She sighed and sat back in her seat. ‘If I had brothers and sisters I’d see them all the time. I’d love to be part of a big family.’
‘What? Even if it was a family like the Chatsfields?’
‘They’d still be my family. I can imagine Christmas with a house fit to bursting and everybody talking at once and lashings of food on the table. You’re so lucky.’
Was he? He’d never felt lucky. He’d felt … lost—like he’d never belonged. So he’d turned his back on being one of a crowd and fought hard to forge his own identity, fighting to get himself and keep himself out of the limelight.
But now he wondered about his family. He knew what the magazines said about them, but how were they really? Antonio, Lucilla and Nicolo—he didn’t even know if they had partners or were married. And what of his younger siblings, the twins, Orsino and Lucca, and Cara, who had been only seven when he had left?
Only one year older than Nikki when she had died.
He swallowed. Did Cara even remember him? Remember the games of cricket they’d played before he’d left? Remember the warnings he’d tried to give her about the big bad world around them?
And then Holly said something that sounded like koala but she was so casual he thought he must have misheard until she pointed and he was glad the truck in front was going too slowly because he saw it curled high up in a tree.
She spotted another a little farther along, this time with a baby clutched to its mother’s chest.
Nikki would have been beside herself. She’d loved animals, large and small, and he and Michele had taken her to the zoo as many times as her failing body would allow. When she’d seen her first real live koala, she’d grinned so hard her little face had nearly split in two.
He found a place to pull off and they walked back for a closer look. The mother koala chewed on a gum leaf and blinked at them unconcerned while the joey slept oblivious on her chest. He took a photo for Nikki, even though his daughter would never see it, but the other children in Nikki’s Ward would no doubt enjoy it.
‘A souvenir of your trip?’ she asked.
‘Something for a friend,’ he said, and left it at that.
They walked back to the car and he listened as Holly told him about the koalas, her delight in the furry creatures palpable, and it shook off his melancholy. He liked the way she looked when she was happy. He liked what it did to light up her turquoise eyes and put colour in those sensual lips.
He wondered what it would be like to be the one to make her eyes light up like that and put a flush in those pink cheeks. And he wondered whether he might soon get to find out.
‘A couple more kilometres down this road,’ she said back in the car and after they’d made the final turn. ‘You’ll see our sign out front.’
They drove along a winding valley lined by towering eucalyptus trees with creamy smooth trunks, stately and majestic.
‘Candlebark gums,’ she told him when he mentioned them in passing. ‘Eucalyptus rubida.’
He recognised it. ‘The name of your sparkling wine.’
‘Ten out of ten,’ she said with a smile, sounding impressed. ‘We wanted a name that reflected this area. And the vines sit shoulder to shoulder with the candlebarks—it just seemed a natural fit.’
He turned up the long driveway, towards a house set up high on one side beyond which vines marched up the hillside.
‘The manager’s away on holiday with his family right now so you can park anywhere.’
‘We’ve got the whole place to ourselves?’
It was a test. He’d intended it to be one. It would either mean nothing to her, or something.
She blinked, a delicious blush colouring her cheeks, the tip of her pink tongue hovering tremulously at her top lip.
Bullseye.
She cleared her throat. Avoided his eyes. ‘It actually means we should be able to get this wine disgorged and dosaged without interruption and be back on the road in no time.’
It was a reasonable answer, she thought, under the circumstances. It was the right answer if you were thinking about the job at hand and not about the humming in your veins and vague possibilities that he might not even have intended.
And if he had meant anything else, she’d soon know it.
‘After the delays on the highway, you think we’ll get everything done and make it back today?’
His eyes had a glint to them, his lips a faint curve, and his words put her in mind of another answer and reminded her of the key to the guesthouse weighing heavily on her conscience.
Because between the heavy sky and sodden earth, between the barren vines and the towering gums, something had changed between them. There was an added note to his voice, mischievous. Challenging. Maybe even daring.