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 the temperature was just a little too hot for comfort before grabbing a cake of oatmeal soap and scrubbing away the languor of the night.
A plane ride, she thought. Surrounded by camera guys, lighting guys, and Bradley’s drier than toast accountant. Then at the airport they’d go their separate ways, and she could get on with her holiday and remember what it felt like to live a life without Bradley Knight in the centre of it.
A little voice twittered in the back of her head. If you’d taken either of the perfectly good jobs you’ve been offered in the past few months you’d know what that felt like on a permanent basis.
Swearing with rather unladylike gusto, Hannah turned her back to the shower, letting the hot spray pelt her skin as she soaped random circles over her stomach. She let her forehead drop to thump against the cold glass.
Both jobs had sounded fine. Great, even. Leaps along the career path she sought. But working on studio-based programming just didn’t hold the same excitement as travelling to places for which she needed a half-dozen shots. Trudging up mud slopes and down glaciers, canoeing rivers filled with crocodiles, even if she had to count back from a hundred so as not to heave over the side.
At some stage in the past year, small-town Hannah had become a big-time danger junkie. Professionally and personally. And it had everything to do with the man whose impossible work ethic had her feeling as if she was teetering between immense success and colossal failure in every given task.
It was crazy-making. He was crazy-making. He was a self-contained, hard to know, ball-breaker. But, oh, the thrill that came when together they got it right.
She shivered. Deliciously. From top to toe.
She just wasn’t ready to let that go.
Suddenly she realised she had the shower up so high she was actually beginning to sweat. She could feel it tingling across her scalp, in the prickling of her palms. She licked her lips to find they tasted of salt.
She turned to lean her back against the cool of the door, only to find the water wasn’t so hot after all. And she was still sliding the slick soap over her shoulders, down her arms, around her torso, in a slow, rhythmic movement as her head was filled with impenetrable smoky grey eyes, dark wavy hair, a roguish five o’clock shadow, shoulders broad enough to carry the weight of the world …
Heat pulsed in her centre, radiating outwards until she had to breathe through her mouth to gather enough oxygen to remain upright. She wrapped her arms tight around her.
Brilliant, beautiful, intense—and literally on the other side of the door. With no sound in the apartment bar the sound of the running shower. And the door was unlocked. Heck, the walls were so old and warped she had a floor mat shoved at the base of the door to keep it closed. With his bulk, if he walked too hard on the creaky floorboards the thing might spring open.
What if that happened and he looked up to find her naked, wet, slippery? Alone. Skin pink from the steaming hot spray. More so from thoughts of him.
What would he do? Would it finally occur to him that she was actually a woman, not just a walking appointment book?
No, it wouldn’t. And thank God for that. For if he ever looked at her in that way she wouldn’t even know what to do. They worked together like a dream, but as for the paths they’d taken to stumble into one another? The man was so far removed from her reality he was practically a different species.
‘Perfect, safe, fantasy material for a girl too busy to get her kicks any other way,’ she told the wall.
But somehow it had sounded far more sophisticated in her head than it did out loud. Out loud it sounded as though the time was nigh for her to get a life.
She determinedly put the lathered soap on the tray and turned off the taps.
She then reached for her towel—only to find in her rush she’d left it hanging on a hook on the back of her bedroom door.
She glanced at the musty PJs piled on the lid of the toilet, and then at the minuscule handtowel hanging within reach. She let her head thunk back against the shower wall.
The pipes in the pre-war building creaked as the shower was turned off in Hannah’s bathroom.
Finally.