and rested her palms on the granite surface. ‘What can I do to help?’
‘Chop some salad, if you like. Use whatever you fancy out of the fridge.’
Cassidy forgot herself and smiled as he reappeared, tossed the steaks down on the counter and reached into a drawer for barbecue utensils. ‘You have the weirdest accent now, you know. Tang of American, but still using Irish phrases.’
A brief sideways glance of sparkle-eyed amusement was aimed her way. ‘You can take the boy out of Ireland…’
She rolled her eyes.
Will jerked his dark brows as he unwrapped the steaks. ‘Everyone does it. You spend time in a certain environment, surrounded by people who talk a certain way, and you absorb some of it. It’s probably a subliminal need for acceptance.’
The idea that a man like Will would feel the need for acceptance anywhere momentarily baffled Cassidy. Maybe she was reading too much into it? She was known to do that. A lot of women were. She stepped towards the fridge to have a poke around for salad ingredients. ‘Was it weird at first? Living here, I mean?’
‘In Malibu or in California?’
When he reached past her for a bottle of sauce Cassidy’s breathing hitched. He’d bent his upper body over hers, had reached his arm over her shoulder and brushed his fingertips against her hair on the way past, surrounding her for a fleeting moment with an intensely male body heat that contrasted so very sharply with the cold air from the refrigerator’s interior. It had an immediate visceral reaction on her. Goosebumps broke out on her skin, her abdomen tensed, her breasts grew heavy. She even had to swallow hard to dampen her dry mouth and close her eyes to stifle a low moan.
For crying out loud—she knew it had been a long time since she’d last made love, but it was really no excuse for the compulsive need she suddenly felt to turn round and launch herself at him, so they could spend several hours seeing if they still remembered how to play each other’s bodies like fine instruments…
One, two, three breaths of cool, refrigerated air—then she reappeared from behind the door with an iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, a cucumber, and two different bottles of salad dressing. When she chanced a sideways glance at Will she found him on the other side of the breakfast bar, studying her intently.
‘Malibu or California?’
‘What?’
‘You asked was it weird living here. I asked Malibu or California.’
Oh, yes, that was right. She had done that. ‘California.’
‘Yes.’
She set her things on the counter and lifted a brow. ‘Malibu?’
‘No.’
When light danced across his eyes she knew he was messing with her, so she shook her head. ‘A bowl for this stuff?’
‘Second cupboard on the left, underneath you.’
‘So why was California weird?’ She opened the cupboard and hunched down to look inside.
‘Why don’t you hit me with your first impressions and I’ll tell you if I felt the same way when I got here…’ The sound of doors sliding told her he had moved towards the deck.
By the time she came back up, with a large wooden bowl in hand, he was firing up the outdoor grill. So she found a knife and a chopping board all on her own, while raising her voice to continue the conversation. ‘Way more people, nobody smiles and says hello the way they do at home, hotter, brighter—drier. Nothing as green as you’d see in Ireland. Food’s different, television is different, the cars people drive are different…Some things are familiar, but the vast majority of differences outshadow them…’
Will was smiling yet another small smile as he came back in, the sea breeze outside having created unruly waves in his dark hair that made him look even more boyish than he already did in his simple white T-shirt and blue jeans combo. No one would ever look at the man and put him in his early thirties. Good genetics, Cassidy supposed. His kids would inherit that anti-ageing gene, and the boys would all look like him, wouldn’t they? With dark hair that even when tamed would rebel, with that outward flick at the nape, and green eyes that sparkled with amusement, and the charm of the devil when they wanted something, and—
Cassidy couldn’t believe she was standing in his beautiful house and picturing dozens of mini-Wills standing between them. She’d be naming them next. Maybe her biological clock was kicking in?
‘In other words weird…’
She smiled as she chopped. ‘Okay. Point taken. So why is Malibu different?’
‘It’s not so crowded here. The air’s better.’ He shrugged his shoulders as he turned bottles of wine on a rack to read the labels. ‘Quieter. More private. I’d lived in California long enough by the time I bought this place that it wasn’t so alien to me any more. But this was the first place I felt I could call home.’
‘You don’t see Ireland as home any more?’
‘I see it as where I come from, and a part of who I am, but I have my life in California now.’
Cassidy had known that for a long time. But hearing him say it didn’t make it any easier. It was another thing that highlighted how different they were. Somehow she knew she would always see Ireland as home. She had thirty years’ worth of memories there—not all of them good, granted. But it was the good and the bad that made her who she was—for better or worse. A part of her would always ache for the green, green grass of home if she left it behind. The fact Will had left everything behind without any apparent sense of poignancy made her wonder if he remembered their time together the same way she did. Or remembered that he had said he loved her.
Maybe the harsh truth was he hadn’t. Not the way she had loved him. If he had he would never have left her, would he?
The sound of a cork popping brought her gaze back to him as he set a bottle of red wine on the counter to breathe. But when he reached for deep bowled glasses and she opened her mouth to remind him of the dangers of her errant tongue and alcohol, he surprised her.
‘Why teaching?’ he asked.
She frowned in confusion. ‘What?’
‘Why teaching?’ He turned around and leaned back against the counter, folding his arms across his chest and studying her with hooded eyes. ‘I don’t remember you ever showing an interest in it when I knew you before.’
Well, no, because when he’d known her she’d still had dreams that felt as if they were within her grasp. Then she’d been given a harsh reality check. She shrugged and tossed the chopped-up salad ingredients in the bowl. ‘Necessity to start with, I guess. I needed a job with a regular wage. If I was going to spend a good portion of my life working, it made sense to me to be doing something I might enjoy…’
‘Do you?’
‘Do I what?’
‘Enjoy it?’
‘I’d enjoy it more if I was better paid.’ She shot him a brief smile, then concentrated on reading the labels on the salad dressings.
