Read His Until Midnight for Free Online Page B

implication. It was too much.
    ‘Why are you doing this?’ Audrey whispered, tight and tense.
    ‘Doing what?’
    What was it exactly? Flirting? Pressing? She stared at him and hoped her face wasn’t as bleak as her voice. ‘Stirring.’
    He drained the last of the Cristal from his glass. ‘I’m just trying to shake you free of the cold, impersonal place you put yourself in order to have this conversation.’
    ‘I don’t mean to be impersonal.’ Or cold. Though that was a term she’d heard before courtesy of Blake. In his meaner moments.
    ‘I know you don’t, Audrey. That’s the only reason I’m not mad at you. It’s a survival technique.’
    ‘Uh-huh...’ She frowned in a way she hoped would cover the fact he was one hundred per cent right. ‘And what am I surviving?’
    ‘This day?’ He stared, long and hard. ‘Maybe me?’
    ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’
    Four staff with exquisite timing arrived with the second seafood plate of the degustation experiences ahead of them. Two cleared the table and two more lay down matching shards of driftwood, decorated with glistening seaweed, and nested in it were a selection of oceanic morsels. A solitary lobster claw, calamari in a bed of roe, a fan of some kind of braised whitebait and—
    Audrey leaned in for a good look. ‘Is that krill?’
    Oliver chuckled and it eased some of the tension that hung as thick as the krill between them. ‘Don’t ask. Just taste.’
    Whatever it was, it was magnificent. Weird texture on the tongue but one of the tastiest mouthfuls she’d ever had. Until she got to the lobster claw.
    ‘Oh, my...’
    ‘They’ve really outdone themselves with this one.’
    The whole selection slid down way too easily with the frosty glass of Spanish Verdelho that had appeared in front of each of their dishes. But once there was nothing left on their driftwood but claw-husk and seaweed, conversation had no choice but to resume.
    ‘Ask me how I know,’ Oliver urged and then at her carefully blank stare he clarified. ‘Ask me how I know what it is that you’re doing.’
    She took a deep slow breath. ‘How do you know what I’m supposedly doing, Oliver?’
    ‘I recognise it. From dealing with you the past five years. Eight if you want to go right back to the beginning.’
    Oh, would that she could. The things she would do differently...
    ‘I recognise it from keeping everything so carefully appropriate with you. From knowing exactly where the boundaries are and stopping with the tips of my shoes right on the line. From talking myself repeatedly into the fact that we’re only friends.’
    Audrey’s heart hammered wildly. ‘We are.’
    He leapt on that. ‘So now we are friends? Make up your mind.’
    She couldn’t help responding to the frustration leaching through between his words. ‘I don’t know what you want from me, Oliver.’
    ‘Yes, you do.’ He shifted forward again, every inch the predator. ‘But you’re in denial.’
    ‘About what?’
    ‘About what we really are.’
    They couldn’t be anything else. They just couldn’t. ‘There’s no great mystery. You were my best man. You were my husband’s closest friend.’
    ‘I stopped being Blake’s friend three years ago, Audrey.’
    The pronouncement literally stunned her into silence. Her mouth opened and closed silently in protest. She knew something had gone down between them but...that long ago?
    She picked up the M&M’s. ‘This long?’
    ‘Just after that.’ He guessed her next question. ‘Friendships change. People change.’
    ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she whispered. And why hadn’t Blake? He knew that she saw Oliver whenever she went to Hong Kong. Why the hell wouldn’t her husband tell her not to come?
    He took a long breath. ‘I didn’t tell you because you would have stopped coming.’
    Only the gentle murmur of conversation, the clink of silverware on plates and the hum of dragonfly wings interrupted the long, shocking silence. There was so much