Headed back to the shower, washed his hair again. Dressed. Combed his hair roughly and allowed his curls to dry any which way.
Went to collect Shanni.
‘I was expecting you to cry off.’
‘Were you?’ He cast her a sideways glance. Shanni had been waiting on the verandah as he’d driven into the farmyard and she looked absolutely, breathtakingly lovely. She was simply dressed in a pink halter-neck top, the briefest of brief pink shorts and simple sandals. Her hair was sort of tousled and bunched on top. Her look was a million miles from that of any woman he’d dated in the city-and she looked a million dollars.
She wasn’t his style. No!
‘I was expecting myself to cry off,’ he admitted. ‘This isn’t my scene.’
She grinned, teasing. ‘Chicken.’
‘I’d rather be a chicken than a dead hen.’ He said it flippantly enough, staring at the road ahead, but she wasn’t fooled for a minute. She looked at him for a long moment as he steered back onto the highway, and the smile she gave him became sympathetic.
‘Hey, we’re not that scary,’ she said softly. ‘Don’t judges get to face murderers, gang lords and drug barons? What’s a family picnic compared to that?’
What indeed? So there was no reason at all why his insides were telling him this was much, much scarier.
Harry was waiting, too, standing stolidly on the front porch with Wendy, with a look on his face that said he hadn’t expected them to arrive at all. He didn’t smile when he saw them, but the look of resignation lightened just a little, and when Wendy walked him to the car he didn’t drag behind. He looked straight ahead, staring directly and unwaveringly at Nick-as if he was still expecting him to drive off fast.
Then he paused and looked at Nick’s car-seeing it for the first time. The lightness faded, fear flooding back.
‘I don’t want to go…’ he whispered.
‘Harry doesn’t like cars,’ Wendy said, allowing him no time for protests but scooping him up and lifting him into Nick’s minuscule back seat. ‘But sometimes it’s the only way to get where you want to go. Right Nick?’
‘Right.’ Nick turned and gave Harry a reassuring grin. There were two of them in this together, then. Two males who were both scared to death. And there was nothing for it but to go forward. Concentrate on something else but the fear…
‘Hey, I like your shirt,’ he told Harry, starting the engine and giving Shanni a sideways glance that begged for help.
He didn’t need it. His comment was, apparently, exactly the right thing to say.
‘Mmm.’ Harry put his chin deep down on his chest and tried not to look pleased.
‘We bought it yesterday,’ Shanni told him. ‘Harry and I went shopping for clothes, didn’t we, Harry? It’s a swimming T-shirt.’
‘So I see.’ The little boy’s shirt had fish and sharks and octopuses all over it. Nick approved absolutely. ‘It’s a fine choice for today.’
‘Your hair looks funny,’ Harry said.
‘Yeah.’ It did too-and it felt funny. Nick put his fingers up and raked his curls self-consciously. He felt exposed like this. Weird.
‘But it’s a fine choice for today, too,’ Shanni said solidly, and Nick looked across at her-and grinned. Maybe it didn’t feel so bad after all.
‘Nick’s shirt’s a bit boring, though,’ she told Harry. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘Hey…’
‘I’m wearing pink spots and you’re wearing fish,’ she went on, confining her conversation to the child in the back. ‘You’d think Nick could have found a shirt to wear that wasn’t white.’
‘It’s short-sleeved,’ Nick said, protesting. ‘I’m not wearing a tie. It’s fine.’
‘It’s white. Do magistrates have to wear white?’
‘Yes. Always.’ In truth, he owned nothing else.
‘I’ll bet they don’t,’ Shanni said thoughtfully. ‘What do you reckon, Harry? I think Nick would look better in pink spots. Do you?’
Silence.
Then, to Nick’s absolute astonishment, Harry chuckled.
At first he thought he’d imagined it. Shanni, too, looked as if she’d been struck by lightning as the child’s rich chuckle slowly formed and echoed around them.
They looked at each other. Nick and Shanni… Co-conspirators in lighting this child’s life.
And then, slowly, Shanni’s face broke into a smile that said all her Christmases had come at once-and then some.
‘Pink,’ she said, and if her voice was choked with emotion, then who could blame her. ‘I’m buying our Nick a pink-spotted shirt first thing tomorrow morning, and no one in the whole world is going to stop me.’
And, after that, there was nothing to do but enjoy the day and accept that things were out of his control.
Shanni’s extended family was enormous, with assorted cousins, aunts, nieces and nephews, boyfriends and hangers-on like himself, all equally welcomed into the chaos. There were kids and dogs and food and more food. There was beach cricket, swimming, sandcastles… Nick was drawn into the fray the minute he arrived.
He’d worn his swimming shorts under his clothes; his trousers and shirt were hauled from him by Rob the moment he arrived, half a gallon of sun lotion was slapped over him, Harry’s cast was tied in an enormous plastic bag to keep it clean, and he and Harry were declared official cricket umpires.
‘Magistrate work,’ Rob decreed, and Shanni chuckled and disappeared toward the water.
‘That’s right. Make him useful.’
There was part of Nick that wanted to follow Shanni-but she didn’t look back.
Then they were made sandcastle judges.
‘Biggest is not best, either,’ Shanni told him in passing as she headed to prepare the picnic. It was almost as if she was avoiding him.
And it kept happening.
After lunch Harry was scooped up and placed on a floating air-bed, the towrope was put in Nick’s hand and he was sent out to sea with his passenger. And Shanni, again, was elsewhere. The family assumed Nick was here with Harry-not with Shanni. Nick found the sensation odd. Not bad but…odd.
He was accustomed to women taking notice of him-to women sticking as close as Harry-but Shanni wasn’t sticking at all. To Shanni he seemed just one of the mob. She was taking Mary’s kids out to sea on their own air- beds, she was swimming races, diving, surfacing for air, laughing with delight whether she won or lost, and then setting up the next race.
Then she swooped in and made her own sandcastle-when he and Harry were batting at cricket, with Nick guiding the little boy’s hands.
Anything he was doing, she wasn’t.
It finally started to rile him. By mid-afternoon he was sure it wasn’t happening by accident. He could watch her all he wanted, but only from a distance. And she was so lovely…
‘You’ll have to move fast,’ Mary said into his ear, and he jumped. He’d been a million miles away. Harry was settled on a towel by his side, three-quarters asleep and leaning heavily against him in sleepy contentment. They were sated with sun, sand and picnic, and Nick was finding it as hard as Harry to focus.
But while Harry was finding it hard to focus on anything, Nick was simply finding it hard to focus on anything that wasn’t Shanni.
‘I…what do you mean?’ For some reason it was hard to get his voice working.
‘Just what I said.’ Mary plonked herself down on a towel and looked affectionately over at her sister. ‘There’s never much of a gap between Shanni’s men.’
‘I don’t know what business…’
‘There never is for any of the McDonald girls,’ Mary said smugly, ignoring his interruption and looking across at
