Water under the Bridge

by Lily Malone

  * * *

  ‘You’re chipper today. Get lucky last night, didya?’ Lester Huxtable greeted Jake from behind the plumbing supplies counter.

  Lester—who had been married forty years and reckoned these days he only ever got lucky on his birthday—was convinced the entire male population had more good fortune than him. Any time any of the male employees came into Honeychurch Hardware with a smile on his face, Lester was convinced it was all down to the bloke getting laid the night before.

  Jake was chipper. Damn straight. And he didn’t have a morning glory to thank for it.

  He’d felt great driving home from Ella’s last night with the moon in his window and a blossoming sensation in his chest whenever he thought of Ella: her hair in his hand, that little noise she’d made when her lips touched his as he’d kissed her goodnight.

  It was more than enough to put a smile on his face.

  Lester pointed at a spot near his temple. ‘Don’t need to be Einstein to work it out.’

  ‘How about you channel Einstein and work out next month’s orders, Les, hey?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Lester said, lifting his glasses so he could read the fine print on the labels in his hands. Various sized lengths of bright copper pipe snaked across the bench in front of him, a bunch of fittings piled to the side.

  ‘Need new glasses?’ Jake said.

  ‘Turn it up. Go be happy on your own, hey? Leave us unlucky old blokes alone.’

  Jake nodded to a customer who’d approached Lester for help at the counter. June McReid had been coming in to the shop as long as Jake could remember. He would have talked with June—the McReids were good friends of his folks—but at that moment his phone vibrated in his pocket.

  Jake flipped the cover, swiped and saw Ella’s name on the screen, and that warm rubbery sensation smacked him hard in the chest all over again.

  ‘Gotta be a lady, doesn’t it, June?’ Lester said from the counter, raising his eyebrows at Jake.

  June nodded definite agreement.

  ‘Get stuffed, Les,’ Jake said, but he was smiling as he accepted the call and paced away from the plumbing help desk. ‘Ella. Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning. How are you?’ Even her voice sounded like music.

  Jake walked through rows of tap fittings and washers, toilet seats, plungers, hose, pipes and valves, heading for garden products, which led through to the administration offices on the other side.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ he asked her.

  ‘Not really. I had a bit on my mind. You?’

  ‘Like a log. I always do.’ He stepped out the rear entrance of the shop and nodded a silent good morning to Lisa Rohr, who was misting spray over the new seedlings.

  Lisa nodded back at him, then her eyes narrowed, and he thought that he really did have to watch himself in this place. His own grin was gonna hurt his face if he kept this up. The whole staff would be convinced he’d got lucky last night.

  ‘Well, Jake, um … much as I’d like it to be, this isn’t really a social call,’ Ella said.

  Jake stopped at a spot where a dense display of native shrubs made a grey-green screen between himself and Lisa. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘There’s a new offer on your nan’s house.’

  Jake straightened. ‘Yeah? How much?’

  ‘Can I come see you? I’d like to present it in person. Are you at the shop?’

  He checked his watch. ‘For another hour or so, yep.’

  ‘I’ll come now.’

  ‘See you soon.’ Jake ended the call and finished the last few paces in the sunlit garden centre before he reached the timber outbuildings that housed his office. If Ella walked from Begg & Robertson, she’d be less than five minutes.

  His office phone buzzed in three and he picked up. She must have run.

  ‘There’s an Ella for you at the front desk, Jake,’ Jenny Stark announced, and Jake told her to send Ella on through and he stood there waiting while his stomach got tight and that warm rubber balloon in his chest filled and filled and filled.

  A tap on the frame of his door, and Ella was there, smiling at him like he’d made her whole damn day.

  ‘You’re looking chipper this morning,’ she said.

  ‘So I’ve been told.’

  Ella leaned her hip on his doorframe and crossed her arms.

  God, she was gorgeous. If he ever saw Ella in one of those short office skirts she wore—always with heels—and didn’t get every kind of urge to unzip her the hell out of the skirt and chuck the shoes in a corner, he’d be ashes in an urn somewhere and the world better get ready to scatter him in the wind.

  Today’s skirt was grey. He liked it even more than yesterday’s navy one. He liked the pale pink top she wore with it. It looked like silk but he’d have to touch to know for sure. God, she had gorgeous shoulders. Lovely smooth arms.

  That’s when Jake noticed the pages in her hand and remembered this wasn’t a social call.

  It felt like a damn social call, though. It felt like those days when a new girlfriend dropped into your work with a cut lunch she’d made for you, and the guys on site ribbed you for days about how you’d sat under a tree in the park with your girl and ate sandwiches and the slice of cake she’d made specially, instead of a pepper steak pie and a sticky cream bun from the bakery lunch run.

  It felt just like that, with a great big balloon in his chest that was leaving space for nothing else.

  Jake leaned back on the edge of his desk. All he wanted to do was look at her. ‘You look beautiful.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Her cheeks flushed a deeper pink and the hand that wasn’t holding the papers touched two fingers to the hollow of her long, lovely throat, right near that freckle Southern Cross. He’d kissed her on that spot last night. He’d had his hands all over her on the bench under the rising moon. He’d like to kiss her there again right now. Throat or bench. Didn’t care.

  Then Ella’s ankle wobbled and she gripped the doorframe for balance, making the papers crackle as they horseshoe-shaped around the timber. There was a thud as her phone hit the floor.

  Jake got to her in two steps.

  ‘I’m okay. It’s okay. These bloody heels. One day I’ll learn to walk in them,’ she said, bending from the waist and lifting her left foot to examine whether she’d broken a strap.

  Jake got a glimpse of lacy white bra containing a mouth-watering swell of breast. He put his hand on her shoulder. Applied enough pressure to stop Ella’s examination of her shoe, and brought her up straight.

  She was all wide eyes and swish of brown hair. Moonlight, sunlight and everything untouchable and amazing he’d ever known.

  Jake bent his head, tipped Ella’s chin and kissed her, catching her mouth on a gasp of what he hoped was anticipation and not outrage.

  She didn’t feel outraged.

  She felt soft and feminine, but incredibly strong in her skin. Jake skimmed his fingers across years of underlying muscle in one slow stroke of Ella’s arm.

  His hand slipped to her hip and he stepped her sideways along the wall inside his office so he could back her up and kiss her the way he wanted to—was going to—like she was all his.

  He kissed Ella through firm and rough, through questing and gentle, until she moaned into his mouth and under his hands and made him get rough again. Through panting, through desperate, till he had a hand under Ella’s thigh, pulling her closer and her heel scratched the back of his calf where her ankle rubbed his trousers.

  Slow it down, Honeychurch.

  Back off, buster.

  Cool it, dude.

  Softly, Jake stole a last sneaky taste of Ella’s lower lip, discovered a taste in the very corner—of apples—and had to check again to be sure.

  Slowly, he lifted his head. Ella’s eyes were closed and he had the extraordinary pleasure of watching them open. Her eyes were a lighter colour than he’d thought, and now he knew that was because it’d been too dark to see last night and he’d never been close
enough before to get the full effect of the mocha specks sneaking into all that dark chocolate.

  Jake put his hand to her hair, giving the mahogany strands a twist in his palm. Was it the colour of her hair that had fooled him into thinking her eyes were so dark?

  Gently, he cradled the back of Ella’s head, hugging her face into his shoulder as he brought them both down.

  ‘Do I need to say sorry?’ he whispered.

  ‘For kissing me?’ she said, a little breathlessly, ‘Or for stopping?’

  ‘I didn’t want to stop. Stopping wasn’t the major thing on my mind.’

  He felt a pressure from her, a change of weight that told him it was time to let her go. Hardest thing he’d ever done.

  * * *

  It might have been the hardest thing she’d ever done, stepping out of Jake’s arms. In fact, Ella was pretty sure she wasn’t thinking straight. What woman would want to be out of those arms once she’d made a place there?

  But this was his office and a hardware store, for goodness sake. People didn’t kiss like that in hardware stores, or offices. People just didn’t kiss. Like. That.

  Ella’s fingers crept to her lips, as if double-checking they were still there.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Jake asked her.

  ‘Fine. I’m fine.’

  When had she ever been kissed like that? Ever? Her thoughts flew to Marshall, the after party and the aftermath. Marshall hadn’t kissed her like that.

  Erik kissed like … like Erik did everything. With German precision.

  Ella took a tiny step sideways to give her feet a firmer plant and felt her bottom bump the wall. That felt nice and safe and secure, so she stayed there while she caught her breath, looking around Jake’s broad shoulders.

  So this was his office? He had an office, not a space. She supposed he deserved it if he owned the business, like Harvey Begg. Did hardware stores have salespeople of the month? Was there an award for most sales of nails and hammers in the Great Southern?

  ‘Ella? Okay, now you’re scaring me. Talk to me so I know you’re still in there.’ Jake had been holding a curl of her hair. Now he tapped the side of her temple.

  ‘I like your office,’ she said.

  He swung around, putting more space between them, and she watched as he checked out his walls, one hand on his hip and the other spreading left, right and rear before he came back to centre.

  ‘You have your own filing system. That’s a very big desk,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe you should sit down.’

  She pressed her bottom firmly into the wall. ‘Nah, I’m good.’ She was. She was good. Very good. That was some kiss. Ella felt her lips again.

  ‘Okay, I think I’m going to insist.’ Jake held out his hand. ‘I think you’re drunk.’

  He might be right. Ella shifted her left heel further sideways, and a rip-crackle sound tore the air. When she looked down, she saw she’d put her heel through the new offer from Henry Graham.

  ‘Well that’s a bit of a bugger,’ she said.

  Jake laughed, bent and picked up her dropped phone.

  Ella leaned on the wall for balance and reached for the foot she raised, heel first, with the papers spiked to it. She peeled the offer from her heel and set her foot back on the floor.

  Nice flooring. Durable. You’d expect that in a hardware store.

  Ella raised her hand to indicate Jake’s desk and his three office chairs. One high-backed executive chair that looked like it would swing and dip just like Bob Begg’s, and two guest chairs opposite that each looked far classier than her one and only office chair at her space.

  ‘Shall we have a seat, Jake?’

  ‘That’s been my line for about three minutes. Please. Be my guest.’ He put her phone on the desk and pulled one of the guest chairs out for her, waited till she got her bottom from his wall to the seat, then walked around his desk and sat in the big black leather chair opposite.

  It felt like she spent a lot of time sitting at various front steps, chairs, tables, benches and desks with Jake Honeychurch. She was tired of sitting. She wanted to lie down with him. Live a little.

  ‘Will you tell me something?’ Jake asked and Ella’s brain awakened. He was staring at her with quiet intensity, and there was something very different about his tone, like he’d just sharpened it on one of the machines he had in his store.

  Ella licked her lips, trying to find some of the moisture that Jake had kissed away. ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘I was out of the country when you swam—I’ve been thinking about it and I’m pretty sure that’s why I didn’t connect your name or your face any earlier—but you were blonde in the television ads with Erik. And blonde when you were swimming. That’s what I saw on Google. So is that your natural colour?’ He dipped his head with the question. ‘Or blonde?’

  Ella touched the tips of her hair. It was so much healthier these days than when she’d spent all those hours in chlorinated pools. ‘Close to it. It’s got a rinse in it, but I’m brunette. It turned this awful green colour when I was swimming. Something else for the girls at school to tease me about. I dyed it blonde back then.’

  ‘I like it brown,’ Jake said, sitting back as if her answer had solved the problem of world peace.

  Ella put the papers on the desk in front of her—lots of clear space, Jake kept a tidy desk. She pushed them across towards him till she hit a corner of his closed laptop and at that point Jake picked the papers out of her hand.

  He read the new number and Ella held her breath.

  ‘He’s keen, isn’t he?’ Jake said, giving her the papers straight back.

  ‘He must be. He’s just upped his first offer by fifty grand. That’s got to say something.’

  ‘It does. It says he’s playing games. Fishing around. I know Henry.’

  ‘Jake … this is a good offer. I really think you should consider this. The last sale on the Chalk Hill Bridge Road was a bigger block and a much newer house and it went for $460,000 and that was before the GFC took everything out of WA prices. This is $479,000 cash, right here, and I’m not sure you’ll get much more. I appraised Irma’s house for you before between $450,000 and $480,000.’

  Ella had to fight not to shake the papers, and fight not to raise her voice.

  ‘I’m not selling for that,’ Jake said quietly, opening his laptop.

  Now she had to fight not to sigh out her exasperation. ‘A counteroffer then? Something Henry can aim for.’

  He shook his head. ‘Sorry. No can do. Tell him my asking price again.’

  Bloody hell. ‘You’re the boss. If that’s how you’re instructing me, that’s what I’ll do.’ Even if she’d rather crunch the papers in her hand, ball them up and play office basketball with the papers and the rubbish bin.

  ‘I’m sorry. I know this is important to you.’

  ‘It’s not about me, Jake. This is your property. It’s fine. I’ll try harder.’ She would too. She would sell this bloody house or die trying. Ella pushed up out of her seat. ‘Okay, I’d better call Henry. I’ll let you know what he says.’

  ‘Ella?’

  She paused. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would you and Sam like to come out to my place on Sunday? It’s supposed to be hot and it might be the last hot spell of summer. We can swim in the dam and have a barbecue.’

  The word chilled her spine. ‘I won’t swim in the dam.’

  ‘It’s clean. There’s a jetty. It might not be a swimming pool but it’s fine for swimming. It’s better than a pool actually. No chlorine. No salt.’

  ‘I’m not worried about getting muddy feet. I don’t swim anymore, Jake.’

  Swimming was another lifetime, and it led to nothing but tears. Swimming for her had been about doing the work till making a stroke felt like lifting a block of cement. Swimming had been about sacrificing everything and never having fun.

  ‘I won’t swim,’ Ella said again.

  ‘Well, you can paddle your feet off the jetty or something, or you can c
ritique me as I murder my freestyle, and maybe you’ll change your mind when you see how beautiful the water is. Sam would like it.’

  ‘Hate to break it to you. Sam doesn’t swim much either.’

  His brow creased. ‘How can the offspring of two swimming professionals not swim?’

  Ella almost laughed at the irony. Sam was the offspring of two swimming professionals, just not the two Jake thought. She’d kept Sam out of the water as much as possible, because even at five and six he’d been the spitting image of the baby pictures the media always showed of his famous father and she’d been terrified if she put him in the water he’d be a natural. A swimming fish who looked so much like Marshall Wentworth someone would make the connection and the whole world would know her secret.

  Erik said she wasn’t being rational. Sam’s swimming was one of the only things she and Erik argued about. He said all kids should learn to swim, and deep inside Ella knew he was right. It didn’t mean she had to like the idea.

  ‘I swam every day of my life for all those years. Sometimes twice a day. Sometimes three and four hours a day. I don’t miss swimming. I really don’t.’ Skin-folds. Diets. Measurements. Weights. Not eating chocolate or ice-cream, ever. How could she make Jake understand? ‘Taking Sam for a swim was pretty much the last thing I ever wanted to do. It was actually great going places without having wet hair.’

  ‘But he can swim? He’s had lessons.’

  ‘He can stay afloat. Yes. Erik’s taught him a bit. There’s plenty of time for him to learn better technique.’

  ‘Good,’ he said decisively. ‘My cleaning lady, Nita, she’ll be there Sunday and she usually brings her grandson, Ollie. He’s Sam’s age. I think they’d get on well together.’

  If there was one thing that would get her past the chill of the word ‘swim’, Jake had said it. Boy, did Sam need a friend.

  CHAPTER

  18

  ‘I’m sorry, Henry. That’s where Jake is at,’ Ella said, talking into her phone as she walked back to the Begg & Robertson office, moving slowly because the pavement wasn’t particularly smooth and her track record in heels was lousy.