Burning Love Read online

  Warily, he watched her rummaging through the contents of the fridge. Something definitely was bugging her tonight. He knew she liked to keep her feelings to herself, but he’d known her long enough now to know when she was adding another layer of veneer to her shell, and he wasn’t convinced he didn’t have something to do with her edginess.

  She pulled out a container. “How does leftover Mee Goreng sound?”

  “Perfect. You know it’s my favourite.”

  He finished off his beer, while she scooped the noodle and prawn dish into bowls and warmed them in the microwave. She had a way of moving he would never tire of. He was no kind of poet, but it occurred even to him that watching her move was like watching silk in motion. Fluid. Graceful. And as elegant as the stylised phoenix on her shoulder. The artist must have been a master to capture the intent in just a few curved lines of ink.

  He’d seen plenty of fireys with phoenix tattoos, usually rising from the flames, strong and proud – even Dare had one that just about circled her body – and there the meaning was obvious. But he’d never thought to ask Ava what the tattoo on her shoulder meant to her. He’d figured she’d picked it out from a book of designs because she’d liked it.

  Stupid of him, really, but then he hadn’t known her beyond the superficial then. Now he knew there was nothing superficial about her at all.

  And now he was curious.

  “It’s a pretty common tatt for fireys to get – a phoenix, I mean,” he said, fishing. “You see a lot of them around.”

  “Oh?” she said, seeming only half interested. “I didn’t know.”

  “A lot of the guys get one after a major fire, like a badge of honour or a public statement that they’ve come through the worst that life can throw at them.”

  She nodded. “Like I said, it should be something important. My father forbade me from getting a tattoo, so, of course, I was determined to get one. That was important to me. Can you get the cutlery?”

  He dug out cutlery from the drawer and pulled another beer from the fridge while the microwave hummed away, the kitchen filling with the scent of garlic and spices as the machine warmed its contents. Outside the windows, the sky was inky blue, a bright moon turning the trees to dark silhouettes, while inside, his stomach growled appreciatively, and not for the first time he considered himself lucky that he’d come into Ava’s orbit. Stunning looking woman, fantastic lover, and exceptional cook. If a man hadn’t sworn off marriage for life, he could do a lot worse.

  But then, there was so much about her he didn’t know. So much she didn’t share. She dropped tiny glimpses into her past life like bread crumbs scattered along a path. Once upon a time, he wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Now he felt shut out. Excluded. And that was nuts given their relationship was all about the sex, surely?

  They sat down opposite each other—the tabletop between them hewn from another slab of the same timber that graced the benchtops—Caleb feeling more unsettled and off-balance than he’d been in a long time, and wondering if today’s crash had messed with his head more than he’d realised.

  He took a forkful of the warmed up Mee Goreng and flavours exploded on his tongue, and he forgot all about feeling off-balance, and realised how hungry he was. “This is amazing,” he said, between mouthfuls.

  “It’s hot enough?”

  And whether she meant warmed up in the microwave enough or chilli hot, it made no difference to his answer. “It’s perfect. You know, you’re a genius in the kitchen. Not to mention the bedroom for that matter.” Then he remembered where they’d just made love. “Outside the bedroom, come to think of it.”

  The smile in her eyes and her upturned lips put much needed balance back into his off-kilter world. “You know how to make a girl feel good.”

  He raised his beer in a toast to her. “It’s the least I can do. A woman like you deserves to feel good.”

  Ava watched the spinning fan above her bed. She wasn’t so sure Caleb would think that if he knew exactly what kind of woman she was – and what kind of woman she’d been. What would he think she’d deserve then? To feel good, or to feel the weight of her sordid past around her neck like the slumbering millstone that it was. She closed her eyes, feeling the beast awaken and stir inside her, but unable to block out the thoughts in her head, her mind refusing to rest even as their bodies hummed their way down after another lovemaking session. This time had been nothing like that first, frenetic act. This time had been slow to build and sensual, a pleasurable melding of the carnal with sweet, as they took their time with each other’s bodies, took the time to relish every dip and curve of each other, took the time to savour the slide of skin against skin. Even so, when they’d made it to those giddy, teetering heights and she’d come again, it had been with that spellbinding show of light against shadow, and making her wonder, when she was capable of logical thought again, was she really ready to see this end?

  No.

  She squeezed her eyes more tightly. She liked sex too much. She’d liked the sex almost from the start. Liked the power it had given her over the men who’d visited her bed, even when they thought they were the ones being pleasured.

  She liked sex too much to give it up now, on a whim.

  A woman like her? Restlessly, she tumbled in his arms again. What would he think a woman like her deserved?

  “Aren’t you tired?” he asked, as she tried and failed to settle.

  “Not really.” She was warm in the after sex glow, sure, but her thoughts were cold, like the millstone around her neck.

  “Are you thinking about your work?”

  “Yes,” she answered at length, because there was no way she could tell him what she was really thinking.

  “What is it you’re working on?” he asked.

  “A still life for the exhibition.” She shook her head against his shoulder, breathing deep of his underarm scent in the process. Relishing it. There was something about the scent of a strong, clean man. Something honest and raw, and adding another texture to whatever made a man whole. She sighed. “But it’s not cooperating.”

  He kissed her hair. “How so?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders against him. “There’s something unbalanced about it. I worked for hours today, but I just can’t see what’s wrong with it.”

  He stroked her arm with his hand. “Is that what’s bugging you?”

  She looked up at him warily. “Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just this feeling – like something’s out of whack. I was worried that—”

  “Worried that what?”

  “God,” he sighed, rubbing his forehead with his free hand. “Nothing. I didn’t have a good day. I’m not reading anything particularly well at the moment.”

  She exhaled then, and pushed herself higher to kiss his stubbled jaw. “Yes, it’s the painting. I hate it when it’s not working.” And that wasn’t entirely a lie, because the painting was lodged there too, in that place in her head where she could find questions but no answers.

  They lay quietly nestled together, her leg wound over his, his strong arms surrounding her, while her mind continued to tick over. How could she feel so safe, lying here next to Caleb, while at the same time, she felt like she was teetering on the brink of something dangerous? Was the fact it was now getting on for twelve months of shared nights and shared bodies the reason for thinking it must end?

  Twelve months of casual hookups, that started in mutual lust and ended in mutual pleasure that sent fireworks spinning through her body and mind.

  She couldn’t give that up on a whim.

  But twelve months – that was beginning to sound permanent...

  She sensed the change in him, the slowing of his breathing, the muscles of the arms around her suddenly relaxing. Heavier in sleep. She rested her hand on his chest, felt its even rise and fall, his wiry chest hair tickling her palm, an unfamiliar forest around fingers grown up with hairless Asian skin.

  Textu
re.

  The man was a walking canvas.

  Her mind drifted to her troubling painting of the blue and white jug and the lemons and the glossy backdrop, the colours reflected in the snowy white yet still not working, and in her mind her random thoughts merged and coalesced and like a bolt the answer hit her.

  Of course! Carefully, she eased out from under his arms. He stirred but didn’t waken as she slipped from the bed and into her artist shirt and padded barefoot to her studio. She snapped on the lights and night turned into day. In the centre of the room stood her easel bearing her problematic canvas while adjacent sat an old leather chesterfield where she flopped when she was too tired to make it to bed. Canvases lined the two walls, mostly finished in readiness for her upcoming exhibition, the wall of windows overlooking the valley made up the third and the fourth comprised shelving filled with paints and art books and boxes and boxes of stuff that she’d kept because it might be useful some day – and in one of them...

  It was in an old vintage cardboard suitcase that she found it, folded into a square and tucked away because one day she might need it. She’d found it in a fabric shop in a box of remnants and, while it had been the shifting colour of the piece that had caught her eye, it was the compulsion to reach out and touch the piece of fabric that had sealed the deal.

  Reverently she unfolded it, feeling a frisson of excitement as the midnight blue fabric sprang to life in the light. How had she forgotten it until now? She palmed her hand against the short dense pile, put it to her cheek and felt its velvet touch and felt that same excitement she’d had the day she’d found it.

  Texture.

  She looked at the canvas she’d been struggling with, of her favourite jug filled with a posy of plump yellow lemons from a neighbour’s garden and it was so blindingly obvious now why it was never going to work against a stark white background.

  It took the best part of half an hour reworking the still life, positioning the fabric just right, so just like the hills and valleys around her, the light shone or was swallowed up in the shadowy depths. Until finally she was happy and she picked up her paintbrush and got to work.

  Chapter Three

  Caleb’s phone woke him in the predawn grey. He blinked into wakefulness as he groped for it, suddenly aware of the cool of the sheets beside him and the absence of Ava. Painting, he figured she’d be, up with the dawn no doubt, as she often seemed to be on the occasional nights he stayed over.

  He rubbed his eyes as he checked the screen, saw it was his station officer calling, and picked up. “Mike? What’s happening?”

  “The baby,” he said, and Caleb’s stomach clenched because straight away he knew what baby he was calling about. “We’ve just got word from the hospital, it’s a boy and he’s doing well.”

  Caleb put a hand to his head as he let go a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. “That’s good.” At least they’d managed to salvage something from the tragedy that had been yesterday. “Real good.”

  “And mate, get this. The father wants to meet you.”

  “What?”

  “He heard what happened. He reckons if you hadn’t been there wrangling those Jaws of Life in time, he’d be looking at buying two coffins right now, instead of one. He wants to thank you personally. Not yet, the baby’s still in hospital and the father wants to get over the funeral and everything, but he said he’d call when he’s ready.”

  Caleb closed his eyes and thought about a baby who’d never know his mother and a man who’d lost his wife yesterday, and who wanted to thank the man who, in spite of his best efforts, had watched the wife die and hadn’t been able to do a damn thing to prevent it.

  Christ. What a job. Because, while he knew he’d done everything possible to extract the woman from the wreckage in the fastest possible time and the best possible result, he also knew he’d be forever plagued with thoughts that things might have ended up better if he’d done things differently.

  “Caleb? You there?”

  His voice, when it came, was thick with the tangle of emotions. “I’m here.”

  “Good. Only I see you’re down to volunteer on the barbeque at the CFS stall at the Ashton Show next weekend? You still good for a couple of hours in the morning taking care of the sausage sizzle?”

  “You wouldn’t be trying to change the subject, would you?”

  There was a moment’s hesitation, before, “Well, yeah. Maybe.”

  And Caleb snorted and thanked Christ for mates who knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of news like Mike had just delivered, bittersweet news that reminded them all over again about the tragedy of the day before, and how to give them something else to think about.

  He put down his mobile and lay back in bed for a minute, listening to the chorus of birdsong in the surrounding bush, the magpies and parrots and kookaburras all trying to outdo each other in their enthusiasm to greet the new day.

  So it was almost time for the local hills show again? Ava would be there too, painting kids’ faces to raise funds for charity, like she’d been doing the first time they’d met. Heck, was it a year ago already? Bloody hell, that had gone quickly. He’d bet neither one of them had thought they’d still be seeing each other after this long.

  He had Richo to thank for meeting Ava, not that he was going to about to tell him any time soon, because then he’d have to tell him about Ava, and Richo would bang on about it when there was really nothing to tell. But it had been Richo who’d volunteered to help out the CFS stand at the show a couple of years back, and then last year he’d roped Caleb in to help with the sausage sizzle, to give the local CFS guys a chance to spray a few hoses and give the local kids a ride around the footy oval on their appliances.

  Local kids with faces painted, so they looked like butterflies or spidermen or cats or dogs. Faces painted by Ava. And, in a lull in the traffic, he and his mates on the barbeque had drawn straws to see who should get his face painted to drum up business. He’d drawn the short straw, and his colleagues had happily sent him off, but as it had turned out, he’d won the best prize of all, because he’d sat there with his eyes closed and every stroke of her brush had been a direct hit to his groin.

  By the end of it, he’d been nursing a hard-on so debilitating, he’d had to stay sitting down and making small talk about the weather for fifteen minutes while she painted the next kid’s face.

  Butterflies, he’d had to tell himself, think about butterflies or fairies, pixies or kittens. Told himself to forget about the whisper soft yet carnal stroke of her brush on his skin.

  And afterwards, when she was packing up her table and chairs and paints in the back of her small hatchback, he’d dropped over and asked for her number, and she’d told him she wasn’t looking for a relationship. “Neither am I,” he’d said. “So how about we settle for sex?”

  She’d cocked her head and asked him if he was always this direct, and he’d realised, hell no. Which was probably what had got him stuck in his go-nowhere marriage for long after its use by date, and why he was doing things differently from now on. Forget happy ever after, he’d figured. He’d settle for happy every now and then.

  And so far, it was proving to be the right decision.

  Somewhere across the valley, an old man koala was grunting up a storm, advertising his machismo. Damn straight, Caleb thought, looking at the sheet tenting over his own equipment. He only had to think about Ava to get a hard-on. He pulled on his jeans to go find her.

  The dark layers of the sky were peeling back to shades of pink and blue, the air crisp and cool outside. He sniffed at the air, instinctively testing for smoke and finding none, but Ava he found right where he suspected he would. She was in the studio feverishly working, her painter’s shirt tail barely covering her naked ass, her golden skinned legs long and bare below, and swaying evocatively this way and that as she worked. He didn’t interrupt her. He knew better than that, at least before he came bearing a pot of coffee.

  Ten minutes later he
was back. Her movements were slower now, her brush adding tiny detail after detail, before she took a step back, looked at her still life arrangement and the canvas on the easel, and put down her brush.

  “Good morning,” he said. “How’s it going?”

  She spun around, the golden highlights in her eyes almost luminescent, her whole face lit up. “I think I got it!” she said. “It was flat before, and lifeless, but then I worked out what was wrong.”

  He moved closer to study the painting behind her, the jug and the brightly coloured lemons against a rich velvet backdrop that rippled with light and looked for all the world that if you just reached out a finger, you would feel the softness of its pile.

  “How do you do that?” he asked, feeling genuine awe and wonder. “How do you turn a two-dimensional canvas into something that looks so realistic?”

  She shrugged. “It takes time, but I’d done the painstaking work earlier – it was the background I realised wasn’t working.” She rubbed her hands together as she surveyed her canvas once more. “You made me realise what was missing.”

  “Me?”

  She turned back to him and damned if there wasn’t something wicked in her smile. “To be more precise, it was the smell of your underarms and the curl of your chest hair around my fingers that made me see it.”

  He looked down at his chest, took a mock sniff under one arm. “What?”

  She shook her head, still smiling, “Don’t ask,” she said, as she curled herself catlike down on the old leather chesterfield, her legs tucked beneath her, the shirt rising at the sides to expose the glorious curve of her naked hip. God, could she do nothing that didn’t make him think of silk and sex? “Just pour me that coffee.”

  He did just that, saying, “I swear I will never understand women.”

  “You’re not supposed to. That would take all the fun out of it.”

  He handed her the cup of the steaming brew and she put it to her nose and inhaled deeply, taking the tiniest of sips before resting it down on the table alongside to cool.