hair piled up high, and the oversized skirt of her dress floating about her like a cloud.
Ivy couldn’t help but smile, the ridiculous mystery of the step counting put aside for the moment. She was so happy for April. Today was her dream come true.
Slowly she relaxed into her chair, allowing that inexplicable tension to ease from her body.
And it was right about then—right about when she decided that yes, it was totally fine to slide her heels off beneath the privacy of the long table cloth—that she felt it again.
That look. That heavy concentration of attention that made the back of her neck prickle, but other parts of her...tingle. And Ivy was not one for superfluous tingling.
But this time there was nothing stopping her from looking up—from searching the crowd for this person, for this...
Man.
There he was, on the opposite side of the parquet dance floor. With his close-cropped hair, and the broadest of broad shoulders, Ivy would’ve guessed he was in the military, even if she hadn’t already known he was.
Angus. His name was Angus...Something. She remembered his name had stood out amongst April’s seating plan and guest list—a name she didn’t recognise, and who April also didn’t know. An old school friend of Evan’s: All I know is that he’s a soldier, April had whispered with some awe, one of those special ones. SAS.
Amongst a million other wedding-planning things to do—and a million more work-related concerns—she hadn’t given the mysterious Angus Somebody another thought.
But right now, the man had somehow taken up all her thoughts. And when their gazes finally connected—when she could truly see all that remarkable intensity—it was almost as if he’d taken over her body, too. Her skin was hot. Her mouth was dry.
And from this distance, she couldn’t even see the colour of his eyes.
Oh, God. What would happen if he was close enough for her to see if they were blue, or green, or grey?
Based on her current reaction, she’d most likely burst into flames.
No.
Now she was being silly. He was just a man, just a guest at the wedding.
Just a distraction she didn’t need.
She was April’s chief bridesmaid. And she was Chief Operating Officer of Molyneux Mining. Neither of those things were conducive to gazing like a lust-crazed idiot across the dance floor at her sister’s wedding.
Yet she was still doing exactly that.
And just as she was sternly telling herself that it really wasn’t that hard to look elsewhere...anywhere...but at him...
Something happened.
He winked.
* * *
Angus Barlow always knew what he was doing. He was measured, methodical, structured. Calm. Not easily distracted, or swayed by others.
So he’d known what he’d been doing when his gaze had first collided with Ivy as she’d walked down that aisle. He’d been having a damn good look at a beautiful woman.
Her long black hair was looped and twisted up to leave her neck exposed above her bare shoulders. Her skin had glowed in the sunlight, and was still managing to do so now, even in the candlelit marquee without the help of the rapidly setting sun.
She had a great profile. A long, thin nose and a strong chin.
The sea breeze had done fabulous things to the pale purple dress she wore, plastering it hard against her curves as she’d walked. And if he’d continued to watch her rear view, rather than turning to observe the bride’s arrival—well, Angus didn’t really think anyone could blame him.
And now, hours later, he’d found himself again compelled to look at Ivy.
Angus supposed it could be argued that Ivy wasn’t the most beautiful woman at the wedding. In fact, Angus had heard that many considered her unlucky she didn’t inherit more of her father’s movie-star looks, the way her two younger sisters had. Although Angus couldn’t agree. It was true she did take more after her unusual mother—in both looks and personality, given the way she was following exactly in her mother’s business footsteps. But he liked the angles to Ivy’s face: the sharpness of her cheekbones, the slant to her brows.
Plus he’d really liked the contrasting plump of her lips. He’d never noticed before tonight, never really even looked at the many photos of her that could be found in the paper, or the footage of her on TV. But right now it seemed impossible he hadn’t.
So yes, he did know what he was doing.
Right on cue, he felt a twinge in his bandaged right wrist, as if to remind him at least partly why he was doing this.
Not why he was looking at Ivy Molyneux. But why he was here, at this wedding, at all.
He wasn’t supposed to be here, of course. He’d declined the original invitation, only to break his wrist during a training exercise in Darwin a month or so later.
So rather than where he should be, deployed with his squadron in Afghanistan, he was at Evan’s wedding. Surrounded by people who were part of a world he’d exited so abruptly more than fifteen years earlier, and that he’d truly not missed at all.
This was not his thing: an opulent, diamond-drenched evening jammed full of the superficial and the vacuous.
He was on a singles table of sorts. His fellow guests were a mixture of the different flavours of wealth he remembered from high school: old money, new money, and used-to-have money. Then there were the people aware of their luck and good fortune—and then those that were painfully, frustratingly oblivious. In his experience, most of the wealthy fell into the second category. But even then, they generally weren’t bad people. Just not his type of people.
Ivy Molyneux was certainly not his type of people either. A billionaire heiress born into obscene wealth, how could she be anything but extraordinarily ignorant of what it was like to actually exist in the real world?
And yet that was the thing. Amongst the hundreds of faces here at this wedding, amongst all this glitz and glitter, when she’d met his gaze it had felt...
Real.
That he certainly hadn’t expected.
That was why he hadn’t looked away, and why his interest in her had become much more than a simple visual appreciation of a beautiful woman.
That was why he’d winked.
And Ivy’s jaw had dropped open, then almost immediately snapped shut.
Then her eyes had narrowed, just before a near imperceptible shake of her head—and she’d turned her attention to the groomsman beside her, as if Angus no longer existed.
But somehow he knew, knew deep within his bones, that this wasn’t even close to over.
* * *
It
