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moved a little closer, her lips parting in involuntary anticipation. Instead, he had just given her a brotherly hug before taking his arm away and leaving her squirming with embarrassment.
    Out of the corner of her eye she could see him stretched out on the grass, apparently asleep. So much for his insistence that, in his eyes at least, she had grown up. If he really believed it then surely he must have seen the naked longing in her eyes, for somehow, in the pause between one heartbeat and the next, Maggie had started loving him all over again. And she knew that this time it wasn’t just the whimsical imaginings of a lonely child.
    Ruairi watched her through the curve of his eyelashes. He couldn’t believe it had taken him so long to recognize that Maggie had indeed stepped across the threshold of childhood. There was nothing of the leggy teenager left at all. He gazed hungrily at her heavy curtain of copper hair, aching to thrust his fingers into it and pull her to him, to feel the slender lines of her body up close and personal, to crush the rosy pout of her full lips under his. If only!
    The old Ruairi O’Connor would have had no compunction in following up such a sudden and unexpected desire w ith action. But this was Maggie. She wasn’t someone who could just share a part of his journey. Any involvement with Maggie would be forever, and there was no way he was close to being ready for forever with anyone.
    He knew Maggie couldn’t be a few weeks in a foreign city, or a month or two on location. She was already too much a part of him. Despite barely thinking of her for years he was surprised to discover how deeply the memories of the young Maggie were twined around his heart. Maybe, without realizing it, he had just been waiting for her to grow up. Maybe bringing his mother over from Ireland to the one party where he was sure to meet Maggie again was some sort of subconscious act.
    Maybe rubbish! He was deluding himself. Just because the nomadic existence that was part and parcel of the career he had chosen had gone sour, he was looking for a solution. And right at this moment he wanted Maggie to be that solution because she was lovely, and funny, and warm, and achingly familiar as well. If he was finally going to admit to himself that after years of crisscrossing the globe he was lonely, then he wanted Maggie to be the balm that would heal his emotional void.
    Meeting up with the Silvers and being absorbed into the warmth of their extended family had opened up a well of loneliness deep inside him that he hadn’t known existed. He gave an inward sigh as he slanted another glance at Maggie’s bent head. He was being ridiculous. It was just proximity that was making him think this way about her. He would feel differently tomorrow. He always did. In a few weeks his feet would get itchy and he would be impatient to move on. In the meantime though, he needed some down time, and surely Maggie was the ideal person to spend it with. He just needed to stick with friendship and not look for anything else because, apart from the fact that he wasn’t ready to get tied down, Maggie herself had already made it abundantly clear that she wasn’t looking for any sort of relationship with anyone at all. She had just escaped a brush with suburbia, something she appeared to consider a fate worse than death, and she intended to stay footloose and fancy free while she travelled the world, and who could blame her? Not him, that was for sure. She wasn’t much older than he had been when he’d settled for a rootless life lived through a camera lens. And if he was totally honest, until recently he hadn’t regretted it at all.
     
    * * *
     
    Maggie was late for the O’Connor/Silver reunion dinner the following day. It wasn’t exactly deliberate, more a case of taking too long to decide what to wear, but beneath her dithering was a streak of childish defiance; a deep down annoyance that, as usual, nobody had thought to check whether