Logan.’

Evie’s heart skipped a beat. ‘Terms?’

‘Three per cent below market interest rate.’

‘Handy.’

‘You don’t mind?’ asked Max.

‘Do you?’

‘He stole my fake fiancée and messed with my business plan,’ said Max dryly. ‘I’ll take his money.’

‘Yay for brotherly love,’ said Evie. ‘As long as the loan is between you and Logan and the money comes into the business through you alone, I have no objections.’

‘That’s how it’ll work.’

‘Lucky MEP.’

‘Any other questions?’ asked Max.

Evie shook her head.

‘You don’t want to know where Logan is? What he’s been doing lately?’

She did want to know where Logan was and what he’d been doing lately. But she sure as hell wasn’t going to ask.

‘PNG,’ said Max, as if reading her mind. ‘Sorting out the mess some mining company has made of their operation there. Sometimes Logan troubleshoots for others. For a hefty fee.’

‘The devil will have his due.’

‘He’s a good man, Evie.’

‘I know that, Max.’

‘You should call him. Might improve your mood.’

‘There is nothing wrong with my mood.’

‘Carlo would beg to disagree.’

‘Carlo ordered twenty-eight thousand dollars’ worth of reo we don’t need,’ she said curtly. ‘He’s lucky I let him keep his job.’

‘And Logan thinks you meek,’ muttered Max beneath his breath. ‘God knows why.’

Evie knew exactly why. ‘Was there anything else?’

‘Could be Logan will need a place to stay for a few days when he returns at the end of the week and before he heads back to London. Could be I’m thinking of offering up my apartment for him to use while he’s here.’

‘Why? You think he’s short of cash?’ asked Evie dryly.

‘What I think, said Max with admirable restraint, ‘is that if you want to see him again, you shouldn’t wait for him to call you. Call him. Arrange something. Don’t assume that he knows what he’s doing when it comes to relationships, especially important ones, because he doesn’t.’ Max plucked the bank note from her fingers and waved it in front of her face. ‘This, for example, might as well have “Evie, I want to see you again” written all over it.’

‘But it doesn’t,’ she countered sweetly, and Max sighed and dug his mobile out of his pocket and started in on the touch screen before handing it to her with a flourish.

‘Tell him you’ve been mooning over him all week and want to see him again.’

‘I will not.’

‘All right. Then tell him I want my chief engineer’s head back in the game and that I’m blaming him for the fact that it’s not.’

Evie glared at Max’s hastily retreating back, silently wondering just how many problems she’d solve if she brained Max with his phone. Probably not that many.

‘Tell him I said thank you,’ added Max.

‘Tell him yourself,’ she yelled after him, and then put the phone to her ear just in time to hear the man who currently inhabited most of her dreams—sleeping and waking—say his brother’s name.

Which necessitated some sort of reply.

‘Um … hi. It’s not Max,’ she said awkwardly. ‘It’s Evie. Evie on Max’s phone. How much did you hear?’

‘Everything from “thank you” onwards.’

‘Oh,’ she said, more than a little relieved. ‘Good. Because that about covers it. Your bank transfer came in and Max’s just showed it to me and we wanted to say thank you. Which I’m sure Max will do in person when he sees you next. Thank you, that is.’ And if Max said anything else to his brother about Evie’s recently distracted state she’d strangle him. ‘And I’d like to thank you too. The money’s going to help the civic centre bid’s chances a lot, and Max’s set on winning it and can take it from here, and I can get on with the rest of the work and let the prima donna do his thing … so thank you.’

‘You often make business phone calls like this?’ asked Logan.

‘Never.’

‘Good to know,’ he murmured.

‘Bite me.’

Silence after that, heavy and waiting. Evie took a deep breath. ‘Max tells me you’re flying into Sydney later this week, and I was thinking.’

Evie had no idea what she was thinking.

‘… I was thinking that Max probably wants to invite you into the workplace so you can look around. Which would be fine by me. If you wanted to, that is.’ Evie closed her eyes, leaned back in her chair and thumped her head repeatedly against the headrest, scrabbling for confidence in the face of Logan’s silence and coming up empty. ‘I was thinking you might need to be picked up from the airport. I could do that. Take you wherever you wanted to go.’ Excellent. Now she was officially babbling. ‘How’s PNG?’

‘Hot, sticky and politically messy,’ he said. ‘Largely bereft of plain speaking.’

Evie was largely bereft of plain speaking too.

‘Would you like to have dinner with me while you’re here?’ she asked with her eyes closed tightly shut, and figured it for as plain spoken as she was going to get. ‘I know some good casual eating places. Nothing fancy. But the food’s good.’

Asking a man out on a date was hard. Harder still, when the man in question said a whole lot of nothing in reply.

‘This is the part where you say yes or no,’ she prompted quietly.

‘I don’t get into Sydney until late Friday night,’ he said finally. ‘There’ll be a hire car waiting for me.’

Of course there would.

‘And I don’t need the workplace tour.’

Of course he didn’t. ‘Let me just find Max for you, shall I?’

‘Dinner on Saturday evening I could do.’

‘Pardon?’ Evie was halfway to the door. She probably hadn’t heard him correctly.

‘Dinner,’ he said. ‘Saturday night. Something low-fuss and easy. That I could do.’

‘There’s a place called Brennan’s in Darlinghurst. It’s a bar and grill. Very casual.’