Awakened by His Touch

by Nikki Logan

  ‘You may not want to, Elliott, but I think you have to. Because me being happy and fulfilled exactly the way I am only highlights how empty you are.’

  ‘Really? That’s what you think?’ His voice had chilled several degrees.

  ‘I’m starting to.’

  ‘And why exactly should it matter to me what you do? We’re not a couple. We’re barely even friends.’

  A dull ache spread through her thorax. ‘That’s what I’d like to know. What is it to you?’

  ‘I guess nothing,’ he said, after an eternity, his voice rich with sorrow. ‘I just wanted to help you.’

  Poor little blind girl.

  ‘I’m not your project, Elliott. I’m just asking you to respect my choices. To respect me.’

  When he spoke again, his voice was hard. ‘I don’t think I can, Laney.’

  Her gasp cracked the still air. She stared at him through her unseeing eyes. He couldn’t bring himself to respect her?

  ‘You’re hiding out here in this paradise, Laney. A place and existence that’s customised for you, that’s as streamlined and predictable as the lives of your bees. And you’ve convinced yourself that you’re happy that way because you don’t know any different.’

  ‘Any better, you mean?’

  Could he be any more patronising?

  A cold certainty washed over her. ‘Is that why you stopped things between us last night? Because you can’t be with someone you don’t respect?’

  His voice dropped. ‘It’s a pretty fundamental thing.’

  Hurt clenched in her stomach. Yeah, it was. And pretty immutable, too.

  She sagged back against the side of the house, struggling to breathe normally. All this time she’d just wanted to be accepted for who she was, but Elliott found it impossible to like that Laney.

  Not much she could do about that.

  ‘Well...’ What the hell did you say in this situation? ‘Good call, then. That would have been much more painful to discover if we’d got any more involved.’

  You know—if I’d fallen in love with you or something...

  She dropped her eyes in case he read the silent irony in them, unguarded. A silent minute ticked by.

  ‘So, I guess I won’t see you until I get back from the trip,’ he finally ventured, thick and low. ‘I’ll keep you informed—’

  ‘No need. I’m sure Owen will be in touch regularly.’

  Don’t call me.

  Despite his itchy feet, she felt sure that Owen would start missing his family about two minutes after leaving them. And, really, she’d get over Elliott much more quickly if he wasn’t at the front of her consciousness, all glowing and present.

  ‘Laney—’

  She straightened and thrust out her hand. ‘Goodbye, Elliott. I hope the trip is everything you want it to be.’

  She stood there like that—hand outstretched, back straight, chin up—until his warm glove of a hand closed around hers. Firm. Tight.

  A true goodbye shake.

  And when he spoke his voice was no steadier than his hands.

  ‘Bye, Laney. Take care.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CRAWLING.

  Just like the bees on the frames of the hives she checked multiple times each day, the weeks crawled by until they formed reluctant months.

  Doing the hive runs wasn’t as much fun with Rick as it was with her brother, but productivity sure was higher when Owen’s replacement didn’t pepper their every journey with side-trips and errands.

  Maybe that had been Owen’s way of making a dull job more interesting.

  ‘Is this boring to you, Rick?’ she asked between frames. About the job she adored.

  ‘Nope. It’s awesome.’

  Thank you! ‘Awesome because you’ve only been doing it a few weeks and the novelty hasn’t yet worn off?’

  ‘Awesome because it’s outside.’

  See? Rick got it. He’d scored a great job in a surf shop but then discovered he was basically a till jockey, trapped indoors all day, surrounded by boards and wetsuits and diving gear he could only use on the weekend. So he’d jumped at Owen’s offer of filling in for him through autumn.

  ‘And because I get to work with you,’ he went on.

  Laney fumbled the frame as she slid it back down and a heap of bees launched off with a slight angry-bee tone in their buzz.

  Was that an overly appreciative ‘work with you’?

  She’d always liked Rick, and considered him the better of her brother’s friends, and they did have a lot in common, but there was no...whatever...with Rick. No spark. No intellectual attraction.

  And definitely no glow.

  The vacant place behind her eyes was still and dark when Rick was around. The light had been extinguished pretty much the day Elliott drove away from the farm for the last time.

  ‘I’m sure I’m not that interesting.’ She laughed carefully.

  ‘Yeah, you are. I love watching you work with the bees. How they respond to you.’ He closed one hive and moved to the next. ‘But mostly I can just be myself around you, without worrying that you’re working up to hitting on me.’

  The hitch of anxiety in her chest that Rick was suggesting more fizzled into flat understanding. How like one of her brother’s mates to be so utterly self-absorbed. And how contrary, on her part, that she should feel the stab of his rejection even when she didn’t even want his interest. It really didn’t help her to be reminded that the only man she’d welcome interest from was on the other side of the planet.

  And found her philosophically repugnant.

  As always, a deep ache took root low in her belly when she thought about Elliott and the way he’d judged her and found her wanting, and, as always, she forced it deeper, where she didn’t have to think about it. Logically, she knew that she’d done her share of judging, too—echoes of the word empty came back to her at the most inconvenient moments—but as far as her heart was concerned the damage was all his.

  ‘You should be so lucky,’ she joked aloud.

  They worked like that—casually chatting, but mostly getting on with the business of managing the hives—until their growling stomachs forced Rick back to the staff rest area for lunch and her back to the house to make a sandwich before her parents got back from the city with Owen in tow.

  They’d cut their trip short because they’d had more business than any of them could have imagined fulfilling in their first year of exporting, leaving them all feeling very positive about the potential. But did her brother’s enthusiastic reports really need to come so liberally sprinkled with anecdotes about Elliott?

  Her brother’s voice, but she heard Elliott.

  Maybe it was just because he was the first person to take Owen seriously. Or because he was so good at what he did. So lateral and so driven. Maybe he was just the first person to give Owen the right mix of support, belief and education. To appreciate his potential.

  Now that Elliott had turned his full attention to the other Morgan twin, ten weeks’ intensive travel had clearly birthed a serious bromance between the two men.

  And she could hardly blame Owen. She’d had one herself for a while there.

  Fortunately she’d had nearly three months of absolute nothingness to wean herself off Elliott. Not a word directly—only updates channelled through her brother. That kind of total shut-down was as good as a saturated blanket tossed on a grass fire. Total spark-killer. Even the glow had retreated to something that only emerged when she let herself think about him in any way outside of the strictly professional.

  Which was never.

  So everything she knew about what he’d been up to she heard from her brother or her parents. And once from when she web-searched Elliott in a moment of lapsed self-discipline.

 
She settled in at her desk with her sandwich—at the computer that had freaked Elliott out so much because it didn’t have a monitor—and checked her email for something from Owen. Although of course there’d be nothing from Owen, because he would have been in the air for the past twenty-four hours.

  So really this was about Elliott.

  Of course it was. It was his name she was secretly hoping to hear her text-reader announce. But, no. Nothing.

  She keyed the software to instant sleep and reached for the phone instead.

  Time for this to end.

  ‘Welcome to Ashmore Coolidge,’ an über-professional voice answered.

  ‘Helena Morgan for Elliott Garvey, please.’

  The faultless voice stumbled. ‘Uh...one moment please.’

  It hit her then, blazing and obvious—maybe he’d taken the day off since his international flight had only landed this morning. Assuming he’d flown back with Owen at all. And right after that she realised that she didn’t know his home number. Or his address. Ashmore Coolidge was her one and only channel to Elliott.

  ‘This is Roger Coolidge, Ms Morgan.’

  Senior partner Roger Coolidge? Surely Elliott didn’t get to bump his work up the food chain while he was away on business?

  She stiffened. ‘Mr Coolidge, I’m so sorry to have troubled you—’

  ‘How can I help you, Ms Morgan?’

  Time is money. Right. ‘I was calling for Elliott. I’ve just realised he’s probably not back in the office until tomorrow.’

  ‘Elliott?’ he repeated, as though her use of his Christian name was somehow inappropriate. ‘Garvey?’

  ‘I have...um...some questions about the Morgan’s proposal.’ Total rubbish, but somehow she couldn’t imagine Roger Coolidge responding positively to I just want to hear his voice.

  ‘The export proposal?’

  How many proposals were there? ‘I just wanted to see how it was tracking.’

  Ugh, such a bad liar.

  Office sounds clanked away in the background of Roger Coolidge’s silence. ‘Ms Morgan, Elliott Garvey is no longer employed at Ashmore Coolidge. I assumed you’d been informed.’

  Her stomach dropped away, along with her only lifeline to Elliott. ‘What? No...’

  ‘As of several months ago.’

  But their proposal... ‘Why?’

  His voice grew softer. Kinder. ‘I’m not really at liberty to say—’

  ‘Elliott Garvey is in possession of a lot of our financial data,’ she improvised—badly. ‘I would have thought as our financial advisors you would recognise the necessity of my question.’

  The kindness evaporated. Utterly. She should have known better than to try and play someone as experienced as Roger Coolidge.

  ‘Ms Morgan... He left of his own accord after we rejected his proposal for Morgan’s.’

  Rejected?

  ‘He left?’ The job and the company he loved? His promotion fast-track? ‘Why?’

  ‘We disagreed on some of the...conditions of approval. He was inflexible and opted to leave when we denied the proposal.’

  ‘What conditions?’

  ‘Again, I’m not at liberty to say. You’ll need to ask him.’

  ‘How, if he’s not our rep any more?’

  ‘My understanding is that he’s with one of your personnel in the United States right now, pursuing the proposal privately.’

  Those last words were strained.

  ‘Well, I—’

  ‘If you have any questions relating to Ashmore Coolidge’s services, or its current work with Morgan’s, I’d be happy to have Garvey’s replacement contact you personally...’

  The rest was a blur of impatient political correctness until Roger Coolidge disentangled them both from the awkwardness of the conversation and hung up.

  Laney squeezed the phone hard in her hand.

  Gone.

  Proposal rejected. Promotion jettisoned.

  Yet Elliott hadn’t told them before whisking Owen off overseas. What had he done after his proposal was rejected? Taken his bat and ball and decided to play on by himself? To go for the money if he couldn’t have the promotion? Show them what a mistake they’d made?

  Was he that desperate to succeed? Or was it just ego, frustration and maybe even anger at the lack of vision shown by his superiors—men he was supposed to respect?

  Though she knew what a big deal respect was to him.

  Unfortunately.

  But more pressing... Ashmore Coolidge was the only way she knew of getting in touch with Elliott now that he was back from his travels. And there was something terrifyingly final about not having one single communication channel to someone you loved...

  ‘Knock-knock.’

  Rick’s deep voice sounded just inside the front door and sent her leaping out of her chair and Wilbur scrabbling to his feet, both of them as guiltily as if he’d caught them up to no good.

  ‘There’s a dust plume coming in from the highway,’ he announced.

  Owen.

  It occurred to her suddenly to wonder if he’d have Elliott with him and her heart began thumping in earnest.

  ‘One plume or two?’

  And she held her breath.

  ‘Just the one.’ He kept on talking over her plunging hopes until he finished up with, ‘Is that okay with you?’

  ‘Um...sure.’ Whatever she’d just agreed to. If her vacant expression didn’t give her away.

  ‘Great. I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Say hi to Owen for me.’

  And then he was gone, leaving her with just enough time to finish her sandwich and brush the pollen out of her hair, thoroughly distracted, before the return of the prodigal son.

  * * *

  ‘Lake Erie.’

  Her mother had given up describing what was in the photos at image number eighty-seven. Now Laney was lucky if each picture in Owen’s excited slideshow even got a descriptor name.

  Part of her would have liked to ‘see’ Lake Erie. But another part of her—the part that really would have preferred to be doing something more productive with these hours—figured she could pull up a few pictures on the internet and have her mother describe those instead. At a more mutually enjoyable time.

  A time when her thoughts weren’t so completely filled with thoughts of a different man.

  She’d made a total fool of herself, nervously holding her breath as first Owen, then her mother and finally her father had alighted from her dad’s wagon. A pathetic part of her had desperately wanted to hear a fourth door-slam.

  But there had been no fourth slam.

  Owen in full so-tired-he-was-wired mode after his epic flight from the US was just a babbling sequence of stories with barely a breath drawn between them. And every story featured Elliott one way or another.

  Elliott did this... Elliott said that... Here’s Elliott at the biggest apiary in the States...

  Ugh.

  ‘I need to go for a walk.’ She cut across her brother’s slideshow narration, surprising herself with the intention and pushing to her feet.

  ‘Right now?’ her father asked. ‘But your brother’s only just back.’

  She pushed to her feet and felt for her coat before there could be any dissent. Apparently, yes, right now. ‘I need some air.’

  And she needed—very badly—to extract herself from the Elliott Garvey show.

  She felt her way to where Owen sat and kissed the top of his head. His gorgeous surf locks were gone in favour of a much more business-like short haircut. Somehow that made him even more a whole new Owen.

  ‘Good to have you back, O.’

  ‘We need to talk later,’ he threatened—and that was really the only word for the sudden seriousness in his voice. O
wen—the man who was never serious about anything.

  Wilbur groaned as he heaved himself to his feet, and she surprised herself again by signalling him to stay. He sank his old bones back down gratefully. ‘I won’t go far,’ she assured him.

  But she was lying, and his slight doggie whine told her he knew it.

  Staying close was safe, and safe wasn’t what she burned for just now. Safe was what Elliott had accused her of being all those weeks ago. Something deep inside her wanted to prove him wrong. Wanted to show him—or maybe just herself—that she could take as many risks as the next person.

  As him.

  She grabbed up her stick as she left the house and all Owen’s exciting stories behind and turned left towards the coast track.

  * * *

  What she wouldn’t have given for a bigger butt right now.

  Laney shifted from one cheek to the other on the rocky track and flexed tired, sore muscles, then tipped her face up to the sun to give her flagging spirits a boost.

  Stupid.

  She had her phone, but she wasn’t about to use it to call for help. In fact she’d turned it off so that no one could ring her, either, and offer to help. That would defeat the entire purpose of her ridiculous trek up to the lookout without Wilbur. The furthest point she could imagine going on foot. Somewhere she’d never been alone before.

  Somewhere not entirely safe.

  The lookout was a statement, and that statement was not going to be strengthened by a call for the cavalry to rescue her from the stupid stone she’d twisted her ankle on.

  But two hours on her butt in the dust and her throbbing joint wasn’t easing off any. She’d enjoyed the first hour—had used it to think and to gently test her abused ankle, to stretch out the yank on her tendons, waiting for the ouch to ease. But two hours without any improvement and she was starting to question the wisdom of this whole impetuous statement.

  All she’d done was prove Elliott right, really.

  Still she didn’t use her phone. She’d spend the night out here before calling for help. Turned ankles were hardly a new experience for her—she just needed to wait it out. Although she would turn for home just as soon as her leg was up to the challenge. There really was no point in denying reality.