by Holly Ford
Taking her hand, Vito brushed his lips against her palm before holding it to his chest. ‘I dreamed about you.’
‘I was thinking about you, too.’ It was true — and very pleasant thoughts they had been. That kiss … it was enough to keep a girl awake all night. Looking up at Vito this morning, Ella felt something of last night’s tingle run down her spine. Her dreams, unfortunately, had taken a different turn. But so what? She dreamed about all sorts of stupid stuff — it didn’t mean anything.
‘Ella! Ciao.’ Putting one hand on Vito’s shoulder, Sandro leaned into the cockpit and kissed Ella too. ‘Come stai?’
‘Benissimo,’ Ella told him. She sighed happily. It really was a beautiful morning.
Amy soon had them underway with (given Quentin) a minimum level of fuss. Ella gazed through the window as Carr headed back up the valley towards Black Peak. In the strengthening light, the colours — the deep blue of the sky, the burnt gold of the grass, the white snow-line between — were so intense that the landscape looked almost unreal, as though she were looking at it through 3D glasses. This beat the hell out of IMAX any day. Vito, in the seat behind, draped a hand over her shoulder.
As promised, Carr got one skid down on the ridge below the summit. Ella turned in her seat, hoping to catch a glimpse of Quentin’s face in the back: yep, that was an interesting shade of grey he’d turned. Vito, on the other hand, slid open the door, leapt out onto the grass, and held up his hand to Flavia as though he jumped out of helicopters every morning.
Gear and crew unloaded, Flavia gave the thumbs-up and Carr sheered away off the side of the ridge, the tussock tilting giddily under the skids.
‘So, what now?’ Ella asked, as he straightened over the valley floor.
‘Morning tea, with a bit of luck.’ He peered down at some cattle moving below. ‘I’m supposed to be on call to Fratelli Sammartino all day. But I think Charlie’s got other ideas.’
Sure enough, when they touched down back at the homestead they found Charlotte waiting for them. A roll of wire-netting and an evil-looking drum of barbed-wire sat beside the old ute she had parked on the lawn.
‘Morning.’ Charlotte said. ‘Hannah’s got coffee ready up at the house. Then I thought we might have a go at the top of that boundary fence. You know, since you’re here.’
‘Never let a chopper hour go to waste,’ Carr grinned. ‘Especially somebody else’s.’ He nodded at Ella. ‘You want to come along for the ride?’
‘Can I?’
‘Sure,’ Charlotte shrugged. ‘Why not?’
After a quick cup of coffee and another excellent scone, Charlotte and Carr loaded up the chopper with its new, less glamorous cargo. While they worked, Ella checked her camera gear. Finally, she might get to take some shots of her own. High Country Boundary: that had the ring of a photo essay.
She wasn’t disappointed. From the top of the hill where Carr put down, the fence ran straight and true as far as the eye could see, a hard line between nowhere and the back of beyond. There was no stock in sight on either side. Indeed, Ella found it hard to imagine why any animal would climb all the way up there — although if it did, she could understand why it would be keen to get down the other side. Which clearly something had been, since it had trampled the netting almost down to the ground and broken the top wire.
‘What do you think did it?’ she asked, as Charlotte and Carr got to work.
‘Cattle started it.’ Carr fingered the wads of wool wound around the wire. ‘Sheep finished it off.’
‘Do you mind?’ Ella raised her camera.
Charlotte and Carr exchanged a look. Carr shrugged.
‘I guess it’s that sort of week,’ Charlotte sighed. ‘Sure, go ahead.’
They worked in silence. Ella hobbled from tussock to tussock on one crutch, working the zoom. She really wasn’t dressed for this. Not expecting to get out of the helicopter, she’d tried to offset the effect of Charlotte’s old crutches by putting on her shortest pair of denim shorts, strappy flats and a vintage chiffon shirt. With frills. Now she wished she had her combat pants and trainers.
The crutch bit into her arm as the thin leather sole of her sandal slipped on the grass. Steadying herself, she framed a mid-shot of Carr bent over the barbed-wire, hazy blue distance behind him. Thinking of Lizzie, she smiled. Now he looked like a cowboy. A proper seventies one. She zoomed in. Steve McQueen, perhaps — just a touch too rugged for Paul Newman. Except, of course, that his eyes were dark, not blue …
A cold gust of wind raked the tussock, almost unbalancing her. Carr stood up and looked over his shoulder. Lowering her camera, Ella followed his gaze. Suddenly, dirty grey cloud was pouring over the ridge to the south. She stared. Where the hell had that come from? Ella shivered.
‘Cloud’s coming in,’ Carr yelled down the fenceline to Charlotte, over the rising wind. Charlotte was already making her way back. For a moment they stood together, shading their eyes, and watched the cloud, the wind whipping Charlotte’s hair about her shoulders. Quickly, Ella took the shot. Then, slinging her camera over her shoulder, she hobbled over to join them.
‘It’s closing in fast,’ Carr was saying.
‘Yeah.’ Charlotte shook her head in resignation. ‘Go on — go and get them down.’
Carr slapped her shoulder. ‘I’ll get back for you if I can.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’ Ella stared at them. ‘We can’t leave her here.’
‘I can’t take seven,’ Carr told her, shortly. ‘If I take you back to the station first, I might not make it up to the peak.’
‘So either I stay or you do,’ Charlotte said.
Needled, Ella raised her chin. ‘I could stay. Why not?’
‘Because Charlie can walk,’ snapped Carr, ‘and she knows the way down. Now come on. I don’t have time for this.’
He did have a point, but before she could concede it, Ella found herself slung over his shoulder.
‘Send Jen or someone up to meet me, will you?’ called Charlotte. Picking up Ella’s crutches, she followed Carr to the helicopter. ‘I’ll head back down the track when I’m done.’
‘Will do.’
Having dumped Ella in the passenger seat, Carr hurried through his checks and reached for the radio.
‘Flavia.’
‘Carr.’ Flavia’s voice crackled through the speaker. ‘Do you see it?’
‘I see it. Stand by in five — I’m taking you down.’
As they hurtled through the greying sky, flying low, the first fingers of cloud wrapped the tip of Black Peak ahead. Ella could see the crew waiting for them on the ridge. She kept her mouth shut as Carr’s hands moved quickly over the controls, battling the wind as he took them up towards the ridge top. Clearly, holding the chopper steady enough to get the crew on wasn’t going to be easy.
‘Get down the lee side,’ Carr radioed Flavia. ‘I’ll pick you up there.’
The helicopter crested the ridge. Ella looked down as the crew struggled to obey, clothes billowing under the wash of the rotors. Carr took the chopper down, the tension in his jaw easing as they dropped out of the wind.
‘Okay.’ Through the windscreen, he gave Flavia the thumbs-up. ‘I’ll hold her as steady as I can.’
Vito, still in his God-knew-how-many-thousand-dollars suit, leapt onto the skid, slid open the door and vaulted inside. Flavia and Sandro threw up the gear. Vito jumped out again and, balancing on the skid, helped Quentin and Amy aboard. Moisture beaded the helicopter’s glass as the cloud streamed down around them.
‘Okay!’ Flavia yelled, jumping in herself.
Sandro followed. He held down his hand to Vito.
Ella swallowed a scream as the helicopter lurched.
But Vito was aboard and slamming the door.
‘We got everyone?’ Carr demanded.
‘Si.’
‘Good man. Hold on — I’m taking us out of here.’
Ella twisted anxiously in her seat. With a grin, Vito wiped the beads of cloud from h
is hair and straightened his tie.
A few minutes later they were safely back on Blackpeak’s lawn. With one last look at the cloud that had closed around the hills, Carr cut the rotors. ‘No chance of getting back up there now.’
He jumped out and headed for the homestead.
Vito came around to Ella’s door. ‘How did you know how to do that up there?’ she asked him, as he lifted her down from her seat.
‘Oh, I did a little time in the army once.’
‘He was in the Alpini, actually.’ Sandro paused beside them. ‘The Mountain Troops.’
‘Seriously?’
Vito shrugged.
‘Now he is training to be a pilot.’
Gosh.
‘This’ — Vito’s hand swept over his rumpled Fratelli Sammartino — ‘pays for flying.’
‘I see.’ Ella picked a tussock stem off his lapel.
He looked down at the suit guiltily. ‘I should take this off.’
‘Uh-huh.’ She smiled.
His hands slid over her hips, his thumbs caressing her ribcage.
‘Oi, on your own time, you two.’ Quentin strode past. ‘Vito, see Flavia for your change and get your arse to the woolshed, pronto.’
Reluctantly, Ella looked away from Vito to the now-invisible hills. ‘But the weather,’ she protested.
‘Are you kidding?’ Quentin gestured at the biblical rays of sunlight slanting below the low cloud. ‘It’s fucking perfect.’
As Flavia drove them up to the woolshed, Ella looked out at the sky. Behind the shed, it was black. Everything else — the iron, the old timber rails of the yards, the towers of hay in the paddock behind — was razor-sharp and edged with gold. As usual, Quentin was right. You couldn’t buy light like that, and all the skill in the world couldn’t fake it.
Leaping out of the Prado almost before it had stopped, he paused for a nanosecond to get his bearings. ‘A monkey couldn’t take a bad picture in this,’ Ella heard him mutter under his breath. ‘Vito!’ he yelled over his shoulder. ‘You see that wooden fence thing over there? Go and stand beside it.’
Forced to move at a slower pace, Ella reached out her own gear. A monkey might be able to get a good pic, but Quentin, she felt sure, was going to get great ones. She wanted to watch and learn, but she knew better than to ask questions. Instead she stayed back, giving Quentin room to work, and tried to see what he was seeing.
My, but Vito was good at this. If he felt at all silly standing on top of a stock race in a three-piece suit, he didn’t show it. He looked like he owned the place. And in this raw light he was more than pretty. Almost hypnotic, in fact. Those eyes … All trace of his usual smile had vanished from them, and the look he was giving the empty paddock away to his left was enough to leave scorch marks.
‘Keep that light-board up,’ Quentin snapped at Amy. ‘No — bring it down.’
Vito’s eyes smouldered into shadow. It was perfect. The perfect mix of rugged and luxe, the crisp lines of the suit a V from his shoulders to his almost impossibly slender hips, the white collar and cuffs, the rough boards, the threat of storm in his face and the smoky sky.
As Quentin reached for a new camera body, Vito spotted Ella’s lens and flashed that same scorching look straight down the barrel. Gosh. Ella, who had zoomed in for a close-up, felt her knees melt. It was enough to make a girl lose her balance. Not to mention her head. Vito’s face relaxed, looking briefly like a naughty schoolboy again, before snapping back to work.
‘How did it look?’ he asked her, sauntering back when the shot was done.
‘Brilliant,’ she smiled. ‘You should do this for a living.’
‘You think so?’ Smiling back at her, he slipped out of his jacket.
Ella watched as his hands worked loose his tie and began to unbutton his waistcoat. He could do that for a living as well. She looked up into his eyes.
‘I have to go,’ he told her softly, not going anywhere, ‘to get changed.’
Hmm, she supposed he did. In the background, Quentin and Sandro, chasing the light, disappeared around the corner of the woolshed.
Vito’s eyes, their smoulder returning, moved over her face. As his gaze found her lips and lingered there, she felt all the intensity of last night’s kiss flood back. ‘Ella.’ His hand stroked the point of her jaw.
Behind them, the Prado’s engine churned. ‘Vito!’ Flavia stuck her head out of the driver’s window. ‘Andiamo, eh?’
‘Si.’ With a regretful shrug, he brushed a strand of hair from Ella’s throat and placed it back over her shoulder. ‘I will be back soon.’
Ella watched him drive away. She felt a sudden need to sit down. Conscious again of the pain in her foot, she hobbled across to the woolshed and perched herself on the concrete steps, hugging her bare legs against the cold. Close in, she could feel the early morning’s heat still bouncing off the iron. Somewhere nearby, a quad bike was buzzing about. She watched Quentin, Sandro and Amy reappear on the other side of the yards and wondered how much longer Quentin would want to work. She checked the sky. Maybe it would rain.
The quad bike roared up beside her.
‘What have you done with Charlie?’
Ella looked down as Rob cut the ignition and swung off the bike. Not seeming at all worried, he paused, leaning against the steps, to watch Sandro balance on the top rail of the yards in a full-length cashmere coat. Her mind snapped back to the lonely, windswept figure of Charlotte Black receding into the endless miles of tussock. Shit.
‘I thought Carr had told you?’ she hedged, horrified.
Rob sighed. ‘She’s still up there, huh?’
‘I’m so sorry.’
To her amazement, Rob grinned. ‘Not as sorry as she is, I’ll bet.’
‘You’re not worried?’
For a moment, he looked puzzled. ‘She knows her way back. It won’t be the first time she’s walked it.’
Ella tried not to notice Rob’s forearm resting on the concrete beside her thigh. The same light that was working its magic for Quentin was turning the film of sweat and dust on his long, bronzed muscles to gold, and for half a second her thoughts wandered back to last night’s dream. But no, she was cured — this was not the man she wanted. The man she really wanted, deep down. So deep it was almost painful.
Just to prove it, she let herself look at him. He had chaff in his silky blond hair and on his shirt, which was anything but crisp, and below his well-worn collar his brown skin was gritty and still glistening with whatever work he’d just been doing.
‘How’s the foot?’ Rob smiled up at her — a half glance, really, over his shoulder, not even meeting her eyes, but Ella felt it like a touch.
Oh, God. He might as well have pushed her up against the woolshed wall and kissed her as thoroughly as she’d been trying so hard to forget she had dreamed in the small hours of this morning. It made no sense at all. That was the thing about crushes: they fell on you out of nowhere. And once they had you pinned, you couldn’t get free of them no matter how hard you tried.
‘Ciao, Rob.’
Ella looked up from the muscles in Rob’s neck to find Vito standing there, looking, in his perfect tailoring, like he’d just dropped in from another planet. She hadn’t even heard the Prado come back.
‘Ciao, Vito.’ Rob sounded pleased to see him. ‘Looking good.’
Vito grinned.
‘You still keen to give me a hand with those cattle when you finish up here?’
Looking at Ella, Vito hesitated. ‘You are staying, after the shoot? You will be here tonight, for dinner?’
‘I … I don’t know. I have to go home with Carr. I’m not sure what his plans are.’
‘I hate to break it to you,’ said Rob, ‘but unless this cloud lifts, you and Carr will both be here for dinner.’
Oh dear. She’d better call Lizzie.
The afternoon came and went with no break in the cloud and no sign, for that matter, of Carr. Sprawled over the sofa in Blackpeak’s lounge, the first gin
of the day in one hand, Quentin held out the other for Ella’s camera. ‘Let’s see what you got, then — I’ll tell you if they’re as good as mine.’
‘You don’t know what you got yet,’ Amy warned him, as Ella handed her digital over.
‘Course I do. Every frame of film’s right here.’ Quentin tapped his gin against his temple.
‘You don’t need proofs,’ said Amy, raising her eyebrows at Ella, ‘when you’re a believer.’
Quentin ignored her. Without looking at the display, he weighed the digital in his hand. ‘So,’ he said to Ella, ‘are they good?’
‘I don’t know … some of them might be. I haven’t looked yet.’ She paused nervously. ‘I think so.’
‘You think so?’ Quentin glared at her. ‘If you need to look before you know, you might as well chuck this thing away.’ He put the camera down on the table. ‘I won’t look at what I shot today for a week. But I knew which frames were fucking gold before I pressed the shutter.’
‘Oh, give her a break,’ Amy groaned. ‘She’s being modest. Not everyone’s as arrogant as you are, thank God.’
‘So.’ Quentin picked up Ella’s camera again. ‘You tell me, Ells. Which ones should I look at?’
‘About the third shot in — Carr on the boundary this morning. The close-up of Vito on the stock race. The same shot wide with you and Amy below.’
Quentin grinned. ‘Let’s see, then.’ He flicked through her day’s work. ‘Nice. Eat your heart out, Ang Lee. Very nice …’ He let out a laugh. ‘There you go! Take a look at this, Ames — you and me kneeling to the living god of beefcake.’
Ella, recognising high praise when she heard it, grinned back.
‘Now that’s a different look for him,’ said Amy wryly, standing beside the open window. Ella hobbled over to see Rob and Vito walking towards the house. The T-shirt and jeans that Vito was wearing could hardly be seen. He was spattered from head to toe in evil-looking green muck, and, though she couldn’t make out much of his face, he appeared to be laughing.
‘What do you reckon, Ells?’ said Quentin. ‘That do it for you?’
