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CHAPTER
32
Joey sat on the back verandah until nine pm, reading a newsletter put out by the Macadamia Growers Association and trying not to wonder why Kirsty hadn’t come home.
It had rained earlier, but in a good way—enough to soak the mulch covering his tree roots, but not so much he had to worry about Shannon Gully flooding over, and so his thoughts hadn’t turned to road fatality statistics or the white cross beside the bridge more than once.
Okay, twice.
Gus had waited with him until the fruit bats started squabbling in the mango tree. He must have interpreted this as his bedtime signal, as the groodle was now a snoring mound of apricot fluff in the kitchen.
This was what Joey had wanted, hadn’t he? Peace and quiet, a home on the hill with just him and his dog. So why did he feel so blue about Kirsty’s repeated assurances that she wouldn’t be hanging around in Clarence long enough to interrupt that peace and quiet?
Somewhere in the middle of an article on new-fangled nut capture techniques, he’d worked out just how badly he’d been hoping she’d change her mind.
He turned the lights off at ten, when even the giddy contents of an article on phytophthora root rot couldn’t keep him awake, and headed off to bed. Whether he’d been asleep for ten minutes or three hours he couldn’t have said, but he was woken by some shrill, eardrum rattling noise.
A scream? His eyes shot open and he wondered for a half-second if the wind had risen and shorn half the roof off the house.
The noise sounded again, thin and high. Not galvanized iron, he thought sleepily. ‘Good house,’ he murmured and rolled over, burying his face into the deep fluffy comfort of his duck-down pillow. ‘Good pillow.’
He was almost asleep again when his brain worked itself around to the fact that someone—and not just any someone, because as far as he knew, the only other person who could possibly be within a five click radius was Kirsty—was shrieking for help.
She was home, which was excellent.
She was shrieking, which was unusual—
He flung his way up and out from his doona, ignoring the explosion of half-read horticulture books that leapt out of bed with him, and ran across the floorboards in his bare feet.
A sleepy head lifted from the dog bed in the kitchen as Joey flicked on the back verandah light. He ignored it and pushed open the old screen door.
The mango tree that served as one end of the washing line was rustling in a breeze from the southwest, and a frog chirruped from the dog bowl under the back tap. But other than that … nothing. He stooped to haul on a pair of boots, giving them a quick whack against the step to discourage any eight-legged friends whomight have taken up residence, then hit the grass just as another squeal, louder this time, had him squinting in the direction of the outdoor dunny.
Torchlight flickered through the narrow louvred window.
‘Kirsty?’ he yelled. ‘You all right?’
A pale face pressed itself to the glass. ‘No, I am so freaking not all right. Help!’
He took off across the grass at a run. ‘What’s wrong?’ he huffed. She’d slipped and landed on some broken glass, perhaps. She was unwell—that would explain why she’d not turned up earlier! Or she’d trapped herself inside, maybe; the door had to be sixty years old or more, shrunken and swollen a thousand times by rain and hail and winter frost.
He grabbed the handle of the old outhouse, hauled it open and froze.
Kirsty was—
Well, she was—
Nope, he thought with a grin, his bitterness at feeling alone and unloved all evening forgotten. He had no words.
‘What in hell’s name are you doing?’ she said. ‘Get rid of it! Quickly!’
She was frowning at him from within a halo of yellow torchlight. One of her feet was perched precariously on the cistern, the other foot was on the tower of toilet rolls that filled the back corner of the outhouse, and her hands were gripping the timber lintel of the tiny window like a stick insect clinging to a wind-whipped tree.
She was also wearing nothing more than a singlet—tangerine orange—and a pair of frilly grass-green undies that he sure as heck had not seen drying on his washing line, because if he had, they’d have been in every dream he’d had since … and, most likely, every dream he’d ever have in the future.
‘Get rid of what, exactly,’ he said, dragging his gaze away from all that curved thigh and green-frilled bottom, skittering past the bits and pieces barely covered by the singlet, and up to her face. His sleepiness had just changed gear into horniness and getting rid of that might not be so easy.
He was only human, after all.
