She sighed. “There’s the whole you must be lonely vibe. Especially at conferences. When I was first starting out it was much rougher.” She tugged his hand again, and they walked on. “I worked in a smaller construction company. I managed customer relations.”
She sighed and he saw memories chase across her face; grey clouds over blue skies.
“But I was always the cute chick from reception. I was honey, or sweetheart, never Audrey. One character insisted on calling me Holly Golightly after Audrey Hepburn’s character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She was a kind of an American geisha girl, a virtual prostitute and he knew that. That was his whole shtick. Didn’t matter how often I asked him to quit it.”
Reece stopped again, but he wasn’t aware of it until Audrey pulled on his hand.
“They’d ask me about my boyfriends and whether I wore a bikini to the beach, would I play strip poker with them, if I wanted to sit on the office Santa’s knee and give him a kiss at Christmas. They knew they made me uncomfortable. That was part of the joke, like what the girls were doing to you. It’s a power play. Stinks, but it’s rare to find a woman who hasn’t experienced some form of it. You either fight it, and that’s tricky if you’re one person against, well, you saw how that goes, or you shut up and get on with it.”
He let all that wash into him. He’d heard stories like it from Charlie. Probably not the worst of what happened to her, and Sky once got molested on a crowded train. She’d been furious with herself for letting the guy touch her and get away with it rather than cause a fuss. He’d wanted to rip train carriages apart for her, find the guy and pound him into the tracks.
Charlie, Etta, Neeva, Gin, Flip, Sky, Audrey, Mia. All the women in his life had this to deal with because of a chromosomal difference, because men could be pigs.
He’d had raised eyebrows and snickers, he’d been marginalised and lost out on jobs. He got how gender discrimination worked. But he’d had five minutes of being harassed by women he knew and liked, who were doing it as payback in fun. Audrey’d had to build a career in spite of it. Etta had already had a man take advantage of her. His own father was a loser dead-beat he’d never meet. It made his knuckles buzz, like they’d done before a fight and he knew he was going to hurt someone who’d stupidly bet on hurting him instead.
“They didn’t mean it, with you. They were just stirring.”
“I know.” He looked over Audrey’s head to the horizon, but there were no answers there either. “I was thinking about all my girls. Charlie, my sisters, you and Mia. I hate that’s the world you have to live in.”
Audrey stepped in front of him, her arms went around his waist and she pressed her face to his chest. He hugged her in the middle of the walkway. Maybe for Etta, the twins, Flip and Mia it would be different. He’d do anything he could to make it so.
Audrey lifted her face and he bent to kiss her, her mouth opening to him, the scent of her filling his head, and the fact she hadn’t taken his hand on the beach didn’t bother him as much anymore, she was kissing him here where anyone could see.
He went from pissed off at the world to turned on at warp speed. He broke the kiss and took her hand. She needed light cardio, he needed heavy petting. Seclusion would kill two birds. He spun her around to face forward.
“Where are we going?”
He took her hand. “To get wet.”
“Oh God, no Reece. I don’t have swimwear.”
“Not that kind of wet.”
She let him drag her up the coastal walkway. He went too fast, his stride too long and he couldn’t seem to slow it down. He had her out of breath at the top. She laughed between gulps of air, bent forward, hands to her knees. “You’re sacked as my personal trainer.”
“I want you.”
She straightened, the laughter still in her. “You’ve got me.”
She looked confused and breathless and he was going to have to pace himself, but he’d been semi-hard since breakfast. “Do you trust me?”
They were at the end of the pathway where people about-faced and went back the way they’d come. Below them was a flat bed of rock exposed at low tide. You couldn’t see all of it from the path. They’d only met one other couple walking, retracing their steps to the beach. No one was fishing. Middle of the work week they had the place to themselves.
Her chin shot up defiantly. “You know I do.” She knew he was up to something.
He put his hand in his back pocket. He had to push a vision of himself at fifteen out of his head. He pulled out a condom, bought that morning along with petrol, showed it to her in his palm. He wasn’t fifteen and fumbling anymore, but this was so new it had an edge to it that spiked his angst.
She squealed, clapped her hands over her mouth. “Not here.”
He reached for her, dragged her close. “Down there.”
Her eyes went wide, flitting from where he’d pointed, to his face. “Reece, no.”
He tilted her head up, widened his stance and kissed her as tenderly as he could. She was flat lipped, and then her on switch tripped. She opened her mouth and her body to him with a groan.
“I want you too.”
They ki