Читать книгу Swept Away By The Seductive Stranger - Amy Andrews - Страница 10
ОглавлениеCALLUM HOLLINGSWORTH WOULD have had to be completely blind not to notice the sexy blonde in his peripheral vision. Thanks to a combination of excellent medical care, the passage of time and her being on his right, he wasn’t.
Although it was her laugh he’d noticed first.
She was talking on her phone and even though her tone was hushed her occasional laughter practically boomed around the busy café. It was so damn...unrestrained, so carefree, he couldn’t help but stare.
Callum hadn’t had much to laugh about in recent times and a hot streak of envy tore through his chest as he ogled her from behind his sunglasses. Long honey-coloured hair with curly ends that brushed her shoulder blades. A glimpse of sun-kissed skin at her throat and on toned, tanned arms. Legs clad in denim that were shapely rather than skinny and knee-high fringed boots that looked more country girl than dominatrix.
She didn’t wear any make-up or jewellery. In fact, there was a lack of anything flashy or ostentatious about her yet she shone like a jewel in the old-fashioned café in Sydney’s Central Station as the sun streamed in through the high windows overhead.
Maybe it was the way she laughed—with her whole body—that held his attention. Maybe it was the jeans and the boots. Maybe it was her lack of pretension. Whatever, he was just pleased to be provided with some relief from the burden of his thoughts as he sat waiting for his train to depart.
For God’s sake, he was about to embark on one of the great train journeys of the world. He was leaving Sydney and going somewhere else for two months where nobody knew him or about the tumble his career had taken. He could reset the clock. Reinvent himself.
Come back refreshed and show them all he didn’t give a damn.
The sooner he got to grips with his old life being over, the sooner he could get his act together. This was his chance to finally get his head out of his backside and work on being impressively happy once again. Because he sure as hell was sick of himself and the dark cloud that had been following him around for the last two years.
Nothing like moving fourteen hundred kilometres away to send a strong message to himself about the new direction of his life.
‘All passengers for the Indian Pacific, your train is now ready for departure from platform ten.’
Callum gathered his backpack at the announcement over the loudspeaker. The woman on the phone crossed her legs and kept talking and a pang of disappointment flared momentarily. She obviously hadn’t been waiting for the same train. Visions straight from a James Bond movie of a glamorous night between the sheets with a mystery woman on a train as a brilliant way to kick-start his new life fizzled into the ether.
He gave himself a mental shake, his lips twisting at the insanity as he headed towards the exit to the platforms.
* * *
A thrill of excitement shot through Felicity Mitchell’s system as she stepped into the luxurious carriage and was ushered to her compartment by a man in a smart uniform who had introduced himself as Donald, her personal attendant. She passed several other compartments with their doors open and smiled at the couples who beamed back at her.
Booking a double suite in platinum class on the Indian Pacific was a hideous extravagance. She could have done the Sydney to Adelaide leg in the sitting compartment or even the gold class and saved a lot of money, but it had been a lifelong dream of hers to watch the world chug by as she lay on her double bed, looking out the window. She’d spent the last of her inheritance on the fare but she knew her grandpa, wherever he was now, would be proud.
They passed a compartment with a shut door before Donald stopped at the next one along. ‘Here you are,’ he said, indicating she should precede him.
Felicity entered the wood-panelled compartment dominated by a picture window. A small plate of cheese and biscuits sat on a low central wooden table. A long lounge that would become her double bed sat snugly against the wall between the window and a narrow cupboard where her bags had already been stowed.
‘This is your en suite,’ he said, opening a door opposite the lounge to show her the toilet and shower. It was a reasonable size considering the space constraints.
Donald gave her a quick run-down on her compartment and other bits of information about the service before asking if she’d like a glass of wine or champagne as the journey got under way.
Would she? Hell, yeah.
‘Thank you, Donald, I would love a glass of champagne.’
He smiled at her. ‘One glass of bubbles coming up.’
Felicity waited for him to leave before she danced a crazy little jig then collapsed onto the lounge in a happy heap. Workers scurried around on the platform outside, ready for the train’s departure in a few minutes. She couldn’t believe she was finally sitting in this iconic train about to begin the trip of a lifetime.
Donald returned quickly and handed her a glass full of fizz. ‘You’re just with us until Adelaide, that’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s right. I’d love to go on all the way to Perth. Maybe one day.’
The Indian Pacific was so called because it travelled the width of Australia between the Indian and Pacific oceans. The full trip from Sydney to Perth took three days. Her leg of the journey was only twenty-four hours.
‘I think you’ll enjoy yourself anyway,’ Donald said.
‘Oh, yes,’ Felicity agreed. ‘I have absolutely no doubt. I’ve been looking forward to this for most of my life.’
‘So, no pressure, then?’
Donald laughed and Felicity joined him as the train nudged forward. ‘And we’re away,’ he said.
Felicity looked out the window. The platform appeared to be moving as the train slowly and silently pulled away. ‘Let me know if you need anything. Dinner’s served at seven.’
Felicity nodded then turned back to the window, sighing happily.
* * *
Felicity emerged from her compartment half an hour later. She’d stared out the window, watching the inner city give way to cluttered suburbs then to the more sparse outlying areas as it headed for the Blue Mountains. And now it was time to meet her fellow travellers.
Her neighbour’s door was still firmly closed as she headed out. Maybe she didn’t have one yet. Maybe they’d be joining the train at a later stop? Quelling her disappointment, she headed for the place she knew people would be—the lounge.
And she hit the jackpot. Half a dozen couples smiled at her as she stepped into the carriage, her legs already adjusted to the rock and sway of the train. She stopped at the bar and ordered a glass of bubbles from a guy called Travis. It was poured for her immediately and she made her way over to the semicircular couches where everyone was getting acquainted.
‘Hi,’ she said.
The group greeted her as one. ‘Sit down here with us, love,’ said an older man with a Scottish accent. The woman with him moved over and made some room. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, you don’t exactly look in the same demographic as the rest of us.’
Felicity laughed. ‘I have an old soul.’
Every other person in the lounge would have to have been in their sixties. At twenty-eight that made her the youngest by a good thirty years. Luxury train travel was clearly more a retiree option than a hip, young, cool thing to do.
But that was okay. She’d never been particularly hip or cool. She was a small-town nurse who genuinely liked and was interested in older people. She had a bunch of oldies at the practice who she clucked around like a mother hen and she knew this lot would probably be no different despite what would be a short acquaintance.
‘What do you do, dear?’ a woman with steel-grey hair over the other side of the lounge asked.
Felicity almost told them the truth but a sudden sense of self-preservation took over. If she told them she was a nurse, one of two things would happen. She’d have to give medical advice about every ache, pain or strange rash for the next twenty-four hours because, adore them as she did, too many people of the older generation loved to talk obsessively about their ailments. Or they’d pat her hand a lot and tell her continually that she was an angel.
If she was really unlucky, both would happen.
She might be a nurse but she was no saint and certainly no angel. In fact, that kind of language had always made her uncomfortable.
And she didn’t want to be the nurse from a small community where everyone knew her name on this train journey of a lifetime. She didn’t want to be the girl next door. She wanted to be as sophisticated and glamorous as her surroundings. She wanted to dress up for dinner and drink a martini while she had worldly conversations with complete strangers.
Nursing wasn’t glamorous.
‘Oh, I’m just a public servant,’ she said, waving her hand dismissively as she grabbed hold of the first job that came to mind. She doubted it was very glamorous either but it was one of those jobs that was both broad and vague enough to discourage discourse. Nobody really understood what public servants did, right? They certainly didn’t ask them about their jobs.
Or tell them about their personal medical issues.
‘What do you do?’ Felicity asked, and relaxed as the woman, called Judy, launched into a spiel about her job of forty years, which kicked off a conversation amongst them all about their former jobs, and that segued into a discussion about the economy and then morphed again into chatter about travel.
Felicity was in heaven. She was on a train surrounded by witty and enthusiastic companions on the inside and the rugged beauty of the Blue Mountains on the outside. For twenty-four hours she was determined to be a different person.
Tomorrow afternoon she’d be back home where everyone knew her name and stopped her in the street for advice about their baby’s fever, their weird allergies or their shingles. Where everyone called her ‘Flick’ and the guys called her ‘mate’ and the older women of the town tried to matchmake her with any remotely available male.
Tomorrow would be here soon enough. Today nobody knew her and she was going to revel in it for as long as she could.
* * *
The first thing Callum noticed when he entered the restaurant at seven sharp was the sexy blonde from the café. He blinked once or twice just to make sure it was her—his vision wasn’t the best after all. Then she laughed at something her companions were saying and it went straight to his chest and spiked through his pulse.
It was definitely her.
If he’d known she was in the platinum carriage too he wouldn’t have wasted the last few hours catching up on some essential reading his new boss had emailed and insisted he read before he started work.
‘Can I find you a dining companion, sir?’ Donald asked.
‘No,’ Callum said. The beautifully dressed tables seated four and there were several spare chairs around the elegantly appointed dining car but his gaze was glued to the empty one beside her. ‘I’ve found one.’
The corner of Donald’s mouth lifted a fraction. ‘Good choice, sir.’
It took him only a few more seconds to reach the empty chair next to blondie. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. The conversation stopped as all three diners turned to look at him. ‘Is this seat taken?’
Her eyes widened slightly. They were smoky grey and fringed by sable lashes. She stared at him for long moments and he stared right back. He liked that she seemed as confused by her reaction to him as he was to her.
She’d changed into a dress, a slinky black thing that showed off her neck and collarbones and crisscrossed at her cleavage. She was wearing lip gloss. Pink. Light pink—the colour of ballet shoes. The ends of her honey hair seemed curlier or maybe that was just a trick of the overhead light.
The old guy sitting opposite welcomed him heartily. ‘Sit down, young fella. Save this pretty young thing from having her ear bent off by us old fogies.’
Callum didn’t wait to be asked twice. He wasn’t someone who believed in instalove but he sure as hell believed in instalust. He may be rusty but he knew sexual interest when he saw it.
She sure as hell wasn’t looking at him with pity, like too many women had these past couple of years.
No more pity sex for him.
‘I’m Jock, this is my wife Thelma and the odd one out is Felicity.’
Callum shook Jock and Thelma’s hand and reached for blondie’s. Felicity. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he murmured, their eyes meeting again, an awareness that was almost tangible blooming between them.
‘You were in the café,’ she said after a beat or two, sliding her hand out of his.
He let it go reluctantly. ‘Yes.’ A purr of male satisfaction buzzed through his veins. She remembered him. Had she been checking him out at the same time he’d been ogling her?
‘I didn’t realise you were in the same carriage.’
‘I had some work to do.’ Callum grimaced. ‘I shut myself away for a while. I’m in number eight.’
‘Hey, you’re in nine, right?’ Jock asked Felicity jovially. ‘You’re neighbours.’
Callum smiled at her as he sent a quick thankyou up into the universe. Things were definitely looking up for him. She smiled back and for the first time in a long time his belly tightened in anticipation. His libido had taken a real battering since the accident, so it was a revelation to feel it rousing.
‘So, what do you do?’ Jock asked.
Callum dragged his gaze off Felicity and forced his attention on the couple opposite. She wasn’t the only person on the train and this was the way these social situations worked. You ate a good meal, drank good wine and made polite and hopefully interesting conversation with strangers.
God knew, he needed something like this to get himself out of his head. But he promised himself that later he would do his damnedest to shamelessly monopolise the woman beside him. They might not end up in bed together but he intended to flirt like crazy and see where it went.
‘I’m a technical writer,’ he said.
The well-practised lie rolled smoothly off his tongue. He still wasn’t used to the real answer. Becoming a GP after being an up-and-coming vascular surgeon was taking some getting used to. And he only had to look around at the age demographic of the other passengers in the carriage to know that admitting to being any kind of doctor would probably result in an avalanche of medical questions he just didn’t want to answer.
He didn’t want to be any kind of doctor tonight. He wanted to forget about the bitter disappointments of his career and just be a regular Joe. He wanted to be a man chatting to a woman hoping it might end up somewhere interesting.
‘Oh?’ Thelma asked, as she buttered the bread roll Donald had just placed on her plate. ‘What does that entail?’
‘Just boring things like industry articles and manuals,’ he dismissed. ‘Nothing exciting. What about you, Thelma? Are you still working?’
It was a good deflection and Thelma ran with it. The conversation shifted throughout the sumptuous three-course meal and it felt good to stretch his conversational muscles, which were rusty at best. Felicity, on the other hand, was a great conversationalist and Callum found himself relaxing and even laughing from time to time.
His awareness of her as a woman didn’t let up but the urgency to get her alone mellowed.
Like him, she seemed reluctant to talk about herself, expertly turning the conversation back to Thelma and Jock or himself and more neutral topics, such as travel and movies and sport. Consequently, the meal flew by as Felicity charmed them all. It was hard to believe he’d sat for two hours and not thought once about the accident and its repercussions on his life.
That wasn’t something anybody had achieved in the past two and a half years.
He went to bed thinking about it, he woke up thinking about it, and it dominated his thoughts far more than it should during the day.
He suddenly felt about a decade younger.
‘A few of us are retiring to the lounge for some after-dinner drinks,’ Jock said as he placed his napkin on the table. ‘I hope you’ll both join us.’
‘Of course,’ Felicity said, smiling at their companions before turning that lusciously curved mouth towards him. ‘You up for that? Or do you...have more work to do?’
Callum wanted nothing more than to invite her back to his compartment for some private after-dinner drinks. Their gazes locked and her cheeks pinked up and he wondered if she could read his mind. She was a strange mix of eagerness and hesitancy and Callum didn’t want to push or embarrass her.
But he could see in those expressive grey eyes that she didn’t want him to lock himself away again either.
‘I’d love to,’ he said, resigning himself to sharing her for a bit longer, to go slowly, to drag out a little more whatever it was that was building between them.
Anticipation buzzed thick and heavy through his groin.
* * *
Felicity found it hard to concentrate for the next couple of hours, aware of Mr Tall-Dark-and-Handsome sitting beside her in a way she hadn’t been aware of a guy in a long time. Every time he spoke or laughed it rumbled through his big thigh pressed firmly against hers and squirmed its way into her belly.
There was a sense that they were marking time and she was equal parts titillated and terrified. This being a whole other person thing wasn’t as easy to pull off as she’d thought but she’d never felt so alive either. So utterly buzzed.
Not even with Ned. Sure, he’d been the love of her life and being dumped by him had been crushing, but their love had grown out of friendship and a slow, gentle dawning.
This...thing was entirely different.
Was she seriously going to do this? Pick up a stranger on a train? Or let him pick her up? She might have limited experience of the whole pick-up scene but she was pretty sure that’s exactly where they were heading. When she’d booked her train ticket, meeting a good-looking stranger hadn’t been part of her plan.
But here they were with a night full of possibilities stretching ahead of them.
One by one their companions left, withdrawing to their beds, making jokes about old bones and early nights. Felicity contemplated doing the sensible thing and following them. Retiring to her bed and the moonlit landscape flying by outside her window, tuning into the clickety-clack of the wheels as they rocked her to sleep.
But she didn’t.
‘Well,’ Jock said, standing, helping Thelma up as well. ‘This is way past our bedtime and my indigestion is playing up so we’ll be off too.’
Felicity smiled at them and bade them goodnight, excruciatingly conscious of Callum’s eyes on her as she watched their companions disappear from the lounge.
And then there were two.
‘Whew,’ he murmured, his gaze brushing over her neck and mouth, a smile tilting his lips into an irresistible shape. ‘I thought they’d never go to bed.’
Felicity blushed but she didn’t deny the sentiment. She’d thought exactly the same thing.
He tipped his chin at her martini glass. ‘Another drink?’
She hesitated. This was it. This was the moment. Was she going to be the sophisticated woman on the train or the girl next door?
‘It’s only eleven,’ he coaxed. ‘I promise to have you back to your compartment before you turn into a pumpkin.’
Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. The man had a PhD in flirting. ‘Yeah. Okay. Sure.’
He grinned. ‘Good answer.’
Felicity’s mouth quirked in an answering grin. ‘Good question.’
She 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.’
