by Lily Malone
“I gave myself the day off. I planned to go for a ride on that collector’s item you’ve got strapped in the back of that red monstrosity.”
“I’ll tell my cousin you think his ute is a monstrosity—it’s his pride and joy. He’s busted his Achilles playing football, so he can’t drive. I’m borrowing it.”
“Oh.” The faintest tint of red stained her cheeks. “I assumed it was yours.”
“Easy assumption to make,” he said easily. “You could come for a ride with me tomorrow if you want to check out how the Pantah runs. I’m not doing anything. My cousin is about as much fun at the moment as measles and I don’t know anyone else in town.”
“I don’t think so, Owen, but thanks. I have a fair bit of work on.”
A crazy ghost of an idea entered his head. “So if you’re a viticulturist, Olivia, I guess that makes you an expert at pruning?”
“I don’t know about expert exactly, but I know my way around.” Her head tilted to one side and she added: “Why?”
“My aunt owns a vineyard at Balhannah. I promised her I’d help her prune it this weekend. It means I get to stay with her for a week or so. Rent-free. I think of it like a working holiday.”
“So you’re squatting. What’s that got to do with me?”
“I’ve never pruned a grapevine in my life. If you’ll help me, I’ll take your ten grand and I’ll sell you the Ducati to make up the difference.”
The handbag slipped silently from her shoulder and stuck in the crease in her elbow, where it swung like a fisherman’s net. “That’s nuts. That’s paying me, like, fifteen hundred dollars for two days work.”
“It’s not so nuts,” he said, echoing her use of the word, watching hunger flare on her face.
“Why?”
“I’d have to pay someone to give me a pruning demonstration. It might as well be you. This way I get your labour for the weekend too. It’s less work for me.”
“It’s very damn generous.” She shifted her weight uneasily and he knew she was looking for a catch. She bit her lip, chewed at it for a second. “You’re kidding, right? It’s a joke?”
“No joke. I’m serious.”
“How big is the vineyard? One paddock? Two?”
He tried to picture his aunt’s vines in his head. Until this week he’d never paid them much attention. “Maybe not quite two.”
She sucked in a quick breath that hissed through her teeth, and when she exhaled it was more like a shudder. “You, Owen Carson, have got yourself a deal.”
“Excellent.” Owen stepped forward. He plucked the strap from her fingers and laid it gently against her neck, brushing her soft dark hair out from under the fabric so it wouldn’t pinch.
This holiday weekend had just got far more exciting.
Chapter 3
“Hello?” Liv called into her parents’ empty house—ten minutes after finishing the most illogical conversation she’d had in… forever. Was it really possible she still had a chance to buy back the Duke?
She shut the front door behind her, leant back on the frosted glass, and let out the squeee she’d held since Owen said: see you Saturday.
She sniffed. Thursday night was usually roast night, but she couldn’t smell rosemary or lamb. She couldn’t smell anything except the delicious scent of an empty house.
Four nights on her own.
Hallelujah.
Liv skip-limped up the hall, rubber soles squeaking on polished alabaster tiles. She tossed her handbag at the pristine white slab of her mother’s new kitchen bench—a colour the salesman called ‘milk and honey’ and Liv called ‘old wax.’ She ran a finger over the smooth bevelled edge, promising it four sticky days of fingerprints and toast crumbs. Possibly even a trespassing ant.
Her mobile phone rang as she was about to open the fridge.
Ben.
Liv leapt for her handbag and dredged-up her phone.
“Hi.” She set her hip against the bench, trying to take the weight off her sore leg.
Her mother’s bird prints eyed her from the lounge-room wall. Not one print, four, suspended in a framed strip. Wren. Robin. Finch. Shrike. They had beady bright birdie eyes that seemed to follow her wherever she went.
“If you keep all the boys waiting this long for a simple phone call, Olivia Murphy, it’s no wonder you can’t get laid,” Ben greeted her.
“It’s not easy getting laid under your parents’ roof,” she said, ear ringing from the outraged shrill in Ben’s voice.
“Then get a little more inventive, darl.”
“Give it a rest, Ben. I was just about to call you. Can you believe my folks are gone? They’re in Melbourne all long weekend. I never thought mum could do it.” The best way to distract Ben from harping on about her lack of a love life was to mention her parents.
“Old Mrs Bleach must be improving.” Ben snorted delicately—Liv knew no other person who could make a snort sound delicate—then he added: “What about Fireman Jack?”
“Dad’s had this weekend blocked out since they released the football fixture. Adelaide could burn to the ground and he wouldn’t rush back to save it, although if the Crows don’t win Saturday he might come home early. He’s a bear with a sore head when they lose—”
“He’s a bear with a sore head, period.”
“Give him a break, Ben.”
Ben snorted again. “You’re defending him?”
“I guess I am.” She’d grown closer to her father since Christmas. They’d both had to work together to look after her mother—stop Alison Murphy from turning the house into an advertisement for bleach. “Dad would change a lot of things if he could.”
“Wasn’t that always his problem? He kept trying to change the things that should have been left well enough alone.” Three years of pain crippled Ben’s tone. Or was it four? The last year Luke and Ben were together was the year her father made Luke sell the Duke. Nothing was ever the same after that.
She understood how Ben felt, but Liv kept her voice flat. She didn’t have the energy for a rerun of this conversation anymore. “Ben Trencher, when we go on this goodbye ride on Monday that’s it. Finished. You’ve got to let what happened go and move on.”
“I miss him every day, Liv. I wasn’t there at the end. At the hospital. He must have been so scared.”
This time she couldn’t help but soften. Ben’s voice hit her right between the ribs. “He’d gone, hon. He was just a shell living through tubes. You were the last of us to see him alive. Treasure that.”
“Hold on, darl, I have to blow.”
Liv heard the trumpet as Ben blew his nose. He was back seconds later. “Sorry about that.”
“You’ll make your eyes all puffy.”
“No sweetling. I always look fabulous.”
That cracked them both up and when she’d finished laughing, Liv felt better.
Ben spoke first. “So… did those Langs look after our bike? How does it ride?”
“I don’t have the Duke yet.”
“What? Why?”
She could picture him scrambling from his computer desk to his feet, knocking calculator and pens and coffee cups flying. Ben traded swings on the ASX. He spent most days glued to computer charts filled with more arrows than a target tree in Sherwood Forest.
“A guy called Owen pretty much paid Lang’s asking price. Almost twelve thousand dollars. I couldn’t match it.”
After a beat, Ben said: “How are we riding to Mannum together if we don’t have the Duke? No offence, darl, but the two of us riding pillion on my Honda cramps my style.”
Liv giggled. She wasn’t usually a giggler and the sound felt strange in her ears. “Are you ready for the good news?”
“Ready and set.”
“Owen said if I help him prune his aunt’s vineyard, he’ll sell me the Duke at the end of the weekend.”
The phone was silent until Ben said: “Have you been into your mother’s cooking sherry since you got home, Olivia? I’m not following this at all
.”
“If I help this guy prune his aunt’s vineyard this weekend, he’ll sell me the Ducati for the ten grand I would have given Dean Lang. I guess that means he’s paying me fifteen hundred for the pruning.”
“Your boy sounds like quite the salesman. So what’s he like?”
The question caught her off guard. What was Owen like? Liv closed her eyes to block out the beady-eyed birds so she could concentrate. “He’s impulsive. Impetuous.”
“Ooh. Impressive.”
“And impatient. And pushy.”
“I like him. Liv, he completes you.”
“You’re a bloody hopeless case, you know that? This isn’t Jerry Maguire, and Owen is so not my type.”
“Great. Your type sucks. I couldn’t handle another bank johnny like that last one. Andy.”
Liv blew an exasperated sigh. “It was Aiden. And he was in a band. I liked his sensitive side.”
“It was a marching band, Liv,” Ben said. “What else about Owen? Give me details.”
“He leapt the school fence in a single bound.”
“He what? Why did he leap the school fence?”
“Well, I was on the swing. No—hold on. I was on the flying fox.”
“And you think he’s impulsive. Darl, why were you on the flying fox?”
“Why was I—?” Liv waved the hand not holding the phone. “Who cares?”
Ben’s snort was less delicate this time. “So what does he look like?”
Liv opened her eyes. “He has great arms. You’d like them.”
“So he’s do-able then?”
The robin’s unblinking black eye stared into hers. Liv tucked the phone between her shoulder and her chin and limped around the bench to fill a glass with water. Her hip ached, her knee stung, and whether Owen Carson was ‘do-able’ or not, was hardly Ben’s business. Or that bloody robin’s.
“O-liv-ia?” Ben sang. “Don’t avoid the question.”
She took a long sip of water chilled enough to hurt her teeth and ditched the rest in the sink. “Yes. I’d say Owen Carson’s eminently do-able. Please tell me I didn’t just hear you clap?”
“I’ll so want to the details in Mannum on Monday.” He sounded delighted.
“Ten o’clock here, Ben. See you then.”
“Ciao, Bella.”
Liv hung up the phone and returned to the fridge. Her mother had left a container with a neat ‘Thursday’ type-written label on the top beside three matching containers labelled equally neatly: Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
Liv put Thursday’s meal—split-pea soup—in the microwave and, once it was hot, defrosted a bread roll.
She could have cleaned up the plates after dinner, but she took a long relaxing bath instead. The dishes she left piled in the sink.
Chapter 4
Friday morning dawned mushy, shrouded in a grey fog that didn’t lift until late. It didn’t really matter because even though she’d told Owen she’d work, all Liv did with the day was sloth about in her pyjamas in front of daytime television, leaving coffee-cup rings on the sink. Days in this house without her mother looking over her shoulder were gold and that meant taking soil samples in Ned Paech’s patch of Shiraz could wait.
Liv went to bed early, but it took hours before she fell asleep and when she did, her dreams were filled with a slideshow of vineyards, motorbikes, and big hands clicking secateurs.
When she woke, more of the same mushy grey fog lapped at her bedroom window. It didn’t take Liv long to throw on her work gear: jeans, a fleecy shirt and the warmest jacket she owned. After strong coffee and toast, she left the house at seven-thirty.
The Margaret’s Folly sign was right where Owen said it would be and Liv swung her Hyundai hard left off the bitumen. A line of gums stood either side of the road, branches arching overhead to meet in a eucalypt tunnel. Gravel crunched beneath the tyres. Rain overnight had made the track slippery and she drove carefully, eyes on the vines to her left.
As first impressions go, hers were positive. The vineyard looked cared for, neatly fenced. Those trellis posts she could see were in good condition, grey and weathered, but solid. In a sea of vines, a single, massive tree stood—an elm maybe or some kind of oak—branches bare and outlined against the sky.
Liv eased a sigh of relief. The vines had been mechanically pruned and that would make her job so much easier. Two days to get through about, oh, seven or eight hectares she estimated. Two, maybe three people if his aunt worked with them too... it seemed very do-able.
Eminently do-able.
Abruptly, the Hyundai felt rather hot inside. Liv buzzed the window down and wondered at the sudden frantic bounce of her heart. There was no good reason why the thought of spending a weekend elbow to elbow with Owen Carson in a vineyard should make her blush.
The driveway gained gentle elevation toward an old stone farmhouse with wide bullnose verandas and at least three chimneys, one of which lazily puffed smoke. A pair of camellia trees in full bloom stood either side of the steps: one pink, one white. Each tree had a skirt of spent flowers strewn at its base.
Two Border Collies shot from a big Colorbond shed to one side of the driveway and darted at her car, barking, as if they thought the Hyundai was a lost sheep that needed rounding up. The sound of chickens and roosters joined the barking dogs and the scent of wood smoke swirled into the car.
Liv slowed. Squashing the farm animals would not be the best way to start the weekend.
Parking near the shed, she was unbuckling her seatbelt when her eyes lit on the Ducati in the left bay, fuel tank gleaming red against the white of an old beer fridge. At the sight of it, a big happy bubble expanded in her chest, only to pop when a dog batted its paws at the driver’s window.
“Get down you crazy hound,” she scolded it with a pat.
Liv buzzed the window up and grabbed her beanie, gloves and sunglasses from the passenger seat then climbed from the car.
Glancing up at the house, she saw Owen push through the front door. His short hair was spiked and tousled, like he’d leapt from his sheets when he heard the dogs bark, and a smile crinkled the corner of his mouth. Their eyes locked. Something Liv couldn’t define tumbled through her chest and her step hitched mid-stride.
Why can’t he wear proper clothes?
Owen wore a black tee-shirt, one with a logo on the front she didn’t recognise, and khaki work shorts that clung to his thighs. It left way too much skin on display for this hour of the morning. Way too much beautiful, smooth, skin.
Liv’s entire body slowly warmed, like sunrise radiating from inside her, out.
How a girl was supposed to prune a vineyard alongside a body like that was anybody’s guess. She’d slice her damn thumb off.
A second man, taller but not so broad, followed. This guy was propped on a pair of crutches, one of which he poked through the door before it could swing shut.
“Morning,” she called to the two men, willing her voice to sound normal, batting away hyper dogs that were determined to sniff her crotch and trip her up, both at the same time.
“Morning,” Owen answered, sitting on a fabric couch on the front veranda, jamming his foot into a boot. A work belt snaked beside him.
Liv stopped just shy of the pink camellia and tried not to ogle his arms.
“Didn’t anyone tell you it’s winter? It’s five degrees outside.” She pulled her work beanie over her ears, a knitted no-nonsense brown one made in Nepal, and snapped her sunglasses in place.
Before Owen could answer, the man on crutches offered: “Owen doesn’t feel the cold.” He put the end of a crutch in Owen’s boot and jigged it so that Owen had to grab for the boot before it bobbled beyond reach.
“I’m Mark,” he said to Liv. He had brown eyes and hair at least six months overdue for a cut. His left leg was encased in a moon boot and he’d cut a slit in the leg of his tracksuit pants to make them fit over the splint.
“Meet my cousin,” Owen said to Liv. “Mark, this is Olivia.”
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br /> “Liv,” she said, distracted by the way the tendons in Owen’s forearms slid as he tugged at the second boot. Then, because this visit was purely business and at some stage, she needed to get that through her thick head, she added: “I didn’t know what you had by way of tools, Owen, so I brought some things from home. They’re in the car.”
“Great. Let’s get started,” Owen leapt down the steps and clipped the workbelt around his hips.
Liv baulked. “You don’t want a jacket?”
“I’m fine like this.”
Good golly Miss Molly.
“Have fun,” Mark called, turning back into the house.
Liv recrossed the yard and opened the Hyundai’s boot. Owen, a step behind her, peered in the back.
“Wow. Check that out.” He reached around her for the orange and black Felcotronic, bumping her shoulder as he took the tool’s weight.
Liv grabbed his wrist. “Hands-off, Junior.”
The shock of his skin fizzed through her palm and made her drop his arm like it burned. Silvery thrills ran up and down her spine and thank God she could lean her thighs against the car, she needed the support.
Liv picked up the Felcotronic and reminded herself she was a businesswoman—a level-headed one—and this was just a lapse.
“These are for you.” She slapped secateurs and a big pair of tree loppers in Owen hands before leaning back into the trunk. “So is this.”
He examined the fluorescent green vest she handed him.
“It’s a safety vest, so I’ll know where you are all the time,” she blurted.
“You’ll always know where I am.” His eyes did that midnight tango move with hers and she was first to look away.
Grabbing her own safety vest plus an uber-practical navy raincoat, Liv shut the boot. “Are you sure you don’t want to get a coat or something?” A big ugly yellow raincoat, preferably. Cover those arms up.
“Nah. If it rains I’ll borrow yours.”
“You’ll…? I beg your pardon?”
“I’ll borrow yours. We can stretch it over our incredibly safety-conscious heads. You don’t take up much space.” Owen indicated the vineyard with a sweep of his arm. “Shall we?”
