Cross My Hart. Clare Connelly

       CHAPTER ONE

      ‘YOU KNOW WHAT you need to put the wedding out of your mind? That. That guy right there.’

      Penny points across the restaurant and my eyes follow the direction of her finger. I presume she’s not talking about the high-powered businessmen sitting one table over. After Gareth, I’m giving suits a wide berth. Suits make me sick. I look beyond them, none the wiser. A family, an older couple with greying hair and three well-dressed younger people; two of them look to be a couple, one a sibling. My gaze lingers on them for a moment and a familiar pang of sadness sparks inside of me.

      I miss my family.

      Swallowing to clear my suddenly thick throat, I shift my gaze onwards, skating over the figure of a man standing at the bar, his back to me. Every fibre of my being goes on high alert.

      Nothing about this man says ‘suit.’

      He’s wearing low-cut denims, dark, scuffed at the arse in an ‘I’ve worn them to death’ rather than an ‘I paid hundreds of bucks for them’ kind of way, and a fitted white shirt that shows off the contours of a back that is muscular and sinewy. His arms are tanned, his neck thick, and beneath the white stretch cotton of the shirt I can make out the ghost of writing running across his centre—a tattoo?

      My pulse leaps, pounding faster, and there’s a twisting low down in my abdomen. His hair is thick and pale, blond, close-cropped.

      I want to stare at him. I want to stare at him all night, ideally as he strips his clothes from his body.

      All the more reason not to. I jerk my gaze back to Penny, a sardonic smile touching my lips. ‘I don’t think a one-night stand is going to make me forget that my ex is getting married tomorrow.’

      ‘I don’t know,’ she coos, unashamedly watching the man in a way that makes envy spurt, unwelcome, in my gut. ‘I think that guy could drive Gareth out of your head for a while.’

      I look down at my drink, stirring the paper straw—half-disintegrated—in clockwise circles, watching as the ice chips against the edge. ‘I think this is the only way I’m going to forget.’

      ‘To this, then,’ Penny agrees, chinking her glass to mine, lifting it to her lips and throwing it back in one fell swoop. ‘Another?’

      I laugh, despite myself. We’ve been best friends since primary school, when Marcia Adams called me fat and pushed me into the tennis nets, and Penny came running over and shoved Marcia—three years older than us—so hard she fell backwards and landed in a delightfully placed puddle. ‘I can’t have a big night, Pen. I’ve got that gazillionaire flying in tomorrow to inspect the golf course. And you know how much I need to sell it. That commission is... I need it.’

      ‘You don’t have to tell me how much you need it,’ she says, crossing her arms over her chest. Her anger and hatred for Gareth know no bounds.

      ‘I’m giving you until midnight,’ I say, ‘and then I want to be back in my own bed.’

      ‘It’s only six o’clock!’ She laughs.

      ‘Yeah, but I also need to not be hungover!’

      ‘Babe—’ she leans closer, pressing her forehead to mine ‘—do you trust me?’

      ‘Of course I do.’

      ‘Then let me help you put that fuckwit where he belongs—that is to say nowhere. He doesn’t deserve even one minute of your attention. Got it?’

      ‘I know that. I’m not... I don’t still think about him.’

      ‘Sure you don’t.’ Penny rolls her eyes. ‘You’re doing a great job of moving on, but, unfortunately for you, you still co-own the same bloody real estate agency.’

      ‘More to the point—why I need this sale tomorrow!’

      ‘Yeah, I get it.’ She sighs. ‘It’s early. Whatever happens tonight, I promise I’ll get you home by midnight. Okay?’

      I bite down on my lip, nodding slowly.

      ‘The same again?’ She slips her slender body out of our booth, her eyes falling to my still half-full glass with disapproval.

      I lift the glass and throw it back, slamming it on the tabletop before meeting her eyes. ‘You betcha.’

      She winks her approval and then sashays away, oblivious to the way the table of businessmen watch her as she goes. But then, that’s Penny. Stunning, sexy, unselfconscious, smart, and totally uninterested in flattery and praise. She’s just happy going about her own business.

      I’m not still hung up on Gareth. I couldn’t care less that he’s getting married.

      Okay, that’s a lie. I care, but that’s normal. We were together two years—not that long in the scheme of a whole life, I suppose, but two years. We started a business together and were talking about moving in together, and yet he always said to me, from the first date, ‘I’m not the marrying kind.’ And I accepted that, I got used to it, because I wasn’t even sure if I was the marrying kind—so why would I die on that hill?

      And then we got more serious and our friends started getting married and I had this vision of our future, and suddenly it seemed strange to say we’d never get married.

      Stranger still when he broke up with me. Ugh. I try to push that memory way, way back in my mind. The words he used I’ll never forget.

       ‘I love you, Gracie, but just not enough. Not in the way a guy should love a woman. I’m sorry.’

      And he cried, because he’s a good person and I think he felt like absolute shit to be pulling the rug out from under me.

       ‘Everyone says they want to stay friends, but I mean it, Grace. Look at what we did together.’

      He waved his hand around our office, and my stomach twisted because so much of who we were was in that place.

      I agreed with him—we couldn’t let anything destroy the business our blood, sweat and tears had turned into a multimillion-dollar real estate agency specialising in high-end property. Sydney was a tight market but we’d forced our way in and never looked back. We owed it to ourselves, each other, our clients and our reputation to get over this speed bump.

      That seemed a lot easier to do before he hit me with ‘part two’ of the break-up.

       ‘I’ve met someone.’

      Those words! God, I’d heard them in movies and read them in books and they’re just an innocuous collection of syllables, but when they were spoken to me I felt like my ears had been jammed with crickets. Everything hummed and buzzed and suddenly the guy I’d spent two years with, who’d seemed happy and content, was a part of someone else, something else, and I was on the outside of him and that, strangely adrift, as though whatever had anchored me to my place in this life no longer existed.

      ‘His name—’ Penny pushes a drink across the tabletop to me ‘—is Jagger.’ She rolls the ‘r’ like a tiger, and I laugh.

      ‘Of course it is.’

      ‘He’s only in town for tonight,’ she continues, sliding in beside me. ‘And he’d like to meet you.’

      ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ I roll my eyes, sure now that she’s making it up, and look towards the bar. But he’s facing us and my heart jolts in my chest. His elbows are lifted onto the bar so that he can recline casually, and he’s watching me with a curiosity that sparks flames in my blood.