Driving Her Crazy. Amy Andrews
Journalist Sadie Bliss is on a mission to prove herself as a world-class reporter.
But three things stand in her way…
1. Dangerously mouthwatering photographer Kent Nelson—he’s far too brooding and arrogant.
2. A road trip across the Outback with the above distraction—did she mention she doesn’t do sleeping under the stars?
3. An insatiable longing to throw her rule book out of the car window… Because what happens in the Outback stays in the Outback. Right?
DRIVING HER CRAZY
“How are you feeling?” Kent asked as he pulled into a gas station. “Tired?”
Sadie shook her head. Strangely she wasn’t. Driving through the eerily flat landscape on a cloudless, practically moonless night had been weirdly energizing. Like she was in a spaceship, floating through the cosmos.
“You want to see if we can make the Northern territory border? It’s another couple of hours but it’ll cut the trip down tomorrow. We can pull off to the side of the road and catch a few hours’ kip before moving on?”
She pursed her lips. “Camping, huh?”
Kent shot her a derisive look. “I’d hardly call it that. But it’s something you should try at least once in your life.”
Sadie looked at him. At his mouth.
Her, him and a billion stars.
And his mouth.
“Okay.”
Driving Her Crazy
Amy Andrews
ABOUT AMY ANDREWS
Amy Andrews has always loved writing, and still can’t quite believe that she gets to do it for a living. Creating wonderful heroines and gorgeous heroes and telling their stories is an amazing way to pass the day. Sometimes they don’t always act as she’d like them to—but then neither do her kids, so she’s kind of used to it. Amy lives in the very beautiful Samford Valley, with her husband and aforementioned children, along with six brown chickens and two black dogs.
She loves to hear from her readers. Drop her a line at www.amyandrews.com.au.
This and other titles by Amy Andrews are available in ebook format—check out www.millsandboon.co.uk.
This book is for all women out there
who have ever looked in the mirror
and headed straight for the chocolate/wine/Tim Tams. And for men with rose-colored glasses.
Contents
PROLOGUE
Sadie Bliss’s breath caught at the emotive image. Wandering through the ritzy New York gallery surrounded by a crowd of A-listers who blinged and glittered so much it hurt her eyes, she was stopped in her tracks by its starkness.
The background murmur of voices and clinking of champagne glasses faded as the world shrank to just the photograph, the centrepiece of the exhibit.
Mortality.
She’d seen it already, of course, in Time magazine, but there was something so much more immediate about it this close. As if it had just been snapped. As if the tragedy were unfolding before her eyes.
She felt as if she were standing in the daunting arid landscape, weighed down by the heat perfectly captured as it shimmered like a mirage from the sand. Smelling the jet fuel from the twisted Black Hawk carcass that she’d seen in the other shots. Hearing the cries of the young soldier as he clutched one bloody hand to his abdomen and reached the other rosary-beaded one into the impossibly blue sky. Calling for someone. God maybe? Or his girlfriend?
Watching his tears turning the grime on his face to muddy tracks. Tasting his despair as life faded from his eyes.
The caption beneath said: Corporal Dwayne Johnson, nineteen, died from fatal wounds before help could arrive.
Goosebumps needling her skin, tears pricking at her eyes brought Sadie back to the here and now. She moved on wishing she’d never been given the coveted ticket to the much anticipated opening night of Kent Nelson’s A Decade of Division. All the pieces snapped from the award-winning photojournalist’s lens were disturbing, but this image, known throughout the world, was particularly harrowing.
A portrait of a young man facing death.
A private moment of anguish.
And although the artist in her appreciated the abstract prettiness of the rosary beads against the bright blue dome of a foreign sky, the image was too intimate—she felt as if she was intruding.
Sadie pushed through the crowd out of the gallery into the sultry June night. She needed a moment. Or two.
ONE
Four months later...
Kent Nelson stood staring across at the view of Darling Harbour, his gaze following the line of the iconic white sails of the Sydney Opera House. He stood with his back to the woman swinging idly in her chair, his good leg planted firmly in front of the other as he leaned into the hand resting high against the floor to ceiling tinted window.
‘So, let me get this straight,’ Tabitha Fox said, tapping her pen on her desk, her bangles jangling, as she too admired the view. Not the one she was used to seeing when she looked towards her windows but a mighty fine one nonetheless. ‘You want to drive several thousand kilometres to take a few photos?’
Kent turned, his ankle twinging as he rested his butt against the glass, and folded his arms across his chest. ‘Yes.’
Tabitha frowned. She’d known Kent a long time, they’d been to uni together about a thousand years ago, even shared a bed for a while, but since the accident in Afghanistan he’d been practically invisible.
Until he’d turned up today wanting to take pictures any staff photographer could take.
‘Okay...why?’
Kent