Her Knight in the Outback (12 page)

And only a single thin wall between them.

No wonder Marshall was wary of people. And no wonder the tight pain in his voice. ‘I'm sorry. I should have asked you about something else.'

‘It's okay. I got myself out. It's history now.'

‘How do you go from a bad neighbourhood to working for the Federal Government?'

He laughed and she realised how attached she'd become to that sexy little chuckle.

‘It will shock you to learn that meteorology is not the sexiest of the sciences.'

Not sexy? Had any of them
seen
Marshall Sullivan?

‘But that meant there were scholarships going wasting, and one of them came to me. And it came with on-campus residency.'

‘The scholarship was your ticket out?'

‘At first, but soon I came to love meteorology. It's predictive. Stats and signs and forecasting. You always know what's coming with weather.'

‘No surprises?' she murmured.

‘I guess I was just looking for a life where you could spot the truth of something before it found you.'

Yeah. Given he'd been used by his earlier friends, cast off by his mother and then betrayed by his brother, maybe that wasn't surprising.

‘It suits you.'

‘Being a weatherman?'

‘Busting the stereotype.' And how. ‘I'm sorry I called you Weatherman.'

‘I don't mind it as a nickname. As long as it's coming from you.'

‘Why?' She laughed. ‘What makes me so special?'

His answer, when it came, was immediate. ‘How long have you got?'

The same kind of warmth that was soaking into her from without started to spread out from within. But she wrestled it back down. She couldn't afford to be feeling warm and fuzzy about anyone right now.

She made much of sitting up straighter in the spa bath. The bathroom equivalent of shuffling papers. ‘Speaking of specials...what's on the menu tonight?'

Subtle, Read, real subtle
.

But he let it go after a breath-stealing moment of indecision. ‘Give me a second, I'll check.'

Good man, knows what he wants and compassionate.

Marshall Sullivan was just getting harder and harder to not like.

CHAPTER NINE

T
HIS
WASN
'
T
GOING
to end well for him...

It had dawned on Marshall, somewhere between sitting at the bathroom door with his head tipped back against the timber and watching Eve tuck so enthusiastically into a bowl of Italian soup, that not everyone was rewarded for goodness. Any more than they were rewarded for doing the right thing.

Hadn't he got that by now?

But done was done. He'd made his choice and he was here. Only time would tell whether it was a crazily fatalistic or brilliantly optimistic decision. But since he was here and since she hadn't driven him off the road, he could use the time practically. He could try and get to know Eve a bit more. Understand her.

Maybe that way he could get a sense of her truth before it hit him like a cyclone.

‘Can I ask you what happened with Travis?' he asked, passing his empty plate into the long fingers she reached out and starting at the most obvious point. ‘When he disappeared.'

Her bright, just-fed eyes dulled just a little.

‘One day he was there—' she shrugged ‘—the next he was gone.'

‘That simple?'

‘It wasn't simple.'

‘Losing someone never is.'

He fell to silence and waited her out. It had certainly worked well enough on him while she was in the bath. He'd offered up much more than he'd ever shared with anyone else.

‘She was drunk,' Eve finally murmured and he didn't need to ask who. ‘She'd passed the few hours of Travis's Under-Fifteens hockey at the nearest pub. As far as anyone could tell, she thought she was okay to drive.'

Oh. Crap. Drunk and in charge of the safety of a fourteen-year-old boy.

‘Was she an alcoholic?' That certainly explained Eve's moderate approach to liquor.

Her dark head slowly nodded. ‘And the whole neighbourhood got to hear about it.'

He let his hands fall between his splayed thighs. Stared at them. ‘That's a lot for a girl to handle.'

‘It was a lot for all of us to handle,' she defended. ‘Travis watched Mum die, Dad endured her reputation being trashed and I...'

‘What did you do?'

‘I coped. I got on with things. Took over caring for them both.'

‘A lot of pressure.'

‘Actually, it was okay then.'
Then...
‘It gave me something to focus on. Purpose.

‘Dad pulled Trav out of school for the last few months of the year and that might have been a mistake. It took him from his friends, his sport, his structure. He lost his way a bit. He got back into it the next year and got okay grades but he was never cheeky and joyous again. I think we all just got used to the new, flat Travis.' She took a big swallow of water. ‘Maybe we got used to a new
us
, too.'

Yeah. Numbness crept up on a person...

‘It wasn't easy, those first couple of years. At first it was all about getting him out of the hospital, but then life had to... We had to just get on with it, you know?'

Yep. He certainly did know all about just getting on... Story of his life. But not everyone could do it. There were times
he
really wanted to just opt out. In some ways maybe he had.

‘What changed? To make him leave?'

Her beautiful face pinched up slightly. ‘Um...'

Whatever it was, it was hurting her.

‘There was an inquest the year he went, and there was all this media interest in the accident again.'

‘Years later?'

‘A legal queue, I guess.' Her slight shoulders shrugged and he'd never wanted to hold someone more in his life. But she looked so fragile he worried she'd shatter. ‘So much pressure on all of us again.'

He shifted closer. Leaned into her. ‘He couldn't take it?'

Her head came up but she didn't quite meet his eyes. ‘I couldn't. I desperately wanted to understand what happened but I couldn't go through it all again. Supporting Dad, mothering Travis. Just as things were getting normal. I just couldn't do it while we relived the accident over and over again.'

Suddenly her blazing need to find her brother began to make more sense.

‘What did you do?'

‘I went back to my own place. Replaced the dead pot plants with new ones, cleaned the gutters, threw out years of junk mail, started easing back into my own life.'

‘And what did Travis do?'

‘I didn't abandon them,' she defended hotly. ‘I still visited, did sisterly things. But they were both men. They needed to step up, too. They agreed.'

He said nothing, knowing the question was almost certainly in his eyes.
But...?

‘Trav was finding it harder than any of us realised. The inquest brought it all back just as he might have started to become stronger. He turned eighteen, and drifted further and further from us emotionally.' She shook her head. ‘And then he just left. Right in the middle of the inquest. We thought he'd just taken off for a few days to avoid the pressure but then it was a week, and then two. We finally reported him missing when we hadn't heard anything for a month.'

‘You blame yourself.'

Her slim shoulders lifted and then sagged again. ‘I wasn't there for him.'

‘Yeah, you were. For years.'

‘But I withdrew.'

‘You
survived
. Big difference.'

Her tortured eyes lifted. ‘Why wouldn't he talk to me? If he was struggling.'

Yeah—she'd been carrying that around a while; he recognised the signs of soul baggage.

‘Eighteen-year-old boys don't talk to anyone about their feelings, Eve. I've been that kid.'

Old agony changed her face. He pulled her into his arms. ‘You aren't responsible for Travis being missing.'

‘That's what people say, isn't it,' she said against his chest. ‘In this kind of situation. But what if I am?'

Okay, so she'd heard this before and still not believed it. A rough kind of urgency came over him.

‘What if it had nothing to do with you and everything to do with a young boy who watched his mother die? On top of the day-to-day trauma of having an alcoholic for a mother. My own mother was no prize,' he admitted, ‘but she was at least present.'

He'd almost forgotten that she was Eve's mother, too. She seemed so disconnected from her past. ‘What if you had turned up on his doorstep every single day and he had still done this?'

Tortured eyes glistened over. ‘He's my brother.'

‘He's a grown man, Eve.'

‘Only just. Eighteen is still a kid. And with the anxiety disorder, and depression...'

‘Which he was being treated for, right? He was on it.'

‘Then why did he leave?'

It was always going to come back to that question, wasn't it? And Eve was never going to be free of the big, looming question mark. ‘Only Travis knows.'

She fell to an anguished kind of silence, picking at the fabric on the sofa beneath her. Marshall stacked up the rest of the dishes and put the lot outside his door on the tray left there by the staff and quietly turned back. He crossed to her and held out a hand.

‘Come on.'

She peered up at him with wide, hurt eyes. ‘Where are we going?'

‘I'm walking you home. I think you need to be in your own place right now, surrounded by familiar things.'

She didn't argue for once. Instead, she slipped her fingers into his and let him pull her up and towards the suite's door.

‘It's not really my place,' she murmured as they stepped out into the hall. ‘And most of them aren't my things.'

How weird that such sorrowful words could bring him such a lurch of hope. If Eve wasn't all that attached to the Bedford or its contents maybe there was hope for him yet. Maybe he could wedge himself a place in her distracted, driven world.

He kicked off one of his shoes and left it wedged in the doorway so that he didn't lock himself out.

Down in the almost empty car park he opened the bus for her and followed her through to her bedroom. She didn't so much as glance at that presumption, and she didn't look the slightest bit anxious that he might stay. She just accepted it as though they'd been doing it for years.

He pressed his key-card into her hand. ‘Breakfast on the balcony at eight?'

‘Okay.'

He flipped back her bed covers and waited for her to crawl in, then he folded them back over her and tucked her so firmly in that she resembled something that had just tumbled out of a sarcophagus.

‘It's not your fault, Eve.'

He was going to tell her that every day of their lives if he had to.

She nodded, but he wasn't foolish enough to think that she actually believed it. Maybe she just accepted that he didn't think so. Bending brought him dangerously close to her lips, but he veered up at the last moment and pressed his to her hot forehead instead.

‘Breakfast. Eight o'clock.'

She didn't agree. She didn't even nod. But her eyes were filled with silent promise and so he killed the lights and backed out of the room and then the bus, giving the big back door a security rattle before leaving her snug and safe inside.

It went against everything in him to leave her in the car park, but Eve had been doing this a long time and she was a grown, competent woman. Just because she'd opened up a little and shown him some of her childhood vulnerability didn't mean he could treat her like the child she'd almost been when her mother killed herself and nearly her brother.

As hard as that was.

He limped along on one shoe and returned to the big, lonely suite.

* * *

A gentle kind of rocking roused Marshall out of a deep, comfortable sleep. The suite was as dark as an outback road but he knew, instantly, what was going on.

Except it wasn't eight o'clock. And this wasn't morning.

A warm, soft body slid in next to him, breathing carefully. He shunted over a bit to make room, but she only followed him, keeping their bodies close.

‘Eve...?'

As if there was any question.

She snuggled up hard into his side. ‘Shh. It's late.'

Or early, he suspected. But he wasn't about to argue with whatever God had sent her back to him, and he wasn't about to ruin a good thing by reading something into this. Instead, he took it—and Eve—at face value and just gathered her into him so that his sleepy heat could soak into her cold limbs.

But he wasn't so strong that he could resist pressing his lips to her hair and leaving them there.

And she wasn't of a mind to move away, apparently.

‘I have no expectations,' he murmured against her scalp. ‘If you tell me that going our separate ways yesterday felt okay to you then that's cool, I know where I stand. But it felt anything but okay to me and I came back so that we could just—'

‘Finish things up more civilly?'

‘—
not
finish things up,' he said into the dark. ‘Maybe just explore this a little more. See where it goes.'

Her breathing filled his ears. His heart.

‘I slept with you because you were riding off into the horizon the next day,' she whispered.

He turned a little more towards her, trying to make her out in the dark. ‘And I slept with you knowing that. But then I discovered something about horizons.'

‘What?' she mumbled.

‘They're an awfully long way away.'

She pushed up onto one elbow, robbing him of her warmth. ‘So...you're just going to ride shotgun for the next...what—days? Weeks?'

‘Until we know.'

Her voice sounded tantalisingly close to his ear. ‘Know what?'

‘Whether we have potential.'

‘You're in the middle of an epic road trip. It's a terrible time to be looking for potential.'

She was right. He should be aiming for fast, casual and uncomplicated. Like she had.

‘That's the thing, Eve. I wasn't looking. It seems to have found me.'

She had nothing to say to that, but her steady breathing told him she was still awake.

Listening.

Thinking.

He bundled her back in close and fell with her—lips to hairline—into a deep slumberous heaven.