that followed, Maddie supposed that there was a bit of a dare raging to see who grabbed his attention. The fact that he was at least fifteen years older than they were didn’t seem to faze them in the least. It was also galling to realise that they didn’t think her much competition.
This one was a pale redhead with a breathy voice. ‘Sorry to disturb, but would you mind?’ She thrust the book under Cale’s nose.
Maddie sent her a cool look. ‘Excuse me, we’re trying to have a conversation here.’
‘It won’t take a mo,’ Strawberry Cake dismissed her.
Maddie looked at her super-flat stomach and the small medallion that hung off the ring in her belly button. She blinked and looked again. It couldn’t possibly be…
The girl drifted away with another signature and Maddie widened her eyes at Cale. ‘Did you see the picture on the medallion hanging off her belly button ring?’
‘I was too scared of you to do more than quickly scribble my name,’ Cale retorted.
‘Funny man.’ Maddie leaned across the table. ‘It was a very small, very clear picture of a… a sexual position. Very inventive. You’d probably have to be double-jointed to do it…’
Cale mock turned in his seat. ‘I need to see it… Let me call her back!’
Maddie pinched the skin on the back of his hand. Then she sighed heavily. ‘My mother would applaud her upfront attitude to sex, but I think it looks tacky.’
Cale pushed his plate away. ‘Speaking of… how are your parents?’
Maddie leaned back in her chair and rolled her eyes. ‘Still mad as a box of crickets. My mother is working as a guest lecturer in Women’s Studies at Edinburgh University. She’s still got that waste of oxygen with her—Jeffrey. I think you met him.’
‘Mmm.’
‘My father is still a Professor of English Literature, drinking cheap red wine out of pottery bowls while listening to Verdi and bonking as many un-dergrads as he can. And, yes, they still think that I am a massive disappointment as a daughter and an outright academic failure.’
‘And they still have the ability, when I hear that, to make me want to smack them,’ Cale said grimly. ‘How can they think that? You are so successful.’
‘At planning parties? “Darling, any two-bit socialite can do that.”’ Maddie imitated her mother’s crystal-clear diction. ‘“How do I explain to our friends, our colleagues, that our only child obtained a silly degree in Marketing? The shame, the horror!”’ Maddie shuddered theatrically and slumped in her seat. ‘I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m still looking for their love and approval.’
‘It’s a natural response. Habits that are formed in our childhood are the most difficult to break,’ Cale told her, idly toying with her fingers.
Maddie pulled in her breath when his thumb caressed the inside of her wrist.
Cale glanced at Maddie’s frustrated face, thinking he was glad he’d taken the risk to seek her company today. Her prickly attitude and fast mouth amused him. The vulnerability below her tough, business-girl exterior touched him. To throw in a body still slim, tanned and long-limbed was deeply unfair. Cale watched as she threw confused looks at him. Her amber eyes were dark with bewildered distrust, the colour of bold, old whisky.
Since leaving her the other night his mind had frequently drifted in her direction, so he’d done what he always did when a subject engaged his curiosity: he’d looked for more information.
He’d spent the last week reaching out to his extensive network of contacts and found out that she was much respected in her field and solidly stable financially. How could her fruitbat parents not be proud of her? They were, to him, a very clear case of too much education and not enough humanity and common sense.
Cale moved in his chair, unfamiliar with the strange sensation he felt just being in her presence. He eventually identified it as excitement. Excitement. He rolled the word around his head. He hadn’t felt it in a while.
The last two years had been a blur of grief, denial and self-recrimination, and he was still looking for himself… for the Cale he was supposed to be without the person who had shared his life before. Oliver had lived life on a knife-edge and Cale had been sent, he was convinced, to keep him from tumbling over. He had been Oliver’s voice of reason, his compass, his navigation system. While Oliver had been brilliant academically, he’d had the impulse control of a two-year-old.
A two-year-old with the destructive capabilities of a nuclear bomb.
Don’t think about that, Cale told himself. Don’t think about the chaos he created, the hurt he caused… Besides, being Ol’s voice of reason was what he’d done—except when Oliver had been at his most vulnerable and so sick he’d let him down. Cale swallowed, breathing deeply to keep the flickers of panic to a manageable level.
A slender hand slapping his jolted him from his thoughts. ‘What?’
‘You faded away on me—with your eyes on my chest.’
The flickers dissolved with one look at her startling eyes. Relieved, he grinned, probably unwisely, at her pinched face. He couldn’t help it. Prickly or not, it was good just to look at her. He was bemused by how fiercely compelling he found her. The wave of attraction he’d felt back then had morphed into a tsunami of lust. No woman—not even his ex-model ex-girlfriend, Gigi—had roused such thoughts. Candles. Silk sheets. A huge bed with her naked in it.
It had obviously been too long. It wasn’t because he was remembering how addicted he’d been to Maddie, how much he’d craved her. He was over her; he’d been over her the minute he’d realised that she’d disappeared for good a decade ago.
She was a very good-looking woman and he was just a man. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist…
Maddie was staring at his mouth. Damn, he wished she wouldn’t. It gave him ideas, and he needed those ideas like he needed an aneurysm. Naturally even the thought of kissing her had his blood rushing south. Superb, he thought sarcastically, how old was he? Thirty-five or fifteen?
He really had to get himself some action… this was ridiculous.
‘Excuse me?’
Oh, hell. Not another one. He sighed and turned his attention from Maddie’s visibly annoyed face to the blonde bunny looking down at him, with a far too adult promise in those admittedly startling blue eyes.
Maddie’s breath hissed as she swiftly leaned across the table and picked up his plate and coffee cup and handed it to the girl. Not knowing what else to do, the blonde took the crockery and lifted it, puzzled.
‘Thanks. Take this, too.’ Maddie put some bunched-up used serviettes on the plate and waved her away. The blonde, caught off-guard, turned on her heel and dumped the dirty crockery on an empty table.
Maddie ignored Cale’s wide grin, leaned back in her chair and hooked her arm over the back. ‘How is your family? Still boringly normal?’
‘’Fraid so. All of us—parents, Megs, the twins—’
‘Whoah! Back up. You have kids?’
Cale grinned at Maddie’s shocked face. ‘No, you idiot. They are Ollie’s kids.’
More shock. ‘Oliver had twins? He got married?’
Cale nodded. ‘Briefly. The twins were a result of a brief fling and he thought he’d try to do the right thing. He lasted about three months. He tried to settled down with them… but you know Oliver.’
He didn’t need to spell it out. Oliver had had the attention span of a gnat.
‘Did he see the twins? Spend time with them?’
‘He was a great father.’
What