“How’s it feeling now?” Raif asked.
“Fine.”
Her voice sounded husky. Embarrassed by her reaction to him, she pulled her hand free and reached for a towel.
“Here, let me.” Raif took it from her before she could protest and gently patted her skin dry. “I saw some aloe gel in here before... Ah, here it is,” he said, as he poked through a small first-aid box she hadn’t noticed on top of the refrigerator.
Raif squeezed a small amount on her hand, his touch light as a feather as he smoothed it over the burn.
“You should be good as new in no time. Any more pain?”
She shook her head. “Thanks, it’s good now. Seems I’m always finding reasons to thank you lately,” she said, feeling ridiculously shy all of a sudden.
She stepped away from him and reached for the oven door.
“Let me. You go sit down.”
“I’m not helpless, you know,” she muttered in frustration.
“I know. Tell you what. You can wait on me for the whole rest of the trip. How’s that?”
She laughed, her irritation dissolving just as quickly as it had arisen, which was what he’d obviously intended all along. “Fine, I’ll do that. But you might be sorry.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. You don’t cook. Well, let’s see about teaching you, hmm?”
He put their plates on the table and sat down with her.
“This is good,” he said, after tasting the toast. “There’s something different about it.”
“Could be the vanilla essence,” she said, accepting his compliment with a buzz of satisfaction.
“Interesting addition.”
“It’s something my mum does. I learned it from her.”
“But not anything else?” he questioned.
“No, not anything else. What about you? Do you cook?”
“Mum made me learn before I went to uni. It was pretty useful when it came to impressing the girls, so I expanded my repertoire pretty quickly.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, I would have expected that of you.”
He shot her a cheeky smile and applied himself to the rest of his breakfast. When they’d finished, he suggested that he get the boat back en route upriver and leave her to guide it while he tidied up.
For the next few hours they lazily cruised along the Murray, taking turns at the helm and admiring the riverbanks as they went along. It was incredibly peaceful, with the exception of the occasional speedboat that went whizzing past, often with a wetsuit-clad wakeboarder hanging off a rope on the back even on a cold day like today.
It was past midday when they reached a small town. The rain had stopped a couple hours earlier and Shanal had been sitting out on the front deck, admiring the ocher-colored cliffs that rose from the river.
“What do you say about a walk?” Raif called to her through the open cabin door.
Shanal started to say yes, but then a memory from the bad dream she’d had last night tickled the back of her mind. She could still recall the all-encompassing fear she’d felt in the dream when Burton had forced her to remain at the altar. She knew it was ridiculous, that her ex-fiancé couldn’t possibly have tracked her down yet—and even if he did, he was hardly the violent type—but nevertheless she shook her head. “I’m happy to stay on the boat. But you go on if you want to.”
“He’s not going to find you here, Shanal. And even if he does, you don’t have to go with him.”
She closed her eyes and counted slowly to ten. How was it that Raif could read her so easily?
“Okay, I’d like to take a walk with you.”
They moored near a ferry landing and then followed the road up the hill and around a sharp bend. It was good to get out of the boat and really stretch her legs, she found, and she enjoyed the view once they made it to the lookout. From there they had a great panorama of the river. Beneath them the ferry plied back and forth, and other houseboats were moored near the terminal on the other side.
“Our boat looks tiny from up here, doesn’t it?” she commented.
“It does. I always think a view like this helps remind me to keep things in perspective. When we’re on the boat, that’s pretty much all we see—aside from the river around us, obviously. Sometimes you just need a bit of distance to rebalance your perceptions. There’s so much else that’s out there. It makes what we are, what we’re going through, seem insignificant sometimes.”
“I guess,” she agreed, but held the safety railing in front of her in a viselike grip. She wished her problems could fade away into insignificance with just a little distance, but she’d have to return to face them sooner or later. “So, where are we heading from here?”