by Ally Blake
She slowed her steps before she tripped over her numb feet. Zach’s slowed to match.
‘Zach?’ she said, her voice so croaky she cleared her throat. ‘Can I just ask, the things I told you before, I—’
He shook his head and held up a finger an inch from her mouth. Her words dried up in her throat.
Zach’s voice was deep when he finally opened his mouth to speak. ‘My parents passed away when I was five years old. With no other family I grew up in a slew of foster homes and staterun children’s homes—some fair, more atrocious. It didn’t matter which, I was still pushed in and pulled out again months later, again and again, with no warning and no word as to why. I had no consistent contact with any one person—no supervisor, no parent, no other foster child—until the day I turned sixteen and I caught a bus to Sydney and began my life.’
Meg realised she was breathing heavily. ‘God, you must think me a schmuck. Complaining about my father when yours wasn’t even—’
‘No,’ he said with a stilling hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t do that. No comparing. We each need to own what we’ve been dealt or we’ll never be able to move on.’
She nodded. Then laughed softly to release the pent-up energy coursing through her starting at the point where his strong hand lay upon her bare shoulder. ‘You’re making me think I ought to have listened harder in wellness class.’
She shook her head, angry at herself for being flippant when talking about anything real. If there was ever a time to not go there, this was it.
She looked up at Zach—tall, dark, divine. ‘Have you really owned your past?’
He made a clicking noise with the side of his mouth. ‘Please. Why do you think I keep building bigger and better wellness resorts? I’m looking to prove I’m better than my past as much as the next man. But in the past few days I have come to understand a little more about what my foster parents went through. Not taking me in with open arms had little to do with me at all. They would have had to have been masochists to have given that kind of emotional investment to a child they knew would never be theirs. Knowing there’s even a minute chance is akin to emotional torture …’
His voice petered off.
‘But Ruby—’
‘Might still not end up with me.’
‘What?’ Meg said, her voice like air. ‘How?’
‘We have up to a year for the state to decide if I am a fit guardian,’ Zach said.
Meg’s heart squeezed as she remembered the look in Zach’s eyes when he’d said his life had changed in a heartbeat when Ruby had come along. The look in Ruby’s eyes when she’d proudly said who her father was. ‘How long have you had her so far?’
‘Seven months, eight days.’
Meg bunched her dress to keep her hands busy lest she do something stupid like hug the guy.
She couldn’t even imagine the daily torture it must be to have something so wonderful within reach, knowing it might yet be snatched away. She glanced up at his beautiful profile. Okay, so maybe she could imagine it just the tiniest little bit.
She placed a hand on her heart. ‘If there’s anything I can do. Write a letter of recommendation. Talk to the judge. My family has connections the likes of which you wouldn’t believe.’
Before he could be too proud to turn her down, she held out a hand close enough she could feel the warmth of his breath washing against her skin.
‘Forget you’re not a fan of hoopla. If you need to in order to fight for Ruby, use me for all I’m worth. My notoriety has to be good for something more than invites to every party in town, right?’
He wrapped his fingers around her hand, sliding them through hers until they were intertwined. ‘I was going to say thank you.’
‘Oh. Well, then, you’re welcome.’
She glanced at him, the dark silhouette striding alongside her in the near darkness. Things were even more complicated than she’d imagined. A little girl. A custody battle. And all remarkably hush-hush. How he did it alone, with no family support and with such integrity, she had no idea.
‘Is that why you don’t do press? You don’t like talking about your background?’
‘I didn’t like being judged for something I had no control over then and I still don’t.’
‘Why?’
She looked up at him too late to notice how tight his jaw had become.
‘If people tell you you’re crap often enough, you begin to believe it.’
‘You don’t think I know that?’
‘I say don’t give them the chance.’
‘I say find a way to negate it so that it can no longer hurt you. There’s nothing at all shameful about it. Who you’ve become is amazing.’ She looked down at her toes sticking out of her Grecian sandals. ‘I mean, the story of how you got here is amazing. Think about all the foster kids you could help if they knew how you’d pulled yourself up by your own socks to become who you are.’
‘Not going to happen. I have to think of Ruby.’
‘And what about her?’ she asked. ‘Are you ever going to tell her where you came from? And if you do will you swear her to silence? Or keep her locked up here for ever to protect yourself from the sting of other people’s opinions?’
‘What about your father?’ he shot back.
‘What about him?’
He pulled her closer, until they came to a stop. ‘He’s a bully. Hell, Meg, he was emotionally abusive to you. Yet of all the parts of your life on show, why has that never come out? Why not show other young girls that their own expectations of themselves are the ones that matter, not what other people think they should be?’
She tried to expertly extricate her hand from his, a move she’d pulled a thousand times, but it was as though he had been waiting for it.
He took her other hand so she was stuck facing him when he said, ‘Forget Ruby for a moment—what about all the other little girls who read magazines and look up to you as a role model?’
That was what her volunteer work was for! So what if the girls whose hair she braided and the boys she played cops and robbers with didn’t know who the woman behind the bleached-blonde wig and brown contacts was? At least she was there.
She itched to tell him so. To say out loud that working at the Valley Shelter was the most rewarding thing she’d ever done and that every moment she spent flirting with a camera lens so that her rotten bloody father got the chance to muck about with someone else’s hard-earned savings felt more and more like hard work.
Especially when even having looked death in the eye it hadn’t once occurred to him to make retribution.
But the old fear of being thought ridiculous for thinking herself more valuable than she was rose up her ankles, her calves, her waist, until it reached her throat and she sputtered like an old car whose engine would never again come to life.
‘I do think of them,’ she said. ‘I am doing what I can. In my way. Just not the way you mean.’
He closed his eyes a moment and took a calming breath. He was probably counting to ten. Her brothers did that all the time.
When he opened his eyes they were deliberately calm. As such she wasn’t nearly prepared for his next words.
He said, ‘So you’re not simply filling the void of not being loved by your father with being loved by the entire world?’
She coughed out an incredulous laugh, and dragged her hands from his to slam them onto her hips. ‘Are you trying to tell me that giving up your life for Ruby isn’t your way of making someone in the world love you back?’
Silence stretched between them as taut and dangerous as an overstretched rubber band.
Until Zach said, ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s how this all began. But I do love her. And as soon as she comes home from Clarissa’s, I’ll tell her so because it’s important for a little girl to know her dad loves her. Or so someone I trust told me.’
Meg shook her head. This was backfiring big time. If he pulled when she pushed she was never going to be rid of him. Instead, he was being gorgeous
and warm and understanding and a tower of strength and a wonderful dad.
With a growl at the moon she headed back up the path again.
‘Meg,’ he said from behind her.
She waved a go-away hand at him.
He jogged to catch up to her, this time spinning her to face him with the gentlest of pressure at her elbow.
‘Thanks ever so much for being such an enchanting escort, but I’m sure I can make it back from here.’ She glanced at her surroundings to discover they had gone a ways past the Waratah House turn-off and had found themselves outside one of the lovely little bungalows on the way to Zach’s place. A light was on over the porch.
‘I could do with a coffee right about now—how about you?’ he asked.
She whirled to stare at him. The moon was now almost completely obscured by cloud and his eyes were nothing more than patches of black within his shadowed face. ‘Now what are you talking about?’
He waved a hand towards the bungalow. ‘I use it as my office. Some nights I stay over rather than heading back to the house. So the pantry is well stocked with all sorts of delights, including coffee.’
‘Oh,’ she said, his meaning not even the slightest bit obscured by the fact that she couldn’t see his eyes. He’d been leading her here the whole time. To his cosy, empty, private abode. Which had a bed. And coffee.
She licked her lips as her mind whirled a million miles a minute. ‘And you kept this from me the whole time? The coffee part, I mean.’
His mouth lifted so the preposterously sexy arc in his right cheek put in a surprise appearance. ‘I wasn’t prepared to share my coffee with you then.’
‘And now?’
He lifted a hand to slide it into the hair at the base of her neck, the tug of his warm fingers almost too much to bear.
‘I’d say things have changed rather dramatically over the past few days. My eyes have been opened in more ways than one. And I only have you to thank. Coffee seems a meagre place to start.’
Meg swallowed, her mouth dry, her blood thundering in her ears until she felt the slightest bit dizzy. There were reasons, good reasons why this couldn’t happen, only she couldn’t remember one.
He slid his spare hand into his trouser pockets. She imagined she could hear the soft tinkle of keys somewhere on his person.
‘Zach—’ she said, her voice half appeal, half groan.
‘Enough talk,’ he said.
He leaned down and kissed her. And she was on her toes, reaching up to him even before he gathered her into his arms.
The raging heat of his kiss swept her away, spiralling her into the cosmos until she could no longer feel her feet. Could no longer remember her name.
Or why they hadn’t been doing this all along.
Meg lay on Zach’s bed, white cotton sheets tangled about her, his long limbs trapping her in his warm embrace.
She glanced at the clock on the wall. It was only a couple of hours before sunset. Rylie and Tabitha would soon notice her gone. They’d assume where she was, and they’d be right. They’d known she’d end up here before she did. As apparently did Zach. It seemed everyone knew her better than she knew herself.
She tilted her head to watch Zach’s sleeping face. The creases at the edges of his eyes had disappeared. His tanned skin looked radiant against the white pillow. A faint line curved down his right cheek, a reminder of the arc that grooved deep when he laughed. He was sleeping like a man with no worries on his mind.
She reached up and slid a curl from his forehead. He didn’t stir.
Such gentle strength. She felt it infusing her more with every second she spent in his arms until she couldn’t imagine when in her life she would ever have felt this kind of peace, this slowly budding confidence that if she looked deep inside herself she might not be afraid of what she saw.
The words spilled from her lips to his sleeping form before she even knew they were coming. ‘I volunteer at the Valley Women’s Shelter at least once a week. It’s a halfway house for women who’ve managed to break free of abusive relationships but have nowhere else to go. Most have kids. Most have nothing with which to go it alone bar the clothes on their backs. Many are so battered and bruised they can barely talk.’
He shifted and she held her breath. He slid his leg along hers, wrapping his arm tighter about her, sending warm waves of pleasure all over her body. But his eyes remained closed. She waited until the sensations rolling across her skin dissipated, and his breaths were once again even and deep.
‘I wear a blonde wig,’ she whispered, ‘contacts, the kind of make-up you’d see in a bad eighties movie, clothes I picked up in a bargain bin at a thrift store. I can walk through a throng of paparazzi in front of my building and they don’t turn an eye. The guys at the shelter know me as Daisy. They’ve never asked questions, just appreciated someone giving their time to play with the kids while the mums have medicals, or to just sit and hold a woman’s hand while they tell their stories to the counsellors.’
She took a deep breath and let it out on a wobble.
‘Compared with the level of abuse they’ve been subjected to my dad constantly finding new weird and wonderful ways of letting me know he didn’t consider me worthy of the name Kelly was a walk in the park. But I still see myself reflected in their eyes when they talk about how hard it was to finally say “enough”. I give cups of tea, and a shoulder to cry on and secretly stashed envelopes full of money to help them start a new life. It’s the most worthwhile thing I’ve ever done and my name has nothing to do with it.’
She let her gaze amble over Zach’s beautiful nose, his strong jaw, the smattering of dark hair curling over his chest.
‘So there you have it. That’s what I do to really make a difference. I just don’t shout it out to the world. Not because I’m not proud, or I don’t realise it’s vitally important. But because it’s hard, and it’s private, and I do it for myself and for them, not for him and not for the cameras.’
‘Thank you,’ Zach said, and had it not been for the knot of sheets and his heavy limbs keeping her in bed Meg might well have leapt a foot in the air.
She placed a hand over her thundering heart. ‘How long have you been awake?’
‘Longer than you have.’
She lay back and blinked up at the ceiling. ‘So, just now, you heard everything.’
‘Everything.’ He snuggled in closer and kissed her on the cheek, right at the edge of her mouth. ‘And thank you for telling me.’
She turned to face him. His dark eyes burned into hers. She needn’t have searched so desperately for what he was thinking—it was written all over his beautiful face. He did not think her ridiculous. He did not think her a mere party girl. He thought her pretty amazing.
‘Thank you for listening,’ she whispered before leaning in and placing her lips against his.
And they made love again. Slowly, gently, not once taking their eyes off one another.
A while later Meg fell asleep, knowing without a single doubt that she loved him. Knowing she was never again going to meet someone who saw her, really saw her, as he did. Who made her wonder if the day might yet come when she’d be brave enough to let the rest of the world nearer than skin deep too.
She fell asleep knowing Zach cared for her. Knowing he respected her. Knowing he’d made love to her.
She fell asleep knowing that, despite all that, Zach Jones and his gorgeous blooming little family only reminded her with stark, heart-wrenching clarity what she could never have.
As the sun rose through the bay windows of the bungalow, Zach stood in the bedroom doorway in last night’s trousers watching Meg dress.
She stood by his rumpled bed, tying the bow on her dress, the muscles of her back working sexily, a small frown pinched between her brows, and her top teeth biting down on her bottom lip. He couldn’t believe there was ever a moment when he’d assumed the Meg Kelly the country adored was all an act. In that moment she was so very, very real.
The dia
monds, the flashy friends, the va-va-voom, they were the trappings of her life, but not why she was beloved. It came down to the fact that she was a warm, dynamic woman who bled like everyone else, and spent her life making sure those around her didn’t hurt as much when they bled too. Whether it was a woman running from an abusive husband, her complicated family, his young daughter, a complete stranger who accosted her, camera in hand, while she vacationed, she had time, she had a smile, she had a way of making them feel better off for having met her.
His hands literally ached with the desire to haul her back into his arms and soak up every bit of vitality she could spare. But he needed to get home. To be there when Ruby returned. He had things to do. Things to say.
He pushed away from the door and slid his hand down her back, tugging at her dress until he could feel and see the trail of wild daisies tattooed across her lower back.
At his touch her head fell back in pleasure, her hair spilling over her bare skin.
‘So what’s the story here?’ he asked, his fingers tracing the daisy vine, his breath tickling her ear.
She shivered. ‘I got it when I was fifteen. Daisies were my favourite flower. Luckily they still are.’
‘What? Fifteen? You need parental permission, right? Until you’re eighteen?’ Please, God, he thought, let that be true.
She smiled over her shoulder at him. ‘Of course you do. Unless your father said no way in hell was his daughter getting a tattoo and you were me. Then you find a way to get whatever you want.’
Her skin was warm and soft until the tattoo made it feel ever so slightly rough. ‘Did it hurt?’
‘Like hot needles into the bone for two straight hours … Yuh-huh.’
‘You really were a tearaway.’
‘I could tell you stories.’
He placed a kiss where her neck met her shoulder. ‘So tell me.’
She moved so that her hair fell over the spot he’d just been kissing. ‘Another time perhaps.’
He pulled back. A sudden chill had come from her direction. He shook it off. Mornings after were always at least some level of awkward. She’d be all right with some space to process it all.