Hold On to Me (7 page)

‘Okay. I'm done.' Luca slipped his phone into his hip pocket.

‘Great.' Stella wiped her wet hand on her singlet top, on the section pulled tight under her breasts and above her waist. ‘I look forward to seeing what you can do for me.'

He grinned. ‘I'll email everything to you. Where can I send it?'

‘Google me. You'll find my email address on my website.'

‘Style by Stella, right?'

She smiled. ‘The one and only.'

‘Well.' Luca smiled back at her and the sun shining through the roof lit up his perfect white teeth like in a toothpaste commercial. Oh, she could definitely stand to have him around for a little while. Then she caught herself: only if his price was right, of course.

‘Thank you, Mr Morelli. I really appreciate you coming all the way from Adelaide. I hope we can work something out.'

‘I'm sure you'll like what I have to offer. And it's Luca.' He took a step towards her and held out his hand. This time, Stella didn't refuse the contact. She whipped off a rubber glove, wiped her hand down the front of her jeans, and reached for his fingers. His tanned skin against her pale fingers looked like a block of Top Deck chocolate. The heat she felt sizzled up her arm and right into the space behind her ribs. When she lifted her gaze from their entwined hands to his face, she realised that his charming smile had disappeared and something entirely different was in its place.

Slowly, they let go. He smiled at her again and walked away.

Stella propped her hands on her hips and watched his bum move in those shorts and his shoulders sway. When he reached the doorway, he looked back over his shoulder and gave her a slight nod. ‘I'll be in touch.'

‘Ciao,' she said.

His smile was like an arrow to her heart.

‘Oh, that's amazing.' Stella sighed into the sheet covering Summer's massage table, enjoying the excruciating sensation of her friend's strong fingers kneading her back and shoulders. She'd gone there straight from her shop, slipped into Summer's shower, and was now enjoying the ministrations of the best massage therapist on the south coast. The room in Summer's practice was peaceful and quiet. Painted a pale shade of green, its windows captured the setting sun and the aroma of jasmine-scented candles teased Stella's nostrils. New-age music was playing softly in the background and, although it was a little different from the jazz that Stella preferred, she found it the perfect tonic to help her relax while being manipulated and pounded by her friend.

It had been a long day. Stella's every limb ached and there were spasms in muscles she hadn't known she had. She was fit and healthy—she regularly walked along the cliff tops west of Horseshoe Bay—but that day's work had been back-breaking.

‘You're very tense,' Summer said, pushing her fingers into Stella's left shoulder.

‘Yes,' Stella mumbled into the sheet covering the massage table.

‘I wish you'd taken up my offer to come and help you clean up, you crazy independent woman. I can handle a mop and bucket like a champion.'

‘I know, I know,' Stella turned her head to the side so she could chat. She'd had lots of offers but she was so afraid of falling to pieces in front of her friends that she'd refused their help. She was scraping up the ruins of her beloved business—and her life—and she wanted to do that in private.

‘Believe me, Summer, this is the best thing you can do for me right now. Oh,' she murmured, ‘that's good.'

‘Happy to oblige. Did you get much work done today?' Summer positioned her palms on Stella's shoulders and pressed down. Stella exhaled a big breath and felt half her tension flow out of her mouth.

‘Tons. I filled the skip. There's still water on the floor but it's concrete, after all, and given how warm it's been, that should dry out by itself over the next couple of days. I organised a quote for the building work.'

‘Wow. You don't just sit around, do you? Is it someone local?'

‘No. Yes. Kind of. It's Anna Morelli's brother.'

‘Ooh, you just tensed up, hon. You need to relax. Whatever you're thinking about, let it go.'

Let it go? There was no chance of that. After Luca had walked out of her shop with a grin that could melt an ice-cream at twenty feet, Stella had plonked herself on the wet floor and thought over their encounter. So he was handsome—any woman with a pulse could tell you that—but there was more. He was ambitious, already had a builder's licence and his own company. She knew what it was like to start up your own business. Sure, she wasn't building things, but the principles were the same. When it was your name on the letterhead, you worked like mad to make it a success. It was your baby and you wanted to make sure it survived and thrived. Luca was only two years in, and Stella figured he was probably working all the hours under the sun, trying to establish himself and his reputation. And yet he'd dropped everything that day to drive down to the beach and help her out. She had to make sure to thank Anna. She understood how persuasive that woman could be. She'd managed to convince Stella to stock stiletto heels in a beachside boutique, after all, despite her gut instinct that women on holidays wanted comfortable summer flats. Of course Anna had been right. Since the day Stella had put the first pair on display in the window, they'd been among her best sellers.

And it seemed like Anna was going to be right about her brother, too.

Stella blew out a breath and rolled her eyes. As she reflected on her behaviour that afternoon, she came to the conclusion she'd probably not been as grateful to Morelli Constructions as she should have been.

‘So is he going to do the work for you? Anna's brother?'

Stella thought about the young man with the skin and the smile and the charm. ‘Luca. His name is Luca. Luca Morelli.'

Summer stopped. ‘You just said his name three times. What's going on? You're tensing up again. Did it go badly? Is it going to be more expensive than you thought?'

‘No, no. Nothing like that. It's …'

‘Relax a little. You've been through a major shock. No wonder your back and shoulders feel like fishing rope.' Summer ran her knuckles down Stella's spine.

‘It's not the shop. I know I can fix that. I know I can get back to business.'

‘Then what else has got you all tied up in knots, hon?'

‘Luca Morelli.'

Stella didn't like gossip and usually kept things very close to her chest, even when it was bare and only her most private bits were covered with a warm towel. But she'd grown to know and love Summer and felt safe sharing at least some of her secrets.

‘Really?'

‘Oh, yeah. He is absolutely gorgeous.'

‘Don't tease me. There is a serious lack of men in this town. Hang on, let me qualify.
Available
men. Where are all the available men, Stella?'

‘You're asking me?' Stella chuckled.

‘I know, why am I asking you, the born-again virgin of Port Elliot?'

‘Oh, if only I was.' Stella laughed.

‘So you don't mind if I accidentally swing by and check him out for myself?'

‘Please, go ahead. I know I'm a sensible woman, a sensible older woman, but he is hot. Young. Buff. In his prime, if you know what I mean. I don't know what it is. It's not like I don't see hot young men all the time, wandering up from the beach in their boardshorts. They're everywhere down here. But this one …'

‘Score out of ten?'

‘Fifteen.'

Summer sighed. ‘I'm coming tomorrow.'

Stella felt loose and began to talk. ‘It hit me today when I was walking here. I'm thirty-five years old, Summer. I'm too young to not be having sex.'

‘Join the club, hon.' Summer moved to the other side of the massage table and began working on Stella's calves with her magic thumbs. ‘But I don't know what you're complaining about. My dry spell is way longer than yours. You did have Duncan.'

‘Please don't remind me.'

‘You've been so tough on him. I think he's … nice. In a suit-and-tie kind of unruffled way.'

One drunken and very ill-advised night a year back, Stella had slept with Duncan McNamee after an impromptu early-summer street party. All the neighbours had dragged deckchairs and bottles of wine out onto the street and toasted the approaching holidays. The sex had been perfectly fine—if you liked perfectly fine sex—but she shouldn't have scratched that particular itch with a man who'd turned out to have serious feelings for her.
She
had no intention of getting serious about anyone ever again. She'd thought she and Duncan understood each other, that their no-strings-attached sex was mutually convenient and definitely not to be repeated. But, in hindsight, neither of them had been entirely honest about what they were looking for. She had been looking for sex. He'd been looking for love—and he wasn't going to find that with Stella.

She was a woman with a history: there was no denying it. She'd always guarded herself very carefully, but that hadn't kept her from having all kinds of relationships with men in her twenties. With everything that had happened in the last of those relationships, she'd decided that the casual kind, the great-sex-with-no-strings-attached kind, suited her best.

She could have had a relationship with Duncan if that's what she'd been looking for. He was still hovering, a year later, in the hope that she might decide she wanted him again. But she didn't. She'd slept with him precisely because she didn't want him. She'd had an itch to scratch and he'd been there. That was all.

She'd made some stupid decisions in her life before—hello, Sydney—but this one came back to bite her on the arse almost every day. Duncan clearly wanted an encore, and she'd been so embarrassed about her lapse of judgement that she'd willed herself to be nice to him ever since. On the surface, he seemed perfect for her. Stable. He wore a suit to work. Sensible. Clean living. Of course, that was why she'd slept with him. She needed to find someone who was the polar opposite of Sully Brown in every way. If Sully was Adam Levine, Duncan was Michael Bublé. It should have worked. She loved Bublé. She adored the Great American Songbook.

But there was simply nothing about Duncan that zinged.

‘He is a nice guy who does absolutely nothing for me, Summer.'

‘Poor Duncan.' Summer patted her back. ‘Turn around and I'll do your toes.'

Stella flipped over. She liked this position better because she got to look at her friend's face while they chatted. Summer's long, sun-blonde hair was pulled up in a high ponytail, and her bright blue eyes glowed with vitality. She looked exactly like the season she was named after.

‘So are you going to hire the hot Luca, then? Think you can keep your dirty-old-lady hands off him?'

Stella laughed. ‘Oh, I can look—and I will—but that doesn't mean I have to touch. Flirting and fantasising are completely safe, right? It's so much safer than dealing with the real thing.'

‘Yeah …' Summer sighed. ‘At least you've got the flirting. All I've got is fantasising.'

Stella let out a belly laugh that echoed around the room, drowning out the tinkling new-age music. ‘I hear Duncan is still free.'

When Stella finally made it home at the end of an exhausting and confusing day, the first thing she did was check her inbox for messages from her suppliers, her insurance company and customers. Among the fifty new emails, one in particular caught her eye. She pulled her chair closer to the desk in her home office, straightened her back, and clicked on it.

What the? She read it again.

Right. That made much more sense.

She thought back over her encounter with Luca. She felt as though she hadn't looked at a man—or really noticed one—in years. And there had been flirting. Oh yes, that's what had happened today. No one had flirted with her in forever. She'd heard it in Luca's words, had seen it in his smile. In the intense way he'd watched her when she was swigging water from her bottle. And when they'd shaken hands, there was a certain heat and pressure from his fingers. God, she missed flirting. That was the downside of working in an environment that was all about women.

Stella had intentionally created a man-free zone out of her business and, really, her life since returning to South Australia. Her accountant was a woman. So were her bank manager and her insurance agent. The only men she saw regularly were her friends' partners, and she wasn't especially close to any of them. There was a reason she'd run from Sydney and men at exactly the same time. She tried not to think about Sully. It had been five years since he'd snorted away almost all her money. Five years without a word—or a dollar—from the man who'd almost ruined her life. And ruined her.

She read Luca's email again and let herself think about what it would be like to work with him. And then she let herself fantasise for a moment about
all
the things she wouldn't mind doing with Luca Morelli. In an alternative universe, that is. Because Stella didn't let anyone in any more.

So fantasy was what she did now. It was safe. As well as incredibly unfulfilling, but that was her lot and she would live with her choice. Her eyes returned to Luca's email. ‘I hope they meet with your satisfaction,' she murmured. Then she clicked on the attachments. She closely read two glowing references from people who didn't share the Morelli name and, in fact, didn't sound Italian at all. That removed any hint that he'd called in favours from extended family. She saved the references to a folder titled
Operation Survive
and closed her laptop.