beautiful, talented, ridiculously lovely visitor who looked as though she had just stepped out from a cover shoot for a fashion magazine.
She was sunlight in his darkness—just the same as she had always been, and seeing her again like this reinforced just how much he had missed her and never had the courage to admit it.
Amber looked at him with the faintest of polite smiles and slipped her sunglasses higher onto her nose with one fingertip.
‘This place has not changed one bit,’ she whispered in a voice what was as soft and musical and gentle and lovely as he had remembered. A voice which still had the power to make his blood sing.
Then she glanced across at the car. ‘You even have the same sports car. That’s amazing.’
Sam had often wondered how Amber would turn out. Not that he could avoid seeing her name. Her face was plastered on billboards and the sides of buses from California to London. But that was not the real Amber. He knew that only too well from working in the media business.
No. This was the real Amber. This beautiful girl who was running the manicured fingertips of her left hand along the leather seat of the sports car he had just polished.
Maybe she had decided to forgive him for the way they had parted.
‘My dad kept it.’ He shrugged. ‘One of a kind.’
Amber paused and she sighed. ‘The last time I saw this car was the night of my eighteenth birthday party and you were sitting in the front seat with your tongue down the throat of my so called friend Petra. About twenty minutes after you had declared your undying love for me.’
She gave a strangled chuckle. ‘Oh, yes, I remember this car very well indeed. Shame that the driver was not quite as classy.’
Or maybe she hadn’t.
Sam pushed his hand down firmly on the workbench behind him.
So. Here we go. In her eyes he was still the chauffeur’s son who had dared to date the rich client’s daughter. And then kissed her best friend.
Goodbye editor’s desk.
Time to start work and turn on the charm before she chopped him into small pieces and barbecued him on the car’s exhaust pipe.
‘Hello, Amber. How very nice to see you again.’ He smiled and stepped forward to kiss her on the cheek but, before he got there, Amber flipped up her sunglasses onto the top of her head and looked at him with those famous violet-blue eyes which cut straight through any delusion that this was a social call.
Her eyes might have sold millions of tubes of eye make-up, but close up, with the light behind her, the iridescent violet-blue he remembered was mixed with every shade from cobalt to navy. And, just for him today...blue ice.
The contrast between the violet of her eyes and her straight blonde hair which fell perfectly onto her shoulders only seemed to highlight the intensity of her gaze. The cosmetic company might have chosen her for her peaches and cream ultra-clear complexion, but it had always been those magical blue eyes that Sam found totally irresistible. Throw in a pair of perfect sweet soft pink lips and he had been done for from the first time he had seen her stepping out of his dad’s limo with her diva mother screaming out orders from behind her back.
She didn’t seem to know what to do with her long legs, her head was down and she peered at him through a curtain of long blonde hair before brushing it away and blasting his world with one look.
Now she was standing almost as tall as he was and looking him straight in the eyes. The smile on her lips had not reached her eyes and Sam had to fight past the awkwardness of the intensity of her gaze.
‘My agent mentioned that you were back in town. I thought I might pop in to say hello. Hope you don’t mind.’
Her gaze shifted from the casual trainers he had found stuffed in the bottom of the wardrobe in the spare bedroom, faded blue jeans and the scraggy, oil-stained T-shirt he kept for garage work. ‘I can see that your fashion sense hasn’t changed very much. Shame, really. I was hoping for some improvement.’
Sam glanced down at his jeans and flicked the polishing cloth against his thigh. ‘Oh, this little old outfit? Don’t you just hate it when all of your chiffon is at the dry cleaner’s and you can’t find a thing to wear?’ He crossed his arms. ‘And no, Amber, I don’t mind you popping in at all, especially since my editor has been harassing your agent for weeks to arrange an interview. He will be delighted to hear that you turned up out of the blue, expecting me to be here.’
Amber floated forward so that Sam inhaled a rich, sweet floral scent which was almost as intoxicating as the woman who was wearing it.
A whirlwind of memories slammed home. Long summer days walking through the streets of London as he memorised routes and names and places for the limo business. Hand in hand, chatting, laughing and enjoying each other’s company as they shared secrets about themselves that nobody else knew. Amber had been his best friend for so long, he hadn’t even realised how much she had come to mean to him until they were ripped apart.
‘Don’t flatter yourself. May I sit?’
Sam gestured to the hard wooden chair his dad used at the makeshift desk in the corner. ‘It may not be quite what you’re used to, but please.’
She nodded him a thanks and lowered herself gracefully onto the chair and turned it around so that she was facing him.
Sam shook his head. ‘You are full of surprises, Amber DuBois. I thought that it would take a very exclusive restaurant in the city to tempt you to come out of your lair long enough to give me an interview.’
Her reply was to lift her flawless chin and cross her legs. Sam took in a flash of long tanned legs ending in peep toe low wedge sandals made out of plaited strips of straw and transparent plastic. Her toenails were painted in the same pale pink as her nails, which perfectly matched her lipstick and the colour motif in her dress.
She was class, elegance and designer luxury and for a fraction of a second he wanted nothing better than to pick her tiny slim body up and lay it along the bonnet of the car and find out for himself whether her skin felt the same under his fingertips.
‘What makes you think that I am here to give you an interview?’ she replied with a certain hardness in her voice which plunged him back into the cold waters of the real world. ‘Perhaps I am here to congratulate you on your engagement? Has your fiancée come with you from Los Angeles and my wedding invitation is in the post? I can see that you would want to give me heads-up on that.’
He reeled back. ‘My what?’
‘Oh—didn’t you announce your engagement in the Los Angeles press? Or is there another Samuel Patrick Richards, investigative reporter and photojournalist of London, walking the streets of that lovely town?’
Sam sucked in a breath then shrugged. ‘That was a misunderstanding. My girlfriend at the time was getting a little impatient and decided to organise a wedding without asking me first. Apparently she forgot that anything to do with weddings brings me out in a nasty rash. It’s a long-standing allergy but I have learnt to live with it. So you can save your congratulations for another time.’
Amber inhaled very slowly before speaking again. ‘Well, it seems that this garage is not
