Hold On to Me (10 page)

The job would take about four weeks, give or take a day.

Problem was, Luca wasn't sure he could stop himself from going crazy in the meantime.

It was a warm day on the south coast and, without air conditioning, it was officially hot by early afternoon. Stella had opened the new front door but that didn't seem to help get any airflow through the building. The rear door was way in the back corner and led to a maze of outbuildings, storage and toilets, which she had shared with Ian and Lee's café next door. She was sweaty, dripping with perspiration and needed to cool off. They'd done a lot of work during the afternoon, skirting around each other in polite silence. The space was clean and empty and ready for Luca to begin work the next day on knocking out what remained of the ceiling and creating the skylight frame before the Gyprock went in. He'd mentioned that he'd organised a mate to come down and help him out with that task. She believed him when he told her it was a two-person job and Stella was happy not to be helping with that particular aspect of the work. When she agreed, he'd looked a little cocky.

So he had a couple of good ideas. It didn't make him Kevin McCloud.

‘I'm heading off.' Luca had unclipped his tool belt and it was dangling from his left hand. He cocked his right hip and gave her a nod.

That hot and sweaty turned into combustible. ‘I'll see you tomorrow,' she managed.

‘Ciao,' he said and saluted.
‘Boss.'

‘Bye.' Stella tried to affect a casual wave in his general direction as he left. When she heard the now-familiar rumble of his truck disappear into the distance, she exhaled an afternoon's worth of tension. The atmosphere had been crackling between them all day.

I'm all man, Stella.

The look on his face as he'd uttered those words was seared in her memory. She swore that if one more second had gone by he would have dropped his tool belt and his shorts and revealed just exactly how much man he was.

Put the younger man down.

Stella grabbed her handbag, made sure she had the key for the new lock Luca had installed, and pulled the door closed behind her. The rush of cool air in the street was a sheer relief, but she needed more. She needed to head down to the water. She needed to wash off the sweat and the tension in her shoulders and the desire burning her up from the inside.

After a quick detour home to change into her swimsuit and grab a towel, Stella walked the short distance through the pretty streets of Port Elliot to Horseshoe Bay. Past the car park and across the grass, she found a spot on the sand and kicked off her thongs, pulled off her loose T-shirt and dropped her towel. It was still bright and hot in the late afternoon sun, so she kept her sunglasses on. And then she walked directly into the water, revelling in the cool against her ankles and knees, against her thighs and her stomach, and didn't stop until she was up to her neck. It was bliss. There were only a few locals on the beach, and dogs roamed the shallows as their owners met neighbours and stopped for a chinwag. Stella kicked her feet off the sand below her and floated on her back, letting the whoosh of the water in her ears block out everything else.

Things were moving quickly at Style by Stella and she was thrilled by it. She thought back to the phone and social media messages she'd received from her customers, saying how sad they felt about the fire but how delighted they were that she wasn't wasting any time bringing their favourite boutique back to life. There'd been an email from Courtney confirming that an electrical fault had started the blaze in Ian and Lee's café, which she'd passed on to her insurance agent. That would make it easier to finalise the claim, Stella knew. And her suppliers had rallied around her too, promising to deliver whatever summer stock they had left so she could be sure of opening for the bumper Christmas holiday season.

Life really was pretty good, she told herself as she squinted into the perfect blue sky. She lived in a wonderful place now. Her commute to work took two minutes. She worked hard, there was no doubt, but she was surrounded by beautiful things and jazz music every day. She had made lovely friends and had secured the loyalty of so many customers. She was as far away as she could be from the dramas of her life in Sydney without moving to Perth, and she was about to be back in business. Yes, life was pretty good. It had taken her a lifetime of snakes and ladders to get where she was, and she reminded herself to savour every minute of it.

Stella moved her arms in the water, letting them drift back and forth at her sides, loving the ripple of cool over her body.

And now she was working with the delectable Luca Morelli. Sure, he was young—he was probably interested in anything with breasts. But he liked her, which was fine, as long as she was clear about the boundaries. He could flirt all he wanted—and she might flirt a little in return—but absolutely, positively nothing was going to happen between them. There would definitely be no more
touching
. That would make their project together so much easier and more clearly defined. Sleeping with someone you work with? She'd been there and done that with Sully, and just thinking about that man made her feel nauseated.

She swallowed, then righted herself in the water, planted her feet on the sand and slowly walked back out to the spot where she'd dropped her things, the waves gently urging her to the shoreline.

She found her towel, held it to her face and then turned to look back at the beautiful bay. On the east side, a rocky rounded outcrop, and the west, a café, Norfolk Island pines, the memorial garden to fallen soldiers of World War I, the surf lifesaving club and the cliff tops she liked to walk every morning. The sun was low in the sky and all the landmarks she knew so well were already casting long shadows. She goose bumped: the temperature had dropped. It had been a long day. It was time to go home.

‘Stella?'

Luca was jogging up the sand from the water, dripping wet, looking like he'd just stepped out of a Dolce & Gabbana advertising campaign. Every muscle was moving in perfect rhythm. His black swimming shorts were clinging to his thighs, and his dazzling smile lit up his face and sent a jolt of heat right through her.

‘I thought it was you.' He stopped a metre in front of her. Droplets of water drizzled down his sculpted torso. And damn it, there was a tattoo. Of course there was. That's what young people did these days, right? Some kind of vine snaked its way from his hip to his armpit on his right side. She dragged her eyes to his face. His eyelashes looked like a supermodel's and his brown eyes smiled down at her.

‘Long time no see,' she said with a forced laugh.

Someone, or something, was testing her. Maybe it was Summer and her damn angels.

First, her shop.

Now, her very womanhood and professionalism were being challenged. How on earth could she look Luca in the eye and have a regular conversation when he was standing in front of her, wet, half naked and looking like a football player who'd been dipped in a café latte?

Two milliseconds and her pulse quickened.

‘It's fantastic out there, isn't it?' He was slightly breathless but looked completely energised at the same time. ‘Did you swim?' He looked down at her black swimsuit. It was a one-piece but Stella knew the very low cut of the fabric between her breasts took it squarely out of sensible and into sexy. And she noticed that he noticed.

She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. She knew what that did to her breasts and suddenly didn't care. Perhaps she was challenging him too. ‘Me? No, I just floated. I'm too exhausted to swim and I needed to cool off. What about you?'

‘I walked up there on the path and dived in from the jetty, swam right across Horseshoe Bay.'

‘Oh. That's quite a swim.' And it explained his build. There were no tan lines on his upper body. His muscled arms led to strong shoulders and there was dark hair in the dip between his pecs. He wasn't beefy, more defined and toned. He was clearly built for endurance, not speed.

Put the young man down.

Except she really, really didn't want to.

‘It's been such a hot day. It's nice to cool off before you drive up to Adelaide, huh?'

He met her gaze, direct and inviting. ‘I'm staying down here during the week while I'm working on your place.'

Stella really didn't need to know that. ‘You are?'

‘I don't think I mentioned it. I'm crashing at Anna and Joe's place at Middle Point during your job. It'll save me time. It's only five minutes away and they're up in the city during the week, so it's empty.'

‘It's a nice place.' Stella knew it. Joe and Anna's weekender wasn't beachfront property, like the enormous houses along millionaires' row on the beachfront. Joe's childhood home was a few blocks back from the esplanade, but it was up on the rise and had incredible views up and down the south coast, from the Coorong to Victor Harbor. Built in the 1970s, it more closely resembled a suburban home than a beach shack, but it clearly suited Anna and Joe as they commuted back and forth to the city.

Luca looked up the beach to the houses overlooking the bay. ‘You live nearby?'

Stella noticed he still didn't seem to have a towel. ‘Just around the corner from the shop, actually.'

‘Yeah?' he asked, surprised, propping his hands on his hips. She glanced down at his tanned fingers, noticed the way they were the same colour as those clearly defined muscles low on his sides.

‘But I know Middle Point. I lived there when I was a kid, before I moved away to Sydney after high school.'

‘Sydney, huh? Why'd you come back?'

Stella looked out to the ocean. She'd been thinking about that a lot lately, with the fire and starting again and Ian and Lee moving away and starting their lives over too. Why had she come back? Why hadn't she just started again somewhere on the east coast? She'd started to think it was because this part of the world was the last place she'd been truly happy, the place she'd finally found a home, and someone who loved her. But she wasn't revealing that secret to anyone.

‘Things happened.' She shrugged. ‘Maybe I really am a small-town girl after all.'

Luca chuckled. He lifted a hand and pushed the dripping hair from his eyes. ‘Nothing wrong with that.'

‘You'll like Middle Point. The beach and the surf are incredible. You know Julia? Lizzie's best friend? We worked together at the Middle Point general store when we were in high school.'

‘Nice,' he said, and he sounded distracted.

When she noticed his gaze dip down to the curve of her breasts, she picked up her towel. All the relief she'd felt after that refreshing dip had gone. She felt as tight as a wire.

‘I'm heading home. I'll see you tomorrow at the shop.'

‘'Night,' he replied.

Stella opened her front door and walked inside her little cottage. Once she'd showered and changed, she made herself some dinner and ate it with a glass of wine while some generic English crime drama on the television played in the background. Her great-aunt Karen had loved those shows, in which villages and country manors became hotbeds of crime and murder, and in an instant, Stella was spun right back into her history.

Not for the first time, Stella thought about where she might have ended up if it hadn't been for Auntie Karen. The choices were too terrible to even contemplate, but they were always about living in a stranger's home. Always someone else's. Never her own.

That's why her cottage was the most precious place in the world to her.

At the age of ten, an anxious and frightened little girl had started over. In Middle Point, with Auntie Karen, Stella was able to leave her past behind and create a whole new life for herself: one in which her parents weren't criminals and hopeless drug addicts; one in which she didn't live in a dilapidated rental, a desert where lawn should have been, a front door of flapping flywire, and a backyard full of junk—another house her parents had trashed. Her childhood, although it had never felt like one to Stella, had been filled with chaos, love and neglect, in unequal measure, and she always remembered it in snatches.

Every now and then, something would trigger a memory. The smell of toasted cheese sandwiches took her back to that kitchen, where there were dishes stacked high and filthy until she washed them, standing on a plastic chair to reach the sink. Driving past a neglected front yard prompted rolling recollections of bare mattresses and no curtains and cockroaches and filth and litter and pizza boxes and empty bottles and syringes. Her parents had inhabited a subterranean world of drugs and welfare and dysfunction and evictions and had dragged their only child into the mire, too.

Sometimes, when her parents were clean and remained connected with social services, things improved. That meant there was milk in the fridge, loaves of bread on the bench and bananas in a bowl. She shivered at what the memories still did to her: what kind of life had she had that a banana seemed precious?

School had been the only place Stella could escape. But it became a jail of sorts too. At ten, she was already aware that she was different, that other people didn't live like she did. She got a bit obsessed with the prettiest girl in her class, and not because she was pretty, but because she had the best clothes and a seemingly endless array of shoes. Stella only had two pairs: Dunlop volleys bought from the local discount department store and a cheap pair of hard plastic thongs. That was it. No pretty party shoes or sandals for summer. She wore T-shirts that got shorter the taller she grew. They weren't even hand-me-downs because there was no one to inherit them from. It was school and home in her raggedy clothes and that was it.

The words of that prettiest girl still haunted her. ‘You wear those shoes every day. Don't you have any other ones?'

That had been her life.