right. I’m thinking too much, when action is what I prefer. I checked on Mum a few minutes ago, across the corridor, and she’s asleep as well. Otherwise I’d take you across, so she could thank you. I mean,’ he revised, ‘she’s not talking yet, but she was squeezing my hand earlier.’
‘That’s good.’
‘She’s looking a lot better than she did at first. Look, have you eaten? Would you like to grab something? What is it?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Just after six? We could...catch up, or something.’
Dear Lord, what was that odd little thread in his voice? he wondered. Was it shaking?
‘Uh, well, I was about to head home,’ Hayley answered him reluctantly.
She saw the disappointment in his face at once, and guessed its source. He was restless, anguished. He didn’t want to eat with just the company of his own tortured thoughts tonight.
‘But I could hold off on that,’ she added quickly. ‘Just for an hour or so. My son’s with my mother.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he answered. ‘No, please, keep to your plans.’
‘Look, I’ll phone her, OK? Max is probably fine to stay a bit longer. He’s very comfortable at Mum’s, and she was going to feed us anyway. I’m not rostered tomorrow, and I’m taking him to his first preschool session. He and I get to see plenty of each other.’
‘Tori’s starting preschool, too. Supposed to be,’ he revised in a bleak tone. ‘Is your son going to Arden North?’
‘Yes, it’s just around the corner from us.’
‘And it’s halfway between my place and the hospital. I live at—Well, you know where I live.’
‘It’s a beautiful house,’ she offered. ‘So dramatic and cleverly designed. You must have enjoyed getting it right, and once you’ve got the garden going...’
Byron shook his head. ‘It’s not beautiful to me at the moment. Stupid to blame the house for what happened!’
‘Pizza?’ she suggested, to change the subject. He looked as if he wanted to veer away from it—like a racing driver taking a tight turn.
‘Sounds good.’ It was automatic, and Hayley guessed that he didn’t care what they ate.
‘I’ll ring Mum and Max from my mobile when we get outside,’ she said. ‘Want to take my car?’
‘Whatever...’
She suspected he might have more male ego at stake on the issue normally, but tonight he either didn’t care or he realised, as she did, that he was too preoccupied to be safe at the wheel. The latter, probably. She somehow had the impression he’d become a man who kept pretty close tabs on his own emotions.
‘Something’s come up,’ she said to her mother on the phone. ‘Could you handle it if I’m not there till about seven-thirty or so?’
‘We’re fine. Not a problem, I hope?’
‘I’ll tell you later.’
It was almost comical to watch Byron folding himself into her small car. Chris always refused to drive with her at all. ‘That thing? I’d rather walk! Come on, look at me! Do you think I’d fit? We’ll take my car.’
Byron was tactful enough not to comment on the dimensions of the car. Perhaps he didn’t care tonight. He had his knees tipped sideways and pressed hard against the door, and a painfully tight frown on his face.
Hayley didn’t try to talk to him as they drove. He probably wanted to make this quick, and he might well end up regretting that he’d asked her. She’d seen enough of the way people behaved in a crisis to know that moods could swing back and forth like the boom of a runaway yacht in a storm.
There were two pizza restaurants in Arden, and she picked the closest, able to park directly in front of it because it was early and a weeknight.
‘Whatever you like’ was his preference in toppings.
Helpful! But she didn’t want to push, didn’t want to waste time and energy over something that trivial. Suddenly remembered the pizza nights they’d had after swim meets and confidently told the man behind the counter, ‘Large ham and pineapple, please.’
‘Take-away?’
‘No, to eat here, thanks.’ There! Easily dealt with!
There were four tables at the back. Plastic tablecloths. Postcard-style prints of Sicily on the cheaply panelled walls. Red vinyl tiles on the floor. The place wasn’t glamorous.
And it could have been the bottom of a stairwell full of garbage cans for all Byron cared, Hayley realised.
She was swept with a churning wave of tenderness for him. Perhaps it was the kind of thing you could only feel for the man who used to be the boy who’d given you your first real kiss. They’d never had a falling-out. Life had just swept them off in different directions. Heaps of the girls at swim club had had crushes on him, but he’d been too focused on his goals to even know it, and too honorable to have taken advantage of those silly female hormones if he had.
And now he’d grown up. He was a man in every sense of the word. Thirty-four years old, successful in his profession, with a physique that had more than adequately filled its adolescent promise. He had known a man’s joys, and the unique grief of losing a spouse which didn’t touch most people until they were well into old age.
Without thinking about how he might interpret the gesture, she stretched her arm across the table and covered the back of his hand with her palm and fingers, chafing his warm, smooth skin gently.
‘She must be an amazing little girl, Byron,’ she said. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting her properly at preschool. Maybe Max will have met his match at last.’
‘I’ll believe that when I see it!’
He laughed and gave his hand a half-turn so that his fingers met Hayley’s and actively returned her touch. He squeezed her fingers, then stroked the ball of his thumb back and forth over her knuckles. It was slow and hypnotic. Shouldn’t have been erotic as well, but it was, and suddenly Hayley remembered in exact and vivid detail just how good that kiss of theirs had been, sixteen years ago.
Slow, questing, exploratory. Not a prelude to a more intimate goal, but the goal itself. Just to kiss. Just to hold each other. Just to melt inside. She had mussed up his hair. Those short, dark strands weren’t spiky at all, but soft and slippery and clean.
He had slipped his hand beneath the hem of her top and the waistband of her jeans to touch her skin. It must have taken him half an hour to reach her breast. He’d caressed the neat, firm swell the way he was caressing her fingers now, slowly and without demands.
‘It’s good to see you again, Hayley,’ he said at last. It sounded as if he meant it, but it was clearly an effort all the same.
‘Mmm, it was a good time in our lives, wasn’t it?’ she answered. ‘Those years in swim club? We had fun.’
‘Do you still see
