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‘Do you miss your home?’
Jade sipped on her margarita and stared out through the windows of the restaurant at the end of the pier, down past the fair rides and stalls to the row of lights marking out the Santa Monica Bay shoreline.
When she’d agreed to dinner she’d never expected Loukas to bring her to a place like this—so relaxed and unpretentious. She was glad he had—the casual surroundings and the margarita had woven a mellow spell over her, making it easier to talk. At least until he’d asked her about her home.
Her eyes followed the line of lights down the coast to where they disappeared into the sea mist and the smog. It was so different here compared to the small rural town of Yarrabee where she’d grown up—five hours and a world away from Sydney and the sea, where everything and everyone, the crops, the livestock, even life itself, seemed ruled by the seasons and the weather.
Unless you didn’t fit in.
Then your life revolved around avoiding people, staring at the ground and, just like everyone else around you, wishing you’d never been born.
Absence was supposed to make the heart grow fonder but even after her self-imposed exile it was impossible to conjure up any feelings of sentiment for the place. Yarrabee had made her feel like an outcast from the beginning. And now just thinking about Yarrabee left her cold. Because how could a place that had never wanted you ever be considered your home?
Even Sydney, to where she’d escaped at last for medical school, didn’t feel like home to her now. Maybe because there was no one waiting for her back there. No one she’d left behind.
She looked around, saw Loukas staring, waiting for her reply.
‘Miss home? Not really,’ she admitted, brightening her smile with more warmth than she felt. ‘I’ve swapped Aussie sunshine for the Californian variety. I’ve made my home here now, and I’m happy with that decision.’
As easily as that! Did she realise how her smoothly delivered words condemned her, reminding him in no uncertain terms just what kind of woman she was? She’d transplanted herself smack-bang into a lucrative industry in the most body-conscious city in North America. Didn’t she have any feelings for those she must have left behind? What kind of woman was she?
‘What about your family?’ he insisted, thinking of his father and how even now that Olympia was married he still wanted to control her life and keep her safe. ‘How do they feel about you being so far away?’
She shook her head. ‘I guess I’m lucky in that respect. I don’t have any family to worry about.’
For the first time he felt there was more to her easy dismissal of her homeland than she’d let on. Not having a family seemed a strange thing to consider yourself lucky about.
‘What happened to them?’
She screwed up her face and sat back in her chair. ‘Look, you don’t want to hear all this. It’s history.’
‘Humour me.’
She blinked and looked at him, her blue eyes clearly weighing up whether or not to talk. In the end she took a deep gulp of air and shrugged, almost as if telling him that he’d asked for it. ‘There’s not a lot to it. My mother died when I was born. All I know of her I’ve learned from photographs.’
‘She must have been very beautiful.’
A bright smile lit up her face, so brilliant and yet so brief. But he could tell from her eyes that the smile wasn’t directed at him. She was looking inwards, remembering. ‘Would you believe,’ she said, ‘she was actually Miss Yarrabee Showgirl the year she turned seventeen?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, acknowledging that, whatever cosmetic surgery Jade had been treated to while at the Della-Bosca Clinic, she must have started out with some pretty decent genes in the first place. ‘I’d believe it. And I’d believe it more if you told me you’d followed suit.’
Her smile faded and she blinked as her focus briefly settled back on him before she let her gaze fall to the table. And when her voice came it was as if her words were hidden by shadows, heavy with ghosts.
‘No, I never entered.’
He watched her study her margarita as she swirled the contents around the glass, tickling the salt-encrusted rim, slowly dissolving it. Before the past had intervened in her thoughts her face had shone with an unparalleled brilliance. What would it take for her to direct that dazzling smile onto him and mean it? Could you seduce someone into smiling like that? He was aching to try. But she was in the mood to talk, and anything she told him was going to help his cause.
