Outback Sisters

by Rachael Johns

Frankie shifted from one foot to the other. After the embarrassment of the kiss, she didn’t want to go out there and make him feel like even more of an idiot. How would he feel knowing he’d been duped by two teenaged girls?

  ‘I think you should meet him,’ she found herself saying.

  ‘What? Geez!’ Simone groaned. ‘I’m being ambushed from all directions.’

  Frankie heard her nieces in the background. ‘Go meet Logan, Mum. He’s lovely.’

  ‘He seems to be,’ Frankie conceded, looking again through the hatch to perve on the man in question. Maybe he had a twin brother? It was hard to imagine there could be two men like him on the planet, but … not totally impossible.

  ‘Is he really that hot?’ Simone’s question jolted Frankie’s thoughts.

  She sighed, still staring at him. Logan glanced up, caught her looking and waved. Her heart did some sort of gymnastics in her chest. ‘Hot doesn’t even begin to cover it.’

  ‘Why do I think I’m going to live to regret this?’ Simone asked, and then, ‘Tell him I can meet him at the pub in an hour.’

  * * *

  Logan put down the newspaper as Frankie emerged from the kitchen. He couldn’t believe he’d waltzed in here and kissed her before bothering to introduce himself. He was surprised she hadn’t slapped him in the face and he certainly wouldn’t have blamed her if she had. What had he been thinking?

  He hadn’t been, that’s what. Instead he’d been overcome with something he’d never felt before. He’d always been impulsive, something Angus felt a constant urge to point out, but what he’d just done was taking things to extremes. If he told his brother about this later, he would omit the kiss. Maybe it was his recent diagnosis wreaking havoc with his emotions or maybe it was simply because Simone’s sister was possibly the sexiest woman he’d ever met. She wasn’t classically good-looking—not the type that graced movie screens or fashion magazines—but she possessed a natural beauty that shone from somewhere deep within. The little black apron wrapped around her waist, red T-shirt with Frankie’s scrawled in black across one breast and the skinny faded jeans clinging to her legs highlighted her curvy body. He couldn’t help but remember the feel of it pressed against him.

  As she walked towards him now, her pale cheeks glowed a pretty red and her hair—a deep rich crimson—hung in a long, practical, but ever so sexy plait over one shoulder. She was like Anne of Green Gables all grown up, and he had a sudden urge to play Gilbert Blythe.

  ‘Simone says she’ll meet you at the pub in an hour,’ Frankie said, picking up the cloth she’d dumped on a table when he’d walked in. ‘Do you know where The Palace is?’

  He smiled, hoping to relax her, as she seemed a little jittery. ‘Just down the road on the right, yeah?’ He felt the need to explain that he was a relative local—so she wouldn’t take him for a stalker or anything. ‘My family has a farm at Mingenew, so I’ve been through Bunyip Bay before.’

  She nodded and started to wipe the table. ‘When you say “family”—you’re not married, are you? I don’t mean to be rude but you hear all kind of horror stories about online dating and if you hurt Simone, well, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ll kill you.’

  Logan chuckled at her deadpan tone. It was clear she wasn’t joking and he liked that she valued family as much as he did. ‘No, I’m not married. Not anymore, anyway.’

  ‘Good.’ She turned and he followed her gaze to see two elderly women—the only customers in the café—watching them with great interest. Dropping the cloth again, Frankie crossed to the women and all but shooed them out the door. ‘Time to go, ladies. Show’s over. Have a nice weekend.’

  She shut the door behind them, flipped the sign to closed and let out what sounded like a sigh of relief. ‘Local gossips,’ she explained, turning back to him. ‘You’ll be the talk of the town before nightfall.’

  Logan grimaced. ‘Sorry.’

  She shrugged and shot him a smile that hit him right in the solar plexus. ‘Everyone needs a little excitement in their lives.’

  He got the feeling she wasn’t simply referring to the old biddies. ‘Can I help you with anything? I’m a pro at washing dishes and it seems that I’ve got a bit of time to kill.’

  ‘It’s fine.’ She shook her head, her smile vanishing as quickly as it had arrived. ‘I haven’t got much to do anyway.’ And suddenly she was all business again. ‘Well, it was nice meeting you. Hope you enjoy your evening with Simone.’

  With that, she went back to her task and it was clear he’d been dismissed.

  Damn shame, because he was enjoying her company immensely. They’d barely exchanged a few words but the taste of her lips and her no-nonsense attitude had piqued his interest. He only hoped her sister was half as fascinating.

  He stood. ‘Well, I might see you round. Have a great weekend.’

  ‘Thanks. You too.’ But she barely looked up at him as she spoke.

  Feeling odd about leaving a café without so much as a cup of coffee, Logan crossed to the door and let himself out. He stepped onto the main street of Bunyip Bay, wide and near deserted like most country towns at this time on a Friday afternoon. He squinted a few hundred metres up the street to where dusty utes and dirty four-wheel drives were starting to fill the car spaces outside the front of the pub.

  Leaving his own ute parked outside the café, he started the short distance towards The Palace. As a journalist, one of his favourite pastimes was people-watching, and small-town pubs were about the best places in the world for such a thing. He’d grab a beer, find a quiet spot in the corner and sit back and watch while he waited for his date.

  Chapter Two

  Frankie was generally a much better liar than Simone, although she feared Logan might have seen through her fib about almost being finished at the café. The kitchen still needed to be cleaned and she never went home without everything being spick and span, but she’d needed to get him out of her space. After that kiss she could barely breathe with him so close, never mind manage a normal conversation. He’d acted as though it was nothing to simply turn up out of the blue and kiss a stranger like that—like it was something that happened everyday—but she couldn’t forget quite so easily.

  Careful not to be seen, she watched through the window from behind the café curtain as he sauntered down the street towards the pub. From behind he was just as delicious as he was from the front, if not more so. His jeans were tight across his butt and left little to her imagination. Simone was one lucky gal.

  When Logan reached the pub, Frankie finally dragged her eyes away and went back to the task of clearing up. She’d barely made a dent in the mess when her phone beeped, signalling an incoming message.

  Help! What the hell am I supposed to wear? You got me into this mess, so come over and help me decide.

  Technically it had been Harriet and Grace that had started the ball rolling, but Frankie didn’t bother to point this out. It took a great deal of energy to argue with Simone. She glanced around the kitchen—the mess would still be there in the morning and if she got up early, she could deal with it then.

  Less than five minutes later she was letting herself into Simone’s eternally chaotic house with a cardboard box full of leftover cake. ‘Hello?’ she called, as she made her way through the trail of shoes and magazines and quirky doorstops that littered the hallway of the 1950s fibro cottage.

  ‘In here!’ Simone yelled from her bedroom.

  Frankie found her older sister and two nieces crowded around Simone’s tiny but cluttered desk, staring intently at her laptop. She rested the cake box precariously on the top of a dresser.

  ‘Have a read of what they’ve said about me. And would you look at the photo they used? It looks nothing like me. It’s over five years old, from before these two turned into monsters and I got wrinkles. No wonder he wants to meet me,’ Simone said, springing from her stool and turning to her open wardrobe. ‘And then you can help me pick a dress.’

  Lord, that could take a while. F
rankie glanced over at her sister’s collection of outfits. Unlike her, Simone never threw anything out. She still wore things that had been in fashion ten years ago and somehow always managed to look fabulous. And wrinkles? You’d need a magnifying glass to see them, if there were any. Simone had a whimsical, unique style that Frankie had always been a little jealous and a lot in awe of. In contrast, her own wardrobe consisted mostly of skinny jeans, knee-high boots and practical shirts. The very few dresses she owned always made her feel silly when she wore them.

  Sixteen-year-old Harriet and thirteen-year-old Grace stepped aside to make room for Frankie. She sat on the wobbly wooden stool and looked at the screen, which showed Simone’s profile on RuralMatchmakers.com.au. ‘Oh, I read about this site in The West only a few weeks ago. Apparently it’s had a lot of success helping isolated farmers find love,’ she commented before starting to read.

  ‘I’m not sure any farmer—isolated or otherwise—wants to put up with my crap.’

  Frankie chose not to respond and started to read. Within a few seconds she was in hysterics.

  ‘Body type,’ she read aloud, ‘feminine and curvaceous, breasts to rival Barbie but the rest of me in much better proportion. What the hell?’

  ‘Don’t!’ Simone shrieked. ‘I shudder to think what kind of man that profile has attracted, but then I looked at this Logan’s profile and read some of his messages and he seems normal enough.’

  Normal? Frankie thought of how she’d felt the moment Logan had walked into the café and then moments later when he’d kissed her. Nope, he wasn’t normal at all.

  ‘Where’s his profile?’

  Harriet leaned across the screen and after a few clicks of the mouse, Logan’s photo loomed large in front of them. Frankie’s heart rate spiked at the sight of his boyish but irresistible grin and she had to close her eyes a moment to settle it. When she opened them again, she barely glanced at the photo, scrolling lower to read all about him.

  He was apparently thirty years old, so almost smack bang in the middle of her and Simone. His height had him at over six foot but she could have guessed that from the way he’d had to stoop to kiss her and he hadn’t lied about his body type—he was fit, well built and healthy. He didn’t smoke, and only drank ‘on occasion’. She wondered if that was a lie as most farmers she knew had at least a couple of beers at the end of a hard day. But if a little white lie was the biggest fault she could find, well … maybe she would sign up to this site after all.

  ‘See, he’s a Leo and Mum’s Libran.’ Harriet pointed at the screen. ‘That makes them perfect for each other.’

  Frankie raised her eyebrows. Simone was into all that new-age stuff and it seemed to have rubbed off on her daughters, but Frankie thought it all a load of manure.

  ‘It says he’s a journalist?’ she said, reading further.

  ‘Yep.’ Grace nodded, twisting her long golden hair around her index finger. Both of Simone’s daughters had luckily missed the family ginger gene and were blessed with golden hair like their father. ‘He’s a rural journalist. We checked out some of his articles and—’

  ‘He’s very prolific,’ interrupted Harriet. ‘But he also still works on his family’s crop and sheep station in Mingenew when they need him.’

  Frankie wondered who ‘they’ were.

  ‘It’s not far,’ Grace added. ‘We only responded to people within a couple of hours’ drive. Harriet said long-distance relationships never work.’

  ‘Because Harriet knows so much about relationships,’ Simone said sarcastically as she discarded yet another outfit on the bed.

  Harriet glared at her mother. ‘Well, I’m the only one in this room currently in a relationship.’

  ‘Touché.’ Frankie wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

  ‘What about this?’ Simone held up a cute white dress scattered with black stars. It was ruched from bodice to hip and finished just above the knee. It also had a very low neckline, which would show off her enviable cleavage. Not quite Barbie, but still …

  Frankie swallowed. ‘I think it’s perfect.’

  With a nervous smile, Simone stripped down to her underwear—a black, lacy bra with matching G-string. She always wore sexy lingerie, despite moaning about nobody ever getting to see it. Frankie couldn’t help but wonder if Logan would be the exception to that rule and her chest tightened at the thought. Having experienced the magic of his lips, Frankie couldn’t help her jealousy, despite knowing how ridiculous it was to feel this way about a man she’d just met.

  Stepping into the dress, Simone yanked it up over her boobs, slipped her arms into the tiny sleeves and then spun around. ‘Can someone do me up?’

  Harriet stepped forward and tugged up the zip. ‘You look hot, Mum,’ she said, a rare tone of approval in her voice.

  ‘You do,’ Frankie had to agree. She didn’t know anyone else who could get away with a white dress and black underthings, but on Simone the tiny glimpse of dark lace was incredibly seductive. Sometimes she wondered why some guy hadn’t snapped her sister up already, but deep down, Frankie knew it was because no-one had come along who measured up to Jason.

  Ignoring their compliments, Simone asked, ‘What shoes should I wear?’

  The next few minutes were taken up searching through Simone’s massive shoe collection. They finally came to a decision, choosing a pair of strappy silver heels.

  When Simone rushed off to the bathroom to ‘do something about my hair and make-up’, Harriet plonked herself down on the bed to grill Frankie.

  ‘So Aunty Eff, is he really as good-looking as in his photo?’

  ‘Oh … yes, like you wouldn’t be—’ Frankie caught herself gushing about Logan and remembered her place. ‘But it doesn’t matter what he looks like, pretending to be your mum was very irresponsible—you don’t know what kind of people are lurking out there on the internet.’

  ‘We’ve done cyber safety at school,’ Harriet said with a wave of her hand. ‘And we weren’t stupid.’

  Not in the mood to argue with her niece, Frankie decided she’d fulfilled her responsibilities by mentioning the issue. Then, telling herself she was looking out for Simone, she went back to scrutinising Logan’s profile. In addition to playing footy, reading, rock-climbing and canoeing—all that physical activity accounted for his lovely body—he also listed baking as a hobby. Interesting; an all-rounder indeed. And apparently he did have a brother—she’d have to get Simone to enquire after him.

  ‘Can you stay with the girls while I’m out?’ Simone asked on her return to the bedroom. ‘I doubt I’ll be long and anyway, you can be on call if I need you to check any information about this guy.’

  Frankie nodded—it wasn’t like she had any better options—and it was always fun hanging out with her nieces. Reading on the couch had seemed an appealing Friday night option less than an hour ago, but now she felt that her favourite pastime wouldn’t cut the mustard.

  Simone plucked her handbag from where it hung on the end of the bed. Then she took a deep breath and looked at each of them. ‘Are you sure I look okay?’

  ‘Gorgeous, Mum.’ This from Grace.

  ‘Stop fishing for compliments and get the hell to this date,’ Harriet ordered.

  ‘Watch your tongue, young lady.’ Simone pointed a finger at her. ‘And be good for Frank.’

  ‘You look amazing, Simmo. Have fun.’ Frankie summoned a smile as she tried to swallow the lump that had formed in her throat. ‘Can’t wait to hear all about it.’

  Frankie, Harriet and Grace followed Simone to the door and stood on the porch like nervous parents as she climbed into her beaten-up old Pajero.

  ‘Oh bugger, I haven’t organised dinner yet,’ Simone called, leaning out of the driver’s-side window.

  ‘Don’t worry about us, just go,’ Harriet hollered.

  Frankie nodded. ‘Yes, go. I’ll whip something up for them.’

  A man like Logan Knight should not be kept waiting.

  With a final wave, Sim
one reversed her car out of the driveway and started in the direction of the main street. Frankie shook her head, not wanting to think about whether Logan would kiss her sister hello in the manner he’d kissed her earlier.

  ‘Did I see a cake box?’ Grace asked, her eyes gleaming with excitement.

  Frankie reached out and ruffled her youngest niece’s hair. ‘Sure did, my sweet. I’ll go get it.’ Normally she’d have gone to the effort of making her nieces something healthy for dinner, but for some reason she couldn’t summon the energy, so they sat down on the couch together and ate cake right from the box. At least, she and Grace did. Harriet moaned about getting fat and grabbed an apple from the kitchen instead.

  ‘You ought to be careful,’ she said to Grace when she joined them again. ‘Boys don’t like fat chicks and if you keep eating junk food the way you do, you’ll be the size of a house.’

  ‘Harriet,’ Frankie warned. Neither of the girls were fat and this was a ridiculous conversation.

  ‘There’s this thing called exercise,’ Grace snapped back. ‘Of course you wouldn’t know about that because the only thing you ever exercise is your tongue.’

  Harriet’s mouth dropped open and her eyes narrowed at her sister. It wasn’t like Grace to stand up for herself and Frankie couldn’t help but silently commend her; still, she didn’t want to end up umpiring her nieces’ bickering all night, so she distracted them.

  ‘What made you two decide to sign your mum up for Rural Matchmakers?’

  ‘Adam and Stella’s wedding,’ Grace said, dumping her fork into the cake box.

  ‘She’ll look like a sad case if she goes alone,’ Harriet added, picking up her iPhone and staring at the screen. It was a miracle she’d lasted this long without checking Facebook or Snapchat.

  ‘What about me? You don’t have a problem with me going to the wedding solo?’

  ‘Oh, Aunty Eff,’ Grace said, leaning in to hug her. ‘You’re so hot and young, you’ll pick up some gorgeous guy on the dance floor.’

  Hah! The optimism of youth. ‘Your mum’s not that much older than me,’ Frankie said, feeling as if she should stick up for her sister.