Jake was chipper. Damn straight. And he didn’t have a morning glory to thank for it.
He’d felt great driving home from Ella’s last night with the moon in his window and a blossoming sensation in his chest whenever he thought of Ella: her hair in his hand, that little noise she’d made when her lips touched his as he’d kissed her goodnight.
It was more than enough to put a smile on his face.
Lester pointed at a spot near his temple. ‘Don’t need to be Einstein to work it out.’
‘How about you channel Einstein and work out next month’s orders, Les, hey?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Lester said, lifting his glasses so he could read the fine print on the labels in his hands. Various sized lengths of bright copper pipe snaked across the bench in front of him, a bunch of fittings piled to the side.
‘Need new glasses?’ Jake said.
‘Turn it up. Go be happy on your own, hey? Leave us unlucky old blokes alone.’
Jake nodded to a customer who’d approached Lester for help at the counter. June McReid had been coming in to the shop as long as Jake could remember. He would have talked with June—the McReids were good friends of his folks—but at that moment his phone vibrated in his pocket.
Jake flipped the cover, swiped and saw Ella’s name on the screen, and that warm rubbery sensation smacked him hard in the chest all over again.
‘Gotta be a lady, doesn’t it, June?’ Lester said from the counter, raising his eyebrows at Jake.
June nodded definite agreement.
‘Get stuffed, Les,’ Jake said, but he was smiling as he accepted the call and paced away from the plumbing help desk. ‘Ella. Good morning.’
‘Good morning. How are you?’ Even her voice sounded like music.
Jake walked through rows of tap fittings and washers, toilet seats, plungers, hose, pipes and valves, heading for garden products, which led through to the administration offices on the other side.
‘Did you sleep well?’ he asked her.
‘Not really. I had a bit on my mind. You?’
‘Like a log. I always do.’ He stepped out the rear entrance of the shop and nodded a silent good morning to Lisa Rohr, who was misting spray over the new seedlings.
Lisa nodded back at him, then her eyes narrowed, and he thought that he really did have to watch himself in this place. His own grin was gonna hurt his face if he kept this up. The whole staff would be convinced he’d got lucky last night.
‘Well, Jake, um … much as I’d like it to be, this isn’t really a social call,’ Ella said.
Jake stopped at a spot where a dense display of native shrubs made a grey-green screen between himself and Lisa. ‘What’s up?’
‘There’s a new offer on your nan’s house.’
Jake straightened. ‘Yeah? How much?’
‘Can I come see you? I’d like to present it in person. Are you at the shop?’
He checked his watch. ‘For another hour or so, yep.’
‘I’ll come now.’
‘See you soon.’ Jake ended the call and finished the last few paces in the sunlit garden centre before he reached the timber outbuildings that housed his office. If Ella walked from Begg & Robertson, she’d be less than five minutes.
His office phone buzzed in three and he picked up. She must have run.
‘There’s an Ella for you at the front desk, Jake,’ Jenny Stark announced, and Jake told her to send Ella on through and he stood there waiting while his stomach got tight and that warm rubber balloon in his chest filled and filled and filled.
A tap on the frame of his door, and Ella was there, smiling at him like he’d made her whole damn day.
‘You’re looking chipper this morning,’ she said.
‘So I’ve been told.’
Ella leaned her hip on his doorframe and crossed her arms.
God, she was gorgeous. If he ever saw Ella in one of those short office skirts she wore—always with heels—and didn’t get every kind of urge to unzip her the hell out of the skirt and chuck the shoes in a corner, he’d be ashes in an urn somewhere and the world better get ready to scatter him in the wind.
Today’s skirt was grey. He liked it even more than yesterday’s navy one. He liked the pale pink top she wore with it. It looked like silk but he’d have to touch to know for sure. God, she had gorgeous shoulders. Lovely smooth arms.
That’s when Jake noticed the pages in her hand and remembered this wasn’t a social call.
It felt like a damn social call, though. It felt like those days when a new girlfriend dropped into your work with a cut lunch she’d made for you, and the guys on site ribbed you for days about how you’d sat under a tree in the park with your girl and ate sandwiches and the slice of cake she’d made specially, instead of a pepper steak pie and a sticky cream bun from the bakery lunch run.
It felt just like that, with a great big balloon in his chest that was leaving space for nothing else.
Jake leaned back on the edge of his desk. All he wanted to do was look at her. ‘You look beautiful.’
‘Thank you.’
Her cheeks flushed a deeper pink and the hand that wasn’t holding the papers touched two fingers to the hollow of her long, lovely throat, right near that freckle Southern Cross. He’d kissed her on that spot last night. He’d had his hands all over her on the bench under the rising moon. He’d like to kiss her there again right now. Throat or bench. Didn’t care.
Then Ella’s ankle wobbled and she gripped the doorframe for balance, making the papers crackle as they horseshoe-shaped around the timber. There was a thud as her phone hit the floor.
Jake got to her in two steps.
‘I’m okay. It’s okay. These
