The Loner's Guarded Heart. Michelle Douglas

what kind of people would live out here all on their own. Hopefully the kind of people who took a solitary soul under their wing, introduced them around and enthusiastically outlined all the local activities available. Hopefully they’d love a chat over a cup of tea and a biscuit.

      Josie would provide the biscuits.

      Impatience shifted through her. She rolled her shoulders, stamped her feet and gulped in a breath of late-afternoon air. She didn’t recognise the dry, dusty scents she pulled into her lungs, so different from the humid, salt-laden air of Buchanan’s Point on the coast, her home. Her stomach clenched up again at the unfamiliarity.

      She didn’t belong here.

      ‘Nonsense.’ She tried to laugh away the fanciful notion, but a great yearning for home welled inside her. The greyness settled more securely around her. She hastened down the three steps and back along the gravel path, hoping movement would give her thoughts new direction. She swung one way then another. She could check around the back, she supposed. Her landlord could be working in a…shed or vegetable plot or something.

      In her hunger to clap eyes on a friendly face, Josie rushed around the side of the house to open the gate. Her fingers fumbled with the latch. Need ballooned inside her, a need for companionship, a need to connect with someone. The gate finally swung back to reveal a neat garden. Again, no flower beds or pots broke the austerity, but the lawn here too was clipped and short, the edges so precise they looked as if they’d been trimmed using a set square.

      The fence was painted white to match the house and the obligatory rotary clothes-line sat smack-bang in the middle of it all. An old-fashioned steel one like the one Josie had at home. Its prosaic familiarity reassured her. She stared at the faded jeans, blue chambray shirt and navy boxer shorts hanging from it and decided her landlord must be male.

      Why hadn’t she found out his name from Marty or Frank? Although everything had moved so fast. They’d popped this surprise on her last night and had insisted on seeing her off at the crack of dawn this morning. Mrs Pengilly’s bad turn, though, had put paid to an early start. Josie bit her lip. Maybe she should’ve stayed and—

      A low, vicious growl halted her in her tracks. Icy fingers shot down her back and across her scalp.

      Please God, no.

      There hadn’t been a ‘Beware of the Dog’ sign on the gate. She’d have seen it. She paid attention to those things. Close attention.

      The growl came again, followed by the owner of the growl, and Josie’s heart slugged so hard against her ribs she thought it might dash itself to pieces before the dog got anywhere near her. Her knees started to shake.

      ‘Nice doggy,’ she tried, but her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, slurring her words and making them unintelligible.

      The dog growled in answer. Nuh-uh, it wasn’t a nice doggy and, although it wasn’t as large as a Rottweiler or a Dobermann, it was heavy-set and its teeth, when bared, looked as vicious as if it were. She could imagine how easily those teeth would tear flesh.

      She took a step back. The dog took a step forward.

      She stopped. It stopped.

      Her heart pounded so hard it hurt. She wanted to buckle over but she refused to drop her eyes from the dog’s glare. It lowered its head and showed its teeth again. All the hackles on its back lifted.

      Ooh. Not a good sign. Everything inside Josie strained towards the gate and freedom, but she knew she wouldn’t make it. The dog would be on her before she was halfway there. And those teeth…

      Swallowing, she took another step back. The dog stayed put.

      Another step. The dog didn’t move. Its hackles didn’t lower.

      With a half-sob, Josie flung herself sideways and somehow managed to half climb, half pull her way up until she was sitting on top of the rotary clothes-line.

      ‘Help!’ she hollered at the top of her voice.

      Something tickled her face. She lifted a hand to brush it away. Spider web! She tried to claw it off but it stuck with clammy tentacles to her face and neck. It was the last straw. Josie burst into tears.

      The dog took up position directly beneath her. Lifting its head, it howled. It made Josie cry harder.

      ‘What the devil—?’

      A person. ‘Thank you, God.’ Finally, a friendly face. She swung towards the voice, almost falling off the clothes-line in relief.

      She stared.

      Her heart all but stopped.

      Then it dropped clean out of her chest to lie gasping and flailing on the ground like a dying fish. This was her friendly face?

      No!

      Fresh sobs shook her. The dog started up its mournful howl again.

      ‘For the love of…’

      The man glared at her, shifted his feet, hands on hips. Nice lean hips she couldn’t help noticing.

      ‘Why in the dickens are you crying?’

      She’d give up the sight of those lean hips and taut male thighs for a single smile.

      He didn’t smile. She stared at the hard, rocky crags of his face and doubted this man could do friendly. He didn’t have a single friendly feature on his face. Not one. Not even a tiny little one. The flint of his eyes didn’t hold a speck of softness or warmth. She bet dickens wasn’t the term he wanted to use either.

      Heaven help her. This wasn’t the kind of man who’d take her under his wing. A hysterical bubble rose in her throat. ‘You’re my landlord?’

      His eyes narrowed. ‘Are you Josephine Peterson?’

      She nodded.

      ‘Yes.’ He scowled. ‘I’m Kent Black.’

      He didn’t offer his hand, which she had to admit might be difficult considering she was stuck up his clothes-line.

      ‘I asked why you were crying.’

      Coming from another person the question would’ve been sympathetic, but not from Kent Black. Anyway, she’d have thought a more pressing question was ‘What the dickens are you doing in my clothes-line?’

      ‘Well?’ He shifted again on those long, lean legs.

      An hysterical bubble burst right out of her mouth. ‘Why am I crying?’ She bet he thought she was a madwoman.

      ‘Yes.’ His lips cracked open to issue the one curt word then closed over again.

      ‘Why am I crying?’ Her voice rose an octave. ‘I’ll tell you why I’m crying. I’m crying because, well look at this place.’ She lifted her hands. ‘It’s the end of the earth,’ She fixed him with a glare. It was the only thing that stopped her from crying again. ‘How could Marty and Frank think I’d want to come here, huh?’

      ‘Look, Ms Peterson, I think you ought to calm—’

      ‘Oh, no, you don’t. You asked the question and demanded an answer so you can darn well listen to it.’ She pointed her finger at him as if he was personally responsible for everything that had gone wrong today.

      ‘Not only am I stuck here at the end of the earth but…but I’m stuck in a clothes-line at the end of the earth. And to rub salt into the wound, I got lost trying to find this rotten place and ended up in Timbuktu, where I got a flat tyre. Then your dog chased me up this rotten clothes-line and there’s spider web everywhere!’

      Her voice rose with each word in a way that appalled her, but she couldn’t rein it back the way she normally did. ‘And Mrs Pengilly took a bad turn this morning and I had to call an ambulance and…and I buried my father a fortnight ago and…’

      Her anger ran out. Just like that. She closed her eyes and dropped her head. ‘And I miss him,’ she finished