Her Galahad

She flushed in the darkness. “You want to compare notes? I was carjacked today by somebody I thought was dead, with a Ripley’s story about my family for his excuse! If I’d had time to get you out of the car I wouldn’t be here now!”

He looked at her. “If you didn’t believe me you wouldn’t be here, and neither would I. You’d have shot me.”

A sudden jab of anguish landed over her heart, robbing her of breath. Was he right? “I’m still thinking about it. I don’t shoot people without at least giving them a hearing. I still have the gun…and you have tonight to prove you’re telling me the truth.”

He held up a hand. “I get the picture. We’re both overwhelmed and stressed now. Can we call a truce and get the flashlight?”

“Fine.” In moments she handed him the torch. “I have aspirin, antiseptic and bandages. I’ll bandage your wounds inside.”

“Thanks.” He flicked it on, and led the way in.

When the light came on, Jirrah sighed in relief. “Thank God for that. The last thing I needed was to wrestle with that crazy generator tonight. You hungry?”

Tessa looked at the house, with its rough walls, unfinished windows and loamy scent of damp earth rising from between the imperfectly laid floorboards, and frowned. Then she noticed a wood carving set on an upturned crate. An enormous kangaroo made of a deep red eucalypt wood, one of a pair. The other stood on a similar platform in a shadowy corner. “These are magnificent—exquisite pieces,” she said softly, wondering at the incongruity of their surreal and radiant beauty living within the dark shadows of this sad, neglected shack. “They’re so real they look like they’re actually in flight.”

He nodded. “I like them. You hungry?” he repeated.

Looking at him she saw the pain, the total exhaustion, and realized the toll the past few hours had taken on him, driving over unlit roads after a brush with death. “I keep tinned food in my van. I’ll heat some up while you rest. You want coffee?”

“Sounds great.” He fell back on an old brown-and-black striped sofa, just about the ugliest she’d ever seen. He closed his eyes—one eye purple and contorted with swelling.

She left the room, disturbed by the sight of him looking like that. He’d been hurt because he’d come to find her.

Moments later, she touched his shoulder. “Here.” She handed him two tablets and a glass of water.

“Thanks.” He downed the tablets, and closed his eyes again.

Never anybody’s cook, it took Tessa almost half an hour to get the food heating in the gorgeous but impractical Kookaburra wood-fire oven. Soot striped her face and top from trying to light it. By the time she’d cleaned herself up the coffee was cool in the Bodum plunger—so he was still a fresh-coffee addict—and she had to make it fresh. “Where the hell’s a microwave when you need one?” she muttered, dumping the coffee grinds out the window, since there was no drain in the kitchen.

Why did Jirrah live in a hovel like this? If she could just have a week here, he wouldn’t have to. It would be a home—

Don’t think like that. Don’t go there. That’s in the past.

She returned to the living room with her first-aid kit.

A small open fire blazed behind a grate in the corner. Jirrah lay sprawled on the long, ugly sofa in a deep sleep, looking so much like her David she ached with it.

He’s Jirrah. David’s gone. This man is no more the boy I loved than I am the girl he married.

Fighting a second wave of grief over him, she put the water and bandages on the crate before the sofa and tended to the cuts on his arms and chest through the gaping tear in his T-shirt.

The first time she’d touched a man’s body in over two years, and she didn’t want to now; but Jirrah had risked his life to help save hers today. She owed him, big time.

It seemed she owed him even more if he was telling her the truth about Duncan and Cameron’s setup.

He’s alive, and I have a death certificate Duncan gave me. Isn’t that enough?

She continued cleaning the wound with warm water, frowning.

Jirrah started half-awake when her fingers connected with his chest. “Tess,” he mumbled, capturing her fingers with his.

Magic.

A sleepy word, one sleeping brush of his fingers, and all she’d tried to forget the past six years arose from slumber. One unconscious touch, and warm, dark, unpredictable magic lit the very air she breathed—

And it terrified her.

She jerked her hand away, and kept dabbing the antiseptic on the long, ugly gash on his chest.

“Ssssss.” He jerked to full awareness with the stinging touch, sitting up and glaring at her. She scrambled back across the rough floor, hot and cold with panic.

“Tessa? You okay?”

Unable to drag her gaze from his, she saw him watching her with a look she didn’t want to define. She pulled herself together and nodded, feeling sick, hurt, betrayed by the sting of his unwanted pity. “You just startled me.”

“It wasn’t the best way to wake a man, Tess.”

Trying to disguise the little quiver of unwanted pleasure at the intimate nickname he’d given her seven years before, she pointed to the inflamed cut. “It’s infected. I was just trying to help.” She handed him the cotton pad soaked in antiseptic.

He looked at the wound, and nodded. “Thanks.”

She turned away, fighting another unwanted surge of sorrow. They’d been so happy once…now they were just awkward. “Dinner’s almost ready. Do you want it now, or after you’re cleaned up?”

“I’ll take a shower. I need to get the dirt and gravel and glass out of the cuts—and some of them are in places you don’t want to clean,” he added, with a wry grin.

“Nothing I haven’t seen or touched before,” she retorted without thinking.

He looked at her—and she could barely breathe, reading the hot, urgent man’s need in his eyes. She skittered farther across the floor. “Stupid comment,” she mumbled through stiff lips.

After a long moment he nodded. Without looking at her again he headed for the bathroom. She fled to the kitchen, needing coffee to steady her nerves, and clear her turbulent confusion.

When he came back out, she almost spilled the hot coffee all over herself. Clad only in a towel, his dark coffee skin gleamed in the firelight, his wet hair dripped rivulets down his deep brown chest, broad shoulders and muscular arms, like hot sweat.

He walked straight past her, seeming completely unconscious of her fascinated gaze on his superb body—so superb it took her breath away even with the cuts and bruises marking it. “Sorry,” he muttered as he passed, motioning to the towel, his nakedness beneath. “I should have picked up clean clothes from the bedroom first, but I was so tired I didn’t think—” He turned at her continued silence. “Tess?” He made no movement, but somehow seemed closer by the power of the heat in his deep, dark eyes.

She lost the power to breathe. She returned his gaze, licking her upper lip in a fear that was paralyzing, yet delicious…

Like the first time she’d seen him.

Her lips parted, as the sweet rush of erotic memory filled her heart. Returning home from second-year exams at teacher’s college. Attracted by the hammering and drilling, she’d walked around the corner of her house to the backyard. The carpenters her father had hired were tearing down the old gazebo to make way for a new one. Seeing Jirrah—David, as he was then—strip off his T-shirt and mop the sweat from his lithe, muscled body, she couldn’t tear her gaze away, enthralled by an unfettered portrait of masculine beauty: a glistening sculpture of superb honed muscle and warm coffee skin. A purity of grace and perfection of form that could have belonged in Michelangelo’s imagination.

Against her will, half terrified of shattering the moment, she’d kept walking to him, her heart pounding. She couldn’t breathe, or think beyond reaching him. Nothing else had ever felt like this. No man, not even Duncan’s friend Cameron, who was so handsome and so kind to her, had ever affected her this way.

He’d looked up as she reached him, with a quick half smile that froze on his face as he, too, stared. She saw then he was Aboriginal—or, judging by the lightness of his skin, of mixed Aboriginal-European descent; but her family’s prejudice against the lower classes and indigenous Australians made no difference to her heart. She stood before him, struck almost dumb, drinking him into her heart with her wondering eyes.

“Hi,” was all she could find to say, cursing her banal tongue for its stupidity; but he knew. He’d known from that first look all the need, the joy, the emotion in her heart she couldn’t hide. She was his…and he was hers.

“Tess?”