His Brand of Beautiful (14 page)

She opened her mouth to answer, because the word that sprang to mind was
the
government
, then she thought better of it. There were always those who slipped through the gaps.

Tate wasn’t finished. “And if some company does decide to pour money into a program that helps the guy get off his cardboard box and then changes sponsorship priorities for some reason—say a new head of marketing steps in and has different ideas—

Mr Cardboard Box is right back where he started because nothing about the economy or the environment that stuck him on his box in the first place has fundamentally changed.”

He took a breath. The first one she’d noticed.

“If all I want is a bottle of wine for dinner, why should I have to weigh up whether the wine I buy saves Clay Wines’ endangered frog or another winery’s red‐tailed black cockatoo? Why make it my problem? I pay my taxes.”

She interjected: “The frog fund is about raising awareness—”

“If it’s all about raising awareness for the frog, Christina, why does Clay Wines need a logo on the wall of the amphibian enclosure at the zoo?”

“We’re not on the wall. We have a plaque,” she grumbled. “How do you know about that anyway?”

“Call it a lucky guess.”

“Okay,” she said. “No cause‐marketing, I promise. Honestly, you sound like you wrote the speech on this stuff. I win: you work on my brand and we do Cracked Pots your way. That’s huge for me. I don’t like giving up control.”

She watched him pretend to consider the deal. Pretend, because she knew from the look on his face: he thought he couldn’t lose.

“Deal,” he said.

Oh, this will taste sweet.
“Deal.”

She accepted the gun in one hand and a heavy‐duty cardboard box of .22 bullets in the other. The rifle felt as well‐loved as it looked, trigger metal‐smooth beneath her index finger. Lethal. She chose four bullets, flipped them in her palm like marbles, handed back the ammo box and tucked the remaining three in her jacket pocket. Bullet number one clicked as she slid it into place and worked the bolt. The rifle nestled into her armpit like it belonged.

Tate checked his watch. “I opened your book at this
very
dog‐eared page that was about the time Lucy goes into a swingers’ bar. You could read me that part—”

“Shut up, Newell, or I’ll shoot you.”

Her mind refocused, needlepoint sharp. It was as if she could feel every ounce of oxygen entering her lungs. A tickle of breeze brushed her cheek, fanned the scent of silt and earth across the river and something else—cleaning‐oil from the barrel of the gun.

“Ready?” Tate raised his hand and started counting down. At zero, his hand dropped.

“Go!”

She exhaled, raised the gun to her shoulder, sighted on the rock at far left and told herself:
Don’t squint.
A second before her lungs emptied, she squeezed the trigger.

Cockatoos lurched for the sky. Recoil kicked her shoulder. Shards of rock skipped toward the river, raising ripples where they hit. The largest portion scratched bark off the neighbouring trunk; crashed against a serpentine root. A smaller piece fizzed across the sand like a skimming stone.

For a second she stood stunned—which showed how out of practice she was—good shooters didn’t notice noise or recoil or ripples racing for the riverbank. Blood roared through every artery, every vein.

Move, Christina!

She worked the bolt. The spent cartridge spat into the sand, buried itself fat‐end‐up like a lead finger giving the bird. Bullet number two slotted home.

Aim. Exhale. Squeeze.
Thwack
. Eject. Reload.

Bullet number three.

Aim. Exhale. Squeeze.
Thwack
. Eject. Reload.

Fourth shot she hesitated, wanting to make it certain. She wiped the palm of her trigger hand against her pants. Cockatoos screeched above her head, the sound drifting as the birds wheeled. Blue smoke seared the back of her throat.

Exhale. The shot cracked across the sand.

Thwack
.

Christina lowered the gun to her waist. She wanted to throw her head back and scream triumph at the sky.

“When I draw CC Pot she’s getting a gun,” Tate said with the tone of someone who’d just seen pigs flying south. “Forty‐three seconds, four hits.”

Flicking the safety on, Christina concentrated on making sure the hand that held the gun to Tate held no trace of a shake.

“Where’s the poker face, Newell? You seem shocked.”

“Hold the celebrations,
Annie
. Now it’s my turn.” He scouted the bank for more rocks.

“Don’t pick yourself watermelon targets either.”

He placed four new stones on the platform and stepped back behind his improvised line.

“Ready?”

For answer he clicked the safety off, slotted his first bullet and took up his shooter’s stance. Legs shoulder‐width apart, slightly bent at the knees, boots half‐buried in sand, blue jeans showing off his tight,
tight
arse.

She swallowed. “There’s a scene in my book where Lucy has a lesbian romp with the masseuse at a beauty parlour. She has
the
most fantastic tongue, apparently. Maybe I could read you that.”

“And I thought I fought dirty.” His grip on the gun tightened before he backed the pressure off. She couldn’t see any white in his knuckles. He was good.

Lily Malone

She raised her arm, waited for the second hand on her watch to tick to vertical, dropped her arm and clapped both hands to her ears.

Tate’s first shot cracked across the sand like a stockman’s whip. The bullet obliterated the target rock. So did two and three in a blur of pump and reload. She didn’t need to check the time to know he was faster.

He sighted the final target. Squeezed off the shot.

“
Damn
. That’s wide.”

Alone on the platform the final rock mocked him, unscathed. All around them, whipcracks echoed off the sand.

“Woo
hoo
!” Christina pumped her fist. Two seconds later she pounded upstream, away from the over‐excited horses. Her boots ploughed the heavy sand, knees like pistons, and somewhere near the end of the second victory lap as she high‐fived a row of appreciative if droopy‐leaved shrubs, it occurred to her she should offer Tate commiserations. Besides, she had to catch her breath.

She hunted for him, hands on her knees, squinting against the rising sun, trying to pierce the deep shade by the river. She found him on the bank, the .22 propped not far from his thigh against a tree trunk the size of his waist. His mouth was set in a wry half‐smile, arms loose and relaxed.

“You are
such
a crappy winner.”

Head down, lungs burning, she gasped: “You’re such a… lousy… loser.” She looked up in time to see him Frisbee his hat to the sand.

He took a single, menacing pace forward.

She choked on a bubble of giggles. “You wouldn’t dare.”

Lion‐quick, Tate sprinted across the sand. She had no time for a half‐step in any direction before his tackle steamrolled her to the ground and any air she’d managed to get into her body whooshed from her lungs.

A whirlpool of blue shirt, orange sand, and sky—shot through by a whip of chestnut as her hair escaped its tie—spun outside arms that encircled her like an iron cage. His momentum slowed and they ploughed to a halt with her riding boot tangled between his legs and her arms wedged in the too‐small space between her breasts and his chest. She pushed against his solid mass, tried to shimmy an arm free, tried to take a breath. Just one.

She wasn’t greedy.

Tawny‐orange grains of sand scattered through his hair, the two colours in the sunlight a near perfect match and she thought: what was sand and what was hair? Peered closer. Noticed flecks almost the same colour on the very outer rim of his iris, like moons around Saturn. Or was it rings? Did Pluto have the moons?

Amazing
.

“Breathe Christina. Don’t you dare faint,” he growled.

The breath she sucked in went nowhere because her snort of laughter expelled it straight back the way it had come. Her shoulders shook with suppressed giggles and a tear squeezed down her cheek. Tate caught it with a fingertip, held the fat diamond to the sun.

She smelled gun‐smoke on his collar; wood‐smoke at his wrist. The contrast made her wonder.

Her right arm popped free and she laid her elbow over the side of his neck and let her fingers dangle into the coarse tickle of sand, warming now under the morning sun. She couldn’t resist a stroke into his hair, waves a little stiff where sunscreen and dust slicked the tips.

His breath deepened.

“
Christ
,” he said against her hair. Or did he say her name? His voice softened. “What do I
do
with you?”

“You don’t want to work for me. You can’t shoot me.” It started sassy. It ended on a sigh. There was heat in his cobalt eyes that could have melted polar ice‐caps; was melting her.

His hand slid beneath her shirt. Callused fingers, rough from the previous day’s ride, dug under her bra and when his palm caught her breast she wasn’t sure who sighed first.

There was nothing gentle in the lips that parted hers, it felt like their contest continued. She closed her eyes and pressed closer, tasted mint toothpaste, coconut sunscreen and gunsmoke—loitering on his tongue like the memory of yesterday’s thunder. A moan vibrated in the back of her throat.

He teased her lower lip, sucked it into his mouth. Their hips bumped, slid away, bumped again, like boats at the dock.
Rock
. Roll.
Rock
. Roll.

Sunlight flickered across her eyelids and she missed him instantly. Her eyes flew open, found him breathing hard, propped on his elbow, eyes bright.

“What?” It rasped from lips swollen and shaped for kissing.

“I’m lying on a rock,” he said.

She giggled. “So am I.”

“
That’s
not a rock.”

He retrieved his hand from inside her shirt, nudged her hips away then sat, bringing her with him, gentle now. Jolie’s shirt rode up her hip, revealing a muffin‐top swell over the jodhpurs’ tight band. His eyes slid lower.

“Don’t move,” he warned. His palm came up. Levered back. Slapped.

“Hey!”

“Sorry.” Tate flipped his hand. A crushed black body and an explosion of blood painted his palm. He wiped the mess on his jeans.

She rubbed her hip. When he ducked his head low, her heart cartwheeled. He laid his lips over the sting and seconds later the scrape of his whiskers created a whole new kind of pain.

He breathed her scent and she felt his smile against the sensitive skin of her hip. An answering smile curled her own lips. “Let me guess,” she said. “I stink of
Eau de horse
and flyspray?”

He exhaled. She felt the rush of warm air.

“It’s like perfume on you, Christina.”

He helped her to her feet. If he hadn’t, she wasn’t sure she could have moved—

there was something so compelling about the morning light on the lazy winding river, the colour of the sand. About Tate.

A lone pair of cockatoos—the first brave enough to re‐enter the warzone—

screeched defiance overhead. In the shade the horses waited, tails swishing to some unheard tune.

Lily Malone

The ride was different that morning, not only because Tate led them at a faster pace.

Yesterday they’d ridden single file, today he could make out every freckle on the back of Christina’s hand. Yesterday he’d been setting her up to fail. Today he wanted her to succeed. He couldn’t remember ever wanting anything quite so much.

“All this trotting is killing my butt. Can’t we walk?”

“I’m having too much fun watching you bounce,” he said, and he meant it. Christina jiggled. It didn’t matter if he was in front, alongside her, or behind. His view was great.

“And here I’ve been trying for an elegant rise and fall. Why are we going so much faster today anyway?”

“Because yesterday I thought you only rode dressage,” he said.
And today I want to
get you to that shower
. But he reined Bond back to a walk.

A family of emu appeared in the scrub fifty metres to his right, four spotted fluffy chicks led by their father in a swaying train of legs and grey feathers. He brushed Christina’s shoulder as he pointed them out and when she smiled at him, it warmed him inside.

She stretched in the saddle. The teal shirt rode up her back and twin dimples winked at him either side of her spine.

Tate thought he might be in love.

“So is this your ideal holiday?” She asked, dropping Sunshine’s reins to the mare’s neck, unscrewing her water bottle and wrapping lips around the spout.

He watched the sweet vibration of her throat.

“Tate?”

“I go stir crazy if I stay in the city too long. Most times I get out of Adelaide I go for a hike in the Flinders Ranges. Sometimes Shasta and I arrange a fishing trip up to Daly River.

Anywhere where I can find a few Barramundi on the bite, is pretty good by me. What about you?”

“These days I’m all about lazing around a hotel pool with a book and a pile of trashy mags and drinks with umbrellas and names I never remember. I do nothing
really
well.”

“What about in the old days?”

“I was more
Lonely Planet
and Europe on
Five Dollars A Day
back then. I did stuff like backpacking through Spain on an anti‐bullfight protest; hitched with a girlfriend to Berlin to save brown bears; spent a summer in Vietnam building an orphanage.” She laughed, a sweet flowing sound like the river. “I told my father those first two trips were to research Tempranillo and Rhine Riesling. You should have seen how fast he bought the plane tickets.”

It made him chuckle, not because of the way she’d conned her father—daughters were born with that knack, Jolie had it in spades. He laughed because he could picture Christina waving a placard outside the bullring, every guy in the protest group trying to figure the fastest way into her pants.

“So when did Grenache interest you more than Greenpeace?”

“Who knows?” Her shoulders twitched as if a puppeteer pulled her strings, and she screwed the lid back on the bottle. “Richard eventually drew the line at paying for university courses I never finished. I turned thirty. I had an epiphany. He retired and told me if I wanted his job I had to pull my finger out and take the winery seriously. Take your pick.”