syncopated rhythm against the first.
When they shifted into a familiar tune about how his natural born charm and adorable baby blues wouldn’t get him by for ever, Nate slowly turned his chair back to face his vast office as his brain flicked through possible ways to convince them to leave the subject of finding him a good woman the hell alone. He could honestly beg work, but that was nothing new. A weekend was something other people had. He hadn’t set foot on a beach in so long he couldn’t remember how sand felt between his toes. And telling them he was only keen on bad women hadn’t stopped them before; it had merely expanded the pond from which they fished on his behalf.
“I’m seeing someone!” The walls of Nate’s vast office seemed to heave away from him as the import of the words he’d just uttered echoed into the ensuing silence. Damn twins—they were like a pair of hammers banging at an exposed nerve. It had been bound to jerk eventually.
But when the silence deepened, Nate wondered if he’d hit on something inspired. If he oughtn’t to have invented a significant other years ago—someone who travelled often, was ethically against telephones, who had lost her whole family in some tragic accident so he could therefore never subject his love to the pain of meeting his.
Caught up in his own daydreams of freedom, he realised his chance to hang up on a high a moment too late.
One twin said, “Someone who can string a sentence together without saying ‘um’?”
“What the hell do I care?” he heard himself bellow. “So long as she looks good, smells nice and goes home happy.”
“Nate,” they said on twin sighs, with familiar waves of guilt pouring down the phone line. They knew they should be nicer, considering all he’d sacrificed to make sure they were well-adjusted after their father died. Knowing didn’t make it so. They had stubborn Mackenzie genes after all.
“The worst part is I don’t think you’re kidding,” said one.
“That the perfect Nate date wants no commitment, no happy-ever-after, no way,” said the other.
“Find her for me and then we can talk,” said Nate as his office door swung open. Gabe poked his head through the gap. Done with being outnumbered, Nate waved his recently returned business partner in with a brisk flap of his hand.
One raised eyebrow later, Gabe shut the door behind him and ambled across the room to lower his huge form into a chair that would have been plenty big enough for any other man. Gabe, on the other hand, looked as if he’d need a crowbar to get out.
“I have to go,” said Nate. “My ten o’clock is here.”
“Say ‘hi’ to Gabe from me.”
Then, “Tell him if it doesn’t work out with Paige, he can always—”
Nate hung up before any more of that image made its way into his subconscious.
“The girls on the warpath?” said Gabe, as Nate once again rubbed his thumbs across both temples.
“This time, it’s your fault.”
“How’s that, exactly?”
“If you weren’t with Paige, you’d never have met Mae and Clint, who’d never have invited me to their wedding. And Macbeth’s witches wouldn’t have made it their life’s mission to find me a woman.”
Gabe’s dark stare flattened. “Are you wishing away my woman?”
“Not,” said Nate, settling back in his chair. “For years you walked around like a bear with a sore tooth. Now you’re practically cuddly.”
Gabe’s lip curled as he as good as snarled. But then the big guy seemed to soften, sweeten, and the smile that slipped through confirmed cuddly was fine, if it meant he had her.
Hell.
Thankfully Nate was spared, as Gabe’s mobile rang and he answered with a gruff, “Hamilton.”
To think, Nate mused, it felt like only yesterday that together he and the big guy had sketched out their radical dream of a maverick venture capital business on the back of a beer coaster in a pub near uni. And now that crazy dream was a shining beacon of trust, fiscal responsibility and innovation within the morass of world-wide financial tremblings.
Nate had reached the heights he’d envisioned that long ago night, and had soared higher still. He had property all over the world, a stake in some of the most successful businesses in the country, and more money than he could count. And yet the heart of that dream, the pinnacle he’d aspired to, the moment when the pendulum of success had hit its peak and he could ease back, content with his success and enjoy the spoils, had never eventuated.
Every decision, every purchase, every paperclip was still under his tight control—as though if in letting go he’d lose it all. And it wasn’t lost to him that he was nearing the age when his own hard-working father had gone to work one day and never come home.
Gabe hung up and said, “You free for lunch? The gaming guy I was telling you about is meeting me at Zuma at one, and I’m sure having us both there’ll put the requisite sparkle in his eyes to get his scrawl on the dotted line.”
Nate ran his hands over his face, pushing the mounting signs of frustration down deep. “I can swing by at quarter past.”
“Better. Keep ’em keen.” Gabe pressed himself from the chair and only when he reached the door did he look back.
“So, have you got a date for Mae and Clint’s wedding, or what?” Gabe asked.
Nate lugged his stapler all the way across the room. It bounced off the wall a foot from Gabe’s shoulder.
“I take it that’s a no?”
Then Gabe was out through the door, leaving Nate to deal with the onset of a new range of throbs in his temples.
It was a no. And yet he’d told Faith and Hope he was seeing someone. When the actual truth was somewhere in between.
He’d get a damn date, if only to get them off his back for the next few weeks till the big day. But it wouldn’t be anyone they knew. Or even anyone he knew for that matter.
Asking a woman on a date was one thing. Asking a woman to a wedding was akin to smothering himself in catnip and taking a swan dive into a pride of lionesses. There wasn’t a kind way to tell someone with confetti stuck to her eyelashes that it was never going to happen.
But it was never going to happen.
For the six years between the day of his father’s heart attack and the day his trust fund had been opened to him he’d devoted himself to being the man in his young sisters’ lives. They’d repaid the favour by using his toothbrush, and wearing his shirts to bed. He’d asked them to stop and they’d acted out by dating his friends. And no matter how he’d managed to swallow it down, to let them do what they had to do, they’d cried themselves to sleep. He’d heard them, night after night, the sound tearing away at his insides. Until he’d become impervious to tears, to mood swings, to raging hormones and wily feminine ways. It was the only way he’d lived to fight another day.
Two
