Only We Know by Victoria Purman Read Free Book Online

serious than a queue at a just-opened fast-food outlet in the city, he felt the tension in his shoulders ease and he flicked his car stereo over to his iPod.
    He drove out of Penneshaw, past the golf course and up the hill. The rain had slowed to a drizzle and there was even a patch of blue sky above him. As he drove, he glanced to the right and out over the ocean. The houses along that stretch had million-dollar views, all right, and were coveted by people from the mainland for their holiday homes. They were also popular with tourists who came to the island for its unspoilt beauty and its solitude. Sam didn’t need a view and the island to be alone. He’d managed that well enough at home in Adelaide for years.
    He was used to seeing the ocean everywhere he looked, the vast, empty green spaces, the stone cottages dotted on farmlands looking lonely in the distance. He wondered what Calla would think of it, how it would appear to a stranger to the island.
    As he looked out to the blue ocean, he saw her eyes.
    Calla.
    So the redhead had a name.
    He’d met redheads before but he’d never met a Calla and wondered if that was why the two syllables of her name were going round and round in his head, sitting right there on the tip of his tongue. He’d met plenty of Emilys and Gemmas and Sophies and, yes, one Christina. One had been more than enough.
    He wasn’t sure why he’d ambled over when he saw her in the café. After he’d woken up in his car, he’d taken a long walk to ease up his back and clear his head. And then he’d needed to eat. He told himself it was all about checking to see if she was feeling better. Maybe it was his medical training. It was hard to switch off when you were a first responder.
    Or maybe it was because he’d just discovered he liked redheads.
    She looked brighter and more alert. Definitely better than the sickly looking, pale-faced tourist he’d assumed her to be. Maybe the texts she was getting were the reason. Her face had lit up when she’d seen the name on her phone.
    He cranked up the music in the car and looked down the white line. Get her out of your head, Crash. He couldn’t get distracted. He had an old man’s heart to break.
    Calla sat in the café and waited for the rain to clear. She exchanged a few more messages with Rose, then drove out of the main street of Penneshaw in the muted light. The clouds had drifted past the sun but it was still cold, and she glanced up to the sky through her front window, wondering when it would rain again. She’d checked the local weather forecast on her phone and it had indicated cloudy with rain for Kangaroo Island. Helpful.
    When she’d paid her bill at the café, the waitress had told her there was a tourist office a little way out of Penneshaw that she might want to check out. At the very least, she’d told Calla, she’d be able to pick up a decent map. Given her sense of direction, relying on Google maps was probably not the best idea: she needed to go paper, old-school. Something she could fold and unfold and draw on, tracing a line of where she’d been and where she was going.
    As she ambled along in her little red car, the buildings of the small town quickly gave way to fields and distant gum trees, small hills emerging in the distance. There were some pretty fancy holiday homes on the main road, all new and shiny, and a marina to her right where a couple of huge cruisers sat still in the water. If she had been on the island as a tourist, she might have stopped and taken a couple of photos so she could show Rose more incredible views of the mainland to the northeast. But, as beautiful as the views were, she wasn’t there to see them.
    Calla cranked up the music until it filled her car with thumping rock. She sped up as she crested a hill and looked to her right to take in the stunning view.
    It was only a millisecond. That’s all it took.
    When she turned her