how we used to love listening to the band concerts and feeding the pigeons in Hyde Park, Suzie? And watching the yacht races on Sydney Harbour at weekends? And how we loved a good joke? And talking about everything under the sun? Music, sports, politics, books, movies, our dreams, our ambitions?”
She unlocked her throat. “Pipe dreams, in your case!” Her heart rate had picked up to a disturbing degree at his reminder of three years ago, and scorn seemed the best way to cover her turmoil. “You were always full of talk about what you were going to do with your life when your brilliant ideas hit the jackpot and you made tons of money, but I don’t see any sign that you’ve become rich and famous in the past three years!”
She raked a disparaging look around. “Nothing’s changed, has it, Mack? When I first met you, you’d just thrown in a perfectly good job and dropped out of university, and you’ve never knuckled down to a proper job since as far as I can see—let alone hit a jackpot!”
No, nothing’s changed, she thought, stifling a sigh. He’s just like my father. All his dreams of becoming rich and famous—in his case with his paintings—had come to nothing, too.
Mack gave a snort. “What was the point in staying at uni? I knew more about computers and programming than my lecturers. And the job I had with that computer firm was leading nowhere. And I have been working since then. Every time I sit down at my computer I’m working.”
“Playing games,” she scoffed.
“Inventing new games,” he corrected. “New programs. New software.”
“That nobody’s interested in!”
She would never have been so harsh or so discouraging three years ago—she would have put his failures down to being ahead of his time and urged him to keep trying—but she was still bitter at the way Mack had killed her trust in him on that last traumatic night, revealing a side of him she’d never seen, and never wanted to see again.
“So little faith!” Mack sighed. He seemed amused rather than devastated, she noted in exasperation. “How you’ve changed, Suzie. You encouraged me once.”
“Until I realized you were just like my father…living on your dreams and never facing reality,” she retorted. Didn’t he even care? “You’re going to end up just like him, with nothing to show for your life.” And look what that had done to her father.
“Is that why you cut me out of your life as if I’d never existed?”
She avoided his eyes. She’d never told him the full extent of her father’s sins. She’d only mentioned his depression, his drinking and the frustrations of a brilliant artist with a tortured soul. Both she and her mother had always tried to cover up her father’s destructive gambling, to protect the self-esteem of the man they’d both loved to the end. Loved, hated and despaired of.
“I was only nineteen,” she defended herself. “I was still a student. I had my career to concentrate on. I—I didn’t want to get involved with—with anyone.”
“Especially not with me.”
“All right—especially not with you! And you were never really in my life, so stop twisting the facts. We were never together. We were just friends.”
“Do you kiss all your friends with the passion you used to kiss me?”
The memory of their passion—the wild, steaming passion that had flared between them every time they’d looked at each other, every time they’d touched, and especially when they’d kissed—brought a remembered heat to her body. She seized on anger to douse it.
“How dare you throw my adolescent mistakes back at me, today of all days! And it was only a few kisses. You make it sound as if it were a grand passion.” Damn it, it was once…to her. It could have been—if he’d been less like her father, if he’d been able to resist the temptations her father had succumbed to. She could still see the elated look in Mack’s eyes the night he’d come home from the casino rolling in money and reeking of whiskey. She blinked the bitter memory away.
Something shimmered in Mack’s dark eyes, but he said nothing, moving to a corner cabinet to extract a half-empty bottle of Scotch and two glasses. Suzie compressed her lips. So he still drank whiskey!
He poured some into both glasses and handed her one. “Here, sip this while I fetch you something to change into. I don’t possess a dressing gown, but I might have a tracksuit that’ll do. You’d better have a hot shower and get out of that wet garb before you get pneumonia.”
He strode from the room before she could argue.
She took a gulp of her whiskey and coughed. She hated whiskey and rarely touched it, remembering what alcohol had done to her father. And Mack could end up the same way, if he kept on drinking. But this, she told herself, was medicinal! She took another more determined gulp, taking comfort from the hot spirit as it coursed a fiery path down her throat.
Mack came back as she was about to take another reviving sip. He hadn’t wasted time changing and was still wearing his wet T-shirt and black leather pants.
“Here. This will have to do.” He handed her a gray tracksuit. “It has a drawstring waist, so you should be able to keep the pants up.”
She had a strange sense of déjà vu. Mack had been wearing a similar gray tracksuit—maybe even this one—the day she’d first met him. Like most things about Mack, their meeting had been dramatic and unconventional.
Her boss had sent her to a house in Mack’s street to deliver a new outfit to a client. She’d borrowed one of the company cars, which she wasn’t familiar with. Worse, it was a manual, not an automatic. As she was about to drive off after making the delivery, she’d reversed the car by mistake and had collided with Mack as he careered out of his front gate on his Harley—far too fast to stop in time, and looking in the opposite direction.
It was only a glancing blow, but Mack had come off his bike and crashed to the pavement. She’d jumped out of the car and rushed to him, her heart in her mouth, horrified to see blood all over his face. It was only a nosebleed, she’d discovered, but at first glance it had looked far worse. She’d insisted on taking him inside his house to tend to his wounds.
He’d been more apologetic than she had, berating himself for not wearing a protective helmet. He’d only been planning to ride up his street and back, he’d told her ruefully, to test some work he’d just done on his bike.
He’d been lucky. Very lucky.
So had she. Her stupid mistake could have killed him!
“Suzie?” Mack’s voice penetrated her musings, and she realized he’d just said something to her.
“Oh, sorry. What did you say?”
“I just said, you know where the bathroom is.” His dark eyes seemed to swallow her up, as if he were remembering their first meeting, too.
He turned away to pick up the glass of whiskey he’d poured for himself, tossing the contents down at a gulp, bringing a frown to her brow as the devil-may-care action reminded her of her father’s reckless drinking.
“I’ll change while you’re showering, Suzie,” he said as he led the way, “and then I’ll make us some coffee.”
She opened her mouth to tell him not to bother about coffee, that she wouldn’t be here long enough, but she snapped her mouth shut again. Where would she go? She couldn’t go home yet—her mother could be home by now, and she didn’t want to face her mother again tonight. She didn’t feel up to fielding questions or dealing with sympathy.
Mack certainly wouldn’t be offering her any sympathy.
He didn’t. His first words, after they’d settled into armchairs in the front room—she noted he’d removed the newspapers and magazines while she was in the shower—were, “What were you thinking of, Suzie, getting mixed up with a pampered pussycat like Tristan Guthrie? The jerk has no conscience