Nobody But Him

by Victoria Purman

  Over a breakfast of Vegemite toast and freshly brewed coffee, Julia did a quick bit of maths and realised that she’d lived away from the house and the town almost as long as she’d lived in it. The thought made her feel more disconnected than ever from the place she’d grown up in.

  She’d broken up with it a long time ago, and maybe it was true what people said, that you could never go back. It had only been three days, but maybe she really didn’t know this house and Middle Point anymore. It was certainly likely that they didn’t know her, either. And what had she come back to, anyway? A place so markedly changed from her childhood that she barely recognised a house along the beachfront. The old shacks — and the families who lived in them — were almost all gone, pushed out by a spiral of increased property values, higher property rates and taxes and insatiable demand from city people with deep pockets and a desire for an ocean view. They’d changed the place forever, in her mind, and for the worse.

  Her phone rang and she picked up the call, while munching her toast.

  ‘Hey Lizzie.’

  ‘Hey Jools.’ Lizzie yawned. ‘You okay?’

  ‘I think I’m coping rather well with being made redundant, actually. I don’t miss that place at all.’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t know what that was all about. After you left, Ry was like a bear with a sore head for the whole night.’

  Julia squeezed her eyes closed, hoping to blur the image of him that was freeze-framed in her head. Ry in pub. Handsome. Furious. Blonde. Distracted. Stone-cold sapphire eyes. This whole being back in Middle Point thing was going to be harder than she thought.

  Especially since they had Lizzie in common. Why on earth did she think she could hide in her little house bubble and not hear his name or find out anything more about him?

  ‘Serves him right,’ she said. ‘The jerk.’

  ‘Jools, he’s not so bad. Hey, do you want to come over for a coffee? I’m going to suck up every spare minute of your precious time before you head back to the big smoke.’

  Julia looked down at the coffee cup in her hand.

  ‘Love to. Give me a little while. I’m still waking up.’

  ‘Take all the time you need, Jools. I’ve got a day off and I am a total lady of leisure.’

  Julia pulled her mother’s fluffy, white dressing gown tightly around her, comforting as well as warming her, as she listened to the morning radio news humming softly in the background. Julia was a news junkie, listening for any mention of clients in trouble or potential clients who might need their hand held while their world was crashing in around them. It was how she started every single day of her life, waiting for bad news.

  She’d already had her Middle Point bad news, delivered to her in the form of a very handsome man with a forbidding scowl. And there was nothing she could do for her clients when she was so far away. So he leaned over, twiddled with the round knob and stopped when she found some music. Lizzie’s plan for coffee was brilliant. Julia knew that, for her, a whole day ahead with no work to do was a dangerous thing. It would mean there would be too much time to think about her mother and too much time to think about Ry, what the hell he was doing back in Middle Point and how on earth they were going to avoid each other.

  With the coffee mug warming her hands, Julia pushed open the front door and stepped out into the front garden, letting the familiar and comforting sound of the ocean wash over her as she took in the scene.

  The views from the old place were worth a million bucks, literally. The beachfront location was fantastic for the scenery but devastating for the bank balance. It was a constant battle to keep up with even the most basic maintenance, a never-ending fight with the punishing winds and corrosive salt. The house was sixty years old, splashed pale green on the exterior from a decorating era long passed, with a front garden made up of random succulents and seaside daisies, which grew so abundantly along this part of the South Australian coast.

  This had been the place of so many languid summers, of sunburn and salty air, of surfing and surfer boys. Julia glanced across the esplanade to a small grey building nestled in the vegetation and smiled at the memory. That was the place she’d had her first kiss, right there on the sand in front of that toilet block. Oh, the romance. Kevin Higgins was two years older and slightly drunk on wine cooler the summer she had turned fourteen, and she could still remember the shock of his tongue ramming into her mouth. Technique wasn’t his strong point, but he’d looked so cute in those low-slung board shorts that she couldn’t resist him.

  Growing up, she’d known these streets so well, had known every house and the names of everyone who lived in them. The local kids roamed the streets in a giant pack, safe in knowing they weren’t more than three houses from someone’s place in case hunger or thirst overcame them. But Julia didn’t feel that comfortable familiarity anymore. Most of the old places she knew had disappeared, razed and replaced by modern holiday homes, in designer blues and yellows, all glass windows and sharply angled rooves.

  She knew her mother had fielded various offers over the years, a couple of which could have set her up quite handsomely somewhere else, but she’d always been resolute in her refusal. If she’d taken one of those offers, the house would have been knocked down in a hot minute and replaced with one of those monstrosities. Julia had always assumed her mother would die in that house. She just hadn’t expected her to be quite so young when it happened.

  The wind whipped about her ears and Julia took another sip of her coffee to warm herself as she glanced at the new place next to hers. Although dug into the dunes, it was still huge at three-­storeys high, with angles taking advantage of the vistas, east and west, along the coast. Lizzie had told her that the locals hadn’t taken long to christen it the ugliest house in Middle Point. It was an arrogant house, they’d decided, full of itself, too keen to make a statement, too big to blend in with what surrounded it. It was stark and white with windows the height of each story like sheer cliffs, exposing the homes’ interior. With no blinds or curtains to obscure the view, Julia could look right inside and she could make out colours and shadows. It looked like a furniture catalogue in there, she huffed to herself. Modern sofas were posed elegantly around an enormous, wall-mounted flat screen television. Next to it, there was a long white table with perhaps twelve dining chairs artfully arranged around it, just perfect for the cocktails-at-sunset crowd. She’d seen places like it in decorator magazines, and wondered how people who lived like that coped with mess and sand and wet towels and children and dogs.

  ‘Julia?’

  CHAPTER

  3

  Julia heard her name above the crashing waves, above the wind, above the beating of her heart and the pounding in her head. She gripped her shaking coffee cup.

  Ry.

  He stood on the road, clad head-to-toe in black tight-fitting running gear, looking like a panther. Julia tried really hard not to notice that his clothes hugged every well-formed muscle in his body, outlining his strength in a silhouette against the brightness of the horizon. He stepped closer, from the roadway onto the grassed verge.

  ‘Julia?’ He said it again as if she hadn’t heard him the first time. He looked windswept and wild, his arms hanging loosely at his sides, his chest rising and falling with his breathing. He looked at her, then the house and back to her again. A what the fuck expression settled in the wrinkle between his eyebrows.

  Julia lifted her chin and stiffened, pulled her dressing gown tight around her.

  ‘Nothing to see here. Keep running. Move along.’

  Ry exhaled loudly and swore.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ He raised his hands, palms up, in a questioning move and he strode towards her across the garden, not stopping until they were just a few feet apart. His icy-blue stare searched every part of her face, before latching on to her eyes with a high-voltage intensity that made her blink nervously.

  They regarded each other silently and warily for a long moment, so many unsaid words and accusations
flying like an arcing electrical current in the air between them.

  Finally, Julia answered as calmly as she could, ‘I’m having a cup of coffee, what does it look like?’

  Ry drew in a huge breath and turned to face the beach, holding something in. A second later he turned on his heel to face her. ‘I mean … what are you doing back here in Middle Point? In this house? I thought your mother sold up years ago. It belongs to the Kinsellas now.’

  Julia felt a jolt. He doesn’t know.

  ‘I’m just here for a few weeks, visiting the old hometown.’

  ‘Melbourne’s lost its charms, has it?’

  She huffed, drawing her dressing gown tighter around her body. ‘Oh yes, because the weather here is so much nicer.’

  ‘So, how does it feel to be back?’

  ‘It’s fine, thank you.’

  ‘A bit sick of the bright lights and the big city, huh?’ His words were harsh. There was no humour in them and she felt the sting.

  ‘I wasn’t aware that I had to answer to the bloke who owns the pub.’

  Ry took another step closer. He towered above her, his chest just inches away from her face, his intense and angry stare pinning her to the spot.

  ‘So that’s what you think of me? I’m just some bloke who owns the local watering-hole, am I?’

  ‘If the shoe fits.’

  Ry’s eyes took a long, slow journey down her body to her ugg boots and he smirked.

  ‘Bet they go down a treat in Toorak.’

  He was dangerously close to her and despite the wind whipping at them from the beach, she could feel his heat, so close, so dangerous. He lifted a hand to her face and she tried not to react when his rough fingers traced a line down her right cheek. She felt tattooed by his touch. Her body was betraying her, reacting in a way that her brain was telling her was so wrong. Her legs wobbled and her heart raced, throbbing a pulse in her chest.

  When her brain finally kicked into gear against her hormones and won, she found the will to bat his hand away. But damn him, he stayed close. Intimidatingly close.

  ‘How would you know? You’re a South Aussie boy through and through, down to the toes of your R.M.Williams boots.’

  ‘And damn proud of it. Unlike some people I know.’

  Julia took a step back to put some distance between them. ‘Look, I don’t need a job, so don’t worry your pretty little head about me turning up at the pub again.’

  He scoffed. ‘Don’t think for one second I’d offer you one, JJ.’

  And that was it. The bile rose in her throat and her fists clenched. So, he’d slummed it up one summer, but he’d clearly chosen a side since then. Hadn’t he always been one of them? Someone just like Lord and Lady Muck and The Princess, who regarded locals as if they were nothing more than worker bees, whose only role in life was to clean their homes and the streets once the holidays were over. People whose kids treated the town like it was the Gold Coast — schoolies and parties and fast cars and vomit and ­rubbish bins groaning with the smell of warm beer and cigarette ash. Locals were left to clean up the mess and shake their heads. She had to put up with people like him every day when she was growing up in this town and she was so over it.

  ‘Listen, you ungrateful jerk,’ she snapped. ‘I was helping out. You should be thanking me.’ She gripped her coffee cup tight in one hand and jabbed him in the chest with a finger. There was hard muscle underneath and she startled. She hadn’t remembered him being quite so powerfully built. Damn it. A scorching awareness pooled in her belly for an encore presentation.

  ‘Grateful? I should be grateful to you? What a fucking joke.’ Ry moved fast, grabbing her wrist with a strong grip and as his fingers tightened, she was sure he could feel her quickening pulse. He pulled her closer to him, snaking his other arm around her back, low and strong until they were crushed up against each other like it was rush hour on a Tokyo train.

  His breath was heavy, his face just a whisper from hers. He spoke low and rough.

  ‘What say we just stay as far away from each other as possible.’

  The wind teased her hair, blowing a strand across his cheek. It snagged on his stubbled jaw, connecting them. She couldn’t move, didn’t want to.

  ‘Let’s pretend we don’t even know each other,’ she murmured, her eyes wandering the face that was once so familiar to her. Her fingers, with a will of their own, reached up to trace the scar on his check before settling on his lips, parted slightly, pale from the cold. He moved closer still and leaned in.

  He was going to kiss her. And boy did she want him to. She wanted to feel his hard body up against her, needed to have his hands tugging her hair, burned for his lips on hers.

  But he suddenly stopped, let go of her as if she’d turned into a burning match. He took a step back and pushed a hand through his windblown hair.

  ‘We shouldn’t have any trouble with that. We don’t know each other, Julia. Not anymore.’ With a few quick strides, he jumped the small brick fence that separated Julia’s front yard with the glass mansion next door.

  Ry fished around in a pocket and Julia couldn’t believe her eyes when he jammed a key in the front door of the ugliest house in Middle Point.

  ‘Don’t tell me …’ Her voice trailed off in the wind, her nerves too frazzled to do anything else but stare open-mouthed at what she was seeing. Ry turned, a flash of fury in his dark eyes.

  ‘Yeah,’ he spat. ‘I own this too.’

  And he slammed the door.

  CHAPTER

  4

  What say we just stay as far away from each other as possible. Julia screwed up her face at the memory of her ill-tempered outburst and stared out to the distant horizon. The water was a light grey, harmonising with the sky above, and great puffs of white clouds decorated the atmosphere to the horizon and beyond. She tightened her black pashmina around her neck while she waited for Lizzie to bring two steaming mugs of coffee out onto the deck. Lizzie lived a couple of blocks back from the beach on a rise behind the coast, so although she wasn’t beachfront, she still had spectacular views.

  It was such a serene outlook, but Julia was pent up like a taut rubber band. She couldn’t believe she’d lost her cool with Ry. She made a living out of maintaining her calm when people all around her were losing their heads. What was it all around him that made her so crazy and ill-disciplined? And why was it that certain parts of her body didn’t seem to agree with her decisive plan to stay away from Ry Blackburn? Certain parts of her body were still thrumming with sensation, hours after their confrontation on her front doorstep.

  So he wanted to pretend they’d never met. That would be for the best. With the past erased, the boundaries for the present became very clear. Boundaries that she would respect. Especially the one about putting your hands on someone else’s husband. Pity he didn’t have as much respect for his wife. Mind you, if she was shackled to The Princess she might act like she regretted it too. No, she could make sure they stayed as far away from each other as possible. Easy. That firmness of mind would make it so much easier to do what she had to do and head back to Melbourne as planned.

  Lizzie emerged with the coffee on a small bamboo tray and closed the sliding glass door behind her with a clever backside manoeuvre. Julia reached out for a mug and Lizzie sat down opposite her in a deep wicker chair, took a sip and regarded her friend with a beaming smile.

  ‘Jools, have I told you how nice it is to have you home?’

  Julia nodded, breathed deep and tried not to let the tears well up in her eyes. She was still riding the crazy emotional wave of her encounter with Ry and the tears came from nowhere fast.

  ‘Oh Jools.’ Lizzie reached over to hold her hand, ‘I know the circumstances are crappy. Beyond crappy, even. I’m here to help you with whatever you need, you know that.’

  ‘I know it and I’m grateful.’

  ‘Good. And now that you are fully caffeinated, relaxed and grateful, spill your guts sister. What is the deal with you and my boss?’
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  Julia turned away from Lizzie, staring out to the sweeping views. She knew she owed her friend an explanation. At least, half an explanation.

  ‘Remember when you took off to London after we finished high school? I’d just had my eighteenth birthday and I was here all on my lonesome that summer before I went to Melbourne for uni?’

  ‘I still haven’t forgiven you for not coming with me.’

  ‘Well, when you were chasing all those pale-skinned English boys, I met Ry, here in Middle Point.’

  Lizzie’s mouth dropped open in shock. ‘You. Are. Kidding. Me.’

  ‘Not kidding. He was fresh out of uni, one of those rich city boys pretending to be a beach bum for the summer before the family firm snatched him up.’

  ‘And by ‘met’ you mean … ?’

  Julia nodded. ‘Yes. With your boss. Well, he wasn’t your boss then, obviously. Your future boss.’

  ‘Ooh, an older man. Lucky you. Not that he’s my type.’ Lizzie winked. ‘Too blonde.’

  Julia shivered at the realisation that her hormones were telling her Ry was still very much her type.

  ‘I didn’t know he was back here and he clearly didn’t know I was here either. And I’m realising that there’s no such thing as six degrees of separation in Middle Point. It’s more like half a degree. And now he’s back.’

  ‘Well and truly. So how come I don’t know about him?’ Lizzie sipped her coffee, scrutinising Julia’s face for clues. ‘You never mentioned anything about a city boy called Ry. Even after all these years.’

  ‘It was the dim, dark ages before Facebook, remember? When we didn’t feel compelled to reveal every single detail of our lives to the whole world. And in all the years since, I didn’t want to think about him, to tell the truth. I left him behind when I left Middle Point.’