But she didn’t need to know the arguments his conscience and his ego were battling out inside him. What she needed was sleep. And to feel damn proud of herself. So he laid her down, and rolled her into his arms, wrapping her up until her head fitted just under his chin and her breath shifted against his chest.
He lay there, all night, staring at the phone still clutched in her hand, telling himself he’d done the right thing.
* * *
When Nadia woke up the next morning, Ryder was gone.
She reached out for him to find his side of the bed empty and cold and on his pillow a note. A note and an apple.
For the road, the note read.
And the lump that had formed in her throat the moment she’d seen the Sky High producer’s name on her phone dislodged itself and the tears that had gathered behind it poured from her eyes like a damn waterfall.
Because she loved the idiot.
Up and down, through and through. She’d known it with absolute certainty the moment Bob had told her she was in. She should have felt elated, over the moon, vindicated, relieved. Instead all she’d felt was a keening sadness whistling through a hole in her heart.
Even while she’d seen in his eyes that he felt...something, if not love then a definite desire to keep her close, he’d congratulated her, wished her luck, and held her with such tenderness she’d slept like a log. And woken not to the man who’d misappropriated her heart, but a damn apple, and a note that as good as warned her not to let the door hit her on the backside on the way out.
Was that it? Good luck and thanks for all the sex? Because he simply didn’t care, or because he cared too much for some drawn-out farewell?
She couldn’t think surrounded by his heat, his scent, the bachelor pad to end all bachelor pads. She had to get out of his bed. She swiped her palms over her damp cheeks, and then tried to untwist herself from the sheets, but they fought back. By the time she’d yanked herself free she tumbled out of bed and onto the floor with a thump.
And there she lay, breathing heavily, looking up at the ceiling as she had the first night she met him. Only this time it wasn’t the ceiling of her lonely little flat. And this time she wasn’t lost, wasn’t filled with hope that she might one day get her act together. This time all her dreams had come true.
All the dreams she’d ever had until she met him.
With a groan she pulled herself upright, wincing at the bruises on her backside, which would be black and blue by the time she got to Vegas in a few days. A few days. That was all the time she had to tie up the loose threads of the life she’d built. And the more she thought about it, the more threads there were. So many unexpected goodbyes.
“Then you’d better get cracking,” she said, the croak less convincing than she’d hoped.
She was dressed and out of the door within minutes. She only held onto the doorknob a moment. Okay, a few moments. But she had to be sure this time, certain of what she was walking away from.
“Love,” she said out loud, the word picked up by the sea breeze and carried away on the wind. For the first time in her life, love.
But Sky High was what she wanted. It was. It had better be, because it would be her whole life now. Her days and her nights. Her blood and her sweat. Her bruised bones and her tweaked tendons. And as for her inflamed heart?
With a growl she pushed away from the door and jogged down the steps to the footpath.
She’d had her heart crushed a thousand times in her life and survived. So long as she had dance, she’d survive Ryder Fitzgerald too.
With that mantra on a loop inside her head as she walked down the beach road towards her tram stop, Nadia didn’t look back.
ELEVEN
Melbourne put on a most beautiful day. After the weeks of rain and overcast skies the heavens were clear, only a few puffy white clouds marring their perfection. Down on the peninsular the air was more fresh, the salty breeze a reminder how close Ryder was to the sea.
With a plane taking Nadia away that day, Ryder hadn’t trusted himself not to bite the head off some poor contractor on site, so he’d taken a road trip south until he found himself on a very different kind of site, the kind he hadn’t set foot on in years.
Before him loomed a big old house. It listed away from a dangerously pitched cliff face as a result of years of buffeting winds and was now held in place by carefully built scaffolding. Around the property lay palettes of stained glass, piles of old wood, and mounds of new bricks peeking out from beneath paint-speckled tarps.
And just like that his palms itched with the memory of having an actual hammer in his grip, wood and nail meeting with a satisfying jar. It was a memory of his summer days learning the trade in places like this, and of watching his mother grin as she knocked together creations of her own. Either way it felt...good. And after the oblivion of the past few days he’d take all the therapy he could get.