Annie West - Dreaming Of... Australia

He nodded even more cautiously. ‘I’ll see how we go.’

That sounded very much like Wayne’s kind of I’ll see . Her father’s kind.

Translation: no .

‘HOW many siblings do you have in total?’ Aimee asked after a while, when her inexplicable and irrational umbrage at his apparent brush off had subsided sufficiently. It wouldn’t hurt her to remember that this was business to Sam, no matter how chatty they got waiting for the sun to rise. Maybe rapport development was a whole semester unit over at Search and Rescue School. And maybe the two of them just had more rapport than most.

But it didn’t mean he’d want to take his work home with him—even metaphorically.

It just meant he was good at his job.

‘Seven,’ he murmured, leaning forward and blowing hot air into the cupped circle of her hand, still inside his. He pressed his lips against her fingertips for a tantalising, accidental moment. They were as soft and full as they looked. But warmer. And the sensation branded itself inside her sad, deluded mind.

Wayne had kissed her fingers many a time—and lots of other places besides—but while his lips had felt pleasant, even lovely at the beginning, they’d never snared her focus and dragged it by the throat the way the slightest touch from Sam did. She’d even started to wonder whether she was physically capable of a teeth-gnashing level of arousal, or whether ‘lovely’ was going to be her life-long personal best.

Please don’t let this be the drugs talking. Please . She wanted to think she was capable of a gut-curling attraction at least once in her life.

‘I’d definitely want more than one child,’ she said, then snapped herself to more attention when she heard her own dreamy tone. ‘Speaking as an only child, I mean. I’d want more.’

‘Your parents never did?’

‘Mum did, I think.’ But Lisbet Leigh hadn’t been the pants-wearer in their family. ‘Dad was content with just me.’

‘Why “just” you? I’m sure they are very proud of their only daughter.’

She let her head loll sideways on its neck brace. His way. ‘You really are an idealist, aren’t you?’

Was his total lack of offence at her ant-induced candour symbolic of his easygoing nature or of something more? Was Sam as engaged in her company as she was in his? Or was she just chasing rainbows? Maybe even painting them?

‘I’m sure my father will be eternally disappointed that his one-and-only progeny wasn’t really up to par,’ she continued.

‘Define par.’

She shrugged, and snuggled in tighter into her foil blanket. ‘You know … Grades. Sports. Achievements.’

‘You work for the country’s leading science and culture body. That’s quite an achievement.’

‘Right. And I had good grades. Not record-breaking, but steady.’

‘I can imagine.’ He smiled, and it reminded her a little bit of the way people smiled at precocious children. Or drunks. She didn’t like it.

‘You’re humouring me.’

‘I’m—’

Choosing your words very carefully …?

‘—just enjoying you.’ He almost fell over himself to correct himself. ‘Your company. Talking.’

Well … Awkward, much? ‘Any way, nothing short of medicine or law was ever going to satisfy my father. He’s had high expectations of me my whole life.’ And was constantly disappointed. Ironic, really, when she considered how his marriage had ended. Imploded. And how little he’d done to save it.

‘Do you like what you do?’

‘I love what I do.’

‘Then that’s what you’re meant to be doing. Don’t doubt yourself.’

His absolute certainty struck her. ‘What if I might love being a doctor, too?’

He shrugged. ‘Then that was where you’d have found yourself. Life has a way of working out.’

His assured belief was as foreign to her as it was exhausting. How would it feel to be that sure—about everything? She settled back against the seat and let her eyes flutter closed for a moment, just to take the sting of dryness out of them.

‘Aimee—’

Sam was right there, gently rousing her with a feather touch to her cheek.

‘I can’t even rest my eyes?’

‘You went to sleep.’

Oh . ‘I can’t sleep?’

He stroked her hair again. Almost like an apology. ‘When you get to the hospital you can sleep all you want. But I need you to stay awake now. With me. Can you do that?’

Stay with me . Her sigh was more of a flutter deep in her chest. ‘I can do that.’ But it was going to be a challenge. It had to be four a.m. and she’d left at six yesterday morning. Twenty-four hours was a long haul, even if she had had some unconscious moments before he’d found her. And apparently another just now.

‘Tell me about your research,’ he said, clearly determined to keep her awake. ‘What’s your favourite story?’

She told him. All about wrinkled, weathered, ninety-five-year-old Dorothy Kenworthy, who’d come to Australia to marry a man she barely knew eight decades before. To start a life in a town she’d never heard of. A town full of prospects and gold and potential. About how poor they’d been, and how Dorothy’s husband had pulled a small cart with his culture-shocked bride and her belongings the six-hundred kilometres inland from the coast to the mining town he’d called home. How long love had been in coming for them; about the day that it finally had. And about how severely Dorothy’s heart had fractured the day, seventy years later, she’d lost him.

Stories of that kind of hardship were almost impossible to imagine now—how people had endured them—overcome them—and were always her favourites.

‘Dorothy reminds me that there is always hope. No matter how dire things get.’

Sam’s brow folded and he drifted away from her again. Not because he was bored—his intense focus while she’d been telling the start of the story told her that—but because he’d taken her words deep inside himself and was processing them.

‘Why didn’t she give up?’ he eventually asked. ‘When she was frightened and heatstroked and feeling so … alien.’

‘Because she’d come so far. Literally and figuratively. And she knew how important she was to her husband. She didn’t want to let him down.’ His frown trebled as she watched. ‘Plus she’d made a commitment. And she was a woman of great personal honour.’

‘Is that something you believe in? Honouring commitments?’

‘What do we have if not our honour?’

Finally his eyes came back to her. ‘Is it her story on your thumb drive?’

‘No. It’s another one …’

She told him that one too. Then another, and another, sipping occasionally at the water he meted out sparingly and not minding when he shared from the same bottle. She didn’t care if Search and Rescue Sam gave her a few boy germs while he was giving her the greatest gift any man in her life had ever given her.

He listened.

He showed interest. He asked questions. He didn’t just listen waiting for an opportunity to talk about himself, or slowly veer the subject around to something of more interest to him. He heard her. He didn’t interrupt. And he wasn’t the slightest bit bored.

Just like that a light came on, bright and blazing and impossible to ignore, right at the back of Aimee’s mind.

That was the kind of man she wanted for herself. That was the kind of man she’d never really believed existed. Yet here one sat: living, breathing evidence—her already compromised chest tightened—and the universe had handed him to her .

How had she ever thought a man like Wayne was even close to worthy? Maybe if she’d been allowed out more as a young girl, had got to meet more people, sample more personalities … Maybe then she never would have accepted Wayne’s domination of her. Maybe if she hadn’t grown up watching it, until her father had finally forced her mother’s hand …