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She glanced nervously over his shoulder, as if checking no one could see them talking. He could well imagine she didn’t want to be seen as the next notch on his bedpost. He almost wanted to ask her how much free time she imagined a young neurosurgeon to have that he could possibly have made time for so many women.
He bit his tongue.
What did it matter to him if she believed he was as bad as all those stories? Besides, hadn’t he played up to every one of them over the years? Better people thought him a commitment-phobe than realise the truth about him.
Whatever the truth even was.
‘Mal and I stayed to help.’
‘Mal?’
‘Malachi.’
‘That’s right.’ She clicked her fingers. ‘Your brother. You did say he was collecting the girls’ mother.’
‘He’s through there now.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘With Saskia.’
‘Okay.’ She nodded, but her eyes stayed neutral.
Interesting. She clearly didn’t know that Saskia and Malachi had had a...thing. He wondered what, if anything, Anouk remembered from that night. The club? The drink? The fact that he’d been the one to escort her safely home? Did she not remember him at all from that night?
‘Anyway, I have to go.’
‘Women waiting for you?’
That prim note in her voice had no business tingling through him like that.
‘Always.’
She shot him a deprecating look and he couldn’t help grinning, even as he moved to the flight of stairs, heading down two at a time.
‘See you around, Anouk.’
He was briefly aware of her grunt before she yanked open the door and shot through it. Waiting a few seconds to be sure the door closed behind her, Sol turned around and headed back upstairs to the neurology department to check on his patients.
He felt somehow oddly...deflated.
* * *
Anouk tapped her fingers agitatedly on her electronic pad as she waited for the lift.
Why did she keep letting Solomon Gunn get under her skin? It was ignominious enough that her body was clearly attracted to him but it was so much worse that she kept wanting him to be different from the playboy cliché—imagining that she saw glimpses of something deeper within him, for pity’s sake.
She who, of all people, should surely have known better?
She’d spent her entire childhood managing her mother. Playing the grown-up opposite her childlike mother—a woman who had perfected all the drama and diva-like tendencies of the worst kind of Hollywood star stereotypes.
She had watched the stunning Annalise Hartwood chase playboy after playboy, fellow stars and movie directors alike, convinced that she would be the one to tame them. It was the same story every time. Of course each finale was as trite as the last. Her biological father had been the worst, by all accounts, but ultimately they’d all ended up using her, hurting her, dumping her.
And Anouk had been the one who’d had to pick up the pieces and put her mother’s fragile ego back together.
Not that Annalise had ever thanked her for it.
Quite the opposite.
Anouk had never quite matched up to her mother’s mental image of how she should be as the daughter of a famous movie star. She’d been too gawky, too lanky; too introverted and too geeky; too book-smart and too gauche.
It had taken decades—and Saskia—for Anouk to finally realise that the problem hadn’t really been her. It had been her mother.
