Love: Classified (4 page)

     “Good luck, kid. I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Peta said. She sounded more stressed than usual and added, “I have to go now. I’m sorry. Bree’s planning a party. She wants to invite boys
; I don’t. She wants it to go until midnight; I say ten-thirty as it’s a week night. She wanted to be allowed alcohol; I say, no way. You know, for the first time since she was born, I wish her father was here. Having a man around would certainly make it easier. But I doubt Josh can even remember her name. Anyway, you can imagine the battle we’re having. Teenagers! I tell you!”

     “Poor Pete
,” I sympathised. “What you’re going through makes my problem seem insignificant. Why don’t you contact Josh? Maybe it’s time he got involved with his daughter. She’s too much of a handful for one parent.”

    
“You’re right. Maybe I will. I’ll think about it.”

     “I’ll let you go Pete. I can hear Danny wanting your attention.”

     “Yeah. He’s got some new pix and some ideas for how to use them to make them look even more scrumptious. He’s got summer desserts to die for. Chocolate and raspberry roulade. Classic trifle. But you don’t want to hear about
You!
I promise to call you soon, but in the meantime, relax. Try to enjoy it. You love people. And I’d rather have your problem than mine right now.”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” came the untroubled, chocolatey voice.

     I spun around in the driver’s seat,
the bright morning sun in my eyes, realising suddenly that the back end of my precious powder blue Micra was less than a centimeter away from careering into the side of some kind of big stationary vehicle rumbling away in the street behind me.

     I
was about to whiz up to the deli for milk as there was still about a quarter of an hour before Magnus was due to arrive. Once the milk was in the fridge I was going to spend the rest of the time finding something halfway decent to wear.

    
“You can’t park there,” I shouted back. “You haven’t given me enough room to reverse out of my own driveway.”

     “This is your driveway?” he demanded, leaning from the driver’s window.

     The voice sounded dangerously familiar but I put it down to my lively imagination.

     “As it happens, yes. Now please get out of my way. I’ve
got to rush off somewhere.”

     “Are you Virginia?”

     It hit me that this was indeed Magnus. Fuck. I had no milk. And I was in the worst clothes I owned, the ones I gardened in. What was I going to do?

     I drove forward into the carport and turned off the ignition, feeling as if I might throw up.
His first impression of me was going to be the worst impression possible. I caught a glimpse of the vehicle – his camper van – being manoeuvred behind the Micra and my stomach lurched with apprehension. This was the man who’d placed the ad. He was the weirdo I’d been dreading. In my daggy clothes I was too embarrassed to get out of the car to greet him, but I knew I couldn’t stay where I was, gripping the steering wheel so hard my knuckles were white.

      In the
rear-view mirror, I saw that he was climbing down from his van. He was tall, lean, heart-stoppingly good-looking. He could’ve been George Clooney with a face that might have been hewn by a master craftsman from a chunk of Italian marble. The shivery sensations that I’d experienced just from hearing his voice turned into an earthquake that caused my belly to clench and reclench pleasurably and I had to bite my bottom lip to stop myself from moaning aloud. I’d seen Clooney in ‘The Descendants’ only a few nights ago on TV but this guy was actually even better: less manicured and with a stubbled jaw and tousled hair greying in undisciplined streaks. This character, walking towards where I sat, frozen, my heart thumping so hard he must surely have heard it, looked too good to be true. And my body was responding to his scruffy, careless handsomeness in an almost violent way. I swallowed hard, willing my nipples not to betray me, my voice to stay calm.

     “I can’t believe this is happening,” I muttered under my breath.

     “What?” he asked, leaning inside my Micra, his tanned arms resting on the half-open window. The hairs on his arms were dark and curly and he smelled the way I’d always imagined a man should – of leather and pine trees and, under that, salt.

     “Is this a joke?” I asked, unable to meet his dark brown gaze.

     “Do you want to see the world?” he countered, his lop-sided smile sending ripples of apprehension through me so I grabbed the steering wheel even tighter or he would have noticed.

     “But…”

     “Why don’t you get out of your car and ask me in for a drink? I know it’s early, but hell, we’re on holidays, aren’t we? And I know you’ll like it.” He bent down and picked up an enticing-looking bottle of sauvignon blanc from where he’d left it on my driveway.

     “I…” I began. I didn’t want to get out for a thousand reasons.
The main one being that I looked like a pale, flabby, badly dressed hippo while he looked like, well, George Clooney.

     “Come on,” he urged kindly, opening the car door for me. “I promise I’m not an axe murderer. In fact, I’m a vegetarian and I don’t believe in killing anything, including cockroaches.”

     So with a sheepish smile I ungripped my fingers and climbed out, squeezing my bulk past him and self-consciously leading the way to the front door. He followed close behind and I knew his eyes were on my big swaying backside but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

     I pushed the door open and led him through my
house and onto the verandah. I hoped he’d be looking at other things on the way: the flowers, the woven rugs on the honey coloured wooden floor, the prints on the yellow walls, the happy paintings made by a kid who signed her name “Bree”, the quirky ceramic pots she’d made, filled with shells and pebbles. I hoped he’d see the towering bookcase stuffed with old and new books and hear the radio spilling out the crescendos and diminuendos of a Rachmaninov piano concerto. I hoped he’d notice the chooks scratching under the herbs and smell the pizza dough that was rising in time for lunch.

     “Mmm,” he murmured appreciatively. “You certainly know how
to turn a house into a home.”

     “Sit down,” I said, flapping one of the chooks off the cane chair. She was one of the oldest of the girls, the tamest.

     “Isa Browns,” he said, glancing around the garden. “We had them when I was a kid. And I bet yours all have names, don’t they?”

     “Yes,” I laughed
, sitting opposite him and covering as much of my body as I could with a big cushion. “My god-daughter Bree named them for what they like most to eat. So the girl who was on your chair is Watermelon and her friends are Sausages and Chips and Lettuce and so on.”

     “It’s great,” he said. “A suburban garden just like a farmyard. It’s beaut.”

     “Thanks. I like it.”

     “Yet you want to leave?”

     “I s’pose everyone needs a change of scene occasionally, though I’m a homebody at heart,” I said.

     “I can see that.”

     “I think I need that wine,” I heard myself saying. Then I wished I hadn’t because it would mean I’d have to get up and walk to the kitchen for the glasses, giving him another opportunity to size me up and decide he didn’t want to be seen dead with me.

     “Me too,” he said. “I’ll get the glasses. I saw two on the draining board on the way through.
”

     He stood easily, unlike me who struggled to get up out of a low chair. His jeans were low on his hips, his worn leather belt on a tighter notch than usual as if he’d recently lost weight.
However, I couldn’t help but notice the way the denim strained over a certain part of his anatomy and had to bite my lip again because of the ridiculous effect he was having on me. I must have made a squeak because he turned to look at me as if concerned and would have seen where my gaze was directed. I blushed fire-engine red – or so I thought – and he smiled quizzically as another tidal wave of desire surged deep inside me. There should be a law against anyone looking as dangerously delicious, I thought, almost angry with him for tempting me, even though I knew I’d never have a chance, not even a ghost of a chance, with someone like him.

    “You
okay?” he asked, that sideways grin making me long to reach up and pull him mouth to mine.

     “F
ffine,” I stuttered, gulping as he walked into my kitchen as if he owned the joint, his bum high and round like a footballer’s.

     “You were heading off somewhere when I arrived,” he said. “I don’t want to hold you up if you needed to do something.”

     “I was going to buy some milk. We were going to have tea or coffee. Actually, the milk was just an excuse to get some chocolate. There’s a good movie on SBS tonight and I thought some Lindt would go down well with it.” I could have kicked myself for making this confession to this stunning stranger, but something about that grin invited confidences. “The wine idea’s much better.”

     “Yeah. Definitely,” he said.

     He returned in a jiffy. “It’s a special day, Virginia. We have to celebrate. I’m glad I found you. We’ll make some plans. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get this camper van on the road.”

     I astonished myself by asking if he’d like to watch the
film with me – and drive to the deli to choose the chocolate.

     “I’d like that very much. Thank you,” he astonished me by replying.

     He leant across and filled my glass. Then his own. His body, close enough for me to feel its heat, was like the wine; as close to perfect as it was possible to be. My body was responding wickedly to both. The sauvignon blanc was an inexpensive one from Margaret River in the south-west. Its price was deceptive, though. It was one of the best wines in the world and I knew that he’d chosen it carefully, maybe to impress. Well, I’d try very, very hard not to show that I was, I decided. He was the sort of man who could snap his fingers and have any woman he wanted. Even if he wanted me, which was highly improbable unless he was blind drunk, I’d put up a fight, I told myself. He couldn’t just expect to walk in and make a conquest every time. I’d make him do a double-take, take him down a peg or two. He wouldn’t be used to that sort of treatment from a woman, I was sure.

     How on Earth would I stand three months with such a cock-sure man? He’d drive me mad!

     Another piece of music floated out from the retro Bush radio that reminded me of my grandparents. I always had it on the classical music station with no ads. Now it was Vivaldi.

     “I think we have the same taste in music,” he said raising his glass. “I’m sure, by the end of our holiday, that we’ll have discovered we have much more than that in common.”

     “I haven’t said I’ll go with you yet,” I reminded him, annoyed at his presumption that I’d jump at the chance to go away with him. Secretly, though, I knew I’d be mad not to. How often did a woman like me even get within six feet of a man like him? Peta would give him ten out of ten, just for his body. His warm, if too self-assured personality, would have seen the score rocketing off the page.

     “I hope you will,” he said, sounding so sincere I was taken aback.

     “I s’pose I’m apprehensive,” I admitted. “I’m naturally cautious and all my good sense tells me that to go away with a total stranger, even one who likes Vivaldi, is madness. I’m beginning to have serious regrets about answering your ad. I must have been out of my mind.”

     “I can understand you feeling like that,” he said, nodding thoughtfully. “If you like, I can get a police reference. It might put you at your ease.”

     I considered this for a moment. But the way his eyes unashamedly held mine, the fine laugh-lines that radiated across his cheek-bones, his firm, square jaw and big, capable work-worn hands bespoke honesty and reliability.

     “That won’t be
necessary,” I heard myself say. I couldn’t help myself from returning his smile and realised I was developing a very schoolgirlish crush on him already. Then a thought crossed my mind and I asked him if he wanted me to supply him with my own police reference. “Maybe you’d like to be sure that I’m an honest woman without a blemish on my good-behaviour record,” I asked.

     “I’m prepared to take a risk. You don’t look like the sort of person who’s ever done anything underhanded.”

     “I once pinched a lollipop from the corner shop,” I confessed, remembering my eight year-old self.

     “Did you get caught?”

     I nodded. “I could never run fast, even then. But when I explained to the shop assistant that the lolly wasn’t for me but for a classmate who’d forgotten her school lunch, the woman gave me not one but two lollipops and made a vegemite sandwich for the girl who’d forgotten her lunch.”

     He laughed. “So you were a Good Samaritan, even then?”

    “Not really. I was too busy surviving in the playground to think much about anything else. I’d been bullied into pinching that lollipop. It was tough, being a fatty.”

     I sipped the wine thoughtfully, wondering what it was about this man that made me drop my guard. Was it his careless
ly brushed short hair that flopped over his eyebrows? The faded denim stretched over muscular thighs? The grey cotton of his old tee-shirt, the way the biceps flexed when he simply lifted his glass to that mouth that so readily broke into a grin? I longed to let my eyes stray again to the obvious bulge under the zip of his jeans but knew he’d see me. So I kept them above his belt, my body feeling as if it were alive for the first time as it responded to every one of the deep notes of his voice as if I were a violin and he the musician. He was so blatantly masculine, unlike my work colleagues, whose unremarkable bodies were hidden in loose suits and more or less regulation shirts and ties. Yet his eyes, fringed with luxuriant black lashes that caressed his broad and tanned check bones, were like a little boy’s. It was this devastating combination of man and child in him that unnerved me.