Sweet as Honey (The Seven Sisters) - By Caitlyn Robertson Page 0,21
in her arms, in her bed, but that only made her heart race even faster at the thought of what could go awry in that area. “Is everything all right, Dex? Only you sound…odd.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll ring you tonight.” He hung up.
She stared at the phone, flipped it shut and then banged the steering wheel. She’d annoyed him with her questions. He was nervous and anxious, just like she was. Why did she have to blow everything out of proportion?
And why was she so worried about the bloody wedding night? She wasn’t a virgin, for crying out loud. Saturday was going to be wonderful, the culmination of a year of longing, a blissful coming together of two souls who were meant to be together. Ian had called her bad in bed because he wanted to hurt her—it didn’t mean anything. Dex loved her—it didn’t matter if she hadn’t swung from the chandeliers or didn’t know the Kama Sutra inside out. Just being together was going to be fabulous. Nothing was going to go wrong.
She bit her lip. Please God, don’t let anything go wrong.
Chapter Nine
Dex slipped the phone back into his pocket and walked across the café to the table where he’d left Cathryn nursing a latte. He pulled the chair out and sat, conscious of her watching him, and leaned back, putting as much distance between them as he could.
Honey’s call had unsettled him. He hated lying to her. Well, he hadn’t lied because she hadn’t asked where he was and who he was with, but he hadn’t been open either. He hadn’t said, “By the way, my ex came to see me and we’re just having a chat.” He hadn’t told Honey because he knew it was wrong and it would upset her. So what the hell was he doing here?
He wished he’d walked away when he saw Cathryn standing by the car, but his instinct to get her away from his hometown had overrode his natural caution at being within ten feet of her. He’d driven to a café on the state highway some fifteen minutes from Kerikeri, but now it didn’t seem far enough. He should have driven to Australia.
His heart thudded at twice its normal pace as he wondered what she was doing there. Her letter had been brief, had just said that she’d be in the area and had thought of popping into the station to see him. How had she found out where he was? He hadn’t told her where he was going when he’d left Wellington.
He wondered if she’d heard he was getting married. Had she come to ruin it? He wouldn’t put it past her. She was smart, beautiful and sexy, but she had a mean streak he had been on the receiving end of too many times to doubt her ability to drop a bombshell should the need arise.
She smiled at him over the rim of her coffee cup, the naughty twinkle in her eye that he remembered so well suddenly appearing. “Relax, sweetie. I don’t have an axe hidden in my handbag or anything. I’m not here for revenge.”
He said nothing, turning a packet of sugar over and over in his fingers. He wasn’t willing to believe it just because she said so.
She sipped her coffee, looking across the room and out of the window to the road as she did so, watching the logging lorries and numerous cars trundling past. He took the opportunity to study her, to see how she had changed over the past two years. She was still shockingly beautiful. Her dark hair was longer, shiny, bouncing around her shoulders. She’d put on a little weight but it suited her, filling out her figure, and she’d lost the haunted, gaunt look she’d had near the end, when things had got so bad between them. There was no evidence of the hatred, the madness that had seemed to overtake her that last time they’d met, when she’d screamed until her voice was hoarse, the razor in her hand, threatening to slit her wrists.
His last memory was of walking out of the house, glancing back over his shoulder and seeing her fall to her knees, her face filled with fury and anguish that he didn’t seem to care if she took her own life. He hadn’t, at the time. Later, he’d rung one of her friends to make sure she was all right, but it was more out of guilt than out of genuinely caring