by Amy Andrews
So many memories.
“She just keeps going and going. Can’t trade her in. It’d be disloyal.”
Selena rolled her head along the headrest until she was looking at the hard blade of his cheekbone and the square set to his jaw. She didn’t think he was having a dig at her, but she could see the parallel. Jarrod was a loyal guy. She had no doubt in her head that he would have been loyal to her forever.
And that wasn’t nothing in this era of easy divorce.
Lights from the dash illuminated his strong profile and the soft layer of ginger whiskers. She itched to run her fingers over it, feel it prickling against her palm. He’d taken his tie off, undone the top two buttons of his shirt and rolled up his sleeves a long time ago. The light played across the corded muscles of his forearms and the blond hairs.
She could smell his aftershave and breathed it in for old time’s sake.
He glanced at her briefly before looking back at the road. “About last night …”
“It really is okay, Jarrod. You said some stuff you shouldn’t have. I said some stuff I shouldn’t have. It was bound to happen with us. With so much … unfinished business between us.”
He glanced at her quickly again. “Yes.”
Selena sighed. Her grandmother was right. She did owe him an explanation for running out on him like that, without saying goodbye. The real explanation, not the fake ‘sudden opportunity in the city’ Grandy had been left to dish out.
It had been a shitty thing to do then and not trying to give him an honest explanation now would be even shittier.
The sign to Hobson’s Crossing approached, and he slowed the dual cab down. “You returned all my letters,” he said as he turned off the bitumen onto gravel.
Selena looked out the window as the landscape changed from stubbly paddocks to gum trees and bush, the headlights illuminating the powdery dust and the rutted corrugations of the dirt road.
“I had to go cold turkey, Jarrod,” she said, turning her head to face him again. His knuckles tightened around the steering wheel. “It was always all or nothing with us.”
He slowed the car as it dipped down to the narrow cement crossing that divided Hobson’s Creek in two. The creek was one of the many watercourses that were fed by the springs about an hour’s drive further west and after which Jumbuck Springs was named. When it rained enough, the water would flood over the cement causeway.
But from what Selena could tell from the flash of moonlight on water as they passed, they were in no danger of that.
“I don’t remember the creek ever being that low,” she mused.
“Lowest it’s been in forty years, apparently.”
The dual cab approached the parking area that overlooked the swimming hole. Popular with families during the day, and horny teenagers with only one thing on their minds at night, it was currently deserted.
“Jarrod?” she said as he drove straight by. “Where are you going?” It was a rhetorical question.
She knew where he was heading.
“We’re so close,” he said, his eyes fixed on the road. “Aren’t you curious to see the old hangout?”
Their own private lovers’ lane? She shouldn’t be, but now she was here she could feel the tug of curiosity. Maybe it was the moonlight. Or the stars. Or the memories being stirred by just sitting next to him in Rhonda.
Nostalgia was a bitch like that.
“Can you still find the track?” she asked.
He threw her his best boy scout look. “A man never forgets where he lost his virginity.”
Jarrod had stumbled across the thick stand of trees, just off the road, when he’d been surveying for the fire service, and they’d snuck out to it whenever they’d been able. But it had been fifteen years. Surely it must have fallen back to the inexorable creep of bush?
Unless … “Did you ever bring anyone else out here?”
He glanced at her swiftly, his brow crinkled as he shook his head definitively. “Never.”
A sweet swell of relief washed through her system. Selena didn’t have any right to demand this place be theirs exclusively but she couldn’t deny how happy it made her that it was.
Soon enough, Jarrod was taking the dual cab bush and they bumped along slowly through the undergrowth for a few minutes before the headlights picked out the ghostly outlines of tall thick trunks ahead.
He flashed her a grin. “Ta da.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She rolled her eyes.
Within another minute he was wheeling the car around, positioning it within the horseshoe embrace of the trees, completely invisible to anyone passing by on the road to the springs.
Not that anyone would be at this hour of night.
He released his seatbelt then hit a switch, rolling both their windows down before he killed the engine. The moonlight projected overhanging leafy shadows against the windscreen as the smell of eucalyptus, warm bushland and dry earth joined the aroma of Jarrod’s aftershave.
She inhaled deeply and she was seventeen again.
Her pulse fluttered at her wrists and temple, joining a more primal flutter deep inside her. The hush of the night pressed in on them.
“I am sorry,” she said, removing her seatbelt, staring out the windscreen as the silence stretched, conscious of him looking out his window at God knew what. “About just taking off like that.”
He didn’t say anything, just gripped the steering wheel at the bottom and continued to stare out his window. Selena’s heart thudded loud in her chest. “I realise I never told you that, and I should have. Years ago. I was going to write, but then I didn’t know what to say, and when I did try, it seemed inadequate. I don’t know how many pages I screwed up and—”
She stopped. Shit, Selena, shut up. She was babbling.
But he wasn’t saying anything and she couldn’t bear the condemnation in his silence.
“Then time went by and I promised myself next week, next month or for Easter or Christmas until it just got too … late to do it. And then I figured it was better that you hated me anyway.”
His knuckles whitened on the wheel as he turned his head to face her. “What on earth did I ever do to you to make you think I wasn’t supportive of you moving to the city?”
Selena shook her head. “Nothing.”
“I knew you were leaving to go to college in February,” he said, his jaw tight. “I was fine with that. Well … I hated it, but I knew we’d figure it out. I knew you wanted a career in TV news and I wanted that for you as well. So I don’t understand why you just took off in the dead of night without a goodbye, a note, a phone call … nothing. Why didn’t you just tell me you were going?”
Because she wouldn’t have gone.
Hot tears pricked at the backs of her eyes but Selena refused to let them fall—she’d cried enough back then for both of them. She’d been running scared—terrified—and every action had felt justified at the time, but she’d hurt him and she had to own that.
“I got my exam results that day. I just scraped through with passes.”
Selena had been a straight-A student. She’d worked hard for them; she wasn’t naturally gifted but she’d always topped her classes. Until she and Jarrod had started having sex.
And they’d both lost about a hundred IQ points.
“Crap. I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I guess there wasn’t …” a small smile touched his lips, “a whole lot of studying going on there for a while.”
“No.”
That was an understatement. She’d spent a lot of time studying with Jarrod, but not the kind her grandmother or Jarrod’s mother thought they were doing in his bedroom or at the library or at any number of friend’s places they’d lied about to sneak off to this very place.
Had they been required to sit an exam on the male/female reproductive system, that they would have passed with flying colours.
“But your other results for the year would have almost cancelled them out.”
Yes. Overall she’d still com
e out with a B average. But that had just been one of the whammies she’d been dealing with.
“There’s something else.” She dragged her gaze from his and stared out her window. She couldn’t look at him when she told him the truth. “I missed a period, Jarrod.”
Chapter Four
‡
An ominous silence stretched between them as his gaze lasered into the side of her face. Selena could practically hear the clash of his thoughts as he pieced the puzzle together. “You were … pregnant? I … got you pregnant?”
“No, Jarrod, no.” She turned back, shaking her head, but he wasn’t listening. He slammed his open palm against the steering wheel and Selena jumped.
“Oh God, what did you do?” he demanded, staring at her with wild eyes. “Why didn’t you come to me about that?”
She shook her head again. “I wasn’t pregnant, Jarrod,” she repeated. “But I thought I was. My cycle is every twenty-eight days. Without fail. I hadn’t been late before that or since. For three days I thought I was pregnant. And you and I both know that was possible. There were times when we were bloody careless.”
She’d wanted to go on the pill but there’d been no way she was asking Doc Janson for a script—he’d only just stopped giving her a lollipop with every visit. They’d planned to go into the city after they’d finished school and get it seen to then. They’d planned to wait until then.
But they hadn’t.
And condoms weren’t exactly easy to buy when the only chemist in town was run by a couple who knew both your parents.
He visibly relaxed, huffing out a breath before resting his forehead against the steering wheel for long moments.
“Fuck, Selena.” He sat back. “You scared the crap out of me.”
“Well multiply that by about a million and you’ll probably be in the ballpark of how terrified I was.”
“But … why?” he asked again, raking a hand through his hair as he searched her gaze. “You didn’t have to go through that alone. Didn’t you think I would support you?”
Selena shut her eyes briefly. “It’s because I knew that you would.” She opened her eyes to find him watching her. “And that you’d love our baby and that I’d love it too and then I’d be stuck in Jumbuck Springs, a teenage mother, pumping petrol at Alec Campbell’s or slinging beers at the pub, all the things I always wanted just gone in a puff of smoke. Just like my mum.”
Even now the emotions—the panic—that had swirled inside her those few days still had the power to steal her breath.
“I’m not your father, Selena. I wouldn’t have tried to stop you from doing what you wanted to do.”
Her mother had wanted to be a lawyer. Two months before leaving Jumbuck Springs for university she’d met and fallen in love with a young ringer from one of the local sheep stations and fallen pregnant. Instead of college she found herself married and ensconced in the middle of nowhere with a new baby, no money and a very traditional man who insisted his wife and child stay by his side.
Grandy was convinced Abby Durrum had been in a fog of depression when they’d left Selena with her that day. Her parents had apparently been arguing as they’d arrived—about Abby enrolling to do some university subjects externally—and Grandy said she could see them arguing as they’d driven off.
“You could have had both,” Jarrod continued. “It might not have been easy but I wouldn’t have been like your father. I would have worked my ass off to make your dream happen.”
Selena snorted, because, while she didn’t doubt Jarrod’s sincerity for a moment, becoming an anchorwoman for TV news would have been next to impossible to achieve without completely neglecting her duties to both him and their child.
And that’s where the truly terrifying part of the story came into play.
“No. You don’t get it,” she said, shaking her head. “I was petrified that I might actually enjoy settling. That I’d embrace it. Love being with you and our baby as a family and forget that I ever had any ambitions at all. I didn’t even know if I was pregnant but there was a part of me that wanted that happy little family so badly I could almost taste it.”
He lapsed into silence again, looking out his window, the angle of his jaw as it clenched tight giving his profile a forbidding set. Was he pissed at her or merely overwhelmed by everything? “But … you weren’t pregnant?” he said eventually, facing her.
Selena shook her head. “No. I got my period the afternoon I got my results. But the whole scenario scared the crap out of me. That part of me that wanted to be pregnant, that wasn’t worried about those results? She scared the crap out of me. And I knew the longer I stayed, the more we came out here, the more I fell in love with you, the more powerful she’d grow. I had to stop her in her tracks right then and there. I had to cut her off at her knees. I had to remove myself from all temptation.”
He nodded slowly. “So you ran.”
“Yes.”
“And you couldn’t tell me? Ring? Write?”
“No.” She shook her head emphatically. “I loved you so much. I wanted you so much. And I was weak around you. My exam results told me that. I didn’t trust myself. If I’d gone to you that night and told you I was leaving, I wouldn’t have left. I would have stayed.”
He held her gaze. “What makes you think I would have tried to stop you?”
“Really, Jarrod? Can you look into your heart and tell me you wouldn’t have asked me not to go? Begged me to stay for those few months until college started, until I absolutely had to go? Really?”
He glanced down at his hands on the steering wheel and Selena had her answer. She shut her eyes on a sigh before opening them again.
“I knew I’d cave,” she told his profile. “Grandy knew it too. And she didn’t want that for me. She wanted me to have the life I’d always dreamed about. She watched her own daughter’s growing unhappiness staying in Jumbuck Springs because of my father, and she didn’t want to risk the same thing happening to her granddaughter. So she rang a friend in Brisbane, and she drove me there that night.”
He looked at her. “She told me that you wanted to end it with me but didn’t know how. That a job had come up in the city with an immediate start date and she’d encouraged you to take it. She said she knew a clean break would be hard for me, but it was the best thing for both of us. She asked me to respect your decision and leave you be to get on with your life. Then she gave me a postal box address for you if I wanted to write.”
Selena nodded. “Yes. She told me. I’m sorry. I really am. I just panicked. All I could think about was getting the hell out of here. It was wrong and immature.”
“It was more than that, Selena. It was selfish and cowardly. You should have given me a little more credit.”
Selena flinched. If she thought Jarrod was going to pull his punches, she was wrong. “Yes. It was that too.”
The hard truth in his words hurt. Harder still was the knowledge that she’d deserved them, and she swallowed against the lump in her throat.
If confession was supposed to be good for the soul, Selena wasn’t feeling it. The guilt that had been eating at her for years, the guilt that Grandy had identified so succinctly yesterday, was still there.
Where was the rush of relief? The sense that she’d righted a wrong? That everything would be okay between them now?
It sure as shit felt like there was still unfinished business between them.
He rubbed his palms over his whiskers and the scraping sound went straight to Selena’s belly. His gaze fell to the long, bare, stretch of leg exposed by the split in her dress and lingered there.
She felt that in her belly too. And places a little further south.
Maybe this was their unfinished business? Never saying a proper goodbye?
Could sex be their salvation?
“Say something,” she said into a silence heavy with cicada song and recrimination.
“What do you want me to say, Selena?” he demanded, his voice low and rough as he dragg
ed his eyes north. “That I absolve you, that I forgive you?”
She licked her lips nervously at the sudden tension that had crept between them. His gaze followed the dart of her tongue. Had their breathing got louder or had the insects got quieter? “Maybe … yeah.”
“Jesus, Selena,” he snorted. There was more rubbing of his whiskers. More delicious scraping noises. More heat spreading from her belly to her thighs, to her breasts. “I think you’re going to have to give me a moment or two.”
She shifted in her bucket seat until she was angled more towards him, deliberately planting her feet apart a little, giving him a better view. He followed the movement, his eyes practically scorching a path up her thigh. They stopped at the top of the split but the heat kept travelling. All the way up, settling right between her legs.
“Maybe I could say ten Hail Marys?”
His gaze flicked up to hers. “I don’t think that’s going to cover it.”
“I could get you on TV?”
He rolled his eyes. “Does that actually work?”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Thanks. But no thanks.”
Selena shifted slightly in her seat, wondering what Jarrod’s price was. Twelve years in journalism had taught her everyone had one. For now she figured it was her legs or where they led to, anyway, as he stared at them intently.
“There must be something you want from me, Jarrod?” she murmured, leaning forward slightly at the hips, widening the split a little more.
It was all kinds of fucked up to be taunting him like this but Selena’s brain was on a one-way track as her blood pounded through every pulse point. Her body was on high alert, every cell taut with anticipation. Having Jarrod inside her again was all she could think about.
Jarrod the man.
I can control myself. Can you? Clearly the answer to that was no. Not then. Not now.
He lifted his gaze but didn’t say anything for long moments. He just stared at her, his jaw clenching and unclenching. “Are you trying to seduce me?”
The gravelly question hit her straight between the legs and she let out a husky breath. “Yes.”
