‘Yet, apparently, this paragon is still not worthy. Except for a bit of wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.’
‘You’re the best person I know,’ he muttered.
Oh, please...
‘You just defiled the best person you know. I’d hate to see how you treat everyone else.’
She pushed her half-finished coffee away and stumbled to her feet. Correction, half-drunk but most definitely finished.
Like this relationship.
‘This is what’s going to happen now,’ she began, working hard to keep the thick clag of pain from her voice. ‘You are going to call your car around and tell him to take me to the airport. We will drop you back at your hotel on the way and all of this will be a surreal memory by morning.’
She omitted the part about her crying all the way back to Australia and never having another relationship again in her life. That didn’t seem conducive to a dignified exit.
‘I’m coming to the airport...’
She stopped and glared at him. ‘Because this isn’t hard enough?’
‘Because it’s over for me, then, too. I need to see you walking away.’
‘Why, Oliver? Why not just let me go? Do the right thing.’
‘I’m already doing the right thing. One day I hope you’ll believe that.’
She knew she could hold it all together back to the harbour, but could she do it all the way over to Lantau? And then waiting for her flight to board?
She turned from him and walked towards the stairs, not even sure she could hold it together as far as the top tread. Behind her, he murmured into his phone, and as her foot touched the last flight, the limo pulled up outside the charming old building.
She crawled in without a word.
Oliver followed.
They sat as far apart as the spacious back seat would allow.
All the way back to Central Hong Kong Audrey peered out of the window at the complicated mix of green, verdant hills and dense, crowded, multicultural residential areas. Chances were good she’d be back in Hong Kong on a future instrument hunt but she knew she’d only ever have flying visits. This was no longer a place of pleasure.
It was now wrecked.
She swallowed past the thick lump resident in her throat.
As they approached the Western Harbour tunnel over to Kowloon and Mainland China she glanced east and saw the same junk they’d breakfasted on puttering between bigger vessels in the busy harbour, her sails ablaze. Filled with other people who would imagine it as
their
special thing. Only to discover it wasn’t special at all.
Just like this whole experience.
Perhaps she’d projected too much of her own feelings onto Oliver. Perhaps she’d been foolish to indulge them after they’d come back down to the restaurant.
She’d
reignited things between them then, not him. She had to own that. She’d thought she was capable of handling a one-night stand but that was when it was
circumstance
keeping them apart, not some ill-defined deficiency on her part.
Whatever it was that meant Oliver couldn’t imagine himself loving her as much as she—
Across the car, he seemed to flinch as though he could hear her thoughts and knew what was going to come next.
—loved him.
Her stomach plunged and she blamed the tunnel that sank deeper under Victoria Harbour. There really was no question: she’d adored Oliver Harmer for years. The only mystery was when, exactly, it had graduated into love. Her body had recognised it in the wee hours of this morning, when his hands were in her hair and he was buried deep in her and his eyes blazed up at her in a way that was so close to
worship...
She didn’t have any experience in what love looked like but she’d felt so certain that it looked just like that. That moment where her soul and his connected. Her subconscious had named it even if she hadn’t.
But what would she know?
Maybe he always looked like that when he came?
What if she was exactly as ill equipped to be with a man like Oliver as she’d always feared? What if the whole night had just been one big try-hard exercise on her part and he was just trying to extract himself from an uncomfortable situation?
What if she’d overreached after all?
The tears she’d done such a good job of holding back refused to let that last thought go unanswered. They spilled silently over her lids, along her lashes and then down her cheeks. She let them run, only the tunnel walls to witness.
But the spill became a river and the river a trembling torrent, and as they surfaced out of the tunnel and merged onto Highway 5 she couldn’t disguise what was happening any longer.
‘Audrey—’
Her hand shot up in warning to him as her body doubled over at the combined pain of his rejection and the humiliation of this moment. Only the glass of her window stopped her from crumpling right over and she pressed her forehead against its cool reassurance.
The minute strength she had left was in her silence and so she still didn’t give the slightest voice to the sorrow.
‘Audrey...’
No. Not compassion, not from Oliver. She struggled against him when he moved closer and slid one arm around her shoulders, but her pathetic resistance was no match for his gentle strength.
‘Shh...’
He pulled her against his chest, into his arms and just held her. No platitudes. No promises. No lies. Just silent compassion.
And that made it all so much worse.
She was losing the man she loved and her best friend all at the same time.
The last of her resilience gave way on a hoarse, horrible sob and she buried her shame into his chest. She cried as they passed Stonecutter’s Island. She cried as they crossed onto Tsing Yi. She cried as they rose on a suspension bridge high above the water and breached the two-kilometre ocean passage to Lantau. She cried right past the turnoff to the most magical theme park in China and she cried the full length of Highway 8.
And the whole time, Oliver just stroked her hair, fed her tissues and held her.
For the last time, ever.
A voice crackled on the intercom and she recognised the name of Hong Kong’s primary airport. That and the interrupting voice was enough to lurch her up out of Oliver’s gentle hold and back to her far corner where she pressed a series of fresh, folded tissues to her stinging, swollen eyes.
And still Oliver didn’t speak.
What was there to say?
She’d just melted down on him for the second time in twenty-four hours. He’d already said he didn’t know what to do with her when she was like this. And Hong Kong’s traffic meant it was a long ride with a hysterical woman.
Tough luck, buddy. This one’s all on you.
This was his decision. This was his issue.
‘I don’t want you to come in,’ she gritted between pats. ‘At the airport.’
‘I need to see you to your gate.’
To make sure she actually left? She half turned her head to beg him, ‘And I’m asking you to do what
I
need, not what
you
need.’
His silent stare bored into the back of her head. ‘Okay, Audrey.’
‘Thank you.’
The limo negotiated the tangle of taxis, buses and private cars clogging the airport’s approach until it began moving up the causeway. That seemed to press Oliver into action at last.
‘Don’t you think it would be easier for me to just go with the flow,’ he bit out. ‘To just say “see you in Sydney” and to swing by when I’m in town for a hot hook-up? I didn’t want to be that man.’
That brought Audrey’s gaze back around to his. ‘Should I applaud?’
‘I’d like you to understand. My motives if not my reasons.’
‘You’re avoiding commitment. Seems patently clear.’
He exhaled on a hiss. ‘I’m avoiding—’ He cut his own words off. ‘I didn’t want to hurt you, Audrey. I
don’t
want to. I’m sorry, but, as bad as we both feel, ultimately it will be better this way.’
‘You have nothing to apologise for, Oliver. You’ve lived up to your reputation and given me a night I will never forget. For so many reasons.’ Her smile was tight. ‘I get it, I really do.’
‘Do you?’
‘I’m going to go back to Sydney, throw myself into my work and concentrate on low-hanging fruit from now on.’ That was a lie, she wasn’t going to be interested in fruit of any kind for a long, long time.
‘Audrey, don’t do that to yourself. This is about me, not you.’
He seemed to wince at the triteness of his own words.
‘You’re right. This is about you and your inability to let go of the past. This is about you being so afraid that you’ll end up like your father you’re avoiding any kind of commitment at all. You dress it up in chivalry and concern for me, but, let’s be honest, this is all about you.’
His eyes grew as hard as his clenched jaw.
The limo pulled up to the concourse and Audrey had her door open practically before it had stopped. Oliver leapt out after her as the driver came around to the rear for her case.
‘I’ve held a candle for you since I met you, Oliver. You were everything that I wanted and believed I didn’t deserve. You came to be symbolic in my life of my own deficiencies and I wore them like a badge of shame.
‘But you know what? I
don’t
deserve the man you are. You are the one that doesn’t measure up, Oliver Harmer. You are so fixated on not being the serial cheat your father was, you can’t see that you’ve become exactly like him, ravaging from woman to woman spreading the misery around.
‘Well, I’m done doubting myself.’ She poked his chest. ‘I’m awesome. And clever. And pretty. And loyal.’ Every poke an accusation. ‘And the best friend a person could have. I would have been fierce and proud by your side and someone you could face life with, head-on. But that honour is going to go to someone else and I’m not going to be able to find him while you’re still in my life.’
She let her expressive hands drop by her sides. As dead as she felt. ‘So this is it, Oliver. After eight years. No more card games, no more conversations, no more long, lazy lunches that you can cling to in lieu of a real relationship with a real woman.’ Her shoulders shuddered up and then dropped. ‘No more Christmas. If I’m not in your life then I’m out of it. You don’t get to have it both ways.’ She settled her bag more firmly between them. ‘Please don’t email me. Or call. Don’t send me a birthday card. Don’t invite me to your wedding with whichever Tiffany you find next.’
Fortunately, she’d used up all her tears coming across the causeway. Oliver wasn’t so lucky and the glitter of those hazel eyes just about broke her heart anew.
Audrey swung her bag around, smiled her thanks to the driver trying so very hard not to listen, and then forced her eyes back onto Oliver before whispering tightly, ‘But I
beg
you not to settle for a loveless life. That is not what your mother sacrificed her life to teach you.’
And then she turned and he was gone from her vision.
From her life.
But never, ever, ever from her heart.
THIRTEEN
December 20th, this year
The perfect, practised
English washed over him as Oliver stared out across Victoria Harbour at the building that housed Qīngtíng and the penthouse at its very top, absently rolling an uncut cigar between his fingers. He had no trouble picking the restaurant out; he’d grown proficient at spotting it from any of Kowloon’s major business centres courtesy of his hours of distracted staring.
Even with his lawyer and partner here, he should have been attending. This deal was too important to insult with his inattention the very people he wanted to buy out. But the fact they were speaking in English instead of requiring him to negotiate in Mandarin meant they were already deferring. And that meant they had already decided to sell.
The rest was just a dance.
Meaning his attention was that much freer to wander across the harbour and up sixty storeys of steel.
His brain made him schedule a day full of Hong Kong meetings today, the twentieth, but his heart insisted they be here, in Kowloon, in full view of Qīngtíng across the harbour. As if he’d somehow know if a miracle occurred and Audrey turned up. As if his eyes would make her out, standing, arms folded around herself, against that wall of window. A distant speck against a sea of silver and chrome.
A point of business required him to refocus, but the moment it was addressed he let his gaze wander back to the restaurant, let his mind wander back to last Christmas. That extraordinary, dreamlike twenty-four hours.
He’d been as good as his word and never contacted Audrey again. No emails, no phone calls, no letters, no messages. Well, not the sort she’d warned him against, anyway. He always had a talent for loopholes.
But it had been purgatory this past year. What a fool he’d been to imagine he could just go back to his life in Shanghai and work her out of his system and get by on a steady diet of memories. He’d had to work at it—really freaking work—just to get through those first weeks. Then months. Then seasons.
And now the year had passed and the moment he’d dreaded was here.
The moment Audrey
didn’t
come to Christmas.
Again.
She’d hit him with some home truths that day at the airport. Hard, overdue, unpleasant words that he’d promptly blocked out. It took him weeks to begin to digest them. First he’d used his anger to justify letting her leave. Then he rationalised and remembered how much pain she’d been in and how much courage it must have taken to stand there and let him have it with both barrels.
And finally he saw the sense of her words and, as if letting the words in made them material, he suddenly saw evidence of her truth everywhere he went. Getting in his face.
Mocking him.
His failure to form successful relationships
was
all about him. And he
had
used his friendship with Blake as a protective screen from behind which he indulged his feelings without having to own them.
And once the denial started to drop he saw more and more. How he’d lied to himself all this time believing it was his high standards that made it impossible for him to connect to just one woman. Hardly surprising he could never find her when that was the last thing his subconscious wanted.
He was no more honest with himself about why it didn’t work out than he was with them.
But that was not the sort of epiphany a man could simply
un
see. So he began dating again, testing the theory, testing himself, hunting for someone who could offer him the same soul-connection that Audrey had offered that night in the chair. That she’d been offering him for years. Hungry to find what he’d had a taste of.
And it just wasn’t there.
Even though—this time—he was genuinely open to finding it. And being unable to find someone as good as Audrey didn’t get any more comfortable for being in the cold light of reason.
At least, before, he’d had all his denial to keep him company.
And so he’d thrown a lifebuoy out, courtesy of a favour someone owed him, and just hoped to heaven that Audrey was in a perceptive mood when the unsigned Christmas parcel was delivered last week. And receptive. Or even rabidly furious, as long as it was an emotion strong enough to bring her back to Hong Kong.
Back to the restaurant.
Back to him.
Because he had an apology to deliver. And a friendship to try and save. And possibly a fragile, wounded spirit to save, too.
Behind him, the massive boardroom doors snicked softly and opened. Jeannie Ling murmured in the ear of the man closest to the door and he nodded then tapped a few keys into his tablet surreptitiously.
Seconds later Oliver’s smartphone vibrated.
He glanced down disinterestedly at the subject line of his partner’s email:
Ph. Msg-urgent
But then his body was up and out of his chair even before his mind had fully registered the words and phone number on the next line, and he was halfway to the door before any of the ridiculously wealthy and overly entitled people in the room realised what was happening.
Pls call Ming-húa
* * *
He hadn’t come.
Audrey stared into the busy, oblivious world of Qīngtíng’s dragonflies and cursed herself for the ideological fool she was.
Of course he hadn’t come. He’d moved on. The online gossip sheets made that patently clear. In fact he’d probably moved on by last Christmas. Whatever they’d shared here in Hong Kong was ancient history. Solstice fever. Even the restaurant had gone back to being what it was. Just a place you went to eat food.
She glanced over towards the restaurant’s festively decorated glass wall. The smoking chair was no longer resident.
Their
chair.
Hastily removed as a bad memory, probably. Or quite possibly a hygiene issue.
Heat flooded her cheeks but the dragonflies didn’t much care. They went about their business, zipping around, feeding and frolicking and dipping their many feet in the crystalline water that circulated through their beautiful, make-believe world. Only a single individual battered against the corner of the terrarium, repeatedly. Uselessly.
She knew exactly how it felt.
Most of what she’d done this past year was useless battering. Existing, but not really living. Punctuated by insane bouts of emotional self-harm whenever her discipline failed her and she’d do the whole stalker number online and search out any clues about Oliver.
What he was up to.
Who
he was up to. Whether he was okay.
Of course, he always was.
On her weak days, she imagined that Oliver never contacting her again was him honouring her request, respecting her, and she’d get all sore and squishy inside and struggle with the reality that it was over. But on her stronger days she’d accept the reality—that not contacting her was probably a blessed relief for a man like The Hammer and that there was nothing to really
be
over.
Nothing had even started.
If you didn’t count the wild sex.
She’d vacillate between bouts of self-judgement for her stupidity, and fierce self-defence that she’d fallen for a man like him, convincing herself that it was possible for someone to be a pretty good
guy
without necessarily managing to always be a good
person
.
Except that, like it or not, he’d been more than pretty good. Oliver was exceptional. In so many ways. And knowing that only made his inability to love her all the more brutal.
What the hell was she thinking coming here? She could have done what she needed to do by email.
Almost as she had the thought, a flurry of low voices drew her focus, through the terrarium, past the dragonflies, over to the restaurant’s glamorous entrance.
To the man who’d just burst in.
Oliver.
Her whole body locked up and she mentally scrabbled around for somewhere to hide. Under her sofa. In the lush terrarium planting with the dragonflies. Anywhere other than here, with the terrified-bunny look on her face, peering at him through the glass like the coward she wanted so badly not to be.
It took his laser-focus only a heartbeat to find her.
His legs started moving. His eyes remained locked on hers as he powered around the outside of the terrarium and stopped just a metre away. His intent gaze whispered her name even though no air crossed his lips.
‘Explain,’ she gasped aloud, before she did something more ill-advised.
Not,
‘Hello Oliver,’
not,
‘How dare you look so good
after such a crap year?’
; not even,
‘Why are you here?’
All much more pressing issues.
‘Explain what?’ he said, infuriating in his calmness. As if this weren’t the biggest deal ever.
‘Why my Testore trail leads to you.’
His steady eyes didn’t waver. ‘Does it?’
‘Why the instrument I’ve been slowly working my way towards for two years suddenly turns up in a luggage locker at Hongqiao train station.’
He stepped one pace closer. ‘Asia’s biggest train station. I imagine that’s not the only secret it’s harbouring.’
Both arms folded across her chest. ‘Shanghai, Oliver.’
‘Coincidence.’
‘What did you do?’ Every word a bullet.
He studied the dragonflies for distracted moments and when he brought his eyes back to hers they were defiant. ‘I made a few phone calls. Called in a few favours.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s not like I donated a kidney.’
She peered at him through narrowed eyes. ‘You just happened to be owed a favour by the exact someone who knew where the Testore was?’
He sized her up, as if trying to determine how far he could take the nonchalance. ‘Look...I called in a marker with a colleague, they called one in from someone else and it reverse dominoed all the way up to someone who knew the right people to ask.’
‘And then what?’
‘Then I bought it.’
‘A million-dollar instrument?’
‘Can you put a price on a trafficked child?’
Ha ha.
‘You realise you’re an accessory to a crime, now?’
His eyes grew uncertain for the first time since he’d walked in the door and he frowned. ‘I hoped I’d get bonus points for repatriating it.’
But she wasn’t ready to give him those points yet. ‘You perpetuated the problem by rewarding the syndicate for their crime. Now they’ll go out and steal another cello.’
‘Is that really what’s bothering you, Audrey? Wasn’t it more important to get the cello back into safe hands than to arrest whatever mid-level thug with a drug-debt they’d have made take the fall?’
Did
it matter how the Testore was recovered or what favours were exchanged and promises made? Or did it only matter that its rightful owner literally broke down and sobbed when it was returned to her, triggering Audrey’s own tears—tears she’d thought she’d used completely up?
Maybe it only mattered that Oliver had cared enough to try.
‘What’s bothering me is why you did it.’ And by ‘bother’ she meant ‘making my chest ache’.
‘Because I could.’ He shrugged. ‘I have connections that you would never have had access to.’
‘A million dollars, Oliver.’ Plus some change. ‘Excessive, even for you.’
‘Not if it helped you out.’
Blinking didn’t make the words any easier to comprehend—or believe—but this was not the time to let subtext get the better of her. ‘I’m amazed that you have any fortune at all if you make such emotionally based decisions.’
‘I don’t, generally. Only with you.’
‘Did you think I wouldn’t figure it out?’ That an anonymous key in a Christmas parcel leading her to a Shanghai train station wouldn’t be clue enough?
‘I knew you would.’
‘So did you think I’d gush with gratitude?’
‘On the contrary. I hoped it might piss you off enough to get on a plane.’
Manipulated again. By the master. She shook her head. ‘Well, here I am. Hope you don’t want your million bucks back.’
‘Forget the money, Audrey. I sold one of my company’s nine executive apartments to raise the cash. It had only been used twice last year.’
The world he lived in.
‘What if I’d just taken the cello and run?’
That resulted in insta-frown. ‘Then I’d have been no worse off.’
Ugh. ‘This was a mistake.’
‘Audrey—’ his voice suspended her flight after only two steps ‘—wait.’
She ignored his command. ‘Thank you for doing my job for me. I’ll put a good word in with the authorities for you.’
‘You’re leaving?’
‘Yes. I shouldn’t have come at all.’
What she should do was get back onto her ridiculously expensive short-notice flight and head back to her ridiculously expensive Sydney house. Blake’s house that she’d not had the courage or energy to move out of. The house and the life she hated.
He stepped round in front of her. ‘Why did you?’
Because she was slowly dying inside knowing she’d never see him again? Because she’d managed the first six months on pride and adrenaline but now there was nothing left but sorrow. Because she was addicted.
‘No idea,’ she gritted. ‘Let me rectify that right now.’
He sprinted in front of her again. ‘Audrey, wait, please just hear me out.’
‘Didn’t we say enough at the airport?’ she sighed.
‘You said quite a lot but I was pretty much speechless.’
Seriously? He got her back here to have the last word?
‘Ten minutes, Audrey. That’s it.’
It was impossible to be this close to those bottomless hazel eyes and not give him what he was asking. Ten minutes of her time. In return for a million-dollar cello.
She crossed her arms and settled into the carpet more firmly. ‘Fine. Clock’s ticking.’
‘Not here,’ he said, sliding his hand to her lower back and directing her towards the door.
She stopped and lurched free of his hot touch. ‘No. Not upstairs.’ That had way too many memories. Although, reasonably, there were just as many down here.
But at least, here, there was an audience. Chaperones.
What are you afraid of?
he’d once challenged her.
Me or yourself?