Nikki Logan - Awakened By His Touch

Which pretty much made her Goldilocks, snuggling down into the sensation.

The necessity to converse was forestalled by the business of filling plates with stew and side plates with thickly sliced bread and butter.

‘Home-made bread?’ Elliott asked. Such a charmer. So incredibly transparent.

‘Organically grown and milled locally and fresh out of my oven.’

‘It’s still warm.’

The reverence in his voice surprised a chuckle out of Laney. ‘Are ovens not hot in the city?’

An awkward silence fell over the whole table. She didn’t need to see her mother’s face to know it would be laden with disapproval.

But chivalry was clearly alive and well. ‘Bread starts out hot, yes,’ he admitted. ‘But it’s not usually hot by the time it gets to the consumer. This is my first truly home-made loaf.’

The fact that he needed to compensate for her bluntness at all made her twitchy. And just a little bit ashamed. Plus it made her wonder what kind of city upbringing he’d had never to have had fresh-baked bread before. ‘Well, wait until you taste the butter, then. Mum churns it herself.’

And bless her if her mother didn’t join her daughter in the age-old act of making good. ‘Well, I push the button on the machine and then refrigerate the results.’

‘You guys seem pretty self-sufficient here...’

And off they went. Comfortably reclining in a topic she knew her parents could talk about underwater—organic farming and self-sustainability. Long enough to give her time to compose herself against the heat still coming off the man to her left as they all tucked into the chicken.

Okay, so he was a radiator. She could live with that. And enough of a city boy to never have had home-baked bread. That just meant they came from different worlds. Different upbringings. She’d met people from outside of the Leeuwin Peninsula before. There was no reason to be wound up quite this tight.

She slid her hand along the tablecloth until her fingertips felt the ring of cool that was the base of the glass of wine her father had poured from the bottle Elliott had contributed. She took a healthy swallow and sighed inwardly at the kiss of gentle Merlot against her tongue.

‘Still as good as you remember?’ Elliott murmured near her left ear. Swirling more man scent her way.

Okay, this was getting ridiculous. Time to focus. ‘Always. We have hives at their vineyard. I like to think that’s why it’s so good.’

‘This wine was fertilised by Morgan’s bees?’

‘Well, no.’ Much as she’d love to say it had been. ‘Grape pollen is wind-borne. But we provide the bees to fertilise their off-season cropping. So the bees help create the soil that make their wines so great.’

‘Do they pay?’

Back to money. Sigh. ‘No. They get a higher grape yield and we get the resulting honey. It’s a win-win.’

He was silent for a moment, before deciding, ‘Clever.’

The rush of his approval annoyed her. It shouldn’t make her so tingly. ‘Just standard bee business.’

‘So tell me about your focus on organic methods,’ he said to the table generally. ‘That must limit where you can place hives or who you can partner with?’

‘Not so much these days,’ her father grunted. ‘Organics is very now.’

‘Yet you’ve been doing it for three decades. You must have been amongst the first?’

‘Out of necessity. But it turned out to be the best thing we could have done.’

‘Necessity?’

Every cell in Laney’s body tightened. This wasn’t the first time the topic had come up with strangers, but this was the first time she’d felt uncomfortable about its approaching. The awkward silence was on the Morgan side of the table, and the longer it went on the more awkward it was going to become.

‘My eyes,’ she blurted. ‘My vision loss was a result of the pesticides we were using on the farm. Once we realised how dangerous they were, environmentally, we changed to organic farming.’

Her father cleared his throat. ‘And by we she means her mother and I. Laney and Owen weren’t even born yet.’

She was always sure to say ‘we’. Her parents took enough blame for her blindness without her adding to it.

‘None of us really knew what they were doing to our bodies,’ her father went on, ‘let alone to our unborn children.’

Well, one of them, anyway. Owen seemed to have got away with nothing worse than a teenager’s attention span.

‘Have we made you uncomfortable, Mr Garvey?’ her mother said after moments of silence. ‘Helena said we should have just sent you to town for a meal...’

Heat rushed up Laney’s cheeks as his chair creaked slightly. It wasn’t hard to imagine Oh, really? in the voice that washed over her like warm milk.

‘No. I’m just thinking about how many worse ways the chemical damage might have manifested itself. How lucky you were.’

Again the silence. But this time it wasn’t awkward. Surprised was the closest word for the half-caught breath that filled the hush. Was he being intensely dismissive of her loss—and her parents’—or did he actually get it?

And possibly her.

Warmth swelled up in her chest, which tightened suddenly. ‘Most people wouldn’t consider it luck,’ she breathed. ‘But as it happens I agree with you.’

‘And, as threatening as it must have been for you at the time, the decision sealed Morgan’s fate. Put you well ahead of everyone else in organics today. It was smart.’

‘It was a life-changer in more ways than one,’ her mother cut in.

Silence again. Laney filled it with the first thing that entered her mind. ‘I gather we’ll be seeing you again, Elliott?’

Elliott. The very name tingled as it crossed her tongue.

‘Really?’ His voiced shifted towards her father. ‘You’re happy to have me back?’

Robert Morgan was predictably gruff. He always was when he dwelled on the bad old days. ‘Yes. I would like to hear what you have to say.’

It didn’t take a blind person to catch his leaning on the word ‘I’.

‘And what about you, Laney? You’ll be doing all the escorting.’

‘Free advice is my favourite kind. I’ll be soaking it up.’ But just in case he thought he was on a winner, she added, ‘And weighing it up very carefully.’

Approval radiated outwards. Or was it pleasure? Either way she felt it. It soaked under her skin and did a bang-up job of warming her from the inside out as he spoke gruffly.

‘That’s all I ask.’

* * *

Three hours later they walked together back towards the chalet, an unharnessed Wilbur galloping in expanding arcs around them, her hand gently resting on Elliott’s forearm. Not entirely necessary, in truth, because she walked this trail often enough en route to the hilltop hives. But she just knew walking beside him would be the one time that a rock would miraculously appear on the trail, and going head-over-tail really wasn’t how she wanted him remembering her.

‘It’s a beautiful night,’ he murmured.

‘Clear.’ Ugh, such verbal brilliance. Not.

‘How can you tell?’

‘The cicadas don’t chirp when it’s overcast, and I can’t smell moisture in the air.’

‘Right.’

She chuckled. ‘Plus it may be autumn, but it’s still summery enough that the odds are on my side.’

He stopped, gently leading her to a halt too. ‘Listen, Laney’ he said, low and somewhat urgent. ‘I don’t want every conversation we have to be laden with my reticence to ask you about your vision loss. I want to focus on your processes.’

Was that his way of saying he didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of her any more than she did in front of him? Her breath tightened a tiny bit more.