Training Days (22 page)

But she didn’t. Instead she turned her car engine over and headed out of the school gates, determined to let Ally make the first contact.

The call Morgan had been wishing for came at eight the next evening, just minutes before Michael was due to pick her up for their dinner meeting with the Logies committee.

“Hello,” Morgan breathed into her phone. She wanted to end her greeting with “Ally,” not only for the personal touch, but because she liked the sound of it as it rolled off her tongue. She’d been saying the name out loud intermittently all day, each time she had a moment alone. But now she didn’t indulge her desire. The caller ID might say
Ally
, but anyone could be on the end of the line. James, for example.

“Morgan?”

“Yes.” Morgan sat on an arm of her couch and closed her eyes to the view of the harbor that the lounge room of her Piper Point apartment afforded. “How are you, Ally?”

“I’ve just called to tell you I’m deleting you from my phone memory, and I’d appreciate it if you’d do the same with my number.”

“What?” Morgan’s eyes flew open. The city lights twinkled and the bridge lights formed a glittering arch, well deserving of its nickname of “the coat hanger.” Morgan detached herself from the familiar view and focused on the reflection in the window. She saw herself on the edge of her couch, running a hand through her hair. If she looked more closely at her eyes, they would have shown a wild desperation. This was not at all what she had expected. “Ally, please. Don’t do this.”

The response was flat. “I have to.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t live this way.”

“What way?”

“Thinking about you all the time. Wanting to call . . . wanting to see you.”

“Then call me.” Morgan’s heart jumped to her throat. “See me.”

“I can’t.”

“Ally . . . please!” Morgan pleaded. She thought wildly, trying to figure a way to make her change her mind. An idea jumped out at her. “What will James think if you never make a claim on what you bought at the auction?”

“What James thinks is none of your business” was the sharp reply.

“Ally!”

There was a pregnant pause during which Morgan leapt up to pace in front of her window. Finally Ally’s voice resumed. It was but a whisper. “See me tonight.”

Oh, God, no. Not tonight.
“I can’t tonight. I’ve got plans. But tomorr—”

“Forget it.”

“Ally, please listen. Tonight is . . . important to me. Let’s meet tomorrow. I should wind up around six. I can meet you anywhere you—”

“Forget it.” Coldness had crept into Ally’s tone and Morgan knew she had closed herself off. “I’m deleting you from memory. And I don’t want you to call me ever again. Good-bye.”

The line went dead. Morgan stared at her phone, and despite the explicit instruction not to call, she retrieved
Ally
from the received-calls list and set it to dial. She was switched to voice mail. Morgan left a message for her to please reconsider and call back.

Morgan left her phone switched on throughout her Logies meeting. It vibrated four times, but covert checks revealed that none of the calls were from Ally. So she ignored them. She left another voice-mail message when her meeting ended and another when she got home. She also left a message early the next morning, before she drove to the studios. But when she tried again at the first break in between her recording sessions, she was switched through to a recording that very politely suggested she should check the number she had dialed.

Morgan did—twice—and both times received the same recording. It seemed that Ally had gone further than her threat of deleting Morgan’s details from her contact list. She had even gone further than blocking Morgan from calling her mobile. Evidently, she had either canceled her mobile phone contract or done something to her SIM card—the sliver of technology that sat behind the battery and contained all the subscriber information, including the phone number—that rendered it useless.

From what Morgan had gleaned of Ally during their time spent together on the train, she had a busy professional life with frequent client contact. Her phone would be an important business tool. But obviously that fact had been overshadowed by Ally’s desire to have no further contact with Morgan.

Morgan turned her phone off and dropped it into her handbag, took herself to the toilets and, for the first time in goodness knew how long, she put her head in her hands and cried.

Not too long later, Morgan contemplated her reflection in the large mirror that hung above the wash basin. She would be retouched by the makeup artist before the next session of shooting began, but for now her pride told her she had to try to eliminate the evidence she had been crying. “What have you done to me, Alison Brown?” she asked under her breath as she carefully wiped away the streaks of mascara from under her eyes.

She dabbed at her eyes a few more times and discarded the mascara-stained tissue. Then she dug into her bag, found her bottle of redness-reliever formula and administered a few drops into each eye. That done, she rested her hands on the edge of the wash basin and took another long, hard look at her reflection.

Despite her efforts, any fool could see she’d shed some tears. Her mouth set into a grim line, she dug into her bag again, this time to pull out her phone.

Within the push of a few keys the
Ally
entry was deleted. She put the phone back in her bag, snapped the catch shut and thought forward in time to the next day. Come tomorrow she’d be winging her way out of Australia to Vanuatu, voted as the happiest place to live on the planet. Morgan hoped the island nation lived up to its reputation. Because she sure could use some cheering up right now.

Preferably by some delicious Vanuatu island beauty.

Or not. It didn’t matter really. So long as she wasn’t Australian.

Or French. For the moment she was off them too.

Ally flinched as she closed her office door behind her. She had just finished deceiving her boss. Actually,
deception
was far too soft a word to describe what she’d done.
Destruction of company property coupled with an outright lie
was more fitting terminology. Initially she hadn’t intended to cause any damage to her mobile phone. All she’d wanted to do was make sure Morgan couldn’t keep calling, so, after deleting voice-mail message number four she’d put a block on her phone. But she’d very quickly realized that the block was only good if Morgan dialed from her mobile. She could call from any landline or pay phone, or any other phone for that matter. Plus, Morgan’s number had to be stored in Ally’s phone in order for the number to be blocked and so was sitting there for retrieval should she ever be tempted. Despite telling herself she would not be tempted, there was a niggling voice in her head telling her that she would . . . so blocking her phone was not enough. She needed a new telephone number. And the best way of getting one, without having to answer curly questions from her boss, was for her SIM card to suffer some sort of mishap. Because the card was safely tucked inside her phone and—having figured Josh would never believe it had simply grown legs and walked away—this morning she had purposely destroyed her entire mobile phone by running it under the tap in the office bathroom until some of the electronics short-circuited. It hadn’t taken long.

She had blushed profusely when embarrassedly presenting her still-wet phone to Josh. She explained how she had been desperate for the toilet, made a dash with her phone still in hand, placed it on the women’s sanitary bin, but accidentally knocked it when she stood to flush. And it fell in. The circumstances she described made the blush feasible and he swallowed the whole story, even her proclamation that—thank goodness—she had backed up her SIM card only the week before. In actual fact, she had arrived at the office a good half-hour earlier than normal and backed up her SIM before giving her phone a cold shower.

Ally was relieved that Josh seemed to find the incident more amusing than annoying. Deciding not to push her luck, she shut herself in her office and hardly made an appearance all day. She also refused to dwell on the reason why she had taken such a drastic and dishonest action, choosing instead to bury herself in her work.

James called her on the office line at lunchtime, both to apologize for upsetting her the night before and to see if—as they had arranged before their argument—she was still going to spend the night at his place. He also asked why he was unable to get through on her mobile. Ally broadened the audience of her lie by telling James about dropping her phone down the toilet. She also said yes, she would be spending the night with him. She hung up from the call, bent to her work again and didn’t give him another thought all afternoon.

Come the end of the day she was putting the finishing touches on the first pass of her Kalgoorlie executive residence. Tomorrow she could start inputting it into the 3-D-rendering program that would enable her client to virtually “walk through” his house. She packed up her bag and flicked off the light switch in her office, feeling quite pleased with her progress. Halfway to her apartment in Croyden she remembered she was supposed to be in Balmain. She turned her car around, aimed it for James’s townhouse and let herself in.

She initially kept her “waiting for James at James’s place” routine, bringing in the mail and placing it on the dining table, pouring herself a glass of wine and poking her head in the fridge to see what she might use in the preparation of dinner. She found the makings for a simple stir-fry and was halfway through transferring the ingredients onto the kitchen bench when she began loading them back into the fridge. Ally took herself and her glass of wine upstairs, removed all her clothes and lay down on James’s bed.

She sipped on her wine and experimented with a series of seductive postures, imagining the reaction when James discovered her. Most likely he would be very, very pleased. But he would also most likely approach the bed with caution, not only because of their argument last night, but because of late all his efforts at intimacy had been knocked flat. On the Sunday night after the auction Ally had begged a headache, blaming the champagne. James had reluctantly turned over in bed, although he had quite sarcastically mentioned it was more likely the thought of the five-
thousand
-dollar check she had written that afternoon that was causing the headache. On Monday they didn’t even make it as far as the bedroom. James had been watching the evening news when a promotion for
Bonnes Vacances
came on during an ad break. The five thousand dollars was mentioned again and Ally had let fly, accusing him of being a chauvinist pig who wanted to control her life and her pocketbook, and essentially throwing him out of her apartment. He left without putting up too much of an argument, just shaking his head and once more announcing her as “one confounding woman.” Ally had slammed the door behind him and dashed back to the television. She stared at it for a whole half-hour before another promotion for
Bonnes Vacances
appeared. When it did she sat rigid in her seat, holding her breath until the snippet with Morgan in it had come and gone. When it was gone Ally immediately began waiting for it to appear again. It was after another twenty minutes of staring in expectation of a fifteen-second commercial that Ally reached for her mobile phone, dialed Morgan and told her of her intention to remove her from memory.

Which is exactly what she’d done today. Via vandalism and deceit, maybe, but still, it was done and now Ally could get on with her life as it had been in the days before Morgan. She took another sip of her wine, assumed another sexy posture and focused on James’s reaction to finding her naked on his bed.

Too damn bad if he wasn’t into spontaneity and excitement, because that’s exactly what he was in for tonight.

Two minutes later, as unbidden thoughts of Morgan kept impinging on the space she had reserved for James, she sat up and checked her wristwatch, which she’d laid on one of the bedside tables. It was three minutes to seven. Usually, James didn’t arrive home until after the hour. She lay back down again.

At one minute to seven she was cold and tired of waiting. She was also feeling a little silly lying there with her legs apart. “Where the hell are you?” she muttered grumpily, her seductive mood evaporating with the last sip of her wine. By one minute past seven she was dressed again, had smoothed down the bedclothes and returned downstairs. By three past the hour James was letting himself in the front door.

“How are you tonight?” he asked rather carefully as he kissed her on the cheek.

“I’m fine.” Ally held up her refreshed glass. “Want one?”

“Yes, please. Good day?”

“Fine.” Ally went to the fridge to retrieve the bottle.

“That’s good.” James picked up his mail from the dining table and flicked through it. “What would you like for dinner?”

Ally poured wine and shrugged. “There’s the makings of a stir-fry in the fridge.”

“Sounds good.” James extracted the contents of an envelope as he walked into the lounge area. He picked up the remote and aimed it at the television. “Do you mind if I watch the news?”

“Go ahead.” For the second time that evening Ally transferred items from the fridge onto the kitchen bench. She banged them a little onto the granite surface, not exactly sure why she was so irked. After all, she was getting exactly what she had wanted—the return to life as it had been before . . .
her
.