Unconditional (31 page)

I laughed, enjoying the moment.

“I also plan on being an astronaut,” he continued, whisking the eggs with reckless abandon. “Just so you know.”

“Oh, in that case—” I trailed my fingers over his navel and along the downy line of hair beneath it leading to his groin, “—can I be a life-drawing model? Like the kind we saw at Triptych?”

“No bloody way. I’m not letting weirdoes stare at my woman naked, thank you very much.”

A tight thrill of excitement shot through me at the possessive tone I heard in his chuckled response.

“But if we’re eating out all the time…” I teased, slipping my fingers beneath the elastic band of his boxers. “Or ordering in…”

“I’ll work a double shift at NASA…
ah
, fuck me, Maci, that feels good.”

I squeezed his cock again, giggling into his shoulder at the way he turned the title of America’s space agency into a raw groan of pleasure.

We
did
eat our eggs. An hour later. And they weren’t exactly…good. But due to the fact Raph made them for me, with buttered toast that he did very well, and a mug of steaming coffee, they were the most delicious eggs I’d ever had.

Okay, not really. They
were
kind of gross, but the sentiment behind them was romantic and wonderful so I didn’t care at all.

We were doing the dishes a short time later when he leaned his ass on the kitchen counter and gave me a contemplative inspection. “The last time we woke up together, I asked you to go to Wet’n’Wild with me.”

I nodded, passing him a wet plate to be dried. At the horrible memory of what had come after that invitation, I pulled a face. Damn, that morning. “You did.”

He took the plate and swirled the dishtowel over it, watching his hand’s circular path. “And we didn’t get there.”

I let out a wry snort. “We didn’t.”

“So I was thinking…” He raised his focus from the plate, a grin I could only describe as devilish playing with his lips. “We could go today.”

I raised my eyebrows. “To Sydney?”

He laughed. “I was thinking of the Kangaroo Creek version.”

“The what?”

He took the last plate—now freshly washed—from my hand and winked. “Wait and see. You brought your swimmers, right?”

Thank God I’d spent over two weeks listening to Heather call her bathing suit swimmers, otherwise I’d be more puzzled. I nodded.

With another grin, he whipped the dishtowel over the plate, placed both on the counter and then snared my hips with his hands. “Go get dressed in them. No work today. The koalas can take a break from being studied and watched while they sleep.”

I pulled an indignant face, even as I wriggled the lower half of my belly harder against his groin. “Hey, that’s my thesis you’re dissing.”

He chuckled, stole a kiss and then slapped me on the ass. “And it’s brilliant. I stole a peek last night while you were showering. Even I might be convinced there is such a thing as global warming when you’re done. Maybe.”

I shoved him away with a laugh. “Douchebag.”

Nimble as always, he bounced away from me. “Hurry up. We want to hit the slides before the crowds.”

Still completely puzzled by the whole situation and more than a little excited, I crossed to the tallboy near the bed and withdrew my bikini from the top drawer.

Twenty minutes later, we pulled to a halt beside the most picturesque billabong I’d ever seen. In fact, the only billabong I’d ever seen.

Damn, it was pretty.

Okay, cultural lesson number 642 about Australia: A billabong is a body of water that forms from an offshoot of a river, usually branching out from the main flow during or after an extended period of rain. Essentially, it’s like a pond that appears when there’s been lots of rain and then, when it’s really dry, it disappears.

Raph had brought me to the main billabong on Kangaroo Creek Station. And we were going to swim in it.

Not just swim in it. Slide into it. Because, yep, right beside the billabong was a sloped stretch of grass-covered land that, with a little bit of splashing and a lot of courage, would make a perfect slide.

Wet. And wild.

We spent the morning there, swimming, engaging in fierce water fights, making out. Lots of making out. But also lots of talking. I think we lay stretched out on our towels with the sun seeping into our wet bodies, drying our skin, for at least an hour doing nothing else but talking about stuff. Not important stuff, just stuff. The kind of stuff that makes up a life between couples. The kind of stuff my mom and dad used to talk about. “Just shootin’ the breeze, honey,” Mom would say when I asked her what she and Dad were doing when I’d find them sitting in the front porch swing, iced tea in hand.

Getting-to-know-you stuff. Which I guess is, when it comes down to it, really quite important after all.

And through it all, the splashing, the kissing, the talking, the comfortable silences, I fell deeper and deeper in love with him. And I came to the realization that, no matter what my future held, I wanted him in it.

It was that simple.

Rolling onto my side, I draped my leg over his thigh and rested my head in my hand. “Raph?” I said, heart beating fast. It wasn’t often a girl admitted she was wrong. I
never
admitted I was wrong. Like, ever. This was a momentous event.

Raph rolled his head, currently resting on his threaded fingers, and gave me a lazy grin. “American girl?”

I looked at him, really looked at him. Burned every feature, every line, every freckle and bit of beard stubble into my brain. In the years to come, I wanted to remember
this
moment. “I was wrong,” I said.

He studied me. A slight frown pulled at his eyebrows. “About what?”

“About telling you I didn’t want you to care for me, back in Mackellar House when we had our…fight.” I paused. Swallowed. Touched my fingers to his chest, above where his heart would be. “I know my life is going to get pretty crappy at some point. Yes, there are medical breakthroughs all the time, and the work Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease foundation does is incredible. And I know here in Australia your doctors are making serious headways into treatments. But at the moment, all those treatments are just that—treatments. A way of managing the condition. No one has developed a cure for it, and they may never do so in my lifetime. I
know
all that, and it makes my future worrisome. I’ve watched Mom and Dad go through it, I’ve seen the crap of it all and I never wanted to put someone in that situation.”

The frown knitting his eyebrows grew deeper. “Your mum and dad?”

I nodded. Oh man, did I feel nervous. “Mom has Parkinson’s as well. She was diagnosed over ten years ago. She’s…she’s in an advanced state. I’ve spent so many mealtimes waiting to see if she’s going to choke on her soup because her throat decides mid-swallow to stop working. I’ve spent days at school, at college wondering if she’s fallen over and hurt herself, maybe hit her head and is unconscious, or bleeding out…It’s not…well, it’s not fun.”

“Jesus, Maci,” Raph breathed. “I didn’t…why didn’t you tell me?”

“Pride. Stubborn pride,” I answered honestly. “And embarrassment. Humiliation. All the things that make people do stupid things. I didn’t want anyone to think of me as broken or looking at me with pity. I hate that. But you’ve made me realize…” I let out a sigh, closing my eyes for a moment at a wave of something profound and significant rolled through me. “I’ve come to realize the one person I don’t want to be stubborn with, the one person who makes me not afraid, who makes me not care about humiliation, is you.”

His jaw bunched. He looked at me, silent.

“I was wrong to say I didn’t want you to care about me,” I continued, my throat tight. “I kinda like that you do a lot.”

He drew a deep breath. And then, without a word, rolled over until we faced each other, knees to knees, chest to chest, heart to heat. “Do you remember that word I said this morning?”

I nodded.

He touched my bottom lip with his thumb. “What was it again? Say it for me?”

“Unconditional,” I answered on a whisper. Christ, I felt like every fiber in my body was thrumming.

The corners of his lips twitched. “Sorry? I didn’t hear that. What was it again?”

“Unconditional,” I repeated, a bit louder this time.

He grinned. “What? I still can’t hear you.”

“
Unconditional!
” I burst out, singing the word in my best Katy Perry voice, which is, to be fair, goddamn awful.

But then, so were Raph’s scrambled eggs that morning and I’d loved every bite.

“You better fucking believe it, baby,” he growled, eyes dancing with joy as he flattened me to my back and proceeded to make love to me. So many times I lost count of how many orgasms I had.

Whoa.

The next afternoon, Sunday, he left.

I drove him to the bus station, my heart a messed-up mix of grief and rapture. He had to get back to his classes at the university and I had to get back to my fieldwork and thesis. Life was interrupting our heaven. Damn it. But boy, was our heaven wonderful.

We stood under the bus shelter holding each other, refusing to look away. I know it sounds ridiculous and melodramatic, but that’s what love is, right? Everything is in hyper color when you’re in love. Everything is on full volume. Nothing is diluted or filtered.

“I’ll be back next Friday,” he promised, doing that strokey thing on my bottom lip with his thumb I loved so much. “I’ll drive this time. Takes too bloody long on the bus and train. Also means I don’t have to leave until late Sunday night.”

I forced a smile. I was going to miss him. “Watch out for Shelly,” I said, trying to sound witty and failing miserably.

“Who?”

The damn Greyhound bus pulled to a halt beside the curb before I could think of something equally not-witty to respond with.

“Fuck,” he muttered, pulling me closer to him. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

With another forced laugh, I shoved him away from me. “Get out of here, Jones,” I ordered. “You’re bothering me.”

He snared my wrist with impressive reflexes, yanked me back to his body and kissed me, a hard, fast, mind-spinning kiss. “Love you,” he whispered against my lips a heartbeat before he let me go and ran for the bus’s open door.

“Love you too,” I yelled back, grinning.

Yes, I was shaking. I knew it and so did Raph. Probably one of the reasons he didn’t want to climb on the bus now.

But he had to. And he did. Which sucked. Big time. But it was easier to deal with because I knew he was coming back. I knew he loved me and I
knew
we were going to work it all out, including the whole Australia-American-geographical-impediment thing.

I knew all those things, so I didn’t break down into a sobbing mass of heartbroken misery.

I
knew
those things.

Unfortunately, I was wrong.

And I never saw Raph in Kangaroo Creek again.

Or Sydney, for that matter.

The Royal Family, Photographs and Getting the Fuck out of Dodge—AKA Australia

Bet you thought I was going to say something terrible like Raph’s bus crashed on the way Tamworth or the train to Sydney had an accident and there were no survivors? Nope. Nothing like that.

Raph made it back to Sydney, back to Mackellar House, and we threw ourselves into a highly erotic, thoroughly debauched long-distance relationship.

For four days, we flirted via text, Skype and—when we really wanted to tease the world with the awesomeness of our love—Facebook. We had Skype sex, cybersex, text sex. Yeah, it’s as comical as it sounds. And boy, does that guy know how to text dirty. More than once, we even went the retro route and had phone sex. Four days of being with each other when we couldn’t
be
with each other.

It was awesome. We laughed, got schmaltzy often, shared our days’ highlights and existed together. When I described in great detail the diarrhea of one of my koala subjects, he didn’t stop me. In fact, he asked questions that made me think in ways I hadn’t before, which in turn opened up a whole new direction of research for my thesis.

Four days of goofy, elated, euphoric bliss. It seemed there was a magical element to that number with Raph and me. Four days in Mackellar House and four days now.

Which means I shouldn’t have been surprised when those four days of joy ended with a jarring, cruel blow.

Returning to the guesthouse after a particularly devastating morning on the fifth day of fieldwork, I shuffled up the front porch steps, spirits low. A feral cat had attacked the koala colony during the night and I’d arrived at the site to find the gutted remains of the mother koala and her baby I’d been researching since the beginning on the ground beneath her primary tree. It was heart-wrenching to discover and even more heart-wrenching to document. The photos now in my smartphone’s Koala album would haunt me for a long time to come.

Dropping my backpack onto the desk under the window, I crossed the living area to the bathroom, desperate to not only wash up, but to find some way to revive my mood. Perhaps I’d ring Raph after a shower. If nothing else, the sound of his voice would soothe my frazzled nerves.

I took a long shower. Well, long for Kangaroo Creek, which meant I was under there for about seven minutes. After, I killed the water, grabbed a towel and walked from the bathroom, drying myself off as I did so.

I froze when I found a petite, impeccably dressed, beautiful young woman perched on the edge of one of the sofas in the living room, looking at me.

Actually, the more accurate account of what I did is froze, let out a squeal and staggered back a step, flailing with the damp towel in an effort to cover my naked body.

The young woman—surely no older than eighteen—watched me the whole time, expression bored. “Good morning, Miss Rowling.”

She had an accent. A weird one. The kind the villains in those cheesy eighties spy movies have.

“Who the hell are you?” I demanded with a glare over my shoulder, showing her my back as I knotted my towel around my body.