nanny was pulling beers in the town’s seediest pub added urgency to his objective as well as heat to his conscience. “Joshua can stay here with you and Quade for an hour or two?” he asked.
“Of course,” Chantal answered automatically before she saw him start for the door. Then she threw down a handful of teaspoons with a metallic clatter. “Wait there, just one minute.”
Hand on the doorknob, he started counting down the sixty seconds.
“You’ve been driving half the day, cleaning and unpacking for the rest of it. Go home and sleep. Introduce yourself to a razor and see Emily tomorrow when you’re not looking quite so primitive.” She paused, eyes narrowing as she studied him head to foot. “I assume you do want to engage her services?”
No, want didn’t really cover it. He needed Emily. He and Joshua both.
That steely determination must have shown in his expression because Chantal sighed and shook her head. “Go easy on her, Mitch. I know you’ve had a tough couple of years, but so has Emily.”
Mitch knew all about Emily Warner’s tough years, and the fifteen-minute drive into Plenty provided plenty of time for that knowledge to turn him inside out. His ex-wife dismissing her as Joshua’s nanny for no good reason. Her grandfather’s death and the subsequent battle over his estate. That injustice still boiled Mitch’s blood…although not half as much as his own error of judgment.
Error of judgment? He snorted with self-disgust. That didn’t even begin to describe how he’d abused his duty of care two months after reemploying her, how he’d taken advantage of her warm, compassionate nature and shattered her trust.
As Joshua’s nanny, she’d lived in his home, and the night he learned of Annabelle’s death… His hands tightened on the wheel reflexively. He remembered the gut-kick of intense, impotent anger and the numbness he sought at his local bar. Emily had fetched him home, Emily with her gentle brown eyes and her comforting arms and her soft words of sympathy.
He’d kissed her, possibly to shut off those platitudes. Possibly because he’d ached to lose himself in something softer and sweeter and more supportive than a whiskey bottle. Oh, yeah, he remembered the kissing and the falling into bed and then…a dark, black hole in his memory.
A vision of Emily as he’d last seen her, dressed in nothing but his white linen sheets and a soft, pink flush, drifted through his thoughts and rubbed every raw edge of his conscience. He might not recall what happened that night, but he would never forget the morning after. Her wariness, his clumsy questioning, her insistence that nothing had happened. Except, hot on the heels of that “nothing”—while he and Joshua were traveling to Annabelle’s funeral—she packed her bags and disappeared.
Frustration twisted his gut into a tight, hot knot as he pulled into the car park behind the Lion and switched off the engine. Six months wondering and worrying over the consequences of that night, and he didn’t think he could wait another minute, certainly not the hour until closing. From the near-empty lot he figured she wouldn’t be too busy—the impending rain had kept most sane folk home. He jumped down from the cab, shut the door and—city habit—paused to lock up. He almost missed the small, female figure that slipped from a side entrance. As she hurried off down the street, the wind tore at her hooded parka. Long hair, stick straight, shone silvery pale under a streetlight.
Emily.
His pulse kicked, an instant response to the tumult of sensations that swamped his body. Most of them he didn’t want to identify, so he concentrated on the quick surge of anger. She was walking home alone, through the dark streets, and she didn’t even have the sense to pull her hood over that luminous beacon of hair. Might as well shout, Here I am, young, blond and female. Come and get me.
Suddenly the door to the bar swung open, and two men veered toward Mitch, two men he recognized as former classmates at Plenty High. He had nowhere to hide as Dean Mancini did a classic double take.
“Mitch Goodwin? Stone the crows! I heard you were coming back. Moving into the old Heaslip place, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.” Beyond the mens’ shoulders, Mitch could see Emily’s rapidly retreating figure. “Sorry, mate, but I—”
“Lucky break, your sister getting married and letting you take her place.” Rocky O’Shea rode right over the top of Mitch’s attempt to end the conversation. “But then you always were a lucky bastard.”
Dean planted an elbow in his mate’s side and Rocky, eventually, caught on. His gaze skittered, his Adam’s apple bobbed, and Mitch didn’t really want to hear whatever fumbling words came next. “I have to be somewhere,” he said shortly. “Catch you another time.”
Dean cleared his throat. “Sorry about your…you know.”
“My ex-wife?”
Both men shifted their feet, awkward and ill at ease, but Mitch was already climbing into his truck. Powerful engine gunning, he wheeled the vehicle into the street, but his irritation faded as quickly as it had flared, replaced by a tinge of sympathy for the discomfited pair.
What were you supposed to say to a man whose wife ran off to chase her dazzling career without a thought for their three-year-old son? A wife whose glamorous must-have lifestyle placed her in a doomed jet in a Caribbean thunderstorm?
Even six months after her funeral, he didn’t know what the hell kind of etiquette covered that.
When the first spots of rain dotted the pavement a block from home, Emily huddled deeper into her parka and walked more briskly. She didn’t run. Running would be like ceding defeat to the fear crouched low in her belly, woken by the dreaded combination of rain and darkness and the revving of a powerful motor.
“For pity’s sake, Emily Jane, you’re not even in the car,” she muttered. “Plus you’re in Plenty, not Sydney.” Reasonable points, but the sweep of headlights turning into her street sent her memory into a tailspin.
Her car stopped at traffic lights. The door wrenched open. The man, the knife, the icy clutch of terror as he told her to drive.
Emily was jolted back to the present by the sound of a vehicle slowing and pulling into the curb behind her. Now she should run but her stupid, scared legs refused to cooperate.
“Emily.”
At the sound of her name—of that voice—her heart stuttered, then resumed at the same frantic pace, except with a different kind of panic. A Mitch Goodwin kind of panic. She’d heard talk of his imminent move from Sydney to his family’s hometown, had known he wouldn’t let sleeping dogs—or nannies—lie. That was Mitch’s way, ever the journalist, needing the full story, fact by painful fact.
Six months she had spent constructing her version, preparing for this moment, and now her brain appeared to be in meltdown. Wonderful. With a fatalistic sense of doom, she turned toward the car…correction, truck. Mitch Goodwin sat behind the wheel of a crew-cab truck that could have been tailor-made. Big, dark, rugged. A shivery tension weakened her limbs as he stretched across the front seat to open the passenger door. The cabin light cast tricky shadows across his darkly stubbled face, and his deep-set eyes, too, looked unfathomably dark. Emily tried not to stare at his lips, not to remember their determined heat as they—
“Get in,” those lips said. “It’s starting to rain.”
Her
