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‘Were you?’ she ground out at last.
‘No. I merely happened to be stopped at that particular traffic light as you came out. Now, if you have decided to add good works to your music—’ he indicated the beautiful harp that stood in the corner of the den ‘—your flying lessons, your desire to speak Indonesian and your pottery, I’m all for it—but...’ He paused. ‘Something tells me it’s not so.’
Nicola took a deep breath. ‘I do play that harp, I do speak Indonesian, I love pottery and I enjoy flying—are you trying to belittle me for any specific reason?’ she asked with a quizzically raised eyebrow.
He shrugged, smiled slightly and ignored the question. ‘I’m not disputing that. In fact, I’ll go further and say that you’re highly intelligent as well as artistic, and your flying instructor reckons you’re a natural. It still doesn’t explain Lifeline.’
Nicola paced around the room and darkly contemplated the fact that it was impossible to hide most things from Brett—it always had been. Which made it rather surprising to think that she’d been able to hide the most important thing of all from him.
She paused beside the harp and ran her fingers gently across the strings in a glissando, to make a golden bell of sound, then stilled it with her palm and turned to look at him.
He was still sitting on the corner of the desk, idly running his tie through his fingers—quite a colourful tie, with red, navy and jade diamonds on it etched in a bone colour that matched his shirt.
But even sitting he was obviously a tall man, who happened to be twelve years her senior with a mind that was razor-sharp. He also had aquiline features, an impressive build and, although he wasn’t precisely handsome, once you got to know him you couldn’t help but be aware that he had a rare charm when he chose.
And when he didn’t choose there was the aura of a powerful intellect combined with a strong physique that gave notice of a man who got his own way frequently.
All in all an irresistible combination, and not only to me, she thought gloomily. To most women—and, even although they’ve been divorced for four years, still to Marietta, she suspected...
‘Nicola?’
She focused her gaze on her husband and shrugged. ‘I went to see a marriage counsellor, that’s all.’
It gave her a fieeting sense of satisfaction to see that she had momentarily stunned him. Then he said a shade grimly, ‘A man?’
‘Yes, he was a man—that threw me at first as well, but—’
‘Nicola.’
‘But he’s also a minister, and he was very nice, Brett, you don’t have to worry on that score.’
‘And what did he advise you to do?’
‘Well, you’re really going to enjoy this,’ she said with simple satire. ‘He advised me to stay put.’
For a moment she wondered if her eyes were playing tricks on her, because she could have sworn she saw him relax slightly. Then he said, ‘Not what you wanted to hear, I’m sure.’
‘No,’ she agreed, and shrugged. ‘That doesn’t mean to say I’ll stick to the letter of his advice.’
‘Nicola, I—’
‘Don’t, Brett,’ she said with a sudden, weary little gesture. ‘I have no plans to go anywhere at the moment, but that doesn’t mean to say I’m reconciled to anything.’
He seemed about to say something, then apparently changed his mind and murmured with a humorous little glint, ‘So I can expect you to be here for your twenty-first birthday?’
‘Yes.’ She shrugged.
‘You don’t sound very enthusiastic.’
‘I’m not but I’ll probably come round.’ She studied him unenthusiastically, then a faintly malicious glimmer lit her blue eyes. ‘By the way, don’t imagine you’ve escaped The Wiggles.’
‘Why not? I mean to say,’ he amended hastily, ‘I never intended to. I did forget.’
‘And then breathed a sigh of relief, no doubt But we didn’t watch them.’
Brett Harcourt looked at his wife narrowly. ‘How come?’
‘Well, knowing how much you love them, I persuaded your children to let me tape the programme so that we could all watch it together some time tomorrow. Which is a Saturday, in case you’ve forgotten, and one of the two days of the week you keep inviolate from work or whatever.’
‘You—did that to me?’
‘Yes, Brett, I did,’ she responded gravely, then started to laugh. ‘They’re very good, you know.’
‘If you’re a kid. Four young men who’ve tapped into the kindergarten set and made a fortune, I imagine,’ he said meditatively. ‘Oh, well.’
‘You could thank me for averting a crisis. Sasha was distraught when you didn’t turn up.’
‘Sasha is every bit as histrionic as her mother,’ Brett Harcourt said a shade grimly.
‘And getting more and more like her by the day,’ Nicola agreed with a reminiscent little grin.
‘How about Chris?’
‘Oh, I think he’s going to be a chip off the old block.’
He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Me?’
‘Yes, you.’
‘In what way?’
Nicola considered. ‘He’s clever—and practical. He said to Sasha, when she was throwing herself on the floor in floods of tears, “Don’t be so silly, Sash. If we tape it we can fast-forward all the advertisements.”’
Brett chuckled softly. ‘Definitely a man after my own heart. What did she say to that?’
‘Well, she’s no fool either,’ Nicola mused with secret laughter lurking in her eyes. ‘She said she liked the advertisements, they gave you a chance to go and get drinks and things, and she couldn’t stand the way men imagined they were driving a speed car when they had a remote control in their hands—flicking from one channel to another, fast-forwarding things and so on.’
‘You’re kidding. She’s only six.’
‘All the same, in more juvenile terms, that’s what she said! Six is old enough to be struck by male failings, apparently. You, for example, are a nightmare to watch television with for just that reason. So is Chris.’
‘Good Lord!’
‘So, there you go.’ Nicola sat down and pulled the sheaf of bills towards her.
‘We’ve been invited out to lunch on Sunday, by the way,’ Brett said after a moment.
‘Anywhere interesting? Can we take the kids?’
‘Of course. The Masons—I believe you met them at the Goodes’ dinner party a few weeks ago.’
Nicola wrinkled her brow. ‘Oh, yes, I remember. He’s a big, bearded bear of a man and she’s small and cuddly and given to being embarrassingly frank.’ She looked amused. ‘Isn’t he the new District Court Judge?’
‘The same. They’ve invited us to their house at Buchans Point. They have a pool as well as the beach. The kids should enjoy it.’
‘Sounds nice.’ Nicola threw down her pen to yawn heartily. ‘I think I’ll finish these tomorrow.’
‘Tired?’ he asked casually as he watched her tuck her feet beneath her.
‘I don’t know why.’
‘The rigours of marriage counselling?’ he suggested.
‘I think the rigour was on the other foot, if anything.’ She grimaced. ‘He was quite bemused.’
‘Let’s hope he’s quite discreet,’ Brett said.
‘He assured me he was.’
Brett stood up and stretched. ‘Because I doubt whether you’d enjoy featuring in the gossip columns any more than I would, Nicola.’
They stared at each for a long moment, until he added, ‘Don’t forget, that was the other object of this exercise—to protect your fair name from being dragged through the mud.’
‘And on that properly grateful note—’ she got up and curtseyed ‘—I’ll take myself to bed, sir!’
He said nothing, but his eyes were suddenly cynical and cold.
Don’t say it, Nicola warned herself. But, as so often happened, she failed to take her own advice—although she did manage to sound fairly clinical instead of rashly impassioned. ‘There are times when I hate you, Brett.’
‘I know.’ He picked up his glass and drained it.
‘Doesn’t it ever bother you?’
He set the glass down on the desk, stared at it for a moment, then raised his eyes to hers. There was so much amusement in them now, she caught her breath at the same time as a little frisson ran down her spine. A frisson of awareness that she despised herself for but couldn’t help, because Brett Harcourt did that to her even when he laughed at her.
‘No, Nicola. You remind me of Sasha, actually. She often hates me when she doesn’t get her own way. Why don’t you go to bed? You not only sound tired and cross, you look it.’
She opened her mouth, then bit her lip and walked past him. But he put out a hand and closed it round her wrist. ‘Good thinking,’ he said with soft satire, then genuinely laughed at her expression. ‘OK, OK, I’m sorry! Of course you don’t remind me of Sasha, that was tit for tat, but there is nothing on earth for you to be in a state about.’
They were very close-close enough for Nicola to see the little golden flecks in his eyes and feel that frisson of awareness grow into something stronger as his lean, strong fingers moved on the soft skin of her inner wrist.
‘If you say so, Brett,’ she murmured colourlessly, and removed her gaze from the line of his shoulders beneath the bone-coloured shirt, hoping and praying at the same time that he had no idea what the strong column of his throat and those broad shoulders sometimes did to her—evoking an erotic little desire to explore them with her fingertips and follow that trail with her lips.
He released her abruptly. ‘I do. Goodnight, Nicola.’
But something stopped her from moving immediately, something that made her look at him fleetingly, into his eyes, to discover that everything—the amusement and everything else—had been leached from his expression so that it was like looking at a blank wall.
‘Goodnight, Brett,’ she said then, quietly and evenly, and slipped away.
Brett Harcourt stood in the same spot for some moments and wondered, as he’d found himself wondering from time to time over the last two years, if his wife was essentially naive and genuinely had no idea how attractive and desirable most men found her. Because it was true that he couldn’t accuse her of appearing to have much interest in men at all, although he’d been right about her effect on them.
But was it something she still had to grow into? he mused. Or had this marriage of convenience been even more successful than he’d thought, from the point of view of keeping the daughter of a man he’d admired immensely safe? But safe in an ivory tower?
He stared at nothing for a moment, then shrugged.
CHAPTER TWO
SUNDAY dawned clear and hot, although not nearly so hot as Cairns could get. May was one of the nicest months in the far north of Queensland, Nicola often thought. By May the threat of cyclones had receded, the stingers and box jellyfish were removing their deadly tentacles from beaches and the weather was generally cooler and dryer—if not exactly autumnal by southern standards. Although she’d been brought up in Cairns, there was no doubt the hot steamy summers took their toll.
She walked out onto the veranda and absorbed the view.
Brett Harcourt had built a house at Yorkeys Knob, a northern beach suburb of Cairns dominated by a small, steep and wooded headland—the Knob. He’d built his house on the Knob to take in spectacular views of the ocean, as well as the cane fields, of which he owned a large slice, that stretched inland to the range. Sugar cane was not his only investment. He owned banana and avocado plantations, as well as mango farms—for that matter, so did she.
But it was not the injustice of having her inheritance in someone else’s hands until she was twenty-three that was on her mind as she gazed at the view, it was only how lovely it all was that preoccupied her.
Out to sea there were magic reefs and cays, not visible at this distance, but once you’d visited them they stayed in your mind whenever you looked out. Michaelmas Cay, Upolo—a lovely little hoop of pale gold sand in a turquoise sea studded with coral—Green Island, Arlington Reef, and to the north Batt and Tongue Reefs, the Low Isles, Agincourt Reef and many more as the Great Barrier Reef rose from the depths of the Coral Sea.
Closer to home to the north was Trinity Beach and Palm Cove on the mainland, then Buchans Point—the venue for lunch today. And the Range, cloaked in its dense, dark green foliage, rose majestically behind them to Kuranda and the Atherton Tablelands.
The other advantage of having a house on the Knob was the wonderful privacy. The road was actually above their roof level, and their neighbours were hidden by a glorious tangle of tropical shrubbery: pink, purple and white bougainvillaea, yellow allamanda and scarlet poinsettia. There were palm trees and causurinas on the front lawn, and beyond, a sheer drop down to the sea.
She breathed the clear, sparkling air deeply and turned to look at the house. Built on two levels in a mixture of stone, timber and glass, it blended well with the hillside and made the most of the wonderful views. The upper level, containing the bedrooms and where she was now standing, had its own deck around the front of the house, whilst the lower level opened onto a paved terrace with an in-ground pool and a thatched open barbecue pavilion. There were big terracotta pots scattered about, in which Nicola grew flowering perennials, and some flourishing pandanus palms.
Louvred doors onto the deck and terrace, as well as simple cotton blinds, let the air flow through the house as well as giving it a slightly Oriental air. The floors inside were all sealed timber or polished slate, and the rooms were uncluttered to minimise the heat but furnished beautifully, with a mixture of modern and colonial. Curiously, the fact that some of it had been Marietta’s doing didn’t offend Nicola.
There was also a garden for the children, a shed and a kiln for her pottery, and a shady, secretive courtyard outside the front door that was definitely Oriental in design and a delight to Nicola. More of her pottery pots and most of her statues ended up in it, and she grew herbs, lemon trees in tubs, impatiens, and miniature capsicum and chillies beneath a magnificent tree that was at present a blaze of bloom and spreading a pink carpet on the uneven tiles that surrounded it.
The sight of a small face at her bedroom doorway, which was instantly whisked away, alerted her. She waited a couple of moments, then padded back to her room silently and sneaked up to the bed that now had two still mounds beneath the covers. She fell on the bed, causing screams and loud gurgles of laughter to emanate as the mounds wriggled joyfully and they all ended up in a heap.
‘Who’s been sleeping in my bed?’ Nicola demanded, feigning utter surprise.
‘You knew, you knew!’ Chris, short for Christian, chanted.
‘How could she know?’ his sister contradicted, coming up for air. ‘We didn’t make a sound. We didn’t even breathe!’
‘I bet you she knew—’
‘OK.’ Nicola gathered them on either side of her and plumped up the pillows. ‘Let’s not start the day with a fight. How about a song instead? Let’s see...’
They sang ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, then, because The Wiggles were such a hot topic, embarked on one of their songs about a dog that barked all day and night. They sang the chorus with great gusto and much hilarity, alternating from basso profondo to a shrill, scratchy falsetto.
‘All right, all right!’ Brett Harcourt appeared at the doorway with his hair hanging in his eyes, wearing only a pair of sleep shorts and with blue shadows on his jaw. ‘Doesn’t anyone in this house believe it’s Sunday?’
Nicola said through her laughter, ‘Sorry, but they both have perfect pitch, you know!’
Sasha and Chris leapt off the bed to besiege their father, and presently to partake peaceably of a late breakfast, and then get through the whole traumatic business of being dressed and groomed for an outing without one squabble.
‘There.’ Nicola slung a large bag into the back of the BMW between the children and stood for a moment with her hand on her hip.
She wore a filmy beige and white paisley overshirt and white linen drawstring pants. Her hair was in a simple knot and she had beige canvas rope-soled espadrilles on her feet. She held up a finger for each item. ‘I’ve got two spare sets of clothing, sun-cream, hats, togs, buckets, spades, toys in case they get bored, books—I’ve got the lot.’
She swung herself into the front seat and exchanged a wry glance with her husband, who said, ‘It’s like moving an army.’
‘You’re not wrong. Now listen, kids,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘we’re going to visit Mr and Mrs Mason for lunch. Don’t forget your manners, will you?’
‘I never do,’ Sasha said proudly and pointedly.
“Course you do,‘ Chris responded. ’Who threw a plate of jelly at—?‘
‘That was because he pulled my hair! And don’t forget the time you spat at—’
‘Kids,’ Brett said, mildly enough, but they subsided—as they always did for Brett, Nicola thought ruefully.
‘Wish I had you around more often,’ she murmured with a faint grin, and glanced at him expressively.
Gone was the dishevelment of earlier. He was shaved, his brown hair was orderly and he wore a brown and white striped T-shirt, off-white thin cotton jeans and white deck shoes. The hairs on his arms, she noted, glinted chestnut in the sun.
‘I might not be so effective then—familiarity could dull the edge.’
‘I doubt it. They’re always good for you.’
‘Do you find them such a handful, Nicola?’ he asked after a moment. ‘By the way, I presume I’m forgiven?’
‘For last night?’ She shrugged. ‘Yes. You know I don’t find them a handful,’ she added with more warmth. ‘And on the odd occasion that I do,’ she said honestly, ‘I’ve always got Ellen to fall back on.’ Ellen doubled as housemaid and babysitter, and had been with the children since birth.
‘I just wondered,’ he said slowly, ‘whether they had anything to do with your seeking counselling. Whether you felt tied down, were yearning for a career or something like that,’ he said, before she could speak.
Nicola paused. ‘I never could decide whether I wanted to be a potter, a pilot or a musician—that’s strange, isn’t it? No. It’s not that, Brett.’
‘But what would you do if you left us?’
The question hung in the air—air that rushed by as they drove up the highway past Palm Cove towards Buchans Point with the roof down. And it was a question that affected Nicola suddenly and curiously. Was it because, she wondered, it was the first time Brett had actually asked her? Not in the context of pointing out her lack of purpose in life, or her unwisdom et cetera, but just as a simple, genuine enquiry?
And it came to her with a little stab of shock that perhaps he was entertaining the idea of her leaving...
‘I...I could start my own gallery,’ she said at random. ‘A lot of people are very taken with my pottery.’
‘Anything else?’
She cast around in her mind a little desperately. Before anything presented itself, she remembered suddenly that Brett had gone out the night before, alone, and come home very late. Well after midnight, in fact, as she’d seen on the luminous dial of her bedside clock when the opening and closing of the garage doors had woken her briefly—something she hadn’t recalled until now.
Not that there was anything particularly unusual in it. She often went out with girlfriends, and he didn’t always include her in his socialising, but...had this been a different kind of socialising, with a woman? she found herself wondering. A woman he was serious about? Serious enough to be contemplating putting an end to this marriage of convenience. But what about Marietta? she thought. And...
‘Nicola?’
She jerked her eyes to his to find his gaze narrow and probing, but all he said was, ‘We’re here.’
‘Oh, sorry.’ She shrugged, but it was a long moment before she could tear her gaze away from his. Then she got out of the car and helped the children out.
‘Now, let’s see.’ She straightened Sasha’s pretty sun-dress and smoothed her red-brown curls. ‘You look gorgeous, darling,’ she said, and turned to Chris. ‘Whereas you are very handsome, young man!’
Both children exuded gratification and put their hands into hers, leaving their father to deal with the large bag.
And that was what the Masons, Rod and Kim, as well as their resident guest, saw advancing up the garden path as they opened their front door, causing Kim Mason, in her forthright way, to say, ‘Nicola, dear, welcome! But how can you possibly be old enough to have two children this age?’
‘Oh, she’s not our mother,’ Sasha piped up with a world-weary air. ‘She’s our aunt.’
‘Sasha.’ Nicola frowned down at her. ‘I’m not your aunt, I’m your stepmother. Where did you get that idea?’
‘Excuse me—how silly of me,’ Kim murmured, but Sasha was not to be denied.
‘I ’scussed this with my friend Emma, and we decided you can’t be any kind of a mother, Nicola, because you don’t do the things mummies do.’
“Course she does,‘ Chris said witheringly. ’Who makes us clean our teeth three times a day and washes our ears and makes us eat our crusts?‘
‘That’s not all mummies do,’ Sasha replied with a superior air. ‘They look after their kids’ dads as well. They kiss and cuddle them, and they sleep in the same bed with them—’
‘Sasha,’ Brett said from behind a frozen Nicola, ‘that’ll be enough, thank you.’
‘But what would Chris know about it? He’s only a silly little boy who doesn’t even go to school yet—and that’s why we decided, me and Emma, that she’s got to be an aunt!’ Sasha finished triumphantly.
Instead of falling into a convenient hole that might magically open up at her feet, Nicola had no alternative but to proceed with the day. To pretend as if Sasha had never spoken and ignore the bemusement in their hosts’ expressions, until they hurriedly masked it, gracefully acknowledging the introduction of the other guest—a man of about thirty who was visiting the Masons from Sydney and was in some way related to Kim. His name was Richard Holloway.
Brett did the same, and before long they were seated on a shaded terrace beside the pool, with Ellis Beach below them, stretching northward beside a sparkling sea, sipping aperitifs as the children splashed happily in the water.
As if to make up for the incredible revelations she had unwittingly unleashed, Kim talked non-stop to Nicola while the three men talked cricket.
Then, to Nicola’s relief, Kim drew her husband away to deal with the barbecue and commanded Richard to replenish everyone’s drinks.
Brett said into the sudden silence, ‘All right?’
‘Yes. No. I had no idea...’ Their gazes locked and Nicola found herself going hot and cold again as the truly mortifying thought of people wondering whether she did or didn’t sleep with Brett crossed her mind.
‘No, Nicola, it’s not anything you might be thinking,’ he said, and he scanned the tense way she was sitting. She looked lovely enough to tempt any man, he thought, and then also thought, They’re probably wondering if I’m mad... ‘Because it’s not anyone’s business but our own,’ he added.
‘How...how do you know what I was thinking?’ she asked.
He smiled a little wryly. ‘You looked intensely embarrassed.’
‘I felt it—didn’t you?’
He shrugged philosophically. ‘I’m older and probably tougher. It was also out of the mouths of babes, so to speak.’
‘Isn’t that a euphemism for an uncanny ability to see the truth? I told you she was no fool.’
‘Obviously not,’ he said dryly.
‘You mustn’t be cross with her,’ Nicola responded swiftly. ‘She doesn’t understand the implications of what she said. It’s simply something she noticed and found strange.’
‘I’m not cross with her. Or only for inheriting her mother’s ability to lack any sense of tact or diplomacy.’
Nicola found her lips twisting involuntarily. ‘It’s the kind of situation Marietta would enjoy. By the way, when’s she due home?’
‘When she suffers some pangs of maternal longing, probably,’ he said cynically.
Nicola said nothing for a time. Marietta swooped in and out of her children’s lives like a brilliant bird of paradise. And, unnatural as it might seem, they adored her when she was around and appeared to accept her absence with equanimity. She had a unit in town, where they went to stay with her to be shamelessly indulged, but they cast it all off like a second skin when they came back to their father.