‘Hmm?’ Rachael finally pulled a hairbrush out of her bag and started running it through her unruly dark-brown curls. ‘Did Jo agree to this? I mean, I never really knew her that well, but given how much you screwed up her life—’
Stephen winced. ‘Yeah. I get what you mean. Scott’s worked it all out so she must have.’
‘Hmm . . .’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘So what’s the deal with this woman, Bridgett, that you’re having a fling with? You sleep with her to get this restaurant deal?’
‘Jesus Christ, Rachael! What do you think I am?’
Rachael shrugged. ‘She’s hot. Okay, yeah, she’s a cougar, but she’s classy and sexy and it looked like she wanted to get into your pants when she visited yesterday. It wasn’t hard to put everything together.’
‘It’s not like that. Yeah, we’re sleeping together, but it’s only casual and that only happened after we decided we wanted to make a deal in the first place.’ Stephen shifted uncomfortably in the driver’s seat. Talking about Jo Blaine with his sister was one thing. Talking about the woman he was breaking the ice with after his split from Lauren was something else entirely.
Thankfully, Rachael decided to let the subject drop for a couple of minutes, her expression thoughtful as she looked out the window. In fact, he’d almost fully relaxed back into his earlier good mood, contemplating where he’d take Bridgett to celebrate their business deal, when Rachael spoke again.
‘Stephen?’
‘Hmm?’
‘You said you were looking after Jo’s cat.’
Stephen nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘But you’ve been down the farm for the weekend.’
He shrugged. ‘Yeah, but Mike’s in town, remember?’
Rachael just gave him a look. Mike was their older brother by two years. He lived overseas, mainly London, and to this day, no one really knew what he did there to make a living other than itinerant bar work. ‘Mike,’ she repeated. ‘I thought he’d gone home already.’
‘Nah. Said he’d stick around for a while longer. He said he’d call you in the next couple of days.’
‘So . . . Mike’s taking care of Jo’s apartment?’
Stephen nodded. ‘Yeah. He’s taking care of things. It’s all good.’
Rachael snorted. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’
Jo looked down at the naked man lying facedown at her feet, feeling her blood bubble and hiss.
She didn’t give a shit if this dude looked like a Hollywood fantasy come to life or had an arse that would make Thor jealous. As far as she was concerned, he was male, he was in her bedroom and she wanted him gone.
‘Who the hell are you?’ she repeated, giving him a prod in the ribs with her toe.
‘Who the hell am I?’ The man rolled over, looking up incredulously at her with brilliant blue eyes. ‘I’m the man who’s just sprained his dick on a hardwood floor. Who the hell are you?’ His voice was baritone and he had a broad Australian accent.
Jo added that to his angular chiseled features, unruly curly blond hair . . . and felt herself getting queasy. ‘Oh no . . . You’re—’ She backed up. ‘Oh no, no, no, no, no! This is not happening.’
‘What’s not happening? You didn’t answer me. Who the hell are you?’ Mike Hardy got to his feet, seemingly completely unconcerned about the fact that he was bare-arsed naked.
Jo stared at him, not quite believing her ears. ‘Me? Jo Blaine. Remember me? I used to live on your farm. For sixteen years. And this is my apartment, so you can leave right now!’
Mike looked her up and down, frowning. ‘You don’t look like Jo Blaine.’
‘And you won’t look much like Michael Hardy once I’m finished with you! How did you get a key? Who gave it to you? Amy? Scott?’
Mike Hardy scowled, running a hand over his head. ‘Stephen. Who else?’
Jo’s jaw dropped. This had to be some kind of twilight zone. ‘Stephen? You mean your brother Stephen? Stephen Hardy Stephen?’
Mike looked at her like she’d just asked him if the sky was blue in summer. ‘Well, yeah. Who else?’
‘Who else?!’
‘Jo?’
Jo spun around at the sound of her best friend Scott’s voice. ‘Down here!’
There was the thud of heavy footfalls and seconds later all six-foot-three of Scott Watanabe skidded around the corner, his Yakuza-gangster-meets-Eurasian-god features screwed up into a horrified grimace that got even more pronounced when he took in the scene. ‘Mike? Where the fuck are your clothes, man? Jo, I’m so sorry. Jesus Christ!’
‘She came in here and woke me up!’
‘I don’t give a shit if she lit your arse on fire! Put some clothes on and get the hell out of there. I told Stephen that no one was supposed to sleep in Jo’s room.’
‘I don’t remember telling you that anyone could stay here, let alone your goddamn cousin!’ Jo heard her voice rising and tried to calm down. Tiredness, disorientation, and now sheer panic, were all rolling into one big urge to scream.
She didn’t want to see Stephen Hardy again! She’d spent her life running away from what happened fourteen years ago; she didn’t need it creeping up on her now.
‘You didn’t say we could stay? What’s with that, dude?’ Mike added his two cents with so much indignation that both Jo and Scott turned to stare at him.
‘I don’t believe this is happening.’ Jo shook her head in stunned bemusement.
Scott spared a frustrated gawp at his cousin before turning on Jo. ‘What the hell are you doing here? You were supposed to be in Brazil!’
‘I’m not! I’m here!’
‘Yeah! But—’
‘But nothing! Just fix it!’
Boomba yowled in protest, walking straight past Jo to rub himself against Mike’s legs. Mike picked him up as if he wasn’t stark naked, while the cat started purring loud enough to cause tectonic plate movement.
The surrealness of the scene, the exhaustion, the everything finally became too much. Jo took a step backwards. ‘Scott, I just want you to make this all go away. Him I can deal with.’ She pointed at Mike while still looking at Scott. ‘But Stephen Hardy?’ She felt a punch of dread curling around her anger, mixing with a bout of anxiety that had its roots in a long-ago day when she’d been twelve years old.
Scott opened his mouth and then snapped it shut, then held his hands in front of him, palms out. ‘You weren’t supposed to be here so I didn’t think it would be a big deal. He broke up with his girlfriend, Lauren, and—’
‘Not a big deal?!’ There was only a small chance the people in remote islands in the Pacific didn’t hear Jo’s roar. ‘What part of Stephen Hardy living in my house didn’t you think would be a big deal? Tell me that?!’
‘You weren’t supposed to be home!’ Scott shot back at her, his baritone climbing the decibel ladder with much more ease than hers. He dropped his hands and inhaled deeply. ‘Look . . . look, this never should have happened. Let me call Stephen now. I’ll fix it.’
‘You’d better!’ Jo felt her stomach clench at the thought of seeing Stephen again. The old awkward nervousness she’d felt through her entire childhood came to the fore, unfettered by her usual barriers due to shock and tiredness.
For a couple of seconds she felt herself turning back into the overly tall, overweight poor kid hiding out on the Hardy farm with Amy, watching Stephen from afar. She’d spent years doing it. She’d had the opportunity. Her dad worked for his, she’d grown up on his family property, or at least she had until she was sixteen.
The twinge of that old anxiety, the memory of her stupid crush and where it had led, rekindled her temper to inferno level. ‘I want him gone.’ She pointed a finger behind her at Mike. ‘And I want him gone. I want my house cleaned up and returned back to the way I left it, and if the toilet seat is up when I come back home, by God there will be hell to pay. And—’ she held up her hand when Scott began to speak. ‘You owe me an apology.’
/> ‘Yeah, it sounds like you do, mate. This all sounds pretty heinous,’ Mike Hardy piped up from behind her.
In one swift movement Scott walked forward past Jo and slammed her bedroom door closed on his cousin’s face before turning back to Jo, his expression a picture of desperate conciliation.
‘I’m seriously sorry. You’ve got to know I didn’t realise this would happen, right? You know this wasn’t deliberate?’ He reached over to tug at a stray strand of her short red hair.
‘Yeah.’ She exhaled, feeling the anger leaving as another wave of exhaustion whacked her in the solar plexus. All she wanted to do was crawl into her bed and sleep for another three years, but oh wait, Mike Hardy had been using it. An insidious voice, long buried in the past, whispered she wouldn’t mind so much if it had been Stephen, but she squashed it down with a solid mental stomp. Stephen Hardy, whatever he looked like and whoever he was nowadays, was well and truly on her shit list.
‘Can you at least try to forgive me?’ Scott looked so miserably apologetic that she felt herself softening. They never fought. Oh, she might threaten to rip his head off every now and then and vice versa, but that was normal stuff. After over eighteen years of friendship and everything they’d been through, it was pretty much expected.
She felt the tension in her shoulders relaxing a little. ‘Scott, I’ll forgive you as long as you sort this all out by the time I get back.’
‘Where are you going? You’ve got to be seriously jetlagged.’
‘Amy’s,’ Jo answered automatically. Scott and her sister equalled home. They were why she kept coming back and she always checked in with the two of them the minute she got in and had a decent shower and sleep. ‘Don’t let Boomba eat anything else today. He’s fatter than a cow.’
Relief oozed from Scott’s pores. ‘Yeah. Okay. I’ll sort it. When you come home, this place will be spotless. I’ve got a gallery opening tonight. I’m exhibiting with Myf. How about I meet you back here at six to take you to the show? You think you’ll be awake enough?’
Jo nodded, looking at her watch. It was eight in the morning on a Saturday. She was fully intending to catch up on some sleep at her sister’s before guilt-tripping Amy into opening up her beauty salon so she could transform the feral monster Jo had become over the past eight weeks into something respectable. ‘Should be. This is all a bit much right now. I don’t know what to make of things, but I want to talk to you, Stephen and Mike later, all right?’ She would frankly rather throw herself off a bridge than see Stephen Hardy again, but he’d been living in her house for who knows how long and it would be cowardly to leave things at this.
If she was honest, she also wanted to see him again to remind herself why her childhood crush had been so ridiculous. Okay, so his near-identical brother still looked like a goddamn male model, but with luck Stephen would have a spare tyre and would be balder than a baby’s backside.
Scott ran a hand through his long straight black hair, making it even messier than it had been before. ‘Sure, babe. We’ll meet you here.’ He bridged the distance between them, braving imminent emasculation to give her a tight warm hug, enveloping her in his familiar sandalwood scent, pressing a soft kiss on her forehead. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Yeah, yeah. I’ll kick your arse with pleasure once I’m less hairy and more human.’ She fought the prickle in her eyes, squeezing him back tightly, momentarily feeling her bone-weary body give in and relax against him for a couple of seconds before she pushed back, picked up her bike helmet and walked out the door.
Stephen slammed through the front door of Jo Blaine’s apartment, his adrenaline spiked to the max, his cousin and his brother in his sights.
He’d been halfway to Perth airport with Rachael when he’d fielded Scott’s call and it had been a monumental effort to play it cool and collected long enough to get his sister on to the plane. The minute he’d waved her off, he’d headed for Fremantle with the intention of creating mayhem.
How could he be in this situation? The whole house-sitting deal had been meant to help Jo, not upset her so much Scott had said she’d left this morning and hadn’t come back. Just that thought alone added to Stephen’s volume as he yelled out Scott and Mike’s names.
‘Here,’ Mike bellowed back. ‘And keep it down, you wanker, I’m trying to fix something here.’
Stephen strode into the kitchen. ‘What do you mean, keep it down? You’re lucky if I don’t kill you—what the hell are you doing?’ He glared at his brother, who was sitting on the floor, inspecting the sucking end of a vacuum cleaner as if it was something NASA had invented to confuse him.
Mike looked up at him with a scowl. ‘Fixing the bloody vacuum cleaner. What do you think?’
‘It wasn’t broken!’
‘Yeah. Well that was before I accidentally sucked up a sock this fat-arsed puffball dropped in front of it.’ Mike jerked his head at the giant grey cat Stephen had been cohabiting with.
Stephen could feel his brain beginning to boil. In fact, he was dead certain steam was billowing out of his ears. ‘You’re blaming a cat for—’
‘Oh thank God, you’re here.’
Stephen turned on his heel to find his cousin behind him. Scott was carrying a bucket brimming with sloshing water in one hand and a mop in another. Any other time, seeing a hardened war photographer like Scott looking so domestic would be hilarious, but right now Stephen didn’t feel like laughing. ‘What the hell, Scott! Tell me you haven’t screwed things up for me with Jo even more than they were before.’
‘Yeah. About that. Ask this dickhead for the details.’ Scott walked by him, heading for the laundry, giving Mike a kick as he went.
Mike yelped, springing to his feet. ‘What the hell, man? We’ve had this out already. I’d had a big night with my old mates and I wasn’t thinking. I just headed for the nearest bed!’
‘The nearest bed’s mine,’ Stephen said.
Mike shrugged. ‘Yeah. But I had to make a right turn for that. Jo’s room was at the end of the hall. It must have made sense at the time.’
‘I’m going to make sense of your head in a minute.’ Stephen growled. When Scott and Amy Blaine had approached him with this whole deal, the only condition had been that Jo’s bedroom was off-limits and he’d stuck to it, respecting her privacy. ‘No wonder she was pissed off.’
‘Understatement.’ Scott’s voice echoed from the laundry over the sound of him pressing buttons on the washing machine. ‘He was stark naked when she found him.’
Stephen closed his eyes and counted to ten, feeling all of the optimism he’d been harbouring first thing this morning smash to pieces at his feet.
After everything that had happened with his ex-girlfriend, this had been his way of trying to go back and fix what he could from his past. This was meant to be his way of making something right and he’d be buggered if Mike or Scott were going to screw it up.
He hauled in a deep breath, shoved all thoughts of throwing his brother off Jo’s balcony into the Swan River out of his mind, and focused. ‘All right. Scott?’
‘Yeah?’
‘When’s she going to be back? How much time have we got?’
Scott came back into view. ‘A couple of hours at the most.’
Stephen watched as Boomba strutted into the room, sock in mouth, and dropped it directly in front of the dismantled vacuum cleaner.
Stephen spared the cat an exasperated glance before turning to his brother and Scott, who was now holding another clean bucket of water. ‘All right. You two had better come up with some kind of way to fix this mess and fix it fast.’
Scott nodded curtly. ‘Yeah, all right.’
‘That’s what I was trying to do when you came in.’ Mike held the vacuum cleaner hose up in the air.
Stephen wrenched it out of his hand. ‘Give me that before you kill yourself with it.’
‘Suits me fine. Knock yourself out.’ Mike crossed his arms over his chest, looking smug for the few seconds before Scott handed him t
he mop.
‘Bathroom probably needs cleaning. I’d get cracking if I were you, mate.’
Amy Blaine stood behind Jo’s plush pink swivel chair, surveying her sister’s overgrown pixie cut critically in the bevelled glass mirror in front of them. ‘The red has really faded this time, m’love. You’re better off going back to brunette with a few red foils. We’ll start on your colour, and then get going with everything else. You look bloody awful.’
‘Insult me all you want. I’m still pissed off with you,’ Jo grumbled, but Amy had already bustled off to mix her colour, heels clicking over the salon’s black-and-white tiles.
Jo had ridden her vintage Triumph Bonneville up to Amy’s tiny home eight hours ago, breathing buckets of fire and brimstone. The flames had been stifled immediately with an exuberant hug, and completely extinguished with a cup of tea and a slice of sinfully rich chocolate cake. Before Jo had swallowed the last crumb she’d been shoved into the shower then put to bed while Amy washed and dried her plain-awful clothes.
Now, hours later, Jo was sitting in Amy’s retro beauty salon getting the full treatment.
Her tastebuds were again being bribed, this time with a glass of champagne and her shoulders relaxed from a heavenly shoulder-and-head massage while Amy proceeded to scrutinise and criticise every inch of her person in minute detail before springing into action. Knowing the drill, Jo gave in and submitted herself to the process with no more than a token protest and a satisfied tummy gurgle. Being upset with Amy was like being upset with a box of marshmallows in a kitten factory. Amy was simply that cute. Always had been. It was a quality that had kept the two of them sane through the years of their dad’s alcoholic rages, pretending everything was fine in public while Jo was harbouring various bruises, cracked ribs and, in one instance, a broken collarbone. Amy’s cheer had carried them through the horrible months after they’d first run away from home and then beyond.
Unforgettable You: Destiny Romance Page 2