Zane: The Wild One

Julia looked out the window. They had reached the edge of town. In a couple of minutes she would step down from the truck, toss him a careless “See you later” and know that later might be another twelve years. She felt a deep, totally inappropriate sense of disappointment. Her loss indeed.

Of course, she could always change into some jeans and walk down to the Lion. She could saunter up alongside him and say, “Hey, Zane. You want to shoot some pool?”

Then she could watch the whole bar population either A: burst into spontaneous laughter, B: keel over with shock, or C: call for the men in white coats.

Julia Goodwin sauntering up to a public bar? That isn’t going to happen, she concluded fatalistically as he turned the corner into Bower Street and pulled up alongside number fourteen. When he reached for his door, she leaned across to stop him. “There’s no need to get out.”

She felt him still, and when his gaze dropped to where her hand rested on his forearm, she was suddenly aware of more than his stillness. His skin felt warm—no, hot—and slightly rough, with its smattering of hair. It also felt incredibly hard, and she realized with a start how long it had been since she had touched a man’s bare skin. And how much she missed that sensation of heat and strength, of leashed masculine power.

The moment stretched out, silent and thick with awareness, until she reclaimed her hand, dragging her fingers a little because she couldn’t stop herself. Telltale heat rose from her neck to her ears, and she silently thanked Kree for making her leave her hair down. At least she had got that part right!

She cleared her throat, unable to look at him in case he had misinterpreted that touch as some sort of come-on. “I just wanted to say thank you, and sorry for interrupting your night, and I hope you catch up with Kree soon.”

“I’ll call her at work on Monday.”

“Mornings are usually quietest, especially Monday. She might even be able to take a half day.” She reached for the door. “See you later, then.”

“What about your car?”

Julia blinked, and he hooked a thumb back over his shoulder.

Ah, that car! How could she have forgotten? “It’s my mother’s, actually. I don’t have a car at the moment, so she loaned me hers while she’s overseas. My parents are in Tuscany.” And why am I telling him all this? She clutched her evening bag with unsteady fingers. “What did you need to know about the car?”

“D’you want Bill to fix whatever needs fixing, or just do up a quote?”

“Oh. Yes.”

“Yes…what?” he asked slowly, and she felt that same intense scrutiny she had felt out by the roadside. Her ears burned with heat as she scrambled for an answer to the simple question.

“Yes, please.” Good grief, could she have said anything more stupid? She bit her lip, then tried again. “Yes. Please have him fix whatever needs fixing. Bill does all our work—there’s no need for a quote.”

Quitting on that positively eloquent note seemed like a good plan, so she opened her door and slid down to the curb, but before she closed the door she forced herself to smile up at him. “I really can’t thank you enough for bringing me home.”

“You’ll get the bill.”

Julia shook her head. “I wanted to thank you, personally.”

“Buy me a drink sometime.”

She stared up at him, one part of her brain screaming, How about now? while another urged her to smile, offer something politely meaningless such as, Yes, we must do that sometime, and walk away.

Oh, but she didn’t want to listen to that safe, sensible, good-girl voice. For once she wanted to do something a little bit bad. Ordinarily one drink wouldn’t qualify as even vaguely bad, but she had a strong feeling—a hot, dizzying feeling—that a drink with Zane O’Sullivan wouldn’t be ordinary.

“I think I would like…” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, moistened her lips, then realized she had lost his attention. He was frowning into his side mirror, while his fingers drummed against the wheel.

“Looks like you have a visitor.”

She stepped back just far enough to see the gleaming white Volvo that had pulled up behind them, and the gleamingly groomed man who stepped from the driver’s seat. He looked solid and respectable and, yes, dull.

She heard the tow truck kick over and felt such a jolt of panic, she had to stop herself from leaping at the window. Instead she stepped onto the running board and somehow above the thud of her heart she heard herself say, “I really would like to buy you that drink sometime.”

Perhaps he saw the nervous tension in her face. Or perhaps he was looking right by her at Dan the Dentist waiting patiently on the verge. With those impenetrable lenses, it was impossible to know. Whatever he saw, it caused one corner of his mouth to kick up wryly. It also caused him to shake his head and say, “Thanks, but I’m thinking that’s not such a great idea after all.”

Of course he was right.

She stepped down from the window and away from the truck, and as she watched it pull away, she felt a weighty gloom settle over her.

Drinks with Zane O’Sullivan might not be such a great idea, but that didn’t make a dinner party with Mr. Solid and Respectable sound any more palatable.

Two

In the end she didn’t go to Chantal’s dinner party. Instead she shared a considerably less formal supper, sitting at her kitchen table, with Dan. He wasn’t as dull as she had imagined. In fact, he seemed nice, in a comfy, companionable way. When he sheepishly admitted that Chantal had browbeaten him into attending her party, Julia decided she could like him.

She certainly liked how her concentration remained fixed on the conversation, instead of straying to his lips. She enjoyed the complete absence of breathlessness and butterflies, and she positively loved how she could read every expression on his open face.

If she ever went for a drink with Dan she wouldn’t consider it bad, and touching his arm would be simply that. Touching his arm. It wouldn’t remind her how long it had been since a man’s arms embraced her, or how many nights she lay awake wondering if she would ever be held that closely again.

If Dan reminded her of a mild autumn morning next to Zane O’Sullivan’s midday summer heat, then so much the better. Summer had never been her favorite season.

After she waved Dan goodbye, she told herself she liked a man who fit her homely decor, as Dan surely did. As Zane wouldn’t. He would fill her kitchen with his size and his maleness. He definitely would not look at home. Nor would he succumb to Chantal’s velvet-steamroller tactics, as Dan had done, although that was a moot point.

His name would never grace one of Chantal’s guest lists.

For a start, he dressed for work in rugged denim instead of fine Italian suit cloth, and second, he didn’t have a prestigious address. In fact, if he even owned a home, Kree hadn’t mentioned it. He lived wherever his work as a heavy-machinery mechanic took him—most recently the mines in remote West Australia—and he didn’t stay anywhere long. His seven years in Plenty had probably been the longest he had lived in one place.

As she propped open her bedroom window and breathed the heady scent of moonlight and roses, Julia recalled how the O’Sullivan family arrived in town. What a stir they’d created in the conservative community—two rebellious preteens and their mother, old before her time and carrying more baggage than could ever fit in the beat-up van that died slap-bang in the middle of Main Street.

That was how they arrived, and they’d stayed because they couldn’t afford to leave.

Julia remembered the hushed talk—ugly rumors of a shadowy strife-filled past—and she remembered how most of the township had ostracized them. A smaller part had adopted them as its charity du jour. Not an easy introduction to a new community, especially for adolescents, and they’d each handled it differently.

Kree had built a brash facade, stuck her snub nose high in the air and refused to accept that she couldn’t belong. She battled to win not only acceptance but popularity, too, while her brother…well…Zane never won any popularity contests, because he’d refused to enter.

Some said he would have joined his father behind bars if Bill hadn’t given him a job at the garage, first pumping gas after school and then full-time. But as soon as he completed his apprenticeship he’d left Plenty—and those Claire Heaslip rumors—behind.

It seemed as if he had been moving ever since.

Why he’d chosen that lifestyle was not her concern, Julia told herself as she settled into bed and punched her pillow into shape. She had no business thinking of Zane O’Sullivan at all. She should be thinking of Dan—nice, comfortable, settled Dan—who had left with a promise to call her during the week.

Unfortunately, with her eyes closed and the summer air embracing her in its sultry caress, the mild dentist didn’t stand a chance. Instead she remembered the supple strength of a man’s arm beneath her fingers, the movement of snug white cotton over the casual shrug of broad shoulders, hair glinting with gold in the sun’s dusky light.

And with startling clarity she recalled one simple scrap of conversation.

Zane had been hooking the truck to her car when he’d asked how it ended up in the drain. When she told him the sequence of events, magpies and all, he didn’t shake his head critically or fix her with the scathing look she’d expected. He simply murmured, “Accidents happen,” and carried on with his task.

Julia slipped from wakefulness into sleep with that neutral, nonjudgmental phrase in her mind and a small smile on her lips.

Six days later, Zane stood on the neatly mown verge outside 14 Bower Street, juggling her car keys from one hand to the other. Distracted first by the touch of her hand and then by the arrival of Volvo Man, he had barely glanced sideways at the place on Friday night. Today he saw the truth of Kree’s excited exclamation when she had moved in last summer.

“You wouldn’t recognize the old Plummer place!” she had practically screamed down the phone line.

A gross understatement, Zane decided.

Julia had transformed the rundown weatherboard cottage, painting it some soft shade of blue and framing it with a garden. He wasn’t big on descriptive labels, but right after pretty and peaceful, he thought of welcoming. He could almost imagine the old house itself smiling gently as it opened its arms and beckoned, Come on in.

Houses with arms? Houses that beckoned?

“Time you started sleeping nights, O’Sullivan,” he muttered as he turned to study the wider streetscape. It registered that number fourteen wasn’t the only recent renovation in the low-rent street…although it was likely the only one resurrected personally by, and now inhabited by, a woman who belonged up on the hill.

He resisted the impulse to look that way. He hated the bitter, edgy feeling in his gut from just thinking about looking up there. It made him want to jump in his car—any car—and put pedal to metal. To keep on driving until Plenty was nothing but a hell of a bad memory.

But he didn’t, and he wouldn’t. Not in her car, anyway.

Although, juggling her keys from hand to hand, he still considered leaving. Suddenly his reason for being there seemed more like an excuse, and a transparent one at that. He should have left a message on her answering machine telling her to collect the car on her way to work. She walked by the garage at eight forty-five every morning, her body swaying enticingly beneath the black skirt and white blouse that were the staff uniform of the town’s only department store. He tried not to notice the swaying, but he was only human.

Hell, he didn’t even have to leave a message. Tomorrow he could call out to her, “Hey, Julia. Your car’s ready.”

Except he was here now, and so was she. Zane had seen her go by on her way home, and something about the way she held her head or swung her hips or, shoot, didn’t even glance in his direction, had him deciding to return her car. Personally.

Plus, he needed to reassure himself about a couple of things. Such as the way he must have misread that curling caress of her fingers and the message in her eyes when she’d said she wanted to buy him that drink. Such as the way nothing about the impression she had left on his hormones matched his memory of Julia Goodwin, the all-’round good girl who used to cross the street to avoid him. Such as the fact that she already had Volvo Man ready and no doubt willing to take her up on the drinks offer.

Yeah, all he needed was a quick dose of reassurance and he would be on his way. No sweat.

He pocketed the keys, opened the tiny front gate and was ducking under a naturally sculpted archway of climbing roses when a dog appeared…although it took him an instant to recognize it as a dog. The animal appeared as an unidentified black-and-white streak careering through a mass of flowers to his right; then it came into focus as a border collie just before it launched into a frenzied welcome of circling, barking, leaping and grinning.

Zane couldn’t help grinning back, even as he tried to temper the dog’s exuberance. Then a tingly sense of awareness skittered down his right side and he knew she was there, watching him. Slowly he straightened, turned and immediately found her. Standing in that wild riot of garden, her light sundress lifting with a subtle shift of the breeze, she looked like some ethereal beauty born of the flowers themselves.

For a long second he squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them, she’d moved, walking around the flower bed onto a path that traced a circuitous route to the front gate. As she walked toward him, Zane filled his empty lungs with fragrant air and told himself he’d been hallucinating.

Julia Goodwin was no otherworldly beauty. He smiled as the strange tightness in his chest eased. It was relief, he decided, nothing more. Relief because this Julia Goodwin looked exactly as she should. She bore no resemblance to Friday’s siren in black silk.

Good Girl Julia stopped in front of him, her smile tentative, her eyes not quite meeting his. If there’d been a street to cross, she would likely have crossed it. “I’m sorry about McCoy’s welcome. He gets a bit excited around men.”

“Around men, huh?” Amusement quirked the corners of Zane’s mouth. “Should we go there?”

For a second she looked puzzled; then the implication of her innocent remark took hold. “Oh, no, that’s not what I meant. McCoy actually belongs to my brother, and every time a man comes through that gate, he goes crazy hoping it’s Mitch.”

Her brother’s dog—that made sense.

He’d been thinking how McCoy didn’t fit the picture. Women who wore filmy dresses and whose skin looked as soft as the velvety roses overhead had lap dogs called Muffy. Or cats. Not rowdy bundles of energy such as McCoy here.

He stroked a hand over the dog’s silky head. “You have a lot of men coming through your gate?”

“Visiting Kree,” she replied instantly, then looked stricken. “Not in that way, not since she’s been going out with Tagg. It’s just she’s so popular with guys. Ugh!” She clamped a hand over her mouth and then slowly removed it. “Do you suppose I can get my foot any further in here?”

“You could try it without the sneaker.”

“Mmm, barefoot would be easier.” She laughed and shook her head, and Zane remembered the laughter and the bare feet and the heat from Friday night. Then, still laughing, she looked right into his eyes, and he only remembered the heat.

Instant, blazing, intense.

About a millisecond before he went up in smoke, she blinked and looked away. Then she stooped to pet the dog and started talking—started and didn’t stop talking—about needing to keep the dog chained during the day because he’d found a spot in the fence he could jump over, about how much exercise he needed after such confinement and how she’d been about to take him down by the river.

“Some days I let him run free, other days we just walk.” Her monologue concluded as she straightened and smoothed an imaginary crease from her dress, and Zane noticed the leash attached to the dog’s collar.

With a twinge of irritation he also noticed how she avoided looking at him, even though he was blocking the exit she obviously intended taking. He planted his feet a little wider on the path and folded his arms across his chest.

Frowning, she checked her watch. “Kree’s not home yet. Thursday is her late night.”

“I know. I had lunch with her today.” And every day since Monday, plus a couple of dinners. Seeing as he’d been meeting her at her shop, he pretty much had Kree’s routine down pat.

“Oh. You’re welcome to wait for her inside.”

“You trust me in your house while you’re gone?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Her gaze—warm, hazel and a little perplexed—came to rest on his. “You’re Kree’s brother.”

Trust by association. Of course. Why had he thought it might be something personal? She didn’t know him. She couldn’t even hold his gaze for more than a second. And the way she kept shifting her weight from one sneaker to the other—hell, she looked as if she would be more comfortable in a snake pit.

He should tell her he wasn’t here for Kree. He should hand over the keys, leave, go. Hadn’t he found what he’d come here to find? The real Julia? The naive good girl?

Funny, but he didn’t feel reassured…or much like leaving. Call him perverse, but if she needed to go walk her dog, if she wanted him to step aside and let her by, then she could tell him straight-out instead of pussyfooting around.

Settling one hip against the gatepost, he looked around as if studying his surroundings for the first time. “You’ve done a great job here.”

She thanked him, politely but reservedly, as if she thought his words were empty rhetoric.

That only ticked him off more, and he found himself adding, “Yeah, I like it. But if old man Plummer were still alive, he’d come after you with his shotgun.”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “What do you mean?”

“You cut down his hedge.”

“It was overgrown, and it blocked the view.”

“He treasured his privacy.”

“Privacy!” She made an indignant huffing sound. “I needed a chainsaw and a blowtorch to get through the wretched thing.”

“That hedge was something else.”

“Old man Plummer was something else.” But she couldn’t help the small fond smile that came with memories of the irascible recluse. “And he was a lousy gardener. About the only thing I kept was the cedar tree out back.”

“In the northern corner?”

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“I hung a tire swing from it one summer.” He grinned, remembering. “That’s one great tree.”

Julia shook her head. A funny mix of surprise and wonder and delight bubbled around inside her. Not to mention the effect of that grin. Mama mia. She shook her head again. “I won’t ask how you got past the hedge and the shotgun.”

“You don’t want to know.” Their gazes met, held. Heat, yes, but this time it was the solid companionable warmth of a shared memory, and she didn’t need to look away, to escape. This time she smiled and said, “You want to come take a look at your tree?”

He looked surprised; then the corners of his mouth curled into that killer grin. “Yeah. I’d like that.”

Julia turned away quickly. The way her heart started hammering away in her chest every time he grinned might just be noticeable to a man with such an intensely sharp gaze. That grin was one the first things she’d noticed when she’d come upon him in her garden.

One of the first, right after the immediate impact of his presence.

Today the T-shirt was black, the jeans faded by work and wash, and as he’d stooped to pat McCoy, both had molded the hard contours of his body in a way that screamed m-a-n. All that potent masculinity was thrown into perfect counterbalance by the gentle frame of her pastel-pink David Austen roses…the ones she’d planted to replace old man Plummer’s infamous hedge.

“I didn’t know you were so familiar with this place,” she said over her shoulder.

“We lived around the block, on Docker Street.”

“I remember.”

“Yeah?”

“Kree lived there, too.”

“I don’t recall you visiting.” They came to a halt on the open stretch of lawn behind the house, but she knew Zane wasn’t looking at the tree. As she bent to free Mac, she felt the full force of his gaze on her.

“I wonder why that is?” he asked.

“Why do you think?”

“Scared of big brother?”

Lifting her chin, she met the intense stillness of his gaze. “Terrified. But that’s not the reason. Kree didn’t ever invite me.”

A touch of bitterness sharpened his silver-grey gaze and hardened the line of his mouth. His tension seemed to reach out and enfold her, blotting the late evening sounds until all she could hear was the heavy pounding of her heart. She felt sure he would say something, something to challenge why she’d never visited her friend, something that included the word slumming.

But whatever burned so harshly in his eyes remained unsaid. He turned and walked away, stopping in front of the tree, hands on hips, to inspect the tire she had slung from the lowest branch.

Moving closer, he reached up and took a firm grip of the rope, as if to test its strength. The action called Julia’s gaze to the width of his shoulders, to the richly tanned curve of his biceps, and she was back in that moment when she’d first seen him in her garden. Giddy, dry-mouthed, determined not to keep staring in case she hyperventilated.

Needing a distraction—badly—she threw a stick for Mac and watched him execute a spectacular catch. She sensed Zane’s soft-footed approach, felt it in the heightened sensitivity of her skin. She rubbed her hands along her arms, but the tingling remained.

“How long is he staying?”

“Indefinitely.” She tossed the stick again. “Mitch used to have a house with a yard and plenty of space, but when he got married, they moved into an apartment and he couldn’t keep Mac.”

“Isn’t that meant to work the opposite way? Apartment first, house and yard second?”

“Oh, there’s nothing usual about Mitch’s marriage,” Julia said without thinking. Chastened, she bit her lip. “That didn’t come out right. They both travel an awful lot, so it wasn’t practical to have a pet or a garden that would need care.”

He didn’t comment, but he looked around, taking in the rest of her yard—Mac’s kennel, her well-tended herb and vegetable plot, the swing and sandpit over by the fence. She sensed a strange tension in him as he took it all in, as he turned to look at her. “Kree told me you’d been married. She didn’t mention kids.”

Kids? It took a second for his meaning to gel. The swing, the sandpit, the discarded toy dump truck. “Oh, no, I don’t have children. These are for Joshua, for when he stays.”

“Joshua?”

“Mitch and Annabel’s son.”

“They farm him out, too?”

He might not have been passing judgement—neither his casual tone nor his closed expression gave anything away—yet Julia’s protective instincts shot to full alert. “It’s only occasionally that they’re both away at the same time, and I don’t mind having him.”

In fact, she loved having Joshua stay, loved indulging him with the simple things he missed out on, such as homemade swings and sandpits, and playing with a dog. Staying here was good for him. It wasn’t farming out.

Feeling unduly aggrieved, she put her whole shoulder behind the next throw, then watched Mac disappear around the side of the house in frantic pursuit.

“Where is he getting out? Your fences look good.”

“Around the front. It’s simply not high enough.”

With one of those noncommittal grunts peculiar to men, he ambled over to the side fence, studied it this way and that, then started pacing the distance between fence and house.

“It’s three point six meters each side,” she said, way too snappily. “And I know that by fencing it off I can enclose the backyard to keep him in. I’m saving to do it.”