by Holly Ford
Carr stood in the lamplit glow of the kitchen, hanging up the keys to the Hilux. She waited, watching the door behind him. Any second it would open and—
‘What have you done with Ash?’ Lizzie enquired casually from her chair beside the range.
‘Left him at Blackpeak,’ Carr said. ‘He’s going to give Charlie a hand to rake the mob out tomorrow.’
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Cally fought to ratchet her nerves back down. What was the matter with her? She should be pleased. It wasn’t as if she wanted Ash to be there. So why did she feel so—
‘Cally.’ Carr’s eyes met hers. ‘Hello,’ he said, giving her one of his rare smiles. ‘Welcome back.’
She nodded, trying to return his smile, but for some reason she felt rather teary again. Maybe because he and Lizzie both looked so exhausted, and they were being so nice, and she didn’t know how to thank them for trying to make everything right when she’d been such an idiot. She watched Carr stop to kiss Lizzie’s cheek. Such a small thing to do, but for half a second Cally thought it might break her heart. If anyone, ever, looked at her the way Carr looked at Lizzie — anyone, just once — she swore she’d die happy.
She dropped her gaze as Carr walked towards her. As he passed her in the hall doorway, to her great surprise he put his hand on her shoulder.
‘It’s good to have you home,’ he said.
Suddenly, Cally had a powerful sense that everything was going to be okay. That was where Ash got it from, she realised: the gift of soothing frightened animals. Calming by osmosis. Ugh. She was back at Ash already? Carr’s hand left her shoulder, but amazingly her sense of reassurance lingered, as if some problem she’d never quite managed to formulate had just been solved.
It got her as far as the bathroom that night, where the mirror began to blur. She wiped her eyes quickly, and, opening the cabinet, put her toothbrush back on the shelf below Ash’s things. If she started sobbing over the sink she might never stop. For God’s sake, it was only his mouthwash.
Carrying her lamp into her room, she paused briefly at the window, listening to the wash of the rising wind, before she pulled the thick curtains. Immediately, the roar of the gums diminished, and the shepherdesses’ candles barely flickered as she lit them. This old house, it occurred to her, must have stood for half a century or more before it ever saw a light bulb.
‘Cally?’
She hurried to open the door at Carr’s knock.
‘I thought you might want to light the fire,’ he said, the library’s log basket under one arm.
‘Thank you.’
She watched him carry the wood across the room and set it down beside the hearth. Wordlessly, he sank to his haunches and put a match to the fire. In the growing light of the flames, his face looked not only tired, but — Cally was shocked to even think it — worried.
‘Is everything okay?’ she asked.
The look Carr gave her made her contemplate a step back.
‘With the station, I mean,’ she explained, hurriedly. ‘Has the snow been really bad?’
‘No,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘We’re fine. It’s just what happens here in winter.’ He stared at the fire.
‘I can help tomorrow,’ Cally offered. ‘What time are you feeding out?’
‘You don’t have to do that.’ Carr eased himself to his feet.
‘I want to.’
He gave her an appraising look. ‘If I load the feed, you think you can handle the lower block?’
Drive the tractor? By herself? ‘Yes,’ she decided. Fortune favoured the brave. And anyway, it was an awfully big paddock. There wasn’t a lot she could hit. Well, apart from the sheep, of course.
‘Okay,’ Carr nodded. ‘I’ll be heading out about seventhirty. I’ll give you a yell when I get up.’
Actually, without the distraction of being jammed up against Ash in the cab, Cally discovered the job was pretty easy. Once it got going, the tractor practically drove itself, which was probably why Ash had been sufficiently bored to teach her how to work the controls in the first place.
By the time she was heading up the lower block on her second morning, laying out what she hoped was a steady line of baleage behind her, Cally had relaxed at the wheel enough to drift off into a pleasant daydream that she could be a high country farmhand for a living. Maybe, at the end of the season, Hannah could get her a job at Blackpeak. She’d need dogs, though, that was the thing. Not to mention the ability to work them. Was there some sort of course she could do? Carr would help her, she felt sure, if she asked. And then maybe she could work for her keep while Jen got her trained up.
Back at the homestead, she was still mulling over what she knew, in her heart, was a fantasy as she made a start, at last, on the housework. Outside Ash’s room, Cally lifted her chin. It had to be done. And she would feel a hell of a lot more comfortable in there knowing he wasn’t about to walk in at any moment. That his bed — she resisted the urge to touch it — had been empty for two nights, and that neatly tucked sheet had not been twisted around his naked body a few hours ago, and probably, probably, would bear no trace of him at all if she were to … Forcing herself to remember who else his sheets might bear traces of, Cally turned her back on the bed and tried to get on with the dusting.
There. She was getting better, she told herself, slipping off her shoes and clambering onto the window seat to reach the top of the cornicing. At least the thought of Valentina in here didn’t make her want to throw up any more. It felt less like a kick in the stomach and more like … an ache.
Another hangover, that’s what it was. The nasty consequences of something she should have known better than to do in the first place.
The chug of a diesel engine rose outside. Cally looked down through the turret window as an unfamiliar ute rolled up the drive and came to a halt beside the back door. Ash? She hurried out of view as he stepped down from the passenger seat and, running his hand over his jaw — was he growing some kind of beard? — waited for the driver. Cally watched in horror as a tall, slender, drop-dead-gorgeous girl unravelled herself from the cab. Jesus. Already? Valentina hadn’t even been gone a week. Had he broken up with her? The girl flicked her long black ponytail to her other shoulder and followed Ash inside, the old jeans and work-boots she was wearing doing nothing to disguise the length of her legs. No need for high heels there.
Cally stood still for a moment, watching the space where Ash and the girl had been. And so it began. This was what she would have to deal with if she stayed at Glencairn. She had to admit they made a perfect couple. No wonder Ash had been helping out at Blackpeak. Rapidly, she changed her mind about wanting a job there.
Another thing she needed to do rapidly, she realised, was get out of his room. What if they came up here? Ash did look a bit like he had just rolled out of someone else’s bed. Gathering up her things, Cally fled.
On the landing, she hesitated. Where was it safe to go? She could hear their voices in the kitchen. She wanted nothing more than to get out of the house completely, but she would have to go past them to get to her gumboots. Treading as lightly as she could, Cally hurried down the stairs and shut herself in the library.
The stag on the wall eyed her glassily. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she told him, under her breath. ‘At least your problems are over.’
She looked around the room. Okay. Now she was here, she could curl up in a ball on the floor and weep, or — Cally blinked hard — she could get on with the job they were paying her to do. She stared at her duster. She’d chosen to come back here, so now she had to man up and get on with it. Don’t let anyone make you feel you’re worth less than a Valentina, she reminded herself. Mind you, Luke hadn’t seen this new girl.
Half an hour later, Cally glimpsed the girl’s ute heading off through the gums. Soon afterwards, Ash’s footsteps passed the library door, and she heard the stairs creak. Good. Cally took a deep breath. If she hurried, she could be safely out of the house before he came back down, and hopefully she w
ouldn’t have to see him again until dinner time, when Carr would be there, and everything would start to seem all right.
Finishing up in the library, she packed her cleaning things away and headed out to the vegetable garden. Its brick walls were radiating the heat of the winter sun, and the wet straw covering the vegetable beds was the only remaining sign of the weekend’s snow. Cally slung her jacket over the pile of bean stakes and rolled up her sleeves. She just had to concentrate on what she was doing, that was all. It was lovely out here. She should think about that. Clearing a section of straw from the potato bed, she dug in her spade. The wet soil made it harder work than usual. She sank her weight against the blade.
‘Cally.’
Oh, Jesus. She straightened. Ash walked towards her. He’d shaved. And changed. Breathe, she tried to tell herself. Breathe. But her heart was beating so fast she could hardly hear herself think. In the last week, she had turned him into some kind of ogre, but now he was — right here — he was — God, he was—
‘Hi,’ he said gently. He was standing so close she’d have to look up, she knew, to see his face. Cally kept her eyes on the grip of the spade. Her knuckles, she realised, were white.
‘Here.’ Ash reached for the spade. ‘Let me do that.’
As she failed to release the grip, his hand met hers. Slowly, Ash reached out, his other hand taking the back of her arm. ‘You’re shaking,’ he said, his voice very low.
‘Don’t,’ Cally managed, at last, in a whisper barely audible even to her.
She felt Ash tense. ‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t — don’t touch me. Please.’ She stared down at his hand on her arm.
He let go.
For the first time, Cally looked him full in the face. At the expression of hurt surprise in his eyes, her temper snapped. Jesus. Did he have no idea what he was doing to her?
‘Don’t touch me,’ she repeated, a fury she hadn’t known she felt bubbling up to the surface, ‘don’t help me, don’t try to be my friend. Just leave me alone and let me do my job.’ Snatching the spade away, she plunged it into the ground.
By the time she felt sufficiently calm to look up again, Ash had gone.
‘You’re back,’ Carr observed, evenly, as Ash finally entered the kitchen that night.
Putting a bowl of mashed potatoes on the table, Cally risked a quick look at him. Whatever he’d been doing all afternoon didn’t seem to have left him in a good mood.
‘Yeah.’ Avoiding her eyes, and his father’s, Ash sat down. ‘Charlie gave me a lift home this morning.’
‘They got the mob out okay?’
‘Yeah, we got them all down.’
Cally frowned at the carrots. Hang on — Charlie? That was Charlotte Black he drove up with this morning? Hannah and Jen’s boss? Bloody hell, why hadn’t anyone mentioned she looked like that? And she’d married someone last year, hadn’t she? Cally felt a wave of relief. A stupid wave of relief, she reminded herself. So she’d been wrong this time. But Ash was going to come home with another girl sooner or later. That or Valentina was coming back. Would it be better or worse if he found a nicer girlfriend? As she pulled out her chair, Doug stared up at her from the seat with a look of reproach. It would be better for everyone else, she supposed.
Carr being there, Cally discovered, didn’t make everything all right after all. In fact, he seemed withdrawn himself, and dinner passed in excruciating silence. Not that last night had been much better, but Cally hadn’t felt responsible for that; Carr was always more than usually quiet after Lizzie had gone. And at least the two of them had been able to look at each other.
‘I’ll get those,’ Ash began, starting to rise from his chair as she began to clear the table. For a second, their eyes met. Ash sat back down. Snatching up plates, Cally turned away to hide her flaming cheeks.
With what sounded like a sigh, Carr stacked Ash’s plate on top of his own and carried them both to the sink. ‘I’ll be in the office,’ he growled, heading for the door, ‘if anybody needs me.’
Hearing the door close behind him, Cally’s spine stiffened. Please, God, let Ash just go, too. Keeping her back to him, she started loading the dishwasher, ridiculously aware of every move she made. After what seemed like forever, she heard Ash’s chair scrape. The kitchen door opened and closed. She let out a long breath, her spine slumping with relief. Doug wound around her ankles and Cally scooped him up, holding him tight to her chest. The cat squirmed as she burst into tears.
The kitchen cleaned to within a centimetre of its life, she gathered her courage to head out at last. Passing the office, she heard voices behind its closed door. Ash was in there with his father? That was a first. Cally crept upstairs, seizing the opportunity to gather what she needed from the bathroom.
Sneaking down again a few minutes later, she scanned the shadowed hallway, looking back nervously as she put her hand to the door of the downstairs bathroom. It flew towards her in a blaze of fluorescent light. Sidestepping rapidly to avoid being hit in the face, Cally collided with— Oh, Christ, no. Ash. Of course.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she mumbled, scrabbling for the toothbrush she had dropped and wishing that she, too, could somehow disappear into the pattern of the rug. ‘I — I thought …’
‘You thought you’d be safe.’ Ash handed her the toothbrush.
Cally said nothing, averting her eyes from his chest. At least he still had his shirt on.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ll take this bathroom. You take upstairs.’
‘No,’ she frowned. ‘You should have it. It’s your bathroom. Your house.’
‘It’s Dad’s house, not mine. He says what goes where.’
Ash’s tone was flat. Taken aback by it, Cally glanced up at him in concern. ‘Are you okay?’
The look he gave her in return was one she didn’t often receive: one that implied she was utterly stupid. Remembering her little speech in the garden, Cally felt her colour rise again. Now who was trying to be whose friend? Her gaze slid down to the toilet bag in her hand.
‘Take the upstairs bathroom.’ Ash brushed past her. ‘I won’t be using it any more.’
Chapter TWENTY
As the plane began its final taxi down the runway, Ella stared out the window, hoarding her last seconds on New Zealand soil. In the past year, she had flown out so many times she’d lost count, but this time — this time it was different. This time she didn’t know when she’d be back. And there would be no Luke waiting for her. When she felt the wheels leave the ground at last, her usual spike of excitement was replaced with a crushing sense of loss. Almost everything she really cared about was down there, slowly disappearing below the clouds.
Beside her, Damian put his hand on her arm. ‘You’re doing the right thing.’
Yes, everybody agreed about that. Damian, Lizzie, Richard. Luke, judging by his silence. Since he’d walked out of the apartment four days earlier, the only response Ella had been able to get out of him was a six-word text in reply to her plea to let her know what to do with the garage-door opener. Leave it at the manager’s office. She still had the message on her phone. She still had every message he’d ever sent her.
‘Come on, honey, don’t look so down. A year from now you won’t remember his name.’ Damian sipped his champagne. ‘And from what I saw of him, he sure as hell won’t remember yours.’
Ella rested her cheek against the seat. She didn’t have the will to argue with Damian, but she knew it wasn’t true. She would never forget a second of the time she’d had with Luke, whether she wanted to or not. The look in his eyes as he’d walked out the door would still be with her if she lived to be a hundred. Luke had done everything he could to keep them together, and she had done — nothing. Worse than nothing. She’d been so worried about getting her own feelings hurt that she hadn’t thought about his at all. She’d ruined everything all by herself. God. Even her own mother wasn’t on her side.
‘Darling,’ Lizzie had told her gently, as she’d sobbed the story
into the phone on the day Luke had left, ‘what did you think was going to happen when you told him you wanted to live in another hemisphere? He was bound to take it as a bit of a hint.’
‘But I never said I was going. I don’t even want to go to New York, not any more. All I was doing was thinking about it, and now he won’t even take my calls.’
‘Darling, I know you’re hurting, but … well, if Luke wants to make a clean break, maybe he has a point. Maybe this is all for the best.’
The best? ‘How can this possibly be for the best?’ It was the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
Her mother’s hesitation had flowed down the line. ‘When you see somebody building you into their life … building a life around you … well, if you’re not sure you feel the same way about them, it might be kinder to let them go.’
‘But I love Luke. More than anything.’
‘Do you, Ella? Really? Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ she had snivelled, shocked at the doubt in her mother’s voice. ‘How can you even ask me that?’
‘Well, darling, ever since you started working for Damian it’s been pretty hard to tell.’
Working for Damian, working for Damian. Everything always seemed to come down to that. For the past six months it was all she’d done, and now it was all she had. These past few days, it hadn’t felt like much. Nothing did, now Luke was gone.
On the other hand — Ella stole a glance at Damian, who was flicking through the in-flight magazine with a look of boredom — it was better than nothing.
‘You’re upset now,’ Lizzie had told her, ‘but of course you have to go to New York. You’ll never forgive yourself if you turn it down.’
