Page 22 of Forbidden Hawaiian Nights
Had she been clear?
‘Where is he now?’ Max asked abruptly. He stood up and stretched his joints, then cast a satisfied look at the job he had done bandaging her foot. ‘And don’t try to stand. It looks like a nasty sprain. Bit of swelling but I suspect a day or so of painkillers and keeping it off the ground will do the trick.’ He looked at her. She was rain-washed. Her hair was drying in a spiky way but it did nothing to detract from her sexiness.
‘So?’ Never one to dig deep when it came to women’s backstories, he now found that he was burning with curiosity and impatient to continue the conversation.
‘So what? I won’t stand on the foot. At least not right at the moment. And thank you for…you know…bandaging this up. You didn’t have to.’
‘The guy you married. Where is he now?’
‘Oh. Kai.’
‘That his name?’ He was still getting his head round the fact that the woman now resting her bandaged foot on the stool he had brought for her, the woman with the sparkling brown eyes and skin as soft as silk, could have been married…could still be, for that matter.
‘He lives in Honolulu with his new wife, as it happens.’
‘You’re incredibly sanguine about that.’
‘You think I should be bitter?’
‘I think it would be understandable.’ He pulled a chair closer to her and dropped down into it. What did the guy look like? More to the point, what had gone wrong? Curiosity dug deep.
‘I was very young. We both were. We knew each other from school. You could say that we mixed in the same crowd and then, at some point, we became an item. Both of us came from large families and after we left college it just seemed natural for us to…take things to the next level.’
‘You drifted into marriage.’
‘Sounds awful, but we had really high hopes. In fact…’ She paused and sharply looked away. ‘It never occurred to us that it would all fall apart at the seams. That’s how cocky and confident we were. But as it turned out we were way too young and, much as we got along, we’d never shared space together. We did everything as part of a group most of the time. We surfed and went to parties and hung out. We liked each other and we translated that into something else.’
‘And then…?’
‘You don’t have to pretend to be interested in my life, Max,’ she said gently. ‘And you don’t have to feel that you need to hang around here for a bit longer because you’ve been kind enough to bandage my foot.’
‘I seldom do anything because I feel pressured,’ he returned drily. ‘Tell me what happened. I’m interested.’
‘Things went wrong.’ She shrugged. ‘We started arguing. Kai wasn’t cut out for staying in. He still wanted to party all the time. We thought we’d be great but in the end we couldn’t even play house. It all started unravelling and eventually we called it a day.’
‘And yet you seem to have gone past that pretty successfully.’
‘I learnt from it.’ Mia tilted her chin and firmed her mouth. ‘That was years ago, and I made my mind up after that that I would never jump into anything without really testing the waters first. I’d have to be sure that any guy I went out with was the right one.’
Max wanted to laugh. Was there such a thing as ‘the right one’? He very much doubted it. There were the loved-up and oblivious, like his parents. That seldom lasted. The magic wore off and in the blink of an eye someone was getting up to something they shouldn’t with someone else. Too much fairy dust never augured well for the institution of marriage. Boredom had a nasty way of setting in and then where was the fairy dust? On the ground, being swept up by a disillusioned spouse.
Of course, in the case of his parents, the overpowering ‘I only have eyes for you’ love had lasted, but to the detriment of the kids they’d had.
Whichever way you looked at it, handing your emotions over to someone else and asking them to return the favour was never a good idea.
The ‘right one’ didn’t exist.
A life lived logically was a good life, he mused. And if he ever decided to get married, well, a logical union would be just the ticket. Something that made sense. A business proposition, in a manner of speaking.
His eyes met hers and he held her gaze until she blushed and eventually looked away.
That blush said a lot, he thought with lazy satisfaction. He’d noticed it before—the way she slid her eyes away if he looked at her for too long, and the way she focused on him when she figured he wasn’t looking.
A Pandora’s box begging to be opened and he clenched his jaw, trying hard to stifle temptation at its source.
‘You must be hungry,’ he growled. ‘I am.’ He stood up and strolled without his usual grace to the window that gave out onto a dark, rainy and windswept night.
‘I… There’s no need…’
