soft sighs when she wiggled her bottom to find a more comfortable position. And all the while her fragrance teased his nostrils.
It was like an endurance test.
They stopped for a late lunch, then a major accident and a hailstorm held them up. Darkness fell suddenly, like a wet blanket.
They’d swapped driving duty an hour ago, which gave Steve nothing to do but concentrate on not thinking about his proximity to Anneliese. The radio had dropped out fifty kilometres back and the silence inside the car was beginning to grate on Steve’s nerves. It was past 10:00 p.m. ‘We’ve got to stop somewhere tonight,’ he said. ‘Any ideas?’
‘Ah…I…was hoping we could drive straight through—’
‘Nope.’ He’d expected that. ‘I need a few hours of horizontal.’
‘Take a nap now, then. I’m right for a while.’ Without taking her eyes off the road, she set the open map on his lap.
He’d hardly closed his eyes when he woke feeling vaguely disoriented. He checked his watch. One hour. Something wasn’t right.
She caught his glance and her frown mirrored his. ‘I expected we would’ve been near Moree by now… I think maybe we took a wrong turn somewhere…’
‘We?’
‘I thought—’
‘The general condition of this road gave you no clue?’ He gestured at the view beyond the windscreen, switched on the car’s interior light. ‘Why didn’t you wake me? Pull over to the side of the road.’
She complied without a word.
‘This is where we’re headed—were headed…’ Taking the map from his knee, she spread it out on the dashboard.
‘Anneliese. No.’ He remained calm—was calm, he told himself—as he reorientated the map ninety degrees, pointed to their route. So it was true what they said about women and maps. ‘I’ll drive.’
‘No.’ She set the car into gear, turned and headed back the way they’d come. ‘What’s that noise—?’
‘Just what we damn well need—’
They both spoke at the same time.
‘Pull over again,’ he ordered.
A chill wind wrapped around him as he climbed out. He confirmed the problem, then poked his head inside to give Anneliese the good news. ‘We’ve got a flat.’ He zipped his vest as high as it would go. ‘Guess we can be thankful it’s not something serious or we might be stuck here for hours.’
CHAPTER THREE
A FLAT.
As in tyre.
As in we need the spare.
The spare with the three-month old puncture she’d forgotten about.
Taking a deep breath, Anneliese closed her eyes. A hole seemed to open up in her stomach and she wished she could just crawl into it and disappear. So much for being independent.
‘Switch off the engine and help me unload your gear from the boot and I’ll change it,’ she heard Steve say. ‘Maybe we can still make Moree this side of midnight.’
She switched off the car but remained where she was. A muffled ‘um’ escaped from between her tight lips.
When she opened her eyes she found Steve leaning over the passenger seat, his gaze fixed on hers. ‘Tell me you have a jack.’
‘I do.’
‘Thank heavens for that, then,’ he said, backing out again. ‘For a moment there, I—’
‘But the spare’s…punctured.’
‘The. Spare’s. Punctured.’ He enunciated each word as if he needed time to absorb the meaning.
‘I never got around to…’ she looked away; she didn’t think he’d appreciate her bringing into it the fact that Dad considered it a man’s job and took care of her car. ‘…getting it repaired.’
‘You planned to drive seventeen hundred k’s without having your car checked over first.’ She flinched at the sound of a frustrated palm slapping the car’s roof. ‘I bet you didn’t forget your perfume, did you?’ He shut the passenger door with a firm thud.
‘For your inf…’ Forget it, he can’t hear you. He doesn’t want to hear you.
And what he’d said was no more than the brutally honest truth.
She watched him in the car’s headlights as he walked away, his unkempt hair whipped by the wind. He turned into the glare and motioned her to turn off the lights as he pulled something out of his pocket.
What in heaven’s name would she have done if she’d been alone? Exactly what he was doing, she thought, watching him punch numbers into his mobile. But she breathed a sigh of relief that he had everything under control and slumped down in her seat.
Except hadn’t she sworn to take control of her own life? She jackknifed up again. Wasn’t that why she’d begun this journey? To make changes? Forget that if she’d been responsible he wouldn’t be making calls on a lonely road in the middle of the night. Someone else taking charge. Again. Worse, it was Steve, the man she always seemed to fall apart in front of.
She couldn’t take her eyes off him. Ratty vest aside, he was…what? She’d never been so aware of any man the way she was aware of Steve. Because he was different? Because he didn’t treat her the way her usual dates did?
Her mind spun back to her twenty-first party at an exclusive Melbourne club. Most of the guests had left and he’d turned up late to collect Cindy and somehow Anneliese had found herself alone in the car park with Steve…
‘Happy birthday, Anneliese.’
His deep-timbred voice resonated along her bones, sending excitement fizzing through her veins like the celebratory champagne she’d been drinking all night, and she quite simply froze.
‘Thank you,’ she managed—barely—mesmerised by a smile that was as potent as the intensity of his dark eyes. She’d have walked past him, but even motionless he seemed to be blocking her way. Her feet remained glued to the concrete.
His hair stood up in spikes, and that facial fuzz had to be at least three days old. There was a smear of grease on his arm, as if he’d been playing mechanic. In tattered jeans and sneakers and a black T-shirt that looked as if it had been spray-painted over that mile-wide chest, obviously he didn’t care that this place had a dress code, even if he was only on driving duty.
And yet her pulse took no notice of the fact that this was the type of man she avoided.
‘You look sensational tonight,’ he said when she didn’t move. Didn’t speak.
Just stood like a statue in her filmy white
