How to Get Over Your Ex (8 page)

He smiled. ‘Right. That’s all the company I need.’

Suddenly she felt very self-conscious to be standing here
taking up his silence. Although she suspected he’d only be working anyway.
Fortunately, a tube entrance loomed.

‘Well, I guess I should—’

‘I have a garden,’ he blurted. ‘An actual one, I mean.’

She figured that the big house in Hampstead Heath came with a
big plot of land. ‘OK.’

‘I’d like you to see it.’

‘Why?’

He paused before answering. ‘Because it’s lovely. It should be
appreciated.’

The man who didn’t even use the rooms in his house? She
couldn’t picture him getting out in the garden. But maybe this whole contract
arrangement had some kind of implied reciprocity that she hadn’t considered.

Or maybe this was some kind of peace overture. If it was, she’d
take it.

‘Sure. I’d like to see it.’

‘Maybe you can give me some tips on what to do with it.’

‘I’m not a landscaper—’

‘I’m not looking for shape, I’m looking for soul.’ Surprise
flooded his face, as if he’d never considered that before.

‘A soulful garden. Well, I’m sure I can at least give you some
tips.’

‘Don’t underrate yourself. Look at what you do in your back
yard. The life you’ve invested that three square metres with.’

She considered that. ‘When do you want me to come by?’

‘How about next Saturday?’

‘Aren’t you running?’

‘I’m doing a night run. I have all day free.’

All day? ‘Just how big is this garden?’

He smiled and ushered her onto the tube steps. ‘You’ll
see.’

* * *

Enormous
was the answer. Gi-flipping-gantic. At least four
times the size of the house sitting like a stone sentry on its western edge and
that was already very big.

Georgia turned a slow three-sixty from her spot in the middle
of the garden’s first chamber and surveyed the extraordinary, neglected space.
Not physically neglected—the turf was mowed and the pruning regular. But Zander
was right: this garden lacked any kind of soul.

‘This is amazing.’ She looked at him. ‘Do you truly not use
it?’

‘I shortcut through it from the main street.’

Sacrilege. To have a garden like this, to have it be all your
own and then never use it.

‘There’s a lot you could do here.’

‘I have brown thumbs.’

‘You have something better. Deep pockets. You could hire a
team.’

‘I don’t want a team. I want you.’

She glanced at him.

‘Someone like you,’ he rushed on. ‘Someone with passion for it.
To look after it.’

The awkwardness of the moment flailed around between them.
I want you.
She’d practically given herself
whiplash snapping her head around to look at him.

‘I don’t think you’ll have any trouble finding someone to do
more than just mow and prune. I could give you some names if you like.’

Hers would have been at the top of the list for anyone but him.
What she wouldn’t give to get to tinker in this garden.

‘That would be great.’

She basked in the heat coming off him in the cool mid-morning
air. Maybe carb-loading turned you into a furnace. Whatever the cause, she
caught herself swaying towards his warmth.

She turned the unintentional move into a full body spin before
he noticed it and looked again at the magnificent potential all around her.

‘I have hedgehogs,’ he murmured.

Her eyes fluttered shut. Of course he did. That was just the
final nail in the coffin. ‘This is wasted on you,’ she said, bleak. But her soft
groan must have communicated her affinity for the space because he didn’t take
offence.

‘Because I don’t use it?’

‘Because you don’t love it. This garden—’ she turned back to
the west ‘—this stunning house... These should be in the hands of someone who
worked hard their whole life to have it. Not someone who only uses the garden
for short cuts and who uses just two of the rooms.’ Yet paid a premium for them.
‘Why do you stay?’

She’d asked him before but he hadn’t answered.

‘Come on in,’ he hedged. ‘I’ll show you inside.’

Maybe she’d been rude to say it like that—out loud, to his
face—but she truly didn’t understand how someone could have all this and not
want to spend every waking moment in it.

Inside was the carefully styled twin of outside. Perfectly
maintained, but utterly soulless. Like a short-term executive rental.

‘Where’s your study?’ She could hardly ask to see his bedroom,
but she was desperate to get a sense of him. Of who Zander Rush really was.

He led her up a sweeping, curved staircase to the upper floor
and along a spotless landing. It struck her then that he’d be better off closing
off the unused rooms and throwing cloths over all the furniture. She suggested
it.

‘No. I don’t want to live like that. It doesn’t take my cleaner
long to dust and vacuum. This way it’s ready if people come over
unexpectedly.’

She slid her eyes sideways. ‘Does that happen often?’

Something told her it didn’t. She had the strangest feeling she
was one of only a few people this house ever saw.

Again, criminal.

A house like this should be seen. By someone.

He paused outside a door and looked at her. ‘Welcome to the
inner sanctum.’

It felt like that. Privileged. Rare. Something about the air
that whooshed out as he swung opened the big timber door. She thought to see
some kind of expansive library with ladders and a massive antique desk and dead
animal heads lining the wall. Something as grand as the house. She couldn’t have
been more wrong. It was small but not tiny. Opulently carpeted, tasteful timber
desk at the far end, and an array of antique bookcases of all different sizes
and shapes and filled with books.

It was charming. And warm. And personal.

And such an unexpected thing given the rest of the house.

She stepped forward and trailed her fingers along the various
surfaces. He watched her silently.

‘It’s lovely,’ she said, conscious that he seemed to expect
some kind of verdict. ‘And comfortable; I can see why you spend a lot of time in
here.’

Not as much as the garden, if this were her house and not his.
She’d build a nest in the conservatory and hibernate in there.

‘I get much more done here at home than at the station.’

‘I’m surprised you don’t work from home more.’

‘There’s only so much alone time a man can take.’ He smiled.
‘Even me.’

She couldn’t imagine a busier or noisier Monday to Friday than
working in a crowded radio station. She crossed around behind his desk and
studied the carved bust by the window. ‘A relative? Some famous broadcasting
type?’

He shook his head. ‘It was in the house when I bought it. I had
it moved in here because it seemed a fitting sort of decoration for a
study.’

How sad. A beautiful house full of someone else’s memories. She
turned and skimmed her eyes over the paperwork scattered around a closed laptop
on his desk. None of it interested her, but a colourful mini-poster pressed to
the surface of the desk by a chunk of granite did.

His next event notice. Hadrian’s Wall, Gilsland to Bowness. The
following weekend. She’d never seen a marathon in progress. And it was a public
event...

She conveniently ignored the fact that she’d promised him she
wouldn’t ask to go to one of his events. And that not telling him was just plain
creepy.

‘Do you cook in your kitchen?’ she blurted, steering her
focus—and his—away from the notice on his desk.

‘With fifteen restaurants in walking distance there’s little
need, but yes, I have used the oven.’

‘I was thinking more about the kettle. I’d love a coffee while
I make that list of landscapers.’

And get a better feel for the man himself, and what might have
happened to him in his life to make him such an under-committed, over-achieving
workaholic.

* * *

‘Best
.
Course. Ever!’ Georgia said as she hunkered down on the opposite
side of a half-destroyed door, chest heaving and brandishing her heavy artillery
up near her face.

Zander chuckled from the darkness beyond the flimsy doorway. ‘I
don’t believe it. Have we finally found something you’d have done if you had
free choice?’

‘Totally! Who knew I’d be so fast at assembling a gun?’ She
tightened the harness crossing her chest until it was snug again.

‘Or cracking a code.’

She leaned back into the artfully decorated set designed to
look like a shelled-out building. Less shabby-chic and more...Afghanistan-ic.
‘Makes up for being such a lousy femme fatale, I guess.’

‘Not everyone’s cut out for seduction,’ he threw away in the
brief moment he peered his head around the doorway to assess the enemy
location.

Some of the joy sucked out of her day. Believing it herself was
different from having it pointed out by a man. By this man.

‘Ready?’ he checked.

She shook her doubts free and readied her weapon. ‘Locked and
loaded.’

‘On my count...’

God, this was fun. She braced herself against the wall and
waited for ‘three’. When it came she surged to her feet and sprinted across the
open courtyard, as damaged and rubble-strewn as the rest of the set, with Zander
hard up behind her. Halfway across, one of the yellow team popped up out of
nowhere and aimed right at them both. Georgia dived to her left, crashing into a
fake rubbish skip and sliding around behind it only to come face to face with
one of her instructors, kitted out in the garb of the yellow team.

‘Bang,’ he said, popping the barrel of his fake gun hard up to
her laser-tag and firing. The lights came on in the arena. He gave her his hand.
‘The good news is, you were the last of your team to die. If that’s any
consolation.’

Yay for her! Last woman standing.

‘What happened to Zander?’ she puffed.

‘The big guy? He got hit by the shot you dodged.’

Her breath caught.
Whoops
.

Sure enough, the look Zander threw her as she stepped out from
behind the skip was incredulous. ‘I can’t believe you let me take that hit!’ he
accused.

She lifted her weapon and unclipped her body harness. ‘I would
have died.’

‘But I’m your superior.’

She tipped her head back and threw him her sweetest smile.
‘Superior at dying, maybe...’

He snagged her arms and pinned them behind her, stepping in
hard against her body and glaring down on her. ‘Isn’t that just like a
woman?’

The hardness of his body—all strapped up in military chest
plate and pressed up so firmly against hers—stole what little breath she’d
managed to recover. ‘The sarcasm or the faithlessness?’ she whispered.

He tightened her hands and his eyes bored down into her soul.
‘Both.’

‘Just because I wouldn’t die for you? Is that what you expect
of people?’

A shadow crossed his features and he let her hands go. ‘Is a
little loyalty too much to ask?’

He was taking this very seriously for a game. ‘We’re highly
trained agents. Loyal to no one but Queen and country.’

He grunted.

‘Besides,’ she breathed, ‘just think how guilty you’d have felt
for the rest of your military career, letting a woman die for you. It would eat
you up and you’d find yourself a hermit, living in a mountain, loving no one and
letting nobody in. All bitter and twisted. Useless to MI6. I saved you from a
fate worse than death, Agent Rush.’

Although it occurred to her that the description wasn’t all
that
unlike
the real him. Minus the mountain.

His eyes narrowed. ‘Also just like a woman, spinning it so I
should somehow be grateful.’

‘All right, people,’ the instructor shouted over the din, and
she stepped away from Zander’s warmth, reluctantly. ‘Great to see that a full
day of spy training has taught you all absolutely nothing about field
survival...’

Georgia laughed along with everyone else and glanced at Zander.
How long had it been since she’d felt this...light? He took her weapon for her
and just held it. As though it were her hand.

Of course it wasn’t.

‘Next week we’ll be looking at surveillance gear,’ the
instructor continued, ‘and having a go at planting a bug on someone.’

She rounded on Zander, eyes wide, and mouthed,
Yay!

He shook his scraggy head, laughing, and stood back to let her
pass in front of him back to the classroom. They stripped off their borrowed
military accoutrements—very reluctantly on Georgia’s part because she’d been
having herself a nice little fantasy about Zander doing that for her—and
collected up their belongings.

‘Would you truly have wanted me to take that hit for you?’ she
queried as they walked back towards his Jag a little later.

‘It’s nice to think someone would.’

She lifted her eyes to his.

‘Isn’t that what anyone wants?’ he said. ‘Someone to sacrifice
all for them.’

‘You don’t seem the type,’ she murmured, sliding into the
passenger seat next to him.

‘I’m as susceptible as anyone to grand gestures.’

She laughed as they pulled away from the kerb. ‘And you wonder
why your staff are frightened of you.’ And then, at his frown, ‘If death is the
only way they can get in your good books. Even metaphorically.’

He stared ahead at the road, letting that sink in.

‘You value loyalty that highly?’ she risked.

He took a moment answering, but when he did it wasn’t with the
same light tone that they’d been firing back and forth since the war-games
ended. ‘I’ve not had a lot of it in my life.’

‘Who from?’

But of course he wasn’t going to answer that. And no matter how
many hours of fun they’d just had, it didn’t give her much of a right to
ask.

Instead he turned to her, brightly, and said, ‘Want to grab
something to eat on the way?’