its owner: a rough-made house with an uneven front verandah, surrounded by dense brush except for a coarse, bumpy dirt track. All was dark and quiet. There were no streetlights, no sealed roads, no near neighbors she could see. She almost felt like she’d stumbled into a fairy tale—except Jirrah’s home was no enchanted forest cottage—more like the abandoned shack in the back of beyond. A bush-ranger’s retreat: Ned Kelly’s hut, or Captain Thunderbolt’s hideout in the hills.
Yet once upon a time, she would have been happy here, making Jirrah’s house a home, because he’d built it for them. Planting flowers, painting the wood planks rich cream and the windowsills a soft yellow. Working side by side with him to fix the roof, as she had when they were lovers: Tess the carpenter’s mate, he’d dubbed her, solemnizing the event with her own tool belt and hard hat. Fitting in work between kisses. Oh, together they could make this place a home he’d want to come home to—
“Do you have a flashlight?” Jirrah asked, interrupting her reverie. “The generator might be dead by now. It’s pretty old.”
“What a pity you didn’t think of it before,” she snapped, exhausted with the day’s stress, embarrassed by her little daydream. “Now I’ll spend the night imagining us playing blind-man’s buff with Cameron in a dark, isolated cabin!”
He made a small, savage sound of impatience. “Look, I just spent three hours driving on lousy roads after your fruitcake husband car bombed me. I’m hungry, I have a headache the size of a Mack truck, my wrist’s throbbing and I’m covered in cuts and gravel burns. I want food, a shower and sleep before I have to outrun Beller yet again. So I’d appreciate it if you’d cut the complaints and tell me if you have a flashlight or not.”
She yanked a lock of hair behind her ear. “Yes, I have one. I’ve also got food and a first-aid kit. I’ll bring my gun inside, too. At least one of us was prepared for this!”
“Yeah, well, any preparation I might have had blew sky-high back at Lynch Hill, so don’t expect any apologies from me.”
She flushed in the darkness. “You want to compare notes? I was carjacked today by somebody I thought was dead, with a Ripley’s story about my family for his excuse! If I’d had time to get you out of the car I wouldn’t be here now!”
He looked at her. “If you didn’t believe me you wouldn’t be here, and neither would I. You’d have shot me.”
A sudden jab of anguish landed over her heart, robbing her of breath. Was he right? “I’m still thinking about it. I don’t shoot people without at least giving them a hearing. I still have the gun…and you have tonight to prove you’re telling me the truth.”
He held up a hand. “I get the picture. We’re both overwhelmed and stressed now. Can we call a truce and get the flashlight?”
“Fine.” In moments she handed him the torch. “I have aspirin, antiseptic and bandages. I’ll bandage your wounds inside.”
“Thanks.” He flicked it on, and led the way in.
When the light came on, Jirrah sighed in relief. “Thank God for that. The last thing I needed was to wrestle with that crazy generator tonight. You hungry?”
Tessa looked at the house, with its rough walls, unfinished windows and loamy scent of damp earth rising from between the imperfectly laid floorboards, and frowned. Then she noticed a wood carving set on an upturned crate. An enormous kangaroo made of a deep red eucalypt wood, one of a pair. The other stood on a similar platform in a shadowy corner. “These are magnificent—exquisite pieces,” she said softly, wondering at the incongruity of their surreal and radiant beauty living within the dark shadows of this sad, neglected shack. “They’re so real they look like they’re actually in flight.”
He nodded. “I like them. You hungry?” he repeated.
Looking at him she saw the pain, the total exhaustion, and realized the toll the past few hours had taken on him, driving over unlit roads after a brush with death. “I keep tinned food in my van. I’ll heat some up while you rest. You want coffee?”
“Sounds great.” He fell back on an old brown-and-black striped sofa, just about the ugliest she’d ever seen. He closed his eyes—one eye purple and contorted with swelling.
She left the room, disturbed by the sight of him looking like that. He’d been hurt because he’d come to find her.
Moments later, she touched his shoulder. “Here.” She handed him two tablets and a glass of water.
“Thanks.” He downed the tablets, and closed his eyes again.
Never anybody’s cook, it took Tessa almost half an hour to get the food heating in the gorgeous but impractical Kookaburra wood-fire oven. Soot striped her face and top from trying to light it. By the time she’d cleaned herself up the coffee was cool in the Bodum plunger—so he was still a fresh-coffee addict—and she had to make it fresh. “Where the hell’s a microwave when you need one?” she muttered, dumping the coffee grinds out the window, since there was no drain in the kitchen.
Why did Jirrah live in a hovel like this? If she could just have a week here, he wouldn’t have to. It would be a home—
Don’t think like that. Don’t go there. That’s in the past.
She returned to the living room with her first-aid kit.
A small open fire blazed behind a grate in the corner. Jirrah lay sprawled on the long, ugly sofa in a deep sleep, looking so much like her David she ached with it.
He’s Jirrah. David’s gone. This man is no more the boy I loved than I am the girl he married.
Fighting a second wave of grief over him, she put the water and bandages on the crate before the sofa and tended to the cuts on his arms and chest through the gaping tear in his T-shirt.
The first time she’d touched a man’s body in over two years, and she didn’t want to now; but Jirrah had risked his life to help save hers today. She owed him, big time.
It seemed she owed him even more if he was telling her the truth about Duncan and Cameron’s setup.
He’s alive, and I have a death certificate Duncan gave me. Isn’t that enough?
She continued cleaning the wound with warm water, frowning.
Jirrah started half-awake when her fingers connected with his chest. “Tess,” he mumbled, capturing her fingers with his.
Magic.
A sleepy word, one sleeping brush of his fingers, and all she’d tried to forget the past six years arose from slumber. One unconscious touch, and warm, dark, unpredictable magic lit the very air she breathed—
And it terrified her.
She jerked her hand away, and kept dabbing the antiseptic on the long, ugly gash on his chest.
“Ssssss.” He jerked to full awareness with the stinging touch, sitting up and glaring at her. She scrambled back across the rough floor, hot and cold with panic.
“Tessa? You okay?”
Unable to drag her gaze from his, she saw him watching her with a look she didn’t want to define.
