Her Favorite Temptation (6 page)

“Scary mum in the flesh.”

“Yep.”

She felt him looking at her and glanced at him. “What?”

“Happy birthday, Leah.”

She shuffled her feet a little. She would have preferred for him not to guess that today was her birthday. She wasn’t sure why. “Thanks,” she mumbled.

“How old?”

She made a rude noise. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you never to ask a woman that?”

“You are not even close to old enough to worry about your age yet.”

“I’m practicing for when I need to worry. What have you been doing for food while you’re sick?”

“I’ve been managing.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “That had better not mean pizza.”

“Honestly? I haven’t been that interested in food, but the supermarket around the corner delivers, so I’ve been choking down some soup and the occasional bowl of cereal.”

“Okay. That’s acceptable.”

“Glad you approve, Dr. Mathews.”

“William Jones?” the pharmacist called.

Will stepped forward to collect his medication. Leah waited by the door for him, and they fell into step as they made their way to the apartment building.

“I’d like it noted for the record that we’re almost at the apartment and I haven’t dropped dead or keeled over in any way, shape or form,” Will said.

“Oh, yes, you’re a picture of health. It’s a wonder the sports commission isn’t chasing you down, begging you to represent Australia in every sport known to man.”

He laughed, the sound devolving into a dry cough.

“I rest my case,” she said.

“I’m much better than I was.”

“You know what the best way of getting a secondary infection is? Pushing yourself when you’re not up to it. Take your medicine. Eat something green. Go to bed. Okay?” She reached into her handbag and slipped a card from the side pocket. “And if you need anything, call me—the number on the bottom. I’m more than happy to grab some food for you or whatever you need.”

He took the card, studying it briefly. “Pretty cool way to slip me your number, Dr. Mathews.”

She blushed, even though she knew he was only teasing her. “I was trying to be a good neighbor.”

She attempted to take her card back, but he smiled and tucked it into his pocket. “Too late. It’s mine now.”

She couldn’t stop herself from smiling. He truly was an excellent flirt.

Her parents’ Mercedes was ahead and she could see her parents watching them out the windshield.

“Your dad is a bit of a silver fox,” Will commented.

“So I’ve been told. Promise me you’ll take it easy for the rest of the day.” She stopped a few feet away from the car. The walk had put a bit of color into his face, but he looked tired.

“I will go straight upstairs and put on my jim jams just for you,” he said solemnly.

“As if you own pajamas.”

“It was worth a try. By the way—” he reached into his pocket, then surprised her by catching her hand and pressing something into it “—happy birthday.”

She glanced down and discovered she was holding a snack-size bag of multicolored jelly beans. He’d obviously added it to his order when he’d paid for his prescription.

“I love jelly beans,” she said, thrown by the gesture.

“Good. Have a great day, Leah.”

“Thank you.”

She waited until he’d entered the building before slipping the jelly beans into her jacket pocket and walking to her parents’ car.

“Sorry about that. Thanks for waiting,” she said as she slid into the backseat.

“I take it he’s got everything he needs?” her mother asked.

Her tone was neutral, but Leah could feel the tension in the car. Her mother was not even close to forgiving or accepting her change of specialty. As Leah had anticipated, it was going to be a fun day, full of unspoken undercurrents and unvoiced disapproval. Yippee.

“Yep, he’s all sorted.”

They chatted about the weather and the traffic as her father drove through the city, all of them working hard to keep things light. He kept the destination a surprise until the last minute, finally revealing that he’d booked a table at Vue du Monde, one of Melbourne’s most critically acclaimed restaurants.

“I feel very spoiled,” Leah said as they rode to the fifty-fifth floor of the Rialto building.

“Your father’s been dying to come here for a long time,” her mother said. “We wanted to save it for a special occasion.”

The restaurant was moody and dark, with parquet floors and button-back chairs and white-neon abstract swirls on the walls. And the view... The view was astonishing. Her father insisted on her having the best seat to appreciate the panoramic expanses of city, thanks to the floor—to-ceiling windows, leaving the seat beside her free for Audrey so she, too, could soak up the view. He’d just ordered a bottle of champagne when Audrey arrived, looking elegant as always in a black, beige and white striped dress.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to keep everyone waiting,” Audrey said as she reached the table.

“You didn’t. We just got here,” Leah said.

She stood and kissed her sister’s cool cheek, smiling when Audrey wished her a happy birthday.

“We saved you one of the seats with a view,” their father said warmly.

Something inside Leah relaxed as her sister sat next to her. Audrey was so smart and calm and composed. She never let their parents rattle her, no matter how hurtful they were. Just having her close made Leah feel stronger, more resolved. After all, Audrey had endured years of disapproval and criticism. If she could survive and thrive, so could Leah.

“This all looks pretty amazing,” Audrey said brightly.

Talk quickly gravitated to medicine, the default setting for almost every conversation with their parents. Leah tried to derail it so that Audrey could be included, but it was one of her parents’ many blind spots and after a while she decided it was easier to go with the flow.

Their meals were delivered to the table and the conversation finally shifted from medicine to the situation with Audrey’s work. She was employed as a buyer for a major hardware chain, a position she’d worked her way into from a lowly clerk’s role, but apparently a new CEO had been appointed and heads were rolling left, right and center.

“So far we’ve lost six people from our department. But it turns out we’re the lucky ones—he’s really cut through the marketing and accounting departments,” Audrey said.

Leah felt a surge of panic for her sister. What a stressful and horrible situation to be in. “It sounds as though you were lucky to keep your job.”

“Yeah. It feels that way at the moment, believe me. Morale is at an all-time low. No one feels safe,” Audrey said.

“Do you think they’ll be letting more people go?” her mother asked.

“I don’t know. I’m keeping my head down and hoping.”

Leah could see her sister was genuinely afraid, even though she was doing her best to appear matter-of-fact.

“That sounds scary,” Leah said. “I’d be freaking out if I was you.”

“That won’t ever be you, darling. People with your skills don’t grow on trees,” her father said, patting her arm reassuringly.

As though
she
was the one who needed reassuring. Leah felt rather than saw her sister’s reaction to their father’s sleight—the smallest of flinches, as though he’d dealt her a direct hit. Which he had, verbally if not physically. Embarrassment and guilt flooded Leah as she watched her sister adjust the starched linen napkin in her lap, her gaze carefully downcast as she fought to regain her composure.

All her life, Leah had sat by while her parents dealt out these kinds of backhanded blows to her sister. It had never been enough that she, Leah, be praised—Audrey must always be held up in comparison and found lacking in some way, too. When she was younger, Leah had basked in her parents’ approval and attention. What kid didn’t want to be the star of the show? But as she’d matured, she’d started to feel increasingly uncomfortable about their family dynamics. She’d begun to realize that in order for her to be
special
, Audrey had to be flawed. Sometimes the comparison was so subtle, it was almost undetectable. But it was always there, bubbling beneath the surface.

She’d scarcely gotten a grip on her own role in this messed-up melodrama when her sister had disappeared. She’d been twelve, Audrey barely sixteen. One night they were all around the dinner table, the next morning Audrey’s bedroom was empty, the curtains billowing in the breeze from the open window. Her sister had left a note, telling their parents that she’d gone to live with her boyfriend, Johnny, because he “believes in me and makes me happy.”

Leah hadn’t even known her sister
had
a boyfriend, let alone that he was old enough and employed enough to have a house she could share. As it turned out, he was seventeen and a squatter, breaking into empty houses and living there until the authorities drove him and his friends out. Lord only knew what else he’d gotten up to on the side. Audrey had lived that life with him for eighteen months before she collapsed with pneumonia at a train station in the city and was rushed to hospital. Even then she’d held off for several days before finally giving the hospital permission to call their parents.

To this day, Leah would never forget the terror she’d felt during those long, dark eighteen months. Every time she’d seen a newspaper headline or heard a news-at-six bulletin about a girl being attacked or a body found, she’d felt sick to her stomach until learning enough to know it wasn’t her sister. She’d promised herself that if Audrey ever came home again, things would be different between them. She would make an effort to be closer, to bridge the gap that had always existed between them. She’d show Audrey that she loved her.

Then Audrey had come home and been so repentant and cowed, so withdrawn, that Leah hadn’t been able to find a way in to say or do any of the things that she’d intended.

All these years later, not much had changed. Audrey was no longer cowed or repentant, but the face she presented to her family was smooth, impermeable. A smiling, pleasant facade that kept them all at arm’s length. Leah didn’t blame her. Having endured a sustained burst of her mother’s disapproval, she could fully understand why her sister might pull up the drawbridge and conduct all negotiations from a distance. Only a fool wouldn’t protect herself, and Audrey was no fool.

The conversation had moved on when Leah tuned in, and she did her best to keep it flowing.

“I meant to tell you, Leah,” her mother said casually. “I ran into Professor Stenlake the other day.”

Leah eyed her mother’s butter-wouldn’t-melt expression across the table and suppressed a sigh. It was almost inevitable that this would happen, despite the fact that her father had assured her that the subject of her career switch was verboten. “Mum. Can we please not get into this today?” she said firmly.

“Get into what? I simply want to pass on the fact that he said hello and that you were greatly missed. Which suggests to me that if you asked nicely, he’d be more than happy to accept you back into the program before too much damage has been done.”

Leah was aware of her sister glancing around the table, trying to fathom what they were talking about.

“I’ve made my decision, Mum. Can we leave it?”

“What’s going on?” Audrey asked.

“Your sister has dropped out of the surgical program. She’s decided she wants to be a clinical immunologist,” her father explained, his tone flat and uninflected.

Playing Switzerland, as usual.

“Even though she has poured years of her life into a highly prestigious specialty that will ensure she has a brilliant future,” her mother said.

Leah gritted her teeth, refusing to let her mother get to her. Refusing to prosecute this argument yet again.

“Immunology. That’s a bit of a change of pace.” Audrey’s voice was calm and clear, and Leah grasped on to it like a life buoy.

“I enjoy it. I have some ideas I want to explore. It’s an exciting field with lots of challenges.”

“Well, good. Congratulations,” Audrey said.

For some reason, the simple sincerity in her sister’s words hit home.

“Thank you,” Leah said, meaning it from the bottom of her heart.

Her mother leaned across the table, one hand pressing down onto the surface as she strained to make her point. “I understand you’re infatuated with immunology at the moment. But there is so much more opportunity for you in cardiothoracic surgery, Leah. So many more chances for you to make your mark.”

Things spiraled downhill from there as her mother trotted out the same arguments she’d been peddling for weeks, and Leah countered with the same responses, the whole disaster coming to a head when she knew she couldn’t hold back her angry tears a moment longer.

“It’s not what I want, Mum. It’s what
you
want, and I can’t live my life for you. Not anymore.” She stood abruptly, her chair legs scraping across the parquet floor. Blinking away furious tears, she headed for the ladies’ room.

It was all dark surfaces and luxurious lighting, and she paced the small space a few times before coming to a dead stop in the middle of the room.

She shouldn’t have risen to the bait. She’d given too much energy to her mother’s negativity already, and she refused to be bullied into feeling guilty about living her own life. She let her breath out on a sigh, then turned to the mirror to check her makeup. She may not have actually cried, but her makeup was smudged anyway. Awesome. She looked like Alice Cooper.

She shoved her hands into her jacket pocket, searching for a tissue, and frowned as she discovered a bumpy, plastic object. She pulled it out, confused.

Jelly beans. Right.

She stared at the orange and green and purple beans, remembering the way Will had pressed them into her hand, remembering the soft, private note in his voice when he’d wished her happy birthday.

Then she remembered what he’d said to her the night of their pizza date.
Every time I’ve swum against the tide in my life
—every time—
there’s been someone shouting at me to turn back
,
to go the other way.
Every time I kept going
,
and things worked out fine
.