Falling for the Lawyer - By Anna Clifton Page 0,32

unless we want to go for fun.”

“What do you mean?” Alex asked as her heart began to pound away in her chest.

“I’ve sold the whole business.”

Alex gaped at him, dumbfounded. “What? But I thought you were only going to sell part of it.”

“They made me an offer. I’ve jettisoned the whole business. And that means …” he began suggestively, raising his eyebrows.

“You can come back to Australia for good,” Alex finished, plastering a smile on her face, waiting for the inevitable upshot of his news.

“And that means you and I don’t have to wait any longer to get married. Let’s book the church and do it.”

Alex nodded in response to his ecstatic look. “Yes … yes, of course.”

Simon’s smile dissolved. “You don’t look as happy as I expected you would.”

“No, I am happy Si, really.” Alex reassured him and summoned everything she could from within herself to reflect his own happiness.

But then Alex’s eyes caught her mother’s. Mary Farrer had been watching her future son-in-law and her daughter and she was now staring at Alex with a look of intense disapproval.

Alex felt sick. Did her mother see something that no one else in the room could, something that even she was having trouble recognising?

At that moment the doorbell rang again. Alex jumped into movement, mainly to escape the scrutiny of her mother and fiancé.

Thankfully her father had been unable to hear the bell over the conversation in the kitchen so she had a free run to collect her thoughts and calm her nerves as she made her way down the hallway. It had all been too much, that was for sure. First, those intense minutes in the car with JP, then the big announcement from Simon. Alex wasn’t sure she could take much more.

JP heard the sound of heels clicking on a timber floor within before the front door was swung open.

“Oh no!” Alex shook her head in disappointment and disbelief as she took in the sight of him outside her parents’ door.

“That’s a nice way to greet your boss,” JP replied with a sardonic smirk.

He was enjoying surprising her, he couldn’t deny it. And to think he could have been sitting in his car and heading for home right then, still fuming over her final decision about the paralegal offer. Yet that was exactly what he’d planned on doing not ten minutes before as he’d drummed his fingers on the wheel and watched her disappear like an apparition into the house opposite.

Then as fate would have it a call from a client had delayed his departure and thank God it had. But for that call he would not have been sitting there when that cab drew in across the road from where he was parked. He would not have watched a couple get out of the cab and remove their suitcases from the boot. He would not have seen that same couple linger on the footpath for several minutes after the cab had driven away, leaning towards one another as they engaged in an intimate conversation before finally heading into the house. And he would not have had an opportunity to decide it was absolutely necessary he get into that house to find out whether the man he’d just watched making body language love to another woman was Alex’s fiancé.

The only problem was JP didn’t have a single excuse for barging into her parents’ home unannounced. It wasn’t until he’d racked his brains, come up with no brilliant ideas at all and thrown the car into gear that he finally saw it: Alex’s wallet was lying on the floor in front of the passenger’s seat. It had obviously fallen out when she’d grabbed her bag and fled just minutes before.

JP sat back in his seat and laughed in mirthless disbelief as he killed the car engine, wondering whether the devil himself might have made that wallet fall out that night.

“I thought you’d have gone by now,” Alex hissed back irritably as the initial shock of seeing him on her parents’ doorstep subsided.

“I took a business call after you got out of the car,” he explained, loving the effect he was having upon her.

Turning to check no one had followed her down the hallway, Alex pulled the front door closed behind her and stepped out onto the front porch.

“You can’t come in,” she directed, her voice pitched at near hysteria.

“Why not?” JP drawled, unmoved by her panic.

“You know why not.”

“Is it because Simon has arrived? I saw him get out