His Brand of Beautiful (26 page)

“The fruit’s intense. Do you want a taste? I’ll get a glass.”

“It’s a bit early for me.” The thought of grape juice straight from the barrel turned her stomach. This stage in the winemaking process the stuff looked like a cross between cat piss and pea soup.

“So don’t swallow. Practice your spit.”

She pulled her hands from her pockets, put them up to ward him off and felt his eyes search beneath the peak of her wool cap.

“Rough weekend, CC? You look like you’ve hardly slept.”

“I could say the same. Have you shaved since Friday?”

He rubbed the fuzz on his face. “Keeps me warm.”

The hose scraped concrete as he moved the attachment to the next barrel in line.

Christina’s pulse kicked. “So, Mikey?”

“Yup?” He extracted the bung.

The forklift roared to life outside the barrel hall and seconds later Crewy drove in, tines targeted at a stack of barrels four‐high against the wall. The rotating light on the forklift flashed orange circles across concrete and oak. It lit the stubble on Mikey’s chin.

Her brother waved the hose at the forklift. “That’s us in the Bash in a few weeks, skidding round the corners.”

“You need me along on that launch, just to keep you on the bloody road.”

His finger inched for the pump switch. “You wanted to ask me something?”

Tell him about the baby. Tell him.
“I’m moving in with Tate.”

He grinned. “Sounds serious. Changed your mind about walking up the aisle? Should I hire a suit?”

She punched his arm. “Lacy says you’re still having trouble with your landlord. I thought you guys might like to move in to my place? At least for a while. I don’t want any rent. You can just pay the bills for power and gas.”

“True?”

She nodded.

“Unreal! We’ll give notice tonight.”

“I have to go into Outback Brands this afternoon to sign‐off on the new labels. I won’t be back,” Christina said.

“Tomorrow then. And CC? Thanks. For the cottage. It means a lot.”

She waved his thanks away. “You’re welcome. It makes sense.”

The suck of wine and the thrum of the pump faded as she strode from the barrel room. She gave Crewy and the forklift a wide berth and in seconds she was out, making her way through the silver forest of stainless steel tanks.

Lily Malone

Outback Brands’ boardroom was the first door on the left, in a wall of floor‐to‐ceiling glass, as Christina followed Lisa Kendrick left off the stairs.

“Jobe and Leesa won’t be long, Christina. Are you sure I can’t get you anything?” Lisa asked, showing her in. “Coffee? Tea?”

“Water’s fine, thanks.”

Lisa smiled and left.

Outback Brands’ boardroom was longer than it was wide, with tan leather chairs encroaching on a solid timber table. A smart‐whiteboard covered the right‐hand wall, the type where you pushed a button to get a hard copy of whatever you’d scrawled. Two Apple Notebooks sat on a built‐in timber cupboard opposite the door, one connected to a widescreen monitor running a slideshow of customer testimonials promoting Outback Brands.

She listened to Lila Blu laud Tate’s brilliance at creative strategy and a carpet wholesaler wax lyrical about how Outback Brands created him a new website that increased business by twenty per cent.

Bet they never had to prove how wild they were to become Tate’s client
. Then she felt a blush stain her throat.
Bet they never had to lick his nipples.

A large Aboriginal dot painting decorated the wall above the widescreen and there was a second painting in the same style at the rear of the room. Christina preferred it: white daises, petals outlined in subtle yellow and pink on a charcoal canvas. She found it strange Tate would decorate his office but not his house. With Tate, there were always more questions.
It was one of the things she—
Christina froze mid‐thought. Had she seriously been about to think,
loved about him
?

Her handbag bumped her hip as she swung away.

The boardroom overlooked an open‐plan studio area, green with indoor plants, where computer monitors the size of small television screens sat on desks above ergonomic chairs. An aquarium filled with fat orange and silver fish bubbled against a wall.

A well‐dressed man with skin the colour of coffee beans stood behind the shoulder of an even darker‐skinned Indigenous woman, barely older than a girl. He pointed at the screen and the woman’s fingers pattered on the keyboard. On the other side of the studio was a row of glass‐fronted offices. She wondered idly which one was Tate’s.

A woman so strawberry‐blonde as to be almost ginger sat behind a desk in one of those cubicles, a line of red metal filing cabinets spanning the wall at her back. She looked up once and their eyes met, warm if brief contact, and it was Christina who looked away first.

The man and woman were crossing the studio toward her, A3 sheets of white paper clasped in the girl’s skinny hands.

“Miss Clay, hello. Finally, we meet. I’m Jobe.” He had a rum and Coke voice and the whitest teeth she’d ever seen and pale, pale eyes like ice mirrors.

She held out her hand, a little dazzled. “Call me Christina.”

Jobe Basel was short, black and sweet, with a milky shot of latte‐coloured hair sprouting from an impeccably‐shaped skull.

“It’s good to put a face to the emails, Jobe,” she said.

“Definitely, it is.” His eyes held hers as his voice dropped a tone and he gave her hand the slightest squeeze before he let go.

The girl with him was taller, but slouched. She peered around Jobe’s shoulder rather than over it.

Jobe performed the introductions. “Christina, this is Leesa, she illustrated your labels.”

“Hello Miss Clay.” Black eyes flicked up, away.

“Christina, please.”

Leesa laid the pages clockwise around the boardroom table. Flashes of colour caught Christina’s eye like autumn leaves tossing in the wind and while part of her couldn’t wait, the other part didn’t want to look. When the last page was laid flat, Jobe stretched his arm in invitation.

Her mouth felt dry as a desert. “I’ve seen them all as PDFs for weeks. This is ridiculous. I’m so nervous.”

“It’s always different when you see them in print,” Jobe responded. “It makes it more real.”

“You’re telling me.” She sucked a deep breath, curled her nails into the palm of her hands and stepped forward until her thighs bumped the back of a tan chair. Her gaze fell to the prints on the table and the plants and the fish and the flashing slideshow of clients lauding Outback Brands, faded away.

Cracked Pots Killer Heels Sauvignon Blanc.

Her handbag slipped from her shoulder into the nearest chair. Gooseflesh broke across the nape of her neck.

CC Pot crouched like a sprinter awaiting the
pop
of the starter’s gun. The perspective showed a lethally‐spiked red heel occupying most of the bottom‐left corner frame, red fingernails spread in the sand. A daisy chain garter—petals the same vibrant colour as the shoe and exquisitely drawn—gripped the curve of CCs thigh. The tail of a chestnut plait tangled down the back of her pot body and caressed the butt of the gun holstered at her hip.

“Oh my God,” Christina breathed. The colours were scorched earth—the shoe, fingernails, the triangle of CC’s pot body—they could have been painted with Binara dust.

At the top right of the frame, distant and slightly unfocused, stood a pair of legs in denim jeans and boots, leather scuffed at the ankle.

You wouldn’t know if she planned to shoot the guy or race into his arms. You could
die wondering.

The label blurred in a prickle of blinked‐back tears. Christina’s tongue crept out to dampen her lips. She stepped sideways.

Cracked Pots. He Loves Me Not. Shiraz. McLaren Vale.

In a field of poppies a thick, slumberous, lip‐stick shade of red, CC Pot sat cross-legged, tossing petals over her shoulder.

“So what do you think?”

That wasn’t Jobe’s voice. Christina spun.

Tate stood two steps inside the door, hands buried in the pockets of a tan sports coat. In the fishbowl of his boardroom, the slow cobalt burn in his eyes was back and with it, an intensity that made her spine melt.
That’s the difference
, she thought.
Jobe has eyes I
bounce off. Tate’s invite me in.

Lily Malone

“I think they’re amazing,” she breathed, turning back to the proofs. “The colours are incredible.”

“Leesa has two of the best eyes for colour I’ve ever seen.”

Leesa tried to blend in with the wall. Tate picked up a remote and pointed it at the Apple Notebook. The customer testimonials stopped.

Christina stepped sideways.

Cracked Pots. The Posse. Tempranillo. McLaren Vale.

Jobe cleared his throat. “Christina?”

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“The closure, did you decide?” Jobe asked.

“We’ll go with screwcap.”

“Embossed with the gun on the cap?” Jobe addressed the question to her, but glanced at Tate.

“I like the idea,” she said.

“You want buyers to think you’re a brand
on
the edge, not over it, Christina. Too much emphasis on the gun might put some people off,” Tate said.

“So what do you suggest? Leave it blank?”

Jobe’s head pivoted between them.

Tate shrugged. “I’d suggest a flower. It’s fresh. Unpretentious. It goes with a pot.

Cracked or otherwise.”

She wanted to argue. Like
really
wanted to argue, but in the end she rolled her eyes and said to Jobe: “Does he get bored being right all the time?”

“Only
boring
,” Jobe answered.

Leesa covered a snicker with her hand.

“So to what flower, Bwana, would you have us turn our collective brilliance?”

Simultaneously Tate and Christina said: “A daisy.”

“It’s unanimous,” the designer grinned. “Leese, let’s go work our magic.”

Leesa almost tripped over her feet trying to get out of the room, but Jobe lingered.

He collected the proofs, tapped them on the table to neaten the edge. “Christina, take these with you. Tonight look with fresh eyes and tomorrow, call me with any of your changes.” He passed the pages to her with a business card, held the card a heartbeat too long. “That’s my direct line.”

Tate moved a tan shoe.

Jobe released the proofs. He favoured Christina with another dazzling smile and left the room.

“Mesmerising my senior staff now are you?” Tate said.

He stepped into her line of sight, close enough to block her view through the glass and when she tried to sway around him he shadowed her, step for step. His warm leather scent hit her and damned if her nipples didn’t tingle. The edge of the proofs crumpled in her palm.

“Have you started packing?”

“I have heaps of time for packing,” she responded. “Don’t let me hold you up. You look busy.”

Only he didn’t look busy. He looked like he’d spent the morning playing tennis. He looked relaxed and vital and every second she spent here made her remember how long it had been since she’d had him deep between her thighs.

“Tell your brother I’ll call him about the Landrover design for the launch,” Tate said.

“Why don’t you just ask me?”

“Cars aren’t your strong point, Christina. I ask you the dimensions of the bonnet, I bet I get the width of the boot.”

She had to give him that. She exhaled. “Tate,
please
don’t mention the baby when you speak with Michael. I haven’t had a chance to tell him yet and if I don’t tell him just the right way he’ll try to talk me out of going on the launch and I have to be there or this whole thing is a waste of—”

“You’re not going on the launch.” He said it very soft.

“I’m not asking permission. This is my decision, Tate.”

“The hell it is.” He gripped her elbow.

She tried to snatch her arm back. “You’re hurting me.”

He let go and she grabbed for the boardroom table. In the second before his hand steadied her shoulder, the room spun. She shrugged his hand away.

“There’s no doctor on every street corner out there, Christina. You can’t just dial 000

if something goes wrong and wait for the ambulance.”

“I’ll be
fine
. I’ll be thirteen weeks by the time the race starts. If I have any problems before then of course I’ll reassess.”

“You’ll
reassess
?” He spelled out every syllable.

“Yes. Mikey hates dealing with the media, Tate. He’ll need me there. The success of our launch hangs on it.”
I am not begging.

Tate slapped his hands on the back of the chair and his tawny head dipped until his forehead fell beneath the line of his shoulders. Over his head, Christina could see Leesa out in the studio chewing her lip, oblivious, eyes intent on her computer screen. Behind Leesa, strawberry‐blonde stared into the boardroom like she’d witnessed a train wreck.

“Do you remember the night I told you about Jolie? About how she died?”

“Of course.”
I’ll remember it the rest of my life.

“I didn’t tell you everything.” His voice grated like a truckload of wet cement.

She touched his arm.

“Jolie was six months pregnant when she died. None of us knew. The Consulate told us over the phone but Shasta and I had to see her with our own eyes before we could believe it.”

Leather groaned as the chair pitched slowly back and forth beneath his weight.

“Jolie filled two pages of her diary the day she felt the baby’s first kick. She said it was like having a moth flying around in your stomach and feeling the beat of its wings.”

Christina’s hand crept to her belly.

“There were pages and pages of baby names. She settled on Eva‐Marie Newell if it was a girl. Oliver Gilbert Newell for a boy.”

“What was it, the baby?”

“She would have been my niece,” Tate said.

Eva‐Marie Newell.
“I’m so sorry.”

He flicked two fingers at her, never letting go of the chair. “I don’t want your pity, Christina. I want you to say you understand, and you won’t go on the launch.”