His Brand of Beautiful (13 page)

“Two weeks after the funeral he came to see me at Outback Brands. He was all apologetic about the timing, but he said Jolie owed him money. That he’d paid for the airline tickets to Africa and for the safari and that she never paid him back. I knew it was bullshit. Jolie never owed anyone anything in her life.”

“Thank God she kicked him out,” Christina murmured.

“Kicked him out?” Tate asked, confused.

Christina nodded. “She didn’t stay with him and try to patch things up. There are women who stay in abusive relationships and can never get out. Thank God Jolie kicked him out. She was getting on with her life. She was doing something she loved.”

“But how do you know she kicked him out?”

Because it’s what I would do, and you think Jolie’s like me.
“Didn’t she? Didn’t her diary say?”

“I don’t know. The diary only started after—” he stopped. “It started after he’d gone.”

Pain swam in his eyes, across his face. The muscle in his jaw twitched.

She probed gently: “Bree said you and Shasta blame yourselves...”

Tate took up the narrative again, but he sounded somehow less sure of the story. “If I’d paid more attention, I could have stopped her going. Or at least I could have stopped her going to Africa with him. She had her whole life in front of her.”

Christina leaned across the fire‐lit space, ignoring the pain that splintered in her ribs.

She found Tate’s hand and held it. “If Africa was in your sister’s blood she would have gone one day, with or without this Callinan creep. Africa’s like that. Most people go to see elephants and lions and come home with photos for slide night. Jolie didn’t need those things, helping people was her souvenir.

“Blaming yourself for decisions
Jolie
made means you think those decisions were bad ones. I don’t think she’d see her choice like that, Tate. It was about helping the Ugandan women, not about
him
. Not in the end.”

“When did you get so wise?”

A miscarriage teaches a woman all about guilt.
“None of this was your fault, Tate. Or Shasta’s. It just sounds like plain damn bad luck to me.”

He lifted her hand, palm up, then turned it and rubbed her knuckles over the scratch of day‐old whiskers at his chin. Low in her stomach, she felt a slow, delicious flip. Christina leaned closer—hungry for his wildness, his warmth—when pain knifed at her ribs and turned her next breath into more of a hiss.

“What hurts?”

“What doesn’t hurt? Right now it’s my ribs. They kill.”

He kissed the middle of her palm, lips open, breath hot, and it felt like he’d branded her with his mouth. His teeth grazed the pad of flesh at the base of her thumb, nibbled to her wrist, sent shivers racing up and down her arm.

“Do your ribs still kill?” He asked, voice husky. “Or have I made you forget about your ribs?”

“They still kill.”

He leaned closer, a wicked gleam in his eyes. “More distraction then?”

“Hmm. Please.” She tilted her head, raised her lips, waited for the exquisite press of his mouth on hers.

That sweet contact never came.

Tate’s free hand extended toward her breast where it jutted through Jolie’s teal shirt. His index finger traced the swell. Circled—but didn’t touch—the pointed tip.

The throb between her legs was instant. It made her ache for his kiss, for his hands and his lips. For his touch on her nipples, on her skin.
Everywhere
.

She leaned into him, pressed her lips to his neck, all aches forgotten, head filled with nothing but the heat and smell of him, breathing him in. Breathing...

Christina’s nose wrinkled. She pulled away so she could meet his eyes. “You smell like sweaty horse and fly spray.”

He laughed and the tension broke. “Shasta’s hut has a shower. We can see if you like how I smell tomorrow night.”

****

Lily Malone

Nylon rustled in the dome tent.

Christina had been in there for about an hour and every time Tate heard that sound, he let himself imagine for one crazy second that she—like him—couldn’t sleep; that she might be coming out.

More than once he’d thought about going in. Unzipping that tent and taking her in his arms. He didn’t think she’d stop him. It made his blood race.

But something held him back. He wanted her to be sure.
He
wanted to be sure.

Because whatever was going on here, it felt too important for him to fuck it up.

Tate stared up at the sky, found the Southern Cross, Alpha and Beta Centauri, the pointers. He’d banked the fire to last the night and it didn’t crackle any more but its ember base moaned beside him, basting his swag and the tent in an orange glow.

A telltale series of dull thumps sounded in the dark to his right and seconds later the smell of horse shit reached his nose. It didn’t worry him. Shit fit out here.

As a boy camping out, he used to lie back at night and look at the stars. He’d count his blessings, like Nanna Newell always said he should.

At thirteen he’d been thankful for his family, his dog. Mates on School Of The Air, his birthday coming up or Christmas just gone, chocolate at Easter; that his mum agreed Coco-Pops were okay for breakfast.

In his twenties he counted his health, his family, the marketing degree he completed, the Crows winning back to back flags, meeting Jancis Woody, whichever girlfriend he had at the time.

It was years since he’d counted his blessings. Years since he thought he had any blessings to count. Not since Jolie died.

He knew she was up there, outshining the stars, baby girl at her breast.

She felt close tonight. No surprises there. Binara was her home too and firelight did tricky things with the shadows. There were times he could have sworn she was right there, poking at the fire with a stick, smiling the way she did when she’d just made one of her crappy jokes.

Where do watermelons go for their holidays? John Cougar’s Melon Camp.

Tate worked his arms out of the swag, flexed his fingers and cradled his hands behind his head. His hair tickled the fresh welt and it stung.

He hadn’t told Christina everything. He hadn’t told her Jolie was six months’

pregnant when she died. Whenever he thought about it—and he tried not to—his mind would fill with the consulate photographs he’d seen of broken vehicles and broken bodies, clothes spewing from busted suitcases, feathers of dead chickens coating the pot‐holed road. He didn’t want those memories tonight.

Could Christina be right? Could Jolie have been the one to kick Ian out? He’d always assumed it was the other way round. That Ian left when Jolie got pregnant.

There was a time he had thought Callinan should have done the responsible thing.

Married Jolie. Looked after his family.

That’s what Tate would have done.

But that was before he knew Callinan. Marriage to a man like that would have locked Jolie in hell.

Over the chorus of frogs, nylon rustled again and his stomach clenched. Was she coming out? Should he go in?

Firelight winked on the tent zipper’s metal teeth. A sudden flare of flame fired it white‐yellow, as if a shooting star shot across the black velvet skies and burned itself out in the sands.

Lily Malone

Christina woke way too early and knew there would be no peaceful drift back to oblivion.

Not this morning. Not while the shriek of cockatoos whirled overhead and a bored‐sounding crow
qua‐aarked
to its mates. Not on a mattress that held all the comfort of a wooden plank. And not when her mind picked up right where it stopped plotting last night.

I could have a baby with Tate. I’m not going back on the pill and he never needs to
know. If it happens. It happens. Bugger the odds.

Dawn light filtered through the canvas tent. It held no hint of warmth but the sound of dry branches snapping outside did, so too the poke of a stick trawling through coals. She rolled to her side and gasped as pain shot through her hips.

In the corner, crumpled clothes lay with her riding boots on top. Everything smelled of horse, sunscreen, bug spray, dust. She sniffed at her underarm.
Sweat
.

She ran her hand over the warm mound of her stomach—like patting a bubble-wrapped pillow—cupped the swell of her left breast, loose and lazy with gravity.

I want him.
The nipple hardened in her fingers.

Last night’s orgasm had left her slippery and wet. She’d lain like a mummy on the nylon sleeping bag trying not to make it rustle, knickers halfway down her thighs as her finger circled her clit. Now her hand tracked lower, arrowed toward the patch of hair at the junction of her thighs. Her ovaries squeezed. She could picture them in her head, warm and ripe, like cherry tomatoes.

“Rise and shine, Sleeping Beauty.”

Bugger
. She rolled to her knees.

The jodhpurs prickled as she pulled them up her legs, Jolie’s teal shirt hung dirty and limp, but the jacket that had spent the night masquerading as a pillow smelled fresher, and when she upturned her boots, at least no spiders fell out with the horse‐hair and dust.

Christina opened the tent zip and poked her head out to a morning that smelled of instant coffee and wood smoke.

“Good morning,” Tate called, Santa Claus‐bloody‐cheery by the fire. He had a coffee in one hand and his swag already rolled in a neat bundle at his feet.

“Morning doesn’t start till the school bus arrives.”

He smiled. “How’s the backside?”

“Don’t ask.” She duck‐walked forward and straightened when her shoulders cleared the tent opening.

“You’ll be fine once you warm up. Move around a bit.”

Hands on hips, she lunged forward over her bent left knee, straightening her right leg and pushing the right heel to the ground. She held the stretch till her right calf burned then repeated the exercise on the opposite side; caught Tate stealing an eyeful of her butt.

“Lacy’s a stickler for warm‐ups. I guess all those exercises have to be good for something.”

He cleared his throat, held out a tin mug of coffee that looked strong enough to float the spoon. She took a sip and made a face. Powdered milk cleaved to her tongue.

“Last night when you asked me about shooting that rabbit, Christina? Can you really shoot a .22?”

“I can hold my own,” she said carefully, trying another sip. The stuff tasted like cornflour.

“Are you up for a side‐bet then? Let me win my hundred bucks back?”

Her coffee hit the sand with a
schlupp
. “Sure.”

Tate’s eyes lit up.

Breakfast was a sachet of oatmeal mixed with hot water and a little sugar and she ate it from the same tin cup now empty of coffee. Once it was washed out, she brushed her teeth in the same cup emptied of oatmeal, and spat toothpaste to the sand. When they’d repacked everything and packed the horses, Tate took the .22 aside. He dumped the last of the billy water into the fire, kicked sand over the coals then led the way to the river.

Christina followed, leading Sunshine and Charlie Brown.

Twice Tate stooped to pocket rocks in a fold of his shirt. At the river he secured the horses into a copse of trees and searched upstream till he found a flat branch, made where a broken bough lodged in the ‘v’ of a neighbouring trunk. It formed a platform about five feet high, parallel to the ground.

“Chin height for you,” he said.

He placed four rocks on the platform, stepped out twenty generous strides then gouged a line in the sand with the heel of his boot.

“Ladies first. Need a sighter?” The .22 shone in his hands, bolt‐action, timber stocks gleaming.

“And give you a chance to see what you’re up against? No way. Make your bet. My hundred’s on the table. It says I can outshoot you.”

He raised the gun and looked through the sights, then turned toward her. “I was thinking we should make it more interesting. How about if I win you read me a scene from that book you keep under your bed.”

A jackhammer took off in her heart. “What book?”

“
Call Girl By Night
. That’s if my memory’s right. I must say, I like your bedtime reading.”

Thank God. He means
that
book. Not
the how‐to‐get‐pregnant‐after‐fibroids book or Yogina Nuri’s visualisation guide to conception, with its bright red strawberry on the cover.

The Yogina encouraged women trying to conceive to imagine their ovaries as fruit, ripe for the plucking.

“You snooped under my bed?”

“I was trying to find my shoe.”

“You’re
trying
to psyche me out.”

“I’m the one going out on a limb here. I’ve got to make it worth the hit to my male pride, you probably shoot like Annie Oakley. Four bullets each, four rocks. Whoever hits the most rocks wins. We’ll put it on the clock and if it’s a tie we’ll take the fastest time.”

He smiled on the word
tie
.

He thinks he’s on a sure thing.
“If you’re betting on me reading you porn, I’m upping the ante too.” The jackhammer heartbeat kicked again.

“Go on.”

“If I win, you design Cracked Pots for me.” She tried to say it casual but the tremor in her voice gave her away.

He turned one‐hundred per cent serious in a second. “I won’t help you design a wine brand that siphons cash to Aboriginal causes, Christina. All bets aside.”

Her hands clenched into fists. “The idea was never to siphon cash, as you put it—”

her fingers made pissed‐off quote marks in the air “—to Aboriginals, Tate. It was to fund a program where teenagers from those remote communities could have come down to our Lily Malone

vineyard on work experience. You’d have known that was the plan if you’d ever heard me out.”

He was quiet for a moment, but his expression didn’t change. “That’s a better idea, but it depends what your goal is.”

“What do you mean what my goal is?”

“Is it publicity for your brand? Or do you genuinely want to help Indigenous people?”

“I guess, if I’m honest, it’s both.”

He answered her with questions of his own. “Why should you, or I, or an oil company, or a bank, decide who or what deserves our help? Companies are so keen to tie their brands to saving whales, koalas, baby seals, orphans. But what about people with bad teeth and worse breath who sleep in their own piss on a cardboard box and don’t look so cute on a T‐shirt? What about the ugly bald fruit bat? Who helps them?”