by Giulia Skye
Evie pulled him back, cupped his face and kissed him deeply. “I did believe you and I do trust you,” she said. “Thank you.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then kissed her back. “You’re welcome.”
The rest of the journey wasn’t as treacherous, and even though, on some of the rockier dips, Adam had to slow down to a crawling pace, not once did he seem to doubt whether or not he would make it.
Eventually, the track, still very rugged, flattened out and started to lead to the base of the rocky plateau that had been described to them as the end of the trail. As they got closer, the line of vegetation grew thicker, which surely indicated the location of the pool.
Adam cranked the handbrake and took off his sunglasses, staring ahead as he massaged his neck and shoulders. He looked very tired but by no means beaten by the journey.
“Looks like we’ve arrived,” he said at last.
“Yes.” She squeezed his hand. “It looks like we have.”
After driving three long hours to Damsel’s Hole, Adam chased Evie down a pebbly bank wasting no time in getting to the water. The pool was half shaded by trees, glistening in the dappled sunlight. Jumping in together—still wearing the dirty, dusty clothes they’d been living in for days—they reveled in the fresh, cool water. Adam took his T-shirt off and threw it to the water’s edge, and to his delight, Evie followed suit, her saturated sports bra clinging to her skin. They laughed like kids in a paddling pool, dunking themselves in the clear water. It was too shallow for any real swimming, so Adam paddled out to a deeper part of the pool with Evie on his back, hitching a ride. Fallen branches jutted from the water, but it still only reached his chest.
“You’ve got a swimmer’s physique,” she said, when they’d reached the other side. “Broad shoulders, long arms. Big hands and big feet.”
These past few days had been some of the happiest of Adam’s life, but when Evie said things like this, he was reminded that this wasn’t his real life. This was a vacation and these happy days would be short lived.
After they’d cooled off in the pool, they lay on the fine sand-like pebble beach with their legs in the clear shallow water. Kissing soon turned needy and greedy. Working his way down her body, Adam spread her then licked her until she came. The condoms were in the truck, a good fifty meters away, but as if she sensed the effort it would take for him to move and get them, she pulled him back and guided his hips so he could stroke himself against her wet flesh. Evie was always so giving like this, he thought. She didn’t seem to mind the mess, nor the earthy, sweaty heat they generated—a million times more intense than the outback sun.
He’d gone crazy with it. Crazy with her.
The squawk of two white corellas in the trees snapped him back to reality. He rolled off her and slowly, slowly, when she sat up, he could tell she’d been snapped back too.
“What on earth are we doing?”
“Don’t overthink it,” he told her, even though he felt the absence of the bubble they’d just vacated. He didn’t want to consider what on earth they were doing because that would inevitably lead to thinking about the end.
“I’m not overthinking it,” she said. “I just can’t believe we’re doing this.”
“You want to stop?”
“No, I don’t.”
“We’re just a man and a woman making out.”
“Making out?” She laughed. “Most of the time I feel like I’m in a porn film.”
He flashed her a wicked grin. “And that’s a problem because …”
“It’s all very unexpected.”
Adam leaned back. Yeah. He understood that. The fantasies she’d told him about were one thing, but sex—with him or anyone else—hadn’t featured on her to-do list. “It is what it is. Let’s just go with it.”
“Drift with the tide?”
“Yeah.” He brushed his lips against hers. Exactly that. Exactly what a guy like Adam would want her to do. “Just drift and sway.”
CHAPTER 21
That evening just before dusk, Evie set about cooking dinner hoping the concoction of ingredients would bring her some clear-thinking time. She’d always enjoyed cooking—had never seen it as a chore—and she still savored the memory of the way Adam’s eyes had lit up that first time he’d tasted one of her dishes.
“This is good,” he’d said, like he wasn’t expecting it to be. They’d eaten not long after having had sex on the bonnet, so she’d expected some post-glow happiness at play, but he’d enjoyed every mouthful he’d eaten since. Evie knew because he always asked for more, scraping the bowl for every last bit, saying how amazed he was that she’d made something so delicious on a single hob stove.
Adam now lay on the mattress next to where she’d set up her kitchen and was gazing up at the sky. By this point, he would have usually asked what she’d intended to cook, but since their “making out” by the pool, he’d slipped into another of his quiet moods, and she’d been shying away from asking if something was bothering him, not wanting to know the answer in case the answer was her.
Earlier, by the pool, she hadn’t meant to ask what they were doing. It sounded like she wanted an acknowledgment of sorts—but for what? They were having a great time together. They were having sex. Lots of it. She knew full well what they were doing, so why the need to have it quantified?
She placed the stove near him and kneeled beside it, surrounding herself with utensils and ingredients.
“Do you need any help?” he asked.
He was always so attentive, always there to assist her in some way. God, he was nice. Such a nice guy. But there was something so distant about him. Something she could never quite put her finger on because it was so ethereal and faint that most of the time she wondered if she was imagining it.
“Do you do much cooking back home?” she asked.
“Not as much as I’d like to.”
She handed him a couple of tins to open. They talked all the time but right now she couldn’t think what they actually talked about. Every once in a while, he spoke about Canada and Edmonton—or Edmenten as he pronounced it—had explained how he now lived in Vancouver, not far from his father, and that’s where he worked. Adam never put an obvious stop to a conversation if or when it led to anything personal, but she realized that she’d been subconsciously steering away from asking him anything personal in the first place.
How intimate did a woman have to get before she had the right to pry? And, beyond his obvious desire for her, she had a right to know how he felt about her—she had a right to know more about his life—even if it risked finding out something she didn’t want to hear.
Let it go, she told herself. But that was just the thing about her. She had this inbuilt turbo that kicked in at the first sign of cowardice. She’d been afraid to ask him direct questions because she’d been afraid to hear the answers.
That inbuilt turbo started to whirl now. “Tell me what made your year so stressful. Tell me why you came out to Australia so unprepared?”
There was the briefest of pauses as Adam opened the first tomato tin to which he gave more attention than was due. “It’s a long story.”
“They always are.” She drizzled oil into a pan, giving him time to recover from the shock of her blunt questioning. “I’ve got several long stories of my own.”
He tossed the tin opener back in the box. “Let’s hear one, then.”
Ah. Deflection. Did he think she could be so easily dissuaded? For the first time it irritated her—and she knew what would irritate him back. “Okay, you want a long story? How about my fifteen-year relationship with Zac? How about a month by month account from the day we met until the day we decided to break up?”
He snorted. “That dickhead.”
“He’s not a dickhead.” She took the tomatoes from him and dumped them into the pan. “You don’t know Zac.”
“Good. You won’t ever meet him so it’s never going to be an issue.”
“But you know what is an issue for me? The way you defend him. The way you still consider him a good friend even though he—”
“Before you say it, Zac did not have an affair.” She glared at him. “He wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
“Whatever.”
This wasn’t about Zac. She was sorry to have pushed Adam’s buttons, but what was his problem? Why was he picking a fight with her? Why did he get cagey the moment he had to reveal information about his life?
“You shouldn’t make judgments on people you don’t know. Okay, Zac should have told me about Teagan and the baby, and I was deeply upset, but he’s not a dickhead and the fact that you call him one is very insulting.”
“That’s just it! Why the fuck should you care if I insult him or not?”
“Because it’s insulting to me! It’s insulting that you think I’m the type of woman to put up with a dickhead for fifteen bloody years. If he was a dickhead, he wouldn’t have lasted fifteen bloody days.”
Aw, fuck.
Adam pushed to his feet as Evie stalked off toward the watering hole.
“Evie, I’m sorry!” He watched her disappear into the bushes, took a moment to steady himself, then followed her. He found her by the pool, sitting in the same spot where they’d made love just a few hours ago. The mirror-smooth water reflected the darkening sky. “I’m sorry,” he said again. He sat down beside her. “I was out of line and I’m sorry.”
“Whatever it is you’re trying to forget isn’t Zac’s problem,” she snapped. “And it’s not mine either.”
“I’m not trying to forget anything.”
But when she turned to him, he knew she suspected that wasn’t quite true. Evie was clever. Far too clever for him. And what had she said in the caves last week about filling in the blanks for the things she couldn’t see? “It’s a long boring story.” And he could see she was waiting to hear it. He sighed. He had to tell her … something. “A long boring story about how I made a huge fucking mistake.”
“About what?”
“Work.” That’s how he saw it, anyway. There’d been nothing pleasurable about faking being in love with Saskia, being mobbed by fans, or having paps take pictures of him every frickin’ time he so much as sipped a coffee. “Business affairs.”
“Do you actually own the gym where you work?”
He hadn’t thought about it that way, but he supposed it was as close to the truth as he was going to get. “Yeah. I co-own it with my dad, and a third party. That … woman I mentioned.”
“She’s a business partner?”
“Kinda. More like a sort of sponsor, really. We needed something to raise our profile. It was my dad’s idea to get her involved.”
Christ. When had he become so pathetic? A grown man still being told what to do by his father. He sounded like an easily led fool, but wasn’t that how it had been? He told himself it shouldn’t matter what Evie thought of him—but still, he felt like bashing his head against something hard.
It was a good thing, though, if she saw him as a total loser, wasn’t it? Especially after the drive out here earlier today. He’d surprised her with his driving skills, but wasn’t it best if she didn’t look upon him as some competent hero? The further away from Michael Adams he got, the better, and he had no place wishing that she could see him as a champion. Despite getting them here safely today, he hadn’t felt like one for a while. Not since he had walked away from competitive swimming and retired. At the time, his coach, Frank, had been insisting it was too soon for Michael to give up. “The shoulder will get stronger,” he’d kept saying, but Michael hadn’t seen the point of striving for another bronze when he’d been used to achieving gold. All that work. All that physio. Just to be someone half as good as before. He hadn’t wanted to embark on that particular journey and so he’d stood at the crossroad waiting for someone to point out the way.
Then, he’d allowed his father and Howie to push him into a stupid TV show, which had been followed by the cooked-up romance with Saskia—and he’d thought—hoped—it would lead to bigger, better things.
“You’re in!” Howie had said the day he’d confirmed the fee and contract for Michael’s appearance on Celebrity Stakes, the high-profile reality TV challenge show in which celebrities were pushed to the so-called limit in front of the nation. The producers of the show had teamed him up with Saskia, a glamour model whose own rags to riches story had already captured the nation’s heart and imagination the previous year when she’d shot to fame as the jilted-at-the-altar fiancée of Hollywood actor, Josh Brennan.
While Josh had been branded a love rat and scumbag, Saskia had been photo’d looking heartbroken and withdrawn, portrayed as every girl who’d ever suffered a broken heart. Celebrity Stakes provided her with a platform for one of the greatest comebacks of all, and her on-screen chemistry with Michael Adams quickly sparked rumors of romance. Ratings rocketed. They were crowned the winning team following an unprecedented number of viewer votes, and after Celebrity Stakes wrapped, newspapers, magazines and TV companies were lining up at their door.
“We have to milk this, Mikey!” His father hadn’t hesitated to remind him of all the money he’d invested in Michael’s coaching and competitions over the years. “We have to milk this for all it’s worth. It won’t last forever.”
“So what happened?” Evie asked.
Adam flicked away an insect buzzing too close to his ear. Strive Sportswear had come next. The fitness wear company offered the new, hot celebrity couple a very lucrative deal—but only if they stayed together. They wanted the healthy-living brand and Michael had been all for it. Until he realized none of it was real.
“This sponsor we got involved with went off the rails, living a way of life that I didn’t agree with. We were meant to be a brand built on health and fitness.”
“And she was smoking around the back, necking wine from the bottle?”
Actually, it was vodka.
But yeah. Evie had joined up the dots. He smiled. “Pretty much.”
“So what was your vision for this gym?”
Adam threw a pebble in the water. He’d had so many visions, so many plans throughout his twenties. He’d once had a dream of owning his own chain of fitness centers, but he couldn’t ever imagine someone like him—someone who’d only achieved basic grades at school, who’d only ever swam—running a business.
He glanced up. Evie was still waiting for his answer, the smile on her pretty face like a beam of moonlight cutting through the darkness, shedding enough light to allow him to search for new growth among the deadwood of his life. She made him remember how it had been in the beginning. His fame had become a curse, but hadn’t he once believed he could do some good with it?
“My main vision was to get kids and adults—families—moving again,” he heard himself say. “Maybe I thought I could do it with this sponsor’s help, but I soon realized she was giving out the wrong message.” And the right message suddenly burst to the surface. “Do you have any idea of the amount of health issues that are caused simply by lack of movement? And I’m not talking marathon running, or swimming the length of Lake Ontario, here. I mean walking, bending, stretching. Moving the body like nature intended. For years I’ve done work for schools and community fitness programs, and I’ve always wanted to take it to the next level … I guess, I—” Shit. He was saying too much, getting carried away with his patchwork of dreams. “I dunno.” He sighed. “I suppose you could say fitness is a passion of mine.”
“You and fitness?” Evie rested her head on Adam’s shoulder, placing a hand on the hard mound of his bicep. “I’d never have guessed.”
Hanging on his every word, Evie had never thought Adam capable of speaking so much in so short a time. Her he
art raced. She’d felt his passion, and—she knew it! He wasn’t a hapless drifter after all. He was a businessman with buckets of motivation and drive. He had ambition. She knew there’d been more to him than muscles and disorganization, more to him than some idiot who’d left his wallet on the beach and had got it stolen.
“So what’s the plan for when you go back?” she asked, eager to hear the rest of the story.
“I don’t have one.”
She raised her head. “But surely the contract with this sponsor will expire at some point and you’ll sort out the gym business. You’ve still got co-ownership, haven’t you?”
“I guess, but I don’t want it anymore.”
“You don’t want to reclaim what’s yours?”
“Nah.” She watched him run his fingers in the sand as if co-ownership of a gym was no big deal. “I’m not interested. It’s not worth the effort.”
What? That’s it? No inbuilt turbo at the first sign of cowardice for him? She heard her mother tut. What did you expect from a man—the strength of a woman?
Evie frowned. “So you’ve just left it all behind? You’ve run away from it?”
Adam’s body tensed as if the accusation rattled. He didn’t look like someone who would give up and run away—surely a man disciplined enough to create and maintain a body like his had some staying power? But muscles aside, she’d gotten to know him these past two weeks since that shower in Broome, and contrary to his drift-with-the-tide attitude, Adam was practical and full of common sense and nowhere near as disengaged to his surroundings as he at first appeared.
But rather than deny that he’d run away, he simply sighed and accepted. “I’ll have this break, spend some time with my friends and figure something out later.”
Evie gazed across the shiny pool of water and listened to the gentle stirrings of the sticky outback night. She told herself she had no right to be disappointed. It wasn’t like she was going to be with Adam forever, and she hadn’t failed to notice that his vague plan didn’t include her.