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  Afterwards, they lay skin to skin in the cool sheets and scratchy blankets. Sam was on his back, an arm around Calla, and she was curled up at his side, pressing a thigh against his very satisfied cock. She nuzzled into his neck, breathed against his skin. He didn’t want to move for about a hundred years.

  Calla pressed her lips to his neck. ‘You were right.’

  ‘I’m right about a lot of things. Which one are you talking about?’

  She chuckled against his skin. ‘You are an arrogant arsehole.’

  ‘Hey, didn’t I make sure you came first?’ He chuckled, played with a nipple and loved the sound of her breath catching in her throat. That moaning thing she was doing was pretty fucking hot too.

  Calla laughed and pressed her body closer. ‘And third.’

  ‘I told you it would be spectacular, Red.’

  ‘See? You’re doing it again. It’s all about you, you, you. My only problem is that …’ Calla kissed his chest. ‘Damn you, Sam Hunter.’ She pressed her lips to his neck. ‘You’ve got a lot to be arrogant about.’

  ‘I’ve never had any complaints.’

  Calla jabbed a finger into his armpit and he squirmed, wrestled with her and pulled her on top of him.

  ‘This happen every time you meet a seasick woman on the ferry?’ It was meant as a joke but he could see the doubt in her eyes.

  ‘Only the redheads.’

  ‘Didn’t think you’d be so selective. You must have to beat women off with a stick, being so spectacular and everything.’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘C’mon,’ Calla teased. ‘The firefighter thing? Isn’t it one of the perks of the job? Doesn’t every woman love a man in uniform?’

  Sam hesitated. She was right. He’d been offered sex in too many places to remember, by women whose faces he’d immediately forgotten. It came with the job, and if women wanted him to tick off a number on their bucket lists he’d always been happy to oblige. Some fun, no strings. He’d been a single man, after all, with no interest in getting tangled up in anything. No one got hurt. Everyone got their rocks off. What was the big deal?

  ‘You get turned on by a man in uniform?’

  Calla splayed a hand between his pecs, teasing the dusting of hair on his chest. ‘I prefer a naked man, myself.’

  ‘Lucky I happen to have one right here.’

  ‘I noticed.’ She moved her hips and he got hard again.

  ‘You’re beautiful, Red.’ He cupped her bum with his hands and pushed himself against her.

  ‘So are you.’ He could feel Calla’s smile in his chest.

  He kissed her again. Harder this time.

  ‘This is your last night, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she breathed. ‘Let’s make some memories.’

  Sam moved her, filled her with a thrust. ‘Who needs a fucking postcard?’

  Later again, they lay entwined. Calla listened to the soft sounds of Sam’s breathing as he slept next to her. She didn’t want to fall asleep, didn’t want this night to end.

  Sam had promised that having sex with him would be spectacular. She bet he got a kick out of being right all the time. It had been spectacular. Incendiary. And it made her reflect sadly on her own experiences up to that point. Like what the hell she’d been missing.

  There’d been messy and awkward teenage encounters and then some pretty good sex after that with boyfriends from uni. But all the time she’d been with Josh, it had been quick and empty. In his back seat in a remote car park in the Hills. Plenty of phone sex and furtive conversations by their cars before they both went home, he back to his wife and she back to her lonely house. Not once had they spent the night together. Not once in the two years they were involved had she been able to lie next to him in bed, wrapped around his naked body.

  Meeting Sam might just have been about the best thing that could have happened to her. Something had awakened inside her, a spark of the old Calla, the honourable person she had been before she’d let her heart be used and crushed by a man who didn’t deserve her.

  In the rosy afterglow of spectacular Sam sex, she realised Josh had never looked her in the eye when they were fucking. He’d never given himself to her completely. He was a cheater. He had a foot in each camp and was on rocky ground in both. She’d been a willing party to a situation that had left her hurt and humiliated. She looked back on her behaviour with shame and mortification, at the realisation that she’d believed that’s all she’d been worth. That that’s all his wife had been worth.

  Calla moved against Sam’s strong arm and pulled the sheet and blankets up to her nose.

  That was the difference with Sam. She felt as if she had all of him, even if it was only for one night.

  CHAPTER

  36

  Calla woke the next morning shivering. It was cold enough in Sam’s old bedroom that her breath clouded in front of her face like cigarette smoke. There was so little room in the bed that she was crushed up against Sam, had been forced to cling to him like a limpet to get any sleep. And she was still in the same position. One cheek against his shoulder. Her breasts squeezed into his back. Her thighs curved around his perfect arse. Her toes pressed against his calves.

  Absolutely, positively the worst night of her life.

  And there they were, still naked, still together. There were no regrets fogging her brain or her heart. She felt released, free. In the words of that song she used to love: man, she felt like a woman. A woman who’d had spectacular sex. And that feeling had been a long time coming. Sam had been the perfect antidote to her shitty love life. He kissed like a demon, looked at her like she was a supermodel, and fucked like an expert. All of that with no strings attached. He might well be the perfect man.

  Absolutely, positively the best night of her life.

  She relished the warmth of his body against hers; his smooth skin pulled tight over his muscled back and shoulders. She lifted her cheek, turned slightly and closed her eyes, pressed her lips against his shoulder blade. His skin was smooth and cool and tasted like salt and Sam. She wanted to remember every minute of this awakening. She wanted to remember what he tasted like, what he felt like, wanted to remember every minute of her night with him. Every inch. Every kiss. Every caress. The exact way she felt when she was close to him, when he was inside her. When he said her name in the dark, the way she swallowed the sound whole and kept it inside her like a precious breath. She listened to it over and over and over in her head. Calla. Calla. Calla …

  If she could remember every second, she would be able to carry those memories back to Adelaide, back to her ordinary life, when the magic of the island had worn off. When she had said goodbye to Sam.

  Because she had to say goodbye to Sam. Sam the Spectacular had been a magical diversion on her island adventure. But there was nothing holding her there any more and it was time to go home. She’d done her best with Jem. The rental on her cabin was almost up. All the signs were there: it was really, finally, time to go home.

  Sam moved in her arms. She could feel his shoulders rise and fall, and he reached for her hand, which was tucked under his arm, and kissed the back of it.

  ‘Good morning.’ His voice was sleep-groggy and husky. It did mysterious things to her still taut and tingly insides. She pressed herself tighter against him in response.

  ‘Good morning,’ she whispered.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you to wake up.’

  ‘You have?’ Please god make him be a morning-sex person. She kissed his shoulder, left her lips there against this warm skin.

  ‘Yeah. It’s my back. I need to turn around.’

  ‘Oh.’ Calla’s heart plummeted. She whipped her hands away from his delicious body, scooted out of bed, scrabbled around on the floor for her clothes and began pulling them on. The single bed squeaked behind her and, when she turned, she saw Sam slowly repositioning himself, first onto his back and then on his side facing her. His face flared into a grimace as he sucked in a breath. He looked white and s
he felt terrible and guilty and sad all at once.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yep. No big deal. Old football injury.’ He pressed a palm into the mattress and heaved himself up to sitting. When he turned his eyes away from her, she looked away too. Charlie’s words about Sam’s accident came back to her in a flash, his fraught voice in her head as clear as day. I thought I’d lost him too. Ben had told her that Sam had been stuck behind a desk for a year — how had he put it? — ‘pushing paperclips around’ while he’d recovered. It must have been bad. Sam wasn’t old; Calla guessed he was in his late thirties, but he was as stiff this morning as someone twice his age.

  She gave him as much space as she could by perching herself on the very end of the bed to tug on her socks. She found her most nonchalant voice. ‘Need a hand?’

  His feet hit the floor with a thud. And then out of the corner of her eye, she could see him standing tall.

  ‘No. Thanks.’

  Calla looked down at her toes. There was a tingling sensation in every part of her body but most noticeably in her chest. Her brain thudded with her pulse and she couldn’t catch her breath. She knew there was no way to fight this desire for him, the hunger he’d unleashed in her, the desperate need to touch him and be touched.

  And her time was running out.

  She slowly turned to look at him. He was naked and spectacular in the light as well as the dark. Strong and tall, muscled and firm. But what really took her breath away was the look on his face. His dark eyes shone, gazing at her like she was a prize.

  She stood up, went to him, wrapped her arms around him.

  Didn’t say another word.

  When Sam was dressed, they went out to the kitchen to get some breakfast. Charlie was pushing his chair back. He was dressed, already wearing a coat and a beanie pulled low on his head. He took a sideways look at his son and walked over to the sink to put his empty cup on the bench.

  ‘Morning, Charlie,’ Calla called.

  Sam noted the curious look he shot her. He could guess why Charlie had the shits on. ‘Warm enough for you, Dad? I put some more wood on the fire last night. Didn’t want you to go getting cold this morning.’

  Charlie harrumphed, didn’t look at either of them. ‘It’s too hot. You’re wasting my wood. I’m bloody well going for a walk.’ The door opened to the excited yelp of the dogs and then it slammed behind him, like a huge apostrophe on his determination to get away from his son.

  Maybe the old man’s memory wasn’t going after all. Sam felt a new urgency about talking to him today. He would talk to him about the nursing home and then drive Calla back to Penneshaw. He’d have to stick around for the final week of his leave to get Charlie moved and get the house and property ready for sale. There was a real-estate agent in Kingscote he knew from school and she’d already promised to get it listed as soon as she could. That way, Charlie could have some money in the bank and some to spend. Hell, Charlie could spend the whole lot as far as Sam was concerned. Charlie’s safety was priority one and, judging by the way he’d been losing his marbles, Sam knew it wouldn’t be long before he was found on the side of the road, crashed into a bloody tree.

  He stared out the window above the kitchen sink, watched Charlie trudge up the hill, the dogs racing ahead of him to the gate at the top. What was Roo’s Rest anyway without any of the Hunters living there? It would be empty paddocks and an abandoned house. Someone else could buy it, make new memories and a life on it. Sam didn’t want it. Had never wanted it.

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  Calla’s hand was on his arm. ‘I was asking if you want some breakfast.’

  He turned and leant back against the sink. When he widened his stance, Calla stepped in against him, pressed her hands to his chest and turned her soft green eyes up to him. He reached around and cupped her arse. He could stop thinking about his old man for a minute. It should be easy with a redhead in your arms, right? She looked up at him with a smile that killed him. The bloke who was fortunate enough to wake up to this woman every day would be one lucky bastard.

  ‘Breakfast? Mmm,’ he said. ‘Coffee maybe. Then more getting naked.’

  Her sexy smile was exactly the reaction he was hoping to get. ‘I meant food. I’m starving.’

  ‘I’ll make breakfast but there’s something I need to say.’ Sam kissed her gently, played with her hair, which felt like silky strands against his fingers. ‘I’d planned to say it last night but I got distracted.’

  Calla shrugged. ‘That’s only natural. You are a man, after all. You can only think about one thing at once.’

  ‘You got that right.’ He was all man and she was most definitely all woman. And she’d nailed it. He could only think about one thing. Her. He looked at her, took her in. There were freckles on her face, not just on her nose and her cheeks but faint ones almost everywhere. There were black smudges around her sea-green eyes. Her pale lips were parted in a smile and he wanted to kiss that mouth all over again.

  ‘The thing is …’ he started before forgetting what he’d been about to say. ‘The thing is … I’m sorry to land you with all of this Charlie stuff. I know you had a lot to deal with, down at Hidden Bay.’

  Calla dipped her eyes and shrugged. ‘It’s not your fault. I’m glad you pushed me to see Jem when I got the wobbles; I really am. I feel like it’s done now.’

  Sam caressed her cheek. He couldn’t seem to keep his hands off her. He traced imaginary lines between the freckles on her cheeks. ‘You want to go back, try again? I think Jessie would want you to. She looked pretty cut up about what Jem said.’

  ‘She seems really lovely and I’m sure if we’d met some other way, we’d really like each other,’ Calla said. ‘But I’m not fighting him any more, Sam. I’ve done what I came here to do. I’ve given him the money. We never wanted to spend what was rightfully his. It’s up to him what he does with it.’

  ‘You sure?’

  Was she sure? Absolutely. ‘I’m really sure. I’m simplifying my life so I can find a new one.’ Saying it out loud was strangely liberating to Calla. ‘What happened with Jem has been hanging over my head for too long. And … what happened with Josh.’ His name hung in the air like fog. She hadn’t wanted to say it, hadn’t wanted to bring him back to life when she was with Sam. She waited for a reaction. He didn’t flinch, kept her pulled close.

  ‘You haven’t got another long-lost brother, have you?’

  Calla closed her eyes, breathed in the scent of him. ‘No. One’s enough.’

  ‘So who’s Josh?’ Sam twisted the word as he twisted one of her curls.

  ‘He was …’ Calla sighed. ‘He was my big mistake.’

  Sam raised his eyebrows. ‘How big?’

  ‘Oh, massive.’

  ‘What the hell.’ He shrugged. ‘We’ve all made them. The thing is … they never seem like mistakes at the time, do they?’ Sam smiled wryly. ‘I had a big mistake too. Married her. So, were you married to this guy? Josh?’

  Calla laughed and even she could hear the bitterness in the sound of it, tight in her throat. ‘A little hard when he was married to someone else.’

  ‘I see. That is a massive mistake.’

  ‘A colossal one. So was the size of my broken heart.’

  ‘He broke your heart? Sounds serious.’ Sam laid his palm on her chest, just to the left of her breastbone. She wondered if he could feel it start to beat faster. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Between Josh and me? You really want to know about what happened?’

  ‘He hurt you. Of course I want to know.’

  Calla closed her eyes and pondered where to begin that story, one of wasted years and her stubborn determination to break her own heart.

  It had been instant and complicated the moment she’d met Josh. She’d heard him laughing across the staffroom in a school that she visited regularly. She’d looked up to see where the sound had come from. At the same time, he’d looked over at her. That was the first smile.
/>   And from there, it took off like a frightened bird. From the very beginning, she knew he was married. Had seen the chunky gold ring on his finger when he waved at her across the car park in the warm early mornings before the students began arriving for lessons. At first, it was a new and easy friendship. A shared sense of humour and a common eye-rolling frustration with the older teachers. They’d run into each other in the coffee shop down the road from school and he started inviting her to share his table. They talked so easily they’d almost missed the bell more than once. And after that, he always managed to stumble into her. Mysteriously, they often seemed to be walking to the car park at the same time and a wave to say see you later would turn into a lingering goodbye. Sometimes they talked for half an hour by his car, Calla not even noticing how heavy her artist’s bag had become in her hand.

  It grew and she wanted it to. Her father had just died, Jem had disappeared and it seemed to Calla that everything else in her life was conspiring to hurt her. Many times since, she’d tried to remember exactly when she’d fallen in love with Josh. It was impossible to pinpoint the exact day or date or time. It grew slowly, unconsciously, until suddenly she was in it and had no idea how she’d got there, and was trapped in the maze of him.

  And then it was over. It was the day he’d told her that he and his wife were having a baby. He’d pulled her into his arms and then told her that whatever their thing was, it had to stop.

  Whatever it was?

  And then she’d slapped his face. She could still feel the sting on her palm. And as she walked away, she wanted to believe that the tears in his eyes weren’t from the slap alone. She’d hoped there was just a little bit of regret and love in those tears too, because the idea that she’d been duped by someone who hadn’t cared for her at all was too crushing a blow to even consider.