Page 7 of Down the Track
CHAPTER
3
Fourteen years ago
On a stool in a pub on the main street of Yindi Creek, flirting
Life was awesome.
And sure, that might be the chardy talking—the wine was ice cold and cheap, pluses enough to offset the way it came out of a cask not a bottle and stripped a bit of lining from her throat with every sip—but actually, probably, (thrillingly) had a lot more to do with the man standing so close behind Jo that she could feel his rib cage move every time he laughed. Which he did, often.
They’d walked around the stalls and everyone had known his name. Everyone had been keen to tell him how the bets were looking for the shearing competition he was entering later that day—roped into, he’d said. And here in the pub, he chatted with everyone like they were family. Not like they were her family, of course. Her family didn’t chat; they delivered passive-aggressive monologues on topics like Wasting One’s Education on a Career With Minimal Earnings Potential, or Daughters Who Show No Gratitude. No, the helicopter pilot she’d met on the dig site, and who’d somehow decided he liked her—her!—despite the fact that every time they met she was either a sweaty mess scrabbling around in a pile of dirt or stressing out in her tent over the ten thousand word scientific paper she was hoping to submit for publication but finding so difficult to write, was about as different from anyone she’d ever met as organic matter was from stone.
And—she twisted her head a little so she could double-check she hadn’t imagined it—the pilot was a looker. Blue eyes, which, okay, scientifically speaking was just a byproduct of melanin and chromosome 15, but visually speaking? She rested her hand over the larger male hand that was currently draped over her shoulder. Yeah, visually speaking, those eyes made her think about a whole lot of other things besides melanin and chromosomes. They made her think of starry nights by the campfire, rock pools deep in a gorge that had been millions of years in the making, the endless shimmery mirage that the midday sun turned the horizon into out here in the western plains. A Burke and Wills mirage they called it out on the dig site—a promise that beckoned.
Those eyes, and the way they looked at her like she was his everything, made her think reckless thoughts. Unplanned, wild, scary thoughts that made her feel ateensybit anxious. Like, maybe she didn’t need to go overseas to gain international experience in the palaeontology field. Maybe she didn’t need to hustle back to the university to pursue her PhD application; maybe she could do more fieldwork up here.
Near Hux.
Sure, it would mean messing up the plans she’d made and tearing up the lists with which she’d mapped out her career, but was there anything to be scared of from being impulsive?
(Yes, whispered that teensy anxious feeling.)
She ignored it. She was trying to repress all the many things she was scared of for once. She was having a holiday fling like a regular girl who didn’t overthink everything ever, and it was awesome.
In fact, perhaps she could work up a little list in her head right this very second to prove shecouldstay. She could sell some of her textbooks now she’d graduated her honours year in zoology. An excellent start; some of those doorstoppers had cost hundreds of dollars. What else? Oh, yes: she could probably extend the sublet on her room in the sharehouse in Toowong. Perfect. And it probably didn’t really matter if she only had $207.56 left in her bank account and didn’t actually have a paying job. Did it?
Maybe if she—
‘Hey,’ Hux said, his voice low and whispery in her ear, making little electric signals go pop-pop-pop along the neurons in her brain and then down her arms and all the way to her chipped and scruffy fingernails. ‘You want to come cheer me on in the shearing? I’d better go get ready. Then we can grab some dinner, maybe. You and me.’
That had to be code, didn’t it?
If only there’d been a university subject to teach her about that! The code she was most familiar with was DNA sequencing codes, specifically the DNA from bone fragments used in a polymerase chain reaction to sequence part of the gene responsible for mitochondrial cytochrome B, which—although mind-blowingly awesome in its own, sciency way—was not overly helpful in interpreting the subtext of messages being whispered in her ear by a husky male voice.
‘Jo?’
She blinked. It had happened again—around Hux, her brain became one of those etchy-sketchy magnetic kids’ boards and wiped itself clean—she promptly forgot what she was thinking. ‘Heck yes,’ she said. Because as fun as hanging out with Hux in a crowd was, hanging out with Hux when it was just the two of them was So Much Better.
His cheek was against hers so she knew he’d smiled. Which made her smile.
Really, they were just too cute, the two of them, and if she’d had time in the last four years of tertiary study and volunteering to find herself a bestie, she’d be texting them right this second to boast.Breaking news: I met someone.
Since they’d met—a memorable event in itself—the days had become weeks, and the weeks a month and now (was she blushing? It felt like she was blushing) she, the wannabe fossil hunter with the grime under her fingernails and all the confidence of a forgotten bunch of pak choi wilting in the bottom of a camp kitchen esky, was currently somehow, um, gosh … Hooking up?
No, that sounded dumb and juvenile and sitcommy, like she was a schoolgirl, not an over-achiever twenty-one-year-old trying to persuade a university that she was ready to be taken on as a PhD candidate.
Dazzled by? Embroiled with? Lusting for? (Listen to her, flinging out prepositions like she’d finally mastered the complexities of grammar without help from editing software, lol.)
She felt Hux’s hand wrap around the braid that spilled down her back, then give it a gentle tug. Oh, yeah. Definitely all of the above.
Who knew an outback fling could turn into something so—she rubbed her chest, distracted momentarily by the epiphany that a heart could hurt for good reasons as well as for bad—huge?
CHAPTER
4
At the pre-arranged time of six o’clock, after a shower and a lie-down on the chenille cover of her bed, where Jo distracted herself from dwelling on her long-ago visit to Yindi Creek by trying to interpret a two-word text from her son—the wordsyeah nah, to be specific—she pushed open the swinging lead-light doors that separated the old-fashioned dining room of the Yindi Creek Hotel from the bar.
