His pale eyes lit up and his mouth curved with a feline smile. ‘“What is it you do?” Ah, here we are. Barbershop small talk and the first step to categorisation. Why is that the first thing people want to know? Not, what’s your favourite colour? Not, do you eat small fluffy puppies for breakfast? No, that one simple question, once answered, should tell you all you need to know. If I tell you I’m a lawyer, you’ll have a whole barrage of generalisations at the ready. Same with doctor, dentist or nurse.’ He tilted his head sideways when Amy began shaving with clean strokes down the side of his cheek.
‘So are you gonna tell me or not? I do have a knife to your throat, you know,’ Amy persisted.
‘No, I don’t believe I will. Do your worst. I hear face transplants are a new and exciting field of medical science. You can guess if it’s that important. Or better yet, you can tell me about yourself. I find
you
absolutely fascinating.’
Amy looked up, startled to find him gazing at her with a disconcerting intensity. In an effort to appear nonchalant, she wiped her lather- and whisker-flecked razor on the towel she’d placed over his shoulder. ‘How about I guess, then?’
‘Pardon?’ he murmured through stiff lips as she navigated around his nose. His breath smelled of mint and coffee. Amy felt her hand begin to shake with nerves again. She paused briefly, concentrating on Muddy Waters and the faint sound of female voices coming through the wall dividing barbershop and salon.
‘Guess. I’ll guess what you do,’ she said, meeting Ben’s enquiring glance as she scraped the razor along his jaw line again.
‘Be my guest.’
‘Well.’ Amy stood back and regarded him with a critical eye. He should have looked comical with half his face still covered in shaving foam and the other baby-smooth, but he didn’t; he looked completely at ease, like a tiger who knows it can eat you for dinner but is humouring you by letting you think it’s a big softie.
‘Well . . . you can’t be a lawyer, although I’m guessing you keep them in business.’ She moved around to the other side of the chair and started on his other cheek.
‘True.’ He shrugged unapologetically.
‘You can’t be a doctor or anything to do with medicine. I see enough of those here to tell them on sight. Tilt your head a bit this way. Thanks.’
‘You don’t think I’m intelligent enough?’ He raised an eyebrow and followed her request.
‘No, as rude as you are, you’re not self-absorbed enough. I doubt you’d get a kick out of looking at teeth, so nope, not a dentist. I just can’t see you taking direction, so definitely not a nurse.’ Amy bit the side of her cheek to keep a straight face as he snorted, sending a large clump of lather flying.
‘You’ve got lots of money.’ She tilted his chin and began scraping the last of the whiskers on his neck away with a practised ease.
It was amazing what she could tell about men at this point. Most of them at least swallowed nervously at the prospect of having their throats accidentally cut by a cheerful blonde, but this one looked completely relaxed. In fact, she would swear he was watching
her
expression to see what the whole thing said about her personality.
She swallowed loudly and kept talking. ‘That shiny spaceship car parked out the front is yours, right? I bet you spent a fortune on those clothes you’re wearing too.’
He shrugged. ‘The Aston Martin’s mine. The clothes are moot. I don’t know how much I spent on them; they were bought for me. I hate clothes shopping.’
‘Ah.’ Amy nodded and then swiped the razor down the underside of his chin, deftly clearing away the last of his stubble. ‘How did you get this scar here?’ Without thinking she ran her thumb over a faint white line at least ten centimetres long that ran down his neck from just below his left ear.
‘Skiing accident. How did you get that one on your lip?’
Amy paused, stunned. No one other than Scott and Jo, who’d been there when it had happened, ever commented on the inch-long hairline scar marring the upper left-hand corner of her mouth. The thing was usually invisible with the aid of a bit of artfully applied foundation, concealer and lipstick.
She looked in the mirror to see if she’d botched her make-up that morning, only to find Ben watching her. She forced her mouth to curve into her autopilot cheerful smile.
‘Ah well . . . I’d answer you, but there’s no time left.’ She retrieved a hot damp towel and wiped down his smooth cheeks, before quickly rubbing some aftershave balm over them.
‘Pity,’ Ben replied, waiting for her to untie his cape before standing up.
He wasn’t as tall as she’d first thought, but he was still a head taller than she was. Inexplicably, he made her feel small, which didn’t make sense. She was used to almost everyone being bigger than she was–in the case of her sister and Scott, much bigger, and being around them never left her feeling this way.
‘Yeah. Pity.’ She recovered and took a quick step backwards. ‘Anyway, that’ll be thirty dollars.’ She fully expected him to mention the free shave she’d offered his friend but he didn’t.
‘Hmm.’ He reached into the back pocket on his jeans, retrieved the money out of a Louis Vuitton wallet and handed it to her, his expression thoughtful. ‘I’d like to take you to dinner. Saturday night. What time do you finish work?’
‘What?’ Amy looked at him incredulously.
‘Dinner. Where you put food in your mouth, chew and swallow. Most people do it daily. I’d like to do it with you.’
‘Dinner? Ben. I’m not—’
‘Good. I’ll pick you up here at six,’ he said, apparently deciding that he wasn’t going to get the answer he wanted if he waited for her to finish talking. ‘Wear something . . .’ He gave her a very blatant up-and-down and his mouth twitched at the corner. ‘Wear anything.’
He strode out the door before she could respond, climbed into his spaceship car and pulled out into the traffic.
She was staring out the front window when the door at the rear of the shop opened and Kate walked through and leaned against the doorframe with one hand propped on her hip.
‘Who was
that
?’
‘Ben.’
‘What’d he want coming here? He looked like he was worth a mint.’
‘Dinner,’ Amy replied, cursing herself for once again not getting his last name. Bugger.
Chapter 3
Ben leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head in a languorous stretch and regarded the screen in front of him with a sense of overwhelming satisfaction. The trip to the barbershop, combined with Alex’s little case of being mistaken for a sailor, had produced comedy gold. He’d hammed events up and changed a few facts for entertainment’s sake of course, but that was normal. He was in top form.
He made a mental note to bring a copy for Amy when he saw her for dinner. Or maybe he wouldn’t. At the moment he liked the fact that she had no idea who he was, although she’d more than likely find out soon enough.
He had no doubt that Amy would find his writing just as amusing as the rest of his readership did, who expected witty satire mixed with a bit of the ridiculous with their Saturday morning crumpets and coffee. If his attitude was arrogant, Ben didn’t care. He’d done the hard yards in his youth: stand-up in dingy pubs, writing for any infernal little publication that would pay and taking any job going to get to where he was now. His success had been earned honestly.
Today, he was particularly impressed with himself. Never in the entire history of his varied fifteen-year career as a writer, comedian, broadcaster, scriptwriter and columnist had he ever submitted work
before
a deadline. Incredible and, above all, improbable, which is exactly what his editor Ross would say when he received Ben’s email.
To make matters even more unbelievable, it was before ten in the morning and Ben was awake and out of bed and had been since seven. He’d even managed to get in his daily hour-long swim before sitting down to work. He thought about calling a few of his friends in London to share this momentous achievement, then remembered the seven-hour time difference.
That
made him want to call them even more, but he decided against it at the last minute. As much as they’d all given him hell about his late nights and later mornings over the years, he was feeling far too damn peppy to be vindictive. In fact, he was in a better mood than he had been for months–and he knew the cause.
It appeared he had acquired a muse. An unlikely one with an abominably quirky sense of style and a penchant for holding razors to men’s throats, but a muse nonetheless.
Rain gurgled through the rusty gutters of Amy’s little Fremantle home, pitter patting on her bedroom window. Normally she loved the rain; it reminded her of the nights in her early childhood when she’d cuddled up on the bottom bunk with Jo in the postage stamp-sized bedroom they’d shared, safe in the knowledge that their dad wouldn’t drive to the pub in bad weather. Amy had always slept the best those nights.
By rights she should be sleeping now, but something was stopping her. Well, not something–
someone
. Try as she might, she hadn’t been able to get Ben last-name-still-unknown’s dinner invitation out of her head. More to the point, she couldn’t figure out
why
he’d invited her in the first place.
The man was good looking, rich, educated and, if Scott’s reaction was anything to go by, famous. For the life of her she couldn’t work out what his deal was. She’d analysed every second of his visit to Babyface time and time again and still couldn’t come up with an answer, and that left her feeling wary.
She knew she was attracted to him, in the way that humans look at tigers and think they’re cute until they get their heads bitten off, but what did attraction mean? If her past experience with men had taught her anything, it was that if they looked too good to be true, they were either married, gay or a total bastard. Her first experience having a boyfriend had been a nightmare. Since then, other than Tom Draper her no-show date, Amy had made a point of always sticking to the non-threatening variety of man: men who needed her more than she needed them, who couldn’t harm her emotionally or physically.
That thought led her to the other source of her insomnia, her first disastrous boyfriend, Liam. It was the third week of the month, which meant that he would be home on his monthly rotation from the oil rigs up north. He’d no doubt visit the salon and try his best to scare the pants off her. He’d been doing it since she’d left him nine years before, and it didn’t look like he was going to stop any time soon.
Liam hadn’t laid a hand on her since she was nineteen, but that didn’t stop him from regularly making her life miserable. Usually, he just came to the barber shop and tried to intimidate her. Sometimes, he slipped abusive letters under her front door. The problem was that they both knew Amy couldn’t, or more to the point wouldn’t, do anything about it. If she went to the police and reported him, Jo might find out about it and that was unacceptable: in the early days, Liam had threatened to get Jo fired by spreading a couple of malicious rumours if Amy said anything. At the time, Liam had been Jo’s boss and Amy had fully believed he’d do it.
Years later, Amy knew she’d been naive.
Jo had frequently complained about how much men on the rigs gossiped and Amy knew that any rumour Liam could have spread would have been ignored. She hadn’t known that at nineteen. At the time, she’d been worried about her sister’s career and, much more importantly, her feelings. Jo had introduced Amy to Liam, thinking he was the antithesis of their dad, a good man who’d look after her, treat her well and keep an eye on her while Jo took her first international oil and gas job. Amy had gone along with it because she’d watched Jo protect her for years, taking hits from their dad when they were younger, worrying about how to make everything work financially and emotionally after they’d run away from home. In Amy’s mind it had been her way of giving Jo peace of mind, of giving her something back and setting her free to take her career to the next level.
Having to tell Jo she’d ended the relationship hurt Amy almost as much as it hurt Jo, but it was Jo’s reaction that broke Amy’s heart. Jo had been so upset, couldn’t understand what had gone wrong, so she’d confronted Amy. The year of silence that resulted between them was easier to Amy’s mind than telling her sister the truth about Liam. They’d only made up after Scott locked them in a room and refused to let them out until they’d formed a truce, with the tacit understanding that Amy’s love life was well and truly off-limits in the future.
Jo would be devastated if she discovered that she’d pushed Amy into an abusive relationship, never mind the guilt she’d feel over that awful fight they’d had nine years ago. There was no way Amy would put her sister through that, even today, especially not when Jo had physically put herself on the line so many times in the past to protect Amy, even getting shot two years ago in what had been the beginning of the end as far as Amy and Jo’s relationship with their parents was concerned. Just the memory of what had happened was still horrible.
Jo had been visiting their mum, trying to convince her to leave their dad. Their mum had chosen to stay and Jo had taken a bullet to her thigh when leaving.
It had still taken a little while for the reality of what had happened to sink in, for Amy and Jo to realise that their relationship with their parents couldn’t go on.
Amy had been completely devastated. The pain still hadn’t left her and probably never would but it was preferable to what had been before; Jo always trying to protect her from their dad’s violent outbursts.
The last thing Amy wanted was to see the worried look from their early years back in Jo’s eyes and know she’d put it there. Anything was better than that.
Amy groaned in frustration, pounded her feather pillow into shape and closed her eyes again, but the neon-pink light from her Hello Kitty alarm clock burned through her eyelids.
It was no use. Might as well get up.
She threw herself out of bed and padded into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. The ritual of measuring tea leaves and boiling water calmed her down, as did the sight of the rain beating against her dark kitchen window. She contemplated doing some of the ironing that had been piling up over the week but decided against it. Her wardrobe was high maintenance, but she didn’t mind. Her clothes were so much a part of the persona she’d created more than ten years before, she couldn’t imagine not taking painstaking care to maintain them. Four in the morning, however, was not the time for ironing.