Darkening Skies by Bronwyn Parry Page A

remembered how much he hates me. I do remember it. The day after Paula died, he made sure I understood that it should’ve been me, with his words and fists.’
    The day after Paula died …
Everything kept coming back to that one event. For a moment he didn’t dare look at her, didn’t dare touch her, his gaze focusing only on the disinfectant wipe as he carefully laid it on the plastic sheet.
    ‘He assaulted you then?’ he asked quietly, anger building in his gut again.
    She nodded. ‘He was drunk, angry and looking for a scapegoat. I wascrying in my bedroom and didn’t run fast enough. Fortunately, Jim came along and stopped him.’
    Mark pressed the first steri-strip across the cut on her arm. The reality of her bruised and bleeding now, as an adult, was bad enough, but imagining the teenage Jenn in the same state, vulnerable, grieving and alone, disturbed him deeply. That he’d known nothing about it, had failed to help her when she’d needed a friend, sat uneasily in his soul. ‘Did you report him then?’
    ‘No. Maybe I should have, but what would’ve been the point? He was grieving for his daughter. I doubt they’d have even laid charges.’
    Given what he knew now about the man who’d been the Dungirri police sergeant at the time, the man who’d helped frame Gil, she was probably right. ‘Is that why you left Dungirri?’
    She paused imperceptibly, but in that moment he both wanted her answer and dreaded it.
    ‘After Paula’s funeral, there was no reason to stay.’
    No reason.
He focused on the task at hand. Of course their friendship had not been enough reason.
He
had not been enough reason. They’d just been kids with different goals and no defined relationship to bind them.
    No reason for his distracting physical awareness of her proximity now, either. No reason other than nostalgia, memories, fondness and pheromones.
    They both fell silent as he put the last steri-strip on the wound and covered it with a dressing. He flushed the small cut nearher elbow with saline, her skin smooth and warm from the sun, and the small fragment of glass washed out, a brief sparkle amid a trickle of diluted blood.
    She slid off the tailgate while he packed up the first-aid gear, but the tension from being so close to her didn’t dissipate with the increased distance.
    He couldn’t allow himself to spend time thinking about why. If it turned out that he bore responsibility for Paula’s death, it would obliterate any remnants of their friendship, destroying his past as well as his future.

    Jenn hunkered by the fence of the dog run, their warm tongues licking her fingers through the wire. The dogs’ enthusiastic attention seemed surreal in the circumstances, but she stayed there, wishing the playful contact could restore some badly needed equilibrium.
    She couldn’t think straight, her ability to objectively assess a situation totally derailed by the onslaught of unfamiliar and conflicting emotions. The reality of Mick’s physical attack had hit her as she sat on Mark’s ute, her reaction so disorienting that she’d almost succumbed to the temptation to turn into Mark’s arms and weep. Except that he was the cause of at least half the confusion in her head.
    Mark, who’d dragged her bastard uncle away from her, the rage and power of that moment kept in check, directed by reason, all his interactions with her afterwards unfailingly calm as he responded to her needs.
    A man who … damn it, that was the crux of it. A man, not a boy. Standing closeto her, tending to her arm with a gentle, considerate touch, his masculinity had inundated her, throwing her even further off balance than her uncle’s attack had.
    Maybe she’d been half in love with Mark as a teenager. More than half. He’d been a rock, understanding her, challenging her, supporting her in her efforts to shape her own life. Caring for her. But she wasn’t a lonely, lost teenager anymore. She’d carved her own life, worked hard for her