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‘You shouldn’t come here on your own—you never know who might be around.’
Nick’s appearance startled her.
‘Obviously!’ she snapped at him.
But as he ignored her comment and fell into stride beside her, she knew all the good of her run had vanished, and with it her peace of mind.
It’s only Nick, she told herself, but that didn’t seem to stop the awareness that prickled in her skin all down one side—the side closest to her jogging companion.
Veering away from him, she headed for the water and dived from ankle depth into the clear, green-blue sea, surfacing to breathe then diving again to porpoise along parallel to the beach, relishing the silken kiss of the water against her skin.
Had she always been this gorgeous?
Long, lean, and tanned in a way redheads weren’t supposed to tan?
Nick watched as she dived and surfaced in the water, only to dive again, her limbs flashing in the sunlight, her hair trailing behind her—a mermaid at play.
Was it because she’d always been a friend that he’d never seen her as a woman? Not that he could afford to see her that way now—they were friends! There’d be plenty of interesting and intelligent, even beautiful, women here in Willowby. It was only a matter of connecting up with some of them, and the thoughts he found himself having about Bill would disappear.
For all she joked about having escaped a fate worse than death when she’d dumped Nigel, she was the kind of woman who should be married—married with a tribe of red-headed kids clustered around her—because she’d always been a mother hen, adopting not only him but any fellow pupil in danger of being bullied or excluded from one of the childhood gangs.
He stripped down to his jocks and dived into the water, surfacing a little distance from her, uncertain enough about the strange reactions of the night to not want to be too close.
‘Race you to the rocks,’ she challenged, and started immediately, but his longer strokes and stronger kick soon had him catching up, so they swam together towards the smooth, rounded rocks that jutted into the water at the end of the bay until they were close enough for him to swim away, beating her by a body length.
Strange reactions or not, he wasn’t going to let her beat him!
‘Oh, that was good,’ she said, coming up out of the water, her hair streaming down her back. ‘I find it’s so much easier to sleep during the day if I have a run and a swim before I go home.’
She looked at him for a moment, her golden-brown eyes assessing.
‘And a hearty breakfast at the surf club back at the main beach. You up for that, or has your body become a temple so you can’t eat delicious crispy bacon, and beef sausages, and fried tomatoes, and all the other things that are loaded with cholesterol and fat?’
Nick shook his head in disbelief.
‘So you still eat like a navvy and stay as slim as a whip. Some metabolism you de Grootes inherited.’
‘Not all of us,’ Bill told him, smiling as she waded in front of him back to the beach. ‘Bob’s developed a most unsightly paunch, and Joel’s heading in the same direction. Too many business lunches and not enough exercise, that’s the problem with those two.’
Nick watched the way her butt moved as she walked in front of him and tried to think of Bill’s brothers rather than how those twin globes would fit into his hands.
‘Have you already moved into the apartment?’
She threw the question over her shoulder but it brushed right past him, his attention snaffled by the way the woman in front of him moved, and how her breasts hung low as she bent to retrieve her T-shirt from the sand, the bikini she wore barely covering her nipples.
‘Nick?’
Had she caught him watching her as she turned, her eyebrows raised as she waited for a reply?
What had she asked?
Had he moved in …?
‘If you call dumping a couple of suitcases in the bedroom and unpacking my wash bag as moving in, then yes,’ he responded, hoping the gap between the question and the answer hadn’t been too long. ‘It’s fully furnished so all I had to bring were clothes and personal stuff. I’d hardly begun to unpack when the hospital phoned to ask if I could work last night.’
Bill didn’t respond, so disturbed was she by the sight of Nick’s lean, toned body that casual conversation was beyond her. He’d shrugged as he’d mentioned unpacking, an unfortunate movement as it had drawn her attention back to his chest, with its flat wedges of pectoral muscles and clearly defined six-pack.
She wanted to ask if he’d been working out, but that would give away the fact she’d noticed and the way she was feeling it was better if the question went unasked.
She climbed the first dune and raced down the other side then up the next, aware he was pacing himself to stay beside her—aware of him!
It was bad enough that he was living in the same building, so now she’d have to avoid seeing him out of work hours as well as at work, without him suspecting she might see him as other than a friend.
A passing fancy, surely?
But her reactions to him were forgotten as she topped the last dune.
‘What is that?’
The words burst from her lips as she saw the racing-green sports car, hood down, cream leather seats, sleek lines shouting speed and, yes, seduction.
‘My car?’ His voice was quiet but she heard the pride in it.
‘Well, that will get you noticed in Willowby,’ she muttered, aware of just who would notice it first—the constant stream of beautiful women who used Willowby as a jumping-off place for reef adventures. True, they worked, if you could call hostessing on luxury yachts or on the six-star island resorts working, but since the mining boom had led to the town becoming one of the wealthiest per capita in the country, the place had been swamped by women, and men if she was honest, looking to separate some of that money from those who had it.
‘Gets me noticed most places,’ Nick replied, and the smile on his face made her stomach clench.
That’s why he’d bought it! She knew that much immediately, remembering the email he’d sent her many years ago when he’d returned from his first stint with the army reserve, serving overseas. He’d helped to put back together young men blown apart by bombs in wars that ordinary people didn’t understand.
He’d come home, he’d said, with one aim—to live for the day. He’d promised himself a beautiful car, the best of clothes and as many beautiful women as cared to play with him. ‘I’m honest with them, Bill,’ he’d said in the email. ‘I tell them all it’s not for ever, that marriage isn’t in my long-term plans. You’d be surprised how many women are happy with that—even agreeing that it’s not for them either. Things are different now.’
Were they? Bill hadn’t been able to answer that question then and couldn’t now. For herself, she knew she wanted marriage, and children too, but not without love and so far, apart from that one disastrous experience, love hadn’t come along.
‘Ride with me,’ Nick suggested. ‘I’ll drop you back at your old bomb after breakfast.’
‘Ride in that thing? The town might have grown, Nick, but at heart it’s still the same old Willowby. I only need to be spotted by one of the local gossips and my reputation would be ruined. Did you see the de Groote girl, they’d be saying, running around in a fast car with a fast man? You, of course, will be forgiven. About you they’ll say, hasn’t he done well for himself, that grandson of old Mrs Grant? And such a kind boy, coming home to be with his gran now she’s getting on.’
Nick laughed and headed for his car.
‘Okay, but I won’t offer to race you to the surf club,’ he teased. ‘Too unfair.’
Bill climbed into her battered old four-wheel drive, the vehicle her father had bought her new when she’d passed her driving test. She patted the dash to reassure the car she wasn’t put off by its shabby appearance, or influenced by the shining beauty of Nick’s vehicle, but it was she who needed reassurance as her folly in suggesting he breakfast with her finally struck home. Even with her sea-drenched curls, and the tatty old T-shirt, she’d always felt quite at home at the surf club, but these days many of the beautiful people breakfasted there as well—
Whoa! Surely she wasn’t concerned that Nick would compare her to some of the other women and find her wanting?
Of course she wasn’t!
Then why was she wondering if there might not be a long shift somewhere in the mess of clothes, books and papers in the back seat of the car—wondering if there might be a slightly melted tube of lip gloss in the glove box?
Hopeless, that’s what she was.
He’d selected a table that looked out from a covered deck over the town’s main beach and the placid tropical waters. Bill slipped into a chair beside him, so she, too, could look out to sea. Far out on the horizon they could see the shapes of the islands that dotted the coastline—tourist havens on Australia’s biggest natural wonder, the Great Barrier Reef.
‘I’ve ordered the big breakfast for both of us,’ Nick informed her. ‘Anything you don’t want, I’ll eat. And coffee—double-shot latte still your drug of choice?’
‘It is, and thanks,’ Bill replied, telling herself at the same time that a nice normal breakfast with Nick should banish all the silly stuff that had been going on in her head.
Especially as Nick was wasting no time checking out the talent, with his eyes on a group of three long-haired blondes, laughing and joking on the other side of the wide deck.
‘The town’s scenery’s improved,’ he joked.
‘It’s the money that’s being splashed around,’ Bill reminded him, deciding to take his comment seriously. ‘Money attracts money but it also attracts the kind of people who like to have it—like to spend it. The problem is that while the miners and the people who work in mining support services are all earning big money, the price of housing goes up, rents go up, and the ordinary people of the town, especially those who don’t own their own houses, are stuck with costs they can’t afford.’
Nick smiled.
‘Still a worry-wart,’ he teased.
‘Well, someone has to worry about it. Nurses at the hospital don’t get paid more than their counterparts in other places in the state, yet accommodation costs in town are enormous. Fortunately the hospital has realised it has a problem and has built some small rental apartments in the grounds, but you spread that problem out across the town—the check-out staff at supermarkets, the workers in government offices, the council truck drivers—all the locals suffer.’
She stopped, partly because she was aware she’d mounted her soap-box and really shouldn’t be boring Nick with the problem but also because the blondes appeared to have noticed him—new talent in town?—and were sending welcoming smiles his way.
‘Maybe they saw the car when you drove in,’ Bill muttered.
‘Ouch! And anyway the car park’s out the back. No, it’s my good looks that have got their attention—see, one of them is coming over.’
One of them was coming over. The leggiest one, with the longest, shiniest, blondest, dead-straight hair!
‘Aren’t you Nick Grant?’ she asked, and as Nick nodded, she held out her hand.
‘I told the girls it was you. You used to go out with Serena Snow, didn’t you?’
Again Nick had to agree, and the leggy blonde introduced herself.
‘I’m Amy Wentworth. I met you a couple of times at parties back then. What are you doing up in this neck of the woods? Holidaying? Off to the reef for a few days’ R and R?’
So far she’d totally ignored Bill—not that it mattered, Bill told herself.
She studied the woman while Nick explained he was working here, living in the new apartment building at the marina but with no elaboration on why. Amy raised her eyebrows.
‘Can’t imagine you in a hick town like this. Oh, I know there’s a lot of money around, but what do you do when you’re not working?’
Nick grinned at her.
‘I’ll be doing pretty much what I did when I wasn’t working in Sydney.’
Amy drifted away but Bill wasn’t going to let him get away with that tantalising reply.
‘Which was?’ she asked.
‘What which was?’
‘The “pretty much what you did in Sydney” bit of that conversation.’
‘Ah, but I told you years ago,’ he reminded her. ‘I had a good time and I intend to do just that up here. You don’t need nightclubs and friends with yachts on the harbour to have a good time.’
‘We’ve got a nightclub and a two of my brothers have yachts, or big motor launches,’ Bill said defensively, and Nick laughed.
‘Exactly, although I think the nightclub crowd are a bit young for me, but you can have a good time wherever you are. In fact, I’m off for three days next week and think I might pop across to one of the island resorts—do a bit of diving and fishing and …’
‘Meeting beautiful women,’ Bill finished for him.
Again Nick smiled, although this time it was a little forced because in the back of his mind he’d had another reason for returning to Willowby, one that was becoming important to him.
‘That too, of course,’ he answered glibly. ‘Want to come?’
CHAPTER THREE
SHE DIDN’T REPLY, studying him intently for a moment instead, and he knew that look. Undoubtedly she’d picked up something from his tone.
‘Did it hurt you?’ she asked.
Yep, he’d been right about the look and although he knew full well what she meant by the question, he wasn’t going to cede ground to her by admitting it.
‘Did what hurt me?’
‘You know full well what I mean,’ she said crossly. ‘Serena saying no to your proposal.’
His turn to study her. The problem with friendship—a strong and enduring friendship like the one they shared—was that you couldn’t lie to the other party. Oh, you could fudge around a bit and dodge answering, but you couldn’t right out lie.
He turned his gaze from Bill’s too-perceptive eyes and looked out over the beach and island-strewn sea.
The truth!
‘More than I could have imagined,’ he admitted, and turned back so, now it was out, he could meet the gold-brown eyes fastened so steadfastly on his face. ‘I don’t think it was Serena’s rejection so much. I liked her well enough. For all her self-focus she was fun to be with and happy that we more or less lived separate lives—both of us working long hours at different times—so I can’t see why it wouldn’t have worked.’
Bill’s small, rather shocked ‘Oh’ broke into his thoughts but now he’d started he wanted to finish what he’d been saying.
‘You know how I feel about the “l” word, Bill, so I can’t say I loved her, but what had … not excited but certainly intrigued me was the idea of having a family—a wife and child—people who belonged, not to me but with me, if you know what I mean.’
The disbelief on Bill’s face was so easy to read he had to laugh.
‘Yes, yes, I know I said it would never happen, but finding out Serena was pregnant, well, it kind of changed something inside me, as if a wire that had been shorted out was suddenly reconnected and family stopped being in front of going down mines, abduction by aliens and the bogeyman in my fears.’
He paused, marshalling his thoughts.
‘In part, it’s why I came home—came back to the only family I’ve ever known: Gran and you de Grootes.’
‘Looking for a family of your own?’ Bill asked.
