gaze away from Heath to find Lisa had joined in the frantic waving. It seemed there were now two guys awaiting her. But if she had to say the words, ‘So tell me about your job,’ one more time…
Jodie stood, and with shaking hands patted her napkin against her mouth. ‘Meet me at the street crossing on the city side of the building,’ she murmured. ‘Five minutes.’
Heath looked up at her with more than mischief in his bright blue eyes. ‘Shall do, Ms Bond.’
Jodie turned and, without looking back, headed for the ladies’ room where she had a date with a tiny window and a Dumpster.
Heath turned on his chair and watched Jodie walk away, keeping a close eye on the tidy package within the hipster jeans, the bouncy auburn hair, and the expanse of creamy skin exposed by her glittery contraption of a top that was held together by modern-day engineering and luck.
He blew out a long slow breath when she finally sauntered from view.
In her website picture she had been worth a second glance, but in the flesh those intense green eyes of hers were just something else—relentless yet radiating unexpected vulnerability. He’d had to stop himself time and again from reaching out and running a soothing finger over her furrowed brow as every worry that had run through her mind had flashed across her eyes like a freeway warning sign.
One of those flashing signals had told him what she saw of him she liked, and, even without all the other inducements she offered, that was a pretty potent thing to find in a first date. And a blind date at that.
So while half of him couldn’t quite believe that he was with a woman whose intention to marry wasn’t just a niggling presumption in the back of his head, but a blatant prerequisite to his spending time with her, the other half of him found that the most heady inducement of all.
Added to that there was something about being with a city girl that took him away from his troubles back home. Something about the powders and potions they used to look after themselves. They always smelled so good. He wondered if he would get close enough to Jodie that night to find if she smelled half as good as he imagined she would.
And Jodie was not only a city girl, but a foreign city girl to boot. A girl with skin so creamy it was never meant to be exposed to the harsh Australian clime, with hair so fine it gleamed, and with an accent so strong that every word she uttered reminded him that there was a big world out there that he had been ignoring for the longest time. Until now.
Heath looked towards the front door where the blonde who had shown him to his table stood fighting with a rangy brunette. Both were staring at the ladies’ room door. Jodie’s last line of defence, perhaps?
The brunette glanced over at his table and he gave her a small wave. She grabbed the blonde and ducked behind her, leaving the blonde having to wave back. Yep. They both belonged to Jodie for sure. City girls and their mates…
With a secret smile, he turned back to his beer, his mind whirling through the night so far. But then he groaned as he remembered blurting out, ‘I am also a qualified civil engineer.’
How long had it been since he had even said those words out loud? Sure, they were true—he would have been eminently employable in the field if not for the fateful timing that had forced him to return to his outback home to look after his younger brothers and sisters and to run the family farm.
But why had he needed to let this slip of a girl know such information? Because she had been so obviously trying to reconcile to herself what the heck she was doing sitting across a table from a farmer, that was why! Well, he was more than that, just as he was sure that behind those liquid eyes there was more light and shade to Jodie Simpson than she was letting through her shield as well.
Thinking of light, he could still remember the radiance in Cameron’s eyes the day he had married Marissa. He remembered the scent of roses from Marissa’s bouquet as he had hugged her after the ceremony. She had thanked him that day, for being a good friend, to her and especially to Cameron.
The picture dissolved as he remembered the darkness in Cameron’s eyes as he’d sat in the funeral chapel while his young wife’s coffin had lain quiet and sombre to his right. The depth of Cameron’s sorrow rocked Heath to his very soul.
In his brother Heath had witnessed the extremes of both bliss and despair. But at thirty-six years of age he had never known either firsthand. His life had been lived by the rules and where had that put him? Alone.
Light and shade. It was way past time his stagnant life was injected with more of both. This was a woman who could take him out of his comfort zone. Jodie was a woman who wanted change so badly she was willing to risk everything by marrying a complete stranger in order to get it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?
He pushed back his chair and walked towards the front door and the two women all but fell over themselves to look natural.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet.
‘Is everything all right?’ the blonde asked.
‘It’s fine, apart from the fact that my…date seems to have left me with the bill.’ He gave her enough money to more than cover his one beer and Jodie’s untouched glass of wine.
Then, with a spring in his step that would have been more appropriate for an eighteen-year-old buck on the prowl rather than someone twice that age, he stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and stepped out into a mild spring darkness feeling like a car whose battery had been jump-started after being flat for a decade.
CHAPTER THREE
SUNDAY morning Jodie pushed back the comforter, hitched up her too-loose flannelette pyjama pants, and yawned magnificently as she opened her bedroom door.
Louise, already showered and dressed in what amounted to a casual outfit for her—a lemon twin set and designer jeans—turned on the couch with a hand to her throat. ‘Oh, my. I thought I was the only one here.’
‘Mandy and Lisa have gone out?’ Jodie asked.
Louise nodded. Jodie looked to the clock on the microwave to find it was only nine in the morning. They’d still not been home when Jodie had snuck in at three that morning, so they would have had five hours’ sleep at the most.
Jodie shuffled to the couch on which Louise had slept, though you wouldn’t know it by the neat throw rug over the back of the chair and the perfectly placed scatter cushions. Louise sat, crossing her feet neatly at the ankle, an open bucket of ice cream before her. Jodie sat on her hand to stop herself from mussing up her sister’s perfect hair.
‘What’s with the nine in the morning ice-cream fix?’ Jodie asked.
Louise offered her spoon, but Jodie declined.
‘Mum…Ivy…just called.’ Poor Louise’s face crumpled as she fought to settle on how she ought to think of the woman who had brought her up as her own. ‘But that’s neither here nor there. Tell me about your night. Did you meet anyone brilliant?’
Jodie wasn’t quite sure what to say. While her life felt as if it was on the up and up, Louise’s was falling apart at her feet.
Before searching out Jodie, Louise had discovered that before she was born her father had sired illegitimate
