by Amy Andrews
As if she were some doll he could manipulate into whatever position he wanted.
She looked down at his thumb still stroking her. The skin was pink as a newborn babe’s and she could see the whorl of his fingerprint. I need you, Sadie.
She took a step away from him as realisation dawned, his hand falling away. ‘Oh, my God. You’re blocked, aren’t you?’ She looked around at the studio gleaming like a luxury car showroom. ‘You’re not in between projects at all.’
Leo looked at the floor. ‘A small slump,’ he dismissed.
‘How long, Leo?’ she asked his downcast head.
When he finally looked at her again she could tell he was steeling himself to lie. But then his shoulders sagged and he looked significantly more than twenty years her senior. ‘I haven’t painted anything decent since you left.’
Sadie blinked at his admission. She’d been gone for over three years. That had to be killing him.
Leo looked at her. ‘You belong here with me, Sadie.’
He sounded like a petulant child and Sadie shook her head as she realised she was finally free of him. ‘No. I belong to me. And I have a job that I love.’
‘You loved posing for me.’
His interjection was almost a whine and she took pity on him. ‘It’s not a real career, Leo.’
‘That didn’t seem to bother you at the time.’
Sadie ignored his sarcasm and the truth of it. ‘Journalism can take me places. I’ve been out for just a few months and already I have a shot at my dream job.’
Leo stuck his hand on his hip. ‘Thanks to me. You’ve only got this shot because you slept with me. I warned you—you were nothing without me.’
Sadie reeled a little as the crudeness of his triumphant accusation sank in. He’d obviously been waiting three years to throw that one in her face. And it was true—she had scored this interview because of her association with Leo. But she wasn’t the lost young woman he’d tossed away a few years back—she had a spine these days and his slights didn’t have the power to hurt any more.
She certainly wasn’t going to hang around listening to any more. ‘Goodbye, Leo,’ she said, turning away from him.
‘Sadie, wait!’
She contemplated ignoring him, but the urgency in his voice pulled her up and she turned around.
‘You walk away and you’re walking away from that.’ He pointed to the painting. ‘You’ll never get a shot at being her again.’
Sadie looked at the painting and finally saw what Kent had seen last night. Bones and angles and hollows. Leo had even painted her breasts smaller—artistic licence, as he was so fond of quoting. Suddenly she looked like just another skinny Hollywood starlet or skeletal model.
Like every ballerina he’d ever painted.
It didn’t look like her.
‘I don’t want to be her, Leo. I like me. I like the me I am now.’
She stalled for a moment, realising the words that had just fallen out were utterly true. Time, distance and Kent’s kiss had put some things into perspective.
‘I like to eat good food and drink good wine and I love junk food as well! I like those little tiny marshmallows on my cornflakes for breakfast and hot dogs and, damn it all, I think Twisties should be a food group.’
Leo shook his head. ‘You don’t mean that,’ he said.
Sadie nodded. ‘I’ll tell you a secret about that girl, Leo. She wasn’t happy. Not really. She just thought she was.’
Sadie couldn’t look at the painting a moment longer. All she could see now was how starved for affection she’d been.
And she just wasn’t that girl any more.
She turned on her heel and left. Left Leo standing in the middle of his studio gawping like a landed fish.
She took the stairs two at a time to her room and threw her things in her bag. As she headed out again she noticed a sketch pad and a box of sketching pastels on the bedside table. She fingered them lovingly—Leo was a creature of habit. He’d always kept stashes of them everywhere so he’d have access when the muse struck.
No doubt they were here because he’d thought they’d end up in bed together.
On a whim she picked them up and shoved them in her bag. Then she turned straight back around. She reached the front door just as Kent was entering. He looked so good, so he-man, so not arty, she almost threw herself straight at him.
But the wariness in his gaze as he took in her bag stopped her. ‘We’re leaving,’ she said.
Kent blinked. They were supposed to stay another night with Sadie getting a plane to Darwin in the morning. He wasn’t sure what had gone on in his absence but Sadie sounded pretty serious.
Hot but serious. That damn mouth he’d been thinking about all night set in a determined little line.
Just as the line of buttons down her front was taunting him.
‘Give me five.’
She nodded. ‘I’ll wait for you in the car.’
Kent didn’t ask any questions about Leo when he joined her in the promised five minutes. He just started the car. ‘Where to?’ he asked.
‘Town,’ she said. ‘I need Twisties.’
Kent kept the food coming at a café in Borroloola and Sadie ate as if she were pregnant with twin elephants.
‘Better?’ he asked as she finally pushed away her plate and refused some more of his hot chips. It had given him immense satisfaction watching her load food into her mouth.
The painting of her in Leo’s studio had been disturbing and he’d spent a lot of time out in the bush last night trying to scrub it from his brain. Understanding that the misogynistic idiot residing in Casa Del Leone was behind all her insecurities hadn’t helped—seeing her eat did.
It also distracted him from the buttons.
And the kiss.
She nodded. ‘I think I’m going to vomit, though,’ she said as she rubbed her painfully full belly.
‘Then my job here is done,’ Kent mused as he sucked on his thick shake straw. She looked as if she’d been sprung from prison—or at least the chains from her past—and he was glad he was here to witness her first moments of freedom.
Sadie laughed, then groaned. ‘Don’t make me laugh or I really will throw up.’
Kent shrugged. ‘You have tablets for that.’
‘They’re for motion sickness. Not gluttony.’
He laughed then and Sadie was relieved to see the wariness that had been in his gaze when they’d met at Leo’s front door and on the silent trip into town seemed to have dissipated.
‘What now?’ he asked. ‘Your flight doesn’t leave until the morning. I can drop you at a hotel on my way out of town?’
Sadie shook her head. She didn’t want to stick around any longer than she had to. ‘You leaving for Darwin straight away?’
Kent nodded. ‘It’s about fifteen hours without stops for photos and a kip here and there.’
Sadie thought about it for a minute. Another night under the stars. With Kent.
Who had kissed her.
It didn’t sound wise.
‘Can I hitch a ride with you?’
Kent’s gaze dropped to Sadie’s mouth as the illicit request undulated towards him. He sobered as he dragged his eyes upwards. ‘I didn’t think you were keen to drive any further than you had to?’
Sadie nodded, noting the return of his wariness. And the way he’d looked at her mouth. Her heart started to beat a little faster. ‘By the time my flight gets into Darwin tomorrow you’ll already be there, right?’
‘Probably,’ he conceded.
‘So it kind of makes sense to go with you.’
He nodded. ‘It does.’
Which didn’t stop him from knowing that being in a car with her for hours on end was not at all sensible. Nor was lying on a rooftop with her under the stars.
Not after the kiss.
‘Please,’ she asked quietly as his face remained in an uncompromising mask. ‘I really just need to get as far away from Leo as possible.’
>
Well, now that reasoning he couldn’t fault. If he had his way, he’d be on the other side of the planet to the man.
Sadie watched his features soften a little and quickly jumped in. ‘I promise I’ll be quiet as a mouse.’
Kent snorted as he pulled his wallet out and threw money on the table. ‘I’ll believe that when I see it Sadie Bliss.’
Sadie’s vow of silence didn’t last long in the car. ‘About last night.’
Kent’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. He flicked a glance at the dashboard clock. ‘Ten minutes, Sadie, you’re slipping.’
Sadie ignored him. She could feel the tension rolling off him and didn’t want to spend fifteen hours absorbing the fallout. ‘I think we need to talk about it... It’s kind of the elephant in the car at the moment, don’t you think?’
Kent shrugged. ‘It happened. It shouldn’t have. Let’s leave it at that.’
Sadie blinked at the very neat summation of what had been going through her head. How surprising that Kent should be so succinct!
‘It was just a kiss,’ he dismissed as Sadie’s silence worried him. ‘It was a weird moment in a strange night.’
She nodded. It certainly had been. But it hadn’t just been any old kiss. There’d been nothing friendly or brotherly about it. Nothing comforting. It might have been brief but for those few seconds she’d never felt so out of her depth.
‘Stop it,’ Kent said as the silence stretched loudly between them.
Sadie frowned. ‘Stop what?’
‘Stop humming the “Wedding March” in your head.’
Sadie glanced at him, alarmed. ‘Don’t flatter yourself, Kent Nelson. It wasn’t that good,’ she lied. ‘I’m not into strong silent times. I like to be able to converse with a potential future husband, not have to bargain for every word that comes out of his mouth.’
‘Good.’ He nodded, satisfied.
She glared at him, feeling tenser than when she’d first opened her mouth. ‘There, now, don’t you feel better it’s all out in the open?’ she asked sarcastically.
Kent didn’t deign to answer and not least of all because the answer was no. All she’d done was put the kiss front and centre when he had been almost successful in burying it with the other stuff in his do-something-about-it-later box.
Sadie spent the next few hours feigning interest in the scrubby red-earth scenery but her brain was busy with other things. She couldn’t work out whether she was more upset that he’d dismissed the kiss as nothing or that he’d kissed her in the first place. She certainly had relived it more times than was helpful when the man responsible for it and all its cataclysmic glory was just an arm’s length away, those lips of his tantalising her peripheral vision.
Lips that knew how to get down to business.
By the time the dash clock hit five she desperately needed a distraction from the direction of her thoughts.
She glanced at Kent, his strong silent profile unchanged, an ear bud jammed in the ear closest to her. She reached over and pulled it out.
‘Why haven’t you done an interview since the accident?’ she asked, her idea of a feature story on him returning.
Kent ignored her, not taking his eyes off the road. And to think her silence had lulled him into a false sense of security.
Sadie rolled her eyes. ‘So we’re back to ignoring me again?’
‘If I thought it’d make a difference I just might.’
‘You must have had offers,’ she pressed when it became obvious he wasn’t about to say anything else. ‘It’s a fascinating story.’
‘Yes I have,’ he said, gaze fixed on the white lines running up the centre of the highway.
‘And?’ Sadie prompted.
Kent turned his head and looked her straight in the eye. ‘It’s no one’s damn business, Sadie.’ He looked back at the road. ‘What happened to me is private—very private. It’s not for general consumption.’
Sadie got the message loud and clear. But it was pretty obvious Kent needed to talk to someone.
‘What if I interviewed you? I’m pretty sure Leo’s on the phone right now to Tabitha revoking all rights to the interview material so I’m going to need a back-up plan.’
‘You have the road-trip story,’ he dismissed.
‘She wants two for the price of one, remember, and getting sacked on my first job is not good on the CV. I can’t let her down. I need to deliver.’
Kent nodded. ‘That’s true. Tabitha doesn’t like to be let down.’
Sadie gave an internal groan. Excellent. ‘Is that a yes?’
Kent wrapped his fingers more firmly around the steering wheel. ‘My story is not for sale.’
Sadie heard the same ice in his voice he’d used for telling her he didn’t fly. Regardless, she prepared to launch into a whole selling patter because the thought of letting Tabitha Fox down was not a nice one, but mostly because she knew it’d annoy him.
And at least when he was angry at her she wasn’t thinking about kissing him so much.
But an awful clunk coming from the general direction of the engine put paid to any further chit-chat.
‘What was that?’ she asked, clutching the door handle.
Kent slowed the still-running vehicle slightly as he looked at his instruments. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said after a moment or two. ‘The temperature gauge is climbing, though.’
His eyes sought the road ahead, looking for the best place to pull over.
Fifteen minutes later Kent had parked the Land Rover under some large gum trees on the relatively flat stretch of highway. The other side of the road was less hospitable with a large expanse of scrub stretching almost uninterrupted to the horizon.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ Sadie asked as she joined Kent beneath the bonnet.
‘I think I’ve blown the water pump.’
Sadie looked at the convoluted metallic pipes of the internal combustion engine. It might as well have been an alien spacecraft. ‘That sounds bad.’ She looked at him. ‘Is that bad?’
‘It’ll need a new one and if we were in Sydney I could probably find a dozen mechanics within two city blocks that had one in stock. Maybe not so much out here.’
Sadie chewed on her lip. ‘Oh.’
Despite the fact that his hands were covered in grease, all Kent could smell was that damn passionfruit aroma of hers. Combined with her fate-worse-than-death look it was just plain irritating.
‘It’s okay, Sadie Bliss,’ he said as he pulled the bonnet down and wiped his hands on an oily rag. ‘You’re not destined to be stuck in the outback for ever. I’m sure there’ll be a garage in Borroloola that will be able to help.’
He left her by the front of the car and grabbed the satellite phone from the front seat. In ten minutes he’d located a supplier in Katherine who would send a tow truck by nine tomorrow morning. He hung up the phone. ‘Better get comfortable. We’re here for the night.’
Sadie looked at him, alarmed. ‘We are?’ She looked around her wondering how many spiders chose to call this speck on the earth home.
He nodded. ‘It’s okay, I have camp gear in the back. I’ll build a fire for now and we’ll sleep up top like we did the other night.’
‘Right,’ Sadie said faintly.
Except they hadn’t kissed the other night...
Kent set her up in a fold-out chair beneath the shade of a tree with her fully charged laptop and then came and went unloading stuff from the back of his vehicle and gathering firewood. In an hour he was lighting the fire. Sadie half expected him to drop a couple of rabbits at her feet and then set about skinning them.
‘How’s it going?’ he asked, nodding at the laptop. ‘Did you get everything you wanted for Pinto’s feature?’
Sadie blinked, momentarily confused by the question because she hadn’t been tapping away about Leo at all. Instead she’d been writing about him. About the strong, silent, tough-guy enigma that both baffled and intrigued her.
‘Oh, yes, good, thanks,�
� she lied, shutting the lid. ‘Plenty of info.’ The earthy aroma of wood smoke spiralled out to meet her as the first plume hit the air. ‘What about you? Are you happy with the pics you got on your little expedition last night?’
Kent nodded as he knelt by the fire, slowly feeding it. ‘Yep.’
‘Can I see them?’ she asked.
Kent looked up at her, surprised. ‘Sure. My camera bag’s in the car.’
Sadie retrieved it and Kent showed her how to scroll back to the pictures he’d taken the night before. It seemed more complicated than something off the space shuttle, but eventually she got the hang of it.
‘What did we do before digital cameras with delete buttons?’ she murmured as she viewed the images of the starry night and giant phallic termite mounds rising out of long grass and silhouetted in the moonlight.
‘I wish I could see these bigger,’ Sadie said, frustrated by the vast outback night condensed to one tiny image.
‘USB lead in the camera bag—attach it to your laptop,’ Kent said as he threw bigger logs onto the fire.
Delighted, Sadie hooked up his camera to her laptop and scrolled through the images again. She skimmed right through the ones of Leo and his monolith, slowing down as she got to Kent’s outback shots.
‘These are amazing,’ Sadie breathed in awe. ‘They’re going to look spectacular in the feature.’
Kent nodded, more than a little pleased with the shots himself.
‘How did it feel? Out there, taking them?’ she asked.
Kent paused, surprised at her question. Surprised even more that he wanted to answer it. ‘It felt...good.’ As if the part of him that had died, or had at least been severely injured, was finally recovering. ‘Familiar.’
Sadie realised she probably wasn’t going to get any more from Mr Silent and contented herself going through the shots a second time, picturing them laid out in the magazine. When she was done she realised the shadows had grown quite long and evening was just about to fall around them. She shivered as the temperature suddenly seemed to plummet.
‘Here,’ Kent said, coming up behind her and plonking something around her shoulders.
Sadie hunched into the warmth of the fleecy flannelette shirt, like one of those cowboys always wore.
How fitting that Kent should own one.
