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I’d love to have her! We’re learning The Night Before Christmas.
I smile at that, slipping my phone into my handbag. I have three patients to get through before I can go to Noah, but I’m going to fix this for him, for us, because I love him, and I’m going to show him that love means fighting. Love is lasting. Love is permanent and he is worthy of all of those things.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SHE’S WEARING THE same perfume as Holly. It smells like chocolate and flowers. It’s why I approach her, because I catch a hint of the fragrance as I pass the bar on my way back from the john and the smell draws me in, like a man who needs an urgent fix of a drug he can’t have, so he settles for something—anything—to ease the pain.
This woman is nothing like Holly, though. This woman has a body like a fashion model, all skin and bone, draped in a black leather dress. Her hair is black, pulled into a silky ponytail. Once upon a time, I would have fantasised about wrapping my fingers around the ponytail and pulling her head back, kissing her lips, taking her against the bar.
Instead, I take the seat next to her and order two Scotches. ‘Join me.’
It’s a gruff command. She doesn’t seem to mind. Her eyes are brown; I’m glad they’re not blue. Holly’s eyes are like ice.
Out of nowhere, I see them as they’d been that afternoon. I was right, in Paris. I feel Holly’s pains as if they were my own. Her emotional hurts haunt me.
But fuck her.
What did she expect?
Making me talk about Julianne and whether or not she could have kept me? Should have stayed in Sydney? Then telling me she, Holly, loved me? Jesus. I’ve known her only a few weeks. It’s just sex!
And sex is something I’m good at, I remind myself, wishing I felt a stirring of desire for the very beautiful woman I’m sitting next to. I don’t, though, but I’ve done this enough times to fake it.
‘Nice...dress,’ I say, dropping my eyes to her cleavage.
When I look at her face, her lips are parted and then she smiles at me. Her fingers run across the dipped neckline and she leans forward, purring, ‘You should see what’s underneath.’
‘I’d like that, sweetheart. Have a drink with me first, though.’
I slide the Scotch across to her and throw my own back, signalling the barman for another. It’s busy for a Wednesday night. I guess that’s this fucking Christmas time of the year, though.
‘You drink like you’re trying to forget,’ she says smoothly, a hand creeping over to my thigh.
‘Do I?’
She tilts her head to the side, her feline eyes appraising me. ‘There are other ways to forget. Better ways.’
She’s right. Holly used me to fuck Aaron out of her body and now I see the logic of that. Of being able to devalue what you had with someone by having exactly that with someone else.
‘What’s your name?’ I ask the woman.
‘Do we need to swap names?’
My chest lifts with relief. What a pleasure it is to talk to a woman who doesn’t want to psychoanalyse everything I say and do. I tell myself this is good. This is healthy. It’s an added bonus that she doesn’t recognise me. I’m not exactly famous, but I find I get recognised often enough to dislike it.
‘I’ll tell you what I want, sweetheart. I want to get drunk. And then we’re going to...’
The words die on my lips. I see Holly. Not here, just in my mind. But I see her as she’d been that first night: in my bed, so beautiful, so willing, so gentle, so kind.
I see her as she’d be if she knew I was planning to fuck this other woman. I see her hurt and my heart cranks in my chest.
Fuck it.
Holly was an aberration. A break from my usual rules. That doesn’t mean I’m bound to her for ever. I don’t owe her anything, just like she doesn’t owe me anything. She could be with someone else and I wouldn’t care.
That’s a lie. The very idea fills me with bile. The thought of another man’s hands on her body makes me want to vomit.
But that’s wrong. Because Holly deserves a nice man. A nice man who won’t hurt her. A nice man who smiles when she says she loves him, and buys her roses as a sign of his love. All that romantic shit I don’t have any time for.
