Dirty Work - Regina Kyle Page 0,68

on the plane.

It had to be an adventure because she couldn’t take it back.

She blew out a breath and looked out the window. It was coming up on half six in the morning in Sydney, and the sun was only just making its appearance. Jenny was sure that once it rose, her head would feel less fuzzy. That the strange weighted feeling tugging on all her limbs, and the odd sensation that she was scraped raw, was a gift of her long plane ride. No one could possibly spend nearly twenty-four hours on two planes and not feel like an alien. Even her feet felt as if they belonged to someone else.

You felt equally worn out in London, a voice inside her piped up. It wasn’t the flight.

The voice sounded suspiciously like Erika Vanderburg, her other best friend.

Erika had looked at Jenny almost pityingly the last time they’d seen each other. Jenny had been perhaps too enthusiastic about Erika’s plan to return to Oxford to finish her degree course, all these years after she’d left her degree course.

Geography isn’t going to cure anything but your location, Erika had said gently.

Because the new version of Erika was not the messy creature Jenny was used to, always drunk and inappropriate, scandalous and fun. The new version of Erika was settled in her relationship with the intimidating Dorian Alexander, best friend to Erika’s older brother, Conrad. Easygoing in a way Jenny would not have believed possible if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. Even having seen it, she wasn’t sure she believed it. How could she? The new Erika was so self-possessed it made Jenny’s lifelong pretense of self-possession look like exactly what it was. A sham.

But as the cab navigated the early morning streets, she stared down at the enormous ring on her hand that she kept meaning to get fixed so it wouldn’t slide about so much, blinding unwary passersby, and wondered if it was as simple as the fact Erika was in love.

Love was something not even Jenny could fake.

Luckily, her engagement—to Conrad Vanderburg, Erika’s chilly older brother, whose success in business made Lord Markham as close to giddy as a man not given to such displays could get—was practical, not passionate. No faking required.

“Dylan will sort it all out,” she told herself, muttering staunchly beneath her breath so as not to alarm the driver. “He always does.”

Erika had always been Jenny’s most vivid friend, the mad one who could go out for chips and end up dancing on tabletops in a different city at dawn. She was ardently loyal, she was passionate about everything and Jenny had wanted to be her, some years. But Dylan had always been her stalwart. He listened. He gave good advice. He’d been keeping Jenny grounded as long as she’d known him.

If he couldn’t help her, no one could.

Not that she needed help, she corrected herself as the cab continued east. She was fine. Her life was carrying on according to plan. Some people—Erika, for example—might think that was a bad thing, but Jenny knew better. This was life.

Dylan would take the rawness inside of her, name it and laugh at it, and in so doing, make it feel better. And make her feel better.

She looked around as they drove, trying to take in architecture that looked both brand new and comfortingly familiar at once. It was like looking at proper British streets, but with a certain overlay that was distinctly Australian. She couldn’t have said what that was. The extra filigreed bits on the gratings and railings, perhaps? Or all the years she’d spent sneaking episodes of Neighbours, more like. Everything was Ramsay Street, if she squinted.

Eventually, the car went around a bend and she realized that wasn’t only sky in the distance, it was the sea. And Jenny had to remind herself, with a kick of wonder, that it was the Pacific, deep and blue. Not the gray North Atlantic she knew better.

And for the first time since she’d jumped on a plane in Heathrow, on a whim, the fact that she’d taken herself off across the planet hit her.

Hard enough that she found herself quite glad she was sitting down.

She worried that huge ring on her hands instead of thinking about all the likely reactions back home, turning it around and around and telling herself that she was exhausted. Obviously. And that was why the weight of the ring, which had never been light to begin with, seemed more