her hair out from under the strap of her bag, slipped on her oversized sunglasses, took a deep breath of the crisp winter air, and headed for the tram stop that would take her to her tiny Fitzroy apartment.
And that was how Hannah’s first holiday in nearly a year began. Her first trip home in three years. The first time she’d seen her mother face to face since she’d married. Again.
Let the panic begin …
HANNAH was in the bathroom, washing sleep out of her eyes, when her apartment doorbell rang just before six the next morning. It couldn’t be the cab taking her to the dock; it wasn’t due for another hour.
‘Can you get that?’ she called out, but no sound or movement came from Sonja’s room.
Hannah ran her fingers through her still messy bed hair and rushed to the door.
She opened it to find herself looking at the very last view she would ever have expected. Bradley, in her favourite of his leather jackets—chocolate-brown and wool-lined—and dark jeans straining under the pressure of all that hard-earned muscle. Tall, gorgeous and wide awake, standing incongruously in the hallway outside her tiny apartment. It was so ridiculous she literally rubbed her eyes.
When she opened them he was still there, in all his glory—only now his eyes were roving slowly over her flannelette pyjama pants, her dad’s over-sized, faded, thirty-year-old Melbourne University jumper, her tatty old Ugg boots.
Even while she fought the urge to hide behind the door, the feel of those dark eyes slowly grazing her body was beautifully illicit.
‘Can I come in?’ he asked, eyes sliding back to hers.
No good morning. No sorry to bother you. No I’ve obviously arrived at a bad time. Just right to the point.
‘Now?’ She glanced over her shoulder, glad Sonja’s makeshift clothesline, usually laden with silky nothings and hanging from windowframe to windowframe, had been mysteriously taken down during the night.
‘I have a proposal.’
He had a proposal? At six in the morning? That couldn’t wait? What could she do but wave a welcoming arm?
He took two steps inside, and instantly the place felt smaller than it actually was. And it was already pretty small. Kitchenette, lounge, two beds, one bath. Small windows looking out over nothing much. Plenty for two working women who just needed a place to crash.
She closed the apartment door and leant against it as she waited for him to complete his recce.
Compared with his monstrous pad, with its multiple rooms and split-levels and city views, it must seem like a broom closet.
When he turned back to her, those grey eyes gleaming like molten silver in the early-morning light, the pads of her fingers pressed so hard into the panelled wood at her back her knuckles ached.
But he was all business. ‘I hope you’re almost ready. Flight’s in two hours.’
She blinked. Suddenly as wide awake as if she was three coffees down rather than none. Had he forgotten? Again? She pushed away from the door and her hands flew to her hips. ‘Are you kidding me?’
His cheek twitched. ‘You can get that look off your face. I’m not here to throw you over my shoulder and whisk you off to New Zealand.’
She swallowed—half-glad, half-disappointed. ‘You’re not?’
‘The ferry would take a full day to get to Launceston. I looked it up. It seems a ridiculous waste of time when I have a plane that could get you there in an hour. As such, I’m flying you to Tasmania.’
‘What about New Zealand? It took me a month to organise the whole team to fly in from—’
‘We’re making a detour. Now, hurry up and get ready.’
‘But—’
‘You can thank me later.’
Thank him? The guy had just gone and nixed her brilliant plan to take a full twelve hours in which to rev herself up to facing her mother, while at the same time putting lots of lovely miles between herself and him. And he was doing so in what appeared to be an effort at being nice. If things continued along in the same vein as her day had so far, Sonja would walk out of her room and announce she was joining a nunnery.
‘It’s decided.’ He took a step her way.
She held her hands out in front of her, keeping him at bay and keeping herself from jumping over the coffee table and throttling him. ‘Not by me it’s not.’
He was stubborn. But then so was she. Her dad had been a total sweetheart—a push-over even when it came to those he’d loved. Her occasional mulishness was the one trait she couldn’t deny she’d inherited from her mum.
‘I know how hard you work. And compared with most people I’ve come across in this industry, you do so with great grace and particularity. I appreciate it. So, please, hitch a ride on me.’
The guy was trying so hard to say thank-you, in his own roundabout way, he looked as if a blood vessel was about to burst in his forehead.
Hannah threw her hands in the air and growled at the gods before saying, ‘Fine. Proposal accepted.’
He breathed out hard, and the tension eased from him until his natural energy level eased from eleven back to its usual nine and a half.
He nodded, then looked over his shoulder, decided only the couch would take his bulk, and moved past her to sit down. There he picked up a random magazine from the coffee table and pretended to be interested in the ‘101 Summer Hair Tips’ it promised to reveal inside its pages.
‘We leave in forty-five minutes.’
Well, it seemed happy, lovely, thank-you time was over. Back to business as usual.
Hannah glanced at her dad’s old diving watch, which was so overly big for her she had to twist it to read it. Forty-five minutes? She’d be ready in forty.
Without another word she spun and raced into her room. She grabbed the comfy, Tasmania-in-winter-appropriate travel outfit she’d thrown over the tub chair in the corner the night before, and rushed into the bathroom.
Sonja was there, in a bottle-green Japanese silk kimono, plucking her eyebrows.
Hannah’s boots screeched to a halt on the tiled floor. ‘Sonja! Jeez, you scared me half to death. I didn’t even know you were home.’
Sonja smiled into the mirror. ‘Just giving you and the boss man some privacy.’
The smile was far too Cheshire-cat-like for comfort. Hannah suddenly remembered the unnaturally underwear-free window. ‘You knew he was coming!’
Sonja threw her tweezers onto the sink and turned to Hannah. ‘All I know is that from the moment we got back to the office yesterday arvo he was all about “Tasmania this, Tasmania that.” Everything else was designated secondary priority.’
Hannah opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
Sonja pouted. ‘He never offered to fly me home for the holidays, and I’ve been working for him for twice as long as you.’
‘Your parents live a fifteen-minute tram-ride away.’ Hannah shoved her friend out, slamming the door with as much gusto as she could muster.
With time rushing through the hourglass, she whipped off her pyjamas and threw them into a pile on the closed lid of the toilet, then scrunched her hair into a knot atop her head as she didn’t have time to do anything fancy with it, before standing naked beneath the cold morning spray of the tiny shower. Sucking in her stomach, she turned up the heat and waited till