Chapter 9

Now that someone suggested it, food sounded like a great idea. There"d been that lemonade and a promise of cheesecake several hours earlier, but with Eric going to the hospital and the need to assess and plan for rebuilding the gazebo, Tiffany had completely forgotten about it.

Furthermore, having dinner with this slightly odd, extremely sweet, unbelievably handsome Australian guy was the best idea Tiffany had heard in weeks. Months. Possibly years. "Yeah, that sounds terrific." She tilted her head to get them into motion, then smiled up at Ollie. "Although you might want me to shower first, though. I"ve been out sweating in the sunshine all afternoon."

He took an unexpectedly deep breath, and while Tiffany was panicking about whether she smelled like sour socks, offered a reassuring grin. "Nothing but summer sunshine and grass," he promised her. "Although if you"re looking for somebody to wa—" He actually clapped a hand over his mouth, eyes wide above it.

Tiffany"s own eyes rounded both in surprise and a certain amount of admiration. "You don"t miss a chance, do you?"

"Chance"ll be a fine thing," Ollie whispered between his fingers, eyes still wide.

Tiffany laughed. "What?"

"It"s, ah." Ollie dropped his hand but still looked faintly mortified. "It"s a thing we say down under." He said it the way Tiffany had always heard in movies, daan undah, and a silly little thrill went through her.

Ollie, who probably didn"t even notice he had an amazing accent, went right ahead with his explanation. "It"s what you say when you want something to happen but don"t think it will."

Tiffany tried to fight off a grin. Apparently Mr. Mild-Mannered Aikido Words Aussie Man thought washing her back in the shower was a hope outside of the realm of possibility. She wasn"t nearly so sure of that. This could turn out to be a great wedding weekend, even if she wasn"t even going to the wedding.

She heard herself say, "Dinner first," out loud, and fought off a blush as something more than hope bloomed in Ollie"s face. It was practically awe, Tiffany thought. She could get used to a guy looking like that when he thought about her.

"Dinner first," he agreed. "I"d offer to take you somewhere nicer than the hotel, but I know nothing about Virtue and their town website is completely useless."

Tiffany laughed. "I know! When the application for bids went out I looked it up, but the website looks like it was actually made last century. It"s like they don"t want people to come here."

"I don"t kno—" Ollie cut himself off so hard Tiffany looked up at him in surprise.

"You don"t know what? Why they wouldn"t want people to come here? Me either. It seems like a nice little town. Vibrant, you know? There"s all those local businesses in the shop fronts around the square, and I know there"s a couple restaurants and a movie theatre."

"Big library, too," Ollie volunteered. "The librarian seems to be the social mover and shaker in town. She was the one in the retro outfit helping with the decorations."

"Oh, she was fab. Cool sense of style. And there"s enough people—enough students—for a K-6 school down there on the same property as the high school." Tiffany waved a hand toward the street they"d passed, as if Ollie would miraculously understand that was where the schools were. Of course, it was named "School Street," so if he"d noticed that….

But they"d passed it now anyway, and were heading toward a street she was surprised wasn"t called Boarding Street, because she was fairly certain the hotel, just a few blocks off the town square, had been a boarding house once upon a time. Possibly it had also been the two or three houses nearest the boarding house, because it stretched a significant part of the block. Someone in the recent past had brought them all together into a small, modern, boutique hotel that was currently absolutely bustling with business.

Even after sunset, people were in and out, sitting on outdoors benches and tables beneath thick-trunked trees that offered the both the street and the hotel"s low tidy lawn plenty of shade in daylight hours. Wildflowers grew in bunches around the roots of the trees, with little curved fences protecting them from careless feet. Even the building"s exterior paint job was bright and new, making the hotel look inviting. "Yeah, it"s not too bad, is it?" Tiffany asked. "Virtue, I mean. It"s a nice town. So your cousin lives here?"

By unspoken agreement, they took one of the outdoors tables—Tiffany was still aware she hadn"t showered—and smiled as a young man in a waiter"s uniform hurried by with menus for them. "I"ll bring you water in just a minute," he promised. "Anything else to drink now, or would you like to look at the menu first?"

"Lemonade," Ollie said suspiciously.

"Gotcha. And you?"

"I"ll also have lemonade," Tiffany said with a grin, and when the waiter had gone, added, "although maybe I should just assume I"ll get to drink yours. It"s not going to be fizzy, my man."

Ollie put a hand over his heart. "Don"t take this from me. I believe."

"It"s your funeral." Tiffany made a face. "That sounds way too dramatic. It"s your eternal disappointment?"

"That," Ollie informed her, "didn"t sound any less dramatic."

"No, I guess not." She glanced over the menu, as if she was going to eat something less than a bacon cheeseburger as big as her face. Having determined that was an option, she put the menu down, and when Ollie ordered a Caesar salad, ended up laughing. "I"m sorry, I thought that stereotypically, women ordered the salad on a first date, and guys ordered the huge, meat-heavy meal."

"In this case, I"ve been sitting around chatting with people all afternoon while you"ve been doing heavy lifting, so I think in terms of calories burned, it"s about right. It"s also that I"m vegetarian-adjacent. And also, technically, I think this is our second date."

"Oh!" Tiffany looked after the waiter like she"d call him back. "Sorry, do you mind me having a burger? I can order something else if it grosses you out."

"No, no, I just have an inner koala that lives on gum tree leaves—eucalyptus leaves—alone, so I try to make it happy by feeding it different kinds of leaves whenever I can."

"Oh, right, of course. That sounds cute, an inner koala. I think I probably have an inner…" Tiffany pulled a thoughtful face. "God. I"m afraid it"s like an inner corgi. Short but unexpectedly tough, even though everybody just thinks it"s adorable. Except the thing about corgis is they"re actually medium-sized dogs, just with really short legs, and I"m actually small."

Ollie took a deep breath. "If I may be permitted a comment about the visible bits of your body, Boss?"

Laughter bubbled through Tiffany again. She loved the way this man talked to her. "Proceed with caution."

"You"ve got incredible biceps," Ollie said without hesitation. "And if the way those jeans fit is any indication, your thighs are just as powerful. So I would like to cautiously suggest that "medium sized in deceptively short package" might actually be a perfect descriptor for you. Not that I think you"re a dog," he added with a degree of alarm.

"Well, no, I assumed not, but if we"re discussing our inner animals…" Tiffany smiled as a peculiar expression crossed Ollie"s face. "You know what, though? I"ll take it. There are worse things to have than an inner corgi. So how come a koala? Is it just an Australian thing?"

The funny little expression ran over Ollie"s face again. "Um, no, I"m afraid I was born with it. No choice in the matter."

Tiffany ducked her head, grinning again. "Maybe we"re all just born with an inner animal and that"s what we"re stuck with. At least you"re not like one of those horrible terrifying jellyfish you have down under, right? Or one of the spiders. Or?—"

"An emu," Oliver interrupted solemnly.

"An…emu? Aren"t they…birds?" Tiffany had a vague, ostrich-like idea associated with the word "emu."

"Big ones. Kind of like ostriches. The Australian military lost a war against them in the 1930s." Ollie"s delivery was perfectly serious, but his eyes sparkled so much that Tiffany looked at him dubiously. He ended up laughing. "Really. They were running and destroying the crops. Local farmers asked for military assistance in culling them, and it just didn"t go as planned. It turned out if you shot at them, they all ran different directions and that hunting them got a lot harder. It didn"t play well politically and it ended up being called the Emu War."

"That sounds way more bad-ass than being a corgi!" Their food arrived and Tiffany discovered she was absolutely starving. Half a burger down, she mumbled, "Food good. Thanks for suggesting I should eat. I get distracted sometimes. Especially in an emergency. So it"s your cousin getting married? I swear we"ll have the gazebo back up and running for him."

"It"ll be a good yarn, at least. And yeah, it"ll be a real rellie bash."

Tiffany paused halfway through chewing a bite and stared at him. Ollie stared back, then laughed. ""Rellie bash." Rellie is family, bash is?—"

"Party," Tiffany managed as she swallowed her bite. "That part I know, but you put that all together and it"s like you"re speaking a foreign language."

He grinned at her. "Right, so translated into American, we"re all getting together. Which we don"t very often, because—" Ollie made a globe shape. "You know, America, Australia. Long way. But Steve"s the first cousin to get married, so we"re all making a fuss."

"Mmm." Tiffany shook her head as she drained her lemonade. "You should have arranged it better. Everybody should have gotten married one after another, so you could all go to each other"s weddings."

"Nah, yeah, that woulda been good. Would you like to get married?"

Tiffany"s heart lurched so hard choked on the last bit of ice in her lemonade. She put it down, eyes watering. "Excuse me?"

"Just checking," Ollie said with a sincerely apologetic expression. "You good?"

"Fine, fine, I"m…" Tiffany wheezed a couple more times, but not really because of the lemonade. It was the extraordinary impulse to have said okay! to that ridiculous question. "Do you often propose on first dates?"

"Second date," Ollie reminded her, and grinned. "And no, I"ve never done it before. I"ll let you know how it turns out."

Tiffany wheezed again. "You do that, yeah. Good grief. Right, I"m finishing my dinner now." She turned her attention to the burger, and tried to calm the wild fluttering of her heart. "You were, uh, you were telling me about the cousins?"

"Four of them. All as big as bears. Steve"s almost the runt of the litter."

"Steve? Steve that I met today? Steve who could be mistaken for a wall if he held still for a minute? That Steve?"

"That Steve," Ollie agreed. "There"s Bill, he"s the oldest, and Jon and Laurie. And me, of course. The odd man out."

"You don"t seem so odd to me," Tiffany said with a loyalty born from the same impulse that had nearly convinced her to agree to an impromptu marriage. "I"m the only child of only children, so it"s just me out here in the wind all alone."

"How"d you get into construction work?" Ollie sounded like he was really curious, not just being polite.

"I always liked moving dirt around." Tiffany laughed at herself, but it was true. "I was a Tonka kid. Do you have Tonka in Australia?"

"Everywhere has Tonka," Ollie said with a nod.

"Right, so imagine me, six years old and about eighteen inches tall?—"

Ollie laughed out loud, leaving Tiffany grinning at him. "Okay, I wasn"t that small, but I was pretty little. Even for a little kid. There was construction going on in the street and I was out in the yard copying everything the big machinery was doing. One of the scoop drivers got my Mom to let me drive my toy dump truck out to them, and he filled its bed with a big pile of dirt from the site. Imagine—for real—this huge scoop—" She spread her arms, encompassing a full-sized scoop"s dimensions, then shrank her hands down to indicate the size of her toy truck, "s—filling a truck this size, and me, like genuinely just this big?—"

Another gesture indicated she"d been maybe three and a half feet tall. She could still remember her awe, watching the delicacy the driver had worked with. "I fell in love with it completely right then. The next day the dozer driver let me and Mom get up into the cab so I could drive it for a minute. They"d totally have lost their job for doing that, these days. Honestly, they probably would have then, too, if anybody in charge had noticed. But it thrilled tiny Tiffany right down to her tiny toes. It was all I ever wanted to do since. By high school I was working part time for a local company, and I got a business degree and did an apprenticeship and boy I"m just talking a lot, aren"t I?"

"Keep talking." Ollie"s eyes were shining. He"d finished his salad and had put his arms on the table, leaning toward her a little as she spoke, like he didn"t want to miss a single word. "Really. Please, keep going. It"s fascinating. My idea of adventure as a kid was doing academic decathlon."

"Really? I literally only got a degree because it made it easier to start my own business. I"d have been happy never going to school again."

"And here I am, a bonafide nerd. Honestly, though, I"m serious, the idea of driving one of those things terrifies me. I"m genuinely in awe."

"Well, the idea of having to make all the numbers line up for a jillion different businesses terrifies me, so I guess we"re even. Look," Tiffany said with a regretful glance toward the time, "I"m going to have to be up with the sunrise to get that gazebo put back together tomorrow, so I really should probably pay up and head to bed. But I"ve had a strangely great day, so thank you for that."

Ollie laughed. "Strangely great, huh? I"ll take it. Tell you what, text me your team"s coffee needs and I"ll deliver at tea time."

Tiffany"s eyebrows rose. "I don"t have your number."

He beamed. "I"m so glad you asked. I didn"t want to be weird and just offer it."

She stared a moment, then threw her head back and laughed out loud. It took two more real bursts of laughter before she finally managed to contain herself enough to say, "Oh, that was smooth. Oh my God. Yeah, okay, give me your number. Wow. Wow."

He actually had to get a piece of paper out of his wallet to give her the number, mumbling an apologetic, "It"s a temporary American phone, I don"t actually know the number," while she kept chortling and put it in her phone. They had a brief disagreement over who would pay for dinner until he reminded her that during the afternoon lemonade incident, she"d agreed to him paying next time, and Tiffany, still laughing, went to bed a lot happier than she"d have expected at the start of the day.