The House On Jindalee Lane Read online

  Why she wanted to open the Little Theatre here, he had no idea. She wouldn’t stick around to keep it going. She’d be off as soon as Viv got better. Back to her theatre mates and after-show parties.

  He eyed the committee.

  Swallow’s Fall: middle of practically nowhere in the New South Wales Snowy Mountains, population 182. That number still included Ryan who’d moved out two decades ago when his mother left town after his father divorced her. It also included Edie, who’d moved away when she went to drama school and had only come back on the odd fleeting visit. Maybe she felt like an outsider too. But what would he know about what was going on in that head of hers?

  He’d agreed to build her stage but hadn’t expected her to move into Jindalee House with him. She arrived with big smiles, her suitcases, all her female paraphernalia and feminine powers, and given his heart a fright. He’d moved into the barn straight away. The thought of catching a glimpse of her in her dressing gown or tripping out of the bathroom with only a towel wrapped around her disturbed his equilibrium. He liked holding on to his control, and Edie had a way of unbalancing him.

  He’d thought it best if he moved on and let someone else build her stage since there was no chance of them getting together romantically, then Ethan Granger took him to one side and told him he thought Edie might be in some sort of trouble and that’s why she’d come home.

  Ethan said he knew his daughter and she was covering up something. He had a feeling it might be a man bothering her but he’d only told Ryan—Sammy didn’t know about Ethan’s worry. The thought of a man bothering Edie had all but put Ryan into combat mode. He’d assured Ethan he’d watch out for her and try to figure out what was going on, which had effectively stopped him from leaving.

  Ethan was the town’s patriarch and Ryan had a lot of respect for him. So if Ethan thought Edie might be in trouble, Ryan wasn’t going to ignore it. Nothing usually rattled Ethan, and Ryan liked a man who lived life as it happened, without overreacting to adverse conditions. Like Ryan was trying to do with the adverse condition of being attracted to Edie more than he damn well wanted to be.

  He had a few mates around town though. He got on well with his sister Gemma’s husband, Josh Rutherford. He also had Nick Barton as a friend. Nick was an ex-navy diver, so they talked forces stuff.

  But otherwise, that was it. Unless he counted Ted. More bluff than bite, Ted had been widowed a number of years back and hadn’t really got over it, so Ryan shrugged along with the friendship Ted obviously wanted from him.

  He pushed to stand when Edie finished her speech, and grabbed the back of his chair and the empty one next to him. He’d stack the chairs, smile at the committee as they were ushered into the cool September night, help Ted lock up then drive Glam-puss home.

  He walked across the room as soon as he’d finished with the chairs. Ted was herding everyone to the doors, making noises about electricity usage nobody was paying for.

  Edie was gathering her paperwork and stuffing it into her messenger bag.

  ‘So how do you think it went?’ he asked.

  ‘Excellent!’

  He didn’t flinch when she tossed her head back. Much as he was loath to acknowledge it, he was bewitched when she did the hair-fling thing. She reminded him of an old movie actress in some black-and-white film he’d watched with her one time. Rita somebody. Sitting at her dressing table. Camera zooms in just as she’s throwing back a head of long, glossy hair. Edie Granger—total pain in his heart and Rita Somebody lookalike.

  He stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets. ‘Don’t be deterred, Dazzlepants. You didn’t do too badly. Although I thought at the end there, you didn’t quite have their full attention.’

  ‘Thanks for noticing,’ she said dryly.

  ‘You’re welcome.’ He liked seeing her tawny eyes spark and her refined attitude come to the fore. He’d always thought her refined. Even when she was jumping in puddles as a ten-year-old she had something graceful about her. Or maybe it was the pure joy she’d shown the world.

  ‘But more importantly,’ he said in a serious tone, ‘what’s for dinner and who’s cooking?’

  She gave him a dazzling, totally theatrical smile. ‘How about you cook and I tell you all about Who Shot the Producer?’

  He stepped back, biting into his own smile. ‘That’s just what I was hoping for,’ he said, and waited for her to do the hair-fling thing.

  2

  The Leading Man

  ‘Ryan!’

  Ryan wiped his boots on the coir doormat, which told him Welcome to Jindalee House.

  ‘Ryan! Oh, there you are.’ Edie smiled at him.

  ‘What have you done now?’ he asked, ignoring the smile which brightened her already lovely face. He walked into the sunny, farm-style kitchen. ‘What’s on fire?’ Edie had a bad case of break-anything-electrical. She’d stuffed up the blower-vac yesterday while using it to get the dust out of the barn and had almost blown herself up at the same time. One of these days she’d electrocute herself. Or just his luck, she’d electrocute him.

  ‘Nothing’s on fire,’ she said. ‘I need to ask you for a favour. A really big favour.’

  ‘Oh?’ He ensured he sounded not particularly interested.

  ‘I want to ask you to do a job for me, for the play. I need someone I can trust, Ryan. Someone smart. Someone—’

  ‘So ask,’ he said, cutting her off. ‘Stop with the effusiveness or I’m going to think you don’t hold me in contempt after all.’

  ‘I don’t hold you in contempt,’ she said, looking shocked.

  Maybe not, but he wouldn’t blame her if she did. He’d walked off and left her after that kiss three years ago and he’d never forgive himself. He’d like to apologise—but Edie the actor was making it difficult for him. He wanted the old Edie back but she was too ensconced in her thrilling career to remember who she’d once been. Not that he had any right to change her.

  ‘What do you need me for?’ he asked, backing down as soon as he recalled his behaviour that night.

  She paused, mouth slightly open as she looked at him, probably wondering what kind of mood he was in.

  She was makeup-less today as she was most days recently, dressed in dark blue jeans and deck shoes, and a white T-shirt. This was more like the Edie he remembered. Although even now, she managed to look like she was off to lunch on some super-yacht.

  ‘I need a stage manager,’ she said.

  ‘No.’ His immediate image was of her ordering him around.

  ‘Go on, Ryan,’ she pleaded, tilting her head and making her hair, loose again this morning, fall to one side.

  He grumbled something unintelligible, then clenched his abdomen. If only she’d tie those auburn locks back he wouldn’t keep wishing for the hair-fling thing while also checking out her body. Tall and slim, she still had enough curves to hold any man’s attention.

  ‘Please, Ryan. I’ll do anything for you. Name it and I’ll do it.’

  ‘Anything?’ Regardless of his immediate thought about the kind of things he’d like her to do for him, he was amused by her beseeching eyes. She was such an actress.

  He’d followed her career—how could he not? His sister sent him clippings of everything she did. Gemma had ticked him off royally three years ago for stuffing up what she said was a perfect match. Showed what she knew.

  He’d seen Edie on stage once, although he hadn’t let her know he was in the auditorium. She’d been in a comedy, engaging the audience and pulling them along with her warmth.

  She’d been twenty-two to his twenty-seven the first time the essence of her loveliness—all that female stuff that hit a guy in the heart region—had swallowed him whole. He’d been visiting Gemma between tours. ‘Goodbye, Dazzlepants, stay out of trouble,’ he’d said to Edie when he left, mussing her hair so she wouldn’t know how much she’d affected him.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she asked now, bringing him out of the memory.

  ‘No reason,’
he said, putting his impersonal expression back in place. He didn’t want her guessing he was having troubled thoughts about a possible something he might still be interested in taking further with her.

  The last Goodbye, Dazzlepants, stay out of trouble he threw her way was after the kiss. She’d been twenty-seven to his thirty-two. He’d spent a couple of weeks in town, and went out with her like a good mate would. She didn’t appear to want anything more than a friend and someone to drive her home from the bar in Kookaburra’s to Burra Burra Lane, but he was keenly aware of her as a desirable woman. Sometimes he caught a look in her eye that said she might be as attracted to him as he was to her. Once or twice when he was with her, walking down Main Street, carrying her groceries, they’d stop to chat to someone and she’d lean against him slightly. No more than her shoulder and the length of her arm touching him but it had been like fire sweeping through his system.

  ‘So will you be the stage manager?’ she asked again. ‘Please, Ryan.’

  He ought to phase her out of his life and the best way to do that was to pack up and move on. But he’d made a promise to Ethan.

  ‘All right. What’s the scope of the job?’

  Her smile of thanks made his heart swell.

  ‘You’d have to take—’ She paused. ‘Directions from me.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘You mean orders.’

  She sucked in her cheeks to halt her grin.

  He held his ground and kept his gaze steady. Christ, he’d do anything for her. Good job she didn’t know that.

  ‘You’re looking at me weirdly,’ she said. ‘What’s happened to you?’

  ‘I’ve been living with you for eleven days,’ he said in a neutral tone. ‘What did you expect would happen to me?’

  ‘Oh, ha ha,’ she said with a light in her eyes, then did the hair-fling thing, which made his heart swell all over again. ‘Has anyone ever told you how unamusing you are?’

  ‘Only you and a few Afghanistan insurgents, Glam-puss.’

  The way he said ‘Glam-puss’ in a low, mellow tone puckered Edie’s stomach muscles. Why was it so hard to be less attracted to him?

  ‘So I can order you around?’ she asked.

  He huffed a low, hard and genuinely amused laugh.

  She acknowledged it with a flash of a smile. If they could just get on a decent footing with each other. If he’d just fall madly in love with her.

  ‘I guess I can manage taking directions from you,’ he said.

  She looked into his dark brown eyes. He had a way of being amused without letting anyone know and at the moment she was reasonably sure he was having her on. He had a sharp awareness of what went on beneath the surface of people too.

  ‘You agreed too easily,’ she said. ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  It wasn’t only his intense, enquiring eyes that engaged her and made her want to squirm, as though he saw right through her. It wasn’t only his body—pretty bloody perfect, with all that rippling tree-trunk-muscle strength. It was how he managed to hold himself so commandingly, while appearing casual and laid-back. He gave Edie the impression he could move in an instant, and capture her in his arms.

  She pushed away the torment of knowing that would never happen.

  One thing was sure. They clashed. Their personalities were so far off either end of the grid, the grid didn’t have any accountable clarification for how wrong they were for each other except: off the scale. ‘Why did you say I treat you with contempt?’

  ‘Maybe you don’t. How would I know who you are these days?’

  ‘What does that mean?’ The last thing she wanted was an argument but he had a knack of pushing all her buttons.

  ‘I’m not going to get into this, Edie.’

  ‘Are we having an argument?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  Damn. ‘Why don’t you like me?’ It hurt that he didn’t. Or didn’t appear to.

  ‘I didn’t say I didn’t like you.’

  He was never daunted. He never flinched. Is that how he’d handled himself in the army with all those dangerous assignments and invasions he’d had to deal with?

  ‘So you do like me?’

  He paused, and their gazes lingered, hot and somehow tangled …

  ‘You’ll never know how much I adore you.’

  That made her splutter a laugh, and even he smiled.

  ‘Dazzlepants,’ he added.

  Edie pulled a face.

  He’d given her the moniker on her eleventh birthday. She’d always loved dressing up so had borrowed Viv’s superhero costume, squeezing herself into it because Viv was younger and much shorter than Edie, and had climbed a tall gum tree. She’d told everyone she could jump from one branch down to the next without breaking her leg. But she’d landed upside down, with only her red cape and thick silver knickers—snagged on a limb—to save her from head injury. Silver knickers and the sure, strong hands of seventeen-yearold Ryan Munroe as he untangled her.

  Why couldn’t he be the leading man in her life?

  It had been a shock when he arrived in town three weeks ago. They hadn’t spoken much at first, as they hadn’t seen each other since she’d almost knocked him unconscious, but he’d been carefully attentive, initially. Maybe he’d wanted to mend things between them and that’s why he’d come home, then had decided she wasn’t worth it. God, that hurt. Best not to think too hard about it. But just before she decided to open the theatre he’d met her in town and insisted on carrying all the library books she’d borrowed for her mum, Viv and herself, plus the boxes of groceries she’d bought, and she’d had a vision of him in his uniform, laden with equipment and weapons, walking across some hot, dusty and dangerous place.

  ‘What kind of missions did you go on?’ she’d asked him as they walked towards his four-wheel drive because he’d also offered to run her home as her dad had been called out on a veterinarian emergency.

  ‘A fair amount of sensitive stuff the last few years. But security over there is improving.’

  She’d worried about him over the years. Even though they hadn’t seen each other much, he’d always been in her thoughts. He’d had six deployments to Afghanistan. How could men and women live through that and get out the other end without being scarred, mentally as well as physically? The boys in his regiment had done some of the heaviest fighting in Afghanistan. She’d followed the news, praying for him.

  ‘Do you feel like the same man now as the man who went into the army sixteen years ago?’ she’d asked. He didn’t seem too different, but he was older and wiser—and sexier because of it. Probably because of all that command he carried with him so easily.

  ‘I lost some good friends. You don’t come back the same. Nobody does.’

  She’d only ever prayed when it was to ask for Ryan to be kept safe. He’d probably laugh if she told him, but she hadn’t expected to ever have this conversation with him, and she wanted him to know.

  ‘I thought of you all the time. I prayed for you.’

  He paused and for a moment she thought perhaps she’d punctured that steadfast, solid persona. ‘Thank you.’ That’s all he said. But then he leaned down and kissed her cheek. ‘I thought of you too, Edie.’

  Her heart had near enough jumped into her throat. It was only a peck on the cheek, but still an act of intimacy—or good friendship. She’d looked away quickly so he didn’t see her flush, but before she took her focus off him, a thought crossed her mind: that he’d been reaching out to her in some way and she’d shot him down in his tracks.

  ‘Edie?’

  She came back to the present, to the light, airy kitchen, but she was still partly stuck in that memory. ‘Why did you come back to Swallow’s Fall?’ Why come here to visit his sister and end up sticking around? Especially as he wasn’t comfortable being around Edie. Apart from when he was doing her the favour of running her around because she didn’t have a car. Or fixing the toaster and the blower-vac and building her stage … Gosh, he di
d so much for her.

  He sighed and looked distractedly over her shoulder and out the kitchen window. ‘I came to see if …’

  ‘What?’

  Something made him swallow whatever he’d been about to say. ‘Nothing. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I’m not worrying.’

  ‘You’re always worrying. You’re pushing people into corners they have no need to be in.’

  ‘If you’re talking about the love I have for my sister and my intentions to help her, you can stop.’

  ‘She doesn’t need your heavy hand.’

  ‘I haven’t got a heavy hand!’ Oh, lord—here they were having an argument!

  For a split second her eyes watered. She couldn’t let that happen. ‘But it is going to be fun ordering you around.’ She thumped him on his chest in a playful but hearty manner and turned.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, taking her arm and pulling her around to look at him.

  ‘You,’ she said, blinking away the watery stuff. ‘You really are a pain in the neck.’

  ‘So are you. What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. Did I hurt your chest?’

  He let go of her arm and grinned. ‘You punch like a toddler.’

  She gave him a reluctant smile. His chest was like a brick wall so of course she hadn’t hurt him. ‘I could put in some training. How about I join your next boxing class?’

  ‘I have enough women on my plate in that quarter without having to make sure you don’t knock me out.’

  Her breath hitched. Was that a reference to their kiss? She couldn’t read anything in those eyes or in his unyielding demeanour, which had replaced anything softer and more intimate from a few moments ago. What had he been thinking in that short connection? That he might actually want to take her in his arms?

  ‘Where are you off to?’ he asked, stepping away. He nodded at her messenger bag, which she’d placed on the pine table with her cardigan on top of it. ‘Want a lift?’