Summer Sins

She watched as he wandered over to her desk and picked up a recent photo of his father she had taken a few days before he died. He stood looking down at it for a long time before he put it back on the desk, his expression when he turned to face her once more devoid of emotion.

‘I’ll give you a call in a couple of days,’ he said. ‘In the meantime don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

She gave a cynical little grunt. ‘That certainly leaves the field wild open. It seems to me there’s very little you wouldn’t do to get your own way.’

He blew her a kiss across the flat of his extended palm. ‘Love you too, Hayley.’

Hayley felt a tiny shiver of apprehension run up her spine as the door closed on his exit. There was something about Jasper Caulfield that had always signalled danger. She had never felt entirely safe around him in all the years she’d known him.

Marrying him was out of the question.

She wasn’t even going to think about it.

No way.

Not even for a minute.

She didn’t dare …

CHAPTER TWO

‘ARE WE STILL on for dinner tonight, Myles?’ Hayley asked, holding the phone to her ear as she checked her make-up in the mirror above her bathroom basin of her small inner-city rented flat.

‘Er … tonight might be a bit of a problem, my dear,’ Myles said. ‘I’ve got a new client I have to see. It was a last-minute booking. I can’t really get out of it. Sorry.’

Hayley turned her back on the flash of pain and disappointment she could see in her blue-green gaze. This was the third night in a row Myles had cancelled their arrangements.

‘That’s OK,’ she said, trying not to sound too let down. ‘I have some paperwork to see to anyway.’

‘Sorry about that, Hayley. I’ll give you a call tomorrow. Maybe we can get together then.’

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Hope it goes well with your client tonight.’

‘Yes … yes, I’m sure it will. Bye.’

Hayley had only just ended the call when the phone rang again in her hand. She didn’t recognise the caller ID number but answered it anyway. ‘Hello, Hayley Addington speaking.’

‘So you are still speaking to me, then,’ Jasper commented wryly.

Her hands tightened on the receiver. ‘Get off my phone.’

‘Have dinner with me?’ he asked, totally unfazed by her acid tone.

‘You must be joking.’

‘I know this great place we can go,’ he said. ‘It’s really swanky. You never know who you might see there.’

‘I’m busy tonight,’ she said through tight lips.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re going to sit at home all by your little lonesome self, missing your fiancé who just cancelled your dinner date for the third time this week, right?’

She gripped the phone even tighter. ‘How on earth do you know that? Have you got a tap on my phone or something?’

His deep chuckle lifted the fine hairs on the back of her neck. ‘Come on, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I need you and you need me. Let’s go and have dinner and if we happen to run into your cheating fiancé you can tell him to his face that you’ve changed your mind about marrying him.’

‘Myles is having dinner with a client,’ she said, doing her best to ignore those niggling little doubts again. ‘He’s a busy real estate agent with a lot of high-profile clients. Entertaining them is one of the demands of the job.’

‘If that’s the case, then you should have no concerns about coming with me to dinner at the same restaurant,’ he pointed out. ‘If Myles’s dinner is all above board he’ll just assume we’re having dinner together like any other stepbrother and stepsister.’