‘Yeah. If I can borrow some transport. I’ll figure out some pretext for dropping in.’ She grinned. ‘Guys are usually nice to me when I drop in.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ he said, before he could stop himself, and her smile faded.
‘Nope. That wouldn’t be just a tourist being a nosy parker. It’d make him suspicious.’
‘I don’t know what you hope to achieve.’
‘I don’t either,’ she agreed. ‘But if I could find out who they are…if I could find out their nationality…I could get interpreters up here. I could get a paper drop in their own language, telling them that illegal arrival isn’t a hanging offence and we’ll look after them first and ask questions later. I could do… I don’t know. Something.’
He stared at her and then rose slowly to his feet. ‘You care, don’t you?’
‘Why ever would I not?’
He thought back to the Sarah he’d met six years ago. Not the Sarah whose first impression had been so wonderful, but the Sarah whose image he’d held in his head for six long years. A Sarah who took party drugs; who was rich and spoiled; who cared for nothing but herself.
Had she changed-or had she always been like this but he hadn’t been able to see?
He was seeing now. He was staring at her as if he’d never seen her before. She was gazing up at him, her eyes questioning, and suddenly…suddenly-irrationally-crazily-she was just there-she was so close-she was so beautiful and he wanted to so much…
Stupidly, senselessly, and for no reason at all, he took her into his arms and kissed her.
What was it supposed to be? A kiss of what? A kiss of why? There was absolutely no logic behind this kiss-no reason at all that this couple were being hauled in together as if they were magnetised, magnet to metal, irresistible force meeting irresistible object.
Whatever the logic-or the lack of logic-what was between them now was unmistakable. It was a full-blown explosion. The moment Sarah’s lips met Alistair’s the whole world changed.
Or stopped.
What was happening here? This was crazy, Alistair thought as he felt passion surge between them. There’d been nothing but businesslike efficiency and a coldness caused by shadows that the past could never eradicate.
But now… Now he was holding her, kissing her, this slip of a girl with her wondrous green eyes, with her glorious hair, with her beautiful silk pyjamas…
He was kissing Sarah.
And there was the nub of it. She was Sarah. No more and no less. Sarah. She was kissing him back, he thought dazedly, and she was kissing him as he wanted to be kissed. Her lips were opening slightly under his mouth. Her body was yielding to his, her breasts moulding against his chest. Her arms were holding him as he was holding her.
She was on fire!
No. It was he who was on fire.
The heat of the moment was almost overpowering. His body felt as if it was melting inside, being consumed, transformed, changing to something he hardly recognised.
He wanted this woman and he wanted her with a force that was outside his imagining.
Sarah…
His hands were moving almost of their own volition. They were holding her waist, hauling her close. Closer. And, joyously, she was yielding. Yielding with such sweetness. Her lips were fastened on his. He could feel her tongue against his mouth. He could taste her…
Sarah. Her name was a prayer. A joyous refrain. A desperate, aching need.
What was happening? How had this started?
But he knew how it had started. He knew. It had started six long years ago, when he’d first stared down at her on the floor of the kids’ ward and he’d fallen in love.
The words slammed into some dark recess of his brain, registered, shocked.
Love.
She was his twin’s fiancee. She was Grant’s love. She had nothing to do with him.
She was a part of him that had died along with Grant. A searing, aching pain that could never go away.
An impossibility.
And she felt it. He could sense the moment when she tensed and moved back, just a fraction, so she could see his face. Her eyes resting on his were huge in the shadowed light cast by the table lamp. She looked ethereal. Not of this world.
She’d destroyed Grant, he thought desperately. She could well destroy him.
‘What…what do you think you’re doing?’ she asked, in a voice that was distinctly tremulous, and he tried to collect himself. He tried to think.
Had he kissed her against her will? How had this craziness started?
He hardly knew. Somehow he dragged himself back. They stared at each other and his horror was reflected in Sarah’s eyes. She was as appalled as he was, he thought. She hadn’t wanted to kiss him.
But she had.
And he’d kissed her.
‘It’s hormones,’ he managed, and his voice came out a sort of hoarse croak. ‘I never meant…’
‘Neither did I.’
‘It’s those pyjamas.’
‘It’s because you look like Grant.’
Yeah. There it was.
Grant.
He lay between them like a physical barrier that they could never overcome. Alistair’s twin. The other half of his whole.
Sarah’s fiancee.
‘I need to go to bed,’ she whispered, and he nodded.
‘So do I.’
‘Goodnight.’ And she didn’t wait for an answer. She turned and she fled.
CHAPTER SIX
WHAT followed was a really long night.
Sarah tossed and turned until dawn. Flotsam came and joined her in the bedroom for a while, and she was really grateful for the little dog’s company. Then the dog padded off down the corridor and she heard the bedsprings creak in the other bedroom, Alistair’s voice murmuring a greeting.
Flotsam was obviously going back and forth between the two of them.
An hour later Flotsam wuffled back. He snuggled in and Sarah thought, It’s as if he wants us to be together. Man and woman with dog between.
Yeah. Great. Really ridiculous fantasy.
She desperately wanted to get up and make a cup of tea-anything to make the night go faster-but she was afraid that Alistair would have the same idea. She heard him rise a couple of times. The phone rang once-someone looking for advice on a child with croup. Through these thin walls she could hear everything. The child was obviously on an outstation a long way from town.
She listened to Alistair’s patient, measured advice; she waited for him to hang up but then frowned to herself as he didn’t. She realised he was waiting. He was holding onto the end of the line to see if his instructions were effective.
She imagined herself as the mother, on an outstation somewhere, maybe hundreds of miles from town. Croup was just plain scary. She’d be desperately worried as the child fought for breath. In the city there’d be a brief call for advice and then a trip into hospital or a call to the ambulance.
