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She waited until he was in, then lowered herself beside him so she was wedged between the side of the plane and his long—and wet!—body.
‘Why do you feel like a shower curtain?’ she said.
He snickered. ‘I guess I could have taken the raincoat off before I climbed up. What the hell is this brick I’m sitting on?’
He fumbled beneath him and dragged up the book she’d been planning on burning. The investor book.
‘What’s this doing here?’
‘Um, yeah. About that. I put it in my backpack yesterday when I came to find you on the farm, but you weren’t there and … well.The upshot is, I think I’ve been an idiot, Joe. That book shows just one of the many ways in which I’ve been an idiot. I have some things I need to say.’
‘Well, that’s a coincidence, so do I.’
It was tempting to let him go first, but she wasn’t woosing out now. ‘I was running away when I came to Clarence,’ she said. ‘I had a meltdown at work, and it brought up some old, undealt with issues.’
‘I’m sorry.’
She shifted slightly, and he rested the torch against the instrument panel so it shone off into the distance.
‘That’s why I kept overreacting to things. The raffle tickets today—you know my mum’s got a problem.’
‘Mm. A problem which you think I share, thanks to Kim. I’m not a gambler, Kirsty.’
‘It’s true, Kim was a little bitchy, but it’s also true that I didn’t take the time to check what she’d told me—I overreacted to that, too. Turns out … that’s something I’m pretty good at.’
‘I was a stockbroker in my old life. That’s how I lost most of my assets. But I can’t be too sad about that, because if I hadn’t, maybe I wouldn’t have returned to Clarence.’
She cleared her throat. ‘And I overreacted to the joyflight you organised.’
Joe’s hand ran along her leg until he found her hand, and he held it.
‘On the bright side,’ she said, ‘all that drama finally made me realise that what I really needed to be doing was talking to my mother and fronting up at work to face the fallout from my grounding.’
‘I’m glad you came back.’
‘I had to come back. Everything I found up here was what gave me the courage to go and face my mother. I realised I’d been looking for a family, but I already had one.’
‘So … that’s all you found, huh?’ he said.
She smiled. ‘Not quite all. I found myself in the middle of some knock-brained matchmaking scheme being run by the local Bush Poetry Muster committee.’
‘Totally knock-brained.’
‘I mean, who lets a committee decide who they’re in love with?’ He was silent for a moment. ‘Are you saying they got it wrong?’ She shimmied herself up and over so she was sitting on his lap, and wrapped her arms around his neck. ‘I knew I was in trouble when you offered me a ride on your moped and I said yes. Seriously, my ute was like a hundred metres away, why would I have said yes?’
He chuckled, and his chest rose up and down beneath her fingers. ‘I am irresistible.’
‘But … there’s still something perplexing me.’
‘What’s that?’
‘This plane. What changed? Why is the bank no longer a threat?’
‘But Kirsty—heck, you don’t know. My loan is about to be paid out.’
‘What? How?’
He shrugged. ‘I stopped being an ass-hat and sold my Sydney place to my ex-girlfriend and her new partner. The bank manager is officially off my back, so the Wirraway is yours, just as Mary Bluett intended.’
