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quarters of an hour later Max was freshly showered and
dressed in sweats when the doorbell rang. She opened the door to find Cam and
the pizza deliveryman standing on the doorstep.
    Cam had her purse open. “He wouldn’t
let me pay.”
    “You might have been trying to
hijack this pizza,” the pizza deliveryman teased. “I know it sounds
unlikely—but it has happened and I knew Miss Goode would kill me if she didn’t
get her pepperoni fix.” He grinned.
    “Quite right too.” Max grabbed a
couple of notes from the table and exchanged them for the flat pizza box. “Thank
you.”
    They both watched him walk away.
    “Damn, he’s good-looking,” Cam
said. “If I was on his route I’d be ordering pizza every day.” She held up a
bottle. “I meant to be here earlier, but got delayed. Looks like I arrived at
the right time though. When I dropped Lindsay off at my mum’s she dragged me in
to look at her new curtains.” Cam smiled. “Which was just an excuse to confide
about how difficult my mother is finding my father’s retirement. He’s home all
day and making improvements to the house. It’s driving her crazy. He decided to
put up shelves in the spare bedroom, so our conversation was overlaid with the
sound of hammering. I couldn’t just drop Linds and run. You know how it is.”
    Max shrugged. Her father had been
at home for as long as she could remember.
    “What’s the deal with your
parents?” Cam tilted her head to one side, and fixed Max with a stare. “You
never talk about them. They live in Kent, don’t they?”
    “We don’t really get on.”
    “You fight?”
    If only it were that simple.
    “No. The very opposite. Every time
I go home and see them, we act like polite strangers. I pretend to be the sort
of daughter they want, and they pretend to believe I am.” Bitter rejection
twisted in her heart. “It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way it is.”
    “You’re looking tired. Still not
sleeping?” Cam’s gaze was critical.
    Max shrugged.
    “You should take some time off. You
work too hard. We can handle things for a couple of weeks—why not go on
holiday?”
    “Let’s open that wine.” She strode
into the apartment heading straight for the kitchen, and searched in the drawer
for the corkscrew.
    Max took two plates from the
cupboard and brought them to the coffee table in the sitting room. She flipped
open the top of the box and the room filled with the scent of pizza.
    Cam opened the wine and poured two
glasses. “You’re trying to change the subject, aren’t you?”
    Max nodded. “I’m fine. Don’t make
a fuss.” Reassuring Cam had become a familiar chore over the past few months.
She didn’t want to let on just how badly affected she’d been by the whole Joel
affair. How she didn’t think she would ever trust a man again.
    Cam took the hint. “What do your
parents think about your company?”
    Some of the fantasies they made
real were pretty out there. They certainly wouldn’t receive her mother’s stamp
of approval. “They don’t know about it—and neither do my sisters. I tell them
it’s a concierge service.” She swallowed a mouthful of wine. “They wouldn’t
approve. It was bad enough that my name appeared in the papers with the Hazzard
Hall affair. My mother didn’t speak to me for a month after that.”
    Cam’s eyes were full of sympathy.
She filled her glass and leaned back on the sofa. “So what have you been up to?
I thought I’d see you back in the office today.”
    Max tapped a strand of shower-damp
hair behind her ear. Nerves swirled in her stomach. It was time to fess up, and
for an awful moment she wondered if she’d done the right thing. Cam had made a
throwaway comment she doubtless didn’t expect Max to act upon, but things were
moving at such a clip that she couldn’t back down now. “I’ve been working on a
fantasy.” She gulped a mouthful of wine.
    “A fantasy for you, I hope. You
can’t keep avoiding life, honey—you have