Ryan's Rules

by Alison Kelly

  ‘They’ve caught him, Kirrily.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The police have caught the guy who’s been stalking you. Except you weren’t the target…your flatmate Cathy was. The guy’s name is Conrads. Wes Conrads—’

  ‘Wait up!’ The speed and the detached voice in which Ryan had fired the information at her made it hard to assimilate. ‘Cathy was the victim all along, not me? I…I don’t understand.’

  He sighed as if she were the bane of his life. ‘Apparently Conrads was obsessed with her. It was the announcement of her engagement that caused him to freak out and blow up the car which he thought was hers because—’

  ‘Because I let her drive it sometimes. And I can understand the house, since he must have known she lived there, but why the letters about me to the studio? Cath is an actor, sure, but we didn’t work for the same network.’

  ‘Apparently Conrads saw you as a corrupting influence on Cathy. And that’s as much as I know. Believe me, at twenty past two in the morning just hearing the guy was nabbed was enough for me. If you want more information you can call Senior Sergeant Maskowski in Melbourne.’ He inclined his head towards the phone. ‘You can call him from here, but get dressed first so I can pack the car while you’re doing it.’

  ‘Pack the—?’ It struck her then that each time she’d taken a step nearer him he’d taken two away. At this point the breakfast bar separating them seemed less of an obstacle than Ryan’s detached formality. ‘Ryan, what the hell’s going on?’

  ‘We’re going back to Sydney.’

  ‘Now? Just like…’ she snapped her fingers ‘…that?’

  ‘Kirrily, they’ve got the guy.’ He said it as if she were a simpleton. ‘There’s no reason for you to even stay in Sydney, much less here. If you want to spend a few extra days, feel free, but if you don’t hurry up and get dressed so I can pack the—’

  ‘What’s the all-fire hurry to pack the car?’ she demanded. ‘We’ve got two overnight bags between us; it’s not like it’s going to be an all-day task!’

  He offered no response, already walking away from her, the action holding a symbolism she didn’t want to acknowledge. Fear gripped her heart.

  ‘Ryan!’ Her voice held a touch of panic that she tried to quell as he stared back at her. ‘Where are you going? What are you going to do?’

  His expression was closed to her in a way she wouldn’t have thought possible. In fact had it not been for the way his jaw suddenly clenched then unclenched she’d have said she was staring at a statue.

  ‘Kirrily, if you’re coming I’m leaving in thirty minutes.’

  Her gut knotted. ‘And if I’m not?’

  ‘Then I’m leaving now. It’s over, Kirrily.’

  In her distraught state, Kirrily couldn’t say how long she wandered the empty house crying, but she was standing in one of the unfurnished bedrooms when she made the decision to stop. Well, at least, try and stop, she amended as she fought a potential wail into a subdued sob/sniffle.

  ‘So this is heartbreak,’ she murmured aloud, experiencing what more seasoned actors often described as ‘the third eye’—the ability to stand away from oneself and examine what one was feeling…

  On a superficial physical level her head ached and her eyes stung so much that they felt as big as oranges, yet for the first time in her life it was as if she could see her insides too—the rawness of her heart, struggling to pump blood round a body that wanted only to feel Ryan’s heart beating against it, and the lethargy of limbs so addicted to being entwined with muscled masculine ones that they were incapable of functioning solo. And even though the knowledge that Ryan was gone from her life was as tangible and uncomfortable as a cold, damp blanket wrapped around her, it couldn’t entirely douse the tiny pathetic flame of hope that he’d come back…that he’d realise they belonged together…that…

  The sound of the brass knocker on the front door sent her thoughts flying away. Ryan!

  ‘Ryan!’ she shouted, racing wildly for the foyer. ‘Oh, Ryan!’ she gasped, half laughing, half crying as she fumbled to open the front door. ‘Oh, Ryan, I knew you’d come—’ Her words and the joy spontaneously aborted at the sight of a stranger in grease-stained overalls staring hesitantly at her.

  ‘Er, are you Ms Cosgrove?’

  Over his right shoulder she spotted a shiny maroon van with LANE’S AUTO TUNE emblazoned in the door, only subconsciously noting another man sitting behind the wheel as dread flooded her.

  ‘Oh, God, he’s had an accident!’

  ‘No! No!’ the man said, pulling back from the grasp she had on his shoulders. ‘There isn’t an accident.’

  ‘Ry-Ryan’s OK?’

  ‘Was when he left the Jag at the garage.’ Smiling, he dangled a set of keys in her face. ‘He asked me to drop the car back to you.’

  She glanced at the keys, then stepped past the man onto the front veranda and saw Ryan’s Jag parked behind the maroon car.

  ‘He left his car for me to drive?’

  ‘Yeah. Said you might need it and didn’t want to leave you stranded. Half your luck! I don’t usually do the delivery of cars, but I sure wasn’t about to pass up a chance to drive that beauty!’ The man gave a hearty chuckle. ‘He said I’d be doing him a favour.’

  Kirrily simply stared at the car, her lack of enthusiasm obviously puzzling the mechanic.

  ‘So…er…would you like me to put it into the garage for you?’

  ‘What I’d like would be for you to put it into the wall of the garage,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘But then it’ll be so much more fun to do it myself!’

  The man’s appalled gasp snapped her from her vindictive thoughts. She drew a breath and forced a smile.

  ‘I’m sorry…’ she glanced at the name embroidered on his overalls ‘…Dan, I didn’t mean that. It’s just I’m amazed Ryan would’ve left me his car. I thought he was driving to Sydney.’

  ‘Told me he was hiring another. You oughta be happy, though—you got the best end of the deal; there’s no way he could’ve hired anything that swish around here. Lucky you get to travel in style.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I’m just born lucky and happy beyond my wildest dreams.’ She closed her fist round the keys, knowing that no one who’d heard her deliver that line would have believed she made a living from acting.

  ‘Hi, Kirri—’

  ‘Kirrily! What are you—?’

  ‘Kirrily, what’s—?’

  Rage drove her—week-old, white-hot, blistering rage that swept her past the startled faces of assorted Talbot’s employees and customers.

  She deserved better! She deserved a hell of a lot better! A hell of a lot more than he’d given her—which was nothing! Ignoring the hesitant cautions which followed her, she grabbed the handle of his office door and stormed through it.

  Ryan’s head jerked up in reaction to the slam of his office door and shock paralysed him. Face flushed, eyes hard as emeralds, hair in windswept disarray she looked more exquisite than the image woven into his tormented memory.

  ‘There!’ she said, tossing his Jaguar keys on his desk so hard that they bounced. ‘And now you owe me an explanation!’ Her anger was as potent as the tidal wave of desire rushing through him. ‘I’m not the type who takes getting screwed and dumped in silence, Ryan Talbot!’

  ‘For God’s sake, keep your voice down! You want the whole office to hear?’

  ‘Nor do I take it quietly!’ she screamed even louder. ‘I don’t care who hears it!’

  ‘Damn it, K.C., calm—’

  ‘I will not calm down! I don’t want to calm down! Don’t you dare tell me what to do, you…you…’

  Her momentary confusion gave Ryan the chance to skirt the desk and grab hold of her flailing arms.

  ‘Let me go!’ she screeched. ‘Let me go, you bast—’

  ‘Not yet! I want you to settle down.’

  She went instantly still.

  ‘Settle down?’ she echoed. ‘Settle down!’ H
er laugh was bitter with irony. ‘Oh, that’s rich! That’s really, really precious! A week ago I was praying for you to tell me you wanted me to settle down…settle down with you—permanently—have your kids, spend the re—’

  Her voice broke from the sheer overpowering effect of his nearness; his scent, his body warmth, the gentle yet firm pressure of his hands around her upper arms all conspired against her. Kirrily knew then she’d made a mistake. She should never have come—should never have seen him again, never put herself into the position she was in now, where his softly crooned platitudes whispered across the top of her head and sensitised her all the way to her toes and made her tremble.

  ‘It’s OK, honey…It’s OK…’

  She shook her head, without lifting it from his chest It wasn’t OK. Despite how good, how energised, how hopeful being this close to him made her feel, she knew it wasn’t OK. He was as far beyond her reach as Steven was from Jayne, but unlike Jayne she couldn’t allow her life to become an ongoing valediction to lost love. If she was to survive, much less salvage any part of her former self, she needed to believe that this mistake had been Ryan’s, not hers; she wanted no reason to exonerate him.

  Inhaling hard, as if determination were drawn from oxygen, she tried to ease out of his hold. He resisted.

  ‘Kirrily, I can explain—’

  ‘No!’ She pushed hard at his chest, freeing herself. ‘I don’t want an explanation. I thought I did, but I don’t’

  ‘Kirrily, listen—’

  ‘No. No, I won’t listen. Our history proves that whenever we’ve disagreed about something you’ve invariably been right. If I listen to your explanation it’ll happen again. I know you’ll have a feasible reason why you said you loved me then a few days later walked away. Well, I don’t want you to be in the right this time, Ryan.’

  She paused, taking another deep breath before continuing. ‘If you’re right about this, I’ll never have a reason to hate you. And I want to hate you, Ryan.’ The pain burning at her heart brought tears to her eyes. She ignored them. ‘I want to hate you for making me love you. I want to hate you for giving me the most wonderful six days of my life and spoiling me for any other male who may fall in love with me.’

  When he flinched, she shook her head. ‘I’m not talking about my virginity, Ryan. I chose to give you that and…and, well, these days guys expect not to be the first, just as they can accept being offered a bruised, battered heart. But I can’t even offer that now, because you didn’t just leave my heart bruised and battered, Ryan, you ripped it clear out of my chest; I’ll never be able to return another man’s love even if I want to.’

  Paralysis shut down Ryan’s emotional, physical and mental faculties to the extent that he could do nothing more than stare at her.

  ‘Goodbye, Ryan.’

  Her expression and tone were chillingly final as she turned from him and she’d gripped the handle of the door before he could force any words past the emotion wedged in his throat.

  ‘Kirrily, wait!’

  She stopped, but didn’t turn around.

  ‘I can give you a reason to hate me…I’m responsible for Steven’s death. It’s my fault your brother is dead.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SHOCKED senseless by the enormity of the words, Kirrily braced both hands against the door to steady herself. For long, endless moments all she heard above the silence of the room was her pounding heart. Then her brain began chanting…Lie! Lie! Lie!

  ‘Steven was killed because a drunk ran a give way sign.’ The strain in her voice gave the statement a breathless uncertainty that she immediately tried to dispel. ‘I know that’s the truth. I know it is!’

  Defeating the dull, numb sensation in her limbs, she turned to face him, her heart tearing at the anguish clouding Ryan’s eyes.

  ‘I’ve always suspected I didn’t know everything,’ she said. ‘But I do know Steve isn’t dead because of anything you did.’

  ‘He should never have been driving…I should have. We’d been at the pub and…’

  He turned from her silent plea for explanation, leaving her mentally fumbling to understand what he was telling her.

  ‘Are…are you saying Steve was drunk at the wheel?’

  ‘Hell, no!’ He swung back to her, looking horrified, then lowered his head for only a heartbeat before once more aligning his gaze with hers. ‘I was the one who was drunk!’

  ‘You mean…y-y-you were driving?’

  ‘I should’ve been. It was my turn…’ His voice had a far-away quality suggesting he was being distracted by memories of long-ago. ‘My recklessness, my “to hell with responsibility” attitude killed Steve as surely as if I’d been behind the wheel of the other car. I was supposed to be driving that night, dammit!’

  The more he spoke, the less Kirrily understood, and frustration began dispersing the fog of apprehension his claim had initially evoked.

  ‘I don’t understand any of this…’ She moved closer, as if expecting that lessening the distance separating them would make things clearer; Ryan took a matching number of steps back.

  ‘Dammit, Ryan, stand still! This isn’t making any sense—you’re not making any sense!’ she accused him, flailing her arms in helplessness. ‘In one breath you’re saying you should have been driving and in the next breath you’re saying you were drunk, yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen you have more than two drinks on the same day in my life, and as for the other—huh!’ Her face matched the scepticism of her tone. ‘You’re the least reckless, most responsible person I’ve ever known.’

  ‘You’re confusing me with your brother.’

  Kirrily’s reply was pungently explicit, then she said, ‘I could never confuse you with anybody!’ She sighed, her voice and expression softening. ‘How could I? I only have to think of you for my heart to start hammering and my insides to mush up; no other human being has ever had that effect on me…No other ever will.’

  Ryan clenched his fists at his sides to stop himself from hauling her into his arms and responding to the love shining from her thick-lashed eyes. He couldn’t allow himself to be moved by her words and feelings until he was sure she understood what he was telling her. As the silence lengthened between them, Ryan felt the consequences of what he was about to say as an almost unendurable physical weight. Sighing, he crossed to his chair and sank into it.

  ‘What do you remember about Steven?’ he asked at length, noting she’d instinctively opened her mouth to protest at the question then changed her mind. She glanced at the chair across the desk from his, seemingly surprised that it was there, then gingerly lowered herself onto it, as if suspecting that it might buck her off.

  ‘Sometimes it’s hard to picture him,’ she said in little more than a whisper. ‘I know he was really goodlooking, that you and he were called the “heartbreak twins” and that even though every grrl in the neighbourhood was chasing him he was crazy about Jayne.’ A faint smile touched her lips. ‘When he couldn’t go out with her because he got stuck babysitting me he’d tell me I was a pest and that when he and Jayne got married they’d have a dozen kids, just so babysitting could wreck my social life the way I wrecked his—’

  The teary shine in her eyes prompted Ryan to interrupt. ‘He didn’t really think you a pest, K.C.—he adored you.’

  ‘Oh, I know he was teasing,’ she said quickly. ‘He was always so…so kind, so funny, so…’

  ‘Responsible.’

  Hearing Ryan say the word so resentfully jolted her from her melancholy. ‘Well…yes,’ she said, recalling how everyone had commented about how ‘that Cosgrove boy’s got his head screwed on nice and tight’.

  ‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘You and Steve are…were…alike in that respect.’

  ‘No.’ The word was hard. ‘We weren’t’

  ‘But you’re—’

  ‘What do you remember about me as a kid, Kirrily?’ She frowned, considering the question. ‘I remember you helping me with my homework, the way Steve used to.
And driving me to netball training when Mum and Dad couldn’t take me, and—’

  ‘Before all that,’ he cut in. ‘What do you remember about me before Steven was killed?’

  It surprised her to find that she had to struggle for a clear memory. ‘Er…I remember you blacking out the street on Christmas Eve…’ She bit her lip. ‘Well, I don’t remember it exactly, but I remember everyone talking about it.’

  ‘And…’ he prompted.

  ‘And I remember Dad taking me to watch you and Steve play football and one time you getting sent off for starting a brawl.’ A slow grin spread across her face. ‘Boy, was your dad ever ticked off about that! Almost as much as when you got suspended for sneaking booze into a school dance.’

  ‘Hardly the stuff of a responsible kid, eh, K.C.?’

  ‘Well, no…but kids do that sort of thing—’

  ‘Ever hear of Steve doing it?’ he challenged.

  ‘No, but I know he was usually with you—’

  ‘Yeah, he was there all right,’ Ryan agreed. ‘Sometimes trying to talk me out of getting into strife, but mostly hauling me out of it or trying to cover my butt.’ He shook his head, his eyes distant and sad. ‘Steve was the responsible one, not me. We were as different as chalk and cheese, yet he understood me better than anyone else.’ His eyes again sparked to life. ‘It was him who convinced my dad that my going to uni and studying architecture wasn’t a sell-out.’

  The implication confused Kirrily. ‘But Bob’s so proud of you…I can’t believe he didn’t want you to go to university.’

  ‘Believe it. From the time Steve and I began spending our school vacations working on building sites our dads had everything mapped out: we’d finish school, serve our carpentry apprenticeships with each other’s father, get our building licences and from there it would only be a matter of time before the folks retired and we took over running Talbot’s. The whole scenario was a fait accompli until I threw a spanner in the works with what Dad called my “highfalutin ideas”.’