flat-out ogled him as he walked to the bar. She’d seen him in the café and had been struck by his presence but he’d seemed so brooding and intense, so closed off she hadn’t bothered to go there. He hadn’t put a foot wrong tonight, however.
Sure, there was still a brooding quality to the set of his shoulders and the line of his mouth, but he’d been witty and charming and great with all the oldies and, good Lord Almighty, the way he’d looked at her had been one hundred percent high-octane flirty.
Nothing brooding about it.
Even the way the man leaned against the bar was sexy. His expensive-looking charcoal trousers pulled nicely against his butt and hugged the hard length of his thighs.
And they were hard. And hot. She could still feel the imprint of them along her leg.
He’d worn a jacket to dinner but had since shed it to reveal a plain long-sleeved shirt of dark purple. The top two buttons had been left undone and about an hour ago he’d rolled up the sleeves to reveal tanned forearms covered in dark hair.
Those forearms had caused a cataclysmic meltdown in her underwear.
He turned slightly and smiled at her and Felicity sucked in a breath. The man was devastating when he smiled and it went all the way to his green eyes. It did things to his face, which was already far too handsome for any one man. Square jaw covered in dark, delicious stubble, strong chin, cheekbones that women would kill for and sandy-brown hair longer on the top and shorter at the sides.
Hair made to run fingers through.
His laughter drifted towards her as Travis handed over the drinks and said something she couldn’t quite hear. She liked how it sounded. How it rumbled out of him. She got the sense he didn’t do a hell of a lot of it, though, which was a shame. That laugh was turning her insides to jelly.
The military should employ him as a secret weapon.
He headed in her direction, his gait compensating for the rock of the train. She probably should be glued to the window, watching the moonlit bush whizzing by, and not be so obvious, but she figured they were beyond the point of being coy and, frankly, he was too damn hard not to look at with his long stride and knowing smile.
He placed her glass down and sat opposite her this time, a low table between them. She couldn’t decide if she was relieved or disappointed. Neither, she concluded as he filled her entire field of vision and everything else became pretty much irrelevant.
‘To strangers on a train,’ he said, lifting his whisky glass, that smile still hovering.
She tapped hers against it. ‘I’ll drink to that.’
FELICITY WAS CONSCIOUS of his gaze as it followed the press of her lips then lowered to the bob of her throat as she swallowed. She was grateful for the cold, crisp martini cooling her suddenly parched mouth.
‘So...what’s a young ’un—’ he injected Jock’s Scottish brogue into the words and Felicity smiled ‘—like yourself doing on a train with the cast from Cocoon? Lots more people your age down in the cheap seats. Unless... Wait, are you some kind of heiress or something?’
‘No.’ Felicity laughed at the apt description of their travelling companions and at the thought of her being some little rich girl, although she had inherited enough money from her grandfather to buy a small cottage. ‘I’m not. And you don’t look like you’re of retirement age either. You’re, what? Thirty-five?’
She’d been wondering how old he was all night and this seemed like as good an opener as any.
‘Close,’ he murmured. ‘Thirty-four. And you?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘Ah...’ He gave a long and exaggerated sigh. ‘To be so young and carefree again.’
Felicity laughed at his teasing but was struck by the slight tinge of wistfulness. ‘Oh, no,’ she teased back. ‘You poor old man.’
He grinned at her and every fibre of her being thrilled at being the centre of his attention. ‘Seriously, though,’ he said, sobering a little, ‘why the train?’
‘My grandfather was a railway man through and through. Fifty years’ service as a driver and he never got tired of trains. Of talking about them, photographing them and just plain loving everything about them. We’d go on the train into the city every day when I used to stay with them in the school holidays and he’d take me to the train museum every time without fail.’
He frowned. ‘Didn’t that get boring after a while?’
Felicity shook her head. ‘Nah. He always made it so exciting. He made it all about the romance of train travel and I lapped it up.’
‘Romance, huh?’ He raised an eyebrow as his gaze dropped to her mouth. ‘Smart man.’
Felicity’s belly flopped over. ‘That he was.’
If tonight was anything to go by, her grandfather was a damn genius.
She stared into the depths of her frosty glass as her fingers ran up and down the stem. ‘He spent his entire life saying that one day he was going to take my grandmother on the Indian Pacific for a holiday of a lifetime. Then, after my grandmother died when I was twenty, he used to tell me one day he and I would go on it together. He died last year, having never done it, but he left me some money so...here I am.’
The backs of Felicity’s eyes prickled with unexpected tears and she blinked them away.
‘Hey.’ His hand slid over hers. ‘Are you okay?’
‘God, yes,’ she said, shaking her head, feeling like an idiot. Way to put a downer on the pick-up! ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to get so maudlin. I’m stupidly sentimental. Ignore me.’
‘Nothing wrong with that.’ He smiled, removing his hand. ‘Better than being cold and hard.’
Felicity returned his smile. She appreciated his attempt to lighten the mood. Sometimes, though, she had to wonder. If she was a little more hard-hearted she probably wouldn’t fret so much about her patients or become so personally involved. It would make it much easier to leave it all behind at the end of the day.
‘What about you?’ she said, determined to change the subject. To get things back on track. ‘Why the train?’
‘I guess I’m a bit like your grandfather. Always loved trains. Doing all the great train journeys of the world is a bucket-list thing for me and when I had to travel to Adelaide I thought, Why not?’
It was stupid to feel any kind of affinity with a man—this man—because he was a train guy. Especially when up until about eight hours ago she hadn’t even known him. But somehow she did. Her grandfather had always said train people were good people and, even though he’d been biased, right at this moment Felicity couldn’t have agreed more.
Callum was ticking all her boxes.
‘So...’
