She was sitting on Jake’s desk. On his desk! With her skirt rucked half up her open thighs and Jake standing between them, and the flower he’d given her gone from her hand, sliding half off the desk, with the spiky leaves and the less-spiky but still scratchy flower head brushing her bare skin.
‘Oh.’ Ella picked up the flower stem, twisted it in her fingers, looking at it.
Her free hand patted at her hair. She’d lost her clips. Dumbly, she looked for them on Jake’s desk or on the floor.
He knelt and picked one up. He took a step towards the door to get the other and stopped on the way back, staring at her like she was … like she was the sexiest darn thing he’d ever seen.
‘God, you’re beautiful like that,’ he told her, still staring.
His words made Ella feel bruised, in the softest, most gentle way.
And it got to her then. She lowered her head, breaking his gaze, and her hair tumbled across her face.
‘Don’t you dare hide, Ella Davenport,’ Jake said, stepping close. He caught the hair that was loose and tucked it behind her ear, pushing the clip against her scalp to tie it back in place. ‘Not from me.’
Ella sucked his words in deep and breathed them out again. ‘Okay.’
She closed her thighs, pushed her bottom forward on his desk until her feet touched the ground and then she said it again, stronger this time. ‘Okay.’
‘Good.’ Satisfied, Jake’s attention turned to the papers that were once again scrunched across his desk. ‘Now, do I need to look at these?’
‘Yes, please.’
Jake looked. Ella might have seen the merest twitch of his eyebrow, or hell, maybe he’d been about to sneeze. Maybe she imagined the whole thing.
‘You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?’ Jake folded the pages and handed them to her.
‘Tell him your asking price.’
‘You got it in one.’
‘And you aren’t going to change your mind? You aren’t going to budge?’
‘I’m not.’
Ella pinched her thumb and index finger across her chin as she digested his words. ‘I really think this is as high as Henry’ll go. I think this is the best he’ll do.’
‘Okay. That’s fine.’
Ella nodded once. ‘And you don’t want to counteroffer at all? And you don’t need to talk to your brothers?’
‘No. The decision is mine.’
‘Can I borrow a pen, please?’
Jake gave her his pen and Ella spread the paper on Jake’s desk, smoothing all the scrunches as flat as she could. She drew two parallel lines diagonally across the top page, then inside the lines, in small capitals, she wrote NOT ACCEPTED and the date.
‘That’s it?’ Jake said.
‘That’s it. That’s the end.’
* * *
Ella drove out of Honeychurch Hardware with the offer papers folded in her handbag. Given the one and only dealing she’d had to date was now deader than the last dodo, she felt surprisingly good as she wound the window down and hung her elbow outside.
She didn’t turn right on the main street, which would take her back to the office. Instead, Ella turned left, then left again into Chalk Hill Bridge Road, taking the quickest route to Irma’s house.
Her For Sale sign sat boldly out on the grass verge, a proclamation of all her hopes and dreams. Ella slowed her car and parked behind the sign.
When she got out she stood straight, looking at the flaked paint on the weatherboards, the long straight cement path to the steps, the four panes of glass on the two front windows.
‘Someone will buy you one day,’ she promised Irma’s house.
Ella walked along the road thirty metres to her left, stepping carefully in her heels. Helen Nillson’s front gate squeaked shut behind her as she edged through.
A sprinkler misted over Helen’s vegetable patch where a black and white wagtail fluffed his feathers in the spray. The bird made Ella smile.
CHAPTER
22
Ella parked in the same place the next afternoon, tucking the Mazda between the For Sale sign in front of Irma’s house and the tree on the front verge. The shade fell across the car and she was grateful it would help keep it cool. Like Jake said, the week was hotting up. The weekend was supposed to be a scorcher.
There was another car outside Helen Nillson’s place today and Ella assumed it would be Helen’s son.
Stepping through the gate and up a path that was a mirror of Irma Honeychurch’s house next door, Ella waited after pressing the bell. Footsteps tapped towards her, then the door opened and Helen’s softly round face peered around the old timber.
‘Hi, Helen.’
‘Hi, Ella. Come in. Mick is here. He’s in the kitchen.’ Helen moved back, taking the door with her, and Ella stepped through. It was cooler inside, but not by much.
Once again it struck her how much the layout of Helen’s home mirrored Irma’s, except for the floors. The timber floor she loved in Irma’s house was covered in linoleum here, and it made a sticky thatch thatch noise under Ella’s shoes as she followed Helen through the house. Not that the stickiness was to do with any mess, though, as the place was spotless.
‘Mick, this is Ella Davenport, the one I was telling you about,’ Helen said, opening her hand to indicate her son, a mountain of a man overflowing the table in Helen’s kitchen.
‘How are you, Ella?’ Florid-faced, like his mother, Mick stood to shake Ella’s hand. ‘You’re the swimmer lady, Mum says.’
‘Swimmer lady,’ Ella laughed, touching her hand to her chest self-consciously. ‘I don’t know about that. Once a long time ago, maybe.’
‘Irene Loveday says you’ll be doing water therapy sessions for us oldies when they reopen the town pool,’ Helen said.
Small towns. ‘Oh gosh, I’m not sure about that, Helen. There’s a lot of water that’s got to go under the bridge on that idea first. It was just something that Harvey mentioned the other day … but everyone seems to know about it.’
‘That’s
