close to places she did not want to go, so she called to Henry and started walking towards the park.
‘There’s a dog-walker who walks Henry and other dogs in this area every weekday,’ she told Alex, pleased they had the dogs to talk about. ‘Mayarma, her name is. If Minnie stays inside while you’re at work, you’d have to leave a key. She collects Henry and his lead from my dad, but other dogs she picks up straight from the yard. Are you interested?’
‘Very,’ Alex told her. ‘If someone could walk Minnie during the week, I wouldn’t feel guilty about not walking her at weekends, and as perfect strangers react to seeing me walking her as you did—with hysterical laughter—I’d as soon skip the park sessions. At least with you beside me, people might assume she’s yours and we’ve just swapped leads.’
Annie listened to the grumble but guessed he was far too self-assured to care what other people thought about his dog. But the conversation did raise a question.
‘If you’re embarrassed walking a wig on legs, why buy a spoodle?’ she asked.
‘Buy a spoodle? Do you seriously think a man my height would buy a dog this size? That I wouldn’t have considered the aesthetics of the situation?’
‘A girlfriend’s dog?’ Annie guessed, although the idea of a girlfriend brought a stab of jealousy in its train.
‘My sister’s idea of an ideal companion for me,’ Alex told her, gloom deepening his voice. ‘My sister has despaired of me ever having a long-term relationship with a woman, so when she was visiting me in Melbourne a month or so ago she bought me the most curly, frilly, impossible sort of dog she could find. To keep me in touch with my feminine side, would you believe?’
Annie was laughing so hard she had to stop walking, although Henry, determined to stay close to his new friend, was dragging on his lead.
‘She is all woman,’ she conceded. ‘That’s if dogs can be classed that way. Look at how she’s vamping Henry.’
They were entering the park, and as dogs were allowed off their leads in this part of it, she bent to unclip Henry’s.
‘Will she come when you call?’
Alex looked at his small responsibility.
‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘She’s been to puppy school, but seemed to think it was a place she went to flirt and play with other dogs. How seriously she took the lessons I don’t know, because sometimes she’ll obey all the commands she knows, but at others she’s totally deaf.’
‘Maybe Henry will teach her some sense,’ Annie suggested, although the way he was behaving made her wonder.
But Alex unclipped Minnie’s lead anyway, and the two dogs, so absurd together, gambolled across the grass, Henry using his huge paws with gentle insistence to guide the smaller dog around the trees and bushes.
‘I usually sit over there,’ Annie said, pointing to a comfortable seat beneath a shady tree. Since meeting Minnie and laughing at Alex’s story of her advent into his life, she’d relaxed. He’d made no move that could be indicative that she was anything other than a colleague, so she could put the kiss down to him wanting to prove something to himself.
Or to both of them.
And from now on, colleagues were all they’d be, so when he said things like ‘walk home together’ and she felt prickles of excitement, or when he put his hand on her back to guide her into a lift and she felt tremors of attraction, she had to pretend it hadn’t happened, and act like the efficient, dedicated, focussed unit manager he wanted her to be.
It’s what you want to be as well, she reminded herself.
Alex could feel the woman’s presence on the bench beside him—feel it like a magnet drawing him towards her. But he didn’t move.
He thought instead about the conversation they’d had earlier—about one snippet of it. About her needing a dog that was big and fierce.
Because she was a woman living alone?
But she wasn’t—her father lived with her.
He remembered the bruised shadows under her eyes, the vulnerability he’d sensed in her five years ago. He thought about her change of name, and anger coiled like a waking serpent in his gut.
No, he was letting his imagination run away with him. There could be any number of reasons for a woman to change her name. Marriage was the obvious one. Attractive woman—she could easily have been separated and married and separated again in five years.
He glanced towards her, doubting that scenario. It didn’t fit with the sensible woman he was coming to know—a sensible woman now smiling at the antics of the dogs, then laughing as Henry toppled Minnie with his paw, then rolled around on the grass so the little dog could climb all over him.
Once again Alex heard the joy and light-heartedness in the sound and saw a glimpse of the warm and vibrant woman inside her efficient, work-focussed fac¸ade. But she’d laughed earlier, when he’d told her about Minnie coming into his life, then she’d shut that woman away and become a colleague again, as if that was all she wanted to be to him.
Yet last night, when he’d kissed her, there’d been more. He was sure of that. As sure of it as he was that she was his ghost.
As sure of it as he was that he wanted to know more of Annie Talbot.
As sure of it as he was that he wanted to kiss her again.
‘Are you doing anything tonight? Hot date?’
His thoughts must have prompted his subconscious to ask the question because it was out before he’d had time to think it through. Or consider how Annie might react to it.
She turned towards him, and studied his face for a moment, a slight frown replacing the smile in her lovely eyes.
‘Why do you ask?’
He shrugged—tried to make less of the question than there was.
‘I thought as we’re shopping, I might get the ingredients for a curry. I do a mean curry but it’s hardly worth making it for one person and, knowing Phil, he won’t be home on a Saturday night.’
‘You’re asking me to have dinner with you tonight?’
She spoke the words carefully, as if she needed to make sure there was no misunderstanding.
He answered just as carefully.
‘Yes.’
A long silence, until Alex realised he was holding his breath. He let it out as silently as he could—a sigh might have made him sound impatient.
‘I don’t date,’ she said at last, which wasn’t an answer but was ambiguous enough to give him hope.
‘It needn’t be a date,’ he told her. ‘Just a couple of colleagues sharing a meal.’
She studied his face again, as if trying to read his thoughts behind the words, and her frown deepened.
Then
