Secret Confessions: Down & Dusty — Skye by Rhyll Biest Page A

didn’t actually know why any grown man would seriously want to be friends with a boring, near-sighted nerd like her who read the Australian Veterinary Journal every month from cover to cover and got excited about things like marker vaccines that allowed the differentiation of infected from vaccinated animals.
    And she knew people in a town the size of Milpinyani Springs had to be talking about them given all the time they spent together whenever she came home on vacation, and the way it must look that neither of them was dating anyone else.
    Everyone had to be talking.
    Everyone except her and Bret.
    Last holidays when she’d bumped into him in the kitchen while they were making brownies, and her boob had grazed his arm, he’d actually winced. Like she’d been wearing a barbed-wire bra—electrified wire by the way he’d flinched.
    Though he seemed to like boobs in general—so it had to be just hers that were not welcome.
    But neither of them could talk about it, not her, not even to apologise for attacking him with her boobs, and not him to explain how unwelcome her boobs were.
    So that left them … nowhere.
    She rolled her eyes at herself. Shut up, brain, and stop being so dramatic. Just knock on the door already.
    Her rap on the wood sent a flake of peeling paint drifting to land on the rubber foot mat between her greying runners. Jeez, time for a little home renovation, Bret.
    A dog barked from behind the house. Molly. The kelpie had been seven last Skye had seen her, so she was getting on now at twelve. Perhaps Bret was out the back feeding her.
    She retraced her steps and circled the house, waved to the figure standing in the flatbed of a utility truck a few hundred metres away. Molly barked again from where she lay supervising in the shade of a tree. Skye needed to be more like Molly and stop with the neediness. Only pretty girls got to be needy, not smart-but-plain girls. Cosseted lapdogs slept indoors and did little more than look cute, whereas working dogs ran all day and slept outdoors. Skye knew which she was. Low maintenance.
    Keep that in mind.
    Holding a hand up to shield her eyes against the sun, she squinted at Bret’s distant form. At school he’d been her knight, her champion, turning on any bullies with feet and fists to defend the quiet, skinny girl with crooked teeth and a book forever glued to her hand. And it had seemed like that at some point or other, everyone at school had teased her.
    Except for Bret. Not him.
    Molly’s barking and grizzling intensified as did her dance—a jumping, twisting, leaping jig that rattled her chain—as Skye neared the spot where Bret was unloading hay—sans shirt—from the utility truck to store in the nearby shed.
    She ran her hands over Molly’s coat in greeting, but not before she’d registered the way Bret’s muscle-corded arms and powerful mile-wide shoulders gleamed with a healthy sweat she had no trouble imagining licking off him.
    Her body did its own little jig at the sight of him, and a tight, weird, squirmy heat flashed through her—like she’d swallowed an electric eel.
    She didn’t even know where those sorts of thoughts came from, the thoughts about licking sweat, they were so not her, so had to be his fault. He made her think those thoughts by looking the way he did, in particular by sporting an etched wishbone of muscle that rode his hips and formed a deep V that disappeared down the waist of his worn jeans.
    The nerve of it. No man should have a wishbone thing like that, practically an invitation written in muscle for a girl to pull and make a wish.
    No prizes for guessing what the wish would be—for his jeans to fall off, of course. So that, whoops, just like that he’d be naked.
    A girl could dream, couldn’t she?
    Skye’s wicked eyes made a feast of him as he wrestled another bale of hay into submission and threw it to the ground. She stared at the bale, transfixed, as a very unseemly thought popped unbidden to mind—of how