maybe a little white fluff ball?
Or Horse.
Horse was hardly a fluff ball. Ten times as big, and a lot more needy.
Maybe she could share parenting with Gabe, she thought. When she was needed on site, he could stay home from sea.
Shared parenting? Of a dog who looked like a mangy horse, with a grumpy landlord fisherman?
With a body to die for. And with the gentlest of hands. And a voice that said he cared.
She glanced across the passage. The deal was she wouldn’t check on him every two hours as long as he kept his door open.
If he dropped dead, she was on the wrong side of the passage.
There wasn’t a lot she could do if he dropped dead.
At least the dog was breathing. She watched his chest rise and fall, rise and fall. He was flopped as close to the fire as he could be without being burned. Gabe had set the screen so no ember could fly out, but she suspected he wouldn’t wake even if it did.
He looked like a dog used to being hurt.
Maybe he’d be vicious when he recovered.
Maybe her landlord wouldn’t let her keep a dog.
Was she really thinking about keeping him?
It was just …
The last few weeks had been desolate. It was all very well saying she wanted a sea change, but there wasn’t enough work to fill the day and the night, and the nights were long and silent. She’d left Sydney in rage and in grief, and at night it came back to haunt her.
She also found the nights, the country noises … creepy.
‘Because of guys like you howling on beaches,’ she said out loud, and Horse raised his head and looked at her. Then sighed and set his head down again, as if it was too heavy to hold up.
How could someone throw him off a boat?
A great wounded mutt.
Her new best friend?
She glanced across the passage again. Gabe was deeply asleep, his bedding barely covering his hips.
He was wounded too, she thought, and with a flash of insight she thought it wasn’t just the hit over the head with the poker. He was living in a house built for a dozen, a mile out of town, on his own. Not even a dog.
‘He needs a dog, too,’ she told Horse.
Shared parenting was an excellent solution.
‘Yes, but that’s complicated.’ She set down her pen and crossed to Gabe’s bedroom door to make sure his chest was rising and falling. It was, but the sight of his chest did things to her own chest …
There went those hormones again. She had to figure a way of reining them in.
Return to dog. Immediately.
She knelt and fondled the big dog’s ears. He stirred and moaned, a long, low doggy moan containing all the pathos in the world.
She put her head down close to his. Almost nose to nose. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’ve given up on White and Fluffy. And I think I do like dogs. You’re not going to the vet.’
A great shaggy paw came up and touched her shoulder.
Absurdly moved, she found herself hugging him. Her arms were full of dog. His great brown eyes were enormous.
Could she keep him?
‘My parents would have kittens,’ she told him.
Her mother was in Helsinki doing something important.
Her father was in New York.
‘Yes, and I’m here,’ she told Horse, giving in to the weirdly comforting sensation of holding a dog close, feeling the warmth of him. ‘I’m here by the fire with you, and our landlord’s just over the passage. He’s grumpy, but underneath I reckon he’s a pussycat. I reckon he might let you stay.’
The fire was magnificently warm. She hadn’t had enough sleep last night.
She hesitated and then hauled some cushions down from the settee. She settled beside Horse. He sighed, but it was a different sigh. As if things might be looking up.
‘Perfect,’ said Nikkita Morrissy, specialist air conditioning engineer, sea-changer, tenant. She snuggled on the cushions and Horse stirred a bit and heaved himself a couple of inches so she was closer. ‘Let’s settle in for the long haul. You and me—and Gabe if he wants to join us. If my hit on the head hasn’t killed him. Welcome to our new life.’
CHAPTER FOUR
GABE woke and it was still daylight. It took time to figure exactly why he was in bed, why the clock was telling him it was two in the afternoon, and why a woman and a dog were curled up on cushions on his living room floor.
Horse.
Nikki.
Nikki was asleep beside Horse?
The dog didn’t fit with the image of the woman. Actually, nothing fitted. He was having trouble getting his thoughts in order.
He should be a hundred miles offshore. Every day the boat was in harbour cost money.
Um … he had enough money. He needed to forget fishing, at least for a day.
He was incredibly, lazily comfortable. How long since he’d lain in bed and just … lain? Not slept, just stared at the ceiling, thought how great the sheets felt on his naked skin, how great it was that the warm sea breeze wafted straight in through his bedroom window and made him feel that the sea was right here.
Lots of fishermen—lots of his crew—took themselves as far from the sea as possible when they weren’t working. Not Gabe. The sea was a part of him.
He’d always been a loner. As a kid, the beach was an escape from the unhappiness in the house. His parents’ marriage was bitter and often violent. His father was passionately possessive of his much younger wife, sharing her with no one. If Gabe spent time with his mother, his father reacted with a resentment that Gabe soon learned to fear. His survival technique was loneliness.
As he got older, the boat became his escape as well.
And then there was his brief marriage. Yeah, well, that had taught him the sea was his only real constant. People hurt. Solitude was the only way to go.
Even dogs broke your heart.
Sixteen years …
‘Get another one fast.’ Fred, the Banksia Bay vet, had been brusque. ‘The measure of a life well lived is how many good dogs you can fit into it. I’m seventy years old and I’m up to sixteen and counting. It’s torn a hole in my gut every time I’ve lost one, and the only way I can fill it is finding another. And you know what? Every single one of them stays with me. They’re all part of who I am. The gut gets bigger.’ He’d patted his ample stomach. ‘Get another.’
Or not. Did Fred know just how big a hole Jem had left?
Don’t think about it.
Watch Nikki instead.
He lay and watched woman and dog sleeping, just across the passage. Strangers seldom entered his house. Not even friends. And no one slept by his fire but him.
Until now.
She looked … okay.
She’d wake soon, and she’d be gone. This moment would be past, but for now … For now it felt strangely okay that she was here. For now he let the comfort of her presence slide into his bones, easing parts of him he didn’t know were hurting. A dog and a woman asleep before his fire …
He closed his eyes and sleep reclaimed him.
* *