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.