This Time Forever (Australis Island) Read online

  His voice was softly, softly in her ear and his hands were warm on her bare skin. As she laid her hands over his, they moved forward as one over her ribs and across her stomach.

  She inhaled as they moved together up and over her breasts cupped in lace but her breath stopped in her throat as the palms of his hands settled over her nipples. Her hands tightened over his.

  “My beautiful Meg.” He pulled her back to him and her head rested on his shoulder. “Leave your hands there.” He slipped his out from under hers, moved them lazily to her jeans. He unbuttoned them, downed the zip, slid warm hands under her knickers and pushed her clothes to the floor.

  She bent to step out of them.

  “No. Stay there.” He moved and stripped her clothes off, knelt in front of her, stared up as she held her breasts. “I have dreamed of this for years and years.” He brushed fingertips over the hair at the base of her belly. “And nothing is going to make me hurry.” He pressed his face into her warmth.

  “I won’t be able to stand up.” She swayed at his touch.

  “Just for a minute.” He nuzzled, pressed his face into her, gripped her hips to bring her closer.

  Meg put her hands on his shoulders. “Jarrad, I can’t stay upright...”

  He lifted her, stood right up, and carried her from the kitchen to the lounge room, the soft glow of a sinking sun lighting the room.

  She laughed as he muffled something into her chest before carefully lowering her to the settee. He knelt beside her, kissed her mouth, her neck, reached behind and released the hooks on her bra and stripped it away, her breasts spilling out. He sucked and nuzzled her nipples and waves of intense pleasure shot straight through her. Then he tongued his way down over belly until she couldn’t stand it anymore.

  She gripped a handful of his hair. “Jarrad.”

  He rose and slid alongside her on the lounge and kissed her again and again... many kisses which lingered until there was almost no time to get out of his clothes. He rose up, shucked his jeans, tore his shirt over his head.

  No time for long stares at each other’s bodies, no time for soft spoken words and slow caresses.

  She flattened her palms against the solid span of his chest as he sank over her, the dark hair curling under her fingers. Her arms moved around his neck to draw him closer, and she felt him snug and hard against her leg.

  Urgent and demanding, yet longing to make the moment last, she shifted just so ... a leg moved ever-so-slightly...

  And in he slipped. A soft sigh from her, a breath of surprise from him as she tightened around him.

  “Meg... Meg.” He moved slowly at first but it wasn’t his to control and a primal, age-old rhythm took them over.

  Every nerve in her body reveled. Every plunge he took she wrapped him harder to savour every minute, every second of him inside her.

  She gripped his shoulders, rode with him, higher, faster until a sudden, blissful climax took her by surprise. Pleasure beyond all Meg’s daydreams.

  Someone cried out. Someone cried. Someone whispered that they couldn’t stop, couldn’t hold on... that they wouldn’t let go...

  He held her fiercely against him, and when he plunged deeper before giving in, before giving up to her, he held her tighter and tighter. And when he gave in, he called her name over and over until he could no longer speak and he sank on to her, his strength gone.

  The air around waited for them to breathe again.

  She was home. He was home. Her hand in his hair and on his much loved face was a caress she never believed could mean so much to her.

  Jarrad.

  Meg closed her eyes to shut out everything but the sound of the humming rhythm of his body now alongside hers. As his arm fell under her breasts he gathered her close to him, holding her tightly, murmuring sleepily.

  For years the lonely nights had plagued her sleep, had drawn her days in exhaustion and depletion. And now here he was in her life again, with hardly any warning, large and warm and robust.

  She wanted to settle the doubts; she wanted quiet now.

  But her thoughts wouldn’t be silenced. How could she let him go again? Why should she?

  He stirred and she snuggled closer. She didn’t want to disturb things just yet, needed to think clearly, if she could.

  But clarity wouldn’t be kind.

  How can I not let him go? He wants a baby. “Jarrad, I...”

  “No.” He tucked his chin into her neck again. “Whatever it is, we won’t talk about it tonight.”

  He remained motionless and she knew he was on alert. She took his hand and pressed it to her lips. “All right. Not tonight.”

  Not tonight.

  Meg took time off to be with him at the B&B. While she rarely moved guests, and only when she absolutely had to, she diverted the few bookings she had for the week to Kate McAuley and the Daisy Hill B&B twenty kilometres back towards the main town of Regency.

  For once she would totally indulge herself and greedily grasp every moment of Jarrad Scott.

  They talked late into the nights, and by day roamed the beach or the land beyond, hand in hand, laughing, making grand sweeping plans they both knew might never eventuate.

  The bitter-sweet enveloped them with each passing day, though their delight in each other grew in spite of it. They picnicked in the scrub behind where the house would eventually be built, they made love under moonlight on a mild night, high on the cliff overlooking the beach.

  Her happiness was catchy. The drivers and her staff were worried at first, then relieved that she seemed joyful at last and ready to move on.

  Meg and Jarrad laughed and giggled and loved in their freedom until the day before he was due to leave.

  He spoke of it first. “I have to get back tomorrow, Meg.”

  Meg looked up from the bench where she was preparing their lunch, roasted chicken breast on a bed of fruits and greens with a basil mayonnaise. Lover’s food she’d called it. “Hasn’t escaped my notice.”

  “So what have you come up with?”

  Her silence was longer than she’d intended.

  His voice was soft and flat. “Same old answer then.”

  “Jarrad. I don’t want you to go. You don’t have to go. Stay.”

  “I want to stay, but—”

  “I don’t want to have a baby. I don’t.”

  “I don’t understand that.”

  “I know.” Meg could feel her heart breaking. Even for this man, she did not want to have a baby. Fear, her age, fear. Fear. But regardless, she did not want a baby. She was sure of that.

  He didn’t sigh, he didn’t speak, he just looked at his steepled fingers then his hands dropped on to his thighs. He rubbed them up and down.

  She tried to engage again, but his conversation was monotone, his smiles quick and without depth. Her chest filled with a familiar weight and it was all she could do to act as normally as possible.

  That afternoon they sat inside, staring at the ocean beyond. Dinner was subdued, hardly a bottle of wine consumed between them, and when the time came for bed, their first lovemaking brought both of them to tears. Their last was stormy, tempest-tossed and hard and Meg clutched him with all her might.

  Panic.

  She would not let him go.

  First thing in the morning, she would relent, hold him to her, tell him she’d changed her mind – they’d try for a baby. A baby can’t be so bad. They’d make it work... she’d make it work... It would work.

  It was her last thought as she drifted, wrapped in his arms.

  In the early hours she heard him rouse and go for the toilet. She rolled on to his side of the bed and into the warmth his body had left. She dozed, then slept heavily till morning.

  It was only when she woke hours later that she realised he’d gone.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The shock and the emptiness left her with no words to voice the anguish. At first she frantically searched for a note, a goodbye, an explanation. There was none.

  H
e didn’t answer her calls, even though she left message after message, begging him to call her.

  Three days later, he texted: I’ll miss you forever, my love. Don’t contact me again.

  At first the ache in Meg’s chest was physical, a choking boulder cutting off her breath, the weight of it slowing her down, dulling her down. She wondered at times why she bothered to get out of bed each day.

  Was this grief ? Of course it was.

  She buried herself in her work, added to her load by filling the B&B seven days a week for months on end until Helen shut that idea down and brought the occupancy back to four nights a week.

  Meg didn’t argue, hardly protested, but her restlessness still needed to be burned off.

  She started to drive the tours as well, something she had not done before except for emergencies, preferring to take care of the office and then the evening’s guests. The drivers shut that one down too, as much for her health as for their own earnings.

  Months passed before Meg finally relented and let go, let things get back to how they were before. By now the physical ache was muted and bearable.

  Her body lay dormant in its needs. Her mind could not tempt or tease out the feelings he had invoked in her and nothing would substitute for his touch on her body.

  She stepped through life sure in the knowledge that, though she had let him go for all the right reasons, she never understood how she actually did it.

  Finally the hours and days when she answered each phone call hoping it would be him subsided. She’d thought of calling or texting him but always pulled up short, never able to do it. What would she be interfering with if he did answer? His new life? Would she risk hearing the resentment in his voice, the accusation he’d throw at her? Or his voice saying he’d moved on. She would feel well left behind.

  She couldn’t face that. Her cowardice was her shield.

  Meg could now believe people who told her that they’d dreamed of this or that, how vivid the people in those dreams were. How real had Jarrad’s touch been in her dreams night after night? So real that after she finally slept, she would wake in the dead of night convinced he’d crept back into her house, into her room and her bed and was lying naked and warm beside her.

  How real did it seem when she’d feel him rise over her to kiss her and scrape his chin over her shoulder, her neck and carefully, oh-so-gently over a breast and down over her belly and down, down...

  More often she awoke with a start, and with a sureness that he’d been there in her bed with her, loving her. She’d reach a hand over the place where he would have been only to feel the cool sheets, the space bereft of his body heat.

  She knew she couldn’t have his babies, nor would she have, and it didn’t matter really. If she hadn’t sent him away and he still wanted children and she still refused, sooner or later he would have left. If she’d had children she didn’t want, she would have resented that and made their lives a misery. No. In this she was right to refuse him.

  Leave him free to have his kids.

  At times, she thought she was merely missing him, and that in itself was her grief. Other times she thought it was simply an overworked emotional state.

  She risked her sanity, feared sinking further into the madness of it. His departure had weighed too heavily. She knew she had to go into combat to stay afloat and press on, to keep depression at bay.

  Perhaps she would go mad. Then again, people who were mad rarely had an insight into their madness. It wasn’t madness for her then, after all.

  She would distance herself somehow from the emptiness. It took a long time working through it. It was grief, pure and simple. She was ill-equipped to deal with it. She struggled, drank, slept fitfully, hid herself away and still she pressed on.

  The best she could do was distract herself and once again, she threw herself into the business.

  By the end of the first year she’d resigned herself to just filling her day, to getting out of bed, putting one foot in front of the next, to breathe in and out, to work, to rest. And to remember what it had been like with him.

  Still she wondered for the millionth time what she had done.

  Anne would come to visit. “You need to get out more,” she’d say.

  They’d both chuckle. “Soon as I can take a break,” Meg would answer, knowing the break would never be taken.

  At one point, Anne—who was not a touchy-feely person—reached across the table and placed her hand on Meg’s. “There is life after him.”

  Meg nodded. “I know.” She inhaled deeply. “I’m living it.”

  “He’s not dead, Meg. You could pick up the phone and talk to him.”

  Meg looked at her friend. “Yes, I could do that. But I’m not sure I want to know about the happy life he’s leading, or about his wife, his kids.”

  “How will you know unless you contact him?”

  “And what do I want to find out? That he’s happy? I already know that.”

  “You don’t know any such thing.”

  “Don’t need to ring him to know I’m not happy.”

  “Meg.” Anne’s soft admonishing was not lost.

  Meg shrugged it off. “I wouldn’t want to sound like an ex-lover trying to come back on the scene. I’ve had that happen to me before and it’s awkward and nasty. People move on. I’m sure he has.”

  Anne fell silent for a moment, withdrew her hand and topped up their glasses with Chablis. “You two would be able to pick up where you left off.”

  Meg shrugged again. The thought of calling was tempting, but the reality would be a cold shower. “I think Jarrad Scott was my last man. He should stay in my past now. Leave the hurt there.”

  “You’ll get over that bit and remember only the good bits. Hurt passes, it always does.”

  Meg nodded in silence. She knew she’d get over it, and she meant he would be her last. Not because she didn’t want to love, but because it was never successful for her. All this time since Jarrad, because their relationship—or the chance of one—had failed, it was more proof of her ineptitude. She wouldn’t try again. She just didn’t know how to go about it and succeed.

  “I’m terrified I’ll end up like others I know who’ve had multiple marriages and failed relationships. I’ll end up bejeweled and made-up like some crazy old lady. I feel like I’m already on my way.”

  “It happens to men, too, you know. And I agree, you’re sounding a bit crazy,” Anne said. “You don’t have the jewels and the overdone make-up, though.”

  Meg laughed a little. But that terrifying image of crazy old lady beset her.

  The hurt of missing Jarrad was too high a price to pay. The loneliness, the bewilderment, the trying to make sense of what happened to her over the years, and why, was more than she could bear.

  Sometimes she thought she could grasp the reason, but it always eluded her. She couldn’t sustain relationships—she’d proved it over and over again.

  “I can’t ring him. It wouldn’t be right. He probably has a new life, nothing that belongs to me. I’ll be able to let it go soon, I promise.”

  Meg waved her friend goodbye and sat down at the dining table, gazing at the ocean once again. It was calm today, tiny waves lapping incessantly at the shore.

  For the umpteenth time she wondered what was in her that sent men running for the hills, or what attracted men like Martin or Joshua or any of the others she managed to draw into her life? Why did she accept those losers? Did she think she deserved to chain herself to a less than fulfilling life?

  She didn’t know. And couldn’t find the answers. It was better to withdraw and shore up some self-preservation and strength.

  So she did.

  And the years wandered on.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Six years on

  The young red-haired woman had one of those serious looks about her. She and her husband—Meg assumed it was a husband—had just signed the paperwork to purchase the touring company and the beach house from her.

 
Clodagh and Dex seemed an odd mix, but Meg’s solicitor assured her they had the money. It should all proceed quite smoothly. Meg had negotiated to stay at the beach house until her own place was built on the hill beyond. She would continue to operate a B&B but on a much smaller scale, not in competition with Clodagh—Cloudy as she preferred to be called—and Dex, but as an adjunct.

  As work was already underway, the extra three months she needed would fly. It would take all that time to do a proper hand-over of the business, outfit the new place with furniture and landscaping, begin to operate solely as a B&B, taking the overload from Cloudy and Dex.

  The drivers had all been informed that their jobs were safe. Helen would continue to work for the touring company and would be in touch almost daily with Meg.

  The transition went seamlessly. Meg lived in the new place and the drivers picked up their tour vehicles and passengers from Cloudy’s below on the beach front and their extra passengers from Meg’s on the way past. It was working extremely well.

  Today the early sky was bright blue, the air crisp and the salt on the breeze was sharp. She’d had four guests the night before and they were touring today with her old company. Cloudy and Dex had come up to say hello and to see off their touring clients. They waved goodbye and headed off.

  Meg was outside with them all as the drivers pulled in to pick up the guests and their luggage. She noticed a third vehicle coming in from the main road and presumed it to be her mail arriving in a neighbour’s vehicle.

  It wound its way up her driveway. Garry, one of the tour guides, greeted the driver of the vehicle when it stopped. Fleetingly, she thought it must have been someone new on the job.

  It wasn’t until Garry moved his car off that Meg saw the man who stepped out of the car with a small child.

  Meg focused on him. Strange. No one was booked in today.

  Her heart did a leap. “Jarrad.” Her hand flew to her mouth in shock. Quick, stinging tears of disbelief filled her eyes. “Is that you, Jarrad?”

  The man smiled and her heart leapt again. There could be no other man on earth with that smile, that wonderful boyish grin. Her heart swelled to bursting.