by Leah Ashton
“No,” she said, reluctantly. She looked at her feet again. “Sorry to be stupid about the dead guy’s boots before. Should we go get a pair for me now?”
Clearly Damon wasn’t carrying her piggyback all the way to Laverton.
He smiled. “That was the other piece of good news,” he said, and unzipped the bag. “I found you a pair of shoes.”
Chapter Seven
The shoes – a pair of Suz’s runners – were a size too small, but some quick work with his knife had Beth’s toes peeking out the front, decorated with the Band-Aids he’d also found in the homestead’s bathroom.
Beth put her hands on her hips and wiggled her toes. “Perfect,” she said.
Damon handed her the other things he’d grabbed for her in the house – a pair of shorts, and a hair elastic.
“Oh, how did you know?” she exclaimed, immediately tying her hair back into a ponytail and then turned away to pull the shorts on beneath her skirt. It had been the Band-Aids he’d been searching for in the bathroom, knowing her painful feet would otherwise severely lengthen their journey time, but the hair tie had been lying on the sink and he’d grabbed it the instant he saw it.
She turned back with a bemused grin after she’d shimmied the colourful skirt off over her hips and then shoved it behind the 44-gallon drum with her discarded heels. “You probably think I’m being an idiot for being so modest, given …”
Given he’d had his hands in her underwear?
He didn’t need to say what they were both thinking. She blushed.
“I’d never think you’re an idiot,” he said truthfully. “And you do whatever makes you comfortable.”
She gave him a look he couldn’t interpret, then started fiddling with the hem of the shorts. “These are a bit small,” she said, he suspected just to say something, as she obviously knew they were a more practical option for a two-day hike than her huge skirt.
He didn’t say anything, but he thought her legs looked amazing in those shorts. But given she’d aborted their kiss before, he thought it best to remain silent.
He hadn’t had time to wonder why she’d done that as he’d methodically moved through Knife’s homestead, going room to room searching for a phone, and once he couldn’t find one – supplies for their hike.
But the fact he hadn’t had time to think about it didn’t mean he hadn’t. Because her rejection burned – which was fucking embarrassing, wasn’t it? Here he was, trying to save their lives, and he was bloody hurt about a fucking kiss?
“Let’s get moving,” he said roughly, and swung the backpack onto his shoulders.
“We’ve got at least thirty minutes, maybe closer to an hour, before Gaff or anyone else makes it to the homestead,” Damon explained as they walked briskly in the scrub, approximately parallel to the station’s long, long driveway. “It’s too hot to walk far during the day, so we’ll do most of our walking tonight. But we need to put distance between us and them now, it’s the biggest advantage we have. We’ll rest later.”
“Why rest at all?” Beth asked, taking bigger than usual strides to keep up with him. “Isn’t it better to get to Laverton as fast as we can?”
She rubbed sunscreen onto her face and neck as she walked, courtesy of a little roll-on bottle Damon had found in the house.
“We can’t walk as far in this heat as we can in the cool at night, and we’ll need a crazy amount of water to stay hydrated if we’re walking for kilometres during the day. We just don’t have that. We need to conserve our water and our energy as I’ve only got a few litres in the backpack, and that needs to last us – worst case – two days. I hope we’ll come across a windmill and stock water troughs to replenish our supplies, but we can’t rely on that.”
“Is this a farm?” Beth asked, surprised. “I haven’t seen any livestock.”
She thought of farms as being neat paddocks of crops, or rolling fields dotted with sheep.
“Absolutely. Tiger Snake Station runs several thousand head of cattle.”
“And the bikies look after them?”
Damon shook his head. “Nope,” he laughed. “There’s a station manager, but his cottage is maybe fifty kilometres from here.”
“Fifty kilometres?” Beth asked, stunned. “How big is this place?”
“About 250,000 hectares, give or take. This driveway is over thirty kilometres long, and takes us all the way to Laverton – the station nearly backs onto the town site.”
That meant they were on Notechi land all the way to Laverton. That was not reassuring at all.
“Is it safe for us to be walking so close to the driveway?” The landscape was so sparse, there was little cover between them and the gravel road, and while they were maybe fifty metres from it, the low vegetation between them and the road barely obscured the view. Anyone driving along could see them as easily as she and Damon could see them.
“Absolutely safe,” Damon said, with total confidence. “We’ll see a vehicle approaching from over a kilometre away. The gravel dust cloud will give them away, as well as the noise. Plenty of time for us to hide. And remember, they don’t know exactly where we’ve gone. They’ll guess we’re walking this way, but the only way they’ll approach us without us knowing would be on foot, and tracking people is fucking hard – and that’s if you know what you’re doing.”
He said that with the tone of much experience.
“So, you know how to track people?” Beth asked.
Damon nodded. He’d slowed his pace slightly, because Beth was tiring beneath the suffocating heat, her breathing heavy. She walked a couple of days a week with her sister, but this was hardly a chatty stroll around the lake near her duplex in Mount Hawthorn, and she was struggling.
But while she appreciated that he’d reduced the pace, she wasn’t about to ask for a rest. She wanted to be as far from that homestead as possible before she stopped walking.
“Before I joined undercover ops, I was in the tactical group at Elite SWAT. One of the skills we’re brought in for is tracking. It’s handy for chasing bad guys and for finding lost people.”
In contrast to her, Damon was talking effortlessly, without a hint of exertion. He was still wearing his black T-shirt, jeans, and boots from last night, although he’d used his knife to fashion his jeans into knee-length shorts. That should’ve looked absolutely terrible – and it wouldn’t matter if it did as it was immensely practical – but it didn’t. Damon’s tanned, muscular calves looked pretty damn fantastic beneath the ragged denim hem of his makeshift shorts. In fact, the man looked pretty damn fantastic all over – with his T-shirt clinging to all his lovely muscles with perspiration, and his dark hair slicked back from his face.
But more importantly, he looked extremely capable.
“Tracking someone takes time, and even once you find the trail, it’s a slow process. As long as we’re walking and putting distance between us, we have a huge advantage. And once we have a bit of distance on them, I’ll worry about brushing over our tracks, and laying a few false trails – but I’ll do that once we’ve found where we’re going to bunker down for the rest of the day.”
She was curious about his tactics to foil the Notechi, but the heat had now fully depleted her ability to both talk and walk, and right now, the latter was far more important.
There was no track for them to follow, instead they weaved between sparsely scattered shrubs and mulga trees. The dirt they walked on was dry, firm, and red and their feet kicked up dust from the parched land with every step. Damon lead the way, walking a couple of steps ahead of Beth, and she simply followed behind, her sneakers blurring the indentations his heavy boots made in the dirt.
As they walked, Beth realised she’d been more surprised that Damon had been her ex-student than she was that he was a police officer. Right from the start, she’d viewed his name with scepticism – and maybe that was just because she subconsciously had remembered him from their old high school – but she’d also never truly believed he was a bikie. He w
as a totally different type of man to Knife, or Gaff, or the other nameless Notechi henchmen. Knife was just pure, terrifying brutality, and Gaff was clearly his right-hand man. The other men had just been low-ranking, malleable – and ultimately disposable.
Now, Damon – Damon was powerful, strong – and lethal. She’d witnessed him kill two men, yet she still trusted him completely. And she’d done so before she’d known he was on the right side of the law. Every action he’d demonstrated since she’d met him at the bar – from ensuring her consent before taking her home, to giving her his ID to send to her sister, to reassuring her in the long drive in the SUV, and then attempting to protect her despite impossible odds in the homestead – had told her he was a good man.
Then after he’d dispatched those two bikies in front of her, his skills had revealed his true identity, even if her initial guess of super spy had been just slightly off base.
Now that they’d stopped talking, Beth became more aware of the sounds around them. The loudest was definitely their own feet, scrunching across the landscape. But there were other sounds too – like the call of the occasional bird and the rustling of unseen wildlife taking cover as they approached. Beth hadn’t seen any of those second noise-makers, for which she was glad. Many – if not most – would be snakes, she guessed, and she’d rather not make their acquaintance.
They stopped briefly beneath the shade of a tree which looked like simply a taller version of the shrubs that surrounded it, and Damon offered her a drink – one of those flimsy bottles of water that comes in packs of two dozen at the supermarket. Her bottle crackled as she drank, but Damon wouldn’t let her drink as much as she wanted.
“Sorry,” he said. “We need to ration our water.”
She understood, and she’d known that before she’d started to drink, but it had still been hard to stop drinking, her body craving so much more to quench her thirst. They started off again after not even a couple of minutes’ rest.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” she reassured him. Then added, “If you disregard the running from murderous bikies thing.”
Damon laughed. “There is that,” he said, and gave her a look over his shoulder that was playful and sexy – and all to brief – as then he was back to focusing on finding them a safe path to follow, and their silent trek recommenced.
So, while his career may not have been a surprise, their shared past was definitely unexpected.
As she walked behind this man who she’d once taught Cartesian equations and vector calculus, it was disconcerting melding the man in the now with the boy from her past. And he absolutely had been a boy thirteen years ago, at least as far as how Beth had perceived him. She hadn’t recognised him – she certainly hadn’t remembered his name until he introduced himself, even when she hadn’t believed his name was Todd. He was just one of – she quickly tried to calculate it – maybe two thousand kids she’d taught in her career? – although now she knew his name he was one (of many) who she remembered from that school as talented, but unfocused. But it was only his name she’d recognised – the man ahead of her now bore little resemblance to the boy once in her classroom.
He was thirty now, and she knew there was nothing wrong with her having a relationship with him. Although calling what they had a relationship would be a stretch.
All they had was a few hot minutes and that was that. And that was all she’d wanted from him last night when they’d met – albeit she would have preferred a lot more hot minutes and a lot less kidnapping – and there was no reason for that to have changed now. Sure, they now had this awful shared experience out here in the desert, but that didn’t mean they’d pick up where they’d left off when they were safe.
And, she realised as she pushed sweat soaked strands of loose hair behind her ears, she now did feel like getting home safe was rapidly increasing in likelihood. An hour ago, she was pretty sure she was going to die, but now, she reckoned it was about fifty–fifty. And given the body count back at the homestead, she’d take that.
Damon had been walking on an angle away from the gravel road for some time now, and he came to a stop beside a stubby tree. It wasn’t much of a tree – not much taller than Damon – but its shade was solid and tempting, and Beth practically collapsed onto the dirt when Damon dumped the backpack down beneath it.
“Oh, thank God,” she said and lay down, uncaring about the dirt as she finally allowed the exhaustion she’d been forced to ignore overtake her.
“Have a drink,” he said, “Not too much. I’m going to cover our tracks, won’t be long.”
With that, he was gone, but Beth was too tired to even open the backpack.
The next thing she knew, Damon was gently shaking her awake.
“Beth,” he said, close to her ear.
Her eyes fluttered open, and it took her a moment to remember exactly where she was, although her uncomfortable bed of dirt and at least one pokey twig soon reminded her. Damon was on his knees beside her, leaning close, as if previous efforts to awaken her had been unsuccessful.
She met his gaze and he smiled. “We need to get moving soon,” he said. “And you need to eat.”
Still sleepy, she just gazed at him for a moment, and then longer. He was very handsome, even with a dirt smudge on his forehead. His hazel gaze was magnetic, and she found it impossible to look away. She reached up, tracing the pad of her finger along the grazes on one cheekbone. “Thank you for what you did in the house,” she said softly. “I’m sorry they hit you for trying to protect me.”
“It was instinctive,” he said, with a wry smile. “I couldn’t just sit there. Not that I could do anything with my hands tied.”
“Is that why you became a cop?” she asked, her fingers sliding from his cheek bone and along his jaw. He was perfectly still above her. “To protect people?”
His gaze became hard. “No,” he said firmly. “I’m not that noble, Beth.”
Then he moved away and unzipped the bag, his back to her.
Confused, Beth sat up, and shimmied closer to him. He sat cross-legged, and handed her a protein bar. “These aren’t the best tasting,” he said gruffly. “But they were the lightest, highest energy food I could find in the house.”
Beth was just overwhelmingly grateful to have food to eat, she couldn’t care less what it tasted like.
“Why did you join the police force, then?” she asked.
He slanted a gaze at her. “Why were you in Northbridge looking to pick up last night?”
Beth blinked, stunned at the bite to his words.
“Why were you?”
“Heading home after a tough night of being a fake bikie,” he said. “There’s a club nearby that’s a Notechi hang out. I saw you from the street, sitting alone at the bar.”
“So, you knew who I was when you approached me?” she said, tearing off the wrapper from the bar.
“Of course,” he said, “Why else would I come in?”
“Maybe you regularly pick up lonely women?”
It annoyed her that she cared how he answered this.
“Maybe I do,” he said, teasing her.
“You probably do,” Beth said, not sure if she was teasing him back, or stating the truth. “You were pretty smooth. Bet you’ve had a lot of practise saying those lines that worked so well with me.”
He looked annoyed. “I do not,” he said firmly.
“So you were trying out new material on me?” she asked, then took a bite of her protein bar. It tasted like chocolate flavoured dirt, but it would do.
He’d finished his bar and shoved the wrapper into a zippered compartment at the front of the backpack.
“No,” he said. “I was walking down the street after spending hours with the shittiest people you can imagine, and I saw you – all perfect and pristine, alone at that bar. And then I realised who you were, that you were Miss Banfield from Year Twelve calculus, who wore sexy as hell heels and smelled like vanilla and—”
“I don’t we
ar heels like that anymore,” she interrupted stiffly. “So I’ll ruin that part of your fantasy. Last night was an aberration in the shoe department, I wear much more orthopaedic footwear to work now. And I don’t wear vanilla perfume—”
“No,” he said, “I know that. You wear something sultry now.”
“I wouldn’t call cinnamon notes sultry,” she laughed, or tried to. She’d guessed she’d made some fantasy come true, but hearing him say it was different, and uncomfortable.
“On you it is,” he said, and he moved closer to her. “I saw you there, and I had to talk to you. But then when I got near you it was …” He shook his head. “That’s never happened before. We didn’t even talk, Beth. We saw each other, and that was that.”
“And I made some teenage wet dream come true,” she said, and moved away to shove her wrapper into the backpack too. “Happy to help.”
“No—” he began, and she turned to raise her eyebrows at him. He conceded with half a smile. “Okay, yes, fine. That was part of it.”
“It was all of it,” she said, and she rushed on before he could try to refute her again. “And I can’t talk. You asked why I was out trying to pick up last night? Well, you’re right, I was. Because I’m a thirty-five-year-old divorcee, and my ex called me last night to tell me he’s met someone new. So, some hot, thirty-year-old random guy was just what I needed.”
“Happy to help,” he said, but he was clearly genuine about it. Then his smile fell away. “So, why wouldn’t you let me kiss you back at the homestead?”
“It didn’t feel right,” she said. She stood up, and attempted to dust the red dirt from her shorts. She noticed for the first time that the sun was low in the sky. It would be dark soon.
“It felt very right when you kissed me near the mining shaft.”
Beth shrugged. “Adrenalin,” she said dismissively. “Nothing more.”
“No,” he said firmly. “Kissing you is always more, Beth.”