The Bonk Squad (33 page)

“
You get used to it.” And
because she’d asked about him, he felt he could reverse the
questioning. “How about you?”

“
I’m a nurse, so I know
all about evening shifts,” she said with a wry smile. “I’m only
working part time this year so I can finish my Masters.”

“
Get away from there,
Timmy!” one of the men yelled as a Cocker Spaniel started to roll
in something that was probably rotten fish. The rest of the
group—all retired—called their own dogs to heel.

“
Is she a show dog?” Sarah
asked, eyeing Miss Sweetie’s long sand-sweeping coat. The pristine
white had become decidedly grubby around the edges, and it was a
magnet for bits of dried seaweed and twigs. By contrast Auric’s
distinctive white face-stripe and chest looked crisp and clean
against his massive black body.

Dan shook his head.
“Spoiled rotten though. My grandmother’ll have a fit if she sees
her in this state. I’ll have to find a groomer to give her a bath
and a trim.”

“
Save your money,” Sarah
said, patting Auric as he bumped against her thigh for attention.
“I’ll do it for you if you like. I’m used to bathing this big boy,
so how hard can a little squirt like her be?”

Dan had the next day off
work so he arrived at lunchtime, bringing a bowl of his best
risotto, a bag of assorted salad greens, and a very wriggly
dog.

“
You didn’t have to bring
food,” Sarah said, plainly pleased that he had. They sat at a
shaded table in her sunny yard, eating and talking for far too
long.

Finally he sighed,
stretched, and stood. “I promised Gran a visit today,” he said,
reluctantly starting to tidy the lunch plates away. Sarah was easy
company. He felt relaxed and wound up at the same time. How long
since a woman had done that to him?

Once he’d cleared the
table she scooped Sweetie up from the lawn.

“
Trim first or wash
first?” she asked.

“
I guess if you trim first
there’s less to wash?”

They achieved some sort of
success with Dan holding and Sarah trimming, but it wasn’t easy,
and Sweetie soon resembled a tousled mop instead of her silky
self.

“
I thought you were used
to doing Auric?” he asked.

“
I bath him but he doesn’t
need trimming.”

“
The next bit’ll be easier
then.”

But Miss Sweetie treated
the bath as a game, bursting out of the big basin of warm water
Sarah had set on the table top, drenching Dan and eventually
obliging him to remove his soggy denim shirt. Sarah’s blue tank was
soon spotted with splashes, too—and Dan saw the outline of a pretty
bra through the thin stretchy fabric, and the sweet curves of her
breasts as she bent to restrain the sopping struggling
dog.

Sweetie yapped. Auric,
confined to his run, howled in a deep sad voice.

“
This is hopeless,” Sarah
snapped, pink and disheveled. “I’m going to let Auric out and see
if she’ll hold still with him sitting close by.”

“
Up!” she said, indicating
the sturdy timber bench beside the table. Auric instantly upped,
and sat, and panted, feathery tail sweeping through the air and
thumping the seat. His brown eyes glowed below their distinctive
tan eyebrow spots. Sweetie put her head on one side and gazed
adoringly at him. Sarah and Dan soon made much better
progress.

“
They’re The Odd Couple,”
Sarah said, rubbing Sweetie with a towel. “Do you think she’ll
object to my hair drier?”

“
She’s objected to
everything else,” he said, glancing at his watch and knowing his
grandmother would soon be getting anxious. Sweetie took the noise
and hot air in her stride as long as Auric stayed close. She even
suffered the tangle-brush without too much complaint.

Dan eased back into his
damp shirt, clipped Sweetie’s lead on, and led his refurbished toy
out to the car.

Gran exclaimed with dismay
at Sweetie’s new appearance but her eyes lit up when he started
talking about Sarah. And he found her curiously easy to talk
about.

Two weeks went by. He and
Sarah beach walked every morning, sometimes shared brunch when she
didn’t have lectures, talked non-stop, and managed to see a couple
of movies. Dan fixed the crooked latch on Auric’s run and the loose
handle on one of Sarah’s kitchen cupboards.

And then Gran’s cottage
was sold. The new owners requested a short settlement date—the end
of the month. With only a fortnight left, Dan knew he had to move
out fast.

“
There’s a spare room at
my place,” Sarah said in a very offhand manner as they packed up
the last of Gran’s good dinner set together.

“
What about
Richard?”

“
Not coming
back.”

“
So?” What was she really
offering?

“
So I need to rent out his
room.”

Okay, he could live with
that and see where it led.

Five nights later Dan
parked his car in Sarah’s driveway, unlocked the front door with
his own key, and headed for his king-sized bed.

Sarah appeared in her
bedroom doorway, covered neck to toes in a big pink robe, looking
rumpled and sleepy and irresistible.

“
Come and see these dogs,”
she whispered.

Auric snored softly in his
big dog bed in the corner of her room. Sweetie lay cuddled close
against him, blissfully breathing with the slow rhythm of deep
sleep.

“
Do you think it’s
catching?” Dan asked hopefully.

“
Don’t get any ideas like
that,” Sarah replied, sending him an unreadable grin.

And as he left her room,
he heard with ears well-used to cutting through the clatter and
clamor of his restaurant kitchen, her quiet murmur of
“yet.”

Meg glanced up as Bobbie set a mug of
coffee down beside her. Bobbie kept her eyes averted, looking as
though she expected the guillotine blade to fall on her neck at any
moment.

“
It’s lovely,” Meg said,
laying the sheaf of pages beside the mug. “It’s a great little
story. You’ve got it all. Nice hero and heroine. Something
interesting going on. And a definite indication of a love affair to
follow.”

Bobbie gnawed her bottom lip, still
looking far from convinced. “You really think it’s
okay?”

“
More than okay. Well done,
Bobbie. You have just the right voice for sweet and gentle
romances. I can’t quite imagine you writing erotica, to be
honest.”

“
I did find erotica pretty
hard,” Bobbie murmured.

Not to mention purple and
forked
, Meg thought.

“
Yep,” Ian yelled to the
truckie. “Yep—bit further. That’s fine. Right there.”

The truck braked with a deafening
hiss. The driver leapt from the cab and engaged the machinery,
swinging the dumpster down onto Meg’s driveway. The old Toyota sat
drowsing on the front lawn, out of the way.

He unhitched the clanking chains and
reversed the hydraulics before roaring out of the gate. Meg peered
over into the echoing steel space once he was gone.

“
We’ll never fill
that!”

“
The next size down looked
too small.” Ian stood, hands on hips, a happy man with a project
under way. “I brought my loppers and the pruning saw. Your old
Pittosporum needs a lot of dead wood taking out. The Pandorea’s
running rampant over your fence and could do with a good chop back.
I thought I’d tidy the garden for you by way of apology for the
mess inside.”

Meg, who was absolutely never up this
early on a Saturday, nodded as though she’d always known the names
of the half dead tree, and the dark-leafed creeper she sometimes
took the clippers to when it started scratching the car.

“
I might have a go at that
big flax bush around the back,” she offered. “There are lots of old
stalks on it.”

By later that morning they’d half
filled the bin with vegetation, the garden looked better than it
had in years, and Ian had taken his shirt off.

Meg watched him from the kitchen
window as she stirred three sugars into his tea. Not quite the
fantasy plumber she’d conjured up, but not bad.

He looked hard and
whipcord-strong—with long muscles bunching under his sweat-sheened
golden skin as he stretched and tugged and dragged and lifted. More
like the dangerously sleek men in the Calvin Klein underwear ads
than the bulgy one promoting the Bowflex gym machine on TV, she
decided.

No complaints at all,
really.

“
Time you stopped,” she
called, carrying his tea and her coffee out onto the back patio. He
looked up from loading the wheelbarrow with the broken concrete
which had lurked in a heap behind the garage for as long as she
could remember. “Or would you rather have something
cold?”

He grinned and deserted the concrete.
“Nah—tea’s always good. Three sugars?”

“
Three sugars. You must get
through pounds of the stuff.”

“
Work it all off,” he said,
unconcerned.

If his chest hair was
black, he’d be Carlo
, Meg thought. She’d
always pictured her Italian billionaire as a lean lanky hunk. One
of these days the nanny would get a real treat.

Every Italian Meg had ever seen was
short and nuggety, with knotty muscles and often a little pot belly
from too much good cooking. Rico Favucci from just down the road,
for instance. And Gary’s old fishing mate, Leo. Ben’s rugby coach
at school—Luca someone-or-other. But hey, this was
fiction...

“
Anyway, did you send your
partial off?” she asked.

Ian lowered himself into one of the
timber patio chairs, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and
stretched both long arms to un-kink his shoulders. Meg watched as
his chest expanded and his six-pack popped into sharp relief. Yes,
she imagined he’d have looked good hanging out Liz’s panties the
day before their last meeting. She averted her eyes before he
opened his and caught her rather too admiring
inspection.

“
Printed it out on
Christmas Day. Synopsis, three chapters, query letter, postal
coupon, self-addressed envelope. It’s a bit of a process, isn’t it?
So now we wait.”

“
Now we wait,” she agreed.
“Mine went on Tuesday.” She handed him his tea.

“
Mandy heard back quite
fast.”

“
Faster than I’ve ever
known it to happen. Maybe she struck a new keen editor?”

“
Maybe they really did like
it?”

Meg shook her head. “She’s got all the
medical jargon, but she can’t really write. I don’t fancy her
chances. She needs to finish the rest of the book, anyway. A
partial’s one thing; a complete novel’s quite another.”

Ian ran his hand back through his
hair. “So no-one’s ever wanted the whole thing before
this?”

“
Are you
surprised?”

“
Not very. But she might
amaze us.”

“
I’ll tell you who
might—Eloise’s husband. She doesn’t think he has a show, but he’s a
chatty little Welshman...one of those people who’s a born
story-teller. Ever met him?”

Ian slapped at a sandfly sampling his
chest. “Don’t think so. Didn’t know he wrote. He could join our
group.”

“
She’d never let him. He’d
steal her thunder. She’s twitchy enough about Tigger being part of
things for a while.”

Meg raised her coffee, and
then added, “I’m
fairly
sure Tigger chose my Ben as her holiday
toy-boy.”

Ian turned to her, mid swallow, and
started to cough. “Damn,” he spluttered, setting the tea down.
“Really?” He continued to cough and clear his throat for the next
little while.

Meg waited until he was quieter.
“Surprised you, did I? They were definitely seeing each other, and
I noticed tremendous scratches down his back. Fingernails for
sure.”

“
Well, well. She’s a pretty
little piece. I can’t take those dreadlocks though.”

“
Ben no doubt thinks
they’re very cool.”

“
Ben’s twenty years younger
than we are.”

“
Twenty-three,” Meg
corrected. “My fortieth last month.”

“
And mine
this
month.”

“
We should have some
birthday toasts at the next meeting, then.”

Ian sucked air through his teeth.
“God, no. Not after what happened at the last one. I won’t live
that down for a while.”

She laughed, remembering the chaos,
and Vi’s accusations. “Liz seems to have recovered. I saw her in
town on Christmas Eve. She was in a tearing rush to get
away—nothing wrong with her that I could see.”

“
How did the chap in the
bath towel go? Your bloke?”

“
Not really my bloke.
Haven’t been out with him for a while now. Liz said Paul was pretty
gob-smacked finding her with two different half naked men the same
weekend. I think she achieved what she wanted.”