If You Can't Stand the Heat... (Harlequin Kiss) (15 page)

Merri split a vanilla pod and scraped out its insides with a knife. ‘What changed? Do you think it was because you said no?’

Ellie separated the whites and yolks of eggs as she considered the question. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘If that’s the reason then he’s a jerk of magnificent proportions,’ Merri stated, adding the vanilla to butter and sugar and switching on the beater.

‘He might as well be a guest in my B&B, except that he packs the dishwasher, makes dinner if I’m working late and even, very kindly, did a load of my laundry with his own. I just want my friend back,’ Ellie added.

‘No, you don’t. You want to sleep with him,’ Merri said in a cheerful voice.

‘No! Well, yes. But I can’t. Won’t.’

‘Uh...why?’

‘Because, as you said, I can’t seem to separate the emotion and the deed,’ Ellie admitted reluctantly. ‘If I sleep with him I risk—’

‘Caring for him, falling in love with him. Why would that be the worst thing that could happen to you?’

Ellie viciously tipped the egg whites into another mixing bowl and reached for a hand-beater. ‘I don’t want to talk about this any more.’

‘Tough.’

Ellie shut off the hand-beater and checked on the chocolate that was melting in a
bain-marie
. ‘We don’t have enough time for me to list the reasons...’

‘Yes, we do. Spill.’

‘He has a job I hate. He’s never around. I don’t have time for a relationship—’

Merri pointed a wooden spoon at her. ‘Quit lying to yourself, El. The biggest reason you are so scared is because he doesn’t need you, and we all know that you live to be needed.’

Ellie looked at her, shocked. ‘That’s so unfair.’

‘Ellie, you take pride in being indispensable. You
need
people to need you. You need to love more than you need love, and you recognise that Jack doesn’t need your love to survive, to function. You’re terrified of being rejected...’

‘Aren’t we all?’ Ellie demanded.

‘No. Some of us realise that you can’t force someone to love you just because you want him to.’

‘Bully for you,’ Ellie muttered mutinously.

Merri stared at her, her eyes uncharacteristically sombre. ‘I don’t think I ever realised until this moment how much your father’s lack of attention and Darryl’s scumbag antics scarred you.’

Ellie wanted to protest that she wasn’t scarred, that she was just being careful, but she knew it wasn’t true. She’d suspected for a long time that she was emotionally damaged, and Merri’s words just confirmed what she’d always thought.

So maybe it was better that she and Jack kept their distance, kept the status quo.

‘Can we talk about something else? Molly Blue? Is she teething yet?’

Merri grinned at her. ‘No, I don’t want to talk about my baby.’

She’d been talking about Molly for six months straight and she didn’t want to talk about her now? How unfair, Ellie thought.

‘I still want to talk about you. Let’s talk about your inability to say no...’

Ellie, past the point of patience, threw an egg at her.

* * *

Ellie rolled over and looked, wide-eyed, at the luminous hands of her bedside clock. It was twelve-seventeen and she wasn’t even close to sleep. Throwing off her sheet, she cocked her head as she heard footsteps going down the stairs.

It seemed she wasn’t the only person who was awake.

Ellie pulled a thigh-length T-shirt over her skimpy tank. It skimmed the hem of her sleeping shorts. Deciding against shoes, she flipped her thick plait over her shoulder, left the room and walked down the darkened stairs. She knew where he’d be: standing on the front veranda, looking out to the moonlit sea.

He wasn’t. He was sitting on one of the chairs, dressed in running shorts and pulling on his trainers. Ellie hesitated at the front door and took a moment to watch him, looking hard and tough, as he quickly tied the laces in his shoes. It was after midnight—why was he going for a run? It made no sense...

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, stepping through the open door.

Jack snapped his head up to look at her and she caught the tension in his eyes. ‘Can’t sleep.’

‘So you’re going for a run?’

Jack shrugged. ‘It’s better than lying awake looking at the ceiling.’

Ellie folded her arms and looked at the top of his head. For the past four days he’d been quiet, and tonight at dinner he’d said little, after which he’d excused himself as usual to do some work. Despite hoping that he’d come back downstairs, she hadn’t seen him since he’d left the table.

Jack stood up and started to stretch, and Ellie wondered if this was Jack’s way of expelling stress and tension. She might indulge in a good crying jag but he went running. Maybe, just maybe, she could get him to try talking for a change.

She crossed her arms as she stepped outside, then walked up to him and nudged him with her shoulder.

‘Why don’t you talk to me instead of hitting the streets?’

‘Uh—’

‘C’mon.’ Ellie boosted herself up on the stone wall so that she faced Jack, her back to the sea. ‘What’s going on, Jack? Has something happened?’

Jack placed his arm behind his head to stretch out his arms and Ellie noticed his chest muscles rippling, his six-pack contracting, that nasty scar lifting. She forced herself to take her mind off his body and concentrate on his words.

‘Nothing’s happened...’

Dammit, he simply wasn’t going to open up. Ellie felt a spurt of hurt and disappointment and hopped off the wall. ‘Okay, Jack, don’t talk to me. But don’t treat me like an idiot by telling me that nothing happened!’

Ellie headed for the front door and was stopped by Jack’s strong arm around her stomach.

‘Geez, Ellie. Cool your jets, would you?’

Ellie whirled around, put her hands on his chest and shoved. Her efforts had no impact on him at all. ‘Dammit, I just want you to talk to me!’

‘If you gave me two seconds to finish my sentence then you’d realise that I am trying to talk to you!’ Jack dropped his arms and pointed to the Morris chair. ‘Sit.’

Ellie sat and pulled her feet up to tuck them under her, her expression mutinous. She’d give him one more chance, but if he tried to fob her off with ‘nothing happened’ again she’d shove him off the wall.

Jack sat on the edge of the wall. ‘Kenya was a fairly routine trip in that nothing
unusual
happened. I hit the streets, found my contacts, got some intel, reported. I worked, hung out with the rest of the press corps.’

Ellie pulled a face. ‘Sorry.’

Jack placed his hand behind his ear. ‘What was that?’

Ellie glared at him. ‘You heard me. So if the trip was fairly routine, then what’s bugging you?’

‘Exactly that...the fact that the trip felt so routine. Unexciting, flat.’

Ellie scratched her forehead. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

‘I’m not sure if I understand either. There are certain reasons I do what I do. Why I do it. I need the adrenalin. I need to feel like I’m living life at full throttle.’ Jack must have seen the question on her face because he shook his head. ‘Maybe some day I’ll tell you why but not now. Not tonight.’

Not ready yet. She could respect that. ‘Okay, so you need the thrill, the buzz of danger...’

‘Not necessarily danger—okay, I like the danger factor too—but in places or situations like that there’s always a buzz, an energy that is so tangible you can almost reach out and taste it. I feed on that energy.’

‘And there wasn’t any this time?’

Jack closed his eyes. ‘Oh, there was—apparently. Everyone I spoke to said that there was something in the air, a sense that the place was on a knife edge, that violence was a hair’s breadth away. The journalists were buzzing on the atmosphere and I didn’t pick up a damn thing. I couldn’t feel it. I felt like I was just going through the motions.’

‘Oh.’

‘There are different types of war correspondent. There are the idealists—the ones who want to make a difference. There are the ones who, sadly, feed off the violence, the brutality. There are others who use it to hide from life.’ Jack scrubbed his hands over his face. ‘I report. Full-stop. Right from the beginning I knew that it wasn’t my job to save the world. That my job was to relay the facts, not to get involved with the emotion. I have always been super-objective. I don’t particularly like making judgement calls, mostly because I can always see both sides of the story. Nobody is ever one hundred per cent right. But I always—
always!—
have been the first to pick up the mood on the street, the energy in the air.’

‘Do you ever take a stand? Get off the fence?’ Ellie asked him after a short silence. ‘Make a judgement call?’

Jack thought about her question for a moment. ‘Personally or professionally?’

‘Either. Both.’

‘When it comes to political ideologies I am for neutrality. Personally, I’ve experienced some stuff...gone through a lot...so when bad things happen I measure it up against what I went through and frequently realise that it’s not worth getting upset about. So I don’t get worked up easily, and because of that I probably don’t get involved on either side of anything either.’

Whoa! Super-complicated man. ‘Okay, so getting back to Kenya...’

‘I made an offhand comment to Mitch about feeling like this and that led to a discussion about me. He said that I’ve become too distant, too unemotional, too hard. He used the word “robotic”.
Am
I robotic, El?’

Ellie stood up, sat on the wall next to him and dropped her head onto his shoulder. ‘I don’t think you are, but to be fair I haven’t seen you in that situation or seen you report for a long time—six months at least.’

‘He also said that I’m desensitised to violence, that I don’t see other people’s pain. That I’m becoming heartless.’

That was rich, coming from her father, Ellie thought, the King of Self-Involvement. Except her father was very good at what he did, so he might have a point. But Ellie didn’t believe that Jack was as callous as he or her father made him out to be. It was more likely that he used his emotional distance as a shield.

‘Is not caring just a way to protect yourself from everything bad you’ve seen?’

Jack shrugged. ‘I have no idea. Mitch said that I’m burnt out, that it’s affecting my reporting, that I’m coming across as hard. He said that I need to get my head in the game, take some time off to fill the well. We had a rip roaring argument...’

‘He sent you home?’

Jack looked rebellious. ‘As much as he likes to think he does, Mitchell doesn’t
send
me anywhere. I left because there wasn’t much more to report on except for rehashing the same story.’ Jack stared at his feet.

‘Is he right?
Are
you burnt out?’ Ellie asked quietly, keeping her temple on his shoulder.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think you need to give yourself a break. You were beaten up in Somalia, stabbed, kicked out of the country. You’ve just come back from a less than cheerful city. When did you last take a proper holiday, relax...counter all the gruesome stuff you’ve witnessed with happy stuff?’

‘Happy stuff?’

‘Lying on a beach, surfing, drinking wine in the afternoon sun. Napping. Reading a book for pleasure and not for research. Um...sleeping late. In other words, a holiday?’

‘Not for a while. Not for a very long time,’ Jack admitted, placing his broad hand on her knee.

‘Thought so. Maybe you should actually do that?’

‘I don’t know how to relax, to take it easy. It’s not in my nature. I like moving, working, exploring. I need to keep moving to feel alive.’

‘Maybe that’s what you’ve conditioned yourself to feel...but it’s not healthy.’ Ellie yawned and reluctantly lifted her head off his arm.

Jack stood up and ran a gentle hand over her hair. ‘Get some sleep, El. There’s no point in us both being exhausted.’

Ellie didn’t think about it. She just stood up, wrapped her arms around his waist and laid her cheek on his bare chest. ‘Don’t beat yourself up, Jack. Mitchell might think he’s always right, but he’s not.’

‘I kind of think he might be this time.’

‘Well, I hope you didn’t tell him that. You’ll never hear the end of it.’ Ellie placed her forehead on his chest and kept one hand on his waist.

Jack stood ramrod-straight and for the longest minute Ellie held her breath, certain that he would push her away. Eventually his arms locked around her back and he buried his face in her hair. Ellie rubbed her hands over his back, met his miserable eyes and ran her hand across his forehead, down his cheek to his chest. Her hands dropped, brushed the waistband of his shorts, and she felt tension—suddenly sexual—skitter through his body. She moved her hands to put them on his hips and felt his swift intake of air.

‘I missed you,’ he said, his voice gruff.

‘I missed you too.’

Jack closed his eyes and his arms tightened and his lower body jumped in reaction to her words. She could feel his heat and response through her light cotton shirt and sleeping shorts and she wanted him...

She didn’t want to want him. She couldn’t afford to want him.

She forced herself to say the words. ‘I need to go to bed, Jack.’

Jack immediately released her and she suddenly felt colder without his heat.

‘Go on up. I’m going for a run.’

Ellie nodded. ‘Thanks, by the way.’

One eyebrow rose. ‘For...?’

‘Talking to me. I thought you were mad at me, so it was a bit of a relief. Sorry I jumped to the wrong conclusion in the beginning.’

Jack sent her a small grin. ‘Next time you jump to conclusions I won’t give you a second chance.’

Ellie patted his chest. ‘Yes, you will.’

‘I’m afraid you’re probably right,’ Jack said softly, and jogged down the stairs.

* * *

The night was warm and the streets were deserted, and the sea was his only companion as he ran along the promenade, his feet slapping against the pavement. Sweat ran down his temples and down his spine into the waistband of his shorts. His body felt fluid but his mind was a mess.

God, it felt good to run. Apart from the fact that it kept his heart working properly, it was easier to think when he was running.