If You Can't Stand the Heat...

‘Dad, why is Jack Chapman in my bakery?’

Ellie heard her father’s sharp intake of breath. ‘He’s there already? Good. I was worried.’

Of course you were, Ellie silently agreed. For the past ten years, since her eighteenth birthday, she’d listened to her father rumble on and on about Jack Chapman—the son he’d always wanted and never got. ‘He’s the poster-boy for a new generation of war correspondents,’ he’d said. ‘Unbiased, tough. Willing to dive into a story without thinking about his safety, looking for the story behind the story, yet able to push aside emotion to look for the truth...’ Yada, yada, yada...

‘So, again, why is he here?’ Ellie asked.

And, by the way, why do you only call when you want something from me? Oh, wait, you didn’t call. I did! You just sent your boy along, expecting me to accommodate your every whim.

Some things never changed.

‘He was doing an interview with a Somalian warlord who flipped. He was stripped of his cash and credit cards, delivered at gunpoint to a United Nations aid plane leaving for Cape Town and bundled onto it,’ Mitchell Evans said in a clipped voice. ‘I need you to give him a bed.’

Jeez, Dad, do I have a B&B sign tattooed on my forehead?

Ellie, desperate to move beyond her default habit of trying to please her father, tried to say no, but a totally different set of words came out of her mouth. ‘For how long?’

God, she was such a wimp.

‘Well, here’s the thing, sugar-pie...’

Oh, good grief. Her father had a thing. A lifetime with her father had taught her that a thing never worked out in her favour. ‘Jack is helping me write a book on the intimate lives of war reporters—mine included.’

Interesting—but she had no idea what any of this had to do with her. But Mitchell didn’t like being interrupted, so Ellie waited for him to finish.

‘He needs to talk to my family members. I thought he could stay a little while, talk to you about life with me...’

Sorry...life with him? What life with him? During her parents’ on-off marriage their home had been a place for her mum to do his laundry rather than to live. He’d lived his life in all the countries people were trying to get out of: Iraq, Gaza, Bosnia. Home was a place he’d dropped in and out of. Work had always been his passion, his muse, his lifelong love affair.

Resentment nibbled at the wall of her stomach. Depending on what story had been consuming him at the time, Mitchell had missed every single important event of her childhood. Christmas concerts and ballet recitals, swimming galas and father-daughter days. How could he be expected to be involved in his daughter’s life when there were bigger issues in the world to write about, analyse, study?

What he’d never realised was that he was her biggest issue...the creator of her angst, the source of her abandonment issues, the spring that fed the fountain of her self-doubt.

Ellie winced at her melodramatic thoughts. Her childhood with Mitchell had been fraught with drama but it was over. However, in situations like these, old resentments bubbled up and over.

Her father had been yakking on for a while and Ellie refocused on what he was saying.

‘The editors and I want Jack to include his story—he is the brightest of today’s bunch—but getting Jack to talk about himself is like trying to find water in the Gobi Desert. He’s not interested. He’s as much an enigma to me as he was when we first met. So will you talk to him?’ Mitchell asked. ‘About me?’

Oh, good grief. Did she have to? Really?

‘Maybe.’ Which they both knew meant that she would. ‘But, Dad, seriously? You can’t just dump your waifs and strays on me.’ He could—of course he could. He was Mitchell Evans and she was a push-over.

‘Waif and stray? Jack is anything but!’

Ellie rubbed her temple. Could this day throw anything else at her head? The bottom line was that another of Mitchell’s colleagues was on her doorstep and she could either take him in or turn him away. Which she wouldn’t do...because then her father wouldn’t be pleased and he’d sulk, and in twenty years’ time he’d remind her that she’d let him down. Really, it was just easier to give the guy a bed for the night and bask in Mitchell’s approval for twenty seconds. If that.

If only they were normal people, Ellie thought. The last colleague of her father’s she’d had to stay—again at Mitchell’s request—had got hammered on her wine and tried to paw her before passing out on her Persian carpet. And every cameraman, producer and correspondent she’d ever met—including her father—was crazy, weird, strange or odd. She figured that it was a necessary requirement if you wanted to chase down and report on human conflicts and disasters.

Mitchell’s voice, now that he’d got his own way, sounded jaunty again. ‘Jack’s a good man. He’s probably not slept for days, hasn’t eaten properly for more than a week. A bed, a meal, a bath. It’s not that much to ask because you’re a good person, my sweet, sweet girl.’

My sweet, sweet girl? Tuh!

Sweet, sweet sucker, more like.

Ellie sneaked another look at Mr-Hot-Enough-to-Melt-Heavy-Metal. He did have a body to die for, she thought.

‘Have you met Jack before?’ Mitchell asked.

‘Briefly. At your wedding to Steph.’ Wife number three, who’d stuck around for six months. Ellie had been eighteen, chronically shy, and Jack had barely noticed her.

‘Oh, yeah—Steph. I liked her...I still don’t know why she left,’ Mitchell said, sounding plausibly bemused.

Gee, Dad, here’s a clue. Maybe, like me, she hated the idea of the man she adored being away for five of those six months, plunging into the situation in Afghanistan and only popping up occasionally on TV. Hated not knowing whether you were alive or dead. It’s no picnic loving someone who doesn’t love you a fraction as much as you love your job.

She, her mother and Mitchell’s two subsequent wives had come second-best time after time...decade after decade. And she’d repeated the whole stupid cycle by getting engaged to Darryl.

She’d vowed she’d never fall in love with a journalist and she hadn’t. But life had bust a gut laughing when she’d become engaged to a man she’d thought was the exact opposite of her father, only to realise that he spent even less time at home than her father had. That was quite an accomplishment, since he’d never, as far as she knew, left London itself.

She’d been such a sucker, Ellie thought. Still was...

Maybe one of these days she’d find her spine.

Ellie looked down at her mobile, realised that her father hadn’t said goodbye before disconnecting and shrugged. Situation normal. She glanced at the monitor again and saw the impatience on Jack’s face, caught his tapping foot. The muscles in his arms bulged as he folded them across his chest. Although the feed was in black and white she knew that his eyes were hazel...sometimes brown, sometimes green, gold, always compelling. Right now they were blazing with a combination of frustration, exhaustion and a very healthy dose of annoyance.

He was different from the twenty-four-year-old she’d met a decade ago. Older, harder, a bit damaged. Ellie felt an unfamiliar buzz in her womb and cocked her head as attraction skittered through her veins and caused her heartbeat to fuzz...

She tossed her mobile onto her desk and pushed her chair back as she stood up and blew out a breath.

It didn’t matter that he was tall, built and had a sexy face that could stop traffic, she lectured herself. Crazy came in all packages.

* * *

‘Jack?’

Jack Chapman, standing in the front section of the bakery—aqua stripes on the walls, black checked floors, white cabinets, a sunshine-yellow surfboard—whirled around at the low, melodious voice and blinked. Then blinked again. He knew he was tired, but this was ridiculous...

He’d been expecting the awkward, overweight, shy girl from Mitch’s wedding not this...babe! This tropical, colourful, radiant, riveting, dazzling babe. With a capital B. In bold and italics.

Waist-length black hair streaked with purple and green stripes, milk-saturated coffee skin, vivid blue eyes and her father’s pugnacious chin.

And slim, curvy legs that went up to her ears.

‘Hi, I’m Ellie. Mitchell has asked me to put you up for the night.’

His pulse kicked up as he struggled to find his words. He eventually managed to spit a couple out. ‘I’m grateful. Thank you.’

Whoa! Jack dropped his pack to the floor and resisted the impulse to put his hand on his heart to check if it was okay. With his history...