‘You walk away. I leave. I find someone else.’
He might at least sound as if he cared one way or another, thought Lizzy with something suspiciously close to petulance. She looked away from him, edgily running a finger around the base of her glass.
She had always prided herself on her refusal to fit the mould. As a young girl she had grumbled endlessly about the old-fashioned attitudes of her parents and their friends. The district might cover vast distances but it had a distinctly small town mentality.
Lizzy hadn’t been able to wait to leave home for the city. She thought of herself as cosmopolitan, and whenever she came home she made a point of looking as stylish as possible. Her transformation into city girl was treated as something of a standing joke in the community, and Lizzy played up to it. She knew that the teasing was affectionate, and she liked the fact that they thought of her as unconventional.
You’d be saying you didn’t care what anyone thought. Tye had issued a challenge, and she longed to take it up, but deep down Lizzy knew that she did care. These people were her family and friends. She might not choose to live in the outback, but that didn’t mean she wanted to shock or offend them unnecessarily. When it came down to it, Lizzy just wanted everyone to like her.
There would be uproar if she kissed Tye Gibson, and in spite of her assertion of confidence Lizzy quailed inwardly at the thought.
‘I can hardly fling myself into your arms in the middle of my sister’s wedding,’ she prevaricated, unaware that her thoughts were written clearly in her expressive face. ‘It would cause a scene. While it might prove your point, I’m not prepared to do anything to spoil her day. It wouldn’t be fair.’
Tye looked faintly bored by her dithering. ‘I wasn’t thinking of a passionate clinch,’ he said with a sardonic look. ‘I know you’re much too nice a girl to go in for anything like that!’
‘Oh.’
Lizzy wasn’t sure she liked the way he’d said that word ‘nice’. It wasn’t that she wanted to kiss him—God forbid!—but she didn’t want to be the kind of girl who didn’t dare either. She stood feeling foolish, unable to decide whether she was relieved or offended at Tye’s lack of interest in being kissed by her.
‘What were you thinking of?’ she asked him uncertainly.
‘More along the lines of a peck on the cheek,’ said Tye, lifting his brows in a way that made Lizzy feel ridiculous for having thought that he could possibly mean anything else. ‘A quick kiss to say goodbye, that’s all.’
‘Oh,’ said Lizzy again.
She bit her lip. Between the crowds, she caught a glimpse of her parents, greeting friends on the other side of the woolshed. They wouldn’t like her kissing Tye at all, and nor would anyone else.
Perhaps no one would notice. It would be dark by then and the party would be well away. Everyone would be too busy enjoying themselves to wonder what she was doing with Tye Gibson, and anyway, it would only take a second.
And it would be worth it. A very special role, wasn’t that what Tye had called it? Quite apart from what it would do for her CV, an important job with a company like GCS was bound to be lucrative, Lizzy calculated.
It was all very well not wanting to upset anybody, but the hard fact was that she needed the money. Since Stephen had moved out she had had all the bills to pay, and Ellie’s wedding had proved expensive, too, what with flying backwards and forwards between Perth and Mathison, buying presents and searching out the perfect bridesmaid’s dress.
Not to mention the shoes.
Lizzy contemplated the champagne in her glass with an inward grimace at the thought of her credit card bill. Face it, her only other choice was to get a bar job of some kind to tide her over. It wasn’t that she hadn’t done it before, but it certainly wasn’t what she had planned to be doing at thirty-three, and the prospect was humiliating when she thought about how she had boasted about her grand new career.
She could ask her parents for help, but it wouldn’t be fair right now when they had all the expense of Ellie’s wedding to cope with. No, Lizzy decided, she wouldn’t go to them. It was her own fault that she had given up a perfectly good job, and it was up to her to find a way out of her financial problems.
She could settle for a bar job.
Or she could kiss Tye Gibson.
A choice between scraping together enough money to pay the bills and seizing the opportunity of an important job with a prestigious organisation that could relaunch her career. Why was she even hesitating? Lizzy wondered.
Tye had been watching the conflicting emotions flitting across her face, but now he looked ostentatiously at his watch and put down his glass. ‘I might as well go,’ he said.
‘What, now?’ Lizzy regarded him with dismay. She had thought that she would have the rest of the evening to build up courage.
‘No point in hanging around,’ said Tye. ‘I’ve done what I came to do. I thought it would be interesting to see if things had changed round here, but obviously they haven’t.’ The grey eyes gleamed with mockery as he looked at Lizzy. ‘Shall I see myself out, or are you coming?’
How hard could it be? It was ridiculous to make such a fuss about a tiny kiss. All she had to do was walk across the woolshed with him, say goodbye and press her cheek to his.
Piece of cake.
Lizzy put down her glass. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said.
Something flickered in Tye’s eyes, and was gone. ‘Good,’ was all he said.
Turning, he headed across the middle of the woolshed floor to the wide wooden doors that stood open to the night. No creeping round the edges for Tye Gibson, thought Lizzy with a mixture of exasperation and admiration as she hurried to keep up with him. He went straight for what he wanted, and to hell with anyone who got in his way.
He walked with the long, deliberate stride of a man used to walking alone, appearing not to notice the almost tangible hostility of the crowd, or the way it parted uneasily before his ruthless self-assurance. Struggling to keep up with him in her frivolous shoes, Lizzy was very conscious of the eyes following her. So much for not being noticed. They might as well have had a brass band and ticker tape.
A murmuring rose behind them as the guests closed back into their groups, but she didn’t hear. Tye had paused at the doors and was waiting for her to catch up. Lizzy told herself that her sudden breathlessness was due to hurrying on unsteady heels, and nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that any moment now she was going to kiss him.
Outside, it was already dark. Two more steps would have taken them into the shadows, but he had stopped deliberately in the doorway so that they were framed against the darkness in the brightness of the light that shone directly above their heads. It was like being on stage.
‘I’ll say goodbye,’ said Tye, and held out his hand. His face was quite straight, but the startlingly light eyes glinted with a mocking challenge.
He thought that she would lose her nerve, Lizzy realised, and it was enough to bring her chin up. This was her chance to prove herself.
She took his outstretched hand. ‘Goodbye,’ she said, surprised at how steady her voice sounded.
The press of his palm was cool and firm, and as his fingers closed around hers she felt something uncurl alarmingly inside her, but she made herself look directly into his eyes, her own very blue and sparkling with defiance.
‘It was nice to meet you,’ she went on deliberately, and without releasing her grip she brought her other hand up to rest against his chest.
She could feel the power of his body through his jacket. It seemed to reverberate through her palm, tingling along her arm and deep into the core of her being, and she had a sudden, vivid sense that time had slowed while her senses simultaneously speeded up. She was acutely aware of the texture of the material