Absent in the Spring (The Shakespeare Sisters 3)

‘I’m so sorry, I’ll resen —’ Her apology was interrupted by a loud blast of a horn reverberating down the phone line. Then there was some shouting, the words muffled so she couldn’t hear them. ‘Lachlan, is everything okay?’

‘It’s fine. Some taxi driver thinks the lights don’t apply to him.’ Lachlan sounded a little breathless. ‘It was something and nothing.’

‘Are you running right now?’ she asked.

‘Yep. Just reached Central Park.’

‘And you can still carry on a conversation?’

‘I’m just warming up. Once I’m going a bit faster it’ll be harder, but it’s all about the breath. As long as the conversation matches the rhythm of my run, I could talk for the whole time.’

She tried to imagine Central Park at this time of year. She’d visited New York when she’d graduated, using the golden handcuff payment she’d received from Robinson and Balfour to fund her travels. ‘What part of the park are you running in?’ she asked him.

‘I’m just doing a circle of the reservoir and then I’ll head back downtown. I’ve got a meeting at seven.’ She could hear the rhythm of his breathing now. ‘In fact, I’ve got meetings at seven, nine, eleven and one. Plus a site visit this a

fternoon. So I won’t be able to take a proper look at the email until tonight. Will that be a problem?’

Her heart was beating in time to his exhalations. ‘It’ll be fine. I’ll check my emails later, in case you reply before I go to bed. And if you need to call me, then do. I don’t want the different time zones to cause us any problems.’

‘I appreciate that,’ he said, his voice still as clear as day. ‘But don’t stay up on my account. I’m going to be stuck in the office until late, so it could be the middle of the night before I get to read it. I’m not going to wake you up over this.’

She waited for the relief to wash over her, but it didn’t. Instead, she felt a sense of disappointment so sharp it made her wince. Did she want him to call her in the middle of the night?

‘Sounds like you’re burning the candle at both ends,’ she said. And yet wasn’t that what she did too? You didn’t get to the top of your game by working nine to five. You pushed yourself to the limits, then pushed a little more.

With his good looks and his natural charm, it would have been easy for him to glide through life. But instead he had this determination to always come out on top. She couldn’t help but be impressed by it.

‘Yeah, well, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. I worked hard for what I’ve got. I don’t intend to lose it now.’

She could tell from the cadence of his words that he’d sped up. ‘I should let you go,’ she said, feeling reluctant to end the call. ‘You need to finish your run, and I need to send you this email, this time with the letter attached.’

He laughed. ‘Okay, Lucy, I’ll speak to you later.’

She ended the call, placing her phone down on the desk beside her laptop, and tried to ignore the way his words made her feel. I’ll speak to you later. She wasn’t sure whether that felt more like a threat or a promise.

The way he was making her feel – as though her perfectly ordered world was being tipped on its edge – it was almost certainly both.

Lachlan leaned back on his chair, running his fingers through his hair as he closed his eyes for a moment, blowing out the mouthful of air he’d been holding. It had been a long, damned day, and it wasn’t looking like ending any time soon. His inbox was loaded with emails that Grant had marked urgent, and his cellphone voicemail had been flashing full all day. At sometime around seven that evening, a delivery guy had brought him a bag full of Chinese takeout, but the cartons remained on his tables – their contents cold and congealed.

He shrugged off his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt, loosening the collar that had been rubbing at his neck all day. Scanning the contents of his inbox, his eyes immediately stopped on a familiar name, one that made the corner of his lips curl up. Lucy Shakespeare. She was like a cool balm on his overworked soul.

He looked around his office, at the sleek interior, the marble floor, the expensive paintings mounted on the wall. He was in no position to complain – not when he’d achieved more than he’d ever dreamed of as a kid, kicking around the streets of Miami, trouble following him like a bad smell. And for years he’d been satisfied with what he had – with the magazine articles that lauded him as the next big thing, with the invitations to exclusive galas and premieres – all the things that accompanied success. And yet now, alone in the office, it didn’t feel as fulfilling as before.

It was hard to put his finger on the reason why. He thought of his father, the man who’d gone to his grave hardly knowing his first-born son. Had Duncan MacLeish Snr. been content with his life? Lachlan thought he probably had. He’d built an empire, after all, one that had turned him from impoverished Scotsman into Miami magnate. What wasn’t to like about that?

Moving the cursor to Lucy’s message, he clicked it open, quickly reading through her words before downloading the attachment. Her emails were so similar to the way she talked that he could almost hear her voice as he skimmed her concise note. Could almost picture her typing it, her eyes slightly narrowed, her lips pursed in concentration.

In the weeks since they’d first met at his hotel in Miami, she’d proved to be exactly the attorney he needed. It was crazy the way he looked forward to their discussions, so much that he’d called her that morning when the sun had hardly risen in the New York skyline, the desire to hear her voice outweighing any good sense he had left. Even crazier that his morning run, accompanied by their conversation, had been the best part of his day.

He’d never had a crush before, if that was what this was. Grant hadn’t been wrong when he’d said women came to Lachlan. He liked their company, enjoyed their conversation, and yes, sometimes they went to bed together. But that was as far as it went. He certainly didn’t spend his free time thinking about them.

Until she came along.

He shook his head at his own thoughts, a half-smile lifting the corner of his lip. She was good at what she did, and that’s what he liked about her. She was key to him getting the inheritance he wanted so much, and that was what mattered.

Not her beauty, not her poise, nor the way she pulled him in every time they spoke. She might have been unlike any other woman he’d ever met, but that was all irrelevant. She was his attorney and she lived two thousand miles away. His life was complicated enough – he didn’t need to add to it.

A glance at the clock on the far side of his wall told him it was almost eleven p.m. He rubbed his dry eyes and sent a message to his car service, asking the driver to pick him up in half an hour. That left him enough time to reply to Lucy’s message and then read through his other emails, before getting home and heading straight for bed.