Fool’s Paradise: Cartwright Brothers, Book 5

by Anderson, Lilliana

  Chapter Nineteen

  Such a Baby

  With a smirk, I broke a tiny piece of toast off and threw it across the table. “What are you looking at?”

  Toby watched the crouton-sized crumb bounce off his light blue T-shirt and land on the table, his eyes sparkled with mirth.

  “Just you,” he said, taking a mouthful of coffee. We were in the dining room of our hotel in Ceduna, fuelling up before hitting the road yet again. Most of the hotel was still sleeping except another couple sitting in the far corner, a family with two little kids, and the hotel staff.

  “I’m not that interesting,” I replied, dropping my eyes to my plate to hide my blush. I wasn’t really the kind of girl to blush at anything, but Toby brought that out in me. I could feel myself blossoming around him—if that was even a real thing.

  “To me you are. I’ve never met anyone quite like you.” There he goes again. My cheeks are on fire.

  In response, I smiled and popped a bit of toast in my mouth, focusing on chewing so I didn’t succumb to this gooey feeling that was developing inside me. Being with Toby had been an intense boot camp in feelings and vulnerability. I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge or share any of the pain I carried inside, but a clock was ticking on our time together, forcing me to take risks I wouldn’t normally take. Unapologetically. I wasn’t a sharer, but with Toby, I wanted him to know everything about me—the good and the bad. Just like I wanted to know everything about him. To be honest, it felt a little crazy. Smiling this much wasn’t natural. But happiness felt good on me, like a bold shade of lipstick I’d never had the courage to wear. I knew I’d only have it for the rest of our trip and in a way, I was OK with that. I didn’t know if I was the full-blown relationship kind of girl, but this I could do. A shedding of old and uncomfortable skins. The gentle feeding of a shattered soul. My time with Toby would be one good memory I’d hold on to if by some twist of fate I survived my father.

  My father.

  Ugh.

  I hated it when I thought of him that way. I tried to keep him catalogued under ‘sperm donor’. It was easier, but recent events had forced that other F-word into my thoughts and vocabulary.

  “Tell me it would be crazy to stay here indefinitely,” I said, releasing a longing breath as I looked out the window, watching whitecaps dance away from the horizon. It would be a beautiful place to quit the rat race in. In another life, I could imagine myself staying in the beautiful coastal town, watching the sunsets and enjoying the idyllic scenery, Toby by my side.

  Reaching across the table, he took my hand in his, his thumb moving over my knuckles. “I want to be selfish, Blair. I want to disappear and leave them to figure this shit out for themselves. You and I…” He grated his teeth over his bottom lip as he gave his head a slow tension-filled shake. “We could be great together. I mean, look at us, travelling across the country, stifling heat, highway dirt and a lumpy bed. Those are shit conditions, but we’re happy. We’re smiling. Because it feels good to let go.” He released my hand and sat back in his seat, grating his hand across this chin. “And I want to let go. It just…” He paused and met my eyes for a long moment. I knew a ‘but’ was coming, because I’d probably say the same thing in his shoes. “It isn’t in my blood. I have to finish this. For you, for me, for my family, and every other human being that man has or will hurt. I don’t feel like there’s even a choice anymore.”

  Leaning on the table, I rested my head on my hand and pressed my lips together. “I understand. I also agree. But, a girl can dream, right?”

  Sitting forwards, he took my hand again. “It’s a good dream, sunshine. I wish I was the man who could give it to you.”

  I’m not a good man.

  To me you are.

  * * *

  “Tell me the most embarrassing thing you ever did in front of a girl,” I said as we walked from the hotel back to the camper van. Being early morning, the sun hadn’t started cooking the bitumen yet. When we’d arrived the day before, it was sticking to the bottom of our runners and making funny tacky sounds as we walked.

  “Besides getting drunk and kissing my brother’s wife?” Toby shifted our duffle bags into one hand then slung them over his shoulder. All I was carrying was a handbag slung across my shoulders. Not that I wasn’t willing to carry my own, he just grabbed it first. Another thing to add to the list of things Toby did for me. How this man wasn’t happily married was beyond me. He was so damn charming that he could pluck any girl off the street and convince her to have his babies—criminal history or not. Women would pay to get a guy like Toby in their bed.

  “Yeah, that’s pretty fucking embarrassing. And recent too. Maybe go for something that doesn’t have a sting attached to it. Something you can laugh at now.”

  “OK. Let me think on this for a second.”

  “You have to think? Ohhh, this is either going to be really good or you’ve always been so suave you don’t have any embarrassing moments.”

  He chuckled. “I have plenty, believe me. I’m not suave in the slightest.”

  “And yet you have me. I’ll have you know that I’m not easily caught, Mr Cartwright.”

  “I have you, huh? That’s good to know.” He bumped his arm against mine then caught my hand.

  “See, that was a suave move.”

  With a laugh, he lifted our joined hands and nibbled lightly on the knuckle of my index finger.

  “They call this deflecting, you know.”

  He nibbled a little more. “Actually, I’m pretty sure they call this thinking.”

  “Oh, come on.” I pulled my hand from his and skipped ahead a little, turning to walk backwards so I could face him. “How can you not have anything? I can probably give you a list of thirty embarrassing moments right off the top of my head.”

  “Give me five,” he said.

  I held up a hand and counted off my fingers. “My tit fell out of my dress at a high school disco. My first actual boyfriend and I head-butted when we tried to kiss and I gave him a blood nose. I sneezed giving a blowjob once and bit the guy’s dick—”

  “OK, OK.” He held his hand up to stop me talking, laughing while shaking his head. “I don’t need to hear about you and other guys’ dicks in your mouth.”

  I grinned. “Jealous?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Reaching forwards with his free hand, he tried to catch me about the waist. But I dodged him and ran the last few metres to the camper van, laughing as he gave chase.

  “Stop!” he yelled, the moment my hand reached for the door. The alarm in his voice caused me to freeze.

  “Why?”

  “Step away, Blair. Real slow.”

  Expecting there to be a brown snake or some equally dangerous reptile at my feet, I did as he instructed, my heart beating up a storm in my chest until I got close enough for him to grab me and pull me with him.

  “What happened?” I gasped. “Why are we running?”

  He led me until we were behind another camper, his back pressed against it like we were under enemy fire.

  “Toby?”

  “Someone’s been in our van,” he said, surveying the area with eagle eyes. He placed his arm across my middle to keep me well hidden while he poked his head out to see if anyone was watching. He was protecting me. Me. The woman who’d hunted him down and brought this rain of hell fire on him. The woman who could stand up and fight as well as any man. He was protecting me. I might have gone a little mushy inside.

  “How can you tell?”

  “The lock is bent and there’s a piece of broken wire lying on the ground near the engine.”

  I tried to peek around him to see. “You’ve got a good eye.” I could barely make out the wire let alone the bend in the lock. “Do you think Irish caught up to us already?” We should have had at least twenty-four hours before they made it here from Perth based on Nick’s intel.

  “Maybe. Or maybe it’s nothing. Maybe the wire is from someone doing repairs and maybe some druggie was tr
ying to break into all the camper vans last night looking to score.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  He ran a hand through his hair, pushing it out of eyes. “Do you have a compact mirror in there?”

  I dug into my bag and pulled one out, handing it to him.

  “Thanks.” He took it and jogged a few metres away, keeping a lookout as he went.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed.

  Bending down, he grabbed a stick and came back to me. “Give me your hair-tie.”

  Without questioning him further, I tugged it from my hair, my heat frazzled blonde locks tumbling to my shoulders in a mess.

  “Ta.” Bending on one knee, he wound the hair elastic around the mirror and the stick, creating a makeshift inspection mirror so he could look at our camper van’s undercarriage without touching it.

  “Clever,” I said, and he winked.

  “Keep an eye out for our explosive friend.”

  With a quick nod, I donned my work persona, shifting from the carefree girl I’d been over breakfast and back into the hard-headed woman who was constantly on guard. It felt like putting on dirty clothes after a refreshing shower, wrong and uncomfortable because it negated the point of getting clean.

  In less than a minute, Toby returned throwing the stick on the ground and returning the mirror and elastic.

  “And?” I asked anxiously.

  “We need to get out of here.”

  “Noooo.” My eyes went wide.

  “Yes. That thing will blow sky high the moment the key turns. The guy doesn’t deviate much from his MO.” He pulled out the Blackberry and punched in a few numbers, holding it to his ear.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Calling it in.”

  “To the cops?” It connected, and he immediately explained where we were and that he’d seen someone attach a suspicious looking package to a van before disconnecting. I slapped him on the chest with the back of my hand. “Are you nuts? Cops are gonna swarm this place.”

  He tucked the phone away. “You want tourist jam on your conscience? We can’t leave a live bomb in the parking lot. Too many innocent people.”

  “You’re right. I just wish I knew how the hell Irish got here so fast?”

  He knelt on the ground again, digging through his duffle. “I don’t know, maybe they sped, maybe your friend’s timeline was wrong and they left earlier. Maybe they got here in a bloody helicopter.” He shrugged as he found a Swiss Army knife and a push button contraption. “Point is, they’re here. And we need to go.”

  “If you need weapons, I have a taser, a tranq gun, and a handgun in my grab bag.”

  He lifted his brow and handed me his contraption. “We don’t need weapons.”

  With a shrug, I turned the plastic box in my hand, indistinguishable as anything besides a remote of some sort. All that was on it was a switch and a button. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Find a car that isn’t over ten years old. Flick the switch and hit the button while you hold the box next to the door. It’ll unlock.” He grabbed a weird-looking screwdriver from his bag then zipped the whole thing up. “Take your bag. I’ll take mine.”

  “We’re splitting up?”

  “No. I’m getting some number plates. We’ve got a lot of road to cover and we can’t be driving an easily identifiable stolen car.”

  “Oh.” I took the bag he handed me.

  “Have a problem stealing?”

  I opened my mouth. Besides some shoplifting as a teen, I hadn’t done a hell of a lot. Ever since I’d started working, I’d been pretty flush with cash.

  “It’s a means to an end, Blair.”

  “I know. It’s cool. I’m cool.”

  He smiled and stood up, grabbing my chin between two fingers before he leaned in and sucked gently on my lower lip. “Now hurry before the cops get here and people start gathering around.”

  After about five minutes, we were on the road in a Holden Ute that was so covered in red dirt I wasn’t even sure what colour it was. It seemed like it was a rusty colour, but it also could have been white. It was that filthy.

  “This cab stinks,” Toby said, adjusting the seat until he found a comfortable position. He grimaced and came up with an old sock. “Animals.” He threw it out the window and it tumbled along the highway.

  “Looks like some guy’s work Ute. Maybe he was out roo hunting in his free time?”

  “It reeks. One of my brothers owns a Ute just like this. The twins use it for their lawn mowing business.”

  “Why do they have a lawn mowing business?” That sounded like a lot of hard labour when they were raised as thieves and could get their hands on easy money.

  “It’s complicated. They do some jobs to appear legit then we launder extra money through it. We have a bunch of different businesses that all feed into each other.”

  “You’re right. That does sound complicated.”

  He shrugged a shoulder and hit the buttons to wind down the back windows. “Anyway, they spend long days in that thing sweating up a storm, stinking of grass, smoking, and whatever else. Even that Ute doesn’t stink like this. I can’t deal. Why did you choose this?”

  Grimacing a little, I shrugged. “It was the one most hidden from view.”

  He scrunched his face up like he might puke and held his hand to his face. “I can’t.” Turning the wheel, he pulled into the first rest stop we came across and jumped out of the car, coughing and gasping like he’d just had his nose pressed up against Satan’s bowels.

  “You’re a baby.” I laughed, pulling open the back doors before taking bits of rubbish out. The car stank, that was true. But not that terribly. I guess Toby just had a sensitive nose. “Whoever owned this is an animal,” I said, removing package after package of old food containers. Partially eaten burgers, chicken bones, and all manners of junk and packaging. There were also a couple of coke bottles with dubiously yellow contents that I held away from me as though they might explode. “This is gross.”

  Pulling his deodorant out of his bag, Toby sprayed it throughout the cabin then left the doors open while it settled. “I can still smell it. It’s like rancid meat.”

  “Well, they did have chicken bones in there.”

  “Yeah.” He sniffed the air. “I don’t know. I think—” Stopping mid-sentence, he walked to the back of the Ute and popped the cover on the tray. Flies swarmed into the surrounding air, looking like static on a TV screen, followed by the stench of a thousand rancid farts.

  “I’m gonna puke.” I immediately jumped back, covering my mouth at the sight of a bloated carcass of a kangaroo, rotting in the back. “What is wrong with people?”

  “Who the fuck knows,” he muttered, covering his face with the neck of his shirt as he dragged the carcass onto the ground with a thud. The moment it hit, maggots came spilling out.

  I screamed.

  As far as the human experience goes, I’ve been through hell and back again. Not once, during all the crap that had happened to my person did I scream. But seeing those wriggling white things spill out of that roo was where my ability to cope ended.

  “Get it away. Get it away. Get it away!” I bounced on the spot and shook my hands as he dragged the poor animal off to the side of the rest area. We’d seen a lot of kangaroo carcasses on our trek across the Nullarbor, they jumped in front of cars and trucks at night and ended up as roadkill, but this was our first one up close and personal.

  “You’re such a baby.” Toby laughed, leaning down and washing his hands under a tap.

  “I am not a baby. That was disgusting, and you know it.” We’d switched roles so quickly. One minute I was laughing at him and cleaning out the car, while the next he was laughing at me and cleaning out the tray. At least we balanced each other out.

  “Looks like our friend was a bit of a hunter.” Toby pointed to the ute’s tray where a long and narrow zip case sat.

  “Rifle,” I said, knowing the type of case by sight. “It
might come in handy.”

  Nodding, Toby pulled the cover back over the tray to hide the gun from view. “We’ll take it with us when we switch cars at the next stop. I reckon we drive straight through now. We can’t afford to pause anymore.”

  “I know,” I said, fighting tears as I helped secure the elastic rope to hook the ute’s cover in place. This new development really sucked. I’d literally just opened up to Toby. In doing that, I’d woken up feeling unburdened, fresh to face a new day filled with these new emotions I’d developed towards Toby. I’d wanted to laugh with him and hold his hand. I’d wanted to kiss him in the open and lick him behind closed doors. I’d wanted to cram so much freaking joy into seven small days, and now… Now, I’d been robbed. The joy was gone. Just when I’d found it. Fucking typical. I hated my life. Hated this world even more.

  All I needed was another seven tiny days.

  “Hey,” Toby said, reaching for me once the cover was secure.

  I shook my head and shied away. “Let’s just go, OK?” I knew he understood what was going on in my head. He had this uncanny ability to read me. But I couldn’t handle that right now. I didn’t want him to hold me, to kiss me, to tell me it would be OK. I didn’t want any of that, because I knew it was a lie. We’d been found too soon and now this was over. We were over.

  And it fucking sucked.

  Chapter Twenty

  Yours

  A little less than sixteen hours later, we pulled into the underground car park of an apartment building in Anglesea; about twenty minutes out of Torquay. We’d switched cars five times, this last being an emerald green Nissan Patrol with two hundred and eighty thousand on the clock. We paid eight grand in cash for it and drove away without having to worry about being pulled over anymore. I actually slept for that final six hours.

  Toby, however, drove the entire time, a grim determination on his face as he gripped the wheel. All the happiness and spark I’d come to expect from him was dimming the closer we got to his home. He still had his intensity, but it felt like that’s all there was left of the man I’d grown to care for. All I wanted to do was turn around and go back to Madura, the last place we’d been happy. I’d give anything to feel that way again, to press pause on everything around us.