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Only the two of them.
Jac didn’t feel quite human tonight, alone with Callan in the desert. Watching the water hole for signs of movement, she heard his breathing, felt his body like a flannel-and-denim-covered magnet just inches away. A man like this gave masculinity a whole new meaning, reminded a woman that human beings were animals, too.
“We were a bit late for them, I guess,” he said, as they walked back toward the ring of barbecue stones in the creek bed. “It’s better when there’s still some daylight. We’ll make a special trip one day. You can bring your camera.”
She’d forgotten it on their picnic, today. “That would be great. Could we get up extra early and come at dawn? I just love the light and the air then.”
“We can climb Mount Hindley, watch the sunrise, make breakfast over the fire in the creek. Would that be good?”
“Oh, it would be wonderful!”
He gave her a look. They still hadn’t switched their flashlights on. “You sure you’re from L.A.?”
“Last time I checked.”
“You’re supposed to like shopping malls better than water holes, aren’t you?”
“I like new things.” She thought about it for a moment. “No, that’s not right. That sounds like I am talking shopping malls.” She tried again. “I like being made to see things in a new way. Like dawn.”
“Dawn is new?”
“It’s new for me. In L.A. dawn means you stayed out late at a party, or you had to set the alarm early for a flight. If you do see the sunrise, you only see it through glass. You don’t smell it, or feel the dew falling on your skin. Here, dawn is … yes, new. It notches my senses up higher, makes me aware. And writers need that. Writers—” She stopped.
There was an old, fallen eucalyptus tree lying on the creek bed at this point. Its trunk was as big as a concrete culvert pipe, as hard and smooth as iron. Without taking his eyes from her face, Callan leaned his lower back against the curved wood as if the two of them had all the time in the world. He put his flashlight down on the tree trunk beside him, tested its balance for a moment, then let it go.
“Tell me about writers,” he prompted.
But Jacinda shook her head and closed her eyes against the idea. “Doesn’t matter.”
“No, it was important,” Callan insisted. “I was interested. Say it.”
She faced him, ignoring the invitation in his body language that told her to lean against the horizontal trunk, too. Those bells of awareness weren’t so distant or so faint, now. The breeze had carried the sound this way and it was clearer, much closer. But she still had the freedom to ignore the bells, if she wanted.
“I don’t know if I’m a writer anymore, that’s all,” she said. “I think it’s gone. Was it ever really there, I wonder?”
“Hey, you made a living at it.”
“I had an ear for dialogue, and I could make those crazy soap-opera plot twists semibelievable when I put the right words into the characters’ mouths. Was it ever more than that? If it was, I can’t remember.” She laughed, moved a little closer to him, although she was barely aware of it, and reached her hand out to the tree trunk. It wasn’t white or gray, it was silver, and scoured to satin by years of sun and wind. “I have this novel somewhere,” she confessed. “Not finished. Miles from finished. A few early chapters and some notes, and snatches of dialogue from a couple of big scenes later on.”
“Was it any good?”
“Listen to you, asking me something like that!” She laughed and leaned her hip against the wood. They were like two strangers propped at a bar, trading life stories with loosened tongues.
“It’s a really naive question, isn’t it?” he said. “Sorry.”
“No, no, it’s not naive. Well, I guess it is. But it’s good naive. No one in L.A. would ever ask that question because of course I’m going to say it’s good. I’m trying to sell it, aren’t I? I’m going to put the right spin on it, package it into a sound bite. Do you know there are people in the industry there who can talk up a project so well that they get development money for script after script even when they’ve never actually written a word?”
“They’re the ones who sound like they’re not writers.”
“Truth is, Callan, I have no idea if my novel is any good. I have no idea if it’s important. Finishable. Remotely saleable. I just have no idea.”
“But you must have known, once.”
“I think it’s been dying inside me for a long time.”
“But you think dawn in the North Flinders Ranges might bring it back.”
She shook her head again.
“Yes.” He rolled his body ninety degrees so that they faced each other. “Because that’s where this started. You were telling me why you loved our dawn, and why you needed to see new things. Because you’re a writer.”
“Let’s find Lockie’s Game Boy.”
“You hope you can get it back. Being a writer, I mean.” He put his hand on her arm. “You really want to get it back. It’s important to you.”
“It’s not your problem, Callan.”
“No, but I can understand—” He stopped suddenly. “No, you’re right, it’s not my problem.”
She knew there was more he wanted to say. Or didn’t want to say, but could have said. The words stayed locked inside him, powerful and important in some way.
Stuck.
Too scary.
Her thigh was pushing lightly against his. They weren’t pretending anymore. He held her softly, weighing their options as he weighed her in his arms. Let each other go, or pull tighter? Hey, Jac? What do you want? The same as me? Yes, I know what you want ….
She looked up into his face.
New.
She hadn’t known him at all two months ago, and even after the magazine article and the cocktail party, this face had only existed in her memory like a few snapshots and video clips. E-mailing him, she had remembered the first smile of relief he’d given her when he’d realized she wasn’t serious about the Outback Wives thing, either, and his quiet good manners the following evening when he’d brought her and Carly the gift and the flowers.
She’d kept his picture from the magazine and, to be honest, she’d looked at it a couple of times. Learned it by heart, along with all the things the picture said about him.
New, but fascinating.
He wasn’t smiling. His mouth was flat and closed and smooth. She liked its shape. She loved his eyes, and the lines of his brows and jaw. Above his mouth, she found a small stretch of skin that he’d missed this morning when he’d shaved. She brushed it with the ball of her thumb, the way she’d have brushed a streak of dirt from Carly’s face, and it felt rough.
She waited for him to make the next move—it sounded too clinical and cold, putting it like that—but he didn’t. He didn’t let her go, either, just kept that light hold, and watched her watching him. She could still feel the roughness of the beard stubble on her thumb, long after she’d taken her hand away. The tension built and became unbearable. He bent his head, suddenly, and pushed his forehead against her neck, whooshing out a breath into the soft angora of her sweater.
“Oh, Lord, Jacinda!”
“I want to kiss you,” she blurted out, because someone had to say it, someone had to take some action.
“I want to kiss you, too.”
“So do it. Please?”
He was so tense, she could feel it, every muscle knotted tight enough to hurt. He breathed against her neck this time, then touched his mouth to her skin there, the movement dry and soft. He made a sound deep in his chest, imprinted his lips on her skin once again. They were so warm.
She waited.
For more.
Oh, Lord, this was unbearable.
Wonderful and unbearable.
Why didn’t he move?
You might have thought he was holding a grenade with the pin already pulled. They both stood turned to stone … except that stone was never as warm and alive as his body. She couldn’t hold on to this any longer; she wanted to force that mouth to move on her neck, to come and find her.
Tilting her jaw, she rubbed her face against him like a cat. She tightened the press of her body, rocked her hips a little. He was aroused. She could feel it. Finally—finally!—he moved to find her lips, only brushing them at first, then softening his mouth, tasting her.
“Yes,” she said. The word was part of the kiss. “Like this.”
It was such a relief to get there at last, such a release. She wrapped her arms around his neck, parted her lips, felt the pleasure spinning through her, tasted the faint notes of peach and vanilla in his mouth. He wanted this, so she didn’t disguise her own need, deepened the contact until they were drinking each other and tangling their tongues. She gave him everything with her kiss—thanks and hunger and happiness and hope.
That was what you had to do, at some point. You just had to give yourself to it and wait until afterward to see how it felt, what you wanted next, what the repercussions might be.
Yes, she and Carly were leaving in three and a half weeks, going back to Sydney. Two days after that, they’d fly out of the country, to a future she hadn’t begun to work out yet. But none of that was enough of a reason never to kiss this man, never to give or to explore.
She gave some more, slid her hands around and ran them down his back, over the tight curve of his denim-clad backside. She pulled him closer. Mmm. Their legs pressed harder together, and she knew he would feel her breasts, too, not Hollywood huge but neat and nice and female.
Mmm, Callan.
She let the hot mound at the top of her thighs squash against his hardness, the denim of two pairs of jeans diluting the intimacy. Oh, but she wished the denim wasn’t there! She wanted his fingers dragging aside the lace edge of her underwear, wanted everything he could do to her, wanted the words he would say, and the convulsive tensing of his whole body.
It was like jumping into the water hole. You started, you ran, you yelled, and you didn’t want to stop. She just hadn’t expected the idea of stopping to feel so impossible and wrong. She didn’t care that the air had started to chill, that the sand would be hard and scratchy and cold, that they might get spied on by mythical bunyips, she just wanted.
Him.
The escape.
The heat.
The newness.
How long did it take her to understand that he hadn’t traveled toward the same place?
Too long.
He had to drag his mouth and his legs away before she realized, before she sensed the change in him—she could practically hear the squeal of the brakes—and then she felt foolish … and a little too naked … because the zing in the air was more like a force field now. It pushed her away, didn’t draw her closer, and he’d already started to apologize before she had a chance to draw her first breath of non-Callan-tasting air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry!”
“For what?” She blinked.
“This … I shouldn’t have done this.” He’d half turned back to the fallen log in a gesture of self-protection, and every angle in his body screamed regret. What didn’t he want her to see or know? She already knew he was aroused. So was she. Her body throbbed, her mouth tingled, and she was hot and moist and swollen. It shouldn’t be a source of shame for either of them. It was human … normal … wonderful.
“Why, Callan?” She felt too bewildered to keep it from showing. “It was—it was good, wasn’t it? Real nice.”
Real nice? Sheesh, no wonder she didn’t dare call herself a writer anymore! Real nice bore as much connection to what she’d felt in his arms as cheap hamburger meat bore to sirloin steak.
“It—it—Yes, it was nice. But it sets up—I shouldn’t have done it.” He circled around, his actions restless, erratic and unpredictable, like a freshly filled balloon escaping from somebody’s grip before they’d knotted the opening. Whoosh. All over the place.
“Kissed me?” she said. “What does it set up? It doesn’t set up anything.”
In her confusion, she came across as indignant to the point of anger, and way too aggressive. The whole atmosphere between them jarred her spirit. How could the physical connection have simply … evaporated?
“Not anything bad, anyhow,” she went on, trying to speak more reasonably. “Please don’t think I’m expecting—” She made some vague circles with her hand, not wanting to put her expectations or lack of them into concrete phrasing. She was only here for a few weeks. She hadn’t been thinking ahead, nailing down a prescribed pathway.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m not saying you’re responsible for any of this.”
Any of what?
“I don’t know what the problem is, Callan.” She said it gently because he looked so troubled.
“Yeah, neither do I.” The words came out on a growl. “But whatever it is, it’s mine, not yours. Okay?”
“Okay,” she echoed obediently. “Um, in that case, thanks for a fabulous kiss. Shall we leave it at that?”
He nodded, but didn’t look grateful that she’d let him off the hook. “Best to.” His circles around the creek bed grew wider. “We have to find that damned Game Boy,” he muttered. “They’re going to wonder what’s happened to us, up at the house.”
I’m wondering what’s happened to us, too, Jacinda thought. And I’m not up at the house. I’m right here. I’m looking right at you, Callan, and I have no idea.
She didn’t join in his search. Or not wholeheartedly, anyway. She was still too confused, didn’t know whether she should be burning with mortification, angry with him, or whether all of that would have been an overreaction. He looked as if he felt all of those same emotions on her behalf anyhow. He didn’t look happy with himself. Didn’t look happy with the entire universe.
He muttered something about Lockie’s carelessness … stupid electronic toys … shouldn’t ever have let him buy the thing in the first place … kids got spoiled with that stuff.
Then he found it, sitting in what was probably the first place they should have tried, on a rock near where the horses had stood in the shade. He expressed his relief in a profanity and headed directly for the four-wheel-drive, his strong shoulders hunched as if to keep Jacinda safely away.
They drove back to the homestead, the jolting of the vehicle echoing her jarred confidence. He’d said it wasn’t her fault, but that was such a classic line. It’s not you, it’s me. Did anyone ever mean it when they said that?
Wheeling around in the front yard, he eyed the lit-up house with a bull-like glowering stare. “Looks like Mum’s still getting the kids to bed.”
“Carly gets overtired sometimes, after a long day, and it’s hard to settle her down. I hope Kerry’s not having trouble with her.”
“We’re all tired. So please, just forget this ever happened. All of it.” He sounded angry, and she didn’t understand.
“Do you want us to leave, Callan?”
“What?” His eyes narrowed. “No! Heck, no! That would be even worse.” He struggled with himself and she decided that if he was angry, he wasn’t angry with her, which made her shaky with relief because the memories of Kurt’s veiled, terrorizing anger were still too strong. “Please stay,” he said. “If you can. If you can forget tonight.”
“I’ll try.” Then something made her add, touching him on the arm, “But no, Callan, I don’t want to forget it. It was—”
“But I do,” he cut in.
