took a cold shower, changed into I am not in need of antidepressants clothes and hurried out of the building.
The boats were what she needed. Up close and personal. Escape. So she crossed the road to the marina and breathed out a sigh of relief as she reached the jetty. The boats would float her stress away as they always did—on a tide of dreams. Adventure. Possibilities.
One day she would hire a sailing instructor and she would learn… She would learn…
Uh-oh.
Her eyes darted from yacht to yacht…and on every deck she could picture Scott Knight eight years ago, young and free, teaching people to sail. Scott as he was now, teaching her to sail.
One of those now-familiar tortured groans was ripped out of her and she turned her back on the boats.
Coffee—she needed coffee.
She hurried to the marina cafe and was horrified when Dean the barista’s eyes popped at her as if she was a crazy person. ‘You okay, Kate?’
What the hell did she look like?
‘Fine, fine, fine,’ she said reassuringly—before realising that two more ‘fines’ than were strictly necessary did not denote ‘fine’. ‘I just need coffee, Dean.’
‘Really? Because you seem a little wired.’
Forced smile. ‘Really, Dean. Just the coffee.’ Subtext: Give me the damned coffee and shut up.
But as she took her coffee to one of the tables and sipped, Dean kept giving her concerned glances from behind the coffee machine. As if she had a neon sign flashing on her forehead: Beware of woman losing her marbles. Thank heaven her coffee of choice was a nice little macchiato. If she’d had to put up with a cappuccino’s worth of Are you okay? looks she might have gone over and slapped Dean!
As it was, she could chug it down quickly and flee back to her apartment. Where she would look up the official definition of ‘pathetic’! Just to be sure she wasn’t.
Fifteen minutes later she had the dictionary open, her finger running down the column…paternalism…paternity…paternoster…
Aha!
Pathetic: arousing pity, especially through vulnerability or sadness.
In other words, Kate Cleary: sexless on Valentine’s Day. The usually imperturbable Dean, the barista, had instantly clocked her out-of-character vulnerability. And she didn’t need a dictionary to know that she was arousing pity—in herself!
How very…well, pathetic.
Although at least she could dispute the ‘sad’ part of the definition. Because she was not sad. She was sexually frustrated! Completely different from sad. Not that two whole nights without sex was going to kill her. She’d gone way longer than two nights before! Waaaaaay longer. She wasn’t a nymphomaniac! Or…hell! Was she a nymphomaniac?
Nylon…nymph…nymphalid…nymphette… Nymphette? Good Lord—nymphette? Nympholepsy…
Nymphomaniac: a woman who has abnormally excessive and uncontrollable sexual desire.
Ohhh, crap. Maybe she was a nymphomaniac. At her age! That was just…sad.
Oh, God! Sad!
She was a fully-fledged pathetic nymphomaniac.
Kate fled to the terrace—the only place in the apartment she hadn’t had sex with Scott. And the only reason she hadn’t had sex with him on the terrace was because exhibitionism wasn’t exactly his ‘thing’. And, even though it wasn’t her ‘thing’ either, the realisation that she probably would have gone there, in full view of any passersby, flashed through her mind and shocked her.
Depraved pathetic nymphomaniac! That was her. And it was Scott Knight’s fault. Because she’d never been this desperate for sex in her whole life.
And now she wouldn’t even be able to enjoy the view from her terrace, because one quick look at the boats confirmed that Scott was now firmly entrenched as part of her escape daydream.
When the intercom finally buzzed that evening and she heard her sister’s calm voice, she almost cried with relief.
Her family always anchored her. And you had to get it together when you had two children to entertain.
When Shay and Rick had left she pushed the coffee table out of the way so the girls could take up their preferred positions on the rug—seven-year-old Maeve leaning back against the base of the couch, engrossed in a book about cake and cookie decorating, and five-year-old Molly stretched out on her stomach, leaning on an elbow and drawing her version of a fairy house in her sketchbook.
Kate was just about to pick up the phone to order pizza—the girls’ favourite meal—when the intercom buzzed again. Shay and Rick should be sipping champagne at the restaurant and surely could have telephoned if they were having a last-minute panic—but nobody needed to tell a family lawyer that parents could be irrational!
She pushed the ‘talk’ button. ‘Yes, Shay?’ she said with an exasperated laugh.
‘Um…nope. It’s me, Kate.’
SCOTT.
Kate’s vocal cords froze. God help me, God help me, God help me.
‘Kate? Come on—buzz me up. My arms are going to fall off in a minute.’
Kate buzzed the door and then just stared at it, paralysed.
Something was swelling in her chest—a mixture of joy and yearning and uncertainty. What did it mean that he’d come when she’d told him not to? He shouldn’t be doing this. She was glad he was here. No, she wasn’t—because they had rules. But it was Valentine’s Day. No, that meant nothing. She couldn’t let him get away with breaking the rules. No matter how glad she was that he was doing it.
Mmm-hmm. She sure was making a lot of sense!
She heard Scott’s voice vibrating through her door like a tuning fork. That disarmingly lazy drawl, addressed to some stranger. A laugh. Yep—he’d hooked a new fan in under a minute.
She rested her palms against the door, could almost feel him through it.
Breathe. Just breathe.
One knock.
Breathe!
She opened the door and Scott stepped over the threshold as though he owned the place.
‘What are you doing here?’ she managed to get
