by Nikki Logan
‘I know you probably would have been more comfortable on one of those.’ She nodded at yet another cruise liner berthed across the harbour. And suddenly she was imagining being with him in an opulent suite with a spa bath and a king-sized bed and a really plush, really comfortable carpet.
‘Maybe, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as memorable. Actually, I was thanking you for letting me in on this whole journey to fulfil the list. It’s been—’ he struggled for the right word ‘—good for me. To have direction. Purpose.’
That was such a profound thing to say twenty seconds before they parted ways.
Unless …
It wasn’t too profound for a goodbye statement. It would be just like Hayden to seek closure with some grand gesture. Maybe he wouldn’t follow up with the next list item after all.
She stretched up and kissed him on the cheek. Ridiculously chaste. Determined to save him the trouble of ending things. ‘Goodbye, Hayden. I’ll see you—’ Soon? Later? In my dreams? She didn’t have control over any of them, so she just settled for, ‘I’ll see you.’
‘I’ll be in touch.’
Which was just one step removed from ‘I’ll call you.’
She had no experience with the whole friends-with-benefits thing. What was the protocol here? Cool, aloof and take it as it comes? Or warm, open and on like Donkey Kong the next time I see you? She was almost certain it wasn’t throw your arms around him and beg him to stay.
That burning urge couldn’t be good for anyone. And, as she’d once bragged, her strongest trait was supposed to be her self-discipline.
She turned for the long-stay parking and reached for her bag. He bent for it at the same time and their fingers tangled on the handle. He straightened, his eyes locked on hers. He relinquished the bag.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ he repeated. Somehow his intense eye contact was like an elaborate signature at the bottom of a legal document. So she knew he meant it.
She smiled. Turned. Left.
Walking away was even harder than stepping off the platform up in the gorge. At least then she’d had the press of his hot, urgent lips to distract her.
Now she had nothing.
CHAPTER TEN
‘I AM almost certain this is not what my mother had in mind.’
Six weeks. Six weeks after the Paxos had berthed in Sydney and swapped her half-empty cargo for a full complement and left two passengers standing on the dock.
Six long weeks without seeing Hayden.
But she wasn’t about to betray her excitement.
The two of them wobbled horribly in a dug-out canoe ten feet from the jetty sticking out from the immaculately crafted but soulless canal suburb feeding off the Georges River.
‘Where did you hire this …?’ She hesitated to call it a boat.
‘This gondola.’
Her laugh was immediate. It was partly fuelled by sheer joy at sitting across from him again. She hadn’t realised until she’d opened the door to him earlier today how not-fully she’d been breathing in the previous six weeks. She sucked in the fresh air now and her body exulted. ‘This is not a gondola.’
He ignored her. ‘We’re not going to get to Venice on a freighter and even hiring a gondola here was more costly than I thought was appropriate, given the no-money restriction.’
‘This was the best you could steal?’
He tutted, offended. ‘Make, actually.’
‘You made this?’ She stared at the most cerebrally talented man she knew. ‘With your hands?’
He flushed overtly. ‘I had help, but yes.’
In that light, it wasn’t all that bad. But it still wasn’t a gondola. ‘Why isn’t it finished?’
He stared at her. ‘Because I’m impatient.’
Her heart flip-flopped. Had he been eager to see her? He could have picked up the phone at any time. Then again, no, he couldn’t, not without saying much more than he would have been comfortable with. ‘Impatient to finish the list?’
His eyes darkened and one side of his mouth quirked as he concentrated on keeping the little boat upright. ‘No.’
Oh. But she wasn’t brave enough to ask further so she worked her way around to what she really wanted to know. Crafty as a fox. ‘Who helped you make it?’
‘Russell.’
Should that mean something? ‘Russell who?’
His dark brows folded down. ‘Actually, I don’t know. Russell from the dolphin place.’
She sat back hard in the canoe. ‘The guide?’
‘Yeah. He’s a carpenter in his day job.’
Not a very good one, it seemed. But, since it was better than either of them could have done she wasn’t going to judge. ‘How do you know? You only said two words to him.’ And neither of them were polite.
‘We’ve been … working together.’
‘What? Since when?’ Not cool, that high-pitched squeak in her voice. She moderated it.
‘Since about a month after we went out into the surf with him.’
She gaped and then grabbed at the sides of the boat as it rocked perilously again.
‘He got me involved with the Dolphin Preservation Society. They’re a client now.’
Umbrage broiled up fast. ‘You hit them up for business?’
His lips thinned. ‘Yes, Shirley. I figured they must have millions hidden beneath the moth-eaten nothing they appear to have and I wanted my cut.’
She let the rest of her confusion out on a hiss. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I work with them pro bono. Help them to position themselves in the market, to find contributors for their cause and customers for the beach experience. Building their capacity.’
A strange kind of mist rose on the water, swirled around their boat and then sucked up into her body, making her feel light and fluid. ‘You helped them?’
‘I am capable of random acts of kindness from time to time.’ His words were half defensive.
‘I … Yes, of course.’ She’d seen that gentle side at work. Up close and personal. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I just did.’
‘No, months ago … Why keep it to yourself?’
‘I knew you’d carry on like this. Make a big deal of it.’
‘I’m not carrying on, I’m curious.’ She sat taller. ‘And it is a big deal.’
‘Well, far be it from me to fail to assuage Shiloh’s fathomless curiosity.’
Super-hedge. And then it hit her. Her breath tripped over the skipped beat of her heart. ‘Did you … Was it because of me?’
Ridiculous, surely. He wouldn’t care what she thought of him. Beyond what she thought of him in the sack. And he knew the answer to that. Because no one could fake the responses he elicited.
‘No, it wasn’t for you.’ Immediate. Slightly urgent.
Okay. ‘So it was for you?’
He rushed to address that misconception, too. ‘No, it was not. It was for them.’
She smiled as he realised he’d been snookered. Whether for her, or them or himself, it didn’t change the facts. ‘That’s a pretty significant philosophical shift, Hayden.’
‘You think I’m only interested in money? Ever?’
‘Based on the evidence, yes.’ Except now the evidence had changed. Now he’d thrown a massive curve-ball into her neatly stacked up preconceptions. And she knew she’d never be able to stack them the same way again.
Which meant it had just got a whole heap harder to keep her feelings at arms’ length. While he was a man who would use his skills to exploit and manipulate others it was possible to maintain a rigid defence against the attraction and intrigue that battered on the door of her resolve.
But if he was a man who helped those who helped others. A man who’d carve a boat to please her. Or jump from a bridge …
She needed to move things back onto a safer footing. ‘So this is our gondola?’
‘And this—’ he cast his arms wide at the ultramodern canal lined with expensive houses ‘—is our Ven
ice.’
It was a bit of a cop-out, but then again Venice was a very long way away, and he had built something—with his hands—for her. That was a turn-on in a very caveman kind of way.
Okay, Venice it was.
She settled herself more primly in the bow of the boat and tucked the folds of her skirt around her. ‘Shouldn’t you be poling us along? And singing in Italian?’
‘Nobody needs to hear that,’ he joked. ‘But … Ecco!’
He drew a tall, brightly painted pole from along the floor of the canoe. The boat wobbled horribly as he rose to his feet, balancing the timber across him like some kind of trainee circus performer and then lowering it into the water on one side. Somehow they stayed upright.
‘Is it long enough? This channel looks awfully deep.’ It had to be for some of the enormous pool toys moored to every jetty.
He slid it into the water. ‘We’ll find out.’
It was, though Hayden’s prowess in the field of gondoliering left a lot to be desired. Fortunately his prowess in other fields more than made up for their slow progress. They splashed on in silence for a few minutes and Shirley let herself enjoy the view. Both in the boat and out of it. Hayden’s muscles bunched under his T-shirt as he propelled them along, his locked thighs holding him steady in the little boat.
She let herself look her fill. Everything around them went kind of … glazy.
‘Don’t look at me like that, Shirley,’ he warned after a silent moment. ‘It’s just a canoe.’
Whoops. What had she failed to disguise? She caught his eyes. Held them. ‘You built it with your hands.’ For me. ‘That’s not nothing.’
His snort was about as graceful as his boat. ‘I did that to get laid. I knew I couldn’t show up empty-handed and expect you to invite me back into your bed.’
No. She knew him well enough now. The defensive tone stood out in mile-high fluoro. He’d done it for her. To please her. A warm rush started at her toes and worked its way upwards. But pressing the point wasn’t going to help matters.
‘How kind that you were willing to wait for an invitation,’ she teased.
He smiled, infuriating in its confidence and seat-squirmingly uncomfortable in its sexiness. ‘Lip service. I know how I affect you.’
Yes, he did. More fool her. And he was affecting her right now. To the point that she wanted to do something about it. Something they weren’t going to be able to manage in his terrible gondola.
So she changed the subject instead. Big time. Desperate times, desperate measures.
‘How old were you when your mum died?’
Hayden dropped his chin, didn’t answer, just kept punting them along. For the longest time. ‘What makes you think she died?’ he eventually said.
She shook her head. ‘What you said just before you met Twuwu, about your parents sitting there together being the least likely thing you could ever imagine. And then at the gorge, you said that we were a decade too late for her.’
‘It’s not really something I talk about,’ he said.
None of your business, in other words. She’d been telling other people straight for long enough to recognise from the hip when she saw it. And to accept it. It wasn’t reasonable to be offended by it. Even if it also hurt.
‘No. Okay.’
Splash, splash … They drifted on, a dark, heavy cloud suddenly hanging over Hayden. She distracted herself looking at the McMansions lining the canal side.
He cleared his throat. ‘There was a reason I was so gutted when we lost your mum.’
We. She would have liked that sentiment at the time; it would have made her feel less alone.
‘It hit me extra-hard because I was grieving for two mothers.’
Her stomach tightened. ‘Did yours go that same year?’
‘Three years before. Just before I started coming to your house on Saturdays.’
Shirley realised what a jerk she’d been, assuming his anguish at the funeral had all been for effect. ‘You hadn’t grieved?’
‘Not properly. There were … reasons for that. But it all kind of caught up with me at Carol’s funeral.’
Where did a girl begin to undo that kind of mistake? ‘I’m sorry that I judged you for not starting the list.’
He shook off the dark cloud. ‘Their deaths motivated me. It reminded me that you can’t rely on anyone but yourself. I set up Molon Labe the next year. Started small, building a client list, making my own way.’
She stared at the darkening waters that rolled in huge swells past the boat. ‘And your father?’
‘He’s still around. I see him about once a year when he wants money.’
Her chest squeezed as tight as his voice. ‘God, Hayden …’
‘It’s a small price to pay. Literally.’ He glanced at her sideways. ‘What about yours?’
Her father? The man who’d left them when she was small. ‘No idea. I don’t remember him.’
Didn’t let herself, anyway. Though she’d found a photograph amongst her mother’s things and kept it. Just because.
‘Carol only spoke of him once. Sounds like a man unsuited to settling down.’
A man just like Hayden? Was she really that much of a cliché? Falling for a man like her father? ‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘You’ve never tried to find him?’
She looked up. Her chest pressed in. ‘He knew where we were all that time. He lived there, too, when I was a baby. Until he left. And we were doing fine. Mum finished her PhD at night, then she went back to work as soon as I was at school full-time. We got by.’
‘What about her funeral. You didn’t send word?’
‘I sent word.’ She dropped her eyes. ‘He just didn’t come.’
‘That’s …’ A lost-for-words Hayden was a rarity. ‘He had no contact after he left?’
The pressing against her lungs became crushing. ‘He’d made his choice. He left because of me; he was hardly about to ask for weekend visitation.’
Hayden stopped, turned towards her. ‘Who says he left because of you?’
She studied the sparkling water. The poling stopped.
‘Shirley?’
‘He wasn’t ready for fatherhood. And I wasn’t a quiet baby.’
‘But who says that?’ He pushed them along again. ‘If you were so young, how do you know that’s true?’
She blinked at him. ‘Mum said. Now and again. When she was mad or upset.’ Or wanting to dent Shirley’s embryonic spirit. ‘Sometimes she’d talk about how much she loved him. Other times she’d talk about how he wasn’t cut out for parenthood. Or how maybe if I’d been quieter … happier …’
‘She blamed you for his leaving?’
‘She attributed his leaving to me,’ she said carefully. ‘There’s a difference.’ But when you were six years old, the difference wasn’t very distinct. ‘It took her a long while to get over him.’
He shook his head. ‘She never remarried?’
Shirley raised her hand. ‘Guilty again. It was hard to find love with a toddler in tow.’
Hayden frowned. ‘Where are these words coming from? They’re not yours.’
She actually had to think about it. Though she knew exactly where the ideas had come from—and the words—when she let herself acknowledge it. ‘My mother wasn’t quite so prosaic when it came to her own emotions as she was when discussing Nietzsche or Socrates or Demosthenes.’
‘And you were how old?’ His words were as unexpectedly gentle as his touch late at night.
She shrugged. ‘Depends; she said some more than others.’
But enough that she’d received the message loud and clear. Enough that Shirley had spent her young life trying to make up for crimes she hadn’t even meant to commit.
He stared at her. ‘My mother was far from perfect, but everything she did she did for me. I can’t imagine her ever putting her own needs ahead of mine like that.’
The intense desire to excuse her mother overwhelmed her. That was straight from the
ancient part of her brain. ‘She was brilliant and focused and hardworking and totally dedicated to her job.’
To the exclusion of all else.
He turned and looked at her. ‘I guess all that focus had to be coming from somewhere.’ She glanced away. ‘I’m really sorry it was from you.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s not your fault she wasn’t better at the personal stuff—’
‘It wasn’t your fault either, Shirley.’ He moved them onwards, visibly battling with something. He lifted the pole out of the water and sat down in front of her, with it lying flat across the gondola. ‘I’m sure there are things in your childhood you did do and you can feel all the guilt in the world you want over those, but don’t take on your father’s abandonment. That’s a reflection on him, not you. And if your mother let you be the reason she never tried to build a new family for you, then that’s on her. Plenty of single mums build new families. Their kids are only an impediment if they’re looking for one.’
‘Why would she seek out reasons not to find love again?’ Who didn’t want to be loved? Other than Hayden.
‘Maybe she couldn’t find it and it was easier to blame something external for that.’
She stared.
‘I’m just saying you shouldn’t carry guilt for her issues,’ he finished.
She sat up straighter. ‘I’m not.’
‘You’re carrying something. Why else would you have this burning desire to finish her list?’
‘To honour her memory.’
‘Why does it need to be honoured?’
‘Because I loved her.’ Even if it wasn’t a perfect love. She was the only mother—the only parent—she’d had.
‘You don’t need a bunch of activities to love her. Why the list?’
She stared at him. Utterly at a loss. How had their nice day on the water turned suddenly so very confrontational?
He wobbled back up onto his feet and moved them along again. ‘That’s a rhetorical question, Shirley. You don’t have to answer to me. Only to you.’
They rowed in silence, the splish-splash of the pole becoming quite hypnotic.
‘Amazing we turned out such a balanced pair, really,’ he murmured into the warm air.
His smile was contagious. Then it turned to a chuckle and a full-out laugh and the gondola rocked. Neither of them could really claim any prizes for mental health. Not if you scratched below the surface. Not even far below.