urged her to smile, offer something politely meaningless such as, Yes, we must do that sometime, and walk away.
Oh, but she didn’t want to listen to that safe, sensible, good-girl voice. For once she wanted to do something a little bit bad. Ordinarily one drink wouldn’t qualify as even vaguely bad, but she had a strong feeling—a hot, dizzying feeling—that a drink with Zane O’Sullivan wouldn’t be ordinary.
“I think I would like…” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, moistened her lips, then realized she had lost his attention. He was frowning into his side mirror, while his fingers drummed against the wheel.
“Looks like you have a visitor.”
She stepped back just far enough to see the gleaming white Volvo that had pulled up behind them, and the gleamingly groomed man who stepped from the driver’s seat. He looked solid and respectable and, yes, dull.
She heard the tow truck kick over and felt such a jolt of panic, she had to stop herself from leaping at the window. Instead she stepped onto the running board and somehow above the thud of her heart she heard herself say, “I really would like to buy you that drink sometime.”
Perhaps he saw the nervous tension in her face. Or perhaps he was looking right by her at Dan the Dentist waiting patiently on the verge. With those impenetrable lenses, it was impossible to know. Whatever he saw, it caused one corner of his mouth to kick up wryly. It also caused him to shake his head and say, “Thanks, but I’m thinking that’s not such a great idea after all.”
Of course he was right.
She stepped down from the window and away from the truck, and as she watched it pull away, she felt a weighty gloom settle over her.
Drinks with Zane O’Sullivan might not be such a great idea, but that didn’t make a dinner party with Mr. Solid and Respectable sound any more palatable.
Two
In the end she didn’t go to Chantal’s dinner party. Instead she shared a considerably less formal supper, sitting at her kitchen table, with Dan. He wasn’t as dull as she had imagined. In fact, he seemed nice, in a comfy, companionable way. When he sheepishly admitted that Chantal had browbeaten him into attending her party, Julia decided she could like him.
She certainly liked how her concentration remained fixed on the conversation, instead of straying to his lips. She enjoyed the complete absence of breathlessness and butterflies, and she positively loved how she could read every expression on his open face.
If she ever went for a drink with Dan she wouldn’t consider it bad, and touching his arm would be simply that. Touching his arm. It wouldn’t remind her how long it had been since a man’s arms embraced her, or how many nights she lay awake wondering if she would ever be held that closely again.
If Dan reminded her of a mild autumn morning next to Zane O’Sullivan’s midday summer heat, then so much the better. Summer had never been her favorite season.
After she waved Dan goodbye, she told herself she liked a man who fit her homely decor, as Dan surely did. As Zane wouldn’t. He would fill her kitchen with his size and his maleness. He definitely would not look at home. Nor would he succumb to Chantal’s velvet-steamroller tactics, as Dan had done, although that was a moot point.
His name would never grace one of Chantal’s guest lists.
For a start, he dressed for work in rugged denim instead of fine Italian suit cloth, and second, he didn’t have a prestigious address. In fact, if he even owned a home, Kree hadn’t mentioned it. He lived wherever his work as a heavy-machinery mechanic took him—most recently the mines in remote West Australia—and he didn’t stay anywhere long. His seven years in Plenty had probably been the longest he had lived in one place.
As she propped open her bedroom window and breathed the heady scent of moonlight and roses, Julia recalled how the O’Sullivan family arrived in town. What a stir they’d created in the conservative community—two rebellious preteens and their mother, old before her time and carrying more baggage than could ever fit in the beat-up van that died slap-bang in the middle of Main Street.
That was how they arrived, and they’d stayed because they couldn’t afford to leave.
Julia remembered the hushed talk—ugly rumors of a shadowy strife-filled past—and she remembered how most of the township had ostracized them. A smaller part had adopted them as its charity du jour. Not an easy introduction to a new community, especially for adolescents, and they’d each handled it differently.
Kree had built a brash facade, stuck her snub nose high in the air and refused to accept that she couldn’t belong. She battled to win not only acceptance but popularity, too, while her brother…well…Zane never won any popularity contests, because he’d refused to enter.
Some said he would have joined his father behind bars if Bill hadn’t given him a job at the garage, first pumping gas after school and then full-time. But as soon as he completed his apprenticeship he’d left Plenty—and those Claire Heaslip rumors—behind.
It seemed as if he had been moving ever since.
Why he’d chosen that lifestyle was not her concern, Julia told herself as she settled into bed and punched her pillow into shape. She had no business thinking of Zane O’Sullivan at all. She should be thinking of Dan—nice, comfortable, settled Dan—who had left with a promise to call her during the week.
Unfortunately, with her eyes closed and the summer air embracing her in its sultry caress, the mild dentist didn’t stand a chance. Instead she remembered the supple strength of a man’s arm beneath her fingers, the movement of snug white cotton over the casual shrug of broad shoulders, hair glinting with gold in the sun’s dusky light.
And with startling clarity she recalled one simple scrap of conversation.
Zane had been hooking the truck to her car when he’d asked how it ended up in the drain. When she told him the sequence of events, magpies and all, he didn’t shake his head critically or fix her with the scathing look she’d expected. He simply murmured, “Accidents happen,” and carried on with his task.
Julia slipped from wakefulness into sleep with that neutral, nonjudgmental phrase in her mind and a small smile on her lips.
Six days later, Zane stood on the neatly mown verge outside 14 Bower Street, juggling her car keys from one hand to the other. Distracted first by the touch of her hand and then by the arrival of Volvo Man, he had barely glanced sideways at the place on Friday night. Today he saw the truth of Kree’s excited exclamation when she had moved in last summer.
“You wouldn’t recognize the old Plummer place!” she had practically screamed down the phone line.
A gross understatement, Zane decided.
Julia had transformed the rundown weatherboard cottage, painting it some soft shade of blue and framing it with a garden. He wasn’t big on descriptive labels, but right after pretty and peaceful, he thought of welcoming. He could almost imagine the old house itself smiling gently as it opened its arms and beckoned, Come on in.
Houses with arms? Houses that beckoned?
“Time you started sleeping nights, O’Sullivan,” he muttered as he turned to study the wider streetscape. It registered that number fourteen wasn’t the only
