Brooding Rebel to Baby Daddy

by Ally Blake

  But the reason that had kept swimming through his head as he’d tried to fall asleep the night before? If he said yes, and if by some miracle Sable actually had his child, he could not imagine a world in which that child did not know who he was.

  It was the “her”.

  When Sable had innocently let that slip, it had knocked him sideways. Leaving a crack through which a vision had slipped. The vision of a little girl.

  Not dark like Janie, but fair like Sable. With her hazel eyes and his curls. He pictured himself, clear as if it were a real memory, holding her tiny hand as he helped her navigate the stones across the river. The same stones he’d used dozens of times, with her mother.

  Picturing that little girl, out there in the world, knowing he’d agreed not to be a part of her life? He’d never agree to that. For he knew what it felt to be that child. To have a parent know him, and still turn their back on him. That wasn’t the kind of man he was.

  Rafe glanced down the side of the house. Once upon a time he’d have slunk through those shadows, and levered open Sable’s window.

  This time, he walked up to the front door and knocked.

  A few beats later, Mercy answered. Gave him a quick once-over. He gave one right on back, which made her laugh out loud.

  She leant in the doorway and said, “She’s not here.”

  Rafe would have bet the farm on the fact she’d chosen those words deliberately. For they were the exact same words Mercy had used on him to let him know Sable had fled to the other side of the world.

  “That so?” he said.

  “Don’t panic, boy,” she said, even while he thought he’d hidden the brief flash of it rather well. “She went off into the bush with her old camera an hour ago. Like stepping back in time seeing her with that thing around her neck again.”

  While Rafe breathed again. “What makes you think I’m not here to see you?”

  A smile kicked at the corner of Mercy’s mouth. For they’d formed a grudging friendship over the years. The only two people in the world who understood what it meant to have a Sable-sized hole in their lives.

  Mercy pushed the door wider and padded inside. And while he wasn’t sure he’d had enough uninterrupted sleep to take a Mercy conversation, he followed her inside.

  “Water?” she called over her shoulder. “Tea? Tequila?”

  It was eight in the morning. “Not for me. But you go right ahead.”

  Mercy stopped in the kitchen, pulled up a stool, and said, “If you’re here to ask for my blessing to start something up with my daughter again you’re not getting it.”

  He could have assured her that was far from the case, but found himself saying, “Don’t need your blessing, Mercy. Never did.”

  “You sure about that? Didn’t take much encouragement for her to leave you the first time.”

  Rafe’s fingers went to the bridge of his nose. “I’d be really careful, Mercy. She left to make you happy. Make sure she also knows you’re happy she’s back.”

  Mercy’s expression twisted before she looked away. “Sooner she gets back out there, the better. She was living the dream, you know.”

  “Not her dream.” For Rafe knew all about Sable’s dream. She’d spent the last few days drawing it out for him in painstaking detail.

  Then Mercy surprised the heck out of him, her nostrils flaring before her face crumpled, her bottom lip quivering before she looked down at her hands. “I thought she was doing fine.”

  There’s that word again.

  Rafe leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I’m sure she was. For a time. But from what I can gather, she’s been lost out there for some time. Did you not pick up on it? When you talked?”

  “I wondered,” she said, then rallied in true Mercy fashion. “But life is a struggle.” Then she crumbled again. It was like an emotional roller coaster. “I never got the feeling that he—that man of hers—was bad to her. I figured he was merely ambivalent.”

  “And that was okay with you?”

  She looked up, her eyes intensely green, with none of her daughter’s softness, pinning him with a glare. “You were never ambivalent.”

  Rafe stilled. Not sure if that was an accusation, or a compliment. “Thank you?”

  “You want to know why she left you?”

  If he’d seen it coming, he might have been able to steel himself. Janie called it his balaclava look. Instead, his entire body jolted.

  “I saw you,” said Mercy. “In the jewellery store. You were looking at a diamond ring.”

  Rafe held his breath as his memories whipped back through time. In the silence, wind set the tree branches outside scratching against the sunroom windows.

  He could tell Mercy was waiting for him to play dumb. But doing what was expected had never been his way. “I’d saved for it for months. Years, really. I was going to give it to her on her eighteenth birthday.”

  Mercy’s face worked. “My problem with you, Rafe Thorne, was never personal. My daughter was always too naïve. She needed grit. Resilience. She could never find that inside of her when she had you making things too easy for her.”

  Sounded pretty personal to him.

  “So I told her to go. Told her she’d never forgive herself if she didn’t. That I was prime example of what it felt like to live too small a life.”

  Mercy’s background had always been a mystery. But he wasn’t going to bite now. This was about Sable. And about him. “Here’s the thing neither of you seemed to grasp—I’d never have held her back if I’d known about the prize. Even if it meant letting her go.”

  Mercy’s mouth flickered.

  “Not that it matters now,” said Rafe.

  “Rubbish. Watching you together, last night, the look in her eyes, the look in yours—” She exhaled hard. “If you care for her at all, and I know that you do, let her go. Let her go for good.”

  Rafe let Sable’s mother sling every charge she needed to sling. For he knew that Mercy’s hardness grew from a deep, instinctual love for her daughter. The kind he’d never had with his own parents. But even while he could have put her mind a little at ease with assurances, or a blood oath, the promise simply refused to come.

  For she wasn’t entirely wrong. There was a significant connection between them. Whether it was chemical, or electrical, or some force he’d never understand, it was a connection that distance, time and heartache had not severed.

  Deciding to act on it, or not, that was where free will came in. She’d chosen to leave. She’d chosen to return. While he was choosing to...bide his time till he’d cleared his head.

  He rapped a knuckle on the edge of her bench and said, “I’m late. Have to go.” Then he turned and walked back down the hall.

  “I won’t tell her you came by!” Mercy called.

  Rafe waved in response. Fine with him. He wouldn’t know how to explain that conversation to Sable if he’d wanted to.

  He’d go to Sydney, pick up the Pontiac, drive it to Melbourne. A good long car ride was the best way he knew how to clear his head.

  He might even get onto the mob in Dubai, negotiate an extension. He could check in with his London branch for a few days, leaving Janie to keep on with the prep on the upcoming Pumpkin Festival car show that was happening a few weeks after that.

  Give himself some solid time to put his decision into words he could live with.

  Sable would just have to wait.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TWO DAYS LATER Rafe rumbled through Radiance in the restored Pontiac Parisienne he’d driven down from Sydney.

  The window was down, his arm resting on the windowsill, as he breathed in the crisp autumn air. No other place in the world smelled quite like it. Fresh, clear, with a tangy edge.

  Home.

  But it wasn’t the promise of clean air that had him driving a smidge o
ver the speed limit the entire way back from Sydney. Or the promise of light traffic making him take a left at Albury rather than taking the straight run to Melbourne. It also wasn’t the reason he wasn’t on his way to Dubai, or London for that matter.

  It was the same reason he’d been on edge for the past two days, spending more time under cars than buying or selling, only blowing his calendar out all the more.

  He needed to get the Sable issue sorted.

  His phone burred. He answered, hands free. “Janie, what’s up?”

  “Wanda rang, she said she saw you trundling down the avenue, and could I send you her way as soon as possible as her oven light isn’t working. Aren’t you meant to be in Abi Dhabi?”

  “Dubai.” He slowed as a sprinkling of swallows swerved from the treetops and into his lane before flittering off into the sky. “I’m sending Jake from the London office in my stead.”

  Janie’s silence was telling.

  “You still there?”

  “Sorry, just had to pick myself up off the floor. Did you just say that you’re...delegating?”

  Rafe rolled out a shoulder and ducked to look through the low-slung branches of an elm to see if he could find a familiar blonde head in any of the Laurel Avenue shops. “It seems so.”

  “Am I allowed to hypothesise why?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay. Look, I wasn’t going to say anything, but since your entire world is going topsy-turvy already, you should probably know it’s been a little rough here for her the last couple of days.”

  Rafe didn’t need to ask to know who the “her” was. “How so?”

  “Some American tourist recognised Sable, walked up and snapped a photo right in her face while she was eating a pie at Bear’s. Big Bear lived up to his name, shooed them out, gave them the fright of their lives, but it was all over the tabloids within the hour. Headlines such as Shamed Star’s Girlfriend Celeb Shutterbug Sable Sutton Seen Stuffing Her Face in Small-Town Hideaway as She Laments Loss of Famous Foodie Lover.”

  Rafe flinched. It was rough stuff. On many levels. Not least of which the jumbled alliteration. “Please tell me you’re reading that and didn’t memorise it.”

  “Want to hear the others?”

  “That would be a no.”

  “Okay. There’s more. Trudy refused service at the wool store, telling Sable she didn’t belong around here.”

  Rafe tapped the brake hard enough the car nearly stalled.

  “I took care of it,” said Janie. “Swung by when I was picking up wood from the hardware store to start making the signs for the car show, asked Trudy what the hell she thought she was doing. She blanched like an almond. Said she’d heard Wanda tell Carleen that Sable had done you wrong, and this town looks after its own. I told her Sable was our own and to send her some free wool in apology. The good stuff.”

  “You did that?”

  “Yup.”

  This from Janie, who would never leave her cosy little cave if she had the choice. If he wasn’t around to nudge her. Make her feel safe. “I’m impressed.”

  “We Thornes stick together. And now that I’m soon to be an auntie it was my duty.”

  Rafe tapped the brakes hard that time, the tyres protesting. He glanced in the rear-view mirror to find not a soul behind him the entire way up the avenue. “What’s that, now?”

  “Ah, right. The auntie thing. Ed let slip when I had him over for dinner.”

  “Ed?” he parroted. She’d had Ed over for dinner? And, “What the hell does Ed know about anything?”

  “Turns out he’d forgotten something at work the other night and when he turned up you and Sable were there. Talking. About what? said I, being sisterly and nosey. You should have seen his face when he realised he should have kept mum! So to speak. But it was too late. I grilled him. Poor guy folded like a pack of cards. So, you guys are thinking about making a baby, eh? That was fast.”

  Small towns, Rafe thought, his inner voice a fractious growl.

  Sable’s words from the other night came swimming back to him. Her dream to be somewhere with the comfort of community but also the private space to figure things out on her own. Somewhere to “disappear and simply live”.

  And in that moment he got it. All of it. Like a snapshot framed on the mantelpiece. He saw her dream as she imagined it, with a clarity that hit like a punch in the gut.

  Rafe thanked everything good and holy when he hit the red light in town so that he could slow to a stop. Running a finger over his bottom lip, he tried to find the right words. Then decided the words weren’t for Janie. Not yet. “You home this arvo? I’ll swing by then. For a chat. About a brother’s right to privacy. And staying away from Ed McGlinty.”

  In that moment, he felt a flash of affinity with Mercy.

  Janie huffed out a breath. “Fine. I’ll make a cake. Now go throw stones at her window. Or climb her tower. Or whatever it is you old folk do to woo one another.”

  “I’m not wooing her. And I’m not old.”

  “Whatever.” With that his sister hung up.

  The light turned green, the engine caught, rumbled winningly as it picked up pace. Rafe kept the speed down, checking every shopfront till he saw her.

  In Wanda’s Cakes and Stuff, of all places. Her hands making pictures in the air as she chatted with someone behind the counter.

  Something inside him clutched, tightened, and released. Something that had been coiled in a hard knot since he’d driven out of town. Mercy’s words, “She’s not here,” playing in his head like a broken record. As if deep down inside, he hadn’t been entirely sure she’d be there when he got back.

  He needed to drop the car at Radiance Restorations, fill it up before getting it to Melbourne, but instead he parked outside Bear’s, eased himself up and leapt over the door.

  “Look at her go.”

  Rafe turned, found Bear leaning in the doorway of The Coffee Shop. “Hey,” he said, moving in to shake hands.

  “Don’t let that fool you,” said Bear. “They’ve been giving her an awful hard time since you’ve been gone.”

  “It’s been two days.”

  “A lot can happen in two days.”

  Rafe turned, saw it was Wanda herself who Sable was trying to charm. Though Wanda, arms folded, was having none of it. “What is she even doing over there?”

  Bear slanted him a look. “You mean trying to charm the hostile locals when she’d much rather be enjoying a quiet coffee in my much nicer establishment? Come on, mate. Think.”

  Rafe didn’t need to think. He knew.

  From Janie’s report Sable had every excuse for keeping out of the public eye right now, but knowing how hard he’d found being the subject of town talk as a kid, she was out there, smoothing the way. For him.

  As if she was a ripple in the fabric of his existence. Rather than a seismic event.

  Rafe took off across the street, pausing to let a single car cruise down the avenue, then jogging the rest of the way.

  A half-dozen faces looked up from their conversations as he whipped open the door. Sable turned at the last. Her hands mid move. Her mouth half open.

  Then she smiled. Her eyes lighting up, as if inside someone had flipped a switch.

  As if he’d flipped a switch.

  Rafe’s lungs emptied in a rush. He felt more than a little light-headed. And the urge to go to her, to drag her into his arms and kiss her till that sunshine filled him too was strong enough he had to press his shoes into the floor.

  Because that wasn’t why she was back. It would only complicate things. Just as she said.

  Only, now, none of that held quite the same sway as it did a week ago. None of it was enough to negate the power, the charge he felt just being near her. Making his fine life look two-dimensional in comparison.

  “Rafe Thorne!” That was Wanda
, coming at him with open arms. She enveloped him in a hug that smelled like lanolin and icing sugar. “You here to fix my oven light?”

  “Not today, Wanda. I’ve got a sweet Pontiac outside and I promised Sable a ride.”

  The customers all craned their heads, oohing and aahing at the slick car gleaming across the road. One of them muttered, “I bet he did.”

  And Sable’s smile slipped, her gaze lowering. As if all the work she’d put in the past two days to try to smooth things over, for him, had been for nought.

  Done with overthinking things, Rafe did the one thing that had always served him, had never let him down. He followed his gut.

  Holding out a hand, he said, “You ready, Sutton?”

  Sable looked at it, then at the customers who were all watching the interplay with bated breath, then back at him.

  He gave her a nod. A subtle wink. All but daring her to take it.

  Finally, her hand reached out, cool fingers sliding into his as the sleeve of her jacket slipped back, revealing her wrist. And the fine, gold bracelet wrapped around it.

  When she saw the angle of his gaze, she went to pull her sleeve back down, but he took his chance to tug her in close, tuck her hand into his elbow.

  He ran a thumb over the fine gold chain. Turned her wrist to find the arrow he’d known would be there.

  And something inside him locked into place.

  Like a lost puzzle piece that had been missing for years.

  He opened the door for her, made room for her to walk through before him. Together they crossed the street. Hips bumping. His hand still resting over hers, his thumb tracing the curve of her wrist.

  Bear gave them a smile before he slipped back inside his shop.

  A few locals walking down the street slowed, gave them a long look before heading on their way.

  “Everyone’s staring at us,” she murmured as they reached the car, taking care to slip her hand out from the crook of his arm.

  “Nah,” he said, no longer sure what to do with his arm, now she wasn’t holding on. “They’re staring at you.”