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‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ Kendall continued up the stairs. She wished she could take them two at a time, but she’d walked so fast into town her damn leg now thrummed.
‘Oh, no, you don’t.’ Taffy’s voice slunk up the stairs behind her, followed by thunderously healthy footsteps.
Kendall burst into her room. Her deaf schnauzer, Orlando, looked up at the flurry of movement and then dropped his sweet snout back on to his paws.
Taffy came into Kendall’s bedroom and leant against the door-jamb, hooking one bare foot along the other calf. ‘So,’ she said, ‘was there a sudden rainstorm? At the market? Because that’s where you told me you were going, remember. To the market to look for fresh meat for tonight’s dinner.’
‘And…’ Kendall said, twisting her damp hair into a low bun and searching madly through the pile of washing on the tub chair in the corner of her room for a fresh towel.
‘And…I see no evidence of meat. Only wet hair and a dress that seems to be inside out.’ Taffy spilled into the room, her hand to her heart. ‘Oh, Kendall! Please tell me fresh meat was code for—’
Kendall threw up her hands and screwed up her eyes to cut out the disturbing images in her head—images of a tanned forearm, a sinewy wrist with a smattering of dark hair and a watch that looked as if it had lived through three world wars. ‘Taffy! Stop!’
Taffy sat on the corner of Kendall’s bed and licked honey off her fingers. She then buttoned her lip and waited for Kendall to simply talk.
Sick of feeling like a bedraggled cat, Kendall tore her dress over her head and wrapped herself in the towel, feeling strangely as if she were back in the pool house again. On show. She didn’t like it. Once upon a time she’d revelled in it. Being the centre of attention. The class clown. Not any more. ‘Do you want to go out while I get changed?’
Taffy shook her head. ‘Tell me about the meat.’
Kendall’s instinct was for self-protection. But this was Taffy. Taffy who’d taken her in at the time in her life when she’d most needed a friend, when the family she’d come to love as her own had left her out in the cold. Besides, she’d already been sprung by the one person who meant her secret getaway couldn’t be a secret any more.
She slumped down on to the bed next to her friend. ‘I was swimming.’
‘At the falls?’
‘No. At Claudel.’
‘The old house? But how? The place is decrepit.’
Kendall shrugged. ‘Not so much. Not the pool house at least. Not any more.’
Taffy shook her head and half laughed at the same time. ‘What have you done now?’
Kendall leant over and buried her face in her palms. ‘I found it on one of my forest walks. It’s the most beautiful building, Taff. And it was just so sad seeing it falling apart like it was. I got this crazy compulsion to make it like new again. Now I’ve cleaned the place up, the floor tiles look like bottled glass. And the marble benches are like something out of a Grace Kelly movie.’
‘Whoa, back up a sec. You cleaned?’
Kendall laughed into her hands, then sat up straight, unpeeling her hands from her face. ‘I more than cleaned, Taff. I filled it. Chlorinated it. Kept it pristine. Perfect. And visited every day for the past two years. The moment I saw it, I kind of just…had no choice.’
‘But that still doesn’t quite explain this.’ Taffy grabbed a hunk of Kendall’s hair and let it slap against her back.
‘Today…’ Kendall said, then took a deep breath as she tried to find the words to explain the unexpected effect of tall, dark ruggedness without making an idiot of herself. ‘Today I was sprung. By Claudel’s owner.’
After a long silence, Taffy said, ‘Don’t tell me you mean Hud?’
Kendall looked her friend in the eye for the first time since she’d got home. ‘Hudson Bennington. The third, no less.’
Taffy slapped her on the arm. Then once more for good measure. ‘Get out of here.’
‘I would love to, but you won’t let me. You know him?’
‘God, yeah. I had the hugest crush on Hud Bennington when he was eighteen and I was thirteen. It was his last year of boarding school and he was here for the summer, staying with Fay while his folks scooted off to Latvia in search of leprechaun remains or something. He was my teen idol if it’s possible for a real life human to be such a thing. So what was he like? All feisty and charming? Cheeky? Pathologically flirtatious? Dry wit? Still as big and gorgeous as ever?’
‘He…he looked like he needed a shave.’ And more, Kendall thought. He looked like he needed a hug.
‘Ooh,’ Taffy said. ‘Stubble on Hud Bennington. That I just have to see. Now hurry up and get dressed and you can go right back over there and reintroduce me.’
The thought of coming face to face with all that undomesticated manhood sent a warning note through Kendall. ‘Did you not hear me?’ she said. ‘He caught me. In his pool. Without his permission. Or prior knowledge. While I was naked bar…my…swimmers.’
Which for another woman would have been a tad awkward, or for Taffy would have amounted to as good an introduction to a cute guy as she could hope for, but for Kendall that meant something wholly different.
Taffy smiled and nodded like a simpleton. But Kendall knew she was anything but simple. Tenacious, clever and stubborn was her Taffy.
‘Go over there yourself if you like,’ Kendall said. ‘I’m not going to stop you. Just don’t tell the guy you know me and you’ll be peachy.’
‘Nah,’ Taffy said, ‘that would seem too eager. Much better to casually bump into him in town. Offer him a coffee so that we can reminisce. And he can remember how I followed him around like a puppy that summer.’ Taffy dragged herself off the bed with a groan. ‘Or maybe I’ll never leave the house again and the men the world over can breathe a sigh of relief that I’m still on the market. Now, get out of here, you’re leaving a wet patch on your bed.’
Taffy left. And Kendall took herself, her bedraggled hair and her damp swimsuit out of the door and into the bathroom, where she spent the next half an hour sitting on the bottom of the shower, letting the warm water run over her clammy skin as the shakes that had threatened the moment she had been discovered finally took her over.
She ran a hand down her damaged left thigh, kneading, hoping it might ease slightly. But it worked as well as putting a Band-Aid on a broken heart.
For the regular aches and pains she felt on a daily basis seemed to have spread. Into her chest. Deep, throbbing, like a forgotten memory trying to burst through to the surface. She knew what those aches were. It was the bitter-sweet sting of unwelcome attraction. And it terrified her to the tips of her black-painted toenails.
She closed her eyes, revelled in the soothing water and tried desperately not to think too hard about how Hud Bennington’s arrival had thrown a spanner into the workings of her neat and tidy life.
An hour later, after reintroducing himself to his old bedroom—still just as he’d left it a dozen years before, with its king-sized bed, boxy teak furniture and small aeroplanes on the wallpaper—Hud stood under the wide brass showerhead in his old bathroom, amazed that the pipes still worked. Amazed and thankful. The purposely cool water sloughed away the remnant heat he’d carried with him since leaving the airport.
He closed his eyes and opened his mouth and savoured the taste of Melbourne water streaming over his face, bringing with it more memories he’d long forgotten.
Six years old and running away the first night his parents had left him here and getting lost in the pine forest before Aunt Fay found him—she and her neck-to-ankle layers of lace, lolloping dog and hurricane lamp. The hundred-year-old oak tree in the centre of town that he knew had changed every summer he visited though he couldn’t see how. The piano in the downstairs parlour with its broken e-flat.
And then suddenly, before he even felt them coming, memories of another kind swarmed over him, making the water in his mouth taste like dust. Memories of no water. For days. So thirsty he couldn’t stop shaking. And the sound of a dripping tap in a room nearby. So close. Yet achingly out of reach.
His eyes flew open. He switched off the tap, his breath loud in the huge marble shower. He leant his hand against the wall, watching the droplets slide from his skin and drip to the floor. Just as they had when his high-spirited mermaid had sprung forth from the depths of the glimmering pool.
He concentrated on brandy-coloured hair. Long pale limbs. Stormy blue-grey eyes. His breathing settled. His memories calmed. And he only had her to thank for it.
Whoever she was.
CHAPTER TWO
HUD woke early the next morning. While still fuzzy with sleep, he tugged on a pair of old jeans and a T-shirt from the minimal choices still stuffed into his rucksack and headed downstairs, through Claudel’s cold, silent rooms and outside into the post-dawn mist.
It wasn’t all that long before he found himself swinging by the pool house. He thought about poking his head inside, even though he knew that he’d find nothing there bar still water and lingering shadows. He hadn’t led a charitable enough life to deserve stumbling upon such an apparition two days running.
Instead he kept walking until he was swallowed up by the cool dauntingly tall moss-covered trees, flat beige ground covered in a layer of pine needles and shadows of the mighty forest separating Claudel’s grounds from the nearby town.
He let his fingers trail over the rough bark, the tactile discomfort grounding him while he headed he knew not where. Into blissful nothingness? Or with all too specific purpose—the knowledge that this was the last place he had seen her?
The sound of a cracking branch stilled his steps. He looked out into the tightly packed trunks and saw something shimmer and shift. Lucky for him this wasn’t bear country. Though he’d come to realise that humans could be far worse creatures to stumble upon down a dark alley.
The form stirred. Took shape. Human shape. Female shape. And there she was. As if he had conjured her out of the mist. His mermaid. The woman whose effortless allure had hovered at the edge of his dreams all night, miraculously keeping far darker dreams at bay for the first time in weeks.
As she slid into full view her dark red curls streamed over her shoulders like waves of silk. Her pale skin was luminous in the weak morning light. The fine features of her face hid nothing. Not her loveliness, or her wariness. Again he wished he had his camera, on him. His camera which he had not picked up once in two long months.
‘Well, hello there,’ he said when she was near enough for him to see the whites of her guarded eyes.
‘Hello,’ she said, offering a half smile, even though her clenched fists and ducked chin told him far more than the smile could hope to hide.
As did the black tank-top with a hot pink one beneath, the long hippy skirt and heavy black boots she’d run off in the day before. It would be close to thirty-five degrees later that day. Her feet must have felt like ovens. But he decided as soon as the thought occurred to him to keep that little titbit to himself. A wild bear she may not be, but there was an air of the intractable about her all the same.
‘I didn’t expect to see you here,’ he said.
‘I wasn’t coming to use your pool, if that’s what you mean.’
Hud laughed before he even felt it rising up his chest. It felt good. No, it felt great. Natural. Unforced. Curative. He held up both hands in surrender. ‘Ah, no. I was just making conversation. Badly, it seems.’
She flicked her hair off her face. Not out of any kind of flirtation but more like she was shooing away a bothersome fly. Either way, the shift and tumble of her hair mesmerised him. The woman wasn’t a mermaid, she was a siren. An unwilling siren, if that clenched jaw was anything to go by, but a siren all the same.
‘You come here often?’ he asked, wondering where these conversational gems were coming from.
‘More often than I should probably admit,’ she said with a shrug.
Hud didn’t realise he had a thing for shoulders until that moment. Pale, delicate, eloquent shoulders were his new favourite thing.
‘But I came out this morning in the hope I might bump into you,’ she said as she finally made prolonged eye contact with him.
Well, that was one for the books. Hud stopped his daydreaming and came to attention. ‘You could have come knocking on my front door,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve established you know where I live.’
Her eyes blazed and he bit his inner lip and told himself to cool it. The more he pushed, the more she seemed determined to pull away. But maybe it was worth it for the flare of energy in those blue-grey eyes.
‘Not my style,’ she said, the tight half smile shifting into something far more natural as it tugged at the corners of her lips. ‘I tend to make things far more difficult than all that.’
‘I’ve been there,’ he said. And he smiled back, feeling it from the inside out.
Then her smile slid away and she shook her head and, with a big deep breath, said, ‘Look, I wanted to apologise for yesterday. And all the days before that. The trespassing. The tidying. The water usage.’ She closed one eye and squinted up at him through the other, obviously mortified at having to say so.
And it was just as obvious to him that he found this woman utterly adorable. Whoever she was. Whatever she was really here to say to him. Because he knew as well as he knew his own name that she sure wasn’t here, hat in hand, just to say, I’m sorry.
‘You have nothing to apologise for,’ he said. ‘The pool house never looked so good. Ever. I should have come looking for you at the other end of this forest of ours to say thank you.’
She opened the other eye and her eyebrows disappeared under wavy wisps of dark red hair. Her voice dropped when she said, ‘It never looked that good ever? Maybe you should demand a refund from your previous pool guy.’
Hud laughed again. And his smile lingered. Grew, even. ‘You needn’t have worked nearly so hard at it.’
‘How could I not? It’s the most amazing structure I’ve ever seen. Like something out of a fairy tale.’ She let go of a sigh. A long romantic sigh that seemed to curl about them both until Hud realised the sounds of the forest had slipped completely away until all he could hear was the sound of her voice, her breathing, the swish of her voluminous skirt.
Her eyebrows settled back to a normal position, perhaps even a little furrowed as she shifted her stance as though her toes were turning numb in her shoes, and said, ‘But, even so, you were no doubt surprised to find…what you found. And I feel utterly embarrassed. About the whole thing with the pool. Tidy though it is. And for thinking you were going to rob me. And for the running away without explaining myself.’
And? Hud thought. For she wasn’t finished yet. He could almost see the wheels turning behind those smoky eyes. Right, she was thinking, he’s going to make me say this, isn’t he?
She squared her shoulders. Tossed her hair again. Looked him dead in the eye and said, ‘But, since you think I’ve done such a good job of keeping your pool house in tiptop shape, perhaps we can come to some arrangement where I can continue.’
She tried to make it seem a by the way kind of statement, but he knew from the tightness in her neck and the way she grabbed hold of clumps of her tie-dyed skirt that this was what she’d come here to say.
Hud opened his mouth to tell her she could do whatever she liked, when she held up a hand, palm forward, and he stopped before the words made it past his larynx.
‘I’m prepared to buy the chlorine, the tile cleaner, pay a portion of your water bill, get on my hands and knees and clean the grout with a toothbrush, anything. I just…’ She stopped to swallow, and for the first time he saw a flutter of vulnerability beneath the resilient exterior. ‘I just need to keep swimming in your pool. If it’s okay with you.’
She made it seem as if she needed it the same way he needed oxygen in his lungs. The same way he needed to find out how to clear his head so that he could get back to work. And the way he had come out here into the misty forest with some strange need to make sure that she was real.
‘Where on earth will you find the time to do all that?’ he asked.
‘I am a fact checker for several regional newspapers. I work freelance. My time management is my own.’
‘Sounds pretty cushy.’
‘Suits me. Not so many rave parties and shoe shops to keep a girl in trouble in Saffron, so one doesn’t need a great deal of money to have a very nice life here.’ She glanced over his shoulder to what was no doubt a gorgeous view of Claudel’s elegant gabled rooftop beyond. ‘Well, I don’t, anyway.’
He didn’t give her the satisfaction of turning. Instead he just waited for her pointed gaze to rock back to his. For suddenly he was having ideas.
Her time was her own. And he had nothing but time. Maybe this woman’s needs and his could work together. He slid his hands into his pockets. ‘So I take it you can type,’ he said.
Her hands slowly let go of the skirt fabric they’d been clinging to until the red and black cotton swished about the tops of her heavy boots. ‘Can I type?’
He nodded.
‘So fast you won’t see my fingers move for the speed. But I don’t see what that has to do with—’
‘I have a story I need to get down on paper,’ he said. ‘And I am a two-finger typist of the worst kind.’
‘You’re a writer? But I thought you were some kind of flashy documentary photographer,’ she said, then her face dropped as she realised she’d given away the fact that she’d done some asking around about him.
‘I am,’ he said, letting her off the hook. ‘But a situation has presented itself that means I need to record some of my more recent experiences.’
That much was true enough. He had been offered a book deal. A lucrative one from a big London publisher. Not that he needed the money. But if that was what it took for his boss to see he was willing and able to get back to work, to the adventures he was missing out on while real life trudged on around him, then that was what he’d do.
‘I see,’ she said, mouth turned down, bottom lip popped out, nodding. Though by the look in her wide open eyes he could tell she couldn’t see the brilliance of his plan at all. The balance. The simpatico.
‘So I have a proposal for you,’ he said.
She stopped nodding. Her eyes narrowed so far they became dark slits of mistrust. For a siren she was turning out to be some kind of hard work. Hud almost backed off. But not quite. For there was something stronger pushing between his shoulder blades again, telling him he had to go through with this. With her.
‘I dictate,’ he said. ‘You type my story. And in return…’
Her arms slid across her chest to cross, creating a shield between them. He bit back the need to laugh. The woman was so guarded she put his clandestine return to Claudel to shame.
So he added, ‘And in return you can use my pool as much as you like.’
