* * *
Julia was scrubbing the shower cubicle in her mother’s bathroom like a maniac, almost woozy from the amount of cleaning fluid she’d squirted around the cream-coloured tiles. She was proud of herself for finally making a start on the place. It needed an industrial-strength clean, given the house had been empty for twelve months. There were still a few dead spiders to collect from the raggedy webs in the corners of the living room ceiling and a scattering of tiny dead ants in the laundry, but she hadn’t got around to most of it yet. She’d been too busy filling in at the pub, catching up with Lizzie, fighting with Ry and trying her best to stay away from the handsome jerk.
Oh yes, this was excellent stress-diversion therapy, Julia realised and wondered why she hadn’t begun the cleaning aspect of this program sooner. Back in Melbourne she had a super-efficient Greek lady who arrived every second Wednesday and made her old cottage gleam. It made life bearable, especially after pulling fourteen-hour days at the office dealing with the crisis du jour. Coming home to a sparklingly clean home was one of life’s pleasures, she’d decided. No one else’s dirty clothes were ever dropped on the floor. The only dirty coffee mug in the sink was hers. She could watch what she wanted, when she wanted. That was her Melbourne life and she loved it.
Middle Point didn’t have a monopoly on handsome jerks. There were plenty in Melbourne, too, she could attest to that. But none were quite so handsome as Ry Blackburn. On the jerk front, he was still out there, way in front too. She couldn’t believe he’d grabbed her arm, right there on the street, pretending everything should be nicey-nicey between them, when his wife was a mere ten feet and a shop window away. He’d been on the phone to her, but that hadn’t stopped him from looking at Julia like she was dinner and he was half-starved.
So he wasn’t only a handsome jerk, he was a sleazy jerk as well.
Julia grabbed the bottle of cleaning liquid, flipped it upside down and squirted it with both hands until it started making farting noises. She stared at the huge white splodge on the tiles before attacking it with both hands, scrubbing furiously until the scourer wore through.
Middle Point was too small. She’d known that all along which was why she’d left in the first place. Now that Ry was back in it she had to get out of the place. For her own sanity.
The next morning, Ry ran harder and faster than he had in months, pounding the sand from Middle Point to Goolwa and back. He’d pushed himself until his quads ached and his running gear was soaked through with sweat. His doctor had told him that exercise was a stress reliever, but when he got home he was more wound up and tense than when he set out an hour earlier.
He could barely think about the night before. Dinner with the Winters had been unbearable. They were nice enough people, David especially, but Ry felt like a freight train was heading right towards him and that he didn’t have the guts to jump out of the way. When the subject of dinner came up, he’d tried to convince them to head over to the pub again for their last night in the Point — he’d joked that he could always get the best table — but they’d insisted on staying in. David had spent an inordinate amount of time fussing over the fireplace, going through almost an entire box of matches, before finally getting the logs roaring into crackling life just as Amanda’s dinner was ready to be served. She’d taken over the kitchen as if she was the lady of the house. The intent wasn’t lost on Ry. She’d spent the whole long weekend trying to insinuate herself into his life, as if this was a trial period and she didn’t want to be returned for the money back guarantee. All that pressure pushed down on him like tropical humidity and he wanted to escape into the night, filled as he was with a polite but confirmed sense of panic. Unfortunately it was kind of hard to escape when it was your house, so he’d gone up to bed early, pleading a big week ahead and an early run. Doctor’s orders, he’d said. Amanda hadn’t tried to argue with that, which was a relief. But sleep hadn’t come easy. It had been fitful and restless and he’d tangled in the sheets most of the night. When he closed his eyes, all he could see was Julia.
A glance at his sports watch revealed it was seven a.m. and the night-time quietness was still settled over the house. Thank Christ for that. They’re still asleep. The fresh sea air did that to people. It seeped into your lungs and your bones and helped you drift off to an easy and lingering slumber.
Yeah, except for him. Ry toed off his wet, sand-covered running shoes at the front door and left them there. He padded in his socks across the wooden floor to the stairs and then up to his bedroom on the mezzanine. With every step, there was a new ache in his legs and in the deep muscles of his arse. He needed a hot shower. Then coffee. Then peace and quiet.
A minute later, he was standing under the steaming spray of a sparkling stainless steel tropical showerhead, hot droplets rinsing through his hair and over his aching jaw. The previous owners had spared no expense on the house and, at that very moment, as the soothing hot water sluiced over his shoulders and ran in rivulets down his aching legs, Ry was glad they’d over-extended themselves and been forced to sell the place, lock, stock and barrel, in a fire sale. Some people’s misfortunes always turned into someone else’s good luck.
Ry let his eyes drift shut, trying to let the repetitive sound of the water against the tiles lull him into a peacefulness he wanted desperately to feel. He turned to face the taps, lifted his arms and flattened his palms up high on the wall, stretching out some of the tension in his shoulders.
Which was when the unmistakeable sensation of skin on skin shot through him. Two tightly budded nipples were teasing their way up his back and a pair of French-manicured hands snaked around his waist.
What the fuck?
CHAPTER
7
‘Good morning handsome.’ Amanda’s voice was in his ear but her fingers were doing most of the talking, trailing a slow but unambiguous journey down his belly to his … Ry quickly looked down … oh no they weren’t. He grabbed her hands before she got to anything important and spun around to face her, spluttering water and curse words into the spray.
Holy shit. She was naked. With a body straight out of a men’s health magazine. Willing. Dripping wet. And looking at his dick with clear intent.
‘Jesus, Amanda …’ he finally managed. She stepped closer, a thigh nudging between his legs, forcing his back up against the cold tiles. There wasn’t much room to manoeuvre between the metal taps digging into his kidneys and her firm breasts pressing insistently into his chest.
Talk about a rock and a hard place.
Not hard, no. Don’t think about this being hard. No fucking way.
Amanda’s eyes flicked down to her wrists, encircled in a fierce grip by his strong fingers. She licked her full lips. ‘You want it rough, Ry? Interesting. I’d never have picked you for one of those guys. But I’m up for it.’
Christ alive. This had to stop right now. Ry gritted his teeth. Her parents were about twenty feet away and … yes, think of her parents. Ry let out the breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding in.
‘Amanda. Stop.’ He released her wrists from his grip and turned the taps off. For a fleeting second he thought about leaving the cold one on at full force and aiming it right at her. Instead, he turned and manoeuvred past her, trying not to rub against her as he did, before grabbing a big white towel from the rail and hurriedly wrapping it around his waist. He pulled another from a shelf by the hand basin and handed it to Amanda.
‘Here. Put this on.’
Amanda considered it for a moment, then let it drop to the floor. She propped one hand up against the open door, the other on her cocked hip and gave him an admiring once over.
He couldn’t help but notice that she was in killer shape, if you liked that sort of thing. Slender hips. A flat stomach, her breasts high and round. Long, long legs. This would be so much easier if he wanted her, if he felt any vague interest at all. Ry planted his fists on his hips and tipped his head to the ceiling, trying not to look at her while he figured out exactly
what to say.
Nasty bastard or nice guy?
‘God, look at you. You must work out. A lot.’ Amanda’s gaze lingered on his shoulders and then dipped to his abs. ‘You’re even more gorgeous naked, you know that?’ She shrugged, regarded him through heavily lidded eyes. ‘So you don’t like to fuck in the shower. That’s fine with me. I’ll fuck you anywhere. The kitchen table. The floor. Your bed.’
Think about her parents. Yeah, think about her parents in the next goddamn room. Ry spun on his heel and headed to the bedroom which, judging by the way she followed him, Amanda seemed to take as an invitation. But when he hurriedly dragged on some jeans and a black, long-sleeved T-shirt, the look on her face transformed from come hither to pissed off. She stormed back to the bathroom and re-emerged with the towel cocooned around her body.
Only when he was fully dressed, safe, did he look at her again. Was she humiliated or furious? It looked like both.
‘Amanda. Why don’t you go and put some clothes on? There’s something I need to tell you, and it’d probably be best if you weren’t naked while I was saying it.’
Amanda hugged the towel closer around her, didn’t take another step towards him. ‘Just say it, Ry. I’m a big girl.’
Ry exhaled in frustration but kept his voice low. There was no point in being a nasty bastard.
‘Look, I’m sorry if I’ve given you any indication that this …’ Ry pointed from her to himself and back again, ‘ … this was ever going to happen. It’s never going to happen, Amanda. I’m sorry.’
And even as he was saying the words, trying to explain what he meant in a cruel to be kind way, her eyes welled up with tears and, yeah, he was pretty sure it was humiliation he saw in her face, not fury. Then he figured out that whatever he’d done, whether he’d slept with her or rebuffed her, he was always going to be the arsehole. And he’d have to take that like a man.
Amanda shuffled over to his bed and plonked herself down on the edge of it. With one end of the big fluffy white towel, she reached up and wiped her cheeks.
‘You can’t blame a girl for trying, can you?’
Ry sat down beside her. ‘I know what it’s like to be lonely, Amanda. But wanting to try me out for size ’cos I look like the perfect candidate? Not a great idea.’
‘You look just like him,’ she whispered, trying to smile but giving up and dropping her gaze to her linked hands.
‘Like who?’
‘My boyfriend.’ She tried to laugh but it sounded empty. ‘My ex-boyfriend, I mean. We were together for four years. Four years and he leaves me. Can you believe that? I thought if I just got right back on the horse and kept on riding that … somehow … I’d be okay.’
Now it all made sense. Her desperation and her hopelessness. This wasn’t about him. It was about the other guy. Amanda was trying to kill off the memory of a lover by sleeping with someone else.
What a fucking stupid idea.
He should know.
Ry shoved those bitter memories down his throat. ‘Look. Why don’t you get dressed. Let’s go downstairs and make breakfast for your parents, butter them up before we break the tragic news to them that we’re not getting engaged.’
And then Amanda smiled. It was perhaps the first genuine smile he’d seen from her all weekend. ‘They’ll be heart-broken you know. They love you.’
‘And someone else will love you one day, Amanda. You can count on it.’
But it won’t be me.
Julia had spent hours scrubbing and scouring and her hands felt soggy from being inside sweaty rubber gloves. She’d filled up most of the day with her stress-relieving cleaning binge and was waiting for Lizzie to arrive with a supply of empty cardboard boxes she’d nabbed from the pub. What had once transported bottles of wine would soon be packed with things that needed to be removed from the house, whatever decision Julia made about its future. Renting or selling, there were things that needed to be dealt with. Old linen. A kitchen full of dishes, platters, cake tins, aged crockery and cutlery. Laundry cupboards that had to be emptied of odd tools, mysterious ice-cream containers full of odd screws and nails, and dried-up tins of shoe polish. There were no memories for Julia in any of it. They were simply the accumulated accessories of a life as wife, mother and widow.
She’d already taken a quick glance at her own things, crammed into her old two door wardrobe and discount store chest of drawers. She’d left behind almost everything when she went to Melbourne and a cursory inspection now had her resolving to ditch the whole lot. All that was left was an old rain jacket hanging next to a stiffened wetsuit she hadn’t worn in fifteen years, which jostled for space with a box of rolled-up posters and a box of CDs. None of it meant anything to her anymore.
Julia hadn’t had much in the way of cool clothes or shoes when she was growing up. Her mother’s favourite stores, more through philosophy than necessity, were second-hand ones. She never owned the cool jeans or the surf gear that all the city kids wore when they came down to Middle Point for the summer. Julia’s bathers and thongs had never been name brand, but discount department store, something the too-cool-for-school city kids had taken great pleasure in pointing out on the beach. The humiliation of those moments still burned in her. She’d gladly left all that behind when she’d shut her bedroom door for the final time all those years before.
‘Hello!’
Julia poked her head up and peered over the kitchen bench. Lizzie had pushed open the front door with a swing of her hips and was carrying a pile of cardboard in her arms, wine boxes unfolded and laid out flat.
‘I’m over here,’ Julia called out, ‘Excavating the deepest darkest depths of my mother’s cupboards. Check this out.’ Julia stood and set a metal tray on the bench with a clatter.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a muffin tray. I swear I don’t remember my mother ever baking anything. She was so not a mother who baked. Why on earth did she need a muffin tray?’
Lizzie dropped the pile of cardboard onto the floor in the living room with a thud.
‘Jools, Mary may have actually discovered the muffin in the fifteen years you were in Melbourne, and perhaps even the friand, verjuice and quinoa. We make a point of keeping up with the times in little old Middle Point, you know.’
Julia crossed her arms. ‘You’re telling me off again, aren’t you?’
‘Things weren’t preserved in aspic when you left, which you would know if you’d ever bothered to come back.’ Lizzie smiled naughtily.
Julia blew a strand of hair out of her eyes, after it had cunningly escaped her ponytail. ‘Believe me, I can see how much this place has changed. I see it every time I step out the front door. I just didn’t think Mum would change, you know?’
Lizzie found Julia and gave her a tight hug. ‘You can either make me cry or put me to work. Which is it going to be?’
‘Work. Definitely work.’
An hour later, Julia and Lizzie had filled boxes for donation, others for storing and there were plastic garbage bags in a pile in the corner ready to be thrown out. Lizzie had pushed the council rubbish bin out onto the edge of the front yard and was slowly filling it, while Julia had her head stuck deep inside the oven, rubber gloves on, scrubbing and wiping.
‘Hey, Lizzie, can you chuck me another scourer?’ Julia’s voice echoed. ‘This one has just died.’
When she didn’t get an answer, she got to her feet and surveyed the silent living room.
‘Lizzie?’ Her best friend seemed to have been gone longer than was strictly necessary for a walk to the edge of the street and back. The gust of wind blowing into the house and billowing the curtains seemed to suggest she was still out there.
Julia crossed the room and stepped out the front door.
When Lizzie and Ry turned to look at her, she realised it was a split second too late to go back inside with any dignity. Her rubber gloved hands waved in the air like they belonged to a surgeon who’d just scrubbed up, and her jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt we
re grubby and damp. Her dirty curls were pulled back off her face and she couldn’t vouch for what she smelled like.
Ry’s words flew around and around in her head. At first there had been a promise to stay as far away from each other as possible. That had recently morphed into figuring out a way to deal with this running into each other thing.
And now … she was supposed to make neighbourly small talk by the rubbish bin?
He stood on the grassed verge, alongside Lizzie, looking at her with a bemused expression on his face. His old denims and his navy jumper, shoved up around his forearms, looked soft and comfortable and worn in, the kind of thing a man like him would wear while lounging around a fireplace sipping red wine with his stylish Princess Wife.
Julia, on the other hand, felt like a total hausfrau.
‘Jools,’ Lizzie called and out of Ry’s line of sight, beckoned her forward with wide eyes and a fluttering hand. Julia decided she would kill her best friend later. Slowly.
She sucked in a fortifying breath and tried to emulate a self-assured strut as she joined the gathering. And because she wanted to get the first word in, show him that she was unfussed by his presence, she called out before she reached them.
‘Hello Ry.’ She tried to ignore the grin and those eyes. Damn him.
‘Julia.’
‘Lizzie, I was wondering where you were.’ The cold wind coming off the beach made her shiver.
Lizzie turned to Julia with a barely suppressed smile. ‘I was just telling Ry about the clean up you’re doing and he’s offered his help.’
Julia turned to look at him. Ry’s arms were crossed over his chest, his legs straight and set in a wide stance.
‘Really.’ Julia lifted her chin and drew back her shoulders. As if she would ever take help from Ry Blackburn.
‘Yes. He said that when your bin is full we could load up his. It’s bin night tonight so we should take full advantage.’
Nobody But Him Page 6
