by Ally Blake
“Ready?” he asked, giving her a look. A look that made her mouth go dry.
She nodded, and sat back. No longer able to ignore the spark burning brightly between them. Now she simply chose not to act on it.
CHAPTER SIX
BY THE TIME they rounded the bend, and the peak of her mother’s gabled witchy roof slunk into sight, Sable was ready to leap from the car.
All that moonlight pouring through the car windows. The warmth of the man beside her. The radio playing softly. It was like stepping back in time. Except she used to sit with one foot tucked up on the seat, the other on the dash, her head tilted to watch him. All cool and capable and hers.
She’d yabber on about some new spot she’d found on one of her forest walks, and he’d listen, an elbow on the window frame, a slight smile on his face. Or he’d glance her way, his gaze filled with enough promise to make her toes curl.
Back in the now, Sable kept both feet firmly on the floor, and her eyes front. But the snippets of their recent conversation swirling in her head did her no favours.
“You’ve found yourself some inner steel. It suits you. A great deal.”
“You’re the best man I’ve ever known.”
“The moment I saw you, it all came rushing back.”
Then there was the look in his eye when she’d spoken about her ex. The look in his eye when he’d said, “Her?”
The car slowed. Sable unbuckled. The car stopped, and she was out of there.
She leaned into the open door and said, “Thanks! I guess I’ll see you when you get back?” But Rafe was already hopping out of the driver’s side.
She stood so fast she got a head rush. Or maybe it was the sight of him over the top of the car as he ambled around the bonnet. Swinging his keys around a finger. His chin lifted, breathing in the chill night air.
When his eyes met hers, the edge of his mouth kicked north and she found herself stuck.
He looked loose, as if something she’d said had eased his mind. While she felt all tight and clammy with You’re the best man I’ve ever known swimming about between her ears.
Remembering she was still standing with the car door open, she slammed it shut. And made to move towards the house.
“Sable,” Rafe said.
She gave him a quick glance but kept on walking. “You can head off. No werewolves here. They’d be too scared of my mother to come close.” Then she lost her footing and slipped on some damp leaves. He spun her towards him, an arm sliding behind her back, so that she wouldn’t fall.
And suddenly there she was. In his arms again. Her heart beat so loudly in her throat, surely he had to hear it.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” she said, trying to break the tension.
Only his hot gaze trailed slowly to her mouth. And he held her, in his big strong arms. It would take nothing at all to fist her hand in the front of his shirt, lift up onto her toes and kiss him.
It could be a goodbye kiss. A have-a-good-trip kiss.
Except he’d slide a hand into the hair at the back of her neck, the strands clinging to his fingers. His other arm slipping around her waist. And he’d kiss her right on back. Soft and sweet and slow, this time. A kiss full of longing and promise.
While she’d melt against him, her lips clinging to his, her body trembling.
Blooming slippery heat and swelling need. Till she could no longer feel the cold. Could no longer sense the night. Till she was drowning in him.
Some last thread of sanity had Sable curling her fingers into fists and looking down, her forehead making contact with his chest. There she breathed for a beat or two. For she would not put herself in a position fated to doom.
Once she could feel her feet again, she disentangled herself from his grip, and ducked through her mother’s broken front gate.
Waving over her shoulder, as if fearing even looking at Rafe again she’d jump into his arms, she said, “Thanks for the lift. And hearing me out. And the—” Don’t you dare thank him for the kiss. “Have a good time in Sydney!”
Then she all but jogged down the driveway and went to heave open the front door. Only to find it wouldn’t budge. For where there had been no lock, no handle, now there was both.
“Are you kidding me?” Sable muttered between gritted teeth.
Sable stomped down the steps, and—ignoring the dark shape standing not two metres away—she moved around the side of the house.
The ground beneath her boots squished, and slurped, sucking at her soles, while throwing up the occasional rock to attempt to twist her ankle. So long as she didn’t meet a spider web, a toad, a snake, she’d be okay.
One window, two, three, there. Sable slid her fingers under the thin frame of her bedroom window, the wood twisted and gnarled like arthritic fingers, groaning under her efforts, before lifting a good foot in one heave, then jamming. It had to be enough.
She tore off her huge coat and shoved it through the crack. Then she stuck her head inside, followed by her shoulders, then with a leap she pushed herself through the gap, only to find herself stuck.
For her backside had wedged. She was nearly ten years older than the last time she’d done this after all. And now she teetered like a human seesaw.
Feeling all the feels—frustrated, embarrassed, fragile—she closed her eyes and yelled into the darkness. Then she huffed out a breath and let herself hang, her hair falling over her face like a wavy curtain, her legs dangling out of the window.
“Here,” a deep voice murmured from behind her, close enough for her to squeak. “Let me help.”
And then Rafe’s hands were on Sable’s backside, square and firm, one on each butt cheek as he gave her a shove. She gripped the window frame under her hips and wriggled as she began to shift, incrementally at first, then—like water through a hole in a dam—in a big rush.
Sable slid over the small white desk under the window and landed in a heap on the rough rug on the floor.
“You okay?” the deep voice said, humour lighting the dark.
Sable lifted her head, peeled her hair out of her mouth and found Rafe heaving the window open as if it was nothing.
Then he leaned into the gap, his strong forearms resting on the sill. Long fingers gripping one wrist, the other hand dangling over the edge.
Her breath caught as she took a mental snapshot. Moonlight casting a glow around his shoulders, shadows bleeding into the shallows of the brawny tendons in his forearms, the divots outlining his work-roughened knuckles, the gap between his lips.
Looking part caveman, part Viking, part poet, he was still the most beautiful thing she’d ever photographed.
“Sable?” Mercy called from somewhere inside the house, snapping Sable out of her reverie. “That you screaming blue murder?”
“Ah, yep! In...my room!” she called, feeling as if she were in some kind of vortex between the present and the past as she flapped a hand at Rafe, urging him to disappear.
But he only grinned at her. Adding crinkles to the edges of his dark eyes, a flash of strong white teeth in the shadows of his gorgeous face.
“I thought I heard voices,” her mother said as she sauntered into the room, snapped on the naked bulb overhead, all but blinding Sable in the process. “Rafe?”
Rafe nodded. “Mercy.”
Sable rubbed her eyes and squinted up at Rafe, then her mother, then Rafe again. Stunned to find both of them calm and smiling.
“You still here,” Mercy said.
“Looks that way,” he said.
“Unusual for you to stick around this long. Usually see the back of you before I even get the chance to say hello.”
At that Rafe smiled. “Off to Sydney tomorrow.”
“Right. Good. How’s your sister?” her mother asked.
“She’s doing all right,” said Rafe with a quick smile. T
hen, “Thank you. And your tomatoes?”
“Thriving. The marigolds really did keep the grasshoppers away.” Then a strained, “Thank you.”
Sable leant back against the saggy couch. “I feel like I’m in The Twilight Zone.”
With an exasperated sigh her mother said, “And why is that?”
“You. And him. Having a conversation. Like normal people.”
“As opposed to abnormal people?”
As opposed to you telling me to stay away from the boy next door if I had any hope of making something of my life. That he would be the end of all my hopes and dreams and I’d end up just like you.
“What are you doing on the floor?” her mother asked.
“The front door was locked.”
Another ever-patient sigh from her mother before, “Well, you were the one who was so insistent I get a lock. There’s never been any pleasing you. Give my regards to your sister, Rafe,” she said over her shoulder as she wafted from the room.
“Will do,” Rafe called back.
Sable scrubbed both hands over her face, before hauling herself to her feet. She winced at a pain in her hip. Another in the heel of her palm.
“You okay?”
Not even close. “Sure,” she said, wincing again as she shifted. “Peachy.”
After a moment he nodded. And offered up a smile. With crinkly eyes.
Funny that the brooding dissatisfaction had done it for her as a teen. But as a grown-up, this new-found assuredness of his had her feeling all wired and warm.
Rafe’s mouth moved, a slight twitch, and she realised she was staring.
She cleared her throat, glanced away. “How long till you’re back?”
“Not long,” he assured her.
“Okay. We can talk then, then. About...things.”
“Yeah,” he said, blinking a moment before drawing away, figuratively and literally, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck as he backed away from the window. “Goodnight, Sutton.”
“Goodnight, Rafe.”
And then he was gone. The window empty bar darkness and moonlight and a light breeze.
* * *
Still feeling a little wobbly after the whole kisses in the garage, drive through the moonlight, Rafe’s hands on her backside thing, Sable wasn’t sure she could cope with her mother. But she went in search anyway, finding Mercy in the kitchen, cleaning what looked like home-grown kale.
“Hungry?” Mercy said.
Sable grimaced as she pulled up a wonky kitchen stool, the bruise on her hip smarting. “Nope. I’m all good.”
“Mmm,” said Mercy. Then, “So, you and Rafe.”
“There is no me and Rafe. Not in the way you mean.” Okay, they were in discussions about him fathering her child but, apart from that, nothing to see here.
Mercy snorted. “You keep telling yourself that.”
Sable bristled. “I’ve struggled to catch you these last days, but now we’re both here, why don’t we catch up? Fill me in—what’s the haps in Radiance these days?”
Mercy just kept washing her kale. It would be the cleanest kale ever at this rate. But that was how she went about things. Loud then silent. Keeping Sable in a state of constant vigilance.
It reminded her so much of The Chef she wished she could go back in time, grab her young self by the scruff of the neck and say, Wake up to yourself!
At least now she could not be bothered to play her mother’s games any more. “You know what, I’m bushed. I might go to my room for a bit. Unless you want help with dinner?”
She made to push back the chair when Mercy said, “Sit down, kid. You know full well I’m happy to see you. But I also wish you’d stayed away.”
Sable laughed. It was either that or cry. Then she sank her head into her hands and rubbed her face hard. When she looked at her mother from between her fingers, Mercy was giving her a look.
“I just never wanted you to end up like me, falling for some small-town boy before you even had the chance to know who you were without him.”
“I know that. I do.” For Mercy had told her so every single day of her life. Her mother’s heart was in the right place, even if her parenting methods were less warm and fuzzy and more steamroller. “So, I went away. And I made mistakes anyway. Some really big ones, in fact. But that’s okay, because that’s how it goes. That’s life.”
“Mmm.”
“I need you to know, though. To really hear me on this. Rafe was never a mistake. He was kind to me. He looked out for me. He respected me, and wished the best for me. He liked me, just as I was. He was my very best friend.”
“And now?”
“Now he’s a good man I once knew.”
The kale lay limp on the cutting board, as Mercy looked off into the distance.
Sable’s heart kicked as it did those rare moments her mother didn’t school her features. When she was spent. Or late at night when she had nothing to keep her hands busy. Or when she opened the mail box to find it empty.
Then Mercy collected herself and shot Sable a look. “Don’t fool yourself. I’ll admit, Rafe isn’t one of the worst, but they are good at appearing good, till they get what they want.”
When she went back to the kale it tore between her fine fingers.
Sable imagined it would have taken a strong man to dare even approach Mercy Sutton, much less gain her trust. Meaning her mother must have fallen hard for her father. Not that she knew for sure. Mercy had rarely ever mentioned him directly. But it was clear—from her obstinacy, her reclusiveness, the way they’d moved around constantly when Sable was a kid—Mercy had held onto the hurt of losing him ever since.
Till it defined her.
And if that wasn’t a life lesson to be gentle with yourself, to forgive and nurture and let yourself grow beyond your follies, Sable didn’t know what was.
Feeling a rare moment of connectedness with her mother, Sable pushed back her chair, moved around the kitchen bench and leaned in to kiss Mercy on her cool cheek. Her mother leaned in to accept it. A bare quarter inch, but it was something.
“Dinner’s in ten minutes,” Mercy grumbled. “Come sit with me even if you’re not eating.”
“Okay, Mum.”
Mercy sent Sable a tight smile.
Back in her room Sable saw that the rug had buckled when she’d fallen in through the window. She gave it a yank, only to expose a slat of old wood a different colour from the rest. A slat with a missing nail.
She crouched, and jimmied the thing loose. And below the floorboards she found a small tin box. Inside it a treasure trove of memories, sentimental things her mother would have thrown away in a heartbeat.
A pure white feather. A smooth pink stone. A postcard Sable had once found among the junk mail her mother had dumped on the bench.
It was from Greece, the return address a scrawl she could barely make out. When Sable had brought it to her mother, Mercy had taken one look, her face brightening, then crumpling, before she’d thrown the card in the bin. Sable had fished it out later that night, stuck it back together, spinning tales in her head that it might have been from her father. Kidnapped by pirates and sending secret messages so her mother knew she was not forgotten.
But the card wasn’t what she was hoping to find inside the little tin box.
There, having slid down beneath everything else, a thin, gold-plated chain, the clasp of which was held together with a slim arrow half the width of her wrist. The bracelet Rafe had given her for her seventeenth birthday. The same night she’d pushed him up against a hay bale in the loft of his father’s barn and told him he loved her and it was time to stop pretending otherwise.
As her thumb ran over the dainty curves of the arrow, she remembered opening the gift. And Rafe’s voice came to her as clear as if he were whispering the words in her ear.
“You
cast your spell on me the moment you looked at me, lying on the banks of the river, your witch eyes drinking me in. You shot an arrow through my heart. Also, I hope and pray the arrow magically infuses you with some small sense of direction, as yours is a shocker.”
He’d been nineteen and magnificent as a cloudless midnight sky. She’d loved him for years, so fiercely she’d feared it might cleave her in half. The thought of spending a day apart, much less years, would have been unimaginable.
But if she’d stayed... What was the likelihood they’d still be together?
If she’d stayed, would Rafe have had the gumption, the time, the drive to buy Stan out? Would he have been as driven to make something of himself, to create the big life he now led? The life that had mellowed him, given him purpose. Or would he have poured every ounce of that energy into loving her?
Her mother had wanted her to leave. To protect her. And to forge her.
But Sable now knew leaving was the best thing she could have done for him.
* * *
Early the next morning Rafe hooked a left from his driveway, about to head to the airport, when he found himself pulling up outside the house next door.
He noted the broken shingles over the front door. The gutters in need of a clean out. He’d get on to that for Mercy. But that wasn’t why he’d stopped.
“Just go,” he said.
The car said nothing back.
Swearing beneath his breath, Rafe switched off the engine, and got out. Clueless as to what excuse he’d make for knocking on the door. Asking after her bumps and bruises following her fall through the window? Suggesting she check in on Janie if she was bored?
Or to tell Sable, now, so it was done, that while he’d heard her last night, while her words had made him see how serious she was, his answer had to be no.
And not for the reason he would ever have imagined.
Yes, growing up, “family” had been a dirty word. Just because someone was blood, did not mean there would be love, or any instinct to care, no matter what. It was a choice. One that you had to decide to make every day.