He might even get onto the mob in Dubai, negotiate an extension. He could check in with his London branch for a few days, leaving Janie to keep on with the prep on the upcoming Pumpkin Festival car show that was happening a few weeks after that.
Give himself some solid time to put his decision into words he could live with.
Sable would just have to wait.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TWO DAYS LATER Rafe rumbled through Radiance in the restored Pontiac Parisienne he’d driven down from Sydney.
The window was down, his arm resting on the windowsill, as he breathed in the crisp autumn air. No other place in the world smelled quite like it. Fresh, clear, with a tangy edge.
Home.
But it wasn’t the promise of clean air that had him driving a smidge over the speed limit the entire way back from Sydney. Or the promise of light traffic making him take a left at Albury rather than taking the straight run to Melbourne. It also wasn’t the reason he wasn’t on his way to Dubai, or London for that matter.
It was the same reason he’d been on edge for the past two days, spending more time under cars than buying or selling, only blowing his calendar out all the more.
He needed to get the Sable issue sorted.
His phone burred. He answered, hands free. “Janie, what’s up?”
“Wanda rang, she said she saw you trundling down the avenue, and could I send you her way as soon as possible as her oven light isn’t working. Aren’t you meant to be in Abi Dhabi?”
“Dubai.” He slowed as a sprinkling of swallows swerved from the treetops and into his lane before flittering off into the sky. “I’m sending Jake from the London office in my stead.”
Janie’s silence was telling.
“You still there?”
“Sorry, just had to pick myself up off the floor. Did you just say that you’re...delegating?”
Rafe rolled out a shoulder and ducked to look through the low-slung branches of an elm to see if he could find a familiar blonde head in any of the Laurel Avenue shops. “It seems so.”
“Am I allowed to hypothesise why?”
“Nope.”
“Okay. Look, I wasn’t going to say anything, but since your entire world is going topsy-turvy already, you should probably know it’s been a little rough here for her the last couple of days.”
Rafe didn’t need to ask to know who the “her” was. “How so?”
“Some American tourist recognised Sable, walked up and snapped a photo right in her face while she was eating a pie at Bear’s. Big Bear lived up to his name, shooed them out, gave them the fright of their lives, but it was all over the tabloids within the hour. Headlines such as Shamed Star’s Girlfriend Celeb Shutterbug Sable Sutton Seen Stuffing Her Face in Small-Town Hideaway as She Laments Loss of Famous Foodie Lover.”
Rafe flinched. It was rough stuff. On many levels. Not least of which the jumbled alliteration. “Please tell me you’re reading that and didn’t memorise it.”
“Want to hear the others?”
“That would be a no.”
“Okay. There’s more. Trudy refused service at the wool store, telling Sable she didn’t belong around here.”
Rafe tapped the brake hard enough the car nearly stalled.
“I took care of it,” said Janie. “Swung by when I was picking up wood from the hardware store to start making the signs for the car show, asked Trudy what the hell she thought she was doing. She blanched like an almond. Said she’d heard Wanda tell Carleen that Sable had done you wrong, and this town looks after its own. I told her Sable was our own and to send her some free wool in apology. The good stuff.”
“You did that?”
“Yup.”
This from Janie, who would never leave her cosy little cave if she had the choice. If he wasn’t around to nudge her. Make her feel safe. “I’m impressed.”
“We Thornes stick together. And now that I’m soon to be an auntie it was my duty.”
Rafe tapped the brakes hard that time, the tyres protesting. He glanced in the rear-view mirror to find not a soul behind him the entire way up the avenue. “What’s that, now?”
“Ah, right. The auntie thing. Ed let slip when I had him over for dinner.”
“Ed?” he parroted. She’d had Ed over for dinner? And, “What the hell does Ed know about anything?”
“Turns out he’d forgotten something at work the other night and when he turned up you and Sable were there. Talking. About what? said I, being sisterly and nosey. You should have seen his face when he realised he should have kept mum! So to speak. But it was too late. I grilled him. Poor guy folded like a pack of cards. So, you guys are thinking about making a baby, eh? That was fast.”
Small towns, Rafe thought, his inner voice a fractious growl.
Sable’s words from the other night came swimming back to him. Her dream to be somewhere with the comfort of community but also the private space to figure things out on her own. Somewhere to “disappear and simply live”.
And in that moment he got it. All of it. Like a snapshot framed on the mantelpiece. He saw her dream as she imagined it, with a clarity that hit like a punch in the gut.
Rafe thanked everything good and holy when he hit the red light in town so that he could slow to a stop. Running a finger over his bottom lip, he tried to find the right words. Then decided the words weren’t for Janie. Not yet. “You home this arvo? I’ll swing by then. For a chat. About a brother’s right to privacy. And staying away from Ed McGlinty.”
In that moment, he felt a flash of affinity with Mercy.
Janie huffed out a breath. “Fine. I’ll make a cake. Now go throw stones at her window. Or climb her tower. Or whatever it is you old folk do to woo one another.”
“I’m not wooing her. And I’m not old.”
“Whatever.”
