‘It was nothing. It wasn’t supposed to be anything.’
That meant he knew it was something. Her mouth dried up.
He lifted his hands either side of him. ‘I just wanted you to have the chance to fly a kite.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you never have. That seems wrong.’
‘Why is it your job to fix the ills of my past?’
He frowned. ‘Because …’ But his words evaporated and his shoulders sagged. ‘I don’t know, Aimee. I just wanted to see your face the first time you got the kite up. I wanted to give you that.’
She stared at him. It was a nice thing to do, and it was just kites. But then it wasn’t. ‘So what was with the kite foreplay?’
It was a risk. She watched his face closely for signs of total bemusement, for a hint that this was all in her head and totally one-sided and she’d just made a complete fool of herself. Or for the defensiveness of a man caught out.
She got neither.
‘I don’t know,’ he murmured, frowning and stepping closer. ‘It just happened. And it was kind of …’ She tipped her head as he grasped for the right words. ‘Beautiful. Organic. It didn’t feel wrong.’
It had been beautiful and it had started so naturally, but it was wrong. It had felt too good so it had to be wrong. She shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her sweatshirt and took a deep, slow breath. ‘This is how we’re always going to go, Sam. Even something ordinary like flying a kite becomes—’ loaded ‘—unordinary.’
He ruffled long fingers through his hair and stared at her. ‘So maybe that’s just us? Why don’t we just … allow for it?’
Allow for it? ‘How?’
He stopped in front of her, looking down with deep, calm eyes. ‘It is what it is, Aimee. Neither one of us is going to act on it, so do we really need to stress about it? We could just accept that there’s an … attraction … between us, and then just move past it.’
Her lips twisted along with the torsion in her gut. ‘You make it sound so simple.’
‘I’m sure we’re not the first two people who have accidental chemistry.’
Except it wasn’t just chemistry for her. Her mind was involved. Her heart. And that made it very complicated.
‘What just happened with the kites …’ he started. ‘I feel comfortable around you, Aimee. Relaxed. It just happened. I’ll be on my guard from now on so that it doesn’t happen again.’
Her chest hurt. ‘What kind of friendship is that going to make? If we’re both constantly guarding our words and actions?’ Our hearts.
His broad shoulders lifted and fell, but she couldn’t tell if it was a shrug or a sigh. ‘Our kind.’
Sam’s defeat was contagious. Her eyes dropped to the ground.
‘Come on. We have an hour before we’re due back. Let’s go rescue the kites and then go back to the café for that interview.’
The interview. Did either of them believe that excuse any more? But the pages of her book were already established neutral territory between them, so it was good to have it to retreat to.
Just accept the attraction …
Aimee shook her head. He was so easy to believe. He was so certain that this was a good idea. Sam had no doubt that he could put aside whatever this was simmering away between them, and maybe he could.
But could she?
AIMEE re-read the opening to the oral history spread out on the hotel table before her and stared at the words as though they were prophecy.
She’d first met Coraline McMahon as an elderly woman from the suburbs of Melbourne, but the Cora she was meeting now was fifteen, beautiful, running barefoot and wild in her home on the Isle of Man. Cora had set her cap at tear-away Danny McMahon from a very early age—a young man idolised by the boys, dreamed of by the girls, and tsked about by their parents alike, which had only made him all the more desirable. Dark and bold and charismatic. She’d fallen hard and irrevocably for Danny, but he’d left her behind when he’d enlisted in the Second World War.
Broken-hearted. Fifteen.
Pregnant.
Within weeks a shamed Cora had been married off to Danny’s younger brother Charley: the responsible one, the tolerant one, the one willing to raise his brother’s child to avoid a family scandal.
They’d had a sound sort of marriage, living in the McMahon household while the war raged on, until the day Danny got a foot blown off and limped home to a hero’s welcome.
‘Ugh.’ Aimee dropped the sheets of her transcribed story onto the tabletop and slid down further on her chair to study the ceiling.
Every day.
Every day Cora had struggled with wanting a man she couldn’t have. Living under the same roof. Watching him making a slow life for himself. It had broken Charley’s heart, watching her try to hide it. She’d never so much as touched Danny again, but breathing the same air as him had tarnished her soul and her husband’s—even after he’d packed them all up and shipped them to Australia to escape his older brother’s influence.
Aimee’s subconscious shrieked at her to pay attention. To what, though? What was the right message to take from Cora’s cautionary tale?
Was it counsel against the pain of spending time with someone she wanted but could never have? Or a reminder of how damaging it could be to any future relationship she might form? Or was it a living warning about not seizing the moment, of settling for someone less than you wanted? Cora had lived seventy years with second-best, faithful, loyal, accepting Charley McMahon. Yet he’d married her because she was pregnant with his brother’s child. Pressured by his parents. And he’d lived his life knowing her heart truly belonged to his brother.
No matter the great affection that had eventually grown between them, each of them lived had long lives knowing that neither was the other’s first choice.
That was just … awful.
And yet their story was going in her book. Coraline McMahon had willingly given her life to the brother she didn’t love. She’d done the right thing by her family, her son, on her own merit. She hadn’t been swayed by the fact that it was the wrong thing for her. Outwardly it smacked of passivity, but there was great strength in the way she’d taken her unplanned future by the scruff and fashioned a reasonable life for herself, and that made her story perfect for Navigators.
She’d owned her choices and she lived with the consequences. For ever.
But … oh … how it had hurt her.
Aimee remembered the cloudy agony in Cora’s eyes as she’d relived the day they’d trundled away from the McMahon home with their meagre belongings stacked around them. Told her about the momentary eye-contact she’d shared with a broken and war-shocked Danny, standing respectfully to the rear of the group farewelling his brother’s family.
Bare seconds locked together. Her first and only glimpse of the saturated sorrow in his eyes. Realising he’d loved her after all.
How had she managed, never seeing him again, never speaking to him …? Aimee studied the yellowed photograph of Cora and her son aboard the ship they’d boarded for Australia. Seeing Danny every single day in the dark eyes