hiding the windows to her soul when she spoke to him. And sometimes she even seemed to struggle to look him directly in the lens. Probably because she knew he might see something there.
Then there was the sadness. Not that she didn’t hide that pretty well. Every day she would smile, crack jokes with her workmates, laugh. But as a connouiseur of her laughter he knew that even that was missing something. It took a lot of careful scrutiny for him to spot the sadness, but it was there. In the unguarded moments when she thought no one was looking or for a split-second before she turned her eyes away.
Something had changed.
When she jumped the day that he crept up behind her in the office he smelt a rat. She was quick to flick the screen of her computer off before she fobbed him off with something about his not having yelled ‘boo’ and how she had been writing a personal e-mail. But that was a lie, Sean knew, because she looked away as she said it and she had been jumpy as all hell for the rest of the day.
It took a lot of investigative work for him to get to the bottom of it. But he got there. Eventually.
And when he did he couldn’t have been more knocked sidewards.
With determined steps he walked across the lawn of the big old country manor that had been turned into luxury apartments. Apartments where he and Maggie lived.
It was a gorgeous summer’s day and a great place for a birthday barbeque for one of their neighbours. But Sean wasn’t thinking about the celebrations. Or the food. Or even the beer clutched in his hand.
He was thinking about Maggie. And her latest brainwave.
‘Fancy meeting you here.’
He grinned, immediately recognising her smile for what it was. A front specifically for his benefit.
‘Yeah, fancy that.’ He took a swig of beer and stood by her side, his feet set slightly apart, claiming the piece of ground he was standing on while he looked at the small crowd and glanced occasionally at Maggie from the corner of his eye. ‘Don seems to be having a good time.’ Maggie looked over at their neighbour. ‘Yeah, he does.’ With a safe topic to discuss she immediately slipped into the easy role that until a few months ago had been so natural to her, leaning a little closer to Sean and nudging her shoulder against his upper arm. ‘You see the way he keeps looking at Rachel?’ Sean leaned his head a little closer to hers and dropped his voice conspiratorially. ‘She keeps looking at him too, when she thinks he can’t see her.’ The subject of the octogenarian love affair was one they frequently talked about. Maggie smiled and tilted her head to look up into dark eyes, her voice low. ‘You think they’ll ever get it together? Or is that still too much of a stretch for you into the realms of believing good things can happen?’ Sean’s eyes locked with hers and he stared at her for a long moment. ‘I’m learning to stretch some. So, maybe it might happen yet. They’ve been friends a long time though.’ ‘Yes, they have, but you only have to see the way they are together to know there’s more there.’ He blinked slowly and smiled.
Maggie searched his eyes, looking from one to the other. She tilted her head to the other side and searched again, then an eyebrow quirked and she asked, ‘What?’
The smile remained. ‘What?’
She stared back at him. ‘You have a look.’
‘Do I?’ He continued smiling his usual self-assured smile, his eyes giving nothing away.
It bugged the hell out of Maggie that he had the ability to do that and that he still felt the need to do it around her. He was just so controlled sometimes that she wanted to smack him silly. He held everything inside, guarded from the world so that in the brief instances he did open up it made it all the more of a gift to whoever was allowed in. But he still didn’t completely trust her, did he?
The fact that she’d had to hold back so much from him of late made the realisation almost hurtful. She hated that a relationship that had come to mean so much to her had got to this point.
He searched her eyes in a similar way to how she’d just searched his. ‘What?’
She mimicked his answer. ‘What?’
‘That mind of yours works in mysterious ways.’
‘At least I have a mind.’
‘Meaning I don’t?’
She only had to search for the briefest of seconds to find the spark in his eyes. ‘Not you, but possibly some of those other women you keep company with…’
‘At least they have brains enough to see what an amazingly sexy, damned good-looking, generally all-round great guy I am.’
What would usually have been taken as one of their usual ‘sparring type’ answers was imparted with a somewhat huskier tone of voice than Maggie was used to hearing from him. But as she searched his eyes again he turned his head and looked back over the crowd, raising his bottle to his mouth.
Maggie’s eyes automatically followed the bottle, watched as his mouth fitted around the lip, saw his throat contract as he swallowed. She hated that she noticed but she did.
‘I already know what a great guy you are.’ The words were spoken with sincerity, even though she didn’t have to point out that she hadn’t agreed with the other descriptions of his ‘assets’.
‘Do you, now?’ He studied the last of the liquid in the bottle, swirling it around against tinted glass.
Maggie felt her heart miss a beat at his question. He had an uncertainty in him she’d never seen before. Sean was just always so confident on the outside. Everything he did, the way he held himself, it all spoke of a complete lack of self-consciousness. Until now. What had her sister said to him during the long conversation they’d been having on the far side of the lawn?
‘OK, what’s going on?’
He didn’t look at her. ‘You’re the one who seems to think that any woman interested in me might not have a brain in their head.’
Maggie frowned. ‘I was kidding.’
‘Were you?’ He glanced at her, then away again.
The question astounded her. For crying out loud she had even introduced him to a couple of the women he had dated way back at the start. That was, until she’d learned better than to get involved in all that would inevitably follow. Now she guarded her single friends with the ferocity of a lioness guarding innocent cubs.
But those earlier women most certainly had not been brainless. They had been smart, successful, pretty women. Like anyone he had been even remotely interested in. So what was with the sudden concern? It wasn’t as if he’d even done that much dating of late. She’d noticed that.
The thought then crossed her mind that maybe he had met someone he had more than a passing interest in. She’d certainly been less aware of him being with anyone new but that didn’t mean there wasn’t somebody. Maybe he was serious about someone and having those feelings was making him insecure. Wasn’t that what happened with something that important?
The idea made her stomach churn ridiculously and she had to take a deep breath when she looked away from his profile. God only knew she wanted him to be happy, to learn about real love and to have all the things he hadn’t quite completely
