Dark Country (5 page)

Gil jammed the ice-pack against his aching face and mentally kicked himself. Hard.

No
. That’s what he should have said.
No thanks, I can sleep in the car out in the scrub
.

Instead he’d not only called her by the traditional bush nickname for anyone with red hair, he’d made a damn stupid comment
that could well add bruised balls to the rest of his injuries.

There had to be a law against flirting with cops. And if it wasn’t in the statute books, it definitely was inscribed in his
personal rule book, up there on page one, right next to ‘Thou shalt not let the Sydney mafia rule your business’.

He heard a door close, then the firm tread of her boots back along the wooden floor.

But when she appeared in the doorway, she didn’t look pissed off, just bone-weary. Like a woman who’d been working too many
hours, and caring too much, for way longer than just a couple of weeks.

Guilt twisted in his gut. If it weren’t for him, her day would have ended at least an hour ago.

‘So, this is where you tell me that the guest room is the one with the bars on the windows and the steel door, right?’

She leaned against the door frame, arms folded, her strained smile hardly touching her eyes. ‘It’s only used for storing old
files these days. Just don’t make me cram you into a filing cabinet, okay, Gillespie?’

‘I won’t cause you any trouble, Sergeant.’

‘You already did,’ she said simply, without any rancour, but the truth of it still made him feel like a bastard. ‘Adam’s walking
the Barretts up from the pub now, so I’d better go and deal with them.’

‘What will happen to them?’

‘Since you won’t pursue charges, they’ll get the thermonuclear death-glare. They’ll be reduced to piles of radioactive dust
on the floor within minutes.’

She didn’t smile, and he almost felt some sympathy for the four Barrett men.

‘Sounds like charging them might be kinder.’

‘For them? Probably. For me – a heap more paperwork.’ She shrugged, a pretence of uncaring that he didn’t fall for. ‘Help
yourself to any food if you’re hungry. You might be lucky and actually find something in the fridge that hasn’t mutated into
an alien life-form.’

She shoved her hands into her pockets, about to go, and without thinking he asked, ‘Have you eaten?’

She paused, a frown lacing her features as if she was trying to remember. ‘I’ll make a sandwich later,’ she muttered, then
turned on her heel and was gone again.

Not a good sign when someone couldn’t remember when they’d last eaten. Maybe he should make something for her …

He shoved the ice-pack against another ache on his face and wondered what – other than the Barretts’ fists – had hit him and
scrambled his sanity so thoroughly.

If he had any sense, he’d leave a note on the table and disappear out the back door. Except then she probably
would
be awake all night, worrying about him, and that was one thing he didn’t want to add to his conscience.

He pulled a chair out with his foot and sat down, leaning his head against the wall, shifting the ice-pack to his jaw, and
closed his eyes, resigned to a night under the sergeant’s roof. With a headache the size of Mount Kosciusko. And knowing that
in a few minutes he’d get up, raid her fridge, and see what sort of meal he could fix for them both.

The alarm beeped its way into her consciousness, and Kris dragged herself awake with a groan and fumbled for the off button.
Early daylight dulled the glare of the electronic numbers. Six o’clock. For the sixth time in as many hours, she dragged herself
out of bed, yanked her robe on, and stumbled to the spare room next door.

He was already up, rummaging in the bag that Adam had brought from the hotel last night, and he must have heard her footsteps
because without turning, he said dryly, ‘It’s Friday, I’m Gil Gillespie, this is Dungirri, and I don’t have concussion, Sergeant.’

Pretty much the same thing he’d said the last four times she’d been in to check him. Except those times, he’d been in bed,
covered by the blanket, and now he stood wearing only his T-shirt and jocks, and she should have been checking his eyes for
responsiveness, but instead she found herself checking over his legs – long, muscular,
naked
legs – and his large, beautiful, equally naked feet.

Lack of sleep must be fusing her brain and drying her throat, because she’d seen plenty of men’s legs over the years without
those effects occurring.

The feet turned towards her, and a yawn gave her the excuse to close her eyes and keep them closed until she could look at
eye level, and not at anything in between. Professional. Impersonal. Like she was supposed to be.

She was too tired to read the lightning-flash of emotion in his eyes before the granite settled again. Pain, probably. Those
bruises had to hurt.

‘I’ve got a jar of ointment that Beth Wilson swears by for bruising. I’ll find it for you.’ She blocked out the thought of
touching his face again to tend to the bruises. She’d get the damn jar, leave it out for him, and then she’d go and take a
shower. A long, cold one, to wake up her brain and cool down her body.

By the time she’d showered, ironed a clean uniform shirt, dressed, and dragged a brush through her hair, he’d had his shower
and was moving around in the kitchen.

The aroma of coffee jolted another two brain cells awake before she entered the room. He leaned against the bench, mug in
hand, in black jeans and T-shirt as he’d been wearing last night, although the T-shirt was a tighter cut, sculpting his body
more closely. His bags stood by the door, the leather jacket draped across them.

‘I made coffee,’ he said, nodding towards the plunger on the table.

‘An omelette last night, coffee this morning – have you got a halo I didn’t notice, Gillespie?’

‘Not me, Blue. Just a caffeine addiction.’ The closed expression never changed, but something about that ‘Blue’ softened it.
Or maybe that was just her imagination.

He drained his mug, then rinsed it out under the tap while she poured her own coffee.

‘I’ll head off. I want to catch Jeanie early, then get back to Sydney.’

‘Oh.’ The mug she’d just lifted shook in her hand, and she lowered it to the table again. Of course he was going. He had no
reason to stay, and she had no reason to detain him.

He paused at the door as he picked up his gear and looked back at her. ‘Thanks.’

That low rumble of his voice
was
a fraction softer. Oh, yeah, like basalt was softer than granite.

She mentally kicked another brain cell into action. ‘All the best, Gillespie. And make sure you avoid the Barretts.’

He nodded once and then he was gone, pulling the door shut behind him. A chilly draught from outside swirled around her, and
for a moment she stood motionless, not able to think,
before she reached for the coffee again and drank a long, strong slug of it.

She had to get moving. She had a hell of a day ahead, a mile-high stack of paperwork, and with the senior sergeant in Birraga
away on a course, she’d be lucky if she made it home before midnight.

And there’d be no-one to care if she ate dinner or not.

Gil walked down the main street, staring ahead to avoid eye-contact with the few locals about, but all he could see in his
mind’s eye was a beautiful, sleepy woman, with tousled hair, heavy-lidded eyes, and a cotton robe that entirely failed to
hide her curves. Strength and vulnerability and dedication and attitude all wrapped up in a body he’d dreamed about in the
rare minutes he’d managed to sleep between her hourly visitations.

Shit. He dragged his thoughts away from remembering those dreams. Talk about a waste of mental energy. In an hour, he’d be
out of Dungirri forever. And then he had Russo to deal with, and how he’d do that he still had no idea. He had no leverage,
as he’d had with Vince. Chances were he’d end up at the bottom of Sydney Harbour, breathing seaweed.

All the more reason to make things right with Jeanie, first. And now that he saw Dungirri in daylight, he figured that Jeanie
might need what he intended giving her. In the years since he’d left, economic decay had eaten through the core of the town,
and only a handful of the businesses remained. Across the road, empty shopfronts gaped between Ward’s Rural Supplies and the
hotel on the corner, and on the side of the road he walked along,
the Pappas’s small corner store seemed to be the only business still open, even the old council office and depot beside it
were padlocked and boarded up. Dungirri had shrivelled to a dry, dead husk, and he couldn’t imagine any business managing
to do well here, even an essential one like Jeanie’s.

He reached his car, dumped his gear in the back seat, and crossed the road to the café, pulling his jacket tighter against
the morning chill as he walked. The café was open, but there weren’t any breakfast customers about.

‘Gil!’ Jeanie’s face creased into a huge, welcoming smile as soon as he walked in, and he didn’t know which surprised him
more – the rare experience of a genuine welcome, or the stark reality of how much she’d aged. The once-grey hair was white,
her hands misshapen by arthritis, and she seemed smaller, frailer,
fragile
beside him.

Yet her eyes still held their sparkle, and the hands she clasped around his were warm and surprisingly strong as she tugged
him towards a table and made him sit down.

‘It’s so good to see you, Gil, although not with those bruises. Ryan was in not long ago. He said you were back, had run into
some trouble last night. Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine, Jeanie.’ Although the sense that he was walking on unsteady, unfamiliar ground made him grit his teeth and move
straight to the point of his visit. ‘I came to repay what I owe you.’

‘Owe me?’ Her puzzled frown seemed entirely genuine. ‘You don’t owe me anything, Gil.’

‘Yes, I do.’ He drew in a slow breath, determined to acknowledge what she wouldn’t even consider a debt. ‘You
paid for the lawyer for my probation hearing, and for his work proving the falsity of the blood-alcohol report and having
the conviction overturned. Until a month or so back, I never knew that you did that – I thought it was on Legal Aid. But the
lawyer happened to come into the pub one day, and he recognised me. We got talking.’

Jeanie clasped her hands on the Formica table-top. ‘You needed proper legal representation, Gil, and the lawyer they sent
from Legal Aid for your committal hearing was a raw graduate without much sense. I never begrudged a cent of the money.’

‘You were saving for that trip to Italy. To search for your husband’s family. You never went, did you?’

‘No. That was just a dream – not as important as getting you released.’

But she twisted her wedding ring on her finger, probably without even realising she was doing it, and the small, typically
Jeanie gesture made him all the more determined. He pulled the cheque he’d written earlier out of his jeans pocket and slid
it across the table.

‘Well, you can go now. Take a friend. Do a world tour, if you want.’

She stared at it, looked up at him and pushed the cheque back across the table. ‘Don’t be silly. That’s ten … twenty times
more than the lawyer cost.’

‘Jeanie, just take it. I sold the pub. Prices have gone sky-high, and I’ve got more money than I know what to do with. You,
of all people, deserve some share of that.’ And if he ended up breathing seaweed, she would get a big share of the rest of
it. That was already signed and sealed in his lawyer’s office.

‘I can’t take that much from you,’ she protested, her stubbornness as great as her generosity. ‘You’ve worked for every cent
of it.’

‘And now I’m spending it how I want. Jeanie, it’s not just the lawyer’s fees I owe you.’ Damn the rock in his throat. He needed
to say this. ‘You gave me a chance, gave me a job and trusted me, when almost nobody else did. And later, in prison … I never
knew how to say –’ Shit, he still didn’t know how, and the rock in his throat was a boulder, and all he could do was push
out some words he hoped she’d understand. ‘Your visits, they made a difference for me.’