by Evie Snow
Stephen winced. “Yeah. I get what you mean. Scott’s worked it all out, so she must have.”
“Hmm . . .”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“So what’s the deal with this woman Bridgett? You sleep with her to get this restaurant deal?”
“Jesus Christ, Rachael! What do you think I am?”
Rachael shrugged. “She’s hot. Okay, yeah, she’s a cougar, but she’s classy and sexy and it looked like she wanted to get in your pants when she visited yesterday. It wasn’t hard to put everything together.”
“It’s not like that. Yeah, we’re sleeping together, but that only happened after we decided we wanted to make a deal in the first place. And it’s casual.” Stephen shifted uncomfortably in the driver’s seat. Talking about Jo Blaine with his sister was one thing. Talking about the woman he was testing the ice with after his split from Lauren was something else entirely.
Thankfully, Rachael let the subject drop, her expression thoughtful as she looked out the window. In fact, he’d almost fully relaxed back into his earlier good mood, contemplating where he’d take Bridgett to celebrate their business deal, when Rachael spoke again.
“Stephen?”
“Hmm?”
“You said you were looking after Jo’s cat.”
Stephen nodded. “Yeah.”
“But you’ve been down at the farm for the weekend.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, but Mike’s in town, remember?”
Rachael just gave him a look. Mike was their older brother by two years. He lived overseas—mainly London—and to this day, no one really knew what he did there to make a living other than itinerant bar work. “Mike,” she repeated. “I thought he’d gone home already.”
“Nah. Said he’d stick around for a while longer. He said he’d call you in the next couple of days.”
“So . . . Mike’s taking care of Jo’s apartment?”
Stephen nodded. “Yeah. He’s taking care of things. It’s all good.”
Rachael snorted. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
* * *
Jo looked at the naked man lying facedown at her feet, feeling her blood bubble and hiss.
She didn’t give a shit if this dude looked like a Hollywood fantasy come to life or had a rump that would make Thor jealous. As far as she was concerned, he was male, he was in her bedroom, and she wanted him gone.
“Who the hell are you?” she repeated, giving him a prod in the ribs with her toe.
“Who the hell am I?” The man rolled over, looking up at her incredulously with brilliant blue eyes. “I’m the man who’s just sprained his dick on a hardwood floor. Who the hell are you?” His baritone voice had a broad Australian accent.
Jo added that to his angular chiseled features, unruly curly blond hair . . . and felt herself getting queasy. “Oh no. You’re—” She backed up. “Oh no, no, no, no, no! This is not happening.”
“What’s not happening? You didn’t answer me. Who the hell are you?” Mike Hardy got to his feet, seemingly unconcerned about the fact that he was bare-assed naked.
Jo stared at him, not quite believing her ears. “Me? Jo Blaine. Remember me? I used to live on your farm. For sixteen years. And this is my apartment, so you can leave right now!”
Mike looked her up and down, frowning. “You don’t look like Jo Blaine.”
“And you won’t look much like Michael Hardy once I’m finished with you! How did you get a key? Who gave it to you? Amy? Scott?”
Mike Hardy scowled. “Stephen. Who else?”
Jo’s jaw dropped. This had to be some kind of twilight zone. This was not happening. “Stephen? You mean your brother Stephen? Stephen Hardy Stephen?”
Mike looked at her like she’d just asked him if the sky was blue. “Well, yeah. Who else?”
“Who else?!”
“Jo?”
Jo spun around at the sound of Scott’s voice. “Down here!”
There was the thud of heavy footfalls before all six feet and three inches of Scott Watanabe skidded around the corner, his Yakuza-gangster-meets-Eurasian-god features screwed up into a horrified grimace that got even more pronounced when he took in the scene. “Mike? Where the fuck are your clothes, man? Jo, I’m so sorry. Jesus Christ!”
“She came in here and woke me up!”
“I don’t give a shit if she lit your arse on fire! Put some clothes on and get the hell out of there. I told Stephen that no one was supposed to sleep in Jo’s room.”
“I don’t remember telling you that anyone could stay here, let alone your goddamn cousin!” Jo heard her voice rising and tried to calm down. Tiredness, disorientation, and now sheer panic were all coalescing into one big urge to scream.
She didn’t want to see Stephen Hardy again! She’d spent her life running away from what happened fourteen years ago. She didn’t need it creeping up on her now.
“You didn’t say we could stay? What’s with that, dude?” Mike added his two cents with so much indignation that both Jo and Scott turned to stare.
“I don’t believe this is happening.” Jo shook her head in stunned bemusement.
Scott spared a frustrated glare at his cousin before turning on Jo. “You were supposed to be in New York!”
“I’m not! I’m here!”
“Yeah! But—”
“But nothing! Just fix it!”
Boomba yowled in protest, walking straight past Jo to rub himself against Mike Hardy’s legs. Mike picked him up as if he weren’t stark naked, while the cat started purring loud enough to cause tectonic plate movement.
The surrealness of the scene, the exhaustion, the everything finally became too much. Jo took a step backward. “Scott, I just want you to make this all go away. Him, I can deal with.” She pointed at Mike. “But Stephen Hardy?” A punch of dread curled around her anger, mixing with a bout of anxiety that had its roots in a long-ago day when she’d been twelve years old.
Scott opened his mouth and then snapped it shut. “You weren’t supposed to be here, so I didn’t think it would be a big deal. He broke up with his girlfriend, Lauren, and—”
“Not a big deal?!” There was only a small chance that people in remote Pacific islands didn’t hear Jo’s roar. “What part of Stephen Hardy living in my house didn’t you think would be a big deal? Tell me that!”
“You weren’t supposed to be home!” Scott shot back, his baritone climbing the decibel ladder with much more ease than hers. He inhaled deeply. “Look . . . this never should have happened. Let me call Stephen now. I’ll fix it.”
“You’d better!” Jo felt her stomach clench at the thought of seeing Stephen again. The awkward nervousness she’d felt her entire childhood came to the fore, unfettered by her usual defenses due to shock and fatigue.
For a couple of seconds she felt herself turning back into the overweight, over-tall poor kid hiding out on the Hardy farm with Amy and watching Stephen from afar. She’d spent years doing it. Her dad worked for his, she’d grown up on his family property—or at least she had until she was sixteen.
The twinge of that old anxiety, the memory of her stupid crush and where it led, rekindled her temper to inferno level. “I want him gone.” She pointed a finger behind her at Mike. “And I want him gone. I want my house cleaned up and returned back to the way I left it, and if the toilet seat is up when I come back home, by god, there will be hell to pay. And—” She held up a hand when Scott began to speak. “You owe me an apology.”
“Yeah, it sounds like you do, mate. This all sounds pretty heinous,” Mike Hardy piped up from behind her.
In one swift movement, Scott walked past Jo and slammed her bedroom door closed on his cousin’s face before turning back to Jo with an expression of desperate conciliation.
“I’m seriously sorry. You’ve got to know I didn’t realize this would happen, right? You know this wasn’t deliberate?” He reached over to tug at a stray strand of her short red hair.
“Yeah.” She exhaled,
feeling the anger leaving as another wave of exhaustion whacked her in the solar plexus. All she wanted to do was crawl into her bed and sleep for three years, but oh wait, Mike Hardy had been using it. An insidious voice from her long-buried past whispered she wouldn’t mind so much if it had been Stephen, but she squashed that down with a solid mental stomp. Stephen Hardy, whatever he looked like and whoever he was nowadays, was well and truly on her shitlist.
“Can you at least try to forgive me?” Scott asked, looking so miserably apologetic that she felt herself softening. They never fought. Oh, she might threaten to rip his head off every now and then and vice versa, but that was normal stuff. After eighteen years of friendship and everything they’d been through, it was pretty much expected.
“Scott, I’ll forgive you as long as you sort this out by the time I get back.”
“Where are you going? You’ve got to be exhausted.”
“Amy’s,” Jo answered automatically. Scott and her sister equaled home. They were why she kept coming back. “Don’t let Boomba eat anything else today. He’s fatter than a cow.”
Relief oozed from Scott’s pores. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll sort it. When you come home, this place will be spotless. I’ve got a gallery opening tonight. I’m exhibiting with Myf. How about I meet you back here at six to take you to the show? You think you’ll be awake enough?”
Jo nodded, looking at her watch. It was eight in the morning on a Saturday. She’d catch up on some sleep at her sister’s before guilt-tripping Amy into opening her beauty salon so she could transform the feral monster Jo had become over the past eight weeks into something respectable. “Should be. This is all a bit much right now. I don’t know what to make of things, but I want to talk with you, Stephen, and Mike later, alright?”
She would frankly rather throw herself off a bridge than see Stephen Hardy again, but he’d been living in her house for who-knows-how-long and it would be cowardly to leave things at this. If she were honest, she also wanted to remind herself why her childhood crush had been so ridiculous. Yes, his near-identical brother still looked like a goddamn male model, but with any luck, Stephen would have a spare tire and be balder than a baby’s backside.
Scott ran a hand through his long straight black hair, making it even messier than it was before. “Sure, babe. We’ll meet you here.” He bridged the distance between them, braving imminent emasculation to give her a warm hug, enveloping her in his familiar sandalwood scent, and pressing a soft kiss on her forehead. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll kick your ass with pleasure once I’m less hairy and more human.” She fought the prickle in her eyes, squeezing him back tightly, momentarily feeling her exhausted body give in and relax against him for a couple of seconds before she pushed back, picked up her bike helmet, and walked out the door.
* * *
Stephen slammed through the front door of Jo Blaine’s apartment, his adrenaline spiked to the max, his cousin and his brother in his sights.
He’d been halfway to Perth Airport with Rachael when he’d fielded Scott’s call, and it had been a monumental effort to play it cool and collected long enough to get his sister onto the plane. The minute he’d waved her off, he’d headed for Fremantle with the intent of committing mayhem.
The whole house-sitting deal had been meant to help Jo Blaine out, not upset her so much Scott had said she’d left this morning and hadn’t come back. Just that thought alone added to Stephen’s anger as he yelled out Scott and Mike’s names.
“Here!” Mike bellowed back. “And keep it down, you wanker, I’m trying to fix something here.”
Stephen strode into the kitchen. “What do you mean ‘keep it down?’ You’re lucky if I don’t kill you—what the hell are you doing?” His brother was sitting on the floor, inspecting the sucking end of a vacuum cleaner like it was something NASA had invented to confuse him.
Mike looked up at him with a scowl. “Fixing the bloody vacuum cleaner. What do you think?”
“It wasn’t broken!”
“Yeah. Well that was before I accidentally sucked up a sock this fat-assed puffball dropped in front of it.” Mike jerked his head at the giant gray cat that had been Stephen’s cohabitant here.
Stephen could feel his brain beginning to boil. In fact, he was dead certain steam was billowing out of his ears. “You’re blaming a cat for—”
“Oh, thank god, you’re here.”
Stephen turned on his heel to find his cousin behind him. Scott was carrying a brimming bucket of sloshing water in one hand and a mop in another. Seeing a hardened war photographer like Scott looking so domestic would be hilarious at any other time, but right now, Stephen didn’t feel like laughing. “What the hell, Scott! Tell me you haven’t screwed things up for me with Jo even more than they were before.”
“Yeah. About that. Ask this dickhead for the details.” Scott headed past Stephen on his way to the laundry room, giving Mike’s back a kick as he went.
Mike yelped, springing to his feet. “What the hell, man? We’ve had this out already. I’d had a big night out with my old mates and I wasn’t thinking. I just headed for the nearest bed!”
“The nearest bed’s mine,” Stephen said.
Mike shrugged. “Yeah. But I had to make a right turn for that. Jo’s room was at the end of the hall. It must have made sense at the time.”
“I’m going to make sense of your head in a minute,” Stephen growled. When Scott and Amy Blaine had approached him with this whole deal, the only condition had been that Jo’s bedroom was off-limits. He’d stuck to it, respecting her privacy. “No wonder she was pissed off.”
“Understatement.” Scott’s voice echoed from the laundry room, accompanied by the sound of him pressing buttons on the washing machine. “He was stark naked when she found him.”
Stephen closed his eyes and counted to ten, feeling the optimism of this morning smash to pieces at his feet.
After everything that had happened with Lauren, this had been his way of trying to go back and fix what he could from his past. This was his way of making something right—he’d be buggered if Mike or Scott were going to screw it up.
He hauled in a deep breath, exiled all thoughts of throwing his brother off of Jo’s balcony into the Swan River, and focused. “Alright. Scott?”
“Yeah?”
“When’s she going to be back? How much time have we got?”
Scott came back into view, carrying a bucket of clean water and a refreshed mop. “A couple of hours at the most.”
Stephen watched as Boomba strutted back into the room, sock in mouth, and dropped it directly in front of the dismantled vacuum cleaner. After sparing the cat an exasperated glace—which it ignored—he fixed his gaze on his brother and Scott.
“Alright. You two had better come up with some kind of way to fix this mess and fix it fast.”
Scott nodded curtly. “Yeah, alright.”
“That’s what I was trying to do when you came in.” Mike held the vacuum cleaner hose up in the air.
Stephen wrenched it out of his hand. “Give me that before you kill yourself with it.”
“Suits me fine. Knock yourself out.” Mike crossed his arms over his chest, looking smug for the few seconds before Scott handed him the mop.
“Bathroom probably needs cleaning. I’d get cracking if I were you, mate.”
* * *
Amy Blaine stood behind Jo’s plush pink swivel chair, surveying her sister’s overgrown pixie cut in the beveled glass mirror in front of her station. “The red has really faded this time, m’love. You’re better off going back to brunette with a few red foils. We’ll start on your color and then get going with everything else. You look bloody awful.”
“Insult me all you want. I’m still pissed off at you,” Jo grumbled, but Amy had already bustled off to mix her color, heels clicking over the salon’s black-and-white tiles.
When Jo had ridden her vintage Triumph Bonneville up to Amy’s tiny home eight hours ago, she’d b
een breathing buckets of fire and brimstone. But the flames had been stifled with an exuberant hug and completely extinguished with a cup of tea and a slice of sinfully rich chocolate cake. Before Jo could even swallow the last crumb, Amy had shoved her into the shower, put her to bed, and then gone to wash and dry Jo’s plane-awful clothes.
Now, hours later, Jo was at Amy’s retro beauty salon getting the full treatment. Her taste buds were again being bribed—this time with a glass of champagne—and her shoulders had been thoroughly relaxed from a heavenly shoulder and head massage. Knowing the drill, Jo submitted to the process with no more than a token protest. Being upset with Amy was like being upset with a box of marshmallows in a kitten factory. Amy was simply that cute. Always had been. It had been a quality that had kept Jo sane through years of their dad’s alcoholic rages—pretending everything was fine while hiding bruises, cracked ribs, and in one instance, a broken collarbone. Amy’s cheer had carried them through the first horrible months after they’d finally run away from home.
Jo remembered how Amy had been at thirteen, bustling around their bleak apartment like the Sugar Plum Fairy on crack. Jo had been seventeen at the time and working two jobs while trying to finish high school, but she’d always looked forward to coming home. Still did. Amy always made her smile.
Sipping on her champagne, feeling the bubbles go straight to her head, Jo spun her chair around and looked over the salon. Amy had come a long way since she’d purchased a run-down corner florist shop three years ago. The minute she’d gotten the keys, Amy had split the place down the middle—transforming one side into a beauty shop named Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the other into a barbershop named Baby Face in nods to two of her favorite movies. Both sides of the business were decorated in a retro 1950s style.
It was the only salon of its kind in the city, and was perfectly situated only ten minutes from Amy’s house in the old convict-built part of Fremantle, five minutes from Jo’s apartment overlooking the river, and just a stone’s throw from the city. Taking care of hair, nails, and waxing—not to mention increasing the average waistline of its customers a thousandfold with Amy’s sinfully delicious home cooking, luxuriously rich hot chocolate, and the odd glass of bubbly—the beauty shop had a waiting list of female customers. The barbershop kept the men coming in too, offering the best shave in town.