‘Country Manor Born.’
‘Live In Your Own Country Manor.’
‘Golden Sweet as Honeychurch.’
She tried those three on her tongue and eventually muttered, ‘One Powerball, and I’d buy it.’
Ella drove into the parking area near the house where she slotted the little Mazda beside Jake’s much larger Landcruiser.
Tugging her handbag across the seat, Ella climbed out. It was tricky maintaining a posture of elegant saleslady efficiency on the loose gravel in her heels. She was glad when she put her foot on the first limestone step and stepped up, through a planting of low-lying everlastings and paper daisies, and the type of grevillea that hugged the terraced ground like a woolly carpet.
There was no sign of Jake or Sam. No sign of anyone. No one to watch her being so very efficient and poised except the ghost of Bob Begg, and he didn’t count.
Ella wiped her shoes on the mat, sucked in a breath for luck and raised her knuckles to knock on Jake’s front door.
‘There you are.’
Jake strolled around the verandah, hands deep in the pockets of a pair of steel grey shorts, dark hair mussed and messy as if he’d let the wind dry it after a swim in that big blue dam. His t-shirt had a white RM Williams logo stamped on the chest and a nicer line of muscle stamped under it.
The pure impact of Jake in that moment made Ella touch her fingertips to the solid front door and leave them there like a lifeline, spread across the wood.
He stopped a metre or so from her and she had to look up to meet his eyes.
‘Hi,’ she said, praying her make-up would cover any blush in her cheeks. She desperately wanted to appear confident, and it was ridiculous that the sight of Jake Honeychurch in his homegrown casual could make her ankles wobble.
He lifted his chin to indicate the papers. ‘That them?’
Ella pulled on a bright smile and pushed herself gently away from the door. ‘Sure is. Shall we talk about the offer first, or do you want to tell me what’s going on with Sam?’
‘Sam first. He’s more important than the house.’
‘You said he was fine.’ Ella tried not to sound defensive. Of course Sam was more important than selling a house.
‘He is fine. Don’t worry.’ Jake raised his arm, indicating the direction from which he’d just come. ‘Shall we?’
‘Thank you.’
Jake led her around the corner of the homestead to an area paved in lovely grey-slate flagstones with a solid old limestone-look table and a host of comfortable cushioned chairs all nestled around it.
She slung her handbag over the back of the chair to her left and put the listing file on the table in front of her before she sat. She wasn’t sure what to do with the sale papers. Tuck them inside the file or put them on top of it? What would Bob do?
Bob would conduct this negotiation in the comfort of his air-conditioned office while Gina made his client a coffee, because Bob had an office and all Ella had was a space.
Ella tucked the offer under the top flap of the listing file, hiding it from view so she could bring it out with a flourish. That was something Bob would do.
‘Can I get you anything, Ella? Water? Tea?’
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ Ella said, pulling out a chair.
Jake chose a seat on the same side of the table, nearer the corner, which meant they could both admire the view of the dam and creek line framed by the grey-brown trunks of two magnificent gums.
‘You have a beautiful place here,’ Ella said because it felt impolite not to acknowledge the property, and because it was the truth. ‘That view is incredible.’
Far to the west, the shadowy outline of the Porongurups met the sky, jagged domes smoothed by distance, as if humpback whales breached on the horizon.
‘Thank you. It’ll do.’ He smiled in a slow-sunrise way that seemed to wake the rest of his face. ‘So, take a stab at what I caught that son of yours doing today.’
Ella’s thoughts about sunrises, whales and distant horizons vanished. ‘He didn’t get in a fight, did he?’
‘No fists. I think he’s fighting with himself, though. I think he’s bored. That’s his biggest problem.’
Ella had to rein in the snap that said she didn’t need his parenting advice, thanks all the same. ‘How about if you tell me what happened and then I can take it from there?’
So Jake gave her the story of the morning, not leaving anything out, including every mention Sam had made about her ‘dumb job and how much he hated it’. Ella went from wanting to find Sam and hug him to wanting to throttle him. How could he possibly think ruining the town’s bowling green was a good idea? She’d raised him better than that, hadn’t she? Where had she gone so wrong?
‘So I told him I had a job for him,’ Jake said. ‘I hope you don’t mind me bringing him out here. I was playing things a bit by ear at that point.’
‘So you’ve got him picking up sticks,’ Ella said stiffly.
‘He was. I think I can hear him coming back, though. Can’t you?’ Jake tilted his head, listening.
She couldn’t hear anything except the sound of a distant car on a highway, and said so.
‘That’s not a car. That’s the quad bike. Sam’ll be riding it back,’ Jake told her.
Her chair scraped the pavers and Ella was on her feet in a flash. ‘Sam’s riding a quad bike? Aren’t those things dangerous? Aren’t those things, like, the most dangerous item of farm equipment going around? Kids get killed on quad bikes.’
‘I gave him a lesson on how to ride it safely first. I was riding our quad bike around here when I was ten. We all were. And we were driving
