‘France must have had its advantages,’ he said, tongue-in-cheek.
‘Of course it did. Not just the food but also the fashion, the architecture—I loved it. Thought I would always live there.’ He didn’t miss the edge of sadness to her voice.
‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured and turned her head to look out of the window, but not before he saw the bleakness in her eyes.
He’d like to know what had gone wrong with her marriage. What kind of a jerk would let go a woman like Lizzie and her cute little daughter? But it wasn’t his business. And he didn’t want to talk on an intimate level with her. Not when he was determined to deny any attraction he still felt for her.
‘If I remember right you used to surf when you were a teenager,’ she said after a pause that was starting to feel uncomfortable.
‘Correct,’ he said. ‘I was a crazy kid, always looking for bigger waves, greater challenges. My first year of university, a group of us went down to Tasmania to surf Australia’s wildest waves. It was a wonder none of us was killed.’
‘Would you do that now?’
‘Go surfing?’ he said, deliberately misunderstanding her question. ‘Not without a wetsuit. The water’s still too cold.’
‘I meant surf those extreme waves. I couldn’t imagine anything more terrifying.’
Should he share his worst ever surfing story with her? The experience that had completely changed his life? He wanted to keep the time he spent with her on an impersonal level. But now that she’d dropped her chilly persona, he found her dangerously easy to talk to. ‘I lost my taste for extreme surfing when I had to outrun a tsunami.’
She laughed in disbelief. ‘You were surfing a tsunami? C’mon, pull the other leg.’
‘Not surfing. Running. Literally running away from the beach as a monster wave thundered in.’
‘You’re serious!’
‘You bet I am.’ Even now his gut clenched with terror and he gripped hard on the steering wheel at the memory of it. ‘I took a gap year when I finished my engineering degree. Thought I’d surf my way around all the great breaks of the world. This particular beach was on the south coast of Sri Lanka. That morning I came out very early to surf. The boy who manned the amenities hut screamed at me to get off the beach and to run to the high ground with him.’
She gasped. ‘That must have been terrifying.’
‘His village was wiped out. But he saved my life. I stuck around to help in any way I could. The organisation I work for now came to rebuild and there was lots of work for a volunteer engineer. When we were done, they offered me a paying job.’
‘That’s quite a story,’ she said. ‘I wondered how you’d got into your line of work.’ He felt her eyes on him but he kept his straight ahead on the road. ‘The thing is, you don’t look like a do-gooder type.’
Her comment so surprised him, he took his hands off the wheel for a second and had to quickly correct the swerve of the car. ‘And what does a do-gooder look like?’
‘Not like he could be an actor or a model. Not like...like you.’
He laughed. ‘It doesn’t matter what you look like when people need help.’
He knew he hadn’t been hit with the ugly stick so didn’t demur with false modesty when people commented on the fortunate combination of genes he’d been blessed with. Your looks you were born with. He’d learned it was the personality you developed that counted. Lizzie, for example, was turn-heads lovely but it was her energy and warmth that had drawn him to her. Camilla had been older than him, eye-catching rather than beautiful, but her smarts and confidence had drawn him to her.
‘Is that why you do it? To help people? When a guy like you could do anything he wanted?’
‘What else?’ He went to shrug but winced at the resulting pain in his shoulder. ‘That first project—the camaraderie, seeing people rehoused so quickly, it was a high. I wanted more.’
The tsunami had cured him of his adrenalin-junkie taste for extreme sports. The surfing on five-metre waves, the heli-skiing on avalanches, the mountain biking off the sides of mountains. After seeing real disaster he no longer wanted to court it in the name of sport.
But recently he’d been wondering if he had replaced one sort of thrill for another. The thrill of being called to dangerous sites of recent catastrophes, the still present danger, the high of being needed. It was a rewarding life. But he gave up a lot to do it. Regular hours, a permanent home. Of course that made for a convenient excuse to stay single. But Lizzie was the last person he wanted to discuss that with.
‘It must be dangerous and uncomfortable at times,’ she said. ‘I admire you. I don’t think I could do it. The world is lucky to have people like you.’
He liked that she got it. Seemed that Lizzie took people for what they were.
‘When it all boils down to it, it’s a job the same as any other,’ he said. ‘Not, perhaps, one I’d want to do for the rest of my life. But one I’ve been glad to do while I can.’
‘I don’t believe that for a moment. It’s like a calling.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, not wanting to be drawn further into a conversation that might have him facing awkward truths about his motivations.
He distracted Lizzie by pointing to a flock of multi-coloured rainbow lorikeets hanging upside down off the branches of an indigenous grevillea bush. They were intoxicated by a surfeit of spring nectar from its spiky orange blossoms. When he and Ben had been kids, they’d found the sight of drunken parrots hilarious. He was gratified when Lizzie found it funny too. And tried not to be entranced at the sight and sound of her laughter.
* * *
Lizzie carefully stacked her finds into the back of Jesse’s SUV, feeling more excited about the café than she had since she’d arrived in Dolphin Bay. Jesse had driven her through unsealed roads that twisted through acres of bushland to a property where the parents of one of Jesse’s old school friends had a beekeeping business.
On the spot she’d bought honey harvested from bees that had feasted on blossoms of the eucalypts growing in the adjoining national park and named for the trees: Spotted Gum, Iron Bark, River Gum.
Jesse seemed bemused she’d bought so many jars. ‘This is liquid gold,’ she explained as he slammed shut the door of the boot. ‘Each honey has a particular flavour and they’re not always available. I’m thrilled to bits. It’s also considerably cheaper buying it direct from the farmer.’
‘Your head is buzzing with ideas on what to cook with all this?’ he asked.
She smiled at his joke and he met her smile with one of his own. When she’d first climbed into his car this morning she’d felt tense and on edge in his company but had gradually relaxed to the point she felt she could have a normal conversation without being choked by self-consciousness. ‘You could say that. I love to cook with honey but I also like to drizzle it over, say, baked ricotta for breakfast.’
‘Ricotta cheese for breakfast! A hungry man coming into the café won’t think much of that.’
‘How about served with a stack of buttermilk pancakes?’
‘With a side of bacon?’
‘With a side order of bacon,’ she said.
‘Much better,’ he said. ‘I like a big breakfast to start the day. I might become a regular customer while I’m in town.’
There was something very appealing about a big man with a hearty appetite. She remembered—
No!