Anger settled between his brows. âI want to just enjoy today. Enjoy your company. Like we used to.â
And he didnât want it to stop, which was not what sheâd expected when she got out of the taxi sixty floors below. She thought heâd have just shrugged and wished her well and found someone else to start an annual Christmas tradition with.
âWell, things have changed now,â she urged. âLike it or not.â
Something flickered in his eyes, his face grew unnaturally intent. And she grew inexplicably nervous.
âSo,â he started, âif weâre not friends what are we?â
She choked slightly on her wine. âSorry?â
âI accept that weâre not friends. But I wonder, then, what that means we are.â
She just stared.
âBecause there were two things that defined our relationship for meâ¦â He used the word âdefinedâ as though it meant âconstrainedâ. âOne was that you were the wife of a friend. Nowâtragicallyâno longer the case. And the other was that we were friends. Apparently also now no longer the case. So, tell me, Audreyââ
He leaned forward and swilled the liquid in his glass and his eyes locked on hard to hers.
ââwhere exactly does that leave us?â
Dear Reader,
Have you ever heard the saying, âwhy let the truth get in the way of a perfectly good storyâ? A friend told me how she catches up, once a year, with a longstanding (male) friend in a gorgeous restaurant high above a beautiful Asian city. They spend a full, lazy day catching up and sharing stories and squeezing a yearâs worth of friendship into that one day of the year and then they fly back to their respective countries. And itâs entirely, completely, unquestionably wholesome.
So of course I had to go and ruin it.
The simple premise grabbed me and filled me to overflowing with those âwhat ifsâ that authors love. What if it wasnât completely wholesome? What if one of them was secretly attracted to the other one but never, ever planned to act on it? What if they did this for years and then one year something changedâ¦?
And I realized that this story was really about the biggest âwhat ifâ of allâ¦one that we can all relate to. What if youâd turned right instead of left that day, or taken the bus instead of walking, or been brave enough to give your phone number to one man instead of his friend? What if youâd just grabbed opportunity by the shirt-collar the first time around? Where would you be today?
This is a story about the patience of Love, the beauty of Friendship and the magic of Christmas.
If youâre reading it at Christmas, please accept my best wishes to you and your family for a wonderful and safe holiday season.
May love always find you,
*Nikki*
www.nikkilogan.com.au â A Romance with Nature
NIKKI LOGAN lives next to a string of protected wetlands in Western Australia, with her long-suffering partner and a menagerie of furred, feathered and scaly mates. She studied film and theatre at university, and worked for years in advertising and film distribution before finally settling down in the wildlife industry. Her romance with nature goes way back, and she considers her life charmed, given she works with wildlife by day and writes fiction by nightâthe perfect way to combine her two loves. Nikki believes that the passion and risk of falling in love are perfectly mirrored in the danger and beauty of wild places. Every romance she writes contains an element of nature, and if readers catch a waft of rich earth or the spray of wild ocean between the pages she knows her job is done.
This and other titles by Nikki Logan are available in eBook formatâcheck out www.millsandboon.co.uk
For Alex and Trev who let me turn their entirely
platonic annual tradition into something much more dramatic. Thank you for the inspiration.
ONE
December 20th, four years ago
QÄ«ngtÃng Restaurant, Hong Kong
Audrey Devaney flopped against the back of the curved sofa and studied the pretty, oriental-style cards in her hands. Not the best hand in the world but when you were playing for M&Mâs and you tended to eat your stake as fast as it accumulated it was hard to take poker too seriously.
Though it was fun to pretend she knew what she was doing. Like some Vegas hotshot. And it wasnât too hard to imagine that the extraordinary view of Hong Kongâs Victoria Harbour stretching out behind Oliver Harmer was really out of the window of some casino high-rollerâs room instead of a darkened, atmospheric restaurant festooned with pretty lanterns and baubles in rich, oriental colours.
Across from her, Oliverâs five oâclock shadow was designer perfect and an ever-present, unlit cigar poked out of the corner of his grinning mouthâmore gummed than smoked, out of respect for her and for the other patrons in the restaurant. It only felt as if he bought the whole place out each Christmas, it wasnât actually true. Though it was nice to imagine that they had the entire restaurant to themselves.