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Kirsty closed the journal and clasped it to her chest.
Luck. Bill had believed in it, and he had come safely home.
Not her mother’s kind of luck, of course. Bill didn’t seem like the guy who’d up stumps and leave the bad stuff behind him. He’d gone back and found the Wirraway after the war, hadn’t he? It’d been crashed and broken, but he’d cared for it anyway, and coaxed it back into life with love and perseverance.
He’d been responsible.
She’d just been cruising along in lifethinkingshe was responsible because she looked after her mother. Held down a good job, paid her own way. But perhaps all of those choices had been easy ones. Perhaps you only learned how responsible you really were when the bad stuff happened and you stuck around to deal with it.
She took a long breath, relieved to note that it came in smooth, and whooshed out smooth, and there was no pain in her chest. No steel band crushing her guts.
‘The suitcase,’ she said to the cool evening air, her hand on the journal the way witnesses in courtroom dramas laid theirs on bibles, ‘and the Wirraway belong in a museum. And I’m going to stick around and make that happen.’
The bank wasn’t going to stop her. Joe and his bedroom eyes weren’t going to stop her.
And nor was her own weakling heart.
Her thoughts were still trapped in shadowy images of Bill and choices and war planes flying low across moonlit, palm-fringed seas when a shadow moved over her. ‘Hey, Kirsty.’
Joe. The man whose bank debt stood in the way of the Wirraway getting the place in history it deserved. It was hard not to feel resentful about that. But he was also the man who’d been blindsided today, and it seemed no-one in his supposedly superclose family had told him something was up with his father’s health. It was hard not to feel devastated for him about that. Or to wonderwhy.
‘Hey,’ she said and wondered what to say next. This kissy-one-minute, strangers-sharing-a-farm-the-next-minute thing they hadgoing on was all well and good for the Kirsty Fox who didn’t stick around.
So why had she been at the family working bee? Why had she braided Amy’s hair and encouraged Gussy to sleep on the end of her swag? What, actually, was she playing at? She didn’t know. ‘How’s your dad?’
‘He’s back home at Bangadoon.’
Not quite an answer. ‘Is it … something serious?’
‘Yep.’
Another deflection. So—they were back to being strangers on a farm. Well, that would make it easier to not give a shit about his bank problems if—when—she and Carol found a way to claim the Wirraway.
Made it easier to stay pissed at him, too, for her shaky relapse earlier today, because man-oh-man she was discovering it was hard to be mad with Joe for long. The wet eyes when listening to his niece’s poem? Adorable. But then his face all pale and still when he found out Robbo was crook and everyone knew but him? It made her sad.
She faked a yawn. ‘Well then. Please give him my best wishes when you see him next. Guess it’s time to hit the swag.’
‘You know there’s a perfectly good bed five feet away from you in the cottage.’
She hunched her shoulder and closed her eyes, but the squeak of floorboards beside her said her hint hadn’t worked. He’d sat down beside her swag, she’d have bet a hundred bucks on it … and she didn’t need to open her eyelids to check, because her Farmer Handsome radar was working on all wavelengths. Gus thunked his tail on the floorboards, canine morse code forYay! Two people settling in for a long dog-pat sesh!
‘I like my swag,’ she said, in a this-conversation-is-over voice. Seriously, Joe had to go. She was—conflicted—and having him around being all adorable and wounded wasn’t helping.
‘Are you trying to get rid of me?’
‘No.’Yes.Also … was Farmer Joe a little drunk? There was a looseness to his pronunciation and, yep, now he’d shifted so she could definitely feel he was sittingrightnext to her, so close she could smell the malt of a beer … or three.
He was silent for so long she wondered if he’d fallen asleep. The moths were still flinging themselves against her little camp lantern, and fruit bats were squabbling somewhere in the distance. She sighed, then rolled over and opened her eyes to find him staring down at her.
He looked tired. Wrecked, in fact, and his shirt was buttoned up lopsided. And if that wouldn’t melt a Fox heart into a hot, steamy puddle what would?
‘I suppose I could boil the kettle,’ she said. ‘Since you seem to be ignoring the fact I’m trying to go to sleep.’
‘You’re pretty self-sufficient, aren’t you, Kirsty Fox?’
She shrugged, but the gesture got caught up in the duck down of her pillow. ‘I spend a lot of time on my own,’ she said.
He gave her a grin that was as lopsided as his buttoning-up skills. ‘I love a bit of alone time myself,’ he said. ‘Especially when there’s someone to share it with.’
