by Ros Baxter
But right now, kissing wasn’t enough. She needed a rerun of the day on the mountain. She needed him inside her. Lou reached behind Gage and yanked his shirt out of his jeans, letting her hands run across his hot skin and feel the satiny bumps and sinews of him. She pushed herself hard onto him, and he responded by lifting her up so her feet came off the floor, and wrapping her legs around his hips. He pushed against her, and yanked up her dress to run his hand along her thighs and over her buttocks. Lou wished with everything in her that she was naked so they could stop the make-believe and do what they both clearly wanted. She opened her eyes and spotted the old-fashioned chaise longue in the corner of the room. Now, how to get him over there?
It was hard to work out how she might even suggest it when their mouths were so comprehensively engaged in devouring each other. She broke away again, determined to give it a go. But Gage spoke before she could.
‘Louise Samuels,’ he groaned, his eyes roaming over her face, neck and chest. ‘You make me want to do things I haven’t done since I was seventeen.’
‘Like what?’ she gasped, her chest rising and falling madly as he stared at her breasts.
‘Like make out in a pub toilet,’ Gage grunted, sounding a little disgusted with himself, but not disgusted enough to stop him from leaning closer and slowly undoing the top two buttons of her dress, revealing a red bra to his eager gaze. He groaned again, and lowered his head to start kissing the soft rise of her flesh.
The proximity of his mouth to her breasts sent Lou into another spin. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could take this without tearing his clothes off and suggesting he have her on the floor. But just as she was marshalling her thoughts to make some decisions, the door swung open and Mary Moriarty from the Welcome Inn staggered through it, arm linked with one of her cronies. Both women were dressed in their best out-on-the-town attire: short denim skirts revealing knees that had seen better days, stretchy tops and colourful make-up.
‘Well, hellooo …’ Mary drawled. Lou and Gage jumped away from each other as though suddenly realising the other was infected with the plague. ‘And doesn’t it look like you two are having a grand old time getting reacquainted? Nothing like a crisis – or two – to bring old lovers back together.’ She said the last words viciously.
Gage took in a breath and looked like he was managing to keep himself nice only by a very large effort of will. Lou blushed and sobered up so quickly it was as though she’d been doused in cold water.
‘Piss off, Mary,’ Gage muttered, grabbing Lou’s hand and making for the door.
‘Temper, temper,’ Mary clucked as they exited.
Lou felt Gage’s impulse to violence coil inside his hand, but he kept himself in check as he shepherded Lou out to his car, which was parked directly in front of the bar, in the same spot he had favoured that morning, right beside the old tree. He slid into his seat and turned to her.
‘Can I ask you something, Lou?’
‘Sure,’ she said, finding it hard to meet his eyes.
‘It’s kind of personal and I don’t want to offend you.’ She heard the smile in his voice.
The echo of her words from earlier in the evening made her smile as well. She nodded.
‘Why do you only ever kiss me when you’re drunk?’ His voice still carried the ghost of a laugh, but there was a raw edge to the question she couldn’t ignore.
‘Not always,’ she said. She could have kicked herself for referring to the mountain incident.
‘True,’ he said, leaning over to take her hand. His hand was so warm and firm, so perfectly shaped to cradle hers, that Lou felt like sobbing.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, shame welling in her. She had tried to put some space between them, but not very bloody hard.
‘I’m not after an apology,’ Gage said, squeezing her hands. ‘I’m pretty sure you didn’t see me complaining in there.’ He paused, and squeezed again. ‘But I would like to know why you keep running away from me, then running back.’
Where to start? Sure, twenty years ago Gage had seemed like an emblem of all the bad things she was going to do and be if she didn’t flee, but she knew enough to know she didn’t feel like that any more. He was different, or rather, he was the same and she understood things differently.
But none of that meant they had a future.
They sure as shit had some out-of-this-world chemistry, but Lou knew better than anyone that it took more than that to make a life with someone. She had been watching her mother luxuriate in wild chemistry for thirty years – and she’d watched all the things that had happened as a result.
Lou could not stay in Stone Mountain, at least not without breaking apart with grief. And Gage couldn’t leave, at least not without leaving the best parts of himself behind.
She needed to ’fess up.
‘Because we can’t do this, Gage,’ she said, hearing the finality in her voice. ‘This has never been some casual thing.’
‘Exactly,’ Gage said, his voice dark and vulnerable. ‘And I never wanted it to be.’
‘I can’t be what you want.’
Gage thumped his hand on the steering wheel. ‘You have no idea what I want,’ he said. ‘You never asked.’
Lou sat very still, her mind churning with all that happened tonight and the after-effects of too many whiskies. ‘Well,’ she said, her blood freezing as she spoke, ‘I think you want to stay in Stone Mountain. And Sunset Downs. I think this is your home. I think you have responsibilities. And I think –’ She stopped herself. That wasn’t quite right. ‘I know, in fact, that I can’t be part of that.’
‘Why not?’ His face was hard but his eyes were searching. ‘Why the hell not, Lou? What’s so terrible about Stone Mountain?’
‘You really have to ask me that?’
Gage exhaled and moved closer to her, wrapping an arm around her. ‘I know it hurt, Lou. But it was so long ago.’
How could he say that? She wanted to hurt him. ‘If Piper died tomorrow, would you get over it? In a year, or twenty?’
His arm tensed against her shoulders, and she pressed on.
‘What if it was your fault? Do you think you’d want to hang around, play happy families?’
‘I’m not saying that.’ His voice was so low and sad it almost broke through the fog of fury clouding Lou’s brain.
‘Well, what the hell are you saying?’ She wriggled away from him, pressing herself closer to the passenger-side door.
‘I dunno.’ He backed off, and moved closer to his side as well. ‘I guess I’m just saying, maybe at some point you need to face it, what happened; you have to … not get over it, I know you’ll never be over it, but maybe at least get past it enough so you can function.’
Lou’s emotions began to shut down, the way they always did when she had these conversations, which wasn’t very often, and usually with Sharni. She knew her lines, just as well as she knew they were lies. ‘Oh, I’m over it, Gage. I’m fine. But I’m fine in Sydney, where no-one knows about me, and what happened, and where I don’t have to face it every goddamned day. And face her.’
Gage made a hopeless gesture with his hands. ‘Skye?’
Lou nodded.
‘So you think there’s no hope for us?’ Gage was looking straight ahead, out the windscreen, like he was already driving home, leaving this moment behind.
Lou tried not to let her brain run away with itself. She tried not to picture living at Sunset Downs, with Gage and the lovely Piper. She tried not to imagine wedding dresses and waking up next to Gage and smelling his skin and living inside his life.
She tried, but she had no chance. Her brain had been doing that ever since she could remember, since the first time she had written her first name with his surname in her diary just to see how it might look. Even now, those fantasies still held a particular spell over her.
But now, things were even more complicated than she could tell Gage. Now, not only did they have all the usual problems between them, but she was abo
ut to do something he would hate to save her father, and the town, and – although he didn’t know it, and probably never would – to save him and his livelihood as well. She blinked back tears. At least she could do this for him. At least she could make this work, even if it meant dealing with the loathsome Matt Finlay. Gage had worked hard to save Sunset Downs; he deserved to be saved for a change. But it meant there really was no chance for them.
And it meant she needed to put this to bed once and for all.
‘That’s right,’ she said, her voice wooden. ‘There’s no hope for us. But Gage –’ She put a hand on his arm, though he had already started the ignition and was working the gears.
‘Don’t,’ he said, as he gunned the car up Main Street. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’ He looked at her one last time, a long look that was one part fury and two parts desolation.
Chapter
14
What’s love got to do with it?
The room was quiet. Lou hadn’t come far, given that she was now staying at the Welcome Inn, a particular form of torture after Mary Moriarty’s interruption two nights before. But it was better than what she would have to put up with at Sunset Downs – the sight of Gage, cold and frustrated, and her mother, still playing no speakies after Lou’s failure to show up to the cemetery.
At least she knew, after finally checking her phone messages, that the police and the insurance company had dropped the investigation, and Skye would be compensated for the loss of the house, at least enough to buy another small place. The one thing Lou needed to resolve before she left Stone Mountain (hopefully tomorrow, after tonight’s meeting) was what her mother wanted to do. Like it or not, plans would have to be made.
A harping voice at the back of Lou’s mind kept reminding her how she’d felt the day Skye had collapsed, and asking if she really was okay to be heading back to Sydney while her mother was in such a precarious state. But so far, she had managed to keep the nag successfully gagged. There were a whole lot of ways to care for someone, even if you weren’t immediately on the scene, and Lou was confident she could set something up that might work.
But right now, she needed to get through this.
Local councils were strange creatures, and Stone Mountain’s governing statutes were no exception. Once Lou had dug into the requirements of activating the exceptional circumstances provision of the council’s powers, it was clear that they would have to hold a town meeting – inviting all ratepayers to take part in having a say about what the council planned to do. It would be a delicate meeting to manage. The mayor would need to advise everyone of the decision he had made to invoke his powers to grant the company access and exploration rights over a swathe of land that cut through almost all the major properties on the mountain. He would have to explain the commercial and social benefits for the town, without giving away the parlous state of the town’s finances, or his own dodgy dealings in trying to keep it afloat. Having been in town long enough to take the temperature of community sentiment, Lou knew there would be a lot of opposition. It would be so much easier if her father could simply stand up and tell them that this was the only way out, for the town and for the farms, but instead, he was going to have to take a fall. Lou was under no illusion that he would never be elected mayor again, which would be horrible for him, having enjoyed the town’s adoration, but it was infinitely preferable to the jail term he would face if he gave the game away. Lou was not prepared to let him go down, not when she was in doubt that he had done everything for the sake of this small, parochial shithole.
It would be too unfair.
The function room at the Queen’s Arms, usually reserved for meetings of the Cattlemen’s Association or the Country Women’s Association, had been filled with chairs in expectation of a large crowd. The room looked ill-equipped for the gravity of the task it faced; its purple-swirl carpet sported ancient beer stains and smelled like camphor. The Regency-patterned wallpaper was faded and inglorious. Two long trestle tables had been erected at the front of the room, along with a makeshift lectern. There was room for the mayor, Matt, a representative of Clean Gas, and the head of the Cattlemen’s Association.
The meeting would follow the usual proceedings for formal business in Stone Mountain. Lou had managed to rope Mitch into helping her reconfigure the karaoke machine so she could use it to support a roving microphone if anyone required one, which Lou doubted. Stone Mountain types didn’t go in for all that showiness. Attendees would stop at the bar to inoculate themselves against the horrors of formal bureaucracy at work, before moving into the back room as early as possible, to ensure they secured the back seats. It was the same thing in Stone Mountain whether it was church, school or local government business – no-one wanted to sit at the front.
Lou flicked her eyes around the room, hoping she hadn’t forgotten anything. A hundred seats were lined up in front of the main tables, but the room was still completely empty. Clean Gas had asked for facilities to run a PowerPoint presentation, but Mitch had laughed at the absurdity of the idea. The company had also suggested they provide refreshments, but Lou and her father had vetoed the idea. As her father had said in his plain-speaking way: ‘The community will know it’s getting fucked; they don’t want to feel like they’ve broken bread with the fuckers.’ Stone Mountain people hated a gimmick. Almost as much as they hated Clean Gas.
Lou decided it was time to slip out and get her father; make sure he was prepped for the event, knew his lines and knew how to respond to the barrage of questions he was sure to face. She headed for the door, and bumped right into Sharni.
‘Oh, hey,’ Sharni said, reaching out to hug Lou. She looked tired but spectacular. She was wearing very tight dark blue jeans, a soft white shirt and her favourite red boots. Her hair was loose and her face free of make-up except for a mad slash of red on her lips. She looked country-girl hot and Lou wondered what Matt would make of it when he saw her.
‘Hey, hon,’ Lou said, melting into Sharni’s arms. ‘I’m glad you’re here.’
‘You said we could talk?’ Sharni’s face was hopeful. They hadn’t seen each other since the night in Matt’s room, but not because Lou was avoiding her. She’d just had a helluva lot to organise.
‘Can we do it after?’ Lou wanted to tell Sharni that she didn’t have to explain anything; that Lou would never judge her.
Sharni’s face fell, and Lou’s heart followed it down. ‘I swear, I’m not fobbing you off, sweetie pie,’ she said, using the old pet name to buy Sharni’s goodwill. ‘I’m just stressed out of my tree.’
Sharni nodded, and gave her a small smile. ‘Okay. What can I do?’
Lou grimaced. ‘Not much, I don’t think,’ she said, noticing a few cowboy-hatted men starting to trickle in and hug the back wall. ‘It’s game on, and I have to get Dad.’
‘Good luck,’ Sharni whispered as Lou made for the door.
Lou blew her a kiss, trying to project a confidence she didn’t feel. She hadn’t seen Gage since the night at the bar, and she knew he would be here tonight, furious about the proposal. A notice had appeared in the local paper this morning, and the whole town was abuzz.
She found her father across the road at the council chambers. ‘Showtime,’ she said, trying to inject strength into her voice.
For his part, Gary looked like hell. He was sitting at his big chair in the office that doubled as a bedroom, doodling notes in a little spiral-bound notebook, looking like a small boy who didn’t want to go to school.
‘Really?’ he asked petulantly, his floppy hair falling across his eyes.
‘Yep,’ she said, going over to his chair and holding out her hand. He took it, as she knew he would, and she helped pull him up to tower over her. ‘Man up, Mr Mayor, it’s time to face the music.’
Her father was dressed as usual in grey pants and navy shirt, but gone was his easy, bounding grace. He shuffled towards the door like he was being led to the guillotine.
As they crossed the road to the pub, Lou looped
her arm through his.
‘There really isn’t another option, Dad,’ she said, holding hard to the warm strength of him, believing in his ability to get it together. ‘The council goes down, the farms go down, the town goes down.’
‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘I just never wanted it to be like this.’
As they reached the front of the pub, Lou noticed a woman standing by the door.
A frisson of energy seemed to pass through her father, electrifying him. Lou released his arm quickly, like she might get a shock if she didn’t.
‘Good evening, Mr Mayor,’ the woman said, her voice low and pleasant. It took Lou a moment to recognise the woman dressed in simple pants and tunic. Her silver hair was cut in a sharp bob that grazed her jawline, and her fiercely bright blue eyes were outlined prettily in grey kohl. She was arresting, if not beautiful, and she looked different outside the hospital setting.
‘Dr O’Brien,’ her father said, and there was a tone in his voice Lou didn’t recognise – sweet and flirtatious. His usual approach with the many women who loved and threw themselves at him was to feign incomprehension, but it was clear to Lou that there was more going on here than met the eye.
‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’
‘Well,’ Martha O’Brien said, smiling at Lou, ‘I hear there’s a meeting tonight. As an interested local, I thought I might come along. Watch our mayor perform, see what the people have to say.’
Gary’s shoulders fell a little. ‘Oh,’ he said, shaking his head gently. ‘I’m not sure you want to do that. I don’t think it’s going to be a very happy meeting.’