Unconditional (26 page)

Even if Raph thought he did. Even if I desperately wanted him to.

He sucked in a slow breath. His nostrils were white with livid rage. Fury radiated from him. “Well, thanks for finally filling me in then, Maci. You’ve saved me making a big mistake. And stopped me wasting any more of my time. Fuck knows, I’ve wasted enough of it on you already.”

The words sliced through my heart. I wanted to cry. God, I was dying inside. “You’re welcome,” I said instead, sick to the stomach. At my hip, my hand shook like a goddamn vibrator on full speed. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to pack.”

Christ, I didn’t want to do this. I so didn’t. I wanted to go back to him and say sorry. But I couldn’t face an almost certain day in the future where he would make excuses to end the relationship, knowing my Parkinson’s was the
real
reason. And I knew I didn’t have the strength to pretend to believe him when that day came.

It’s easier this way. Horrible, yes. Bitchy, definitely. But easier. For both of us.

I turned and walked to his door, pausing for a second as I wrapped my hand—the right one, shaking but not as bad as my left—around the door knob. “If you find my bra and panties just throw them in the trash. They’re not important to me.”

Before he could utter a word, and let’s be honest here, there wasn’t much left to be said, I pulled open the door and hurried through it.

Straight into Brendon. “Hey, Plenty, Ohio,” he said, catching me with a firm grip around my upper arm as I stumbled backward across the threshold of Raph’s room. “I was just coming to get you for—”

“Get me out of here, Brendon,” I snarled. Yeah, I snarled it. “Take me back to your apartment. Now.”

I didn’t look back as I shrugged off Brendon’s hands and stormed away from Raph’s room.

I didn’t pause as I hurried down the stairs. I kept walking. Until I was outside. Until I was at Brendon’s car.

Then, only then, did I allow myself the luxury of collapsing to the ground, one hand holding onto the front passenger wheel, the other pressed to my face, scrubbing at my eyes. Holding back the tears, the hot, damning, self-hating tears.

Holding them back. Holding them back.

And then failing.

Brendon found me that way a minute later. Whatever had held him up, whatever had passed between him and Raph, he didn’t say. He wordlessly crouched down beside me, wrapped a strong arm around my back and helped me to my feet.

“C’mon, Maci,” he murmured against my temple. “Let’s get you cleaned up. You look an absolute mess with all the tears and streaked mascara and snot.”

My answering laugh was tortured and weak. But it was a laugh.

It was the only one I had for the rest of the day.

Heather came and collected me from Brendon’s apartment an hour later. In that time, I’d showered, washed my hair, removed any signs of my tears from my face and removed any remains of Raph from my body.

I sat on Brendon’s sofa, staring at the exercise bike positioned between me and the television. I heard Brendon and Heather talking in low murmurs in his kitchen but didn’t care about what was being said.

I had gone into full-on Parkinson’s melt down. My brain had turned the world gray and bleak and miserable and I was drowning in it.

And it was all my fault. All of it.

At some point, Heather took me back to Mackellar House. I needed to pack after all. Gather up my things and get ready to move on.

That’s what I was doing—moving on. There was no point in staying here, even if my heart was telling me I should.

We walked through the building with its noisy floorboards and noisier occupants that had been my home since I’d arrived in Australia. The smells were familiar to me, the faces the same. As confusing and conflicting as my time here had been, I realized as I climbed the stairs, that I loved it here at Mackellar House.

I was going to miss it.

I was going to miss it all.

My gut flip-flopped at the thought of leaving.

My mind—fuzzy and tormented—told me it wasn’t just the house I was going to miss. Stupid mind. Of course I was going to miss Heather and Brendon. And Raph…

Was he going to hate me forever, I wondered? After what I’d done to him? Was he going to…I don’t know, miss me?

I shut down that thought. It was too raw and messed-up. I didn’t want Raph to miss me. Wanting him to miss me meant I wanted him to think about me and I didn’t want that either. He needed to move on.

Huh. Moving on. Yeah, I was beginning to think moving-on was a sucky term that didn’t come close to conveying how horrible and miserable and wrenched the actual act was.

We were two steps away from my room, Heather being her normal chatty self—this time in an effort to help me find my happy again, I suspect—when the door to Raph’s room opened.

I froze.

My heart didn’t just leap into my throat—it lodged there and damn near suffocated me.

I stared at the dim interior visible beyond the opening.

And sucked in a breath as Shelly White, she of the bikini-modeling fame and Twitter infamy, floated across the threshold, hair a wild mess, lipstick smeared.

“Errr…” Heather said beside me.

Shelly smiled at us and then, with a toss of her artfully wild hair, turned back to Raph’s open door and wriggled her fingers in a cutesy wave that made me want to throw up.

Or maybe it was the sight of Raph standing in the doorway that made me want to throw up. Raph, who was still naked except for his jeans. Jeans that were now hanging lower on his hips, thanks to an undone fly.

Raph’s stare found mine for a split second before, with a silent snarl, he swung the door shut.

I scrunched up my face, drew another breath—this one less shocked—and then opened my eyes and walked to my door.

If Shelly said anything to me and Heather, I didn’t hear her. She probably did. It’s probably for the best I was in a semi-fugue state. I might have snapped and done something highly violent.

Which was stupid really, because I had no claim over Raph. I’d thrown that claim back in his face but a few hours ago. He could fuck whoever he wanted now.

And apparently was.

Yay. Awesome. How freaking fantabulous.

Not.

God, could I be any more fucked-up?

No. Probably not.

Give Me a Home Among the Gum Trees.

But Please, Leave a Canoe

Three weeks into my fieldwork study of koalas, their mating habits and their movements in an environmentally threatened area, a flood hit.

Biblical in size.

I’d spent the last three weeks living with the nicest family in the world. The Scotts—Reginald, Mary and their eldest son, Robbie—ran the second-largest cattle ranch in Gunnedah. Well, outside of Gunnedah.

Gunnedah, I discovered very quickly, was a small country town with only one set of traffic lights, six bars, AKA pubs, and a lot of utes. The Scotts lived on a ranch twenty miles northwest of that. Sorry, a
property
. I’m never going to get used to the jargon. They welcomed me, their American intruder, into their family with open arms. They were warm and friendly and laughed often and didn’t try to force me to eat Vegemite and had a ready supply of Tim Tams in the cupboard.

Robbie helped me with my research. And by helping me I mean he would drive me every morning in his ute, which looked so much like Raph’s I wanted to cry every time I climbed into it, out to the large koala colony on their land. He’d leave me there with a picnic basket full of food Mary Scott had prepared for me and a walkie-talkie to communicate with them. I’d learnt on my day with them there was no cell phone service this far out whoop whoop—whoop whoop being the Australian term for way out in the country, apparently.

They warned me to watch out for brown snakes. I wanted to point out the grass where I was camping each day was brown and long and how the hell did I have a hope of spotting a brown snake in it, but I never did. Robbie was too nice—and busy—for me to make him waste time dealing with an American’s worry about snakes.

I’d settled without any hassles in the three weeks since leaving Sydney. My research was going well. Koalas reacted to daily temperature changes in both speed and distance traveled, it seemed. I spoke daily to Heather via Skype and Brendon every second day—where I assured him I was still doing my exercises, and, no, I wasn’t forgetting to take my meds.

I
was
keeping up with my meds, and there’s nothing like the Australian Outback for meditation. I found myself meditating often during the day, especially when the sun was turning the sky pink as it sank toward the western horizon, the wind rustled the gum leaves and the scent of eucalyptus hung heavy in the air.

I would sit cross-legged on a folding stool—where the brown snakes couldn’t get me—eyes closed, focusing on my calm.

I was
not
, in all those twenty-one days, dwelling on Raph. Nope. I wasn’t. Nor was I feeling miserable he hadn’t tried to contact me. No way. I
wasn’t
lying in the comfy single bed in the Scotts’ spare room every night, imagining a life without Parkinson’s, a life with Raph, torturing myself with the impossible before rolling over and shoving my face to the pillow to muffle my pathetic, self-inflicted sobs. And I sure as hell
wasn’t
fixated on the memory of Shelly White leaving his room as he stood in the door with his jeans undone.

Definitely not.

Not at all.

Nuh-uh.

Three weeks of moving on. That’s what I was doing. Attempting to put Raph behind me, focusing on my studies, existing.

Just existing.

Yeah, right.

And then the flood hit.

Australia is, in case you haven’t figured it out by the ridiculous number of insane memes on the net, a country of extremes. It’s no joke when they say just about every animal here can kill you. The planet’s most deadly spider lives here. So does the planet’s most deadly snake, jellyfish, octopus and shark. Thankfully, I was staying over six hundred kilometers, roughly 374 miles from most of them.

But Australia still didn’t let those of out of range of all the nasties relax. The weather here is insane. If it’s not bush fires destroying almost a whole state, it’s drought killing damn near everything half a day’s drive inland from the coast. If it’s not drought, it’s rain. Flooding rain.

When it decides to rain in Australia,
really
rain, you’re in trouble.

Whole towns can be washed away. I kid you not.

On the twenty-second day of my stay with the Scotts, it began to rain. I had driven Robbie’s ute into Gunnedah on a supply run, and that’s when the heavens opened. Yes, I was driving in Australia. Scary as shit. They drive on the left side of the road, which is the
wrong
side of the road. Oh man, did I have some close calls my first few times behind the wheel. Driving in the rain on the left side of the road was holy-shit petrifying.

By four o’clock that afternoon, the only road leading to the Scotts’ property was cut off by a torrential river that hadn’t been there a mere three hours previously.

I could get to my koalas via the long route (if they weren’t floating away), but I couldn’t get to the Scotts’.

Twenty-four hours later, after a night in one of Gunnedah’s hotels and no meds, I still couldn’t get to the Scotts’ and the water was rising.

Whoa.

Unsure what to do, I rang Sydney University’s Dean of Sciences. We hadn’t spoken since he’d informed me I was being shipped off to Gunnedah early. When I informed him of my situation—a situation he already knew about, thanks to a worried call from Mary Scott—he told me I was going to be collected by the
backup
host family.

“You will still be able to access the koala population you’re studying from their property,” he said, his tone as condescending and self-righteous as it had been during our last conversation. “I’ve arranged for your things to be collected from the Scotts via helicopter and delivered to Kangaroo Creek Cattle Station. Someone will be picking you up from where you are now within the next twelve hours.”

And with that, our conversation was finished.

Excellent.

Huddling under the awning of the Plains Hotel, watching the rain pour off it like a continuous sheet of water, I stared at the empty road. Who in their right mind would travel in weather like this? The road itself, one of the two main streets that dissected Gunnedah, could have been a river, there was that much water on it.

I waited.

Wondered if it was raining in Sydney.

Wondered if Raph was getting wet moving between lectures and Mackellar House. I pictured his dark hair tousled and damp, that hint of a dimple flashing at me as I rubbed said damp hair with a towel.

A sharp pang of misery and longing stabbed my chest and, before I could stop myself, I pulled my cell from my backpack, swiped my thumb over the screen and found Raph in my list of contacts.

I wasn’t going to talk to him. I really wasn’t. I just wanted to hear his voice. Hear his Australian accent. Yes, I know I was surrounded by Australian accents, but that’s not the point, okay?

Eyes burning, heart pounding, pulse a wild thumping in my ears, I held my thumb over the little phone icon, staring at the small image of him at the top of the screen.

I missed him. So freaking much I could hardly breathe.

So much I’d risk the humiliation and embarrassment the call would no doubt cause me just to hear him say my name. Or maybe, if I was lucky, he’d call me
American girl
like he used to and for one brief, deluded moment I could pretend we were still—

“You the American girl?” a deep male voice with a distinct Australian accent rumbled in front of me.

I let out a startled squeak, flinched and almost dropped my phone.

A man stood under the awning in front of me. He studied me with dark eyes, the seams and wrinkles on his sun-leathered face like a map of a life lived hard, the worn cowboy hat on his head dripping with water. “Maci Rowling?”

I stuttered out a nod. Whoa, I was obviously missing Raph more than I realized, although I would have said that was impossible. The guy waiting for me to speak looked like him. Just forty years older.