Then she took out her notebook and jotted something down. ‘But thanks for the idea.’
He laughed, jerking the pain in his back into life.
Josie’s hand twitched as if to reach out again, but she closed it tight about her pen and he told himself that he was glad. He preferred his relationships physical, uncomplicated. That way, everyone knew where they were. The minute emotions, caring got involved, they became dangerous. Impossible to control. With limitless possibilities for pain.
‘You don’t believe in any of this, do you?’ he said, guarding himself against regret. ‘You provide the flowers and frills and fireworks but underneath you’re a cynic.’
‘The flowers and frills,’ she replied, ‘but it was stipulated by the resort that there should be no fireworks.’
‘Well, that’s a relief. You never know which way a startled elephant will run.’
‘That’s an image I could have done without,’ she said. ‘But, since you won’t be here, there’s no need to concern yourself. How was the coffee?’
Gideon looked at his empty cup. ‘Do you know, I was so absorbed by all this wedding talk that I scarcely noticed.’ Holding it out for a refill, he said, ‘I’ll concentrate this time.’
Josie replenished it without a word, then leaned forward to stir in another spoonful of honey.
‘Enough?’ she asked, raising long, naturally dark lashes to look questioningly at him.
‘Perfect,’ he said as he was offered a second glimpse of her entrancing cleavage. A second close-up of that faint scar.
Was it a childhood fall? A car accident? He tried to imagine what might have caused such an injury.
‘So, what have you actually done to your back?’ she asked, distracting him. ‘Did you get into a tussle with a runaway elephant? Wrestle an alligator? Total a four-by-four chasing a rhino?’
‘Actually, since we’re in Africa, that would be a crocodile,’ he pointed out, sipping more slowly at the second cup. Savouring it. Making it last. He didn’t want her to rush off. ‘The creatures you should never smile at.’
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s a song. Never smile at a crocodile…’ As he sang the words, he felt the tug of the past. Where the hell had that come from?
‘Peter Pan,’ she said. ‘Forgive me, but I wouldn’t have taken you for a fan.’
He shrugged without thinking, but this time it didn’t catch him so viciously. Maybe the doc was right. He just needed to relax. Spend some time talking about nothing much, to someone who didn’t want something from him.
Apart from his room.
Obviously a woman at the top of her field in the events industry—and she had to be good or she wouldn’t be in charge of Tal Newman’s high profile wedding—would have that kind of easy ability to talk to anyone, put them at their ease. He’d only been talking to her for a few minutes and already he’d had two good ideas.
Even so.
Most women he met had an agenda. Hers was to evict him and while, just an hour ago, he would have been her willing accomplice, just the thought of getting on a plane tightened the pain.
She might not be a babe, nothing like the women he dated when he could spare the time. Who never lasted more than a month or two, because he never could spare the time, refused to take the risk…
What mattered was that she had access to coffee, the little pleasures that made the wheels of life turn without squeaking, and she would have that vital contact with the outside world.
The fact that she was capable of stringing an intelligent sentence together and making him laugh—well, smile, anyway; laughing, as he’d discovered, was a very bad idea—was pure bonus.
‘My father was into amateur dramatics,’ he told her. ‘He put on a show for the local kids every Christmas.’
‘Oh, right.’ For just a moment she seemed to freeze, then she pasted on a smile that even on so short an acquaintance he knew wasn’t the real thing. ‘Well, that must have been fun. Were you Peter?’ She paused. ‘Or were you Captain Hook?’
Something about the way she said that suggested she thought Hook was more his thing.
‘My father played Hook. I didn’t get involved.’ One fantasist in the family was more than enough.
She lifted her eyebrows a fraction, but kept whatever she was thinking to herself and said, ‘So? Despite the paternal advice, did you smile at one?’
‘Nothing that exciting. Damn thing just seized up on me. I was planning to leave yesterday, but apparently I’m stuck here until it unseizes itself,’ he said, firing a shot across her assumption that he would be leaving any time soon.
‘That must hurt,’ she said, her forehead puckering in a little frown. ‘Have you seen a doctor?’
Good question.
She was going to be responsible for the health and safety of a hundred plus people. If anyone hurt themselves—and weddings were notoriously rowdy affairs—she needed to know there was help at hand.
Or maybe she was finally getting it. What his immovability meant in terms of her ‘block booking’.
‘There’s a doctor in Maun. He flew up yesterday, spoke to my doctor in London and then ordered complete rest. According to him, this little episode is my body telling me to be still.’ He made little quote marks with his fingers around the ‘be still’. He wouldn’t want her, or anyone else, thinking he said things like that.
‘It’s psychological?’
Something about the way she said that, no particular shock or surprise, suggested that it wasn’t the first time she’d encountered the condition.
‘That’s what they’re implying.’
‘My stepfather suffered from the same thing,’ she said. ‘His back seized up every time someone suggested he get a job.’
She said it with a brisk, throwaway carelessness that declared to the world that having a layabout for a stepfather mattered not one jot. But her words betrayed a world of hurt. And went a long way to explaining that very firm assertion—strange for a woman whose life revolved around it—that marriage wasn’t for her.
‘I didn’t mean to imply that that’s your problem,’ she added with a sudden rush that—however unlikely that seemed—might have been embarrassment.
‘I promise you that it’s not,’ he assured her. ‘On the contrary. It’s made worse by the fact that I’m out of touch with my office. That I’m stuck here when I should be several thousand miles away negotiating a vital contract.’
Discovering that the marketing team he’d entrusted with selling his hard won dream appeared to have lost the plot and being unable to do a damn thing about it.
‘I’m
