Dreaming Of You: Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep / Outback Bachelor / The Hometown Hero Returns

‘Why?’ What the hell… ‘Because it was dangerous, that’s why.’

‘Not that.’ She waved an imperious hand in the air. ‘Why is it your company that is doing the work?’

Because Richard had asked him to.

Because he’d wanted to prove that the past had no hold over him any more.

She folded her arms. ‘I should imagine the last thing you wanted was to clap eyes on me again.’

She was right about that.

She stuck out a defiant hip. ‘In fact, I’d guess that the last thing you want is me living in Clara Falls again.’

It took a moment for the import of her words to hit him. When they did, he clenched a fist so tight it started to shake. She glanced at his fist, then back into his face. She cocked an eyebrow. She didn’t unsay her words.

‘Are you insinuating that I’d use my position as a builder to sabotage your shop?’ He tried to remember the last time he’d wanted to throttle someone.

‘Would you? Have you? I mean… There’s that travesty of a sign, for a start. Now the delay. What would you think? You and Gordon Sears could be like that—’ she waved two crossed fingers under his nose ‘—for all I know.’

‘God, Jaz! I know it’s been eight years, but can you seriously think I would stoop to that?’

She raked him from the top of his head to his boot laces with her hot gaze—blue on the way down, green when she met his eyes again on the way up— and it felt as if she actually placed her hands on his body and stroked him. His heart started to thump. She moistened her lips. It wasn’t a nervous gesture, more…an assessing one. But it left a shine on her lips that had him clenching back a groan.

‘Business is business,’ he ground out. ‘I don’t have to like who I’m working for.’

Was it his imagination or did she pale at his words?

Her chin didn’t drop. ‘So you’re saying this is just another job to you?’

He hesitated a moment too long.

Jaz snorted and pushed past him, charged back down to the sales counter and stood squarely behind it, as if she wanted to place herself out of his reach. ‘Thank you for the work you’ve done so far, Connor, but your services are no longer required.’

He stalked down to the counter, reached across and gripped her chin in his fingers, forced her gaze to his. ‘Fine! You want the truth? This isn’t just another job. What happened to your mother… It made me sick to my stomach. We…someone in town…we should’ve paid more attention, we should’ve sensed that—’

He released her and swung away. She smelt like a wattle tree in full bloom—sweet and elusive. It was too much.

When he glanced back at her, her eyes had filled with tears. She touched her fingers to her jaw where he’d held her. Bile rose up through him. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—’ He gestured futilely with his hand. ‘Did I hurt you?’

‘No.’

She shook her head, her voice low, and he watched her push the tears down with the sheer force of her will…way down deep inside her like she used to do. Suddenly he felt older than his twenty-six years. He felt a hundred.

‘I’m sorry I doubted your integrity.’

She issued her apology with characteristic sincerity and speed. He dragged a hand down his face. The Jaz of old might’ve been incapable of fidelity, but she’d been equally incapable of malice.

If she’d asked him to forgive her eight years ago, he would have. In an instant.

He shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘Am I rehired?’

She straightened, moistened her lips and nodded. He didn’t know how he could tell, but this time the gesture was nervous.

‘You won’t find it hard coping with my presence around the place for the next fortnight?’ Some devil prompted him to ask.

‘Of course not!’

He could tell that she was lying.

‘We’re both adults, aren’t we? What’s in the past is in the past.’

He wanted to agree. He opened his mouth to do precisely that, but the words refused to come.

Jaz glanced at him, moistened her lips again. ‘It’s going to take a fortnight? So long?’

‘Give or take a couple of days. And that’s working as fast as I can.’

‘I see.’

He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets. ‘I’ll get back to work on that sign then, shall I?’

The door clanged shut behind Connor with a finality that made Jaz want to burst into tears.

Crazy. Ridiculous.

Her knees shook so badly she thought she might fall. Very carefully, she lowered herself to the stool behind the counter. Being found slumped on the floor was not the look she was aiming for, not on her first day.

Not on any day.

She closed her eyes, dragged in a deep breath and tried to slow her pulse, quieten the blood pounding in her ears. She could do this. She could do this. She’d known her first meeting with Connor would be hard. She hadn’t expected to deal with him on her first day though.

Hard? Ha! Try gruelling. Exhausting. Fraught.

She hadn’t known she would still feel his pain as if it were her own. She hadn’t known her body would remember…everything. Or that it would sing and thrum just because he was near.

She hadn’t known she’d yearn for it all again— their love, the rightness of being with him.

Connor had shown her the magic of love, but he’d shown her the other side of love too—the blackness, the ugliness…the despair. It had turned her into another kind of person—an angry, destructive person. It had taken her a long time to conquer that darkness. She would never allow herself to become that person again. Never. And the only way she could guarantee that was by keeping Connor at arm’s length. Further, if possible.

But it didn’t stop her watching him through the shop window as he worked on her sign.

She opened the shop, she served customers, but that didn’t stop her noticing how efficiently he worked either, the complete lack of fuss that accompanied his every movement. It reminded her of how he used to draw, of the times they’d take their charcoals and sketch pads to one of the lookouts.

She’d sit on a rock hunched over her pad, intent on capturing every single detail of the view spread out before her, concentrating fiercely on all she saw. Connor would lean back against a tree, his sketch pad propped against one knee, charcoal lightly clasped, eyes half-closed, and his fingers would play across the page with seemingly no effort at all.

Their high school art teacher had given them identical marks, but Jaz had known from the very first that Connor had more talent in his little finger than she possessed in her whole body. She merely drew what was there, copied what was in front of her eyes. Connor’s drawings had captured something deeper, something truer. They’d captured an essence, the hidden potential of the thing. Connor had drawn the optimistic future.

His hair glittered gold in the sun as he stepped down the ladder to retrieve something from his van.