Hold On to Me by Victoria Purman Page A

didn’t seem to have a towel. ‘Just around the corner from the shop, actually.’
    â€˜Yeah?’ he asked, surprised, propping his hands on his hips. She glanced down at his tanned fingers, noticed the way they were the same colour as those clearly defined muscles low on his sides.
    â€˜But I know Middle Point. I lived there when I was a kid, before I moved away to Sydney after high school.’
    â€˜Sydney, huh? Why’d you come back?’
    Stella looked out to the ocean. She’d been thinking about that a lot lately, with the fire and starting again and Ian and Lee moving away and starting their lives over too. Why had she come back? Why hadn’t she just started again somewhere on the east coast? She’d started to think it was because this part of the world was the last place she’d been truly happy, the place she’d finally found a home, and someone who loved her. But she wasn’t revealing that secret to anyone.
    â€˜Things happened.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe I really am a small-town girl after all.’
    Luca chuckled. He lifted a hand and pushed the dripping hair from his eyes. ‘Nothing wrong with that.’
    â€˜You’ll like Middle Point. The beach and the surf are incredible. You know Julia? Lizzie’s best friend? We worked together at the Middle Point general store when we were in high school.’
    â€˜Nice,’ he said, and he sounded distracted.
    When she noticed his gaze dip down to the curve of her breasts, she picked up her towel. All the relief she’d felt after that refreshing dip had gone. She felt as tight as a wire.
    â€˜I’m heading home. I’ll see you tomorrow at the shop.’
    â€˜â€™Night,’ he replied.
    Stella opened her front door and walked inside her little cottage. Once she’d showered and changed, she made herself some dinner and ate it with a glass of wine while some generic English crime drama on the television played in the background. Her great-aunt Karen had loved those shows, in which villages and country manors became hotbeds of crime and murder, and in an instant, Stella was spun right back into her history.
    Not for the first time, Stella thought about where she might have ended up if it hadn’t been for Auntie Karen. The choices were too terrible to even contemplate, but they were always about living in a stranger’s home. Always someone else’s. Never her own.
    That’s why her cottage was the most precious place in the world to her.
    At the age of ten, an anxious and frightened little girl had started over. In Middle Point, with Auntie Karen, Stella was able to leave her past behind and create a whole new life for herself: one in which her parents weren’t criminals and hopeless drug addicts; one in which she didn’t live in a dilapidated rental, a desert where lawn should have been, a front door of flapping flywire, and a backyard full of junk—another house her parents had trashed. Her childhood, although it had never felt like one to Stella, had been filled with chaos, love and neglect, in unequal measure, and she always remembered it in snatches.
    Every now and then, something would trigger a memory. The smell of toasted cheese sandwiches took her back to that kitchen, where there were dishes stacked high and filthy until she washed them, standing on a plastic chair to reach the sink. Driving past a neglected front yard prompted rolling recollections of bare mattresses and no curtains and cockroaches and filth and litter and pizza boxes and empty bottles and syringes. Her parents had inhabited a subterranean world of drugs and welfare and dysfunction and evictions and had dragged their only child into the mire, too.
    Sometimes, when her parents were clean and remained connected with social services, things improved. That meant there was milk in the fridge, loaves of bread on the bench and bananas in a bowl. She shivered at what the memories still did