pooled in her cheeks. He hadn’t needed to try very hard. She’d been a young, naive idiot to think there could’ve been anything between them—anything serious, anything that would stand the test of time.
‘Come on, Meg. You’re being silly.’ Suzie cast a long look in his direction.
Meg could see the admiration in Suzie’s eyes. Almost a mirror of what she must have looked like years ago. She slapped Suzie on the arm. ‘With a look like that he’ll come over!’ If he did she’d just die. How could she look at him after all that had happened between them? Guilt assailed her. For the running, for the hiding, and for the secret that hung heavily in the base of her stomach.
Suzie frowned. ‘That’s the point. You’ve got to get a guy in your life. There’s more to life than work. I could go over and get him to—’
Meg’s hand flew out and grabbed Suzie’s wrist. ‘Don’t you dare!’ The look of shock on her friend’s face snapped her back to reality. ‘I’m sorry.’ She tried to slow her breathing. ‘I know him, okay, and it didn’t work out.’ That was an understatement!
Suzie recovered quickly. ‘Can I go over, then, and have a go at him?’ She pulled her long auburn hair over her shoulders, arranging it over her chest to look as though she had just fallen out of a fashion magazine. ‘Could you introduce me? What’s his name?’
‘No, you can’t go over.’ A wave of unfamiliar emotion swept over her. She froze. She couldn’t still feel for him? After all the pain he’d caused her? After all this time?
Meg gritted her teeth. She was annoyed at her idiocy. It was over, she proclaimed to herself—as she’d done many times before. So Suzie was welcome to him. As long as she didn’t bring him anywhere near her.
‘Jake.’ His name slipped from her lips. A name she’d scrawled over her textbooks, over her heart. Etched in, refusing to budge no matter how much she had tried to rid his memory from her life. ‘His name is Jacob.’
Jacob. The young boy next door who had intruded constantly on her time with her father. Her father’s dust-covered four-wheel drive would pull up in the driveway and Jake would be over the fence and next to Dad in a flash. She’d hated him at first—stealing her father’s attention, listening to her dad’s exploits in New Guinea, in Saudi Arabia and in the Australian outback with more enthusiasm and gusto than she could manage. He would gasp about the monstrous earth-moving equipment Dad had worked around and brag how he would do the same when he grew up. Her dad had loved the attention.
The gangly boy next door had hung around for years, idolising her father whenever he deemed to make an appearance in her life. And slowly her anger at this boy had turned to a puppy love that grew into a giant infatuation scored into her heart. Even when Jake had followed in her father’s footsteps, becoming another strong, macho construction supervisor, her feelings hadn’t changed.
She raised the menu again to hide the rush of emotion, the sorrow, and the grief. The pain was still raw, as if a half-healed wound had been gouged anew by his presence. She should have known better than to trust him in the first place. She should have stuck with hating him—she would have been safe then.
Meg held her breath as she heard the heavy footfalls come closer, felt the rush of air across her bare arm as someone passed by. She could hear him stop, could feel him close. Her throat ached at the irony of meeting Jake here, out of the blue and without warning. What was she going to say to him?
She felt his hand on the menu, tugging it. She held firm.
‘Signorina, please,’ said a deep-accented baritone. ‘You eat your minestrone now. I have your order. I take the menu.’
Meg’s relief was palpable. She loosened her grip on the menu and it was swept from her hands. Her eyes followed the departing shield as the waiter proceeded to the next table. She wasn’t ready for Jake to see her—to come over, to talk to her after years of emptiness.
Her eyes leapt to the neatly arranged table. The cutlery wasn’t going to be useful, neither was the vase of flowers, and her soup bowl was out of the question—steaming hot and aromatic.
‘Hello, Meg.’
She froze. His voice was unmistakable, low and smooth, awakening her body to long-suppressed reactions. Jake. Her Jake. Her heart skipped a beat. She’d thought she’d never hear that voice again. She wasn’t sure whether to cry or scream. She looked up.
His eyes bored into hers. Green eyes that tore at her heart. She had the perverse urge to leap into his strong arms and hold him.
Jake stood tall in front of her table, looking tough, his muscles rippling under his cream designer shirt. The years had been kind to him. His features had matured from the smooth and boyish she’d known to the ‘seasoned by the world’, devilishly handsome face that was now right in front of her.
She sat frozen in her seat. There was too much between them for her to embrace him, too much even to move. He was part of the past and there was no way she’d let him or any other man into her heart again just to break it.
Jake pulled a chair to the table. ‘May I?’ He carried himself with a new, commanding air of authority. ‘You’re looking well, Meg.’
She nodded, afraid her voice would betray her if she used it. The scent of his aftershave tormented her with memories of their times together, and hearing her name on his lips was a torture she’d thought she’d never have to endure again.
He turned to Suzie. ‘Jacob Adams. I’m Meg’s—’
‘Friend.’ Meg found her voice. ‘An old friend.’ She gave him a hostile glare. How dared he think he could walk in here and take over? Tell the whole world who he was and what she was to him?
‘You don’t look that old to me.’ Suzie leant her elbows onto the table and rested her chin on her hands. Her friend’s hazel eyes glinted and her cherry lips were conspicuously seductive.
Meg squirmed. Suzie was going all out. She had no idea that this guy had no concept of commitment. She knew it only too well—she’d learnt it the hard way.
‘I’m old enough.’ Jake held Suzie’s look a moment longer than was necessary. He turned to Meg. ‘I hear you’re quite a success. I never knew you were going into fashion.’
It was strange to hear him talk so calmly, so familiarly to her, as if there hadn’t been an altercation between them at all. She forced her lips to move. ‘There was a lot you didn’t know about me.’
‘You didn’t give me a chance.’
‘It wasn’t like you were planning to stick around to find out anything.’ The day she’d found that oneway plane ticket to Delhi had clinched it. It wasn’t going to work if he was going to disappear on her again and again, just like her father had.
‘You didn’t know that.’
‘Yes, I did. I knew a lot more than you gave me credit for.’
His eyes darkened. ‘I couldn’t just walk away from work.’
‘You could walk away from me,’ she bit out, glaring at him. ‘But then I wasn’t very high on your list of priorities, was I?’
‘You
