“O-of course.” She led the way into the old weatherboard farmhouse, shaking so bad she could barely use her hands to hang her hat and gloves on a hook on the verandah.
Mitch walked in without waiting for an invitation—but then, he knew he didn’t need one. The Miller farm had been his only real home in all his life. Her parents had become like his own, and he, their son.
For a little while. Until Tim stepped in and she’d ruined it all by giving in to a girl’s temptation to have a boyfriend—any boyfriend. Fool!
“The place has changed a bit.” He surveyed the big, open country kitchen, soft and mellow, honey and gold toned beneath the flooding sunshine of the skylight. “It was darker before.”
“When my parents retired three years ago I bought them out. I sold four hundred acres to the Brownells, keeping just the fifty around the house to grow fruit and vegetables. Mum and Dad live in a cottage by the ocean. They’re in Europe at the moment; Dad wanted to see the Formula One. Anyway, since it’s my place now, I did up the parts I didn’t like. I felt oppressed by the dark floor and bench tops.” She filled the filter with coffee.
“I like natural floorboards. I did something similar to my place in Bondi before I sold it. It was too gloomy.”
“Where do you live now?”
A second’s hesitation, then he said slowly, “I live here.”
The jug of water slipped in her hands, spilling over the bench. “Here?”
“Yes, here in Breckerville. I’m buying a place. Let me help you.” He stepped forward, grabbing a towel to dry the mess.
He’d always been like that. Always wanting to help her, always close to her. Just never close enough. Always the best friend she’d ever had, never the lover she craved.
Tears of helpless confusion filled her eyes. “I can do it.” She snatched the towel from him, hiding her face.
Again she felt his gaze on her, sensing her quiet despair. Gentle as a whispering breeze he touched her cheek, turning her face to his. “Don’t be sorry about what you said, Lissa. Don’t ever be scared to speak your mind to me.”
Unable to stop herself, she drank in the dark, rebellious face whose memory still walked the land outside her window, whose essence still haunted her dreams inside the windows of her soul. “But I am sorry,” she whispered, lowering her gaze.
Though she couldn’t see him, she could feel the warmth of his gaze on her. “Liss, you know how I feel about my father walking out on my mother when she was pregnant with me, her dumping me at the church steps because she had nowhere to go. Can you honestly see me walking out on a woman having my kids, like I didn’t care that she, or they, might have the life I had before I met you?”
Shamed, appalled by her unthinking judgment, she whispered, “Tim did.”
“No, baby,” he answered gently. “No man who knows you at all would ever think you could abandon your child, like my mother did to me. But he hurt you. You loved him, trusted him, and he hurt you. He left you when you needed him the most.”
His voice was so warm, so tender. He cared for her, and she was answering him with half-truths. But how could she tell him the truth about her marriage? “Yes. Yes, he did.” Well, that much was truth. Tim had left her, the only time she’d needed him.
“Where does he live now?”
Hearing the note of grim promise, she felt seventeen again. Mitch had always pounded Tim when he thought his friend wasn’t treating her right. “Not for my sake, Mitch,” she said with a shy, half-hidden smile. “He’s Jenny’s father.”
Quietly he asked, “Why didn’t you tell me any of this when I asked you to take the boys? My God, if I’d known you were alone, running this farm, a single mother—”
“Which is why I didn’t tell you. Matt and Luke needed a home and a family, after what happened with Kerin.” She refilled the jug and set the coffee going. “So I hear you made lieutenant in the Air Force, fly-boy McCluskey.”
“Squadron leader, actually. I would have made it my career, but the boys need me home more than the life can give.”
She glanced at him as she poured the coffee, afraid to ask the obvious question. “So what are your plans? Are you still going to work with planes?”
He leaned against the counter, watching her as if refreshing his eyes with her face—just her face. “I’m setting up a country-based courier business here. I have two planes, as well as a Maule bush plane I keep for fun, and I do aid drops for the Vincent Foundation every once in a while.”
She grinned. “Don’t tell me, I’m-Gonna-Save-the-World-Rebel McCluskey. You do all the runs for kids in crisis, and you’ve risked your neck to save a few.”
Mitch laughed at the perception of old friendship. Oh, yeah, she still knew him all right—better than any other woman ever had, or would. He could no more turn down a kid in need of help than he could live without flying—but she, so protected and innocent, would never understand his new, hidden work.
Just as well she didn’t know he’d left the Air Force for the Nighthawks almost two years ago; that his usual job description entailed flying over and into the world’s war zones to smuggle out captives and civilians unwittingly locked inside the unstated boundaries of heated battle. As for his adventure in Tumah-ra, and its potential repercussions with little Hana, if he couldn’t—no. There was no way he’d tell her; he didn’t want to shock her.
But lying to Lissa had never been an option.
He grinned and said, “Guilty as charged.”
She grinned in response, and the sweet warmth of it fired his soul, as well as more intimate places. “You haven’t changed a bit. Still the world’s softest touch for a kid in need.” She bit her lip and shoved him his coffee mug over the counter.
He didn’t touch it, barely noticed it. He knew he was staring at her, but he couldn’t stop. She’d changed from the fragile, hauntingly lovely woman-child who’d married his best mate at nineteen. She’d filled out, matured. She held herself with a quaint, unconscious dignity, standing aloof from the hedonistic angst of the world. But she still had the incredible mouth that made men thank God He made women—and she wore the same unique scent of sunshine and earth and grass and a touch of something wilder, sweeter beneath. Just like Lissa herself—a heady mixture of natural, glowing sensuality and sweet, untouchable purity. Lines touched her face, marks of the woman’s rite of passage: the strength and beauty of pain of childbirth and motherhood, the stress of unspoken sorrow and abandonment.
God, she was beyond beautiful now, but in a way that almost hurt him to look. She was a fairy-tale heroine straight from the mind of the brothers Grimm: a shackled maiden lost in the forest. A figurehead carving they put on the bow of old ships, like the Flying Dutchman. Forever sailing on, standing at the front of a boat flying unstoppably through a world and time she had no control over. Beautiful and cold, so untouchably cold. In those eyes of sweet country mist, shadows ran rampant. Shades of fear. Specters of isolation and emptiness. As they did in her heart. The ghosts of the past owned her soul.
But she was free of Tim—which was a greater miracle than any he’d hoped for—and he’d take her any way he could have her.
And he would have her. He’d fight for her with everything he had in him, every ounce of strength and skill he’d learned. He’d fight clean if he could, dirty if he had to. This time no man was coming between them.
He had to force himself to answer her teasing in the same light vein. “So I’m obsessed with saving kids? Says she who took my kids in for the past five months, no questions asked.”
She stilled, looking anywhere but at him. “Are