Dark Country (34 page)

‘I’m glad you don’t remember it, Jeanie,’ Kris said. Then she grinned, made light of it, ‘Because I think I dropped you there,
at one point. Just as well Gil has more muscles than me.’

Jeanie chuckled, a pale shadow of her normal laugh, but a sign that heartened Gil. She let go of his hand and waved at a chair
in the corner. ‘Pull that up, Gil, and sit down beside me.’

Carrying the chair over, he glanced around the room properly for the first time. On the chest of drawers beside the bed, the
photo of Jeanie and Aldo had pride of place, in front of a bunch of flowers. A couple of other flower arrangements sat on
the shelf on the side wall, where Jeanie could see them, and a long cotton robe hung on the cupboard door, a pair of satin
slippers nearby. Although he hadn’t doubted Nancy, it was good to see she’d bought nice things for Jeanie, and given her the
photo.

Jeanie saw him looking in that direction, and smiled at him. ‘Thank you for saving that, Gil. I would have missed it a great
deal.’

‘Were you insured?’ His voice sounded rougher than he meant it to be. ‘If you need anything, I’ll arrange it for you.’

‘It was all insured – the building, the business, the contents. I’ll have enough to get by. That’s all I need.’

She’d have more than the basics, if he had anything to do with it. But he didn’t argue the point. Despite her brave face,
he could see her tiring. They shouldn’t stay too long.

Kris must have noticed, too. She took Jeanie’s hand in hers. ‘Jeanie, I’d like to ask you a few questions, but only if you’re
up to answering them.’

‘I thought you would.’

‘Have you any idea what happened? How the fire started?’

‘No, Kris, I’m sorry. Adam and the customers had gone. I locked the money in the office, and did the normal close-up things
– shutting off the pumps, checking the kitchen, locking up – and then I went upstairs. I was going to make a batch of friands
for the ball, so I turned the oven on to heat up. I remember getting the recipe book down from the shelf, and putting the
kettle on for a cup of tea, but that’s all.’

Jeanie reached for the cup of water on the tray table, and Gil refreshed it from the jug and passed it to her.

Kris waited until she’d had a few sips. ‘The customers – Adam and Gil said they saw two truck drivers when they were in there.
Did you know them?’

‘One of them had been in a couple of times. Sam, his name was. I don’t remember his surname. Pleasant man, not long moved
to the Birraga area. The other man, I didn’t know him.’ Jeanie creased her forehead in thought. ‘Sam called him something,
one of those names that might have been a first name or a last name. Let me think what it was …’ She took
another sip of water. ‘Clinton. That’s it, because I remember thinking he didn’t look like Bill Clinton.’

The names didn’t ring any bells for Gil, and if they did for Kris she gave no sign of it. Nor did she tell Jeanie that one
of them had died.

‘That’s a great help, Jeanie. Now, I’ve just got one more question. Gil’s told me about the trouble you had, years ago, with
someone wanting protection money, and how you dealt with that. Can you tell me if you’ve had any threats, or other trouble,
recently?’

Jeanie glanced between both of them. ‘You think it wasn’t an accident? I thought maybe I’d just left the stove on.’

‘We don’t know yet, Jeanie,’ Kris said gently. ‘We’re still waiting on the report from the forensic examiners. But I want
to make sure I check all possibilities.’

‘There’s been no more trouble. Not for years. They’ve got more business interests, these days, so small concerns like mine
probably aren’t worth their bother. Plus you’re there, now Kris, and Adam, and both of you are much better officers than Bill
Franklin ever was. He turned a blind eye to a lot of goings-on, back then.’

She let her head fall back on the pillow, clearly tired.

Gil signalled to Kris, and she nodded. They’d asked enough, found out the most pressing answers.

Kris kissed Jeanie on the cheek again. ‘We’ll go and let you rest now, Jeanie. I’ll try to come down and visit you in Sydney
while you’re there.’

Gil leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, too, her smile more than reward for the unaccustomed display of
affection. ‘Take care of yourself. And let me know if you need anything at all.’

They didn’t talk until they were well away from the ward.

‘Sam and Clinton – are the names significant?’ he asked her at last, pushing open a door out of the building.

‘Sam Weston was the victim. There’s been nothing about a Clinton, but at least we’ve got a name, of sorts, for the second
driver now. I’ll get Steve to look into it.’ She frowned, stopped abruptly. ‘Did you believe her? About there being no more
trouble?’

He thought back before he answered. ‘Yeah. Mostly. Maybe there were some threats after I left, but not recently. She’s right
in that her business is small, compared to their other operations. Her turnover can’t be much, so extortion wouldn’t be worth
their while.’

He pushed away the other possibility that gnawed at him. Nobody had known about him going to Jeanie’s that evening except
Kris. Even if the truckies had heard Jeanie mention him staying in the cabin, things had happened too quickly for the fire
to be a punishment for aiding him. And it was far more logical that the drivers had been sent to eliminate the evidence. He
just had to believe it.

The late afternoon sun slanted across the road as they left Tamworth. They took back roads, not the highway, winding through
the Liverpool Ranges on roads with little traffic. Nobody followed them. Most of the time, there were no vehicles at all in
sight.

Worry about Jeanie occupied Gil’s mind for the first hour or so, distracting him from thinking about Kris, behind him on the
bike. But after a while, the torture ramped up again, and as the time passed and the twilight darkened to night, Kris filled
his every thought, every moment of awareness. He tried to think of the reasons why him and her would be a bad idea, but his
body rejected all of them. He rounded a wide bend, and she shifted slightly against him, her chest brushing his back. Two
leather jackets, his and hers – Mark’s, he reminded himself – didn’t dilute the effect, or what his imagination did with it.

He gritted his teeth and rode on, hoping for a straight road until the next town. Fifteen minutes, he figured. There’d probably
be a 24-hour or at least a late-night service station there, lights and people and fuel and food, and a chance for them both
to get off the bike, stretch their legs, and give his body some respite from the sensual torture.

By the time he pulled in at the fuel bowsers, his teeth ached from clenching so long. Her hand rested on his shoulder for
balance as she swung off the bike. Taking her helmet off, she stretched her neck side to side, and then gave her head a shake,
waves of red hair blowing around her face, the bright lights overhead throwing glittery highlights in it.
Beautiful
, his brain thought.

She unzipped the front of Mark’s too-big jacket, the leather falling back a few inches to reveal a glimpse of skin-hugging
black knit. His brain stopped thinking. He hooked his helmet on the handlebar, reached for the pump, concentrated on undoing
the cap on the tank, putting the nozzle in – and then kept his eyes straight ahead because that was just too damned symbolic.

‘Do you need coffee? Or food?’ she asked, oblivious – he hoped – of the way his thoughts were running. ‘Shall I go in and
order something?’

‘Yeah. Something quick. And Coke. There’s still hours to go.’

‘We should stop somewhere, in an hour or so, get a few hours’ rest. Neither of us had much sleep last night. We can leave
early in the morning, and still be in Sydney by the time the bank opens.’

He tried to come up with good reasons for not stopping to rest, and then settled on the truth.

‘It’s not sleep I want, Blue.’

Her smile bloomed, danced in her eyes, and she slid a hand under his jacket and stepped close.

‘Me neither.’

Two words, one touch, and almost all his determination went out the window.

He clung on to a last shred of restraint. ‘This is crazy, Blue.’

She cupped a hand against his chin, no longer teasing, the caress and the expression in her eyes more intimate than any of
his sexual encounters.

‘Is it?’ she challenged softly.

‘You’re a cop. I’m a …’ He left the sentence dangling, struggling to find the right descriptor for the taint of prison, for
the darkness of his life.

‘Person,’ she supplied. ‘And last time I checked, consensual sex between two single people who like each other was not a crime,
legally or morally.’ But she stepped back, took her hands
away, and he wanted to grab them back. ‘You tell me if you want it, Gil.’

In answer, he pulled her to him, kissed her hard for a long moment.

When he let her go, she stepped back just enough to see his face, her own flushed, her breathing as fractured as his own.

‘So, we can find somewhere here or, if we travel for another hour to Lithgow, we can leave an hour later in the morning.’

Here
, his body thundered.
Here, now
. But some element of his brain squeezed a reminder in between the thunder that he hated early mornings.

‘Lithgow,’ he said, trying not to regret it. ‘We can make it that far.’
Maybe
, he added to himself. And there had to be a few places they could pull up between here and there if they couldn’t.

‘I’ll go and pay for the fuel,’ she said with a grin. ‘You might want to see if there’s a condom-vending machine in the gents’.’

He did want to. There was. By the time she came back from paying, he was beside the bike, waiting for her, watching her easy
stride as she walked towards him.

‘Can you drive this thing?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ He slid his hand into her hair, bent as if he was going to kiss her neck, and instead whispered into her ear, ‘Because
I’m so distracted I can’t focus on the road.’

She laughed, throaty and low, planted a quick kiss on his mouth, and swung her leg over the bike in a smooth movement that
turned his blood to steam.

By the time the lights of Lithgow were in sight, she was gripping the handlebars so tight she half-expected them to crumble
any moment.

Nothing like straddling a bike, up close to a man she found intensely attractive, to get a girl in the mood. Except she’d
passed ‘in the mood’ after the first fifteen minutes. The last few hours she’d progressed through teeth-grinding frustration
to incoherent silent screaming.

The only thing that kept her halfway sane, and able to keep steering straight, was the worry about what lay beyond, in Sydney,
and her fear for Gil. She didn’t want to lose him. She knew herself, and her relations with men well enough to recognise that
the bone-dissolving physical desire was about way more than just sex. Yes, she
had
missed sex, this last couple of years, but she’d had other things on her mind. And there were few men around who could get
over the whole female cop thing and who she could like enough to have a comfortable relationship with.

Gil … well, Gil sure wasn’t
comfortable
. Beneath the surface, Gil was raw and wild, powerful and rare. Exhilarating and dangerous – drawing the wild part of her
to him, and there’d be no half-measures for either of them.

His hand slipped underneath her jacket, underneath her T-shirt, caressing her waist, gliding up her spine, and she had to
concentrate very, very hard to keep the bike steady.

She turned in at the first motel she saw. Decent, but not flash enough to need a credit card. Perfect for their situation.
She was wired so tight she was almost surprised the metal door handle of the office didn’t give off sparks when she opened
it. She’d registered, paid, and had the room key in her hand within minutes.

‘Room fourteen,’ she said to Gil outside. ‘At the end. I’ll meet you there.’ She needed, for just a few seconds, to walk.
The space. A chance to breathe, if she could. Just like when she used to go abseiling, the few moments of stillness and quiet
before the push off into thin air.

He pulled into the parking space just ahead of her, had their bags off the bike before she’d finished unlocking the door,
and followed her inside.

The moment he closed the door, dropped the bags on the floor, they reached for each other, mouths hungry to taste, to connect,
to explore, even as they shed their jackets and lifted T-shirts to find skin. She indulged herself, loving his mouth, loving
the feel of firm stomach and chest and shoulders beneath her fingers, loving the heat of his hands discovering her. But hands
on skin wasn’t enough. She wanted her clothes off, wanted his clothes off, craved skin against skin and losing herself in
that bliss. She wanted to be herself, fully and wholly, and to peel away his reserve and find the strong, giving man beneath
it.

They broke the kiss, breaths coming hard, and she grinned at him as she pushed his T-shirt up.