by Evie Snow
Ignoring his hold on her, Jo twisted in his arms. “Really?” she asked, eyes wide in disbelief.
He met her gaze before dropping an incredibly gentle kiss on her half-open lips. “Really. And now the great thing, the fantastic thing, is that I have you. I’m not the one watching anymore.”
“I can’t digest this,” Jo said.
“Well, get used to it,” Stephen said, pulling her tighter against him. “Is that all that’s causing the nightmares?” he asked against her hair.
Jo’s temporary moment of elation evaporated. “No, but it’s all I can give you right now. I want to tell you, I really do, but I can’t. Can you trust me and just wait until I come back from work next?” She pulled back, looked directly into his eyes, willing him to accept what she was offering for now.
“It’s not about whether I trust you, it’s if you trust me,” Stephen said gruffly. “But yeah, I’ll go with it, even if I’m not happy about it. And for the record, we can’t move on from here if you’ve got such a shitty view of yourself, Jo. You’re insulting my taste in women.”
He softened the blow of his words with a gentle smile, and Jo had to let a wave of defensiveness wash over her before she nodded and accepted what he was saying.
“I sound pretty crazy, don’t I? Can we put it all down to lack of sleep?”
“Yeah. You’re nuts. It’s a good thing I’ve always had this fantasy about sleeping with a psychotic woman,” Stephen said, pulling away from her but keeping one of her hands in his.
Jo let out a surprised bark of laughter. “Really?”
“Yeah. Now if you could just do a bit of moaning and dirty talk, I’d appreciate it. It’ll be good for my ego.”
“Sounds like you’re a bit crazy yourself.” Jo chuckled.
“Yeah? Well, we’re obviously not that dissimilar, so let’s go be mad together,” Stephen replied, leading the way to his room and pushing her playfully onto the bed.
“Alright. But I get to moan and talk dirty first.”
Jo felt the tightness in her chest abate. If Stephen could accept her like this—at her ridiculously tired, melodramatic worst—maybe, just maybe, he could accept the rest.
Chapter 15
Stephen’s espresso and biscotti were delivered quickly given the busy time of the morning. The small Tuscan-style café on the Fremantle coffee strip, one of many, was so packed with customers that people were lining up for tables. Stephen had been lucky enough to snap a window seat up early and wasn’t planning on moving anytime soon despite the irate looks from couples eyeing his table with two chairs. He shrugged it off. Jo had left for Africa that morning, and he wasn’t exactly feeling sympathetic.
He lifted the small cup to his lips, inhaling the smell of good strong coffee before downing the whole burning lot in one mouthful. He savored the pleasantly bitter aftertaste while watching locals and tourists alike pass by the open window. By the looks of it, there was an American navy vessel docked at Fremantle wharf; a group of sailors walked by in white naval uniforms, loud voices, and distinctive accents advertising their presence to any available women in the area. As Stephen watched, a group of girls called the Americans over and started up a conversation that the Yanks were no doubt hoping would extend to something a bit more friendly. Stephen allowed himself a small, wry smile. Ah well, good luck to them.
On the whole, he liked Americans. He’d grown up with them touring his family’s vineyards and drinking wine at Evangeline’s Rest’s cellar door after falling victim to Angie’s persuasive sales pitch. Later, he’d done business with them, arranging for the Evangeline’s Rest label to be shipped to the States, where it had proved modestly popular. He smiled to himself as he remembered some of the things Jo had told him about her numerous American colleagues. Well, if that’s what you could call a bunch of redneck good ol’ boys. When he’d asked how she got on in such a male-dominated workplace, she’d simply replied that they were a bunch of gossiping old women that she had to put in their place every now and then.
He was happy he’d pushed for more information about her work. It mitigated the frustration that there were still other parts of Jo’s life that she’d shut him out of.
He knew from talking to a cousin in the industry that it was tough for women out on the rigs—so tough that there weren’t a whole lot of women who stuck it out more than a year. Jo had been working offshore for almost a decade. He felt a mixed sense of pride and protectiveness at the thought of what she must have gone through over the years to stay in the business. No, she hadn’t just stayed in the business, she’d kicked ass. When she’d confided her nickname, Krakatoa, to him, he’d laughed so hard she’d had to threaten to pour wine down his shirt to get him to stop.
The other night . . . the other night when she’d opened up to him, he’d felt so relieved afterwards. His patience had paid off. He was going to get the details he wanted and he was going to get the girl as well. The guilt he’d been feeling for years had seeped away in light of the realization that Jo had baggage from her past that had had nothing to do with him. Maybe, just maybe, she could let it all go once they finished talking it all out. Maybe she’d let him fight a couple of her battles for her. Because that’s all he wanted to do.
He’d never felt this urge to defend and protect another human being this intensely before, and it would be funny if it wasn’t such a burning compulsion. Jo had been so strong for so many years, but it was about time she shared a little of the load. And he wanted to be the man she shared it with.
It dawned on him in that moment just how much he’d changed over the past couple of months. Somewhere along the way he’d forgiven the dumb kid he’d been. He’d worked out that he could be himself around a woman he cared for, that he could trust himself not to fuck things up, and that maybe he hadn’t been such a fuck-up in the first place. That thought felt damn good . . . so damn good that he felt his mouth curving into a grin.
A shadow fell across his table, and without glancing up, he reached for his menu, thinking about ordering another coffee.
“Stephen?”
The voice belonged to the last person he expected to encounter. His eyes snapped up to take in the classically attractive face, pale-green eyes, high cheekbones, and gold-blond bob of his ex-girlfriend. The body the face was attached to was medium height and dressed to impress in a white linen suit. She was thinner than he remembered. Much thinner.
“Lauren?”
“Um. Yes. Can we talk?” She put a hand on the back of the spare chair at his table. He noticed she was still wearing the Cartier watch he’d bought her for her twenty-fifth birthday around one painfully delicate wrist. “Do you mind?”
“Ah. Well . . .” Stephen regained his composure. “Yeah, take a seat.” He watched as Lauren awkwardly pulled the chair out. The sound of it scraping over terra-cotta tiles was painful.
She sat down, eyes lowered, looking contained but fragile. “This wasn’t premeditated,” she said in a high, nervous voice. “I’m here to do some shopping and saw you through the window . . .”
“Guessed that,” Stephen replied. “I don’t usually come here.”
“No.” She began to play with the loose band of her watch.
“So?” he asked warily. “What’s going on? Last time I tried to talk to you, you made it pretty clear you weren’t interested. I have it in writing from a lawyer, if I remember rightly.”
She didn’t say anything, just kept playing with the watch, twisting it round and round her wrist.
“Lauren?” Stephen leaned forward to get her attention, feeling his patience—already thin after months of playing games—fray to a thread. “What’s this all about?”
“What would you have said if we had talked?” she asked in such a small voice, Stephen wasn’t sure he’d heard her right over the clinking coffee cups and conversations around them.
“Pardon?”
“If I had met you earlier when you wanted. What would you have said?” she asked, her voice louder, th
ose brilliant green eyes meeting his. They were sad and huge in her thin face.
“You want to get into this now?” Stephen asked, incredulous. “Out of the blue, you walk up to me in a café and want to hash things out? When we haven’t spoken a word for months? After I’ve tried to see you for ages to sort all this out?”
Lauren gave a tiny nod before averting her gaze out the window.
“Alright.” Stephen studied her, weighing up his response, then set his coffee cup down, his voice tight, his temper coming to a dangerous bubble. In the past, he would have walked away, reined it in, but right now, he wanted this finished. He wanted this done. He wanted the guilt gone and he wanted to move on. “It’s not so much what I would have said,” he began slowly, thinking each word through past the roaring in his ears. “It’s what I would have asked.”
“You mean about the apartment?” She had the same edge to her voice he’d heard the morning she’d told him it was over. That she didn’t want him in their home, in her life, anymore.
Strangely, Stephen didn’t feel shattered like he once had. Instead, he felt a clean, almost refreshing anger. Rachael had been right. He needed to get this out.
“Yeah and no.” He leaned forward. “Ten years, Lauren. You were my best friend, my everything, for ten years. I think the first thing I wanted to ask was what happened? What went so wrong that you’d end it like you did, and why the hell did you feel the need to dick me around for a year afterward?”
He gave her a long, measured look, letting a small fraction of the anger he’d suppressed into his expression, not caring if she saw it for the first time since they’d known each other.
“And moving on from questions, I would have told you that the way you’ve handled this was unfair and that you’ve been relying on how I didn’t believe in losing my temper around women to get away with blue murder. We’re having this out right now. You’re going to tell me what the hell your problem was and why you felt the need to trash our relationship without explaining a thing to me. And you’re going to tell me how you could write off the fact that I spent a third of my life totally devoted to you. The way things happened . . . it hurt.”
He felt a massive relief in saying the words. He’d never expected he’d get the chance. It felt good. For the first time in his adult life, he’d let a woman see him angry, really angry. And no one had run away screaming.
In that moment, he knew he could have done this earlier. He should have done this earlier but wouldn’t have been able to if he hadn’t had that talk with Jo the other night. She’d ended up okay. He hadn’t broken her by sharing his jealousy from all those years ago and he wasn’t breaking Lauren now.
Lauren stared at him, stunned.
He looked her straight in the eyes. “It that what you wanted to hear?”
She shook her head.
“So what do you want?”
Lauren opened her mouth as if to speak, closed it, and then tucked a strand of hair behind her ear with a shaking hand. “I thought I knew. I thought I knew exactly what I wanted, but now . . . I don’t know, Stephen. I woke up one morning and just knew things couldn’t go on. We were friends and you’re attractive—you know that—but I wanted so many things. So many things for the future and I realized that I didn’t want them with you. You were almost too nice. That was the problem. I wanted a man who’d take me. Who’d get angry at me when I stepped out of line. I needed more.”
Stephen felt the words like a kick in the teeth. “Why?”
“I don’t know. It made me so angry that you couldn’t work it out, couldn’t fix it. I needed you to be more aggressive, more controlling, and if I’m honest . . . more everything!” She shrugged nervously to punctuate her words, meeting his eyes briefly and then returning her gaze to her watch.
“Lauren,” Stephen began, but she held up a hand.
“No, just wait. Hear me out. We were so young when we met, Stephen. I felt like I’d moved on and grown up, but you were still a kid. You never mentioned marriage, never mentioned children. I’m nearly thirty. Couldn’t you see that might have been important to me? You didn’t even complain when I asked you to sleep in the spare room.”
“I thought I was being considerate . . . and you could have brought those things up. How was I supposed to know? I remember bringing kids and marriage up a couple of times, but you shrugged me off every time. What did you want from me? Because all I’m getting from this is that you wanted me to fight you to keep my relationship with you. It doesn’t make sense.”
Lauren’s vulnerable expression changed to something harder. “Yes! I wanted you to fight for me! I wanted you to prove I was worth it. Worth marrying, worth having babies with. You never had to chase me when we got together. Never had to work for me—and I wanted to know you cared. Instead, I realized we didn’t have enough between us for me to be happy. It hurt. It left me feeling angry.” Her voice had gotten louder, sharper, and a few people at nearby tables glanced up curiously.
Stephen stared at Lauren in stunned silence, angry words racing through his mind. He wanted to remind her of every romantic thing he’d done for her. All the times he’d tried to pull her close only to have her pull away, all the times he’d hinted at their future only to have her change the topic. “You . . .” He paused, taking a deep breath and then another. She started to speak, but he waved his hand at her. “Give me a few minutes,” he said curtly. “Let me get this right . . . your idea of me showing you that I cared was to get angry at you? Well, I’m pretty pissed off right now. Is that working for you?”
She nodded, biting her lip and looking away. “If I’m honest, yes.”
“It’s too late.” Stephen shook his head. “You ended it then, but I’m putting a stop to the games now. We’re over. I want you to sell the apartment. We’re going to split the money and we’re both going to walk away while we’ve still got good memories of the last ten years. I don’t know what you need now, Lauren, but it’s not going to be me.”
A waiter came by to take Lauren’s order. She hesitated before choosing a cappuccino, furtively glancing at Stephen. He ignored her and turned his head to stare blindly at the waves of people passing on the sidewalk.
It took him nearly ten minutes to order the thoughts in his head while Lauren’s cappuccino came and she stared out the window.
“You’re right.”
Lauren put down her coffee with unsteady hands. “Pardon?”
“You’re right. Not about what you just said, but what you said before. Things couldn’t go on. I guess I have you to thank for working that out, because I obviously wasn’t tuned in.”
She stared at him. “Are you having a go at me again?”
His expression softened. “No, I’ve said what I needed to say. I meant it, Lauren. You were my best friend. I loved you. Probably a part of me will always love you, but I get it. It wasn’t working and one of us had to make a move to fix the situation. I’m sorry that person wasn’t me.” He felt the second wave of relief go through him that morning as he spoke the words, knowing they were true.
Lauren’s eyes teared up.
Stephen handed her his unused napkin. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
She shook her head, a tear trailing down her cheek. “I was so angry.”
“Yeah.”
“I thought if I kept the apartment, then at least you’d have to fight for something. I was trying to force you to get it, to understand, but it didn’t work like that.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, Stephen.”
“So am I.”
They sat in a tense silence for a while that gradually, oh so slowly, shifted to something more familiar, more relaxed.
“Your lawyer, your Aunt Corrine, said that you were living with someone when I called her a while back,” Lauren said after a while. “I didn’t realize you needed the money from the apartment sale that badly. I thought you would have had more than enough for your own place.”
“I do have enough, mo
re than enough.” Realization hit Stephen and his eyes widened. “I didn’t realize it until now, but I think in the beginning, before I met Jo again, I wanted to have a temporary place just in case you and I fixed things. And then, well, things changed. My housemate is a special lady.” His mouth curved into a small smile.
“You’re together?” Lauren asked quietly.
“Yeah, we are. It’s different. Not like you and me. I can’t compare. We grew up together, learned so much from each other.” He willed her to understand what he meant. She nodded and he continued. “Jo’s something else. She’s good for me. She gives as good as she gets.” He laughed and then tempered his smile when he realized Lauren looked hurt. “What about you?”
She shrugged her shoulders and pressed her lips together. “No one yet, but I’ve just started to look. It’s taken me a while to work out what I want.”
“Same here. Thanks, Lauren. I know it must have been hard to approach me like this.”
She cocked her head on one side, studying his face intently. “My pleasure.” She abruptly pushed her chair away from the table. “Bye, Stephen. I’ll put the house on the market this week.”
He watched as she wove through the crowded café and out the door, giving him a small, solemn wave as she passed the window and walked down the street out of sight.
* * *
Hello, Petal,
* * *
Mum will be staying with me as planned. Don’t ask how I managed it. I’m not sure myself . . . Talked to Scott. The plan is for you to see the police the second day you’re home . . .
* * *
Jo reread Amy’s email, relief that their plan was falling into place competing with dread over what would happen once she arrived back in Australia. She wanted, needed, to go over things with Amy to assure herself they were doing the right thing. She glanced at her watch. Too late to call Australia now. She’d have to wait until tomorrow. Damn. Oh well. What was one more night of zero sleep? Her nightmares had come back full force her fourth day back on the rig and weren’t getting any easier to handle.