Page 61 of The Vet from Snowy River
She paused. ‘Yes?’
‘I trust you, Vera. I don’t need to know the nitty-gritty. And you can trust me.’ He held out his arm and watched the thoughts play across her face. Wariness. Reserve. And, at last, a wisp of a sad, sad smile. She tucked her arm into his and they made their way back to the clinic.
CHAPTER
18
She should never have agreed, Vera thought, as she slid back the mirrored door of the teeny wardrobe in her tiny bedroom in her incy wincy rented apartment.
Not to the cat, not to the hand holding at the lake … and especially not to a daytrip, together, into the mountains.
Even as her mouth had been saying the wordyes,the realist living inside her brain had been leaning up against the wall of a jail cell, wearing an orange jumpsuit and ankle shackles, shaking its head and sayingVera, I’m tired of explaining it to you. Do I have to remind you what happened when you cosied up with Aaron Finch? Disaster happened. Disaster involving a possible jail term happened. DO NOT GET INVOLVED.
Mostly, it was Graeme’s fault. He’d spent the whole of the week after the cat crisis putting the idea into her head that her life was going well. That she could take good stuff for granted. Poor, deluded man … he didn’t know a black cloud of unhappy endings liked to follow her from one crisis to another.
Take yesterday at the café. He’d started filling her with a false sense ofjoie de vivreafter the Saturday lunchtime rush. ‘We are smashing goals today, boss,’ he’d said.
She’d looked up from her mandolin, where she’d been trying to turn cucumber into tendrils without damaging every knuckle on both hands. ‘How so? Customers have been steady, but we’ve not been run off our feet.’
Graeme ticked his fingers. ‘Catering event for the Women in Business breakfast in Cooma’s town hall next Tuesday. Lunch bookings for Friday booked out for the next three weeks—’
‘Threeweeks?’
‘And that’s not the best bit, honey bunny.’
She grinned. ‘It better be so good it needs a full complement of staff, because I’ve got to tell you, Graeme, calling me honey bunny is a sackable offence.’
Could fifty-year-old bald men with immaculately sculpted facial hair pout? Graeme was sure giving it his best shot.
She took pity on him. ‘Okay, I’m sorry. Call me what you like, just tell me. What’s the best bit?’
‘Someone called @gravydave398 just left us a review on social media and it’s going viral. Six thousand likes in less than an hour. You want me to read it to you?’
‘Hell yes. Every word, maybe twice over.’
‘Okay.If you’re travelling west headed for the Snowy Mountains, do yourself a solid and detour via Hanrahan. Order the cake and coffee special at The Billy Button Café. Here’s what happened when I did. The coffee came out first. Crema like silk, over a coffee so dense with flavour my tastebuds started singingWaltzing Matilda.I joke you not. Nothing can be better than that, right?
‘Wrong! Because that’s when the cake came out. First, let’s talk about wedge size. If you’re a vodka soda kinda guy who only eats carbs on a full moon in a leap year, then maybe you wouldn’t care about wedge size. But everyone else? Think wingspan of a pelican. That’s how much chocolate mocha rum cheesecake was on my plate. No way could I eat that much, right?
‘Wrong! One bite and I thought I’d passed out and travelled into another dimension where trees were made of fairy floss and rivers flowed with Barossa Valley chardonnay. The second bite and all the blood cells in my body stampeded up to my tastebuds, because all those little fellas wanted a taste of the glory.
‘One thousand freaking stars.
‘Oh wait, this site only lets me leave five. Well, it’s an all-caps, all-star fabulous freaking five from me.’
Vera struggled to find words for a moment. ‘You’re making that up. You wrote that. One of your friends from Melbourne. Your partner. Someone.’
Graeme smirked. ‘If you think I’d call myself Gravy Dave on a public forum, you don’t know me very well.’
‘Six thousand likes?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Wow. Maybe the staff will get paid this month after all.’ And maybe Jill’s fees at Connolly House could be paid so far in advance it wouldn’t matter if she was slung into a prison cell to rot.
Business profits! Her head spun into a rainbow-hued daydream where she could put new tyres on her car before the local police noticed the bald ones she’d been driving around on for the last six months. Take some of Jill’s fabric down to the seamstress in Cooma to make cushions for the banquettes in the café. She had plenty of cake in her life now, maybe she could eat some too? Maybe—
No. She was getting ahead of herself. Building an income stream out of this café was her number one priority now. So getting too confident too soon? Nope. Not going to happen.
