by Ally Blake
Her phone lay at the tip of her bare right foot, Felix’s postcard at the top of the left, and a phone number scribbled on the back of an old receipt clutched in her spare hand.
She’d been staring at the phone number for a good hour already. She’d even managed to get halfway through it before hanging up twice.
She put her wine on the bedside table; it only sloshed a very little before steadying. She shook out her hands, cricked her neck, picked up her phone and dialled.
It rang once. She took such a deep breath she started to see stars on the edge of her vision.
It rang twice. She closed her eyes and bounced up and down on the spot to try to release the influx of energy surging through her body.
An all too familiar male voice answered. ‘Hello?’
She stopped bouncing, her eyes flew open. Her voice cracked, just a little, as she said, ‘Dylan?’
A long pause. Then, ‘Wynnie.’
The sound of his voice was like an elixir, warming all the cold places inside her. She drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms about her shins, trying to keep the remarkable feeling locked inside as long as she could.
She closed her eyes and a stray tear slid down her cheek. She hastily swiped it away, knowing it would probably taste of Cab Sav. ‘Look, I’m truly sorry to ring you like this. Mortified, in fact. But I called Meg and asked for your number and she gave it to me.’
She thought she’d sounded perfectly fine but he must have picked up an off note as his voice came back to her strong, determined, and most of all, protective. ‘Wynnie, what’s wrong? Are you all right? What’s happened?’
‘Nothing’s wrong.’ Nothing new anyway. ‘I just had a question that couldn’t keep. It’s not a work question so I didn’t want to bother you during work hours.’
‘Since when did propriety become your catchphrase?’ he asked, his voice now liquid sex, as if he hadn’t been a cold-hearted bastard and she hadn’t told him to rot in hell when they’d last seen one another.
It hurt, it ached, it made her hold herself tighter, but at least he hadn’t hung up.
Not sure she would be able to cope with any more complications to her life in that minute she decided to get to the point. ‘It’s about you having had me investigated.’
‘We’ve been over this,’ he said.
She waved her hand in front of her face as though he could see her. He stopped talking as though he could, too.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I just…There’s something…’
‘Just ask.’
She closed her eyes and this time tears poured down her face. ‘My brother. Do you know where he is?’
‘Wynnie—’
‘I don’t care how you know,’ she said on a rush of garbled air. ‘I don’t care if you have my bank account passwords, statements from my kindergarten teachers, or my bra size on file. I really don’t give a flying hoot at this point in time. I just need to know about Felix. I have to see him. I need to talk to him, to know if he’s all right.’ To let him know I’m not. ‘So if you know anything, anything at all, I need you to tell me.’
Her breaths came laboured and deep and she gripped so tight to the phone her fingers ached, and years worth of sorry tears continued pouring down her cheeks.
His voice was gruff when he asked, ‘Where are you?’
‘Home.’ She sniffed.
‘Don’t go anywhere.’
‘Dylan—’
‘I’m coming over.’
He hung up.
She stared at the phone through her steamy eyes. She gave a great big sniff, wiped frantically at her face and tried calling back, but there was no answer.
She threw the phone on the bed and rubbed her face hard.
Why had she ever thought she might get what she wanted from him, ever? He was so damned contrary!
The moment she’d reconciled herself to not having him she got him. And when she knew how much she wanted him, she couldn’t have him.
She lay back on the bed with a thump and stared at the wide, still ceiling fan.
But when she needed him…he came.
Fifteen minutes later Wynnie was pacing the living-room floor, her bare feet making sharp slapping sounds on the wood, when a loud rap sounded at her door.
Her disobedient heart rapped even louder against her ribs. Four days. Four days without seeing him, and despite everything her heart raced like an excited puppy.
She took a deep breath. She’d open the door, she’d show him she was fine, tell him she’d had a glass too many and should never have called, and then he’d think badly of her—nothing new there—and leave.
She opened the door, expecting to find herself faced with the pitiless suit. But there he stood in a crushed white long-sleeved T-shirt poking out of the bottom of an old-fashioned black blazer and old jeans that fell soft at the knees, frayed and splayed at the hem, and clung lovingly everywhere else.
In a suit he was devastating. Dressed down, as though he was trying to blend in with regular folk, only showcased how truly beautiful he was.
‘Dylan,’ she croaked, ‘go home.’
His blue eyes were dark. His cheeks tight. His mouth a thin horizontal line. ‘Not until I know that you’re okay.’
She shrugged. ‘That’s not your concern.’
His cheek twitched. But he didn’t contradict her. Her heart gave a sorry little tug.
‘Either way, I’m here now, so why don’t you just let me in?’
And then from behind his back he pulled a bucket of ice cream. Dairy Bell’s Nuts About Chocolate, the most decadent ice cream in the history of ice cream. ‘You never mentioned your favourite flavour but this was always Meg’s favourite when she was having a “crapola day”. Her words.’
She took the ice cream and cradled it under her arm, the cold good for her. It helped keep the heat he aroused in her veins from going to her head.
‘I shouldn’t have called.’
‘Yet you did.’
Her next breath in was unsteady. The fact that this man knew everything about her was a relationship she’d never experienced before. Hannah knew pieces. But Hannah didn’t know her grief and her guilt. This man did.
Yet he wasn’t her friend. He wasn’t even her lover. He was a compulsion, an illusion, a threat.
But she was so tired. Tired of keeping secrets, and watching her words, and holding on so tight to her life lest all the disparate pieces got carried away by the lightest gust of wind.
He knew everything. Telling him more couldn’t hurt. Maybe, with his connections, it might even help.
‘I could do with a coffee,’ he said, his eyes boring into hers. ‘And your ice cream’s melting.’
She stood back and let him in.
They sat at the dining table. Dylan at the head, silently watching Wynnie on her chair pulled at an angle from the side of the table. Her knees were hugged to her chest, the spoon with which she’d eaten half the tub of ice cream resting against her mouth, her eyes roaming over a spread-out stack of mail on the table.
Her black dress draped from one shoulder leaving it exposed. Her hair was pinned off her face, her long fringe sweeping across her brow. Her eyes were dark and smudged. Her skin as pale as milk. Her lips bare.
She’d never looked more beautiful, or more fragile. And that was the combination that got him into trouble with her again and again.
Dylan held tight to his cold coffee mug to make sure his hands didn’t rove anywhere else, and questioned himself for about the tenth time what he was doing there. Even though looking back he was conscious he had overreacted and overcomplicated what had only been a night of great sex, the result, their parting, had been for the best.
‘When Felix was little,’ she said as though they were mid-conversation about the guy, not that it was the first time his name had been mentioned since Dylan had arrived, ‘he couldn’t pronounce Guinevere. He called me Wynnie. So when the police finally told me they were done with me, when I knew I had
to have a fresh start, somewhere to wash off that whole experience, I began by shedding the name that had been splashed all over the papers, took my grandmother’s surname and chose a new path.’
She stuck a finger in her mouth and nibbled on the end. Her lips shone with moisture. Her eyes blinked languidly as her memories took her far away. Dylan pressed his feet hard into the floor, and kept his focus from the couch lurking just over her bare right shoulder. From their one night of phenomenal sex.
‘I like the name Guinevere,’ she said, her eyes suddenly focusing and swinging to his, full of accusation.
He held up both hands in surrender. ‘It’s a beautiful name. French?’
She blinked again, and then her cheek lifted into a slow half-smile. ‘I think the name is old French but I have no idea beyond that. What’s with you and the French thing?’
‘It’s the accent. It speaks to my G-spot.’
‘Mmm. Well, all I know is that Guinevere means fair and smooth. Does that work for you?’
‘Don’t ask. And Felix?’ Time to bring the conversation where it needed to be. Flirting, though so very difficult not to engage in around this woman, was not helpful.
‘Happy,’ she said on a ragged sigh.
He furrowed his brow.
‘His name means happy. And he was as a kid. Joyful, and interested and just the sweetest thing on the planet. But after my parents passed away I moved to the city to go to uni and he stayed behind to finish school with his friends around him and…I don’t know. He must have fallen in with some radical types who saw Nimbin as a breeding ground for their bionomical army.’
She frowned at the pile of mail again.
‘Then what happened?’ he asked.
He knew the nuts and bolts. He’d read the papers Jack had given him, more than once in an effort to figure her out. But she needed to tell him. That was why she’d called. And despite his warnings to her on the contrary, it seemed they both somehow recognised she’d be safer telling him than anyone else.
Her finger slid from her mouth to slowly swipe her fringe back from her eyes, but one stray lock fell straight back down. ‘He broke into a science lab attached to the uni, in an effort to let the lab rabbits free. Rabbits, of all things. Environmental pests in Queensland. Anyway, the lab was ransacked, chemicals mixed, an explosion occurred, injuring seven. One man…’ She paused, swallowed. ‘One man lost the use of his legs. Eco-terrorism, they called it, and they had it all on security tape. They showed me his sweet face. And when they couldn’t find him, they came after me.’
‘Where did he go?’
She shook her head, shrugged, her eyes turning the exact liquid brown that made his heart feel as if it were sinking and flying all at the same time.
‘Our parents had money before they moved to Nimbin and left us the lot when they died. Enough Felix could travel, and hide, his whole life if he so desired.’
‘Have you heard from him since?’
Her eye twitched. He felt her drawing inside herself, away from him. He knew that feeling. Closing ranks against all but family. It was an instinct that was hard to break.
She said, ‘If I hear from him I am supposed to call the police immediately.’
It was an answer that Dylan philosophically understood. But it didn’t stop his stomach from contracting in disappointment as she gently pushed him away.
He ran a hard hand across his mouth. It wasn’t as though he deserved her trust. He’d threatened to abuse it so many times.
Then she held up a postcard. A tacky beach setting that ought to have had nude sunbathers on it. ‘Every few months I get one,’ she said. ‘Meaning he knows exactly where I am and what I’m doing. But they never give me one damn clue as to where he is.’
‘This is from him?’ He took the card, turned it over, frowned at the lack of message. This was the thanks she got from the brother whose life she probably saved by giving him the chance to get the hell out of Dodge?
She nodded. ‘It came today.’
So much for pushing him away. Her life had hit a hurdle too high to climb alone and she’d called on him.
This woman had the kind of guts he couldn’t even imagine. What she’d done for her brother and how she’d created a life from the ashes of her family splitting apart showed courage. But now, the blind faith she showed in him that she trusted he was man enough not to screw her over, knocked the wind from his sails big-time.
He silently gave the card back. She flicked at a corner, again and again, then held it in her lap.
She watched him down the last of his second cup of coffee. She sniffed in deep and let her feet fall to the floor. She sat on her hands and leant forward, her dress draping and shifting across her pale skin.
Finally she looked down at her bare toes, hot-red toenails blinking back up at her. ‘I’ve never told anybody what I told you just now.’
‘I can understand why.’
‘And you do realise you could run me out of town with what you know.’
He nodded, his mouth turned down. ‘I could. But then I would never again wake up in the morning, wondering if you might be about to leap out of my laundry basket. My life would become ever so dull.’
She lifted her head, squinted at him through one eye, and even managed half a smile.
He didn’t take his eyes away. He couldn’t.
He’d tried to put her from his mind after Sunday’s fiasco. He’d tried immersing himself deep into the job that had kept him more than satisfied his whole adult life. He’d tried to appear attentive when Eric gave him the briefs on each new Wynnie wannabe who called, or wrote requesting a formal meeting with him.
But everything seemed to remind him of her strapped to his sculpture with her crazy cheap handcuffs. Of her turning up at his at his coffee shop with bandages wrapped about her tiny wrists. Of how deeply she believed in what she did. Or how thoroughly she had given herself up to him the moment she’d decided that was what she wanted.
She’d called and he’d come. There hadn’t been any hesitation. And now that he was here he suddenly wanted to be the man she obviously thought he was. He needed to be.
He leant forwards and held out a hand. She placed her small hand in his. He looked her square in the eye as he said, ‘I’m really sorry but I don’t know where he is.’
Her throat worked, her eyes shone, her hand in his turned cold. So cold, he wrapped both of his around hers. He saw the torment in her eyes, and wanted to make it his own. But he just couldn’t. His plate was overfull looking after those in his life who were his to take care of whether he wanted to or not.
No wonder he’d railed against her when she’d so neatly backed him into a corner the day they first met. It wasn’t altogether fun being shown with such clarity how he’d spent his entire life doing the very same thing to himself.
‘Okay,’ she said on the end of a deep breath in. ‘Then that’s that.’
She pulled her hand away and leant back in the chair.
He curled his empty fingers into his palm. He hadn’t done enough. And he never could.
He was smart enough to have figured out over the past couple of hours what enough might entail. That which he now sensed she wanted from him was simply not his to give. He could be tough if she needed tough, he could be self-deprecating if she needed a smile, he could be kind if she needed a break.
But not even for those demanding liquid brown eyes could he again be naïve enough to promise himself to one woman and mean it.
Yet if he walked out of there and didn’t at least give her back half the trust she’d given him, he’d never be able to look himself in the mirror again.
He leant his elbows on the table and looked into his coffee mug as though hoping to find the words therein.
‘I’m not claiming to have a clue what you went through back then. But I have had had my dirty laundry aired in public once before.’
She leant her elbows on the table, as well, her chin rested on her upturned palms, and she waited f
or him to go on.
He said, ‘I was engaged once, before.’
He flicked her a glance. She gave him a short smile.
‘Lilliana Girard was her name.’
‘French?’ she asked.
He coughed out an unexpected laugh. ‘She would have given her right thumb to stake that claim, but no.’
‘Sorry. I couldn’t help myself. Go on.’
‘We were together for three years. Engaged for one of those. And six weeks before the wedding it hit the papers that she’d quizzed a nightclub full of patrons about which European beach resort she ought to move to when she scored millions in the divorce.’
Wynnie cringed and sucked in a slow stream of air between her lips. Soft pouting lips the colour of dusky pink summer roses. Lips that Lilliana would have killed for. Or had they married she would have used his good money to pay for.
‘That’s harsh,’ Wynnie said. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t a stupid joke? We girls can do silly things after too many drinks. Add a working phone and I’m living proof.’
He shook his head. ‘If only it was the alcohol speaking. Once the story broke, people came out of everywhere quoting conversations had, conversations heard, money owed all over town on the proviso she would take care of it all once she was a Kelly.’
Her eyes grew large with shock. ‘She was a succubus.’
He laughed again. ‘That she was. Now I just feel sorry for her. Three years of her life she spent with a man she didn’t really love all for the sake of the stuff that came with the name of Kelly.’
She dropped one hand to the table. ‘And you didn’t have the luxury of changing your name and moving away.’
He looked into her eyes. Deep as an ocean. Warm as a blanket. Clear as a summer sky. ‘No, I did not.’
Her other hand slid into her chocolate-brown hair, and his fingers began to tingle. ‘It can’t be easy assuming every new person in your life just wants something from you.’
She’d hit the nail so directly on the head his whole body clanged like metal on metal. Habit had him leaning lazily back in his chair so she wouldn’t notice. ‘You know what, it’s easier than you think.’