Luca was jogging up the sand from the water, dripping wet, looking like he’d just stepped out of a Dolce & Gabbana advertising campaign. Every muscle was moving in perfect rhythm. His black swimming shorts were clinging to his thighs, and his dazzling smile lit up his face and sent a jolt of heat right through her.
‘I thought it was you.’ He stopped a metre in front of her. Droplets of water drizzled down his sculpted torso. And damn it, there was a tattoo. Of course there was. That’s what young people did these days, right? Some kind of vine snaked its way from his hip to his armpit on his right side. She dragged her eyes to his face. His eyelashes looked like a supermodel’s and his brown eyes smiled down at her.
‘Long time no see,’ she said with a forced laugh.
Someone, or something, was testing her. Maybe it was Summer and her damn angels.
First, her shop.
Now, her very womanhood and professionalism were being challenged. How on earth could she look Luca in the eye and have a regular conversation when he was standing in front of her, wet, half naked and looking like a football player who’d been dipped in a café latte?
Two milliseconds and her pulse quickened.
‘It’s fantastic out there, isn’t it?’ He was slightly breathless but looked completely energised at the same time. ‘Did you swim?’ He looked down at her black swimsuit. It was a one-piece but Stella knew the very low cut of the fabric between her breasts took it squarely out of sensible and into sexy. And she noticed that he noticed.
She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. She knew what that did to her breasts and suddenly didn’t care. Perhaps she was challenging him too. ‘Me? No, I just floated. I’m too exhausted to swim and I needed to cool off. What about you?’
‘I walked up there on the path and dived in from the jetty, swam right across Horseshoe Bay.’
‘Oh. That’s quite a swim.’ And it explained his build. There were no tan lines on his upper body. His muscled arms led to strong shoulders and there was dark hair in the dip between his pecs. He wasn’t beefy, more defined and toned. He was clearly built for endurance, not speed.
Put the young man down.
Except she really, really didn’t want to.
‘It’s been such a hot day. It’s nice to cool off before you drive up to Adelaide, huh?’
He met her gaze, direct and inviting. ‘I’m staying down here during the week while I’m working on your place.’
Stella really didn’t need to know that. ‘You are?’
‘I don’t think I mentioned it. I’m crashing at Anna and Joe’s place at Middle Point during your job. It’ll save me time. It’s only five minutes away and they’re up in the city during the week, so it’s empty.’
‘It’s a nice place.’ Stella knew it. Joe and Anna’s weekender wasn’t beachfront property, like the enormous houses along millionaires’ row on the beachfront. Joe’s childhood home was a few blocks back from the esplanade, but it was up on the rise and had incredible views up and down the south coast, from the Coorong to Victor Harbor. Built in the 1970s, it more closely resembled a suburban home than a beach shack, but it clearly suited Anna and Joe as they commuted back and forth to the city.
Luca looked up the beach to the houses overlooking the bay. ‘You live nearby?’
Stella noticed he still didn’t seem to have a towel. ‘Just around the corner from the shop, actually.’
‘Yeah?’ he asked, surprised, propping his hands on his hips. She glanced down at his tanned fingers, noticed the way they were the same colour as those clearly defined muscles low on his sides.
‘But I know Middle Point. I lived there when I was a kid, before I moved away to Sydney after high school.’
‘Sydney, huh? Why’d you come back?’
Stella looked out to the ocean. She’d been thinking about that a lot lately, with the fire and starting again and Ian and Lee moving away and starting their lives over too. Why had she come back? Why hadn’t she just started again somewhere on the east coast? She’d started to think it was because this part of the world was the last place she’d been truly happy, the place she’d finally found a home, and someone who loved her. But she wasn’t revealing that secret to anyone.
‘Things happened.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe I really am a small-town girl after all.’
Luca chuckled. He lifted a hand and pushed the dripping hair from his eyes. ‘Nothing wrong with that.’
‘You’ll like Middle Point. The beach and the surf are incredible. You know Julia? Lizzie’s best friend? We worked together at the Middle Point general store when we were in high school.’
‘Nice,’ he said, and he sounded distracted.
When she noticed his gaze dip down to the curve of her breasts, she picked up her towel. All the relief she’d felt after that refreshing dip had gone. She felt as tight as a wire.
‘I’m heading home. I’ll see you tomorrow at the shop.’
‘’Night,’ he replied.
Stella opened her front door and walked inside her little cottage. Once she’d showered and changed, she made herself some dinner and ate it with a glass of wine while some generic English crime drama on the television played in the background. Her great-aunt Karen had loved those shows, in which villages and country manors became hotbeds of crime and murder, and in an instant, Stella was spun right back into her history.
Not for the first time, Stella thought about where she might have ended up if it hadn’t been for Auntie Karen. The choices were too terrible to even contemplate, but they were always about living in a stranger’s home. Always someone else’s. Never her own.
That’s why her cottage was the most precious place in the world to her.
At the age of ten, an anxious and frightened little girl had started over. In Middle Point, with Auntie Karen, Stella was able to leave her past behind and create a whole new life for herself: one in which her parents weren’t criminals and hopeless drug addicts; one in which she didn’t live in a dilapidated rental, a desert where lawn should have been, a front door of flapping flywire, and a backyard full of junk—another house her parents had trashed. Her childhood, although it had never felt like one to Stella, had been filled with chaos, love and neglect, in unequal measure, and she always remembered it in snatches.
Every now and then, something would trigger a memory. The smell of toasted cheese sandwiches took her back to that kitchen, where there were dishes stacked high and filthy until she washed them, standing on a plastic chair to reach the sink. Driving past a neglected front yard prompted rolling recollections of bare mattresses and no curtains and cockroaches and filth and litter and pizza boxes and empty bottles and syringes. Her parents had inhabited a subterranean world of drugs and welfare and dysfunction and evictions and had dragged their only child into the mire, too.
Sometimes, when her parents were clean and remained connected with social services, things improved. That meant there was milk in the fridge, loaves of bread on the bench and bananas in a bowl. She shivered at what the memories still did to her: what kind of life had she had that a banana seemed precious?
School had been the only place Stella could escape. But it became a jail of sorts too. At ten, she was already aware that she was different, that other people didn’t live like she did. She got a bit obsessed with the prettiest girl in her class, and not because she was pretty, but because she had the best clothes and a seemingly endless array of shoes. Stella only had two pairs: Dunlop volleys bought from the local discount department store and a cheap pair of hard plastic thongs. That was it. No pretty party shoes or sandals for summer. She wore T-shirts that got shorter the taller she grew. They weren’t even hand-me-downs because there was no one to inherit them from. It was school and home in her raggedy clothes and that was it.
The words of that prettiest girl still haunted her. ‘You wear those shoes every day. Don’t you have any other ones?’
That had been her life.
When her father was sent to jail, a spotlight was finally shone on the chaos at home. When her mother, consumed with addiction and grief and chaos and her own demons, tried to kill herself with an overdose of paracetamol (it was cheap and readily available), Stella was removed from her care.
Stella didn’t even see her mother in hospital. She was picked up from school by a social worker and delivered into the temporary care of a foster family. They were kind. Old and slightly religious, but Stella didn’t mind that. She had a bed with fresh sheets and their house was clean and tidy and she re-imagined the experience for herself as a little holiday. And although this was temporary—her father was in jail and her mother was god knew where—she quickly felt herself relax. She never went back to that school and never saw the prettiest girl in her class ever again.
Social services cast a wide net and it only took two weeks for them to find her mother’s aunt, Karen. She’d been living in a caravan in Queensland, and as soon as she heard about Stella, she hitched it to her car and drove all the way down to Adelaide, swooping in, picking her up, and creating a new life for both of them in Middle Point.
Auntie Karen was wonderful and alternative but knew the importance of rules to a child who’d had none, and with that kind of care Stella thrived. She pretended her parents were dead and started again. She went to the local primary school and had a perfect attendance record. Karen bought her new clothes, new to Stella anyway, and she thought she’d died and gone to heaven when her auntie took her to the shoe shop—the shoe shop!—to buy a new pair of runners. Stella couldn’t get over how white the laces were, or how springy the sneakers felt to walk in: like stepping on clouds.
Just one simple pair of shoes. One simple pair of shoes that looked like every other kid’s shoes.
Auntie Karen loved her; Stella never doubted it. From the first time they met, when the older woman with the long grey plait halfway down her back held her and whispered, ‘You’re going to live with me now, sweetheart,’ Stella knew she would be safe. Karen smelt like cigarettes. She was soft and a little cuddly and wore kaftans and very sensible sandals. She’d embraced the 1970s and had never really let go. She’d never married, didn’t have any children and hated animals. Living with Karen, even though it was in the caravan park, was like exhaling after ten years of holding her breath. Finally, Stella had a place to call home.
Years later, she was told that her mother hadn’t ever wanted to take her back, even when she had recovered from her suicide attempt. The last information Stella had from her social workers was that her mother had gone to Darwin and had married someone else. Stella’s father was killed over a drug debt a few years after getting out of jail. When Stella found out, she couldn’t make herself care. That life felt like so long ago; so easy to forget now she was safe with Auntie Karen. She was loved. Little Stella Ryan was finally happy.
Mouse jumped on the table and sniffed her dinner plate.
‘I’d better feed you, hadn’t I?’
Once that was done, Stella went to bed, feeling exhausted and empty. In the darkness, in the contemplative time between awake and asleep, she tried to picture their faces. Her mother and father. She drew a blank. She couldn’t remember them anymore.
* * *
There was only one place to be on a Wednesday night in Middle Point and that was at the pub. When Luca pushed open the heavy wooden front doors, he moved through the small front-bar crowd and quickly ordered a beer.
He didn’t plan on eating out every night while he was staying at Anna and Joe’s place, but he didn’t feel like sitting at home alone thinking about Stella.
‘Hey, Luca,’ Lizzie Blake called at him from across the room. She was sitting at a table with her husband, Dan McSwaine. He picked up his beer and happily joined them. He’d grown to know them a little, given that Lizzie’s brother was, every way but legally, his brother-in-law. Did that make Lizzie his sister-in-law? Not officially.
‘Hi, you two.’ He kissed Lizzie on the cheek and shook hands with Dan.
‘Pull up a pew,’ Dan said. ‘Stella called and told me you’re doing the work on her shop. How’s it all going?’ He sipped his beer and looked at Luca with a knowing smile.
‘Yeah, good. Why are you looking at me like that?’
Dan chuckled. ‘Glad she chose you and not us to do the work. I know what she’s like. Picky. Stubborn. Bossy.’
‘Oh, that’s hilarious,’ Lizzie said as she smacked Dan on the shoulder. ‘If she were a bloke you’d say she was determined and had a fine eye for detail.’
‘Oh no,’ Luca said with a wink at Dan. ‘She’s picky and stubborn all right.’
‘Don’t tell me you’re butting heads with her already?’
Luca sipped his beer and looked out the windows to the ocean. The place sat right atop the best spot in Middle Point and Luca could see house lights shimmering and flickering along the coastline. He needed a moment to think about what he was doing with Stella Ryan. Were they butting heads? He didn’t know what the hell was going on. But it was something more than disagreements about glaziers or skylights and accounts.
‘The Boss and I have a very good working relationship,’ he said.
‘Very discreet,’ Lizzie said with a smile.
‘“The Boss”, huh?’ Dan nudged his wife. ‘I remember what happened around here the last time a woman pulled the strings on a renovation.’
‘And what was that?’ Luca looked from Lizzie to Dan.
‘We’re what happened,’ she said. ‘Dan and I worked together on The Market project out the back. You should come on Sunday morning. It’s fantastic. We have stalls and we make breakfast and there’s amazing coffee.’
‘Sounds great but I’ll be back in Adelaide for the weekends. I’m only staying at Anna and Joe’s during the week. I’ve just bought a house and I’m trying to renovate that too. Or at least I was until I started Stella’s job.’
‘Really? That’s amazing,’ Lizzie said. ‘At your age.’
His age? That again? What was it with these women?
‘You’ve got a lot going on,’ Dan said. ‘Are you planning to do your house all yourself?’
‘As much as I can. I’m moving in this weekend and then I’ll get stuck into it when I’m finished with Stella.’
When I’m finished with Stella. The words hit him and he didn’t like how they made him feel.
‘I used to commute too, but I’ve got news for you, mate. There’s something about this place. Once it gets its hooks into you, you can’t leave. You’ll never want to leave.’
‘It’s true,’ Lizzie added with a grin. ‘Hey, are you here to eat, Luca? We’re about to order.’
‘Yeah.’ Luca upended his beer. ‘What’s good?’
While Lizzie and Dan made their choices, Luca thought about his life in the city. Everything was falling into place for him there, with his business and his new home. His life was definitely somewhere else. This favour he was doing for Anna? It was a one-off.
There was no way anything at the beach would get any hooks into him or make him want to stay.