Free The Goodbye Ride by Lily Malone Page B

“There you are, Owen love.”
    Liv turned to see Owen jogging toward them.
He was gasping for oxygen, his face red.
    “Mark said… he didn’t know anything… about
you being allergic to bees...” Owen bent, rested his hands on his knees and
squinted up against a sun now high in the sky. “The only thing we could find
was hayfever tablets...” He pulled a packet from the pocket of his shorts.
    “False alarm I reckon, love,” Margaret said
cheerfully, patting Owen on the back. “It must have been a March Fly. I hate
those buggers. Phew, you look a bit puffed. Did you run all the way?”
    “March fly? It’s June.”
    “Nature is her own timekeeper, Owen.”
    Owen’s mouth opened, then closed.
    Liv put her hand to her mouth to hide her
giggles and turned to find her way back through her obstacle course, to her
place in the vine row.
     
    ****
     
    “Let’s call it quits,” Margaret called
hours later, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “I can finish up during
the week.”
    Liv checked her watch. It was four-thirty
in the afternoon and she could almost smell a celebratory beer. All around her,
Margaret’s Folly had been tamed. Neat brown shoots stuck up from vines stripped
bare.
    “Let me just finish these last two,” Liv
called, making a host of final, strategic cuts on three more metres of canopy,
before switching the Felco off for the last time.
    She joined Owen and Margaret and the three
of them walked up the hill, collecting clothing, water bottles and tools as
they went.
    “Thank you so much for your help, Olivia,”
Margaret said, standing by the Hyundai while Liv stacked pruning gear in the
boot.
    “No problem,” Liv said, not quite knowing
where to put herself after she shut the compartment.
    Owen had his hand on the roof near the
driver’s door, and his charcoal eyes were fixed on a spot somewhere above her
left eye. He was no help at all.
    “Um. Owen?” Liv ventured. “The Duke?”
    “Sorry?” Owen’s head jerked up.
    “The Duke.” She repeated, feeling a bit
silly.
    “Sorry. I was miles away,” he said.
    Whoever wrote the Wiki How regarding
the transfer of a Ducati in return for a weekend’s pruning, Liv would have
welcomed their advice about now.
    “Awkward,” Margaret said, flipping her hand
like a hip teenager as she turned for the steps. “You two sort it out. Thanks
again, Liv. We couldn’t have done it without you.”
    Liv waved her thanks away. “No trouble.”
    Owen moved closer and Liv lost sight of his
aunt’s retreating back and the camellia trees flanking the front steps. She
couldn’t see anything but the solid wall of his chest and the mesmerising rise
of his hand as he lifted it toward her face. “How can I think about transfer
papers when this damn chunk of hair falls across your eye like that? How can I
look at it without wanting to do…this.”
    He tucked the stray hairs behind her ear.
Roughened fingertips skimmed her earlobe, caressed the skin of her neck and Liv
felt all the breath squeeze from her lungs. Could Owen feel her pulse? Surely
he could hear it?
    “How should we celebrate all our hard work,
Liv?”
    “I don’t care,” she said. And she didn’t.
Anywhere with him was fine.
    “Should I surprise you?”
    Liv had three pairs of jeans in her
wardrobe, including the pair she now wore. She hoped he wasn’t thinking of
anywhere too ritzy.“I never really liked surprises.”
    Owen’s eyebrows arched. “You’ll ride the
flying fox in the school playground but you don’t like surprises?”
    “At least give me a clue about what to
wear. I can hardly drag out the party heels if we’re riding the bike again.” That’s
if I owned party heels.
    “You’d look good in anything,” Owen said,
banishing all thought of footwear from her brain as his mouth brushed her
temple. “You’d look incredible in nothing.”
    The husky promise in his voice—his hot
breath on her skin—it turned her knees to jelly.
    Owen breathed her scent, his