He whiled away the hours on the drive back to Melbourne reviewing more possible candidates for Delaney’s future husband. By the time he was turning into the street housing their apartment block, it was after six in the evening and he’d come up with a shortlist of three prospects.
He was feeling quietly pleased with himself when he saw the sign. Six feet tall and almost as wide, it was fixed to the side of their apartment block and featured a big, splashy For Sale across the top, along with a high-gloss photo of the interior of a modern, funky warehouse apartment.
Sam almost drove into a tree as he slammed the brakes on and stared at the living room of Delaney’s place.
What in the hell was going on?
“So, Steve, what did you think?” she asked hopefully.
“It needs a little work, but it’s got good bones. At the right price, I think it’s got a lot of promise,” Steve said.
Steve was her sister’s friend, an architect who’d done Delaney the favor of inspecting a house she’d found in the southeastern Melbourne suburb of Camberwell. She’d gone through the house for the first time on Monday night, spoken to a real estate agent about putting her apartment on the market the following morning, and watched as the sign went up the very next day. Working in publishing, she was familiar with fast turnaround digital printing, but she’d been somewhat breathless at the speed with which her agent had moved.
The plans in front of her depicted a classic California bungalow, with a deep, wide porch along the front of the house, and two sets of diamond-paned windows on either side of central double doors. The rooms inside were spacious, if a little dated with their seventies wallpaper and dingy nylon carpet. But she and Steve had pulled up a corner of the carpet to confirm there was a genuine Baltic pine floor underneath, just waiting to be rediscovered, and the wallpaper was a pretty easy fix.
As Steve said, it had a lot of potential. Delaney glanced around her apartment, feeling distinctly wistful about saying goodbye to its gracious high ceilings and exposed timber beams.
“It’s a great space,” Steve said, as though he could read her mind.
Delaney summoned a smile. “But it’s not really a family home,” she said firmly.
The sound of her front door slamming open interrupted further conversation, and she swung around to see Sam striding toward her, six foot two of indignant, outraged male.
“What the hell is going on?” he demanded, his voice a fierce growl.
Steve shot Delaney a worried look. “Do you know this guy?” he asked.
Delaney nodded. “He’s my neighbor.”
“Neighbor?” Sam all but howled. “Try again.”
Steve kept his eyes on Delaney. “Do you want me to…?”
Delaney had a sudden flash of how quickly this situation could get out of hand.
“It’s fine. But maybe we can talk about the house later, yeah?” she suggested.
“Not a problem,” Steve said.
Rolling up the house plans, Steve shot a look at a glowering Sam before nodding briefly at Delaney and heading for the door.
Sam didn’t bother waiting till the door had shut behind him before he started up again.
“When did you decide to sell your apartment?” he asked, his voice deceptively calm.
“While I was on holidays,” she answered boldly. Sam actually flinched, and she realized that it wasn’t the answer he’d expected.
“So it had nothing to do with what happened the other night?” Sam asked disbelievingly.
“No,” she said.
She could see Sam didn’t quite know where to go with either of her answers.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were going to sell your place? Didn’t you think I might be a tiny little bit interested?” Sam said. She could hear the hurt under the anger in his voice, and her stomach tightened.
“You weren’t here, Sam. What was I supposed to do, hunt you down wherever you’d gone so I could let you know what was happening?”
Sam flushed a dull red and his gaze slid away for a few seconds. Then he was back on the attack.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this. Selling out of the business, moving apartments. And you never even bothered to sit down and talk to me about any of it.”
“I’m just doing what I have to do,” Delaney said flatly. Inside, she felt sick. Sam was right. She never made major life choices without talking it over with him. It felt wrong and weird and incomplete, somehow. But she couldn’t tell him the real reason for all the changes. The man had hightailed it out of her life for nearly five days because they’d had sex. She loved him unbearably, but he was not someone she could pin her hopes and dreams on.
“I don’t understand what any of this has to do with starting a family. Why can’t you meet some guy and get married and have kids while you live here and work with me?” Sam demanded.
Delaney stared at him, the truth on the tip of her tongue. But there was no way she could lay herself open to that much rejection. She’d had two huge helpings of it over the past week, and it hurt too much.
“You wouldn’t understand,” she said instead.
Sam’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head. “At least give me a shot at it! My God, Laney, how many years have we been friends?”
“A long time. Long enough that I would have expected you to hang around, or at least make a real live phone call after what happened between us the other night,” Delaney said.
That stopped him in his tracks. He opened and shut his mouth a few times before he finally spoke.
“I needed to clear my head,” he said, which made her so angry she cut across the rest of his words.
“What about protection, Sam? Didn’t it even cross your mind that I might be pregnant? Or that I might be feeling a little confused as well?” she said.
He stared at her. “Pregnant?” A peculiar expression raced across his face. “Really? Could you be?”
Delaney grabbed either side of her head and held on tight, just in case her brain really did explode.
“No! I am not. Because I am on the Pill. Something you didn’t even bother to ask about. I bloody hope you’re not this reckless with the other legions of women you sleep with.”
“I always use condoms. Always!” Sam said indignantly.
“Except with me.”
“Well it wasn’t as though I was planning on jumping my best friend,” Sam yelled. “It wasn’t exactly something I had on my list of things to do.”
She tried not to flinch from the absolute certainty and outrage in his tone. It wasn’t a surprise to her that Sam didn’t think of her in that way. She had sixteen years of evidence to back up that belief. So why did it hurt every time he proved it to her over and over?
“Yeah, I got that, Sam. And the feeling is mutual,” she said, hurt pride driving her now.
A taut silence fell between them as they glared at each other. Delaney tried not to notice that he was looking particularly delicious in an old pair of board shorts and a stretched-out muscle top. His biceps were golden and sculpted, his calves equally tanned and shapely. His face was all angles and planes, his eyes an intense, deep blue against his skin.
Suddenly all the fight went out of her as she realized exactly what she was sacrificing in the hope of finding future happiness. The last few days had given her a taste of what it would be like when she and Sam were no longer close friends. It had been lonely and hollow and empty. She’d picked up the phone to call him a dozen times before she’d remembered that not only was he not home, but she wasn’t talking to him for a whole host of reasons. The problem was, her mind automatically defaulted to loving Sam, to wanting to be near him. She craved the sound of his laughter, and the way he always had of making everything assume its rightful perspective. Only this time he couldn’t help her do that, because the problem she was tackling was him.
As if he sensed her sudden fragility, the heat seemed to drain out of Sam as well.
“I don’t want to fight with you, Laney,” he said.
Before she could brace herself, he’d crossed the space between them and was enveloping her in a hard embrace.
Despite her better instincts, she found herself clutching him, holding him as close as she could, pressing her face into his shoulder. God, she loved him. She loved him so much. And she was going to miss him more than anything in the whole world.
They stood holding one another for a long time, and slowly Delaney became aware that the desperate hurt that had fueled her was morphing into something much hotter and more undeniable. She inhaled deeply, taking in the scent of sea and salt off his warm, hard body. Suddenly she was gripped with the urge to taste him, to press her lips against the strong column of his throat. Her breasts felt heavy and full, and warmth was spreading between her thighs. She wanted him again.
As soon as the thought coalesced in her mind, she stiffened and pushed herself away from him. She dared a quick darting glance up at his face as she moved away. His expression was shuttered, his feelings hidden from her. She reminded herself that, unlike her, Sam did not have control issues around bodily contact with his best friend.
“I’m sorry for fighting, too, Sam,” she said in a muffled tone.
“Let’s just forget it, all right?” he suggested. “We’ll draw a line under the past week and call it moon craziness or whatever and never look back. You’re too valuable to me to stuff it up for something as stupid and pointless as sex.”
Delaney carefully picked a piece of lint off her jeans, desperately needing a few seconds to control her emotions. He’d called what had happened between them pointless, and he wanted to write last week off as though it had never happened. Again, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to her. She already knew that what had happened between them meant far more to her than to him.
“Yeah,” was all she could manage to say, however. She simply wasn’t that good a liar.
It seemed to be enough for Sam. Crossing to the dining table, he propped a hip against it.
“So who was the guy with the plans?” he asked.
“He’s a friend of Claire’s, an architect. I found a house I’m interested in in Camberwell,” she explained dully. For some reason, all the color seemed to have leached out of the room. She felt brittle and tired and grey.
Sam’s face was a picture of confusion. “I just don’t get why you’re moving, Laney,” he said. She could tell he was making a mammoth effort to remain calm and rational. “You love this place. And you’ve never said a word about wanting to sell.”
“It’s not very practical, though, is it?” she said. “There’s only one bedroom. Anyway, I saw this house and I just fell in love with it.”
Sam’s face lightened as she fed him her latest lie. She saw the way forward—all she had to do was convince him that she was obsessed with the new house, and he would think he understood why she was moving away from him. At some stage he was going to work out that the common factor in both leaving the business and selling her place was his proximity to her, but she was counting on his famed emotional blindness to give her a bit of breathing room for a while yet. Besides, he had no reason to suspect that his best friend was about to cut him loose. Why would he? As far as he knew, nothing had changed between them. Despite their two sessions of desperate, greedy sex.
“Do you have any pictures?” Sam asked. He was doing his best to be supportive, she knew.
“Um, sure. It’s on the Net,” she said. He trailed her over to the corner alcove where her computer was hooked up to broadband Internet twenty-four hours a day. Another thing she’d have to set up from scratch in her new home.
She could feel the heat off Sam’s body as he stood behind her while she keyed in the property’s address. Her traitorous nipples hardened, pressing upward, hoping to gain his attention. She crossed her arms and squeezed them tightly against her body, willing her breasts to behave.
“Looks great from the outside,” Sam said as the first pictures came on screen.
Delaney clicked the mouse to bring up the internal shots, and she could feel Sam’s bewilderment as he took in the dark, dingy-looking rooms with their hideous floral wallpaper and virulent purple-brown carpet.
“Needs a bit of work,” he said doubtfully.
“But it’s a great floor plan, and there’s plenty of land out the back for extending. Steve is going to draw up plans for a new kitchen and family room,” Delaney forced an enthusiasm she didn’t feel into her voice. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the house—she did. It had a lot of potential. But it was a sad, second-rate replacement for her old life. She had a feeling that everything was going to feel like that for a while.
“Once we’ve pulled down that wallpaper and ripped the carpet up, it’ll look better,” Sam said. Her heart twisted as she heard him automatically include himself in her plans.
“Yeah,” she said. “The floorboards are good—Baltic pine—and the ceilings are great, lots of Art Deco features. It’s got the potential to be a great family home.”
There was a moment of awkward silence after she’d said this, and she could feel the tension radiating off Sam in waves.
“I’ve been thinking about all that stuff you said about family and everything,” Sam said, clearing his throat a little as though he were choking on his words a little. “I want to help.”
“Help?” Delaney made the mistake of twisting in her chair, her cheek nearly brushing against the fly of Sam’s board shorts, he was standing so close behind her. He sprang backward as though she’d electrocuted him, and she felt her face flush warmly.
“Yeah, help. I mean, I know heaps of guys. I’ve been kind of mentally sorting through them over the past day or so, and I think I’ve come up with a couple of potentials for you.”
Delaney frowned. “Potential what?”
“Husbands. Partners. Whatever you want to call them. So you can get stuck into this whole family thing,” Sam said.
For a moment she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything except hurt. Sam wanted to hook her up with his friends. He wanted to matchmake for her.