The Wedding Date (21 page)

Nobody had dared mention her name when he’d stormed into the office Tuesday morning with the news that she no longer worked for Knight Productions and made it clear that was the end of that.

‘She did a great job of organising the trip,’ Spencer finished.

Then he snapped his mouth shut, as though he’d just realised he’d said something wrong but wasn’t sure what it might be.

Spencer’s mobile beeped, and he grabbed the thing as if it was a lifeline. ‘It’s the airport. I’m going to find somewhere quiet to take this.’

You do that,
Bradley thought, his gaze winging back to the busker, only to find he was packing up. His disappointment was tangible.

‘She hasn’t found another job yet.’

Bradley flinched, his eyes sliding to the annoying sound. Sonja. He’d forgotten she was even at the table.

‘Hannah,’ Sonja said, in case he hadn’t cottoned on. In case Hannah wasn’t all he’d been thinking about while listening to the busker play.

Remembering the amazing light in her eyes as together they’d belted out that song.

Reliving the light so bright it had been almost stellar when she’d looked him in the eye and told him that she was in love with him.

Recoiling from the darkness in her eyes as she’d stormed out of their hotel room and told him to be gone by the time she got back.

‘She’s had offers, of course,’ Sonja continued. ‘They’re pouring in every day. But instead she’s
remaining locked in her room, doing goodness knows what on her computer.’

He glared at Sonja.

‘What happened in Tasmania?’ she asked.

He gritted his teeth. What had happened in Tasmania had been meant to stay in Tasmania. Yet he felt as if he was carrying every minute of it on his shoulders like a beast of burden.

‘She hasn’t said a word,’ Sonja said. ‘She came home looking like she’d been hit by a bus. In fact she looks about as delighted with life as you do right about now.’

Bradley said nothing. Just stewed as the angry knot inside his gut got bigger and bigger.

‘Fine,’ Sonja said, throwing her hands in the air. ‘You can both be stubborn and refuse to talk to me about it. But since I’m living with her, and working for you, you
have
to talk to each other before you both drive me out of my mind with all your moping. So, whatever it is that you did to made her leave, go and apologise.
Now.
And save us all from all this drama.’

He shot her a sharp glance. ‘What makes you think her leaving had anything to do with me?’

Sonja looked at him as if that was the most idiotic thing she’d ever heard in her entire life.

And the worst of it was she was right. It had everything to do with him. If he hadn’t followed her, seduced her, then cast her away, she’d have
come back from her holiday refreshed and ready to get back to work.

Why couldn’t he have left well enough alone? If he had she’d be sitting there now, laughing with him, picking holes in his ideas, giving brightness to a day which now felt dull as dishwater.

He’d still be suffocating his attraction to her deep down inside, where it could do no harm. He’d never have known that there was someone out there who found it possible to love him. Happy days!

He shoved his dark sunglasses tight onto his nose and pushed back his chair so hard it scraped painfully on the concrete. ‘I’m going to walk back to the office.’ He threw the company credit card on the table. ‘Look after it.’

Sonja nodded, concern etched all over her face.

‘Tell Spencer I’ll be back … later.’

He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket and took off down the street, heading he knew not where. Not a soul stopped him along the way for a chat or an autograph. He must have looked as approachable as a rabid dog.

Away from the glare of his staff, he let his mind go where it had been wanting to go all day.

Hannah.

Wham. Slam. Bam.
He rubbed his fist over
the spot on his chest that still ached days since he’d last exerted himself.

Losing her had put the whole office off kilter all week. She was the one who’d kept such a high-pressure environment fun. The one who’d meant staff turnover was at an all time low. The one whose work ethic had given him the room to just create, meaning he’d come up with the best ideas of his life.

Still, he’d run Knight Productions for years before she came along. The business had such momentum it would survive her loss. Intellectually he knew it would work out in the end.

Knowing it didn’t stop him from missing her thoroughness. Missing the confidence with which she charmed his colleagues over the phone. The way she always had a coffee at his fingertips right when he needed one. The way she finished his thoughts.

He missed her feet on his office desk. The pen constantly behind her ear or clacking mani-cally against her teeth. Her biting sense of humour. Her laugh. Her smile. Her mouth …

Hell.

He missed her taste. Her skin. Her fingers playing with the back of his hair. The soft flesh at her waist. The way his teeth sank into the delicious slope of her shoulder. Waking up with her warm body tucked so neatly into his.

Dammit. He missed
her.

And as he walked up the bustling sidewalk the feelings he’d kept buried for so long refused to be smothered any longer. They pummelled at him until he felt every one in every bruised muscle. His feelings for her were so sweet, so foreign, so consuming, so deep, he knew there was only one answer.

He’d fallen in love for the first time in his life.

He loved her. He
loved
Hannah.

Of course he loved her! How could anyone not? He’d have to be pure rock not to love her lightness, her sense of fun, her kindness, her conscientiousness, and especially—most astonishingly, most unfathomably—the way she loved him back.

That was the truth. The candid, straight up, no embellishment truth.

But it didn’t matter.

It would never have lasted. It was far kinder—to both of them—to cut it off before it had barely begun.

Who says?
an insistent voice barked in his ear. He turned to find the source, only to find nobody was paying him any heed.

It’s a fact,
he continued to himself.
People are inherently self-serving. Relationships never last. They blaze to life and subsist on drama
and eventually fade under their own lack of steam.

She was right. Your relationships have never lasted because you sabotaged them before they had a chance to prove you right. Or prove you wrong.

Bradley felt his footsteps slowing as the other truths he’d always known to be firm began to wobble and crack. It hurt like hell, but he stood there and let it.

She left,
he said to the voice he now knew was in his head.

You pushed her away. But she fought back. As long and hard as she could. Because she believed you were worth it. Your friendship was worth it. Your love was worth it. But any relationship has to go two ways, and you never fought for her. She couldn’t leave you. You’d already quit.

His feet came to a halt. The Brunswick Street crowd spilled around him, muttering none too quietly for him to get the hell out of their way. But, considering the dressing down he’d been giving himself, it was water off a duck’s back.

He’d quit her. Right when she’d needed him most. Right when she’d gathered up every ounce of strength and come to him, with her heart, her soul, her trust, her love in her hands, he’d decided it was too hard.

Yet being without Hannah was harder. Way harder.

It hit him like a sucker punch. It wasn’t drama he’d been avoiding his entire adult life, it was rejection. The infernal emptiness that came of loving someone who didn’t love you back. For a man who thrived on pushing himself to his physical limits, who relished any and every challenge life threw his way, when it came to relationships he’d been an absolute coward.

No more. Not this time.

He breathed in a lungful of cold Melbourne air. He could smell car fumes, baklava from a nearby Greek bakery, and best of all the thrilling hint that the greatest challenge of his life was just around the corner.

There was only one way he was ever going to know for sure.

He looked up, figured out where he was, spun on his heel and headed off with a clear destination in mind.

There was a knock at Hannah’s door. She opened her mouth to ask Sonja to get it, then remembered it was the middle of the afternoon and Sonja would be at work.

She hitched up her PJ bottoms and rearranged her oversized jumper, and let her Ugg boots lead her to the door. She dragged it open to find—

‘Bradley?’

Leather jacket. Jeans. Smelling of soap. And winter air. And that yumminess that was purely
him.
Her heart gave a sorry thump. She forced it to limp back to where it belonged, in a crushed and mangled mess, deep in her chest cavity.

‘We need to talk,’ he said.

‘Do we, now?’

The fact that he’d used the words she feared had been the beginning of the end a few days before would have been funny if she could remember how to laugh.

‘Send me an e-mail,’ she said, swinging the door shut in his face.

He stopped it with a determined hand. ‘I don’t know your new one.’

‘Right.’ Of course. Her old work email had clearly been deleted the same time she had. With a half-hearted wave she said, ‘Then you better come in.’

She left the door open and moved to the couch, where she fell back into the over-soft cushions. She picked up a piece of cold pizza from a box on the coffee table and bit into it, as if that was far more interesting than anything he had to say.

While the sad truth was the second she’d seen his face her whole body had begun to thrum in anticipation.

‘How old is that thing?’ he asked, sniffing in the direction of the pizza box.

She shrugged. ‘It wasn’t in the fridge before I left for Tasmania, so not that old. What are you doing here, Bradley? If you’re here to ask me to come back to work—’

‘I’m not.’

‘Oh.’ Her stomach landed somewhere in the region of her knees. Maybe he was here to kick her in the shins a few times, just in case she didn’t feel rotten enough.

He moved to look at a row of knick-knacks on the shelf over the fake fireplace. ‘Unless you’d like to come back?’

‘No.’ She realised she’d said it overly loud, so softened it with a ‘thank you’.

He nodded. ‘You might like to know things are in disarray without you there.’

‘You’ll survive.’

‘I know.’ A pause, then, ‘Sonja says you’ve been keeping busy. On your computer.’

She had. And she had a sudden need to tell him what she’d been working on. Maybe as a first step to dragging herself back into the light from the dark corner in which she’d hidden herself. ‘I’m going to start my own production company. I’m thinking small to start with. Home-town documentaries. I think I’d have a flair for getting that kind of thing done, and done well.’

He finally turned to her, and she was dead surprised to see a flicker of something that seemed a heck of a lot like respect gleaming in his dark grey eyes.

It gave her courage. She put down her pizza and sat forward on the chair. ‘So, if you’re not here to beg me to come back, why
are
you here?’

He looked at the spare chair, then, sensibly deciding he’d likely break the silly little thing Sonja favoured, paced instead. ‘I was hoping you might give me a chance to say some things. Things I probably should have said a few days ago.’

Heat began in the region of her toes and flowed clean to her scalp. She stood and paced herself. She didn’t want to do this again. Couldn’t. She could kick him out. She could …

But she needed closure on this thing if she was really going to be able to move forward. To begin her life anew. ‘Fine. Go for your life. Talk.’

He looked at her a few long moments.

She tried to steady her heart again, but found she could not. He’d hurt her, but she loved him. Likely would for a long, long time. Unlikely she’d ever love anyone as deeply.

Then he shook out his hands as if they were filled with pins and needles. He was anxious. Skittish, even. She could only watch in
amazement as the great Bradley Knight was reduced to a bundle of nerves in her lounge room.

It was with a strange sense of anticipation that she couldn’t comprehend that she crossed her arms and waited for Bradley to say what he’d come to say.

‘Okay, so here we go. I’ve been an independent man for a very long time. I like that I get to choose what I do on a Sunday morning. I like that I have control over the remote. I like things to go my way.’

Big shock!
Hannah thought, but she just sat on the arm of the couch and let him talk. The sooner he said whatever he’d come to say the sooner he’d be gone and she could drown herself in a bottle of wine.

‘While you …’ he said, waving a hand in the air as though hoping to pluck out the words. ‘You’re a smartass, and your family is like a walking soap opera. You’re a disrupting influence.’

She blinked at him, not at all following where he was going. ‘Fair enough. But I’d ask you to be so kind as to not put that on a recommendation letter in the future.’

He glanced at her, a first sign of humour in his eyes. She bit her lip.

‘I’m trying to say you’ve been an unexpected force in my life.’

‘I have?’

‘From the day you landed in my office till the day we landed in Tasmania I never saw you coming. And it’s on that subject that I need to ask you a favour.’

Her voice cracked as she asked, ‘Which is?’

‘That we leave what happened in Tasmania in Tasmania.’

His words ought to have felt like a slap upon a slap, but the sincerity in his voice, the uncertainty in his eyes, gave her pause.

‘I thought that was what you’d already done.’

‘I don’t mean what happened between us there. I was a fool to think that walking away could ever be that simple.’

She breathed out slowly between pursed lips, willing herself not to get ahead of herself. ‘Okay.’

‘I mean that last day. The way I acted. The things I said. The things I didn’t say. When you told me that you loved me …’