Calla’s plan to simplify her life just got a whole lot more complicated…

Featured book this week is Only We Know by Victoria Purman

And there’s an excerpt too.

When Calla Maloney steps on the boat to Kangaroo Island, she’s filled with dread. Part of it is simple seasickness but the other part is pure trepidation. She’s not on a holiday but a mission: to track down her estranged brother, who she hasn’t seen since her family splintered two years before.

Firefighter Sam Hunter left the island twenty years ago and has made a habit out of staying as far away as he can get. But when his father’s illness forces him home, he finds himself playing bad cop to his dad and reluctant tour guide to a redhead with no sense of direction.

As Sam and Calla dig deeper into their long-buried family secrets, they discover that no one is an island and that opening up their hearts to love again might be the most dangerous thing they will ever do.

 

Excerpt from Only We Know by Victoria Purman

Calla Maloney just wanted it to stop.

Not the ferry, although that would be good too, but the swirling, simmering seasickness. Her gut was treacherously pitching and rolling in perfect rhythm with the swell of the ocean. There was a dull ache behind her eyes and the nausea was crashing through her like the waves pounding and spraying against the hull of the boat.

This trip had seemed like such a good idea two weeks earlier.

Calla wrangled her glasses off her nose, pushed her auburn curls off her forehead and squeezed her eyes closed. She tried to sit still, sucking in and releasing her breath slowly and rhythmically. Deep and complete breaths. The kind she’d learnt at yoga in her first and only lesson. She’d quite liked the breathing part, the way it had relaxed her and made her feel calm and serene. It was the twisting her body into impossible pretzel shapes that she’d hated. She waited a few moments, then tentatively pried one eye open to see if it would make her feel any better. The answer was a big nope. She sighed a swear word with the next exhale. She was wearing her pathetic sea legs so obviously that she might as well have been waving around a sign on a stick that said, About to hurl.

Calla planted her palms flat on the table in front of her, hoping the breathing and the attempt at relaxing would settle the sickness. One minute at a time, she told herself. She simply needed to make it through the next sixty seconds, then another sixty and then another. Ten more lots of sixty and the boat would be pulling into the dock at Penneshaw on Kangaroo Island. She’d been told that the sixteen-kilometre journey from South Australia’s south coast in a straight line across Backstairs Passage — and yes, she’d snorted at the name of the waterway — was only supposed to take forty-five minutes. It felt more as though she’d been on the ferry for three or so years.

Calla pressed a palm to her stomach. She could feel sweat beading on her forehead. Now her heartbeat had picked up and was thudding loud in her chest and in her ears. Wasn’t sitting upstairs supposed to help? She’d heard once that keeping your eyes on the horizon was a good way to ward off seasickness. But looking out the rain-splattered windows and seeing the sea rise and fall was only making things worse.

She chided herself for her cowardice but had to acknowledge the obvious: this wasn’t just seasickness. The truth was she’d felt uneasy since planting her first nervous step on the gangplank back on the mainland and, by the time the terminal and the rounded green hills of Cape Jervis had faded behind them, she was borderline hyperventilating and entirely wishing she were comatose.

No one else in the cabin of the ferry seemed bothered by the rollicking of the boat. An old couple sat a few metres away from her, across from each other at a fixed table. He was reading a detective novel, blood dripping from the steely knife on the cover. She was quietly feeding crackers to a perfectly behaved little white dog nestled on her lap, half hidden inside the folds of her jacket. Two tables up, a man was sitting alone at a table. Dark brown hair, cut short. He looked as relaxed as if he were reading his book in a city café, enjoying a strong coffee. Calla distractedly watched as he shifted, straightened his back, and lifted his arms high above his head, stretching as if he’d stiffened up sitting there for so long. When he glanced around the cabin, she turned her eyes back to the window.

She might have been able to relax a little more if this were a holiday, but there was nothing whatsoever recreational about the trip. She was on a mission, and one her little sister, for one, had thought ill fated from the start.

She tried to distract herself by wondering about the passengers and their stories, these strangers on the boat. Who were they? Why were they making the crossing to Kangaroo Island? Were the old couple locals? Or visitors travelling across the water with a caravan to see the island’s famed wildlife and rugged coasts?

When the boat suddenly pitched to one side like a seesaw, Calla gripped the edge of the table until her knuckles went white. She pinned her desperate gaze across the cabin to a window to try and find the horizon but all she could see were waves. Then grey sky. Then waves again.

She had to get out of there fast.

Only We Know is available in eBook and paperback from all good retailers.
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Read more about Victoria and her books on MEET VICTORIA PURMAN

 

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