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"I had you pegged for a Wall Street type."
"Fuck that. I actually have a soul. I work in agricultural finance."
He veers back a little, jaw clenching. "You're here to take someone's farm?"
That's a common misconception I run into all the time. Farmers hear the wordsagricultural financeand they immediately associate it with losing their farms, theirlivelihoods. I understand that initial response, but that's not what I do. Not entirely, anyway.
"It's not that simple."
"Well, in any case, it might be a good idea to keep what you do and why you're here to yourself." He takes his eyes off me and glances around us. "I'm not saying the good folk of Scuttlebutt would chase you out of town with pitchforks…but I'm also notnotsaying that."
"I get it."
Wilby's jaw tightens again. "This fucking drought, mate, it's killing us."
"Hey." I sweep my fingers along his cheek. "No more work talk."
He nods and shakes out his shoulders. "How long are you staying for?"
"Depends on how long the job takes," I say. "I have an open ticket back to the States."
"This is your last stop?"
I nod. "And I have some good news."
"Oh, yeah?"
"I'm running a little ahead of schedule, which means I have a few days free."
"That so?"
He's smiling, and how crazy is it that I've missed that smile as much as I have? That I haven't been able to get him out of my head the entire time I've been in Australia. That I've not given anyone a second thought on the off-chance I might see him again and we might progress what we started…which is so beyond stupid it belongs in its own stratosphere of stupidity.
I know Wilby and I don't have much of a future, or any future, really.
But we do have a few days together.
Hopefully.
If that's something he wants, too.Andif he can fit me into his schedule.
I brush my hand over his shoulder. "I was thinking, maybe we could?—"
"Wilby, mate, who the fuck is this?"
A short middle-aged man with a beer belly and a friendly, but weathered, face claps Wilby on the back. He takes a good look at me. "Ah, don't tell me. It's that fella you met in Sydney, isn't it? The one with the eyes."
"The eyes?" A woman standing nearby overhears the conversation and spins around. "Wow. Theyareincredible. Hey, Jules," she yells over her shoulder. "Come over 'ere a sec and check this out. This is the bloke Wilby's got a thing for. The one he met in the big smoke."
"The one with the eyes?"
"Yeah." The lady in front of me gets in nice and close, squinting so hard her nose wrinkles. "One's blue, and the other's green. They're fuckin' beautiful."
"Fuckin' dazzling if you ask me," the guy with the beer gut concurs.
More people start coming our way. Wilby looks positively mortified. He snatches me by the arm and escorts me away from the crowd encircling us, muttering something about needing to move to a new town under his breath.
"I am so sorry about that," he says once we're back in the dining section of the pub. His ears have gone red.
