horrified her almost as much as it fascinated her. How would it be to spend your life bumming around skate parks? Or the beach? No responsibilities. No worries. No patients to see. No lives to be responsible for. No beepers. No mobile phones.
Looking at him made her…restless. A feeling that something was seriously missing from her life reared its ugly head and was magnified by the stranger’s utter joy in the adrenaline-charged thrill.
He appeared to be with a little boy who looked about six or seven. His son? There were definite similarities between the two. The boy looked at him with total admiration and the man ruffled his hair as he helped him on his skateboard. He stood back as the boy performed a trick and clapped loudly as he successfully completed it. At least he’s wearing a helmet. The man lifted the boy up on his shoulders and spun him around. The little boy held on and laughed, his head thrown back, the sunshine accentuating his exhilaration.
Madeline felt a weird pull low down in her gut. The man had dimples. He was gorgeous! Pure male. One hundred per cent testosterone. She felt her body responding to his magnetism. The boy obviously loved him and strangely enough that made him even more attractive.
Oh, God! She must be tired. Since when had macho hemen been her type? Spoken for he-men at that? She glanced back at the roadworks, suddenly desperate to get away from this inexplicable transient attraction, but the red stop sign was still stubbornly facing her way. She glanced back at skater boy and found herself wondering what it would be like to be with a man like him.
Despite the unemployed look, there was a presence about him that reached across the fifty-odd metres that separated them. He looked like he knew what he was doing. What he wanted and where he was going. He looked dominant and in command. He laughed again as he jumped back on his board and she recognised something else about him. He looked like he knew how to have fun. To laugh at the world and himself. He looked like he knew how to kiss. How to please. How to pleasure.
She shivered and reached forward to turn the air-con down. Kiss? Pleasure? Where had that come from? OK, it had been a while. It had been seven weeks since she and her fiancé had split up, and several months more since they’d last been intimate. But hell, that had never really been the focus of their relationship anyway and re-establishing the practice had taken up all her time and energy over the last two years. She hadn’t had time for carnal thoughts.
Neither of them had. They’d barely seen each other for months, with her work and his long shifts at the hospital and studying for his exams. Him calling the engagement off in the middle of it all had been just one more thing on her plate. She’d been confused when he’d said he needed time apart. How much more apart did he want? But she doubted it would be permanent—a decade of history was hard to walk away from for ever.
Skater boy laughed again and oozed sex appeal all over the park. It brought her temporarily out-of-order relationship with Simon into sharp contrast. Frankly, she couldn’t remember the last time, if ever, just looking at Simon had made her think sexual thoughts.
She shook her head. Jet lag—that was it. It was responsible for these uncharacteristic thoughts. Sex and sexual urges had never ruled her life. She’d been thrown one too many curve balls to be a free-loving kind of girl. For goodness’ sake! She was a thirty-year-old doctor, she’d seen more naked men in her life than she’d had hot dinners—why should looking at barely dressed skater boy have an effect? Why did his chest and his thighs and his laugh make her want things she’d never wanted before?
A car horn blasted behind her and she looked back to the road to see the sign had been turned to the yellow ‘slow’ side and she accelerated away quickly, grateful for the respite from her jumbled jet-lagged thoughts. She caught a glimpse of the man again in her rear-view mirror and felt the feeling of discontent he had stirred intensify. Damn him. Her life was just fine.
Just. Fine.
Madeline pulled up outside work a few hours later. She’d unpacked. She’d had a shower. She felt slightly revived. But the fog of fatigue still clung to her and she’d known she’d had to get out of the house before she’d succumbed to her bed and the seductive lure of sleep.
It was way too early to go to bed despite her exhaustion. If she went now she’d be awake at three in the morning with no hope of going back to sleep. So a quick catch-up trip into work late on a quiet Saturday afternoon was the perfect diversion.
She noticed the next-door shop, which had been empty when she’d left, was in the process of a fit-out. A painter was admiring his handiwork, putting the finishing touches to the signage on the glass sliding door.
‘Dr Marcus Hunt,’ it read. ‘Natural Therapist.’
Madeline stared at it for a few moments, repeating it over and over in her head until her sluggish brain computed the full implications. She felt the slow burn of rising anger.
‘Over my dead body!’
There was nothing quite like anger to wake you up. She felt it white and hot and burning in her gut. She felt more than awake, she felt alive again. The fog cleared from her brain and the weariness that was deep within her bones dissipated in an instant.
How many patients had she ‘fixed up’ after they’d seen alternative medicine characters? People who had let their conditions and diseases run out of control while some charlatan had used voodoo or a spell book and given them false hope? And then there was Abby.
She’d see about this! She brushed abruptly past the painter, slid back the door and entered the room. She blinked, removing her sunglasses as her eyes adjusted to the dim light in stark contrast to the glare of a summer’s afternoon in the Sunshine State. The chemical smell of paint assaulted her nostrils as she quickly scanned the room littered with boxes and painters trestles.
‘I’m sorry, we’re not open for business until next week.’ A deep, masculine voice drifted towards her from somewhere beyond the clutter of the immediate surroundings.
It resonated around the room and Madeline felt goose-bumps break out on her arms despite the stuffiness of the room. His voice made her think of the guy at the skate park and she gave herself a mental shake.
The man entered from a doorway to the right and leant lazily against the jamb, filling the space easily. She almost did a double-take as skater boy smiled at her and Madeline was pinned to the spot by his laughing blue eyes and boyish dimples.
He was dressed this time. Well, more dressed anyway. He wore a white long-sleeved shirt, completely unbuttoned, revealing that perfectly muscled abdomen. The impulse to touch him, run her fingers down the dark trail of chest hair and watch his abdominal muscles twitch beneath her nails was shocking.
His face was rugged, with a square jaw covered in light stubble. His dimples should have looked ridiculous on anyone older than five but they didn’t. They added to the alluring mix of pure man, giving him a shot of angelic boy.
In his right hand he held a well-used paintbrush and she thought absently that she’d been wrong about his employment status. He did have a job. A painter, or decorator, or something similar. He had some flecks of paint in his hair and the desire to touch them was compelling.
She couldn’t help but compare him to Simon. Physically they weren’t too dissimilar. Her ex-fiancé was a little shorter, a little less bulky, a little paler and his chest hair a little sparser. But there was something intangible about this man, something quite magnetic that frankly Simon just didn’t have.
Simon’s face was pleasant to look at, with a ready smile that put you at ease and oozed nice. Skater
