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swollen mouth and tasted him. Familiar, yet strange. Known but now unknowable.
    She looked up at the big empty house and agonised over what her decision would be on Sunday evening. She wasn’t sure she had much say in the matter; the way her body was feeling had already decided for her. Did she have the strength to walk away from him a second time?
    She went back through the house via the bathroom, to tidy herself before rejoining Byron at the car. She stared at her reflection in the mirror and was a little shocked by the wild, abandoned look in her hazel-flecked eyes. Passion burned in her gaze—a dormant passion now stirred into blistering life by just one kiss from a mouth that still hadn’t once smiled at her.

CHAPTER THREE

    B YRON was leaning against the car, listening to someone on the other end of his mobile phone, his eyes squinting slightly against the bright sunshine. Cara approached the car and he turned as if he sensed her behind him. He carefully avoided her eyes as he came around and opened the door for her. He finished the call and slid into the driver’s seat, all without addressing a single word to her.
    Cara wanted to break the silence but couldn’t think of anything to say. What did one say to an ex-husband in these situations? I still love you after all these years? I made a mistake, the biggest mistake of my life, when I left you? Can we try again?
    ‘No.’
    ‘Did you say something?’ His eyes flicked her way as he turned the wheel.
    She hadn’t realised she’d spoken out loud, so deep was her concentration on the past.
    ‘No, nothing…’
    He turned the car into the traffic before speaking again.
    ‘I thought we could have lunch.’ He glanced at the car clock. ‘I have a client at two, but if we’re quick we can grab a sandwich and a coffee somewhere.’
    Cara didn’t want to appear too desperate for his company, and wished she could invent two or three clients of her own, but the rest of her afternoon was unfortunately very free.
    ‘I should get back to the office—’
    ‘And do what?’ He glanced at her again. ‘Your business has ground to a halt. Is my company so distasteful to you that you can’t even stomach the thought of sharing a simple meal with me?’
    She flinched at the bitterness in his voice.
    ‘No, of course not.’ But even to her own ears her tone lacked conviction.
    ‘No wonder you’re balking at the suggestion of sharing my bed,’ he ground out. ‘Let alone bearing my child.’
    Cara stared at her tightly clenched hands in her lap, and before replying waited until she had her emotions under some sort of control.
    ‘Lunch will be fine,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t have any other engagements.’
    He drove to a café in Neutral Bay in stony silence. Cara looked at him once or twice, but his attention was on the traffic ahead. His normally smooth brow was deeply furrowed, the lines around his mouth tightly etched, as if he were only just managing to keep control of his anger. She knew he was angry with her. Seven years of anger separated them just as much as the issues that had caused the first rift.
    She’d been adamant from their very first date that she had no intention of ever having children. She hadn’t told him the real reason, but instead had grasped for the generally held assumption that young career-driven women had better things to do with their time than haunt some man’s kitchen barefoot with a protruding belly. The fact that she hadn’t at that point in her life had a career hadn’t taken away the strength of her argument. But at twenty-two years old what truths of the world had she really known? She’d flitted from job to job, searching for something she had known was out there somewhere for her to devote herself to. But back then it hadn’t yet appeared on the horizon.
    It had taken the bitter divorce to propel her into the field of interior design. She’d immersed herself in her studies, trying to dull the throb of pain that just