LITMIR.BIZ

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that. ‘Lots of baggage, Logan.’

      ‘More than you can handle?’

      ‘Are you asking me to have a relationship with you?’ Evie wiped her face down with the towel and started in on her dripping hair.

      Logan said nothing, just slung the towel around his hips and stepped from the shower, avoiding the question, avoiding her eyes so Evie figured that for a no, and wasn’t surprised. He’d retreat now, he always did, and she should have felt used and confused, but she didn’t. Instead she felt sad as she let her gaze wash over his naked form. Sad for him. Sad for herself. But not abused.

      She didn’t even know how he came to have a body like that. What sports he played, what he did to blow off steam. The list of things she didn’t know about this man seemed endless. And the list of things she did know about him was short and anything but sweet.

      ‘Do you play sports?’ she asked, and when he lifted his eyebrow at the inanity of the question she shrugged and tried not to be too distracted by the thin line of hair that ran south from his belly-button and disappeared beneath that low-slung towel.

      ‘I climb,’ he said. ‘Snow and water ski whenever I get the chance. Sail catamarans competitively.’

      That’d do it.

      ‘Does this have anything to do with the amount of baggage I can carry round?’ he asked with the ghost of a smile.

      ‘No,’ she replied with a rueful smile. ‘I just wanted to know a little more about you, that’s all. Something little. Something …’

      ‘Normal?’ he offered.

      It was as good a word as any. ‘I don’t know what to do. From the moment I first saw you again, I haven’t known what to do.’ Truth, and if it signified weakness on her part then so be it.

      ‘You need to call off this wedding, Evangeline.’

      ‘I know that, Logan.’ Evie glanced towards the shower. ‘Is that what the sex was all about? A demonstration of my weakness when it comes to your touch? Because if it was, it wasn’t necessary. I already knew.’

      ‘It wasn’t that.’ Logan turned away to pick up his soggy clothes and wrung them out. ‘It was need.’

      And there was the appeal of this man and the danger in him. That stinging, searing, all-consuming need—and his fear of it.

      ‘What if we start again?’ she offered quietly. ‘I call off this wedding, MEP finds some other way to finance the civic centre bid and you and I, we start again. Clean slate. You might, for example, come to Sydney one weekend and ask me out on a date. We might see a movie or go for coffee in the park. You could bring me a bunch of black-eyed daisies or a paper parasol. I might feed you chocolate-cherry mud-cake with my fingers by way of thank you.’

      Logan’s eyes had darkened again.

      ‘Easy as,’ she said lightly. ‘And your call.’ She wasn’t the one carrying a dead father and a battered mother around. ‘What kind of cocktail party does your mother throw? Fairly formal?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Are you planning to attend?’ she asked next.

      ‘Are you?’

      Evie nodded. ‘Got to try and explain my engagement to Max away somehow.’

      ‘Just tell them my mother made a mistake. Tell them you’re celebrating a business milestone rather than a personal one.’

      ‘Yes. Something like that.’ She eyed him steadily. ‘We could use your help to sell it. You could aim for civilised.’

      ‘Yes,’ he said with a smile she didn’t trust at all. ‘I could.’ And handed her back the towel and stalked from the bathroom and then from her room without another word.

      ‘So what happened between you and Logan?’ asked Max for the umpteenth time as Evie plucked a midnight-blue gown from a clothing rack and flattened it against her body.

      ‘We talked,’ she said calmly. ‘Too formal?’

      ‘No,’ said Max. ‘Does he still want you to go live in Antarctica?’

      ‘Probably,’ said Evie, and withdrew a sleek little black dress from the rack. ‘But he knows he can’t make me, so he’s just going to have to learn to live with disappointment. Too severe?’

      ‘Yes.’

      Evie draped it across her arm of potential dresses anyway. Little black dresses could be deceptive. A deceptively demure black-and-caramel-coloured dress caught her eye next. Demure could be deceptive too. ‘What about this one?’

      ‘Evie, just pick one,’ said Max.

      ‘Or I could take an early flight home and forget about your mother’s cocktail party altogether,’ said Evie. ‘As long as we’re talking contingency plans, I’m liking that one a lot.’

      ‘No,’ said Max steadily. ‘We ride this one out together. Kill the speculation stone dead now.’

      ‘Maybe you can tell them I’m gay,’ murmured Evie.

      ‘They wouldn’t believe me. Not if Logan’s anywhere in the room.’

      ‘Okay, then. You can be gay.’ Evie eyed a plum-coloured gown with a plunging neckline and a thigh-high side split speculatively. ‘What about this one?’

      ‘Evie, just pick one.’ And then Max looked at the dress. ‘But not that one.’

      Evie slid it back on the rack. ‘I vote we tell your mother’s friends that we’re celebrating the success of our business partnership and hopefully the beginning of bigger and better things for MEP. We smile and shake our heads and say we’re sorry people got the wrong idea but we’re not engaged and not about to be. We keep it simple. Deny everything.’

      ‘You really think that’s going to fly?’

      ‘Put it this way,’ she said. ‘You got a better idea?’

      The cocktail party was every bit as awkward as Evie thought it would be. Elegant, wealthy people, all set to welcome Evie into their lives at Caroline’s behest, and politely puzzled when it became clear that they didn’t have to.

      Civilised. It was all so very civilised, but no midnight-blue cocktail gown in the world could shield her from Logan’s powerful presence as she stood by Max’s side and talked business goals and achievements with strangers.

      Logan didn’t approach her. He stuck to his side of the room and Evie stuck to hers. She didn’t watch him out of the corner of her eye. Instead she stuck to finding him in reflections in mirrors, of which there were plenty. In the shine of tall silver vases. How could one man assault her senses the way he did, just by being in a room? One man, dressed in black tie, just like every other man in the room.

      ‘Evie, stop fidgeting,’ said Max.

      ‘I’m not fidgeting.’

      She was fidgeting, so with a smothered curse she stopped.

      ‘And swearing,’ murmured Max, highly amused. ‘You could stop that too.’

      ‘I’m not—damn!’ Evie swore rather than add chronic lying to her list of sins too. ‘How much longer do we have to stay here?’

      ‘Until the bitter end,’ said Max cheerfully. ‘I’m guessing around midnight.’

      She’d been sticking to mineral water until now. Maybe it was time she swapped over to something with a little more kick. Then again, the argument against alcohol was a strong one. She’d already been quite uninhibited enough today.

      ‘You could marry someone else,’ she told Max during a moment they had to themselves—just business partners sharing a quiet moment out on the patio, drinks in hand and smiles at the ready. ‘A childhood friend. Someone who

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