Yes. No. She stabbed two fingers at her forehead to make her brain work. ‘I don’t have wheels at the moment,’ she said. ‘My ute’s in the workshop and Hogey’s not done with it.’
‘I can pick you up.’
This was a bad idea. She knew it, so why was she dithering?
‘Are you near the hotel motel? Go grab a warm jacket from your room and I’ll meet you out front in ten minutes.’
A warm jacket? The day was balmy, with all the promise of long, sunny days ahead, and barely five knots of breeze stirring the trees. What would she need a jacket for around here?
And why on earth was she thinking about saying yes?
The first hint of trouble was the warm look Joe gave her as she climbed up into his ute. That, and the way he leaned over, placed his hand on hers for one long, also-warm, moment, and said, ‘I missed you.’
She tuned it out. Joe had given up his right to tell her lovely words like that when she’d found out his secret. She looked out the window to escape those rusty eyes, and there was Ken, unabashedlystaring at them over his garden hedge, his eyes agog. A thought struck her. ‘Is Ken on the muster committee?’
‘Yep.’
Of course he was. Another thought whacked her in the head. ‘And Carol?’
‘Founding member.’
Oh, Carol, she thought. You are a sneaky one.
‘Where are we going?’ she said. ‘Because if there’s a bunch of Clarence busybodies waiting somewhere to get me to move back to the farm, I’m going to get mean. Very, very mean.’ And she’d be ready to give them all a blast for playing matchmaker with her and a bloke who could only let her down the way her mother had let her down time and time again.
He shot her a look, and it was the one which made her knees melt: the half-grin, the dimple, the bedroom eyes, as her octogenarian traitor called them. ‘No locals, I promise. I … well. I have something to tell you, but I’m trying to make a bit of a grand gesture at the same time for reasons which … well. For reasons which will unfold. Can this be a mystery trip for the moment?’
He sounded nervous.
Well, he wasn’t the only one.
The second hint of trouble—and this time it was gut-churning trouble, not the knee-melting kind—was the sound of a double propellor aircraft flying low overhead.
Kirsty kept her eyes firmly at ground level. This was the twenty-first century. Planes were everywhere, right? Joe had headed east out of town on the Bruxner Highway so there were bound to be tourists and airports everywhere, none of which needed to concern her. There was no need—no need at all—for the yucky feeling to start circling in her stomach.
And now she’d acknowledged that carbon monoxide poisoning leaks weren’t actually her problem, she knew what she was feeling.
Panic.
Through the passenger window, she saw a field in the distance dotted with the comfortable cud-chewing presence of dairy cows. Look, she told her guts: everything is normal. An afternoon drive through agricultural paradise. No need to feel churned up.
A sign for Evans Head whipped past, the lovely green fields switched out to industrial sheds of grey brick, and Joe pulled off the road into a carpark and two things became abundantly clear.
One: he had gone to a lot of trouble, which was bad, because she didn’t want him to be a nice guy. She wanted him to be a total prick who it would be easy-as-pie to leave.
Two: her spotty vision was back. And so was the clutching great band around her lungs.
‘You’re going to love this,’ he said in a totally normal voice, as though the world wasn’t about to end and she wasn’t about to be shown up for being the biggest fraud in the Southern Hemisphere.
‘Uhuh,’ she said, her throat dry.
‘And so close to us, too! Amy nearly peed her pants when I showed her the picture online, she was so excited.’
‘Peed pants,’ she echoed, barely registering what she was saying, but repeating Joe’s words was keeping her mind from dealing with the fact they’d just pulled up at a private flight hangar.
With a small, vintage, camouflage-painted plane parked in front of it.
And a massive sign painted across the hangar announcing CLASSICAEROADVENTUREFLIGHTS.