The Auction a Romance by Anna Erishkigal Read online

  "Then why did you agree to hire me?"

  "Roberta loves Pippa like her own child. She wouldn't send somebody who would do Pippa wrong." He took a sip of beer. "It was the one compromise we could get our solicitors to agree upon … to pick Roberta as a third-party neutral."

  I vaguely remembered seeing a certificate on Professor Dingle's wall that said she was certified as a guardian ad litem. She’d mentioned something about a bitter divorce, but I'd been so shell-shocked with my own troubles that everything she'd said had filtered in through a fog.

  "I'm sorry," I said softly. "I know what it's like to have your parents use you as a weapon."

  "I know," Adam said. "It was what convinced me to give you a chance. Roberta said she thought you'd relate to Pippa better than anybody else." He swirled his suds around the bottom of his nearly-empty beer bottle. "Not that Eva left me much of a choice. Lately, her strategy seems to be to get me fired from my new job. I'm lucky there's some sort of history between my boss and Eva's father. He's been very understanding about giving me time to lick my wounds."

  "The news says you made him a boatload of money?"

  "Don't believe everything the media says," Adam said. "Queensland Gas & Coal Company has always been well run. The only difference is my boss won't take a landowner to court to force them to give us access. We are…" Adam held up his beer bottle in a mock toast, "…the least evil rapists of the Earth."

  I knew from my greenie friends that, under Australian law, a property owner didn't own the resources that lay beneath his land. If an energy company wanted to test for deposits, the property owner could demand concessions to mitigate the inconvenience of hosting a mining operation, but they had no right to prevent the drilling. The 'lock your gate' movement had been gaining momentum, encouraging landowners to lock their gates to signal the oil and gas companies they didn't want them on their land. Some companies, like the one owned by Eva's father, readily took the landowners to court, but most of the others would quietly walk away.

  "Have you seen any more of the magical lights from down by the river?" Adam suddenly changed the subject.

  "No," I said. "Although I've been so tired I think I sleep like the dead. It's a lot of work, chasing after a ten-year-old!"

  "Yeah." Adam plunked his empty beer bottle down on the coffee table and shot me a grin. "My mother said its revenge for all the trouble I gave her as a kid!"

  "You, trouble?"

  "My brother and I used to sneak out at night to go down the river to swim," Adam said. "She finally told us the Mimi's would chop us up into kangaroo meat."

  "You mean the fairies?"

  "Sort of," Adam said. "The legend is Aboriginal in nature. My mom called them fairies to cubby-hole their mythology with ours."

  "Is that why Pippa keeps saying she wants a unicorn?" I asked. "What's the aboriginal mythology behind that?"

  Adam laughed.

  "There is none." Adam pointed down the hall to Pippa's room. "Back in Brisbane, Pippa's favorite television show was My Little Pony. Thunderlane's real ANKC name is Australian Thunder, but when Pippa came here, she renamed him after her favorite pony stallion."

  "Your mother named her dog after a bunch of male strippers?"

  Adam clapped his hand over his mouth to stifle a laugh. His chest shuddered as he fought to contain the laugher that wanted desperately to break free. He gasped for breath and forced himself to get it under control. The more he tried to suppress it, the redder he turned, until at last it escaped in a great, hearty, roaring guffaw.

  "My father had no idea!" Adam slapped his hand upon his thigh. "He thought my mother named the dog something patriotic."

  I laughed along with him, until finally we both settled into a fit of giggles that resisted all attempts to talk like a case of hiccups that wouldn't go away.

  Adam got up to fetch us each another beer and, this time, condensation droplets on the cold, dark glass indicated the suds were now reasonably chilled. He sat back down, visibly more relaxed, and scrutinized me, his expression more curious than suspicious.

  "So what's your story, Rosamond Xalbadora?"

  "What Professor Dingle said, I guess," I shrugged. "Parents got divorced when I was fourteen. My mother was a tyrant and kept using me to guilt him into giving her more. After a while my father got sick of it, so he went home to Spain."

  "Where did you grow up?"

  "Nerang," I said, "just outside of Gold Coast. It's one of the, how shall I say it? Wannabe rich communities?" I made air quotations with my fingers. "My mother fashioned herself to be a society maven, even though the country club members would never give her the time of day."

  "Pippa said you used to own horses?" Adam's eyebrows lifted with curiosity.

  "Just one horse," I said. "My father is Gitano, one of the Spanish gypsies. When I was six years old, he bought me Harvey."

  "Did you keep him on your station?" Adam asked.

  I laughed. "Hardly! We lived in a suburban housing tract. My father made arrangements to board him at a local stable. When he was still here, I took horseback riding lessons from him."

  "Western style?" he asked. "Or English."

  I pursed my lips, trying to put a label on it. The haute ecole taught by my father was far more rigorous than what most people called dressage.

  "You would probably call it English," I said. "Harvey was originally a show hunter, but my father trained him to perform Spanish dressage. Our life revolved around training and bringing me to events."

  Adam gave me that superior look that all jackaroos wear whenever they cross paths with an English rider. Yeah … if Harvey was still alive, I'd wipe that smirk right off of his face. Adam had never seen a Gitano pony dance…

  "We owned five horses," Adam said, "as well as the horses owned by the jackaroos, but they were all stock horses, trained to work the cattle." He took a sip of beer and pressed the bottle to his forehead. "My father was a no-nonsense man. If it didn't provide a means to earn an income, then it was a waste of time."

  I leaned forward. "Did you run cattle?"

  "Yes," Adam said. "Although my father and the station hands did the most dangerous work with the bulls. It was the one time I ever saw my mother lay into my father, the day my brother Jeffrey almost got gored."

  Adam's eyebrows knit together and his mouth turned downwards as a shadow of grief crossed his chiseled features. My own chest tightened, almost feeling the echo which told me the poor man still grieved for his lost twin.

  "Pippa told me about your brother," I said softly. "I'm sorry for your loss."

  His hand trembled as he took his next sip.

  "This past year, it seems as though my family is cursed," Adam said softly. "First … Eva started up with her antics again. And then my brother got shot down. Then my father dropped dead three weeks later of a heart attack. Then a month after that my mother told me she'd been diagnosed with breast cancer." He looked away and pretended to scratch an itch next to his eyes; his shoulders slumped as though he were Atlas, forced to carry the weight of the earth. "It's what made me finally realize life's too short."

  We both sipped the remaining beer in silence. It tasted cool and earthy, like a quiet woodland copse, where you could crawl away and hide whenever the world began to spin too fast.

  "Pippa says you promised her a pony," I said at last. "If you get her one, I will teach her how to ride."

  Adam scrutinized the green woodland label pasted to his bottle of craft beer.

  "I don't know what's going to happen with my divorce," Adam said. "Until the dust settles, the only commitment I can make is to do my best to take care of my daughter."

  He looked up at me, his blue-green eyes weary and apologetic. Adam would, I think, make sure his daughter's pets were well taken care of, but what about Pippa's mother? Would the woman who had blown off her summer take good care of Pippa's pets? Or would she do what my mother had done. Use a horse as a weapon to get back at Adam?

  "I understand," I said. "I
t's unfair to make the pony pay."

  Adam got up and wished me goodnight. I went back to my room and stared out at the distant river, but the magical lights never came. If there really was a fairy queen there, she only revealed herself to Pippa.

  Chapter 7

  I woke up decadently late, able to sleep in this morning because Adam had Sunday off from work. I squinted at the light which streamed through a filter of lacy white curtains which billowed delicately in the summer breeze, carrying with it the scent of eucalyptus and the river. My dream had been a pleasant one, galloping across the Bristow's fields on my beloved Harvey, my black hair streaming out behind me as I'd raced to catch up to a girl on a white pony, a small, white mare sized perfectly for a little girl. I glanced up at the picture on the wall.

  "I asked him," I told Pippa's grandmother. "He told me no."

  The girl in the picture smiled down from her small white steed, uniquely Australian in her black drover's hat. It had creeped me out to learn Adam's mother had closed her eyes in this room and not woken up, but it was peaceful here, and the dreams indicated his mother was someone I would have liked. Twice while Adam was gone, Pippa had crawled into my bed, sobbing that she missed her grandmother. The more I could help Adam keep things familiar, the less traumatized Pippa would be when her mother got bored with using her daughter as a weapon.

  Adam and Eva. Who the hell gets married with names like that, anyways? Adam should have run away from the woman offering him a bite of the poisoned apple…

  Oh, who was I to judge? Me, who'd just barely graduated university because Gregory convinced me it was more important to work and put him through college rather than get certified to teach all the way through secondary school myself? Primary school teachers were a dime a dozen. I had hamstrung my own ability to find a job!

  With a sigh I threw back my soft, ugly granny square afghan and got out of bed, straightening the crisp white cotton sheets, and then retrieved the quilt from the back of the rocking chair. I shuffled into the salmon pink bathroom to take my shower, fishing long strands of white-blonde hair out of the drain while waiting for the faucet to cool to some other temperature than 'scalding hot' or 'boiled alive.'

  I closed my eyes and inhaled the light citrus scent of Creed Green Irish Tweed blended with sandalwood. It felt strangely intimate to shower in the same bathtub where Adam bathed. When I was done, I wiped down the mist from the bathroom tiles and polished the faucets before returning to my room to get dressed.

  The heat felt stifling and it wasn't even eight o'clock. I pulled my dark hair back into a ponytail and dressed in denim shorts and a strappy tank top. I looked in the mirror and frowned at the plain old stock horse who stared back at me. I was not beautiful like Adam's former wife; in fact, everything about me was frustratingly ordinary. Average height, average figure, boring dark eyes and black hair which looked unusual in a land filled with English descendants, but over the past week I'd lost some of that pinched, frustrated look I'd worn for as long as I could remember.

  I wandered out into the kitchen and realized the house was empty. A sour note of disappointment echoed in my gut. Had Adam and Pippa gone somewhere without me? No. Sleeping peacefully beneath its beige dust-cover, Adam's Mercedes napped peacefully in the courtyard next to his mother's ancient green ute. I wandered outside, wondering if they'd gone to the river to swim. The sun radiated off the gravel like a heat lamp, causing my forehead to instantly erupt into a sheen of sweat. Ugh! So much for the shower! It was only November and already the sun had begun to dry down the land. I fanned my armpits, hoping in vain to catch a bit of breeze.

  Thunderlane barked from the other side of the barn. I turned the corner and froze as I spied Adam standing in the remnants of his mother's garden, shirtless, a tall, bronzed god, his shovel poised as he prepared to ram it into the earth. A long, slow fire ignited in my feminine core as his chest muscles flexed, and then he jammed the shovel downwards to penetrate the fertile soil.

  Damn… Australian Thunder's got -nothing- on this guy.

  "Mrs. Hastings insists you must dig it two shovelfuls deep." Pippa shook a finger at her father as though she was the station overseer. "If you don't, the roots won't have room to spread."

  "I ran the rototiller through it in September," Adam said. "We just need to dig it deep enough to stick them in."

  As he turned the next shovelful, I watched his muscles ripple beneath his suntanned hide like a Thoroughbred preparing to run a race. Whatever Adam did for work, sitting behind a desk poring over geological surveys was only a tiny portion judging by a physique that had not come out of an executive's gym. The way the earth parted willingly beneath his shovel, it was as though Adam was some ancient fertility god and the earth itself his dominion. The newspapers call him the 'Magic Oil Man'… Oof! I fanned myself again, only this time it had nothing to do with the heat.

  The scent of freshly-turned earth drifted my way as Adam bent and picked up a handful of dirt. The soil ball crumbled in his hands.

  "It's too dry," he said. "If you want to plant anything here, you'll need to carry water to it each day."

  "Can't we just run the hose?" Pippa asked.

  "The town has posted a water conservation alert," Adam said. "Hand-watering only until we get some rain."

  Thunderlane's nose shot up. With a joyful 'yip' the dog rose to his feet and bounded over to where I stood, quasi-hidden at the corner of the barn. He pushed his nose into my hand and wagged his fluffy black tail in greeting.

  "Traitor," I whispered. "Now you've gone and ruined the show." I came out of the shadows and pretended I had just arrived. "Good morning. I was wondering where everyone had gone to."

  Adam rubbed the back of his glove against his sweaty forehead, leaving a broad, brown streak of dust across his brow.

  "You neglected to tell me Mrs. Hastings gave us some pepper plants," Adam said. "Pippa woke me up at five-thirty, insisting we needed to plant them right away."

  Five-thirty? Oy! Didn't the poor bloke ever get a break?

  "She, uh … yeah," I said. "She asked us to thin them out of a place that didn't get enough sun. It's rather late to be transplanted, but Linda figured moving them wouldn't do any more harm than letting them grow up in the shade. I'd intended to plant them next to the patio."

  "They won't do much there," Adam said. "Peppers love the heat."

  Pippa tugged at my arm.

  "Help me plant them, Rosie! Please? Daddy said he'd dig it up, but -I- have to take care of them on my own."

  I got down on my hands and knees, thankful I'd foregone my white shorts in favor of denim ones. Adam dug another row, and then got down along with us, tucking the soil around the root balls as I upended each pepper plant out of the paint buckets.

  "Mrs. Hastings wants these back when we're done." I pointed at the buckets.

  Adam laughed.

  "She'll no doubt send them back filled with something else. I never met a woman with such a green thumb!"

  His hand brushed mine as we moved to plant the last pepper plant together. Adam hesitated, his fingers entangled around my own as the scent of sweat and dirt and a luxurious musky maleness wafted my way, and then he pulled away.

  "I'd best go shower up." Adam rose to his feet. "It's not even ten o'clock, and already I'm sweltering like a pig." He wore that skittish, anxious look I'd noticed whenever we got too close, as though he feared at any moment I might smack a riding crop across his haunches.

  I'd noticed Pippa had a peculiar obsession about cleanliness, even though her natural inclination seemed to be to barge daringly into any situation. It appeared her father shared the same curious dichotomy. How could one be a geologist and not get dirty?

  "Don't shower on my account." I tugged my now-wet tank top away from my skin. "I was about to go into the barn and rummage through my things. It's hot as hades in there. I opened a window in the tack room, but all it seems to do is let hot air in."

  For some reason, Adam visibly relaxed.

>   "The barn is cooled by natural convection," Adam said. "You have to open it up in the right places to let it breathe." He squinted at the burning sun. "I closed it up after we sold off my mother's cattle because it was still the rainy season, but I suppose this time of year it wouldn't hurt to open up a vent."

  He gathered up the shovels, while Pippa and I gathered the buckets. We trailed him into the barn where he took a wire brush, scrubbed down the tools, and then set them neatly onto nails banged into a section that had been cordoned off so the animals wouldn't become injured by the tools. He then walked over to the enormous vertical wooden support column right next to me and grabbed a long rope which wrapped around a pulley.

  "This is a monitor barn," Adam said. "A lot of people don't like the way these barns look with the bell-tower roof running down the length of the ridge, but when it gets hot out, you don't want any other kind of outbuilding."

  His muscle's strained as he pulled the rope. Far above us, the building gave a low groan. Almost immediately, air flooded past us from the open barn door.

  "That opens the windows in the roof?"

  "Ah-yup," Adam grinned. "One of them, anyway." He pointed to the other vertical support posts, each which had its' own rope and pulley. "Heat rises, so if you open the window, and then open a vent in the ceiling, air flows through here just like a chimney."

  It crossed my mind what a beautiful man he was. Broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, with a bare, suntanned chest which glistened with a luxurious sheen of sweat. A smudge of soil still clung to his nipple and it took every ounce of discipline I had not to reach out and brush the errant clump away.

  My hand flew to my own clavicle. Whew! The temperature in here had suddenly risen.

  "How hot does it get in the middle of the day?"

  "When the vents are open it's the second-coolest place in the station," Adam said. "Especially in the hayloft since all the air flows through it." He pointed up at the loft which, unlike other styles of barns, was suspended directly over the center aisle. "It keeps the barn cool and the hay mold-free."