A tango kiss.
Flutters in her stomach became a frenzied whirring of wings as those damned butterflies of desire soared higher and higher. As though everything had been leading to this moment where she would stay forever.
##
Dimly, the sound of the doorbell registered and Harry lifted his head as the front door opened and crashed against the wall. He stepped away from Bri as Vicky ran down the hall and moments later, jumped into his arms. “Daddy, did you miss me? I saw the movie with Fraser and we ate popcorn and Mr. Faulkner bought us drinks.”
Jim, Nancy and Fraser stopped beside the kitchen bench as if in a tableau and Harry realised the music was still playing. He picked up the remote and silenced it. Nancy smiled and bent to retie Fraser’s shoelace. Jim looked from Harry to Bri and grinned.
Harry looked at Bri too. Her colour was high, and her hair had fallen around her shoulders when his fingers had tunneled through it. Passion-plumped lips . . . dammit, she looked thoroughly well-kissed. And guilty, as though she’d been caught doing exactly what they’d done.
He liked the look on her. He wanted to see what she looked like when they reached the next stage, and the one after that . . .
He looked back at Jim. His friend was still grinning. The only way they could have incriminated themselves more clearly would be if he hadn’t just shaved. Scratch marks on Bri’s pink cheeks would have capped off the look. Thinking with his groin had drained the blood from his brain, but now Harry stepped into the silence. “Thanks for taking Vicky with you. Would you care for a drink?” Jim and Nancy exchanged that look old married couples gave each other, the one that said ‘whatever you want is fine with me, but let’s go home’.
“No, don’t let us interrupt your evening.”
Jim knew. He emphasised the action verb, but it was the knowing look, like the thumbs up he’d given Harry at kindy, that showed his approval. He’d probably claim credit for bringing Harry and Bri together after tonight, and perhaps he did deserve some credit. As much as Harry had denied there was anything between him and Bri, others had noticed their chemistry and cheered him on.
It was like a bucket of cold water in winter, but as much as Harry had enjoyed dancing with Bri, and kissing her, he wasn’t ready for another relationship. He doubted he ever would be, despite acknowledging Vicky’s need for a mother. It was too much to ask. He moved towards Jim.
Away from Bri. That’s what he needed to do; create distance between them so he could think clearly. He should never have dipped a toe into dancing with her. And definitely not pushed her to tango with him.
See what that led to, you fool.
Nancy took hold of Fraser’s hand. “Thanks, Harry, another time. It really is past bedtime for this young man. Nice to see you, Bri.” Efficiently she shepherded her husband and son out the front door, pausing at the top of the steps. “Bri, I just wanted to tell you how wonderful the kindy photos are. Can we recommend you to the primary school next year?”
“That’s kind of you, Nancy, but I’ll be gone in a few weeks. Thanks for thinking of me though.”
“We’ll see. I’ll mention you to the school admin, just in case. You never know what a few months will bring.” Nancy’s gaze flicked to Harry before she pinned a farewell smile in place.
Vicky yawned and waved from Harry’s arms as the Faulkners’ car backed out of the driveway, then he carried her upstairs, leaving Bri alone. What was she thinking about that kiss? What was he thinking? “Come on, Pumpkin, teeth, toilet and bed.”
He watched Vicky ply her toothbrush, and helped her into her pyjamas. Her eyes closed almost as her head touched the pillow and he sat watching her for several minutes. Was he wrong to see this attraction to Bri as a betrayal of what he’d shared with his wife? While he’d been kissing Bri, it had felt—really good. And then she’d reminded him how fleeting their time together would be.
A few weeks.
Perversely the thought of her leaving them was cold comfort.
They needed to talk. He switched on Vicky’s night light then headed downstairs. Bri stood at the kitchen bench packaging Anzac biscuits as though her life depended on finishing the job. Her stiff shoulders and refusal to meet his eyes sent a lump like a ton of lead crashing in his stomach. “Bri? Are you okay?”
“Of course. I just need to put these away and I’ll be done downstairs.”
“Look at me. Are you sorry I kissed you?” She folded plastic wrap over the last roll of biscuits and fiddled with it until he wanted to take the biscuits out of her hands and fling them on the bench, then make her look at him. Up close.
Finally she met his gaze. “No, I’m not sorry. But that’s a problem, because I shouldn’t feel so good about it. There’s no point.”
“What do you mean? We’re not talking about forever here.”
“No, but you’re a forever kind of man, and I’m leaving in a few weeks.”
“Indulge me, Bri. I’m a male and I don’t understand what you’re saying. Do you mean there’s no point starting a relationship when you’re going to leave anyway?”
“I mean I liked it too much, but I’m still leaving.”
“Don’t you want to kiss me again?”
“I do.”
He came around the bench intending to pick up where they’d left off, but she placed her palm on his chest and stopped his advance. She dragged in a deep breath and released it as a shaky sigh. “I want to kiss you so badly right now I can’t think of anything else. But I’m not going to. Because it wouldn’t be fair to any of us, especially Vicky.”
Harry stepped back and leaned against the fridge. Damn it. All this time, all the months since he’d lost Linda and his only thoughts had been for his daughter. In the midst of his grief, Vicky had been the only person he’d kept going for. She was his world and his reason for living each day.
Kissing Bri had changed something in him. Now, he wanted something else. He didn’t want another wife, but he wanted Bri.
Instead of reaching for her, he nodded. “If that’s what you want, I’ll say goodnight.”
“It’s for the best, Harry.”
Heart-heavy, he turned away and strode onto the back veranda. Pulling a beer from the beer fridge, he sat on the top step and looked up at the night sky peppered with stars, at the almost full moon cresting the top of shadowy trees. In the distance, an engine revved and voices rose in laughter. Out there, people lived.
Bri was right. He tipped the bottle to his mouth and downed a mouthful. He accepted she was right about Vicky, but he didn’t have to like it. But if they were careful and kept their kisses private, out of Vicky’s sight, avoiding her expectations, why couldn’t they have some fun?
For the first time since Linda had died he knew he was fully alive, not living some ghastly half-life where he felt nothing except pain, grief, unending sadness and loss.
Bri made him feel, and the sense that wanting to be with her was a betrayal of Linda and the love they had shared wasn’t holding up. Not when even his good mate’s approval couldn’t be clearer.
Harry wanted to feel. He wanted to kiss Bri again and know he was alive. Damn her telling him she wanted to kiss him, but she wouldn’t. He tipped the bottle towards his lips. Bri wanted to kiss him.
And Harry hadn’t agreed to a no-kissing policy.
Chapter Seventeen
Amy steered the Flying Doctor’s Cessna in a slow, shallow circuit around the mine while Dan pointed out the landing strip to Bri. “The air around the mine is heavy with dust so we have to land some distance away. Someone will drive out to meet us. Depending on their condition, our patient may be with them and we’ll have a quick turnaround.”
Bri looked through her porthole and lined up her camera, adjusting the setting for the bright day outside. A huge grey hole with three terraced roads angling up like a snail-shell scarred the northern face of the pit, and a pool of dirty water sat in the centre. A tail of heavy dust streamed out behind a truck as it travelled up the midd
le section of road, slowly dissolving from clear defined edges into a haze that hung over the water and softened the hard cut lines of the mine. The idea of anything soft down there was ridiculous. There was nothing soft about the mine or the landscape.
“No wonder Gramps’ lungs are so bad after all those years working in coal mines. Even when he no longer worked in confined spaces underground, above ground must have been something like that.” Anger flickered through Bri, sharp and bright as Gramps’ miner’s pick, but she clicked a steady stream of photos for her project. Profit above worker care could have been their mantra, but her skill would highlight the problems Gramps, and hundreds of miners like him, faced because of greedy, uncaring mining corporations.
Dan raised her spare camera and filmed an aerial video for her until Amy’s voice came through the headphones. “Buckle up, guys. We’re going in now.”
Bri cleared her throat as though the dust and dirt had somehow infiltrated the plane, buckled her belt and turned her attention to the broader landscape as the mine dropped away behind them. Today’s trip had coincided with her day off and the opportunity had been too good to pass up.
Especially after that kiss last night.
She’d told Harry only that she was photographing Dan and Amy as they went about their daily work for her project without adding details and escaped from the house. Now, far from Harry in the relative safety of the plane, she brushed a fingertip over her lower lip and closed her eyes as the memory of his kiss roared back in vivid colour. Like that movie Nana loved where waves crashed over the couple on the shore. Kissing Harry had been that kind of wonderful.
And a terrible idea.
What had got into her? This morning in the kitchen, it seemed as though Harry filled the space. Wherever she moved, she ran into him. Almost as though he was doing it deliberately to provoke her into reacting, into touching him if only to push him out of the way. Almost, she wished Harrison would return with his standoffish manner and monosyllabic replies. In the morning after the kiss, it hadn’t been Harry throwing up a barbed wire fence three metres tall, but Bri.
There was no turning back from the choice she had made. Kissing Harry had been foolish when they lived under the same roof; foolish and dangerous, and it would not, simply could not happen again. She felt the angle of the plane change and opened her eyes.
Ahead, twin ochre-coloured mesas provided colour with a dull, brownish-green fuzz along the southern side, away from the mine. Beyond the furthest mesa, stretching as far as the horizon, the land appeared flat, unrelieved in its never-ending redness. Bri knew that was an illusion. She’d driven through enough dips and rises and spinifex plains to know the land was devoid of human habitation, but not devoid of life.
She sat forward, pressing her nose against the window as she spotted movement across the runway. Spurts of dust followed a group of kangaroos bounding away from the noise of the engines. Then the plane turned, Amy lined up the runway and Bri watched the mesas flash past the windows, rising above them as the plane descended.
“Dan, I thought a mine of this size would employ their own doctor. Why don’t they?”
“They do.” Dan turned from his window and met her gaze across the aisle. “That’s who our patient is. The mine doctor was climbing one of those mesas and had a fall. Concussion and fractured ribs by the description we were given. We’ll do a medi-evac to the Mt Isa hospital.”
“Oh, and what happens while he’s there? Who looks after the miners?”
“She will be replaced by a locum as soon as he’s able to fly out. Townsville airport was closed this morning. They’re on cyclone alert.” He paused and Bri could see concern and compassion in his eyes. Dan was one of the most caring doctors she had met, but there was something in the way he tipped his head and met her gaze, hesitating before he spoke that made her stomach lurch in spite of Amy’s smooth flying.
She licked her dry lips. “Just say whatever it is that’s on your mind, Dan.”
“Conditions are better than when Gramps was working for the mines, Bri. Most mines are well run these days.” She knew Dan was concerned about Gramps’ health—his actions, and the understated attention he gave Gramps when they were together were evidence of it—but he didn’t have the same drive to right wrongs as she and Gramps had. That gene had come to Bri.
“Hmph.” Given the haze hanging over the pit, she doubted Dan’s comment. Not that Bri held Dan’s lack of fighting spirit in the cause against him. She just knew it wasn’t his fight. But as far as she was concerned, no mine was safe or healthy and the super mine Gramps had been fighting to stop would be one of the worst. She hung on to her camera as the wheels touched down.
Amy landed the plane with scarcely a thump, taxied to the end of the runway and rolled to a stop near a four-wheel drive MPV.
Keeping out of Dan’s way, Bri changed the camera settings and began taking photos of the business end of his work. Once she’d seen how bad Dan’s patient was, if the doctor was conscious, Bri could ask permission to include her in the photo feature. If not, she would just set up a scene shot with a stand-in patient when they returned to Mt Isa.
Chapter Eighteen
“ . . . and Harry.” His mother-in-law’s voice continued over the phone, inexorably drawing Harry along with her plans. He slumped over his desk and ran a hand through his hair, grateful Linda’s mother lived on the west coast. “We’d like to take Vicky with us to visit the grave. After all, it will be Linda’s birthday and her daughter needs to observe the day.” Politely phrased, he knew Mavis wasn’t making a request.
Harry closed his eyes and mentally counted to ten. A headache had begun pounding behind his eyes as soon as he picked up the phone and heard her voice—a Mavis-migraine Linda had labelled it the first time he’d disagreed with his mother-in-law and lost. Linda had loved her difficult, demanding, overprotective mother, while accepting and trying to mitigate the effect she had on Harry.
He took a deep breath and gripped the arm of his office chair. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Mavis. Vicky had terrible nightmares for months after Linda died and—”
“Of course she did. She lost her mother in the most awful way. I expect you still have nightmares about it too.” It wasn’t quite a question, but in the pause that followed, Mavis demanded his complete and total grief, now and forever. The loss of her only daughter had made her depressive nature worse. Odd, but it was only now that Harry could name it for what it was. Mavis needed him to grieve as she grieved, but it would never be enough. Never enough mourning for a dearly beloved daughter whose life Harry had failed to protect.
In Mavis’ eyes, there was no pleasure left in her life, therefore Harry could have no pleasure. He had nightmares all right. Linda’s screams still rang in his ears, her body limp as life faded from her eyes. “Mavis, Vicky’s nightmares were about her mother being lowered into a hole in the ground and dirt thrown on top of her coffin. I never let her see her mother in her last moments. No child needs that image burned into their brain.”
“Harry, I’m sure that Vicky will be fine now. She needs to pay her respects to her mother. That’s the end of it.”
Before Bri landed on his doorstep, that might have been the end of it. But Bri—quirky, random, bubbly Bri—had shown herself fierce as a lioness when it came to Vicky. She wouldn’t kiss him again because a relationship between them wouldn’t be good for Vicky. Not when Bri was leaving all too soon. If Bri could defend a child not her own, he could be no less brave. And Harry was Vicky’s father.
“No, Mavis. My daughter will never forget her mother, but taking her to a grave and telling her that her mother is under all that dirt is not in her best interests.” He could picture Mavis’ mouth falling open on the sharply indrawn breath, hear her teeth crash together as she shut her mouth, compressing her lips into that thin, pinched line of disapproval. Always disapproval.
“We’ll talk about it when we arrive. Unless you think our staying with you isn’t in the best interes
ts of our granddaughter?”
Harry was on the fence about that, but he’d save his strength for the biggest battle with his mother-in-law. “Of course, we’ll have a room ready for you. Vicky will be pleased when I tell her you’re coming. Goodbye, Mavis. My regards to Tom.”
His father-in-law had long ago given up disagreeing with his wife and Harry expected no help from that quarter. Harry felt sorry for him, in the way he felt sorry for a dog confined on a short leash. Tom’s leash must be choking him by now. Harry tossed his phone on the desk and wondered if it was too early for a beer.
##
A car door slammed and a breezy “See you, Dan” alerted Harry to Bri’s return. He had the front door open and Vicky at his side before Bri got her key out. No need to tell her he and Vicky had been listening out for her return for the past hour. No need to tell her that he’d missed her and would she please cheer him up with some random nonsense because his mother-in-law, the dragon incarnate, was coming to stay.
Bri tipped her head and looked at him. “Are you okay, Harry?”
“Yeah, why?”
Vicky patted his arm. “You groaned, Daddy. Are you sick?”
“I’m fine. I have a headache is all.” God, he’d have to do better than this before the in-laws arrived. Then again, Mavis might interpret his frown and black humour as grief. That should make her happy.
His stomach rumbled and he realised how late it was. “To make up for the fact I haven’t cooked dinner, I’ll take you both out for a counter meal at the pub, unless you prefer Chinese?”
Vicky clapped her hands and raced towards the stairs chanting, “Spring rolls, ice cream, spring rolls, ice cream. I’ll wash my hands, Daddy.” Her enthusiasm lifted his mood, until he looked back at Bri.
She stood, tense and wary on the veranda. “There’s no need to feed me, Harry. I’ll make a toastie or something and have a long soak in the bath. Enjoy a meal out with Vicky.” As she tried to step around him, her camera bag slammed into his shin.
Wild About Harry (Hearts of the Outback Book 5) Page 10