Pierce ran his palms against the sides of his head, though his hair was short enough not to need tidying. He huffed out a couple of breaths, as if he was about to go for a record deadlift. It wasn’t like him to feel nervous, but Sam had given him a second chance and he was determined not to balls it up this time.
Before she spotted him in the cafe, Sam had been chatty and extroverted, greeting customers with bubbly enthusiasm. It was in direct contrast to the woman he’d met months earlier, who was careful with her choice of words, listening intently as though searching for a subtext in what he said. Briefly, he had wondered whether he’d mis-recalled their interactions, had imagined the thoughtful personality. But when Sam made her way to his table, he immediately found the intriguing woman he had spent too long thinking about.
The problem was that now it was vitally important she accept his apology.
From Gabrielle’s riverfront cottage, on which he’d taken an open-ended lease, he saw Sam’s car head down the dirt track to the dock, before taking the sharp hook onto the pristine white crushed-gravel driveway that swept up to the inn. It was a few hundred metres walk, which should give him time to get his brain in the game. Plus make it look like he hadn’t rushed over to the inn the minute Sam arrived. Even though that’s exactly what he was doing.
He deliberately slowed his pace, forcing himself to take in the scenery. In a burst of autumnal fury, the sun had swept over the high roof of the inn to sink in the lagoons beyond. The willows along the river were clothed in gold, the backdrop of the sunset-lit cliffs shades of honey and copper with the river a solid thread of silver stitching together the softly mottled tapestry.
Autumn might be a time of slowing and endings, but that’s not how he felt. Instead, it seemed his life was just beginning. Anticipation surged through him at the thought of seeing Sam. Although she hadn’t exactly accepted his apology, she hadn’t cut him off either. At least he was in with a chance of making it right. Although, did his fixation on the hurt he might have caused Sam stem, in part, from a desire to ignore any unhealed wounds of his own?
Pierce pondered the thought as he strode across the grass, but then dismissed it: Sam was fascinating, and he wanted to get to know her better. Simple as that.
He entered the inn through the door that was marked Gentlemen’s Bar in gilt lettering above the architrave. The centrepiece of the room was a massive red-gum slab bar, behind which Gabrielle kept a modest selection of top-shelf liquor.
Her hair loosed from its customary ponytail and skimming her shoulders, Sam had her back to him.
From behind the bar, Gabrielle lifted a cocktail glass in his direction. ‘Just in time, Pierce. Friday night happy hour. I picked up my RSA certification, so I’m brushing up my mixology skills. You can be a cocktail guinea pig for me.’
‘I’m not sure that responsible service of alcohol and doing a Tom Cruise quite mesh.’
‘She lost me at guinea pig cocktail,’ Sam said, with a slightly shy smile as she turned, holding up her glass. ‘Now all I can see is a small furry body with a paper umbrella in my glass.’
His heart did a bizarre flip: she wasn’t going to shoot him down. ‘Must be strong if you’re already seeing things.’ Despite his deliberately slow stroll, Sam could only have been seated at the bar moments before he came in. Yet half her creamy drink was already gone. Dutch courage? ‘Hit me with your best responsible service, then,’ he said to Gabrielle as he slid onto a stool alongside Sam. ‘What have you got?’
Gabrielle held up her phone. ‘I’ve got Google. What’s your poison? Sam’s gone for a very ladylike pina colada.’
‘You like walks in the rain, huh?’ he joked. Colour bloomed across Sam’s cheeks, and he could have bitten his tongue. He’d replayed their kiss often enough to recall every detail, including the soft rain that filtered through the leaves, the green canopy enclosing them like a snow globe filled with glitter.
Sam stared into the depths of her glass, then her lips lifted in a tiny smile. ‘I am definitely not into yoga,’ she said. ‘Far too unco.’
His shoulders eased, but he figured it best not to labour the joke any further. ‘Can you handle an espresso martini?’ he asked Gabrielle, leaning his elbows on the glossy red-gum slab.
She held up a vodka bottle. ‘Not enough caffeine in your day, Pierce? I swear, I’ve never known anyone throw it back like you do.’
As she measured out coffee liqueur, he let his gaze range the walls. In the corner to his right was an open fireplace, flanked by shelves of books, but every other wall held pictures and paintings. ‘Love what you’ve got happening with the artwork in here, Gabrielle.’
‘A couple of the oils are my own,’ she said proudly. ‘I find a bit of time during the down season to spend in the studio Hayden built me, across the courtyard.’ She tilted her head toward the rear of the building.
‘Not the photography, though? Cheers.’ He toasted her with his glass, then lifted it to indicate a set of sepia photos on the wall behind Sam.
Gabrielle flicked a glance that way, though her focus was on her phone, her hand drifting across bottles as she chose ingredients. ‘Oh, they’re the floods. Sam’s your girl for those details.’
‘For some reason they’re known locally as the fifty-year floods, but those are 1917, 1936 and 1956,’ Sam said quickly, as though glossing over Gabrielle’s statement, even though he wanted to investigate it: Sam’s your girl. ‘So there’s a bit of an issue with the math.’
‘Fair enough.’ He peered at one of the photos, charmed to find the setting familiar, despite the passage of time. ‘Is that the main street of Settlers Bridge?’ The entire lower storey of the two magnificent stone pubs at the river end of the street were hidden by a grey swirl of water.
‘Yep.’ Sam slid off her stool and crossed to the photo. She had to stretch to tap it. ‘That’s the fifty-six flood, the big one. And there’s my cafe, right here. You can see that was before the council made the gutters higher to protect the shops from future floods.’
‘Can you imagine how terrifying a flash flood would be? A force of nature, completely unstoppable,’ Pierce said, staring at the grainy image, envisaging the loss to the businesses as a wall of water rushed through the town.
Sam raked a hand through her hair, pushing it back as she shook her head. ‘It wasn’t a flash flood.’ She paused, eyeing him cautiously as though checking his reaction. ‘The water took a couple of years to come down the Darling from the big wet in the eastern states. From Wentworth, it all funnelled into the Murray, so the water level rose by the day down here. There was sandbagging and levees, but no stopping it.’
He gave a low whistle. ‘You’re not worried about the inn flooding, Gabrielle? That’d be an insurance nightmare. I guess these locks you were telling me about, Sam, are enough of a control?’
Sam lifted an eyebrow, as though surprised he remembered their conversation. ‘Unfortunately, the locks and weirs are designed more to keep the water interstate when the river’s low, rather than prevent flooding here. We’ve had a few big ones since the locks went in, but the fifty-six flood was the worst.’
‘To be honest, I’d be more nervous about the snakes coming down than the water,’ Gabrielle said with an exaggerated shudder. ‘I’d be back in the city faster than any flash flood.’
‘Snakes?’
Sam gave a chuckle. ‘In the big flood, one of the dairy farmers downriver at Meningie reported killing more than a thousand tiger snakes that washed up on his flats. And people were digging them out of their cellars and houses, along with the black mud, for months.’
‘Ah, the cellar. You said the one here was damaged by the flood?’ Pierce tossed back the rest of his martini.
Sam nodded. ‘The inn’s slightly more elevated, and the river broader here than at Settlers Bridge, so the water didn’t reach as high. But apparently the cellar turned into an indoor pool. Isn’t that right, Gabby?’
Gabrielle nodded. ‘It took weeks for the water to recede, then the mud had to be hauled out by the bucketful. Luckily, it didn’t get high enough to damage the floors.’ She stomped her foot on the boards, and he levered up to look over the bar.
To his surprise, Gabrielle was wearing well-polished farm boots—RM Williams, or something similar. He had rarely seen her not in heels, and certainly in nothing less than a fancy leather number. Of course, being Gabrielle, she still managed to rock a high-end country look. Sam, on the other hand, wore jeans, a fuzzy peach-coloured jumper and flat sneakers. With her bouncy blonde hair and fresh-scrubbed look, she appeared … wholesome.
Gabrielle lifted a tray of umbrella-decorated drinks. ‘We’re heading more into mulled wine weather, but I’m sure my guests won’t complain about free samples. Sam, why don’t you take Pierce down to the cellar and show him the other photos?’
‘Photos?’ He hadn’t mentioned his interest in Sam to Gabrielle—at least, not too obviously—but she couldn’t have been a better wingman even if he had.
‘Of the floods.’ Sam downed the rest of her drink, as though she needed fortification. ‘Gabby unearthed a stack of old pictures and had them blown up and framed to decorate the walls down there. Because everyone decorates their cellar, right?’ she teased.
‘That one was more Sharna’s idea,’ Gabrielle called back as she headed into the adjacent room where the low buzz of conversation was occasionally punctuated by laughter.
‘The cellar entrance is over here.’ Sam waved. ‘Through the old kitchen.’
‘There’s more than one?’ As always, the word kitchen caught his attention. Although Sam had it anyway.
She led the way. ‘The kitchen in the barn wing is a newish addition. The original one is tiny. Gabby uses it as a butler’s pantry.’ She indicated an unusually narrow plank door.
Pierce realised he would have to turn sideways to squeeze through. Which immediately made him think of Dante’s unnecessary penchant for doing the same. He grimaced. ‘Seems odd to put such tight access in a place this size.’
‘There’s an outside hatch.’ Sam’s voice echoed as she led the way down the stairs ahead of him. ‘The drays would pull up to unload the kegs of beer there. And Gabby used it to get out some of the large pieces of furniture that had been stored down here.’
She smelled like sunshine and sugar, he realised. ‘Guess the temperature would be stable, and perfect for storing wine.’ Pierce forced himself to focus on practicalities as they reached the bottom of the stairs. Sam had flipped a switch at the top, bathing the large room in a dim, golden glow. He couldn’t see her remarkable eyes, but the gloom made it permissible for him to move closer, as though the lack of light somehow also made it hard for him to hear.
Sam didn’t step back, but nor did she meet his gaze for more than a fraction of a second. ‘Gabby’s put in a decent wine cellar. Well, she tells me it’s decent, I don’t know a thing about wine.’ She gave a cute, dismissive lift of one shoulder.
Hell, he wanted to kiss her. It seemed pointless to drag up their previous kiss yet again, but he wasn’t sure how to move beyond his mistake unless Sam made it clear he hadn’t overstepped the boundaries.
She ran her tongue across her lips and tilted her head. For a wild moment he thought it was an invitation, but she flicked a hand to the left. ‘The wine wall is that way. The photos are over here. Gabby installed some kind of fancy light so the glare doesn’t reflect off the glass.’
He followed her across to the wall filled with enlargements of old photographs. No doubt they were fascinating. At least, they would be if he could fix his attention on them.
‘I like this one best,’ Sam said, tapping the gleaming timber frame around a sepia print of a side-wheeled paddle-steamer. It was moored at a dock busy with people and crowded with cargo, and the river behind was overhung with white clouds chugging from the funnels of passing boats. ‘It’s amazing how much life is packed into this single shot.’
‘It’s like a moment of time, preserved in amber,’ he murmured. ‘Or behind glass, in this case.’
She nodded, favouring him with a small smile—the ones he’d come to like best, the ones that seemed to say she got him and she liked that he got her. ‘So evocative of when the river was the highway, crowded with vessels steaming up and down. The riverside communities would have been vibrant.’ Her tone became wistful. ‘I like to imagine the whistle of the boats echoing from the cliffs as they steamed into town. There would have been a sense of adventure and expectation in every arrival. People would have flocked to the wharf for news and to trade.’ She screwed up her nose. ‘Now we all sit in isolation, staring at our phone screens for updates rather than making human connections.’
‘It’s odd how some things can conjure what almost feels like a memory, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Some photos carry their sense of place right into your soul.’
‘That’s exactly it!’ she said, reflexively reaching for him, her hand settling on his arm. ‘Taylor Hartmann—she’s the local doc—has a theory that some of us have an ancestral memory kind of thing happening. She said there’s research that suggests memories can be built into our DNA, so we actually inherit some of our ancestors’ experiences.’ She gave a light laugh, waving her hand as though dismissing her own words. ‘In any case, I like to think that’s what draws me to the river. My family have always lived hereabouts.’
‘From what I’ve seen of Settlers, you all have a lot more personal connection going on than happens in the city.’
‘Yeah, I guess smaller communities are definitely better than the larger ones.’ A frown creased her forehead. ‘Well, in some ways.’
‘Is that your paddle-wheeler?’ he asked, knowing it wasn’t, but seizing the excuse to reintroduce the subject as he surveyed the poster-sized photo. He felt he had an obligation to discuss his plans with Sam, almost as though he risked inadvertently stealing something.
The prow of the boat was crowded with waistcoat-wearing deckhands, some raising their caps or hats to the camera, others perched upon huge square blocks.
‘My paddle-wheeler?’ Sam snorted. ‘I wish. Maybe I should work on that whole “possession is nine-tenths of the law” thing, and camp out there? Then Ant would have to let me claim her.’ She tucked her hair behind her ear, giving him a better view of her profile. ‘I haven’t even been to see Pelicanet for weeks. Not since I moved out of here. I’m missing the river something awful.’
‘I thought you’d still be near the river?’ He managed to stop short of asking her address.
‘Nope. Had to head inland a bit. Beggars can’t be choosers, and all that. Besides, Wurruldi is the opposite direction to my grandparents’ farm.’ He seized that information and stored it for later. ‘So it’d be a bit odd to just turn up here to wander along Gabby’s riverfront to visit an old boat I don’t own, wouldn’t it?’
Pierce chuckled. ‘You probably should have mentioned that before. Because that’s exactly what I did. And I fell in love.’
Sam frowned, her blue eyes catching the light. He was fully aware of the double entendre in his words, and, yeah, it was a bit over the top. But he had to find a way to gauge her feelings. A way that didn’t involve manhandling her or stealing a kiss.
She nodded at the photo. ‘Well, then you’d probably know better than me that’s not the sweet little Pelicanet. See how it’s pulling two barges loaded with wool bales, as well as fully loaded on the front decks? Regardless of whether she was running on steam or after she was converted to diesel, poor Peli wouldn’t have had the power to haul that much. I often wonder whether she was named because she’s so ungainly. You know, she kind of looks like those pelicans we saw sitting on the tree stumps, the base too narrow for their bulk.’
‘Or maybe the owners were going for something of a cygnet to a swan kind of thing?’ he suggested, his arm brushing Sam’s side as they contemplated the photograph. ‘Perhaps they had big plans for improving her?’ He silently congratulated himself on the lead-in. The conversation was going exactly where he needed it to.
‘I think she’s perfect the way she is,’ Sam said with a slight frown.
Damn. That wasn’t going to help sell his idea.
‘Or at least,’ Sam added, flicking him a glance, ‘she was perfect, before a load of half-arsed attempts at renovations took away a lot of her original features. Poor thing really needs a rescue mission now.’
‘Have you ever considered doing that?’
She gave a soft, sad laugh. ‘I’ve never been in a position to do anything more than dream. And, for a long time, I didn’t even dare do that.’
‘Why?’ Pierce asked, almost holding his breath. He was usually excellent at keeping his interest at a surface level, pretending to listen without ever wanting to actually hear. Never before had he experienced such a desire—no a need—to know something. The sudden change from humour to sadness in Sam’s tone perfectly matched her enigmatic personality: one moment bubbly and extroverted, the next wary and uncertain. She was complex, and he wanted to unwrap her layers, discover her history, explore those dreams she didn’t dare allow. Why would someone living an idyllic country existence seem so introspective, almost fearful, sometimes?
‘Like the Facebook relationship status, it’s complicated,’ she replied, though he sensed she was trying to make light and deflect his questioning.
He frowned. ‘I don’t know if that’s actually a thing, is it? Can’t say I’ve ever seen it on anyone’s account. Have you?’
Sam shook her head. ‘Told you I don’t even have social media, so I’m the last person to check that with.’ She turned toward the wall of bottles. ‘So you got your business in Settlers sorted, then?’
He was momentarily surprised she had caught his passing reference to business. But then, it was a small town: he was kidding himself thinking she didn’t know what he was up to. It was a shame, though, as he had been hoping to surprise her. ‘Hands have been shaken, money has changed accounts. Deal done. But, honestly, you were my most pressing item of business today. Sam, I want to know that it’s all right between us. I want to know that kissing you was okay.’ It was in his nature to lay it all out on the table, but he wasn’t sure how she would respond.
Sam allowed her gaze to linger on him. ‘It was definitely okay.’
He tried not to exhale his relief too loudly.
‘But I don’t want you to do it again.’
His gut plummeted. ‘No?’
She shook her head, then took a step closer, the faint, sweet smell of baking wreathing them both. ‘No. I don’t like kissing. It’s—’ She made a quick, dismissive motion with one hand, a frown between her brows. ‘It’s too intimate.’
His fists clenched, resisting the rejection. ‘Isn’t that the whole idea?’ he asked carefully.
‘Okay, that probably wasn’t the best word. It’s too possessive. Possessive and meaningless. Whatever. I don’t like it.’ For the first time, her gaze held his unflinchingly. ‘But I do want to have sex with you.’
When he finally found his voice, he managed to say, ‘I like to think that the way I do it, that’s also generally pretty intimate.’
Her breath was warm on his neck. ‘Take it or leave it.’
Hell, he was only a man. Of course he was going to take it.
And maybe it would be enough.