Ally Blake
Falling for the Rebel Heir

For two of the loveliest women I’ve ever known.

Dell and Barbara: godmothers and friends.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

HUD hitched his dilapidated rucksack higher on to his shoulder as he stood staring at the façade of Claudel, the grand old house before him.

Ivy trailed over masonry outer walls, the front marble steps were steeped in mould, the delicately framed picture windows were layered in many years’ worth of storm-splattered mud, the multi-gabled grey roof was now missing tiles and the gutters were filled with rotting leaves.

But even a decade’s worth of invading shabbiness couldn’t stop the memories of sunny days spent with his aunt in the big house from melting into one another—a dozen summers during which his parents had taken off on adventures to far-flung lands to authenticate new discoveries about old civilisations, leaving him behind. He pictured himself lying in the cool grass at the side of the house reading Aunt Fay’s original editions of The Chronicles of Narnia, wishing himself a faun or a lion or, even better, one of the four Pevensie brothers and sisters taking part in adventures. Together.

He sniffed in deep through his nose, then, leaving the house and its deluge of memories for later, he hooked a sharp left to head into Claudel’s colossal garden, only to discover far sorrier disarray.

What had once been a perfect green lawn, littered with croquet arches and bordered by a dramatic garden boasting random marble sculptures worthy of any gallery, was now overgrown weed-infested chaos. Once immaculately clipped conifers were now untamed, with patches torn apart by storms leaving raw-looking wounds. Chickweed, blackberries and roses ran wild. Any patch of grass still visible through the shrubs was littered with wild daisies. Had Aunt Fay been alive to see how much he’d let the place go, she would have screamed bloody murder.

But, after the initial shock wore off, Hud began to notice that the air had been made pungent with a rich floral scent, and through the gaps in the undergrowth bees and wattle dust floated on the hazy summer air. As a photographer for Voyager Enterprises, for both their documentary TV channel and magazine, he’d shot the gardens of queens, rainforests which by now had been demolished and thick, viny, mystical swamps protected by rednecks with guns. But this place was so out of control, so uncontaminated and crazy beautiful, Hud’s throat clogged with unexpected emotion.

He cleared his throat, shoved the feelings down deep inside him where he’d kept every other come-from-out-of-nowhere and too-hard-to-deal-with-right-now feeling that had threatened to expose him over the past couple of months and moved on, forward through the undergrowth, not much caring that branches scratched at his hands or that his jeans collected spiky thorns. It only brought back more memories of trailing Aunt Fay’s crazy Irish wolfhound through the same gardens as the dog in turn had chased invisible air sprites.

Through a gap in the seemingly never-ending wilderness, Hud was blinded by a pinpoint of light. He held up a hand to shield his eyes and tugged his rucksack through the heavy undergrowth until he found himself face to face with the old pool house.

A half smile tugged at the corners of his mouth and pressed against the backs of his tired eyes as echoes of more long forgotten recollections tickled at the corner of his mind. Dive bombing. Performing pretty darned legendary back flips off the diving board. Lying on his back in the water for hours simply watching clouds shift past the pitched glass roof, wondering if his mum and dad looked up they would see the same clouds while trekking some thrilling spot on the other side of the world.

Back then he’d been full of hope and plans that when he grew up, when he was old enough to set out on his own life adventure, then he’d finally understand what the fuss was all about. Why it had been so easy for his parents to leave him behind. He wondered when all that impenetrable hope had become frustration. When anticipation had become cold knowledge. When he had grown up after all.

Had it been hiding with only his camera for company beneath a bush for eighteen hours in the middle of a shootout in Bosnia when he had barely been twenty-one? Waking to find that his team had been abandoned by their guide at Base Camp on K2 on his twenty-sixth birthday? Or when he’d woken in a London hospital less than two months earlier, barely strong enough to ask for a glass of water?

He levered his heavy rucksack to the ground and left it where it lay. Claudel was fifty metres off the road, behind a ten foot brick wall and a ten minute walk through a pine forest to the nearby township of Saffron. If anybody was lucky enough to find his shabby old khaki bag they were welcome to the raggedy clothes and just as threadbare passport within. It wasn’t as though he’d be needing them to head through a different kind of wilderness with his trusty Nikon camera slung over one shoulder and a hunting knife slung over the other with his team of documentary filmmakers at his back any time soon.

He cricked his neck, pressed his hands into the tight small of his back and glanced upwards to find brilliant red bougainvillea creepers seemed to have swallowed half the long building, leaving the hundred odd remaining white-framed glass panels that had survived the test of time thick with dust and mould. He could only hazard a guess how foul the inside might be after not having been blessed by a human touch for a good ten years.

‘If memory serves correctly…’ he said out loud, the sound of his voice raspy and deep in his ears after hours of non-use. Then he made his way around the back of the building to find the door was ajar, at an odd angle, askew on rusted hinges, as though it had been yanked open.

With instinct born of years spent stepping unannounced into dark, secret places, he stepped quietly—toe to heel—over a small pile of worn broken glass and inside the pool house where his feet came to a giveaway scraping halt of boot soles on tessellated French tiles.

The pool house was clean. The mottled green tiles around the margins sparkled and the dozen white marble benches were spotless. Miniature palm trees in plant boxes edging the length of the room were luscious with good health. And the water in the pool shimmered dark and inviting against the black-painted concrete bottom.

A sound broke through Hud’s reverie. A soft ripple as water lapped gently against the edge of the pool. And he was hit with the sense that something was about to break the dark surface. He held his breath, squared his stance, squinted into the shadows and watched in practised silence as…

A mermaid rose from the depths.

From there everything seemed to slow—his breathing, his heartbeat, the dust floating through shards of sunlight, as the nymph sliced through the water, away from him, leaving a trail of leisurely wavelets in her wake.

Water streamed over hair the colour of brandy. It ran adoringly over pale, lean, youthful arms. And, as she swayed up the steps, water gripped her willowy form as long as it could before cruel gravity claimed it back to the dark depths.

Hud felt as if he ought to avert his gaze. As if he was too old, too cynical, too jaded to be allowed such a vision. But those same qualities only meant that his curiosity far outweighed his humility, and his eyes remained riveted to the back of the exquisite stranger.

Once she was land bound her hair sprang into heavy waves that reached all the way to the small of her back, covering the expanse of skin left visible by her simple swimsuit. It was functional. Black. One piece. But, with its low-cut back and high-cut leg, the whole thing was just sexy enough that Hud’s pulse beat so loudly in his ears he feared she might hear it too.

Her feet made soft slapping sounds as she padded over to grab a soft peach-coloured Paisley-patterned towel draped over the far marble bench, revealing a bundle of clothes beneath.

She then lifted a foot and bent over to run the soft towel down one leg. One long lean leg. A drip of sweat slithered slowly down Hud’s cheek.

When she repeated the action with the other leg, her movements relaxed and unhurried, he closed his eyes and swallowed to ease his suddenly dry throat.

She lifted the towel and ran it slowly over her hair, wringing out the bulk of the moisture, kicking out her right hip as she did so. Several golden beams of light slicing through the windows above picked up the rich colour of her dark red hair. Dappled sunshine played across her milky skin like a caress. And all Hud could think was that if this wasn’t a moment that needed to be captured on film for all eternity, then he didn’t know what was.

He was so taken by the aesthetics, mentally calculating focal length and film speed, that he didn’t actually notice her begin to spin to face him until it was too late.

She turned. She saw him. And she screamed.

And he didn’t half blame her. He hadn’t shaved in a fortnight. He was wearing clothes better suited to a London winter than to the thirty degree Melbourne heat.

And she was trespassing on his land and, by the looks of the place, had been for some time.

Kendall yanked her towel to cover her bare legs in a movement that was pure instinct as her scream echoed around the lofty room, bouncing off the glass and back again before sighing to an embarrassing memory.

Unfortunately it hadn’t sent the intruder running for his life. He simply continued staring back at her. Tall, swarthy, fully dressed and all male.

As his eyes glanced from one end of her body to the other, she realised that clutching her towel like some maiden wasn’t going to help at all. She turned her left side away from him and swirled the towel around her body. Naturally it fought against her, wanting to ebb when she wanted it to flow, but eventually she managed to cover the bits that needed covering.

She then took a deep shaky breath before calmly informing the man to, ‘Get the hell out of here and right now, or I’ll scream again, this time so loud the whole town will come running.’

His dark eyes lifted to hers. Connected across fifteen metres of cool dark water. Every inch of skin his gaze touched vibrated as though he’d made actual physical contact. She decided it was a side effect of the shock of being half naked before a complete stranger. Nothing more.

‘Don’t scream again, please,’ he said, his mouth kicking into a pleasant kind of smile. He didn’t raise his voice, but he didn’t need to. The deep rumble carried easily across the wide space. ‘One perforated eardrum is quite enough excitement for one day.’

‘So leave, now, and you can save the other one.’ She spat a clump of wet hair from her mouth. ‘If you’re lost I can point you the way back to the main road or through the pine forest back into town.’ She glanced over her shoulder in that direction and when she looked back she could have sworn he’d moved closer.

‘I’m not lost,’ he said.

‘Well, you’re sure not where you’re meant to be. Everything within one hundred metres in each direction of this place is part of a private estate.’

He simply smiled some more, making her wonder if he knew that already. Everybody in Saffron knew. Claudel was owned by the descendants of Lady Fay Bennington, who hadn’t bothered with upkeep on the beautiful place since Fay had died a decade earlier. But everybody in Saffron also knew everybody else from Saffron, and she’d never seen this guy before. He was the kind of man one wouldn’t easily forget.

Tall and broad, with the kind of physique that could block out the sun. And dark. Dark clothes. Dark eyes. Dark curling hair in need of a cut. Dark stubble on his face that had gone past a shadow but had not quite been tamed into anything resembling a civilised beard. She would have thought him homeless in his battered coat, tattered jeans and scuffed boots but there was something in his bearing that made that seem a non sequitur. A kind of shoulders back, elegant stance, glint in the eye thing he had going on that negated every other potent signal bombarding her senses.

She tugged her towel tighter.

He sunk his hands into the pockets of an unseasonably heavy brown coat and definitely moved closer. ‘I’m thinking you’re the one who ought not to be in here, Miss…’

‘My name is none of your damn business, buddy.’

She’d taken self-defence classes since she’d come to town and moved in with Taffy. Two single girls living together, she’d figured better safe than sorry. So she knew it was better to run than to try to make an assailant see reason.

She dropped the towel in order to grab her clothes and then realised she was naked bar a sliver of Lycra covering not all that much skin. So she grabbed the towel again, then used it as a makeshift screen as she hurriedly pulled her long red sundress on over her swimsuit.

It wasn’t until her head popped through the neck hole and the dress dragged and twisted uncomfortably against her wet bathing suit that she realised it was inside out and back to front. Too bad. Too late. He was getting nearer.

She grabbed her wet hair and tossed it over her back and it instantly soaked right through to her skin, making her feel clammy as well as anxious and embarrassed and just a little bit intimidated.

‘Now, don’t come any closer,’ she insisted, grabbing her Doc Marten boots and holding them in front of her as if they were some kind of lethal weapon.

For whatever reason that seemed to work. The guy stopped. He held out his hands in front of him. Long-fingered hands. Clean hands. The hands of a gentleman, not a drifter.

‘There’s no need for any of that,’ he said. ‘Before you do anything foolish like knock me out with a flying shoe, you should know something.’

She wondered if perhaps he couldn’t swim and was worried about falling unconscious into the pool. She didn’t want him to come any closer, she didn’t want him to tell on her, but she also didn’t want to kill the guy. He was far too good-looking to die.

Feeling ridiculous for even thinking such a thing, she lifted her boots an inch higher. ‘And what’s that?’

‘This,’ he said, waving his arm to his left and taking another couple of slow steps her way, ‘is all mine.’

Her shoes dropped an inch. ‘Yours?’

He nodded. And came nearer. He was close enough now for her to notice a thin scar slicing through his stubble from the edge of his nose to his top lip. She knew about scars and the fact that it was still pink meant it was fairly recent.

Apart from that one flaw, it turned out he had a lovely straight nose and a strong jaw, like one of the statues to be found hidden beneath the dense foliage in Claudel’s grounds. Up close his dark hair curled with a delectable just-out-of-bed look. Like some sort of modern day Lord Byron.

But all that was swept aside when she glanced back into his eyes. They were hazel. Deep, dark, enigmatic hazel clashing against the whitest of whites she’d ever seen, framed by long dark lashes. And all that’s best of dark and bright meet in his aspect and his eyes, she thought.

The guy was in need of a shave and haircut and a shopping expedition, but he was utterly gorgeous. So gorgeous she realised she had spent the past twenty seconds staring, and paraphrasing Byron, as if she hadn’t seen a man this beautiful before. Up close. In the flesh.

A low, lazy hum of awareness settled in her belly.

No, she thought, feeling more panicky at that thought than any other so far, not now. Not like this. I’m not ready. Her mind shook back and forth vehemently, which her head would have done if she hadn’t wanted to keep both eyes on every move of Mr Tall, Dark and Dangerous-To-Her-Equilibrium.

She blinked and thought back to what they had been arguing about. Had he really just suggested…? She raised her shoes to a battle ready position again. ‘What do you mean it’s all yours?’

His enigmatic eyes narrowed slightly and she bit her lip, hoping he had no clue of the thoughts streaming unchecked through her obviously chlorine-addled head.

‘My name is Hudson Bennington III. Everyone just calls me Hud,’ he said, holding out his right hand and continuing to close in on her. ‘My Aunt Fay once lived here. I summered here as a child. And she left it all to me when she died. Ask in town if you don’t believe me. I’m certain there will be those who remember.’

She stared at his outstretched hand, then into his eyes, but she found them far too unsettling so she ignored both and bent to quickly pull her heavy boots on instead, the sudden movement jarring at the rigid muscles in her bad leg. She winced and straightened. She didn’t dare waste further time lacing them up.

‘Well then, I’d better head back to town right now and double-check,’ she said. ‘A girl can’t be too careful.’

She grabbed her towel and moved around the other side of the pool, away from Hudson Bennington III and his dark eyes, and bedroom hair, and rugged elegance, and gentleman’s hands, and disturbing Byronesque handsomeness, towards the exit.

If this guy was who he said he was, if he was back to claim the land as his own, her daily swims would be no more. No more revelling in the bliss of floating, of feeling unencumbered, light and vigorous. And if she’d felt panic earlier, it was nothing compared with the all-encompassing dread that filled her at that thought.

‘You don’t have to run off just yet,’ he said, his deep voice calling after her.

But Kendall spilled out into the bright light and walked as fast as her shaking legs would carry her.

She ducked into the pine forest and looked over her shoulder just the once to find Hud standing outside the pool house looking for her, hands on hips, eyes straining. But she knew this part of the world too well and by now she would be no more than one of a thousand shadows between the trunks.

As she picked up her pace, her persistent limp became more pronounced with each step back to town.

Hud ran a hand over his face and stared into the tree line. He had been hot on her heels as she’d left the pool house and then suddenly…she was gone.

A woman who lived locally. A woman with a mouth and an attitude pluckier than he would have expected in a mermaid if he’d ever given it any thought. A woman who up close had skin like porcelain, eyes the colour of the sky before a storm and hair the colour of red wine.

And a woman who, for the too few minutes she’d been near him, had put out of his mind every single thing he’d come back to Claudel in order to forget.

Kendall hit the edge of the pine forest and stopped to check if anybody was out in the main street of Saffron. She didn’t want anyone to see her in an inside out, back to front dress, unlaced shoes and sopping wet hair.

It had taken almost all of the three years she’d lived in Saffron for the locals to look past the limp and get over whispering behind their hands about how it had happened. The car accident. A young man’s death. Her missing months afterwards. Now she had become the steady, dependable, sensible fact checker for the local newspaper. And she was determined to keep it that way.

When she spotted a break in the dawdling morning traffic she looked right, then left, then right again, before darting across Peach Street, through the garden gate and into the two-storey cottage she shared with Taffy.

The noise she made kicking off her shoes and throwing her wet towel over the back of a chair in the hall was enough for Taffy to look up from her spot at the kitchen table. Her Sunday newspaper dropped in a show of slow motion dawning, her eyes grew wide as saucers and she coughed on her honey-covered English muffin. ‘What on earth happened to you?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ Kendall continued up the stairs. She wished she could take them two at a time, but she’d walked so fast into town her damn leg now thrummed.

‘Oh, no, you don’t.’ Taffy’s voice slunk up the stairs behind her, followed by thunderously healthy footsteps.

Kendall burst into her room. Her deaf schnauzer, Orlando, looked up at the flurry of movement and then dropped his sweet snout back on to his paws.

Taffy came into Kendall’s bedroom and leant against the door-jamb, hooking one bare foot along the other calf. ‘So,’ she said, ‘was there a sudden rainstorm? At the market? Because that’s where you told me you were going, remember. To the market to look for fresh meat for tonight’s dinner.’

‘And…’ Kendall said, twisting her damp hair into a low bun and searching madly through the pile of washing on the tub chair in the corner of her room for a fresh towel.

‘And…I see no evidence of meat. Only wet hair and a dress that seems to be inside out.’ Taffy spilled into the room, her hand to her heart. ‘Oh, Kendall! Please tell me fresh meat was code for—’

Kendall threw up her hands and screwed up her eyes to cut out the disturbing images in her head—images of a tanned forearm, a sinewy wrist with a smattering of dark hair and a watch that looked as if it had lived through three world wars. ‘Taffy! Stop!’

Taffy sat on the corner of Kendall’s bed and licked honey off her fingers. She then buttoned her lip and waited for Kendall to simply talk.

Sick of feeling like a bedraggled cat, Kendall tore her dress over her head and wrapped herself in the towel, feeling strangely as if she were back in the pool house again. On show. She didn’t like it. Once upon a time she’d revelled in it. Being the centre of attention. The class clown. Not any more. ‘Do you want to go out while I get changed?’

Taffy shook her head. ‘Tell me about the meat.’

Kendall’s instinct was for self-protection. But this was Taffy. Taffy who’d taken her in at the time in her life when she’d most needed a friend, when the family she’d come to love as her own had left her out in the cold. Besides, she’d already been sprung by the one person who meant her secret getaway couldn’t be a secret any more.

She slumped down on to the bed next to her friend. ‘I was swimming.’

‘At the falls?’

‘No. At Claudel.’

‘The old house? But how? The place is decrepit.’

Kendall shrugged. ‘Not so much. Not the pool house at least. Not any more.’

Taffy shook her head and half laughed at the same time. ‘What have you done now?’

Kendall leant over and buried her face in her palms. ‘I found it on one of my forest walks. It’s the most beautiful building, Taff. And it was just so sad seeing it falling apart like it was. I got this crazy compulsion to make it like new again. Now I’ve cleaned the place up, the floor tiles look like bottled glass. And the marble benches are like something out of a Grace Kelly movie.’

‘Whoa, back up a sec. You cleaned?’

Kendall laughed into her hands, then sat up straight, unpeeling her hands from her face. ‘I more than cleaned, Taff. I filled it. Chlorinated it. Kept it pristine. Perfect. And visited every day for the past two years. The moment I saw it, I kind of just…had no choice.’

‘But that still doesn’t quite explain this.’ Taffy grabbed a hunk of Kendall’s hair and let it slap against her back.

‘Today…’ Kendall said, then took a deep breath as she tried to find the words to explain the unexpected effect of tall, dark ruggedness without making an idiot of herself. ‘Today I was sprung. By Claudel’s owner.’

After a long silence, Taffy said, ‘Don’t tell me you mean Hud?’

Kendall looked her friend in the eye for the first time since she’d got home. ‘Hudson Bennington. The third, no less.’

Taffy slapped her on the arm. Then once more for good measure. ‘Get out of here.’

‘I would love to, but you won’t let me. You know him?’

‘God, yeah. I had the hugest crush on Hud Bennington when he was eighteen and I was thirteen. It was his last year of boarding school and he was here for the summer, staying with Fay while his folks scooted off to Latvia in search of leprechaun remains or something. He was my teen idol if it’s possible for a real life human to be such a thing. So what was he like? All feisty and charming? Cheeky? Pathologically flirtatious? Dry wit? Still as big and gorgeous as ever?’

‘He…he looked like he needed a shave.’ And more, Kendall thought. He looked like he needed a hug.

‘Ooh,’ Taffy said. ‘Stubble on Hud Bennington. That I just have to see. Now hurry up and get dressed and you can go right back over there and reintroduce me.’

The thought of coming face to face with all that undomesticated manhood sent a warning note through Kendall. ‘Did you not hear me?’ she said. ‘He caught me. In his pool. Without his permission. Or prior knowledge. While I was naked bar…my…swimmers.’

Which for another woman would have been a tad awkward, or for Taffy would have amounted to as good an introduction to a cute guy as she could hope for, but for Kendall that meant something wholly different.

Taffy smiled and nodded like a simpleton. But Kendall knew she was anything but simple. Tenacious, clever and stubborn was her Taffy.

‘Go over there yourself if you like,’ Kendall said. ‘I’m not going to stop you. Just don’t tell the guy you know me and you’ll be peachy.’

‘Nah,’ Taffy said, ‘that would seem too eager. Much better to casually bump into him in town. Offer him a coffee so that we can reminisce. And he can remember how I followed him around like a puppy that summer.’ Taffy dragged herself off the bed with a groan. ‘Or maybe I’ll never leave the house again and the men the world over can breathe a sigh of relief that I’m still on the market. Now, get out of here, you’re leaving a wet patch on your bed.’

Taffy left. And Kendall took herself, her bedraggled hair and her damp swimsuit out of the door and into the bathroom, where she spent the next half an hour sitting on the bottom of the shower, letting the warm water run over her clammy skin as the shakes that had threatened the moment she had been discovered finally took her over.

She ran a hand down her damaged left thigh, kneading, hoping it might ease slightly. But it worked as well as putting a Band-Aid on a broken heart.

For the regular aches and pains she felt on a daily basis seemed to have spread. Into her chest. Deep, throbbing, like a forgotten memory trying to burst through to the surface. She knew what those aches were. It was the bitter-sweet sting of unwelcome attraction. And it terrified her to the tips of her black-painted toenails.

She closed her eyes, revelled in the soothing water and tried desperately not to think too hard about how Hud Bennington’s arrival had thrown a spanner into the workings of her neat and tidy life.

An hour later, after reintroducing himself to his old bedroom—still just as he’d left it a dozen years before, with its king-sized bed, boxy teak furniture and small aeroplanes on the wallpaper—Hud stood under the wide brass showerhead in his old bathroom, amazed that the pipes still worked. Amazed and thankful. The purposely cool water sloughed away the remnant heat he’d carried with him since leaving the airport.

He closed his eyes and opened his mouth and savoured the taste of Melbourne water streaming over his face, bringing with it more memories he’d long forgotten.

Six years old and running away the first night his parents had left him here and getting lost in the pine forest before Aunt Fay found him—she and her neck-to-ankle layers of lace, lolloping dog and hurricane lamp. The hundred-year-old oak tree in the centre of town that he knew had changed every summer he visited though he couldn’t see how. The piano in the downstairs parlour with its broken e-flat.

And then suddenly, before he even felt them coming, memories of another kind swarmed over him, making the water in his mouth taste like dust. Memories of no water. For days. So thirsty he couldn’t stop shaking. And the sound of a dripping tap in a room nearby. So close. Yet achingly out of reach.

His eyes flew open. He switched off the tap, his breath loud in the huge marble shower. He leant his hand against the wall, watching the droplets slide from his skin and drip to the floor. Just as they had when his high-spirited mermaid had sprung forth from the depths of the glimmering pool.

He concentrated on brandy-coloured hair. Long pale limbs. Stormy blue-grey eyes. His breathing settled. His memories calmed. And he only had her to thank for it.

Whoever she was.

CHAPTER TWO

HUD woke early the next morning. While still fuzzy with sleep, he tugged on a pair of old jeans and a T-shirt from the minimal choices still stuffed into his rucksack and headed downstairs, through Claudel’s cold, silent rooms and outside into the post-dawn mist.

It wasn’t all that long before he found himself swinging by the pool house. He thought about poking his head inside, even though he knew that he’d find nothing there bar still water and lingering shadows. He hadn’t led a charitable enough life to deserve stumbling upon such an apparition two days running.

Instead he kept walking until he was swallowed up by the cool dauntingly tall moss-covered trees, flat beige ground covered in a layer of pine needles and shadows of the mighty forest separating Claudel’s grounds from the nearby town.

He let his fingers trail over the rough bark, the tactile discomfort grounding him while he headed he knew not where. Into blissful nothingness? Or with all too specific purpose—the knowledge that this was the last place he had seen her?

The sound of a cracking branch stilled his steps. He looked out into the tightly packed trunks and saw something shimmer and shift. Lucky for him this wasn’t bear country. Though he’d come to realise that humans could be far worse creatures to stumble upon down a dark alley.

The form stirred. Took shape. Human shape. Female shape. And there she was. As if he had conjured her out of the mist. His mermaid. The woman whose effortless allure had hovered at the edge of his dreams all night, miraculously keeping far darker dreams at bay for the first time in weeks.

As she slid into full view her dark red curls streamed over her shoulders like waves of silk. Her pale skin was luminous in the weak morning light. The fine features of her face hid nothing. Not her loveliness, or her wariness. Again he wished he had his camera, on him. His camera which he had not picked up once in two long months.

‘Well, hello there,’ he said when she was near enough for him to see the whites of her guarded eyes.

‘Hello,’ she said, offering a half smile, even though her clenched fists and ducked chin told him far more than the smile could hope to hide.

As did the black tank-top with a hot pink one beneath, the long hippy skirt and heavy black boots she’d run off in the day before. It would be close to thirty-five degrees later that day. Her feet must have felt like ovens. But he decided as soon as the thought occurred to him to keep that little titbit to himself. A wild bear she may not be, but there was an air of the intractable about her all the same.

‘I didn’t expect to see you here,’ he said.

‘I wasn’t coming to use your pool, if that’s what you mean.’

Hud laughed before he even felt it rising up his chest. It felt good. No, it felt great. Natural. Unforced. Curative. He held up both hands in surrender. ‘Ah, no. I was just making conversation. Badly, it seems.’

She flicked her hair off her face. Not out of any kind of flirtation but more like she was shooing away a bothersome fly. Either way, the shift and tumble of her hair mesmerised him. The woman wasn’t a mermaid, she was a siren. An unwilling siren, if that clenched jaw was anything to go by, but a siren all the same.

‘You come here often?’ he asked, wondering where these conversational gems were coming from.

‘More often than I should probably admit,’ she said with a shrug.

Hud didn’t realise he had a thing for shoulders until that moment. Pale, delicate, eloquent shoulders were his new favourite thing.

‘But I came out this morning in the hope I might bump into you,’ she said as she finally made prolonged eye contact with him.

Well, that was one for the books. Hud stopped his daydreaming and came to attention. ‘You could have come knocking on my front door,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve established you know where I live.’

Her eyes blazed and he bit his inner lip and told himself to cool it. The more he pushed, the more she seemed determined to pull away. But maybe it was worth it for the flare of energy in those blue-grey eyes.

‘Not my style,’ she said, the tight half smile shifting into something far more natural as it tugged at the corners of her lips. ‘I tend to make things far more difficult than all that.’

‘I’ve been there,’ he said. And he smiled back, feeling it from the inside out.

Then her smile slid away and she shook her head and, with a big deep breath, said, ‘Look, I wanted to apologise for yesterday. And all the days before that. The trespassing. The tidying. The water usage.’ She closed one eye and squinted up at him through the other, obviously mortified at having to say so.

And it was just as obvious to him that he found this woman utterly adorable. Whoever she was. Whatever she was really here to say to him. Because he knew as well as he knew his own name that she sure wasn’t here, hat in hand, just to say, I’m sorry.

‘You have nothing to apologise for,’ he said. ‘The pool house never looked so good. Ever. I should have come looking for you at the other end of this forest of ours to say thank you.’

She opened the other eye and her eyebrows disappeared under wavy wisps of dark red hair. Her voice dropped when she said, ‘It never looked that good ever? Maybe you should demand a refund from your previous pool guy.’

Hud laughed again. And his smile lingered. Grew, even. ‘You needn’t have worked nearly so hard at it.’

‘How could I not? It’s the most amazing structure I’ve ever seen. Like something out of a fairy tale.’ She let go of a sigh. A long romantic sigh that seemed to curl about them both until Hud realised the sounds of the forest had slipped completely away until all he could hear was the sound of her voice, her breathing, the swish of her voluminous skirt.

Her eyebrows settled back to a normal position, perhaps even a little furrowed as she shifted her stance as though her toes were turning numb in her shoes, and said, ‘But, even so, you were no doubt surprised to find…what you found. And I feel utterly embarrassed. About the whole thing with the pool. Tidy though it is. And for thinking you were going to rob me. And for the running away without explaining myself.’

And? Hud thought. For she wasn’t finished yet. He could almost see the wheels turning behind those smoky eyes. Right, she was thinking, he’s going to make me say this, isn’t he?

She squared her shoulders. Tossed her hair again. Looked him dead in the eye and said, ‘But, since you think I’ve done such a good job of keeping your pool house in tiptop shape, perhaps we can come to some arrangement where I can continue.’

She tried to make it seem a by the way kind of statement, but he knew from the tightness in her neck and the way she grabbed hold of clumps of her tie-dyed skirt that this was what she’d come here to say.

Hud opened his mouth to tell her she could do whatever she liked, when she held up a hand, palm forward, and he stopped before the words made it past his larynx.

‘I’m prepared to buy the chlorine, the tile cleaner, pay a portion of your water bill, get on my hands and knees and clean the grout with a toothbrush, anything. I just…’ She stopped to swallow, and for the first time he saw a flutter of vulnerability beneath the resilient exterior. ‘I just need to keep swimming in your pool. If it’s okay with you.’

She made it seem as if she needed it the same way he needed oxygen in his lungs. The same way he needed to find out how to clear his head so that he could get back to work. And the way he had come out here into the misty forest with some strange need to make sure that she was real.

‘Where on earth will you find the time to do all that?’ he asked.

‘I am a fact checker for several regional newspapers. I work freelance. My time management is my own.’

‘Sounds pretty cushy.’

‘Suits me. Not so many rave parties and shoe shops to keep a girl in trouble in Saffron, so one doesn’t need a great deal of money to have a very nice life here.’ She glanced over his shoulder to what was no doubt a gorgeous view of Claudel’s elegant gabled rooftop beyond. ‘Well, I don’t, anyway.’

He didn’t give her the satisfaction of turning. Instead he just waited for her pointed gaze to rock back to his. For suddenly he was having ideas.

Her time was her own. And he had nothing but time. Maybe this woman’s needs and his could work together. He slid his hands into his pockets. ‘So I take it you can type,’ he said.

Her hands slowly let go of the skirt fabric they’d been clinging to until the red and black cotton swished about the tops of her heavy boots. ‘Can I type?’

He nodded.

‘So fast you won’t see my fingers move for the speed. But I don’t see what that has to do with—’

‘I have a story I need to get down on paper,’ he said. ‘And I am a two-finger typist of the worst kind.’

‘You’re a writer? But I thought you were some kind of flashy documentary photographer,’ she said, then her face dropped as she realised she’d given away the fact that she’d done some asking around about him.

‘I am,’ he said, letting her off the hook. ‘But a situation has presented itself that means I need to record some of my more recent experiences.’

That much was true enough. He had been offered a book deal. A lucrative one from a big London publisher. Not that he needed the money. But if that was what it took for his boss to see he was willing and able to get back to work, to the adventures he was missing out on while real life trudged on around him, then that was what he’d do.

‘I see,’ she said, mouth turned down, bottom lip popped out, nodding. Though by the look in her wide open eyes he could tell she couldn’t see the brilliance of his plan at all. The balance. The simpatico.

‘So I have a proposal for you,’ he said.

She stopped nodding. Her eyes narrowed so far they became dark slits of mistrust. For a siren she was turning out to be some kind of hard work. Hud almost backed off. But not quite. For there was something stronger pushing between his shoulder blades again, telling him he had to go through with this. With her.

‘I dictate,’ he said. ‘You type my story. And in return…’

Her arms slid across her chest to cross, creating a shield between them. He bit back the need to laugh. The woman was so guarded she put his clandestine return to Claudel to shame.

So he added, ‘And in return you can use my pool as much as you like.’

She blinked furiously, then a fast breath dashed from her nose. ‘What’s the catch?’

‘There’s no catch. I’ll supply food. A comfy chair. I can get my hands on a new computer if you need me to. It shouldn’t take any longer than, say…two weeks.’

Which was when his crew were due back in London after a shoot in Uzbekistan. And he wanted to be on the next trip out. He needed to be. For, if he wasn’t, he feared he might never get back out there again. And out there was where he belonged.

‘Am I still in charge of its upkeep?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘No need. The whole place needs a tidy up. I’ll have to hire a gardener. A backhoe. A mini-skip. Or maybe a magic wand to put things back the way they’re meant to be.’

She nodded. ‘Excellent. Happy with that. But what about after I’ve finished taking notes for you? What kind of deal will I have to make with you then?’

Her arms tightened across her chest, pressing her breasts together until she produced some damn fine cleavage. She glared at him and he tried his hardest to keep eye contact as her hot gaze dared him to even think that she might be thinking something raunchy. But the second the thought entered his mind he could think of little else.

A half hour swim for a kiss. An hour for a roll in the grass. A whole afternoon lazing in the pool and maybe she’d agree to going through the rest of Aunt Fay’s rooms and deciding what furniture and knick-knacks to keep and which to let go. For that he’d let her have the darned pool.

‘None,’ he said. ‘No more deals. Doing this one thing for me would be a huge favour, so for that you can use the pool any time you please. For evermore. So how about we clap hands and a bargain?’ He held out his hand to seal the deal.

‘Henry V,’ she blurted, an honest-to-goodness smile creasing her lovely face. She was something when she frowned; she was something else again when she truly smiled. He decided then and there that if she agreed to his terms it would be his mission over the next two weeks to make that happen again and again.

Then her cheeks turned pink and she bit her lip and looked down at her right foot, which was kicking at a small pile of dead pine needles.

‘Henry who or what?’ Hud asked.

‘Clap hands and a bargain,’ she repeated, looking up at him from beneath her dark eyelashes. ‘That was a quote from the proposal scene of Henry V. It’ll make you laugh and cry and your heart go pitter-pat. And, if it doesn’t, well then, I fear you’re just not human.’

Hud took a moment to wet his suddenly dry throat. The woman not only had the hair of a Botticelli model, the skin of a Scandinavian princess and the ability to fill the dark nooks and crannies of his subconscious with light, but he had just accidentally stumbled upon a subject that made her eyes flash like the heralding of a summer storm.

When he said nothing she continued. ‘Shakespeare. Dead English playwright. Quite famous in his time. Funny too that the line comes from the proposal scene and you just made me a proposal. Not like it’s the same kind of proposal, of course. I’d hardly agree to marry a guy for the use of his amenities—’

‘I have heard of him,’ Hud said, cutting her off before she got herself so deep into a verbal hole that she disappeared into her shoes like the wicked witch at the end of The Wizard of Oz. ‘Though I think it’s too late to bluff my way into making you think I was quoting him on purpose. A guy I work with…used to work with, said it all the time. What’s your excuse?’

‘Double English Lit major at Uni,’ she said, back to kicking at pine needles again as she breathed through her recent verbal misstep. ‘That and a computer will get a girl a fine fact checking job with an added sideline in Shakespeare and Keats and Byron quotes on tap. I’m quite the hit at parties.’

‘I don’t doubt it for a second.’ He’d be surprised if she ever made it out of a party without half a dozen new male fans. He wondered if one of those fans had managed to pin her down. Make her his. And if he truly knew what a gem he had. ‘And might I say I’m suitably impressed. You’re the first girl who has ever picked a Shakespeare quote when I’ve given one. Not that I’d rightly know.’

She grabbed a hunk of layered skirt and gave him a little curtsy. Yeah, it would be a fine thing if some guy at a party had taken this woman off the market. For though he was most enjoying looking, he hadn’t come to Claudel to shop for that kind of…what? Tryst? Crush? Holiday romance? Stormy, once-in-a-lifetime, go-for-broke affair?

This girl was witty, cautious and beguiling. It had taken an instant for him to see she was the kind of woman a man could spend a lifetime unravelling, pleasing, knowing. But he didn’t have a lifetime. He had two weeks. Which was more than he’d given any woman in years. He’d just have to be careful to remember that.

She flattened her skirt back to a less frivolous position. ‘So who’s the guy?’ she asked.

Hud lifted his gaze from the fluttering movement of her pale hands to her magnificent eyes. He raised an eyebrow.

‘Whose quotes you steal?’ she continued. ‘The guy with whom you used to work?’

‘Ah. His name was Grant, a sound guy who works for Voyager Channel films.’

‘His name…was Grant?’ she asked, her voice suddenly softer, slower, winding itself around him like one of Aunt Fay’s warm cashmere throw rugs.

‘It still is Grant, actually. Will be for many long years, I hope. He’s fine. He’s just a million miles away and I’m here, in the middle of backwoods Victoria, only it feels like he’s gone when really that honour goes to me.’

When Hud stopped talking, his heart raced as if he’d climbed a mountain, when really all he’d done was tell this strange girl more than he’d told anyone about what he was really feeling. More than he’d told his boss. Or the doctors in London. Or the editor who’d thrown money at him to ‘tell his tale’. Or any of the friends and colleagues who’d asked how he was every time they’d picked up the phone, which was more and more rare with every passing day.

‘So do we have a deal?’ he asked, knowing the time had come to bring this little rendezvous to a close. ‘Your typing fingers for my pool?’

‘Sure,’ she said, her voice still soft, still making him feel as though she had somehow wrapped him in cotton wool.

This time she held out her hand to seal the deal. He stepped forward and took it, entering her personal space, that intangible area that contained a person’s spent energy, and touched her for the very first time.

Her hand was small. Soft. Warm. Enveloped so wholly in his, it made him feel strong. Big. Commanding. It was a feeling he didn’t realise until that moment had been lost somewhere over the past months. A feeling he wanted back. He wanted more. He needed more.

After a few seconds of simply holding hands, her stormy eyes darted to his. Blinking fast. Locking. Connecting. A current seemed to flow from her hand to his. Or maybe it was the other way around.

And in that moment he saw that she felt it too. This strange compulsion pulling them together. He saw in her eyes a deep-seated desire to hold on to him and not let go.

He understood his own reasoning completely. He was a man on the verge of drowning—in violent memories, in red tape, in commiserations where he was used to commendations. And she was a bright light. Sparky, warm, flitting just out of reach.

What a woman like her saw in a broken man in need of a shave, he had no idea. He had nothing to offer her bar his pool. He consoled himself with the knowledge that she seemed switched on. She’d figure it out soon enough.

He loosened his grip and let her go. She stretched out her fingers before clasping her hands behind her back.

‘So when do we start?’ she asked.

I’m afraid we already have, he thought. But all he said was, ‘Tomorrow’s fine with me. Unless you’re busy.’

But she merely nodded. ‘Mornings are always best for me. Projects tend to slide into my inbox around midday. So nine okay with you?’

‘Sounds as good a time as any.’

She gave him a short wave and turned away, taking all that lovely vibrant energy with her.

‘So why do you need this pool of mine so badly you’re willing to give up your precious time for me?’ he asked, not yet ready to see her go.

‘Training for the Olympics,’ she threw back.

‘Then you’d better not forget your bathers,’ he said.

She waved over her shoulder. ‘Not for all the world.’

‘Feel free to come through the front door next time.’

Her head turned, only slightly, but enough for him to see her smile. It was only half the wattage of the one from earlier but still his chest constricted in response.

‘We haven’t known one another all that long, Hud, but I think you already know me better than that.’

The way his name sounded on her tongue made it feel as if they’d known one another a thousand years, though it was the first time he’d ever heard it. And suddenly he realised he had no idea what her name was.

‘Who are you?’ he called out, knowing his interest went far beyond just knowing her name.

She turned to walk backwards, not in the least fearful that she’d walk into a tree. Perhaps she was a wood sprite, after all.

‘The name’s Kendall York,’ she said. ‘The first.’ The half smile kicking up at one corner created a rosy cheek and a hollow cheekbone. Her bone structure was unbelievable. Photographable.

And, as she began to disappear back into the early morning shadows of the pine forest she seemed to know so well, she shot him one last smile and with it one last statement. ‘If you’d simply asked nicely I would have helped type up your story for nothing, you know. I’m that kind of girl.’

The smile hit dead centre of his chest. Burrowing, melting, until it was too late to get a handle on it and pull it out. He said, ‘And if you’d said no I still would have let you use my pool. I’m that kind of guy.’

Her steps faltered. Only slightly but enough for him to take a step forward, as though he’d be able to catch her if she fell, even though by now she was a good ten metres away.

‘See you tomorrow, Hud,’ was all she said.

‘Looking forward to it, Kendall.’

And with that she picked up her pace and she and her heavy boots and hippy clothes walked away.

Hud watched her until she was no more than a sweet memory which he would happily allow to slide unbidden into his mind any time that day or night.

At a couple of minutes before nine the next morning Kendall stood at the Claudel edge of the pine forest.

A large hemp bag containing her laptop, the notebook she never went anywhere without and a red tartan pencil case she’d had since primary school weighed heavy on her shoulder. The plastic bag carrying her bathers and towel felt lighter than air.

She stared at the grey canted roof of Claudel’s main house. And, as always when she stepped on these grounds, she closed her eyes and imagined herself surrounded by ladies in long white dresses and white hats playing croquet and gentlemen in linen suits drinking Long Island iced teas.

Her eyes flickered open and the view morphed into a garden on the verge of eating the house alive while she stood alone in one of her usual long layered skirts and heavy Doc Martens, rigid with the prospect of finding herself once again in the company of a man who made her feel…what?

Well, that was just it. He made her feel. Nervous. Clumsy. Funny. Feminine. With a flicker of those deep dark hazel eyes, a twitch of those sensuous lips, the rise and fall of that broad chest, he conjured feelings inside her she’d believed long since extinct.

And she’d been fine with them being extinct. For memories of a time when such feelings had been the centre of her life hadn’t faded in the years since the boy who’d shared them with her had gone. Memories that had taught her that being emotionally open to someone made a person vulnerable to a thousand different kinds of hurt.

Not that she felt anything for this guy like she had for George. She barely remembered a time in her young life when George hadn’t been there. The past three years without him she had felt as if she were walking through mist.

Two conversations with a stunning man did not a great love affair make, even for a girl who had studied romantic literature. But she still felt something. A flutter. A whisper. The beginning of something that could so easily turn into another thing. After having looked into Hud Bennington’s eyes—twice—her nerves jangled at the very thought of coming face to face with him again.

She wanted that pool, she needed that pool, but had the deal she had made been the worse of two evils?

If she turned around now and broke their bargain surely she could find another way. Another pool. There must be a hundred public pools this side of Melbourne. Where she would have to get into her bathers in front of people. People who would stare at her left leg, and point, and whisper and wonder.

Or what if she just went for a swim anyway? What could the guy really do? Call the police? Barricade the door? Set up a security barrier with lasers and cameras and snipers?

No. He’d asked for her help. Help she could all too easily give. She had the time, the skill and, beneath all of that, like a diamond-tough thread holding the whole deal together, she wanted to see him again. To know if the warm, delicious skittery feeling enveloping her as she’d fallen asleep the night before had as much to do with him as she thought it had.

Well, stuff it. She’d had a crush on Lord Byron when she was twelve and she’d survived it. Now she was three times the age and had learnt the value of self-control. So long as the flutter of her heart didn’t interfere with access to the pool, she could certainly appear all business. All the way.

She sucked in a long breath, allowing the clean scent of the forest to give her strength, and she strode up to the side door of the house. Her hand shook only slightly when she lifted it to rap on the big carved wooden door.

‘Good morning,’ a deep voice said from somewhere behind her.

Kendall spun to find Hud walking towards her, naked from the waist up. Well-worn jeans clung to his hips. Heavy boots caked in mud balanced out his impossibly broad shoulders. And, using his T-shirt as a pouch, he carried a pile of potatoes, tomatoes and carrots which he must have found in a vegetable garden that had survived the years.

The nearer he came, the harder she found it to swallow. Her neck suddenly felt warm and prickly. For it had been some time since she’d been this close to a wall of male muscle. If ever. George had been academic. A smart guy with the softest lips on the planet. But when his life had been snuffed with the slightest swerve of a steering wheel, he’d been a kid compared with the man who stood before her now.

She blinked rapidly, suppressing those memories and thoughts deep down inside.

Hud lifted his right arm to wipe it across his brow and Kendall caught sight of a tattoo etched on to his upper arm, spanning his large bicep. It was a word. A name. A woman’s name. Mirabella.

She nibbled at her bottom lip.

Was she some ex-girlfriend? Or maybe even a current one? Hud’s wife, even? An intrepid journalist still on the trail? Or a native of some far-flung exotic location who’d stolen his heart for ever, making it wretchedly untouchable.

His arm dropped and she glanced up to find him watching her with one of those faint half smiles that made her stomach tumble.

‘Busy morning?’ She dropped her hand to the strap biting at her shoulder and hitched it to a more comfortable position.

He shrugged and the half smile unexpectedly grew a matching blush, which on a guy of his size just made her feel all gooey inside. ‘Sorry about my state of undress. I’m still on London time. I’ve been up with the birds. I had no idea what time it was.’

‘I guess that means we’re even,’ she said. And then regretted bringing up the whole I was there without permission and naked bar my swimmers thing again when she saw understanding dawn. Understanding and a further darkening of his already unfairly dark eyes.

‘So we are,’ he said. ‘So have you been for a swim yet?’

‘Not yet. I thought I ought to work before claiming my prize. I have no intention of taking any further advantage of you…I mean, of your pool.’

‘Don’t worry about it. Swim in the mornings if it suits. Especially with the Olympics just around the corner and all.’

She felt her cheeks loosen and warm. She bit back a smile as she said, ‘I was pulling your leg about that.’

‘No. Really?’ Sarcasm dripped from his words and the smile spilled across her lips anyway.

‘Yes, really. I need the pool because I’m secretly a synchronised swimming choreographer by trade. I just don’t want it to get out or I’ll have people beating on my door.’

‘Right. Makes perfect sense.’

After a few long, loaded seconds in which the scent of pine needles and late roses mixed with the scent of warm male skin, Hud continued towards her. Kendall swayed back on to her heels.

He reached out to her at the last second. She felt all of her promises to brush off her infatuation melting away with the encroaching heat of day. Of him. Her breath clutched against the edges of her throat.

His hand caressed her shoulder, slid deftly beneath the strap of the too heavy bag, lifted it away from her grasp as though it weighed no more than a handful of feathers. And then he passed, bathing her in a whisper of sandalwood scent, pausing only slightly to throw a quick, ‘Coming?’ over his shoulder before disappearing into the belly of the house.

And if Kendall ever wanted to see her laptop again she had no choice but to follow.

As to finding an opportunity to discover who this Mirabella might be, well, she would just have to remind herself on a minute by minute basis why that was just none of her business.

CHAPTER THREE

THE neat elegance of the outside of the house had given Kendall little indication of the grandeur inside Claudel’s high walls.

Cream wallpaper embossed with pale gold roses drew her through the side hall and into a massive parlour where oak floors were inset with marble friezes in the shape of more roses. The ceiling there was so high she had to crane her neck to see up into the second level, which was bordered with a gallery all the way around. Through arched doorways she spotted hallways leading to rooms and wings in every direction with hints of curling staircases winding up into hidden alcoves. It was huge. Beautiful. Graceful. Like something out of an art history book.

But for all that she detected not an ounce of warmth. Every piece of furniture was covered in white sheets as though the house was closed up and the family still away. Hud’s return had not let any new air into the place.

‘Kendall,’ a dismembered voice said from somewhere to her right. She walked gently so that her clodhopper boots didn’t echo through the lofty entrance.

She soon found Hud in a large room, backlit by bolts of light angling through several arched windows with their gold velvet curtains drawn back. Thankfully he’d added a clean T-shirt to his ensemble. If she’d had to sit there with him shirtless she wasn’t quite sure she’d get through the morning without bursting a blood vessel or two.

She spied her hemp laptop bag at Hud’s feet just before he blocked her view by whipping a large white sheet from a piece of furniture between them. Great swathes of dust came away with the fabric, bathing him in a hazy golden light, haloing his dark curls.

‘No need for all this fanfare,’ she said, then cleared her throat when her voice came out a tad ragged, which had nothing to do with the dust. ‘I’m used to much more simple conditions. I usually work at a second-hand Formica desk beside the kitchen. Or, if Taffy kicks me off the big computer, then with my laptop on my lap in front of the TV.’

Hud curled the sheet into a ball and placed it beside a couch that looked as if it had only just been brought back out into the sunlight for the first time in years itself.

‘That table is second-hand too, you know,’ he said, turning suddenly to face her and catching her staring.

Kendall quickly dragged her eyes away from his and to the table to which he was referring. Bevelled edges, Queen Anne legs, antique as all get out. She looked back at him with a raised eyebrow. ‘I’d hazard a guess my Formica number was never named after, and certainly never owned by, royalty.’

‘You probably have me there.’ He watched her for a further few seconds, a gentle smile warming his face. She gave into a sudden need to breathe deep.

Then, easy as you please, he turned away and she rocked back on to her heels as though he’d had his finger curled into the front of her tank-top and had finally let her go.

Kendall plonked on to the velvet-backed chair behind the makeshift desk, knees together, back ramrod straight, still holding on to her swimming bag, not quite sure what she was expected to do while he set to, pulling more sheets off all the furniture in the room. It did look more welcoming when he was done, and made her feel less like they were little kids trespassing. One less tension to worry about.

Eventually Hud stood surveying the room, hands on hips, chest pushed forward, dark eyes flickering over every detail like a soldier casing an enemy camp. ‘So, this Taffy…’ he said, catching her unawares. ‘That can’t be little Taffy Henderson, can it?’

She blinked and let her pool bag drop to the polished wood floor at her feet with a swoosh. ‘Ah, yeah. Though she’s not so little any more.’

He shook his head. ‘I was sure she would have been living in New York by now, treading the Broadway stage. She was always a little drama queen.’

Kendall laughed out loud despite herself. ‘Ah, no. She is the receptionist for the local accountants.’ After a pause she added, ‘She saves the drama queen antics for when she’s at home.’

His gaze swung sideways to engage hers. A matching smile lit his eyes. Her stomach lurched, skidded and fell over backwards with a splat she felt reverberate through her whole body.

‘Lucky you,’ he said.

‘You have no idea.’

‘So she’s your…’ He let the thought carry on the air between them.

‘Friend. I rent a room in her house. We’ve known one another since we were in high school together. She was a couple of years above me. The rest is a long story.’

‘I have nothing but time,’ he said, ambling towards her.

Her head tilted higher the nearer he came. He was backlit, the hard planes of his face in shadow. And once again she felt a warning thump in the back of her head. Only now she knew it had nothing to do with the fear that came from being alone with a stranger in a secluded place. It came from finding herself alone with him.

‘I used to date her cousin,’ she said, so distracted she didn’t even feel the words until they spilled from her mouth.

Hud’s brow furrowed. ‘Another local? Would I know him?’

‘No,’ Kendall said, running a hand up the back of her neck to negate the sudden tightness constricting her muscles. ‘We all went to school in Melbourne. Taffy stayed with George’s family during the week and his family lived near mine. Anyway, I have about half a dozen articles due back at the paper by three, and a swim to fit in between, so…’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I’d completely forgotten that’s the reason you’re here.’

She slid her battered old laptop from its case and with it her ubiquitous red notebook. She turned on her laptop, balanced her fingers over the keys, half the letters long since worn away, and purposely didn’t look at Hud any more.

But, after several drawn-out moments, she couldn’t help herself. Something about this place seemed to have her checking her will-power at the border of the pine forest.

She looked up to find Hud standing in the middle of the room, one hand on his hip, the other running up the back of his neck in a mirror image of her recent action, as though something heavy was bothering him too. His bicep strained against the cotton of his T-shirt, pale denim hung just so off lean hips, and he looked at her. Worse, he looked into her.

As though the well-built, well-tended, protective walls that normally kept her safe from a return of any kind of emotional disorder into her life were to him as transparent as cellophane. As though he knew the half a dozen articles she had due back to The Northern News weren’t the reason why she wanted to get on with their deal and quick.

She was here because she was drawn to him. But whether it was to his sad eyes or his beautiful face she had no idea. Either ought to have kept her strapped to her desk at home instead of sitting here becoming more and more familiar with every tempting facet, for both were so enticing she wasn’t sure quite how to escape their pull.

She let her wrists slump against the table and the breath she let go was juddery and hot, as if it had been pent up inside her for an eternity. Her skin began to itch as if a rash were crawling up her arm, as she waited for him to say something, to tell her what he saw. And her head spun as she tried to think of ways to not answer him.

‘So,’ he said, his hand dropping until his long arm rested at his side, ‘if you’re comfortable there, I’m happier to walk as I talk. Okay with you?’

Kendall licked her dry lips. She would have been more comfy on the couch by far, feet on the coffee table, laptop warming her thighs, but that would have put her nearer Hud and his sandalwood scent and that would have been tantamount to giving the guy the sledgehammer to knock down her walls for good.

‘Fine with me,’ she said.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Then let’s go ahead and get this thing done.’

This thing, Hud repeated in his head. As if getting the story of the last two months of his life out of his head and down on paper was some kind of distraction getting in the way of other things the two of them could be doing together.

But this thing was the reason he was here. While she was the distraction. No doubt about it. All that dewy skin and those great big eyes and complex personality were enough to keep a guy like him—a guy with an infamously short attention span—interested.

Over the years he’d found women the world over who were happy to be distractions to a man who wore his inherent resistance to settling in one place like a second skin. Somehow, more often than not, they sought him out rather than the other way around. As though a friendly ear and a warm pair of arms could get many an aimless soul through the night.

But he knew instinctively that this woman was not like the others. She wouldn’t take being a distraction lightly. Giving into such urges would only be taking advantage. Which he had to tell himself over and over again while she sat there, looking up at him expectantly, eyes dark against her pale skin, believing she was part of something bigger than just the slaying of the monsters inside of his head.

He began to pace. Trying to find a beginning point, a way in. For now he actually had to say the words out loud to begin to get this thing—this great, dark, hulking shadow hovering over his future like a storm cloud waiting to burst—out of him and through her. Not his most brilliant scheme ever, though when an excess of hormones became involved most men could be said to be less than at their prime.

Kendall slowly sucked her lips between her teeth and her hands fell to cradle the edges of her laptop. ‘Once upon a time is a tad clichéd,’ she said. ‘I was born has already been taken. But anything else would suffice.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, shooting her a wry smile. And deciding that perhaps the walking thing wasn’t helping. He sat on the couch, grabbed a velvet throw pillow, punched it a few times and tucked it into a corner of the couch before lying down and using it as a pillow. But then he felt far too much like he was on a psychiatrist’s couch.

He sat up, clasped his hands so tight around his kneecaps his knuckles turned white and figured he may as well start the day it happened.

‘Colombia,’ he said, the word shooting from his lungs as though it had to pass through an obstacle course. He closed his eyes and breathed through it, doing his all to control the images already starting to crowd in on him.

Bad idea. Bad idea, his subconscious chanted. Then, Just be a man, and do it.

He looked across and noticed that, while Kendall’s right leg was stretched out comfortably in front of her, she was kneading her left thigh. Her expression was absent-minded, her brow furrowed.

‘You okay?’ he asked, happy for the interruption.

She looked up. He motioned to her leg.

And then, quick as a flash, she straightened her skirt, a twin to the one from the day before, only this one was the colour of caramel, then folded both legs back beneath her. ‘All good,’ she said with an easy smile. ‘Keep going. So far it’s riveting. I can only hope the rest can live up to the promise so far.’

‘Smart alec,’ he said, but what he thought was, Be careful what you wish for…

‘Night,’ he continued. ‘A sky of dark blue. Market umbrellas like triangular black holes against the squat, square mud buildings surrounding the town centre. Their dark windows like empty eyes looking out over the noisy milling crowd. I pass a group of young men leaning against a building, smoking, laughing, telling dirty jokes.’

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