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‘So he’s okay for you, but not okay for me?’
Archie didn’t know whether to feel insulted or honoured.
‘He’s not okay for you right now. If you were the old, fearsome Archie from back in uni, then I’d say go for it. That Archie could have handled a man like Athari.’
This was it. She could either go along with what her friend was saying, proving Katie right. Or she could show a little spirit. Like she had on that skydive. Not that she’d told Katie, who’d been occupied with her own charity water-polo match, about the tandem jump.
Archie blew out sharply.
‘You know, I think I can handle one little prince.’
Katie opened her mouth, eyed her and closed her mouth again. A crooked smile that Archie knew so well hovered on her friend’s lips.
‘I do believe you mean it.’
‘I do.’
Katie paused, considering.
‘Then far be it from me to stop you. Okay, you know that sexy, dangerous scar across his jawline?’ Archie nodded silently. ‘Apparently it was the result of some big fight when he was younger.’ Katie hugged her arm tightly and whispered in conspiratorial tones. ‘You remember those massive Hollywood kung-fu, karate-style blockbusters he did as a seven-and eight-year-old?’
The Hollywood life he’d been only too desperate to run away from, Archie remembered. Not that she could say anything.
&nbs
p; ‘Yes, I think so,’ she hedged instead.
‘Of course you have to know them. They were huge, until his mother apparently demanded too much money or riders or whatever and he got kicked out and replaced.’
The rumours didn’t come close to the damage his volatile mother had caused. But she couldn’t say that either.
‘So you heard he got the scar on those films?’ Archie tactfully changed subject.
Katie’s eyes sparkled with excitement.
‘No, the rumour I actually read somewhere was that the fight was down some back alley when he was about seventeen or something, and wasted after a drinking session. Apparently he was outnumbered five to one but he still beat their collective backsides. Juicy, isn’t it?’
‘Juicy,’ Archie agreed half-heartedly.
The idea of the quiet, controlled Kaspar of back then drinking, let alone fighting, was a complete anathema to her. No doubt a lie the press had spun to help them with their paper-shifting image of the playboy Kaspar. Not that he hadn’t played his own stupid part to a T.
But the man in the media bore little resemblance to the boy she’d once known. And it was the latter who had stolen her adolescent heart.
Besides, she’d been there when he’d really got that scar, climbing the forty-foot oak tree outside Shady Sadie’s house when he’d been fifteen. Or at least she’d been in the living room with her father when Robbie had raced back to say that a damaged limb had given way and Kaspar had fallen to the ground. He’d been carted off to the hospital with a few superficial cuts and bruises and that one deep gash. He’d worn it with all the pride of a battle scar, of course. Trust the media to come up with something far more dark and exotic to explain it.
But they couldn’t have made up everything, could they? The playboy lifestyle? The dangerous reputation? It had been fifteen years since she’d last seen him so of course he wasn’t going to be the same boy she’d known. As Katie gabbled on, Archie let her head drop back, the cool concrete of the pillar seeping into her brain, and tried to think a little more clearly. Maybe opening the Kaspar Athari can of worms really wasn’t the best idea she’d ever had.
As Katie’s hands grabbed her shoulders and hauled her off the pillar, Archie was tugged back to the present.
‘This is your chance, here comes your Surgeon Prince.’
Before she could stop it, she was being swung around and thrust out around the column. The breath whooshed from her body. She didn’t need to turn to know that Katie would have already gone.
‘And there I was thinking you were hiding from me, Archie.’
The rich, slow drawl was laced with a kind of lazy amusement as every inch of Archie’s skin prickled and got goosebumps. Not least the fact that he knew who she was after all. Her stomach spiralled like a helter-skelter in reverse.
Archie. He rolled her name on his tongue as though sampling it, tasting it. She imagined he was measuring it against the woman she was now, compared to the ‘Little Ant’ he’d always known her as.
