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‘And you felt obliged,’ Connor surmises—correctly.
I wince. ‘It’s not a particularly good reason to go out with someone.’
‘No.’
‘I did like him. We just weren’t a good fit.’
He nods thoughtfully and then, ‘Where’d you go?’ He switches topics but I know him now. I know that he is liquid in his approach to all things. That he eases and thrusts, relaxes and aggresses, as part of his strategy to tease information and gain surrender.
‘All over.’ I smile at him, my tummy flipping.
‘Starting with?’ he prompts, reaching across to my wine and sipping it before standing up and lifting the glass to my lips. I am hopelessly lost, my eyes locked onto his as I take a drink.
A dribble of liquid runs down my chin. He catches it with his fingertip before sitting down, and I return my focus to the pasta.
‘Mmm...’ I pause in my cannelloni stuffing to give him my full attention. ‘The south of France. Spain. Italy—all along the western coastline. Greece. Croatia. Then we sailed to Morocco—which was amazing. We took a flight to South Africa for a few months and then Bali beckoned.’ I wink. ‘We spent another six months island-hopping through Asia. Hospitalised twice...’ I lift two fingers and roll my eyes ‘...for stomach bugs.’
He grins. ‘Bali belly?’
‘And then some.’ I return to the pasta. ‘Then a year and a half in Australia. It was incredible.’
‘Who’d you travel with?’
‘A friend of mine. Clara. We worked together at a café when we were teenagers.’
He’s quiet and I don’t want to stop talking—sharing. I can’t say where the urge comes from, only that I find myself opening up to him in a way I never thought I would.
‘I think it’s why I was so interested in the Donovan case.’ My eyes meet his for a fraction of a second and then flick away. ‘We were practically the same age. I mean, I was eighteen when I left for my trip, right out of school. I can imagine how she felt. The excitement, the nerves. Her life was taken from her, and that’s awful. But the pleasure and excitement she was on the brink of enjoying...what a crime to rob someone of that.’
I stare at him, waiting to see his reaction, but it’s expertly concealed from me. There is barely a flicker of response in his face and, though that might seem cold, on some instinctive level I know it’s not. I believe it’s that he feels so deeply he can’t show it. That he doesn’t want to show it.
‘Don’t you think?’ I push, needing to hear him admit what I know he’s thinking.
He’s quiet still.
‘I mean, she was so young,’ I say.
When he eventually looks up there is something in his gaze, as though he’s weighing his words carefully. I wait, breath held for some reason. ‘Where was your favourite part?’
I narrow my eyes. His ability to clam up on me is utterly infuriating. ‘I couldn’t say.’
‘Try.’
‘I loved Sydney,’ I say finally.
He nods and sips his wine.
‘You didn’t c
ome to my office yesterday.’
I am jerked from our conversation into another river, the current moving in a wholly new direction and at an altered speed. ‘Was I meant to?’
‘Yes.’ His nod is slow, thoughtful. ‘To discuss the group assignment.’
It dawns on me then that he mentioned something about this on Thursday afternoon. ‘I presumed that was just a pretext to get up close and personal so you could slip me the hotel key?’
He shakes his head. ‘I really did want to talk to you.’
