quit?’
Jake laughed. ‘In case you haven’t noticed, I’m about to become a husband and a father. I think my nights spent working in a strip club have been numbered for a while. It’s time to move on to the more responsible stage of my life. I start my internship in three weeks. Quitting The Coop now was supposed to give us time for a honeymoon. So I am at your service. Anything you need, just ask.’
Ruby appreciated the offer. She had come to think of Jake as the brother she wished she had.
Jake was a good man. It was lucky for Scarlett that when Ruby had met Jake it had been clear he’d only had eyes for Scarlett, otherwise who knew what would have happened? Only Ruby did know, Jake was cute and smart but far too conventional for her. She smiled to herself, not quite believing she would ever describe someone who worked as stripper in a male revue club called The Coop as conventional! In fact, his gig as a stripper was far more in keeping with the type of man she usually looked for. Her men were always a little bit edgy. She needed the excitement. But despite his old job Jake was basically a good person. He wouldn’t be able to handle someone like her.
Scarlett was perfect for him. As he was for her. Jake was cute and smart. Scarlett was clever and sensible and they made a good match. Plus it was obvious that he adored her and, most importantly, he allowed Scarlett to be herself instead of the person Scarlett thought she should be or the one she thought people wanted her to be. That had always been Scarlett’s undoing. She always wanted to please everybody.
The same thing could definitely not be said about her.
Jake pulled to a stop in front of Scarlett’s renovated cottage. Ruby grabbed her duffel bag from the boot of his dark green MG and followed him through the gate in the high brick wall and into the tiny front garden. She was travelling light, and hadn’t had time to do more than throw a change of clothes into her bag before racing to the airport. She had known that the phone call in the early hours of the morning would only be bad news. A phone call in the blackest part of the night was only ever bad news.
Now that she was here, she had no recollection of what she’d actually packed. She hoped she had at least one change of clothes, although if she’d forgotten anything she’d borrow it from Scarlett. She had none of Scarlett’s curves but, being summer, she’d get away with wearing her sister’s clothes. It didn’t matter if they were loose on her and in desperate times she knew Scarlett had several tops that could be worn as dresses.
Jake slid his key into the lock on the front door. A Christmas wreath decorated the door, jolting Ruby back to the present. Christmas was less than two weeks away but she had never felt in less of a festive mood.
‘You know where everything is,’ he said, as he held the door open for her. ‘Make yourself at home.’
Ruby always stayed with Scarlett when she visited. It worked best if she and Lucy had their own space, but she hadn’t thought about the ramifications of her earlier arrival. She’d originally planned to arrive two days before the wedding, timing her arrival with Jake’s temporary move back to his parents’ home, but now that she was here early she hadn’t considered that a change of plan might be needed.
‘Does it still suit you for me to stay? I’m not crowding you?’ she asked.
‘It’s fine,’ he assured her. ‘The spare bedroom is still yours to use.’
‘Are you sure? I can stay at Mum’s.’ She could manage a few days there if necessary.
‘Ruby, don’t worry about it. Have a shower and I’ll be back to pick you up in about forty minutes, okay?’
She nodded and stopped arguing and pushed open the door to the spare bedroom. She upended her bag on the bed and rifled through the contents. There were a few T-shirts, a couple of skirts and a dress in various shades of the rainbow, plus an old pair of cut-off denim shorts. She’d make do for a few days. She turned to the wardrobe to grab a clothes hanger. Tucked in the corner beside the wardrobe was a white wooden baby’s bassinette and hanging on the wardrobe doors were two long dresses in pale green silk. The bridesmaids’ dresses, one for her and one for Rose.
She wondered what Scarlett and Jake would do about their wedding. So much had changed in just twenty-four hours. It was more than just Ruby’s expectations of herself. Yesterday Scarlett and Jake had been counting down the days to their wedding and the birth of their first child. Now they were sitting at Rose’s bedside, waiting and hoping for some good news.
A wedding and a baby. Ruby knew one could be postponed but not the other. She hoped the baby didn’t decide to come early. They had enough going on at present.
She threw her clothes onto a couple of hangers and headed for the shower. She showered quickly and turned her back to the bathroom mirror as she dried herself. She hated looking at her reflection in the mirror. She disliked any form of self-examination or introspection.
She knew she wasn’t particularly brilliant, like Scarlett. She was smart enough but didn’t love studying and she wasn’t pretty like Rose. Her face was too round, her nose was too small and she felt that her features still looked babyish despite the fact that she had just turned twenty-seven. At five feet nine inches she was tallish and model thin with no boobs to speak of. Her shoulder-length strawberry-blond locks were currently died platinum blonde, but despite regularly changing the colour of her hair she was yet to find a colour that she thought suited her. Her eyes were her best feature, large and an unusual shade of green. The colour of an emu’s egg. The colour of the bridesmaids’ dresses.
She wasn’t dark and curvaceous like Scarlett or blonde, petite and beautiful like Rose. She didn’t have Scarlett’s lustrous mane of raven hair or accompanying thick dark eyelashes neither did she have Rose’s perfectly proportioned heart-shaped face or dimples. She and Scarlett had their mother’s long, lean legs but that was where the similarities ended.
Scarlett was the clever sister, Rose was the pretty one and Ruby was never really sure which sister she was. She knew others described her as the fun one but she also knew that she’d worked hard to cultivate that image. She wanted to be seen as the fun one, the extrovert, and she knew it was because she was scared that if she stopped and stood still she would disappear. In her mind, if people thought she was fun they would gravitate towards her and then she would know she existed and she wouldn’t be lonely.
Ruby returned to her room and swapped the bath towel for a fresh singlet top and a long skirt made of a multitude of patchwork squares. It had been hot outside, the dry Adelaide summer heat was making the day almost unpleasant, and it had been warm in the ICU too.
Scarlett had left a pile of books stacked beside the bed. Ruby flicked through them as she waited for Jake. At the bottom of the pile was a Jane Austen novel, which Ruby recognised as one of Rose’s favourites. She stashed it in her bag, deciding she’d take it to the hospital to read to Rose. It would help to pass the time.
As she followed Jake back into the ICU she couldn’t help but notice that the new guy, the motorbike accident, had been put into the cubicle next to Rose. The nurses had removed his blankets—she obviously wasn’t the only one who found ICU uncomfortably warm—and she ran her eyes over him appreciatively. His torso was bare but partly covered by his right arm, which was fixed across his chest in a blue orthopaedic sling. She could see the definition of his pectoral muscles above the sling and the ridges of his lower abdominal muscles below it. His chest was smooth and hairless and wonderfully masculine. She could feel her steps slowing as she gave herself time to appreciate his sculpted chest and arms. She couldn’t blame the nurses for exposing him—something so gorgeous shouldn’t be covered up.
His smooth, tanned skin was unmarked by any tattoos as far as she could see, but his youth, physique and the injuries she suspected he had still suggested a motorbike accident. Her eyes drifted up over the curve of his deltoid muscle to where his hair brushed his shoulder. His hair was long and brushed back from a strong forehead. The oxygen mask over his face had been replaced with tubing, exposing a square jaw and full lips. He reminded her of a fair-haired Greek god—dark blond and tanned and perfectly formed—but