The third, no less.’
Taffy slapped her on the arm. Then once more for good measure. ‘Get out of here.’
‘I would love to, but you won’t let me. You know him?’
‘God, yeah. I had the hugest crush on Hud Bennington when he was eighteen and I was thirteen. It was his last year of boarding school and he was here for the summer, staying with Fay while his folks scooted off to Latvia in search of leprechaun remains or something. He was my teen idol if it’s possible for a real life human to be such a thing. So what was he like? All feisty and charming? Cheeky? Pathologically flirtatious? Dry wit? Still as big and gorgeous as ever?’
‘He…he looked like he needed a shave.’ And more, Kendall thought. He looked like he needed a hug.
‘Ooh,’ Taffy said. ‘Stubble on Hud Bennington. That I just have to see. Now hurry up and get dressed and you can go right back over there and reintroduce me.’
The thought of coming face to face with all that undomesticated manhood sent a warning note through Kendall. ‘Did you not hear me?’ she said. ‘He caught me. In his pool. Without his permission. Or prior knowledge. While I was naked bar…my…swimmers.’
Which for another woman would have been a tad awkward, or for Taffy would have amounted to as good an introduction to a cute guy as she could hope for, but for Kendall that meant something wholly different.
Taffy smiled and nodded like a simpleton. But Kendall knew she was anything but simple. Tenacious, clever and stubborn was her Taffy.
‘Go over there yourself if you like,’ Kendall said. ‘I’m not going to stop you. Just don’t tell the guy you know me and you’ll be peachy.’
‘Nah,’ Taffy said, ‘that would seem too eager. Much better to casually bump into him in town. Offer him a coffee so that we can reminisce. And he can remember how I followed him around like a puppy that summer.’ Taffy dragged herself off the bed with a groan. ‘Or maybe I’ll never leave the house again and the men the world over can breathe a sigh of relief that I’m still on the market. Now, get out of here, you’re leaving a wet patch on your bed.’
Taffy left. And Kendall took herself, her bedraggled hair and her damp swimsuit out of the door and into the bathroom, where she spent the next half an hour sitting on the bottom of the shower, letting the warm water run over her clammy skin as the shakes that had threatened the moment she had been discovered finally took her over.
She ran a hand down her damaged left thigh, kneading, hoping it might ease slightly. But it worked as well as putting a Band-Aid on a broken heart.
For the regular aches and pains she felt on a daily basis seemed to have spread. Into her chest. Deep, throbbing, like a forgotten memory trying to burst through to the surface. She knew what those aches were. It was the bitter-sweet sting of unwelcome attraction. And it terrified her to the tips of her black-painted toenails.
She closed her eyes, revelled in the soothing water and tried desperately not to think too hard about how Hud Bennington’s arrival had thrown a spanner into the workings of her neat and tidy life.
An hour later, after reintroducing himself to his old bedroom—still just as he’d left it a dozen years before, with its king-sized bed, boxy teak furniture and small aeroplanes on the wallpaper—Hud stood under the wide brass showerhead in his old bathroom, amazed that the pipes still worked. Amazed and thankful. The purposely cool water sloughed away the remnant heat he’d carried with him since leaving the airport.
He closed his eyes and opened his mouth and savoured the taste of Melbourne water streaming over his face, bringing with it more memories he’d long forgotten.
Six years old and running away the first night his parents had left him here and getting lost in the pine forest before Aunt Fay found him—she and her neck-to-ankle layers of lace, lolloping dog and hurricane lamp. The hundred-year-old oak tree in the centre of town that he knew had changed every summer he visited though he couldn’t see how. The piano in the downstairs parlour with its broken e-flat.
And then suddenly, before he even felt them coming, memories of another kind swarmed over him, making the water in his mouth taste like dust. Memories of no water. For days. So thirsty he couldn’t stop shaking. And the sound of a dripping tap in a room nearby. So close. Yet achingly out of reach.
His eyes flew open. He switched off the tap, his breath loud in the huge marble shower. He leant his hand against the wall, watching the droplets slide from his skin and drip to the floor. Just as they had when his high-spirited mermaid had sprung forth from the depths of the glimmering pool.
He concentrated on brandy-coloured hair. Long pale limbs. Stormy blue-grey eyes. His breathing settled. His memories calmed. And he only had her to thank for it.
Whoever she was.
CHAPTER TWO
HUD woke early the next morning. While still fuzzy with sleep, he tugged on a pair of old jeans and a T-shirt from the minimal choices still stuffed into his rucksack and headed downstairs, through Claudel’s cold, silent rooms and outside into the post-dawn mist.
It wasn’t all that long before he found himself swinging by the pool house. He thought about poking his head inside, even though he knew that he’d find nothing there bar still water and lingering shadows. He hadn’t led a charitable enough life to deserve stumbling upon such an apparition two days running.
Instead he kept walking until he was swallowed up by the cool dauntingly tall moss-covered trees, flat beige ground covered in a layer of pine needles and shadows of the mighty forest separating Claudel’s grounds from the nearby town.
He let his fingers trail over the rough bark, the tactile discomfort grounding him while he headed he knew not where. Into blissful nothingness? Or with all too specific purpose—the knowledge that this was the last place he had seen her?
The sound of a cracking branch stilled his steps. He looked out into the tightly packed trunks and saw something shimmer and shift. Lucky for him this wasn’t bear country. Though he’d come to realise that humans could be far worse creatures to stumble upon down a dark alley.
The form stirred. Took shape. Human shape. Female shape. And there she was. As if he had conjured her out of the mist. His mermaid. The woman whose effortless allure had hovered at the edge of his dreams all night, miraculously keeping far darker dreams at bay for the first time in weeks.
As she slid into full view her dark red curls streamed over her shoulders like waves of silk. Her pale skin was luminous in the weak morning light. The fine features of her face hid nothing. Not her loveliness, or her wariness. Again he wished he had his camera, on him. His camera which he had not picked up once in two long months.
‘Well, hello there,’ he said when she was near enough for him to see the whites of her guarded eyes.
‘Hello,’ she said, offering a half smile, even though her clenched fists and ducked chin told him far more than the smile could hope to hide.
As did the black tank-top with a hot pink one beneath, the long hippy skirt and heavy black boots she’d run off in the day before. It would be close to thirty-five degrees later that day. Her feet must have felt like ovens. But he decided as soon as the thought occurred to him to keep that little titbit to himself. A wild bear she may not be, but there was an air of the intractable about her all the same.
‘I didn’t expect to see you here,’ he said.
‘I wasn’t coming to use your pool, if that’s what you mean.’
Hud laughed before he even felt it rising up his chest. It felt good. No, it felt great. Natural. Unforced. Curative. He held up both hands in surrender. ‘Ah, no. I was just making conversation. Badly, it seems.’
She flicked her hair off her face. Not out of any kind of flirtation but more like she was shooing away a bothersome fly. Either way, the shift and tumble of her hair mesmerised him. The woman wasn’t a mermaid,