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But he needed to watch his step. Especially when his opponent had large media holdings—including some of the country’s most ruthless scandal sheets. And Andrew’s family had just emerged from an alleged breeding crime that made headlines around the world.
Jacko Bullock loved to sling mud. Sexy mud sold best, even if it was lies. Jacko would be delighted to find dirt on Andrew, especially sensational dirt.
Andrew didn’t intend to supply him with any. Not a rustle of impropriety. Not a whisper, a wisp, a breath.
Mick Makem, who was hosting the barbecue, gave him a sly nudge. “That black-haired beauty over there’s giving you the eye.” His freckled face split in a grin.
“Not interested,” Andrew answered, taking a sip of beer. “People are taking pictures here. And she looks like trouble.”
Mick jabbed with a sharper nudge. “Lovely trouble. All work and no play make Jack a dull guy.”
“Better a dull guy than a fall guy,” Andrew muttered.
“Oh,” said Mick, understanding. “Bullock, you mean.”
“Right.”
Bullock still repeated the accusations about the American Prestons’ breeding fraud. Even though the Prestons had been cleared of any wrong doing in the DNA fraud that had ended the career of their star stallion, Leopold’s Legacy, Bullock kept resurrecting memories of the old rumors and implying new evidence might soon emerge.
Bullock’s point, Andrew knew, was to keep the Preston family firmly linked to the word scandal. And what could be more damaging to a candidate than a good old-fashioned sex scandal?
How many American politicians had lost their reputations, even their careers, by not keeping their pants zipped? Count ’em, Andrew thought.
So he had grimly vowed to stay celibate for the duration of the election. Here in Australia, he was the tall, dark, single American from a rich family with a famous stable. Beautiful women signaled him they were ready for kissing and a great deal more. He’d been approached by so many lookers, it made him suspicious.
He knew he was considered handsome. But he was also smart enough to know that he hadn’t become as sexy as a rock star as soon as he stepped on the Australian shore. And he knew looks weren’t particularly an advantage against the homely, hearty and proudly homegrown Bullock. Bullock looked and acted like somebody’s plain and stocky loudmouthed uncle, Australia’s answer to a Good Ol’ Boy.
Andrew didn’t come across as a Good Ol’ Boy. He was long and lean, with chiseled features, brown-black hair and deep blue eyes, and he had a slew of college degrees. Next to the rotund Bullock, he didn’t look homey and jovial; he looked aristocratic and privileged.
Unlike Bullock, he wasn’t a glad-hander or a baby-kisser. He didn’t slap backs or lavish smarmy compliments on everybody he met. When he talked about issues, he talked about them with passion, but his passion was measured and earnest. He didn’t pound the podium like Bullock. He didn’t shout or sputter or chortle or wave his arms or tell raunchy jokes.
The result was that, although some people thought Andrew the serious, committed and perfect candidate, others believed he didn’t have a chance in hell. And tonight, he was haunted by a sensation usually foreign to him: he felt isolated.
Mick’s barbecue wasn’t just for political reasons. This was Andrew’s birthday, his thirty-sixth. Turning thirty-six was sobering. He’d unwittingly crossed some psychological line he hadn’t known existed.
Most of his friends had settled jobs, wives and children. He had a campaign.
He was now closer to forty than to thirty…and in the hurly-burly of entering the election, he’d begun to feel disconnected from his real self. He had to watch every word, every action, even every facial expression and bit of body language, especially here in Jacko-Land.
Stop obsessing, man, he commanded. You’ve got principles, and you committed to run for the presidency. Forget the private stuff. Fight your heart out.
So he set his jaw and put on his public persona again. He smiled. He rejoined the party. He had indulged himself in something like a midlife crisis for almost two minutes, and that was two damned minutes more than enough.
He amiably cuffed Mick’s arm and complimented him on the feast spread before the crowd. Wine from a local vineyard flowed generously and cold beers seemed to number in the hundreds.
“Want to see something really delish?” Mick asked with a wink. “Look who’s coming your way.”
Andrew saw the beautiful brunette making her way toward him, her eyes now fastened on his. Her red sundress was cut low over a startling pair of breasts, and she sparkled with jewelry. She was almost too stunning to be real.
She looked like a model or a beauty queen or a starlet. She certainly didn’t look as though she belonged at a suburban political barbecue. Distrust edged into Andrew’s mind. “Mick,” he said, “do you even know who she is?”
“No,” Mick admitted. “She’s a guest of one of the breeders. But it’s you she’s got her eye on. She’s been trying to catch your attention all night.”
My God, thought Andrew, could she be a plant? Somebody the Bullock people had sent to entice him?
Photographers, press people, some with video cams, milled through the crowd.
The brunette smiled at him and nodded in more than friendly greeting. He smiled back mechanically.
“Hi, there,” she purred. “My name’s Sylvia. I just want to say I totally agree with everything you say. I heard you’re going to stay with your cousin down in Hunter Valley. I get to Hunter Valley now and then.”
“I make my base with him in Hunter Valley,” Andrew said. “But I won’t be there much. Have to travel a lot. Excuse me. I see somebody I have to talk to. Nice to meet you.”
He nodded, a curt movement that signaled goodbye. He turned his back on the woman and left her looking piqued.
Maybe he was being paranoid, but that might be good. No involvement with women—especially one like that—until the election was over. That was that, and it should be gospel.
But suddenly he remembered his strange attraction to the blond waitress. He wondered why he couldn’t forget her. Biology could toss even the most cautious man a curveball.
He was more cautious than most because he had to be. He pushed the blonde to the back of his highly efficient mind.
Almost.
But there was another woman, only a memory now, a lively voice that sometimes spoke to him that no one heard except him.
He gazed up at the night. Darwin’s cloudy sky showed an obscured, gray pearlized moon. Suddenly the voice in his memory, that long-ago woman’s voice, said “There’s a door in the moon—if you can find it. And if you open it, you find out the future.”
For an instant, he saw the past instead, and another young woman, small and spirited like the waitress. Kellie Maguire.
He’d met her his first year at the University of Kentucky. When she’d told him about the door in the moon, at first he thought she was nuts or trying to grab attention. No. She meant it. He finally asked if she’d ever found the door into the moon.
She’d laughed and said she’d never looked for the future; she was too busy with the present. And she was.
She wasn’t like anybody he’d ever known before. She had a sassy air about her and long red hair, always tied back in an unruly ponytail. She was sweet and cheery and as independent as hell.
Unlike him, she didn’t come from a family with money. She was a scholarship student, majoring in art and literature. He thought that was stupid. How could anybody make money that way?
She laughed good-naturedly at his business major. How was he ever going to have fun if he didn’t learn anything except money? “Hey, Preston,” she teased. “Live, why don’t you?”
She didn’t give a damn for fashion, and she was so original and self-disciplined he was in awe of her. He’d only seen her cry once, when she’d learned her grandmother was dying. She broke down in tears for almost a full minute, and he’d held her. Then she’d pulled herself together and tried to act as if nothing had happened. She’d never spoken again of that moment.
He was secretly shy and, though he hated to admit it, hide-bound. She challenged him, she fascinated him, she could get him talking half the night about things he’d never even thought of before.
She enticed him to movies he never would have seen on his own, challenged him to read books he normally never would have opened. She’d changed him, and by the end of his freshman year, he was falling in love with her, unconventional as she was.
And then she was gone. Forever. A swimming accident over the summer. A drunken motorboater didn’t see her, and ran into her, killing her almost instantly. And Andrew hadn’t come close to loving anyone again since.
Now, for that strange instant, the door in the moon opened, and he saw her standing there, with a smile and her untidy red hair dancing in the cloudy breeze.
“Christ, Preston,” she said in his mind. “Now you want to be president of ITRF?”
That question raised a dozen more in his heart.
“Yeah,” he said to her silently. “Very funny, huh? I want to be president…”
“Then go for it,” she answered with her sidelong grin. “But is that all you want? Are you sure? Isn’t there something missing?”
And then her image disappeared, and he was staring up at a clouded, doorless moon.
At midnight that night, Jacko Bullock reached across the sleeping body of his mistress and picked up the receiver. “What?” he demanded. He was in a rotten mood because he’d just dozed off, but he hadn’t quite managed to make love to Tarita, who now slept beside him, all silken and exquisite and useless. He needed a new woman again.
He heard raspy breathing, and that meant Feeney. Feeney was his contact, his liaison in Jacko’s covert war on Andrew Preston. Feeney was a general in this war, one whose face he’d never seen, but who’d been supplied by very dependable allies.
Jacko had a public campaign for president of the ICRF. And he also had an extremely well-hidden private one, as complex as a huge spiderweb. Feeney wasn’t at its center, but he was close enough, close enough.
“Preston steered clear of her,” said a man’s rasping voice. “The dark one. She said he smiled, he nodded. But he didn’t let her get near him.”
Jacko swore. “What is he, a pansy? Sylvia’s gorgeous.”
Hell, he thought, she’d kept him satisfied for almost three months—that’s how good she was. He’d sent orders for her to wear something red and low-cut. And plenty of diamonds. He’d given her diamonds. Cheap ones, but they’d kept her happy.
“He’s not a pansy,” Feeney said. “He likes women, all right. I think he just was leery of her. Maybe she’s not his type.”
Jacko swore again. “Not his type? She’s the type for any man with a set of working goolies. For a while, at least.”
“Well,” Feeney said hesitantly, “she’s not subtle, y’ know? From what we know, he doesn’t go for the glam thing. No super-models. His tastes are hard to predict.”
If Sylvia’d got Preston in bed, I’d’ve given her good diamonds, Jacko thought.
He stared down at Tarita’s lovely, sleeping form and wondered if she’d suit the Yank. If she could turn the trick, he’d give her up in a minute.
“Preston’s human,” said Feeney in his scratchy voice. “This country’s full of beautiful women, and he’s a long time here. And he isn’t made of iron.”
Jacko snorted. “Then watch him. When he finds a piece, she’s dead meat, by God. And he’ll be done. Ruined.”
“He’s being watched,” said Feeney. “He’s being—”
Jacko, disgusted that the bejeweled Sylvia had failed, hung up. He stared down at Tarita, shadowy on the wine-red satin sheet. Should he shake her out of sleep and try again?
No. He was too tired, too disgusted. God, he wished this election were over and he could get on with his life. So much more lay ahead: more power, more prestige—and far more money.
He hoped Feeney was right, and Preston would hurry up and find himself a tasty tart. And then? God help the scumbag. And the unlucky dirty little girl he settled on.
Feeney would help him take care of that, too.
The next morning in Darwin, Marie still moved like an automaton. And like an automaton, she did not feel. She was numb and vaguely wondered if she was in shock.
She managed to get through the day because Colette would have wanted her to.
Reynard arrived late that evening, before Marie got home from Scepter. He’d parked his battered blue truck in front of her apartment and waited in the driver’s seat. As soon as he saw Marie, he leaped out of the truck to hug her tightly.
She clung to him with real affection. He’d always been kind to her and Colette, and Colette had adored him. Even though she fretted over him, he could always make her laugh with a funny story or a cheeky song.
“My little love,” he said against Marie’s ear. “Our Colie’s gone where there’s no more pain. Had she been born my blood sister, I couldn’t have loved her more.”
Marie drew back and studied his face, shadowy in the apartment’s outdoor lights. He was in his early sixties, but still surprisingly handsome. The only apparent flaw in his health was that he wore two hearing aids. He’d suffered for years from ringing in his ears, and had begun to go deaf in his late thirties.
He was tall, and his body was straight and strong. He had dark blond hair, wavy and going gray. His brows were darker, his lashes bronze-colored and surprisingly long.
In spite of the lashes, his face was strong-boned and years of sunburn had lined his skin, especially with laugh lines. His eyes were medium blue and looked lazy, heavy-lidded. They made him seem as if he was ready to nod off, but she knew his gaze missed little.
She looked up at him. “I’m glad you’re here. Nobody else would understand.”
He rumpled her short hair. “I know. We’re an odd lot, aren’t we? Tell me, duck, when’s the service? I’ll have to go to the Salvos and get me a suit.”
Marie looked him in the eye. “There’s no service. She was cremated yesterday. That’s how she wanted it. We can get the ashes tomorrow. She wanted them scattered in the ocean.”
Reynard’s body stiffened, and he stared down at her with displeasure. “Cremated? Burned like rubbish?”
“She never told you. She knew you wouldn’t like it.”
“You did it without me?”
“She didn’t want you to have to be there. She thought it…would hurt.”
“And what about you, miss? You were there all by yourself?”
She swallowed hard, not wanting to remember. “Yes. I didn’t want her to be alone.”
He shook his head in what seemed a mixture of dismay and grudging admiration. “But you were alone. Didn’t you feel wretched?”
“I didn’t feel much of anything,” she said honestly. “Rennie, it’s like an invisible suit of armor fell from the sky and clamped itself on me. It won’t let me feel yet.”
“Ah. I know the sensation.” He looped his arm around her shoulders. “Maybe now that I’m here, you can come back to yourself. Let’s go inside.”
As she unlocked the door, he said, jokingly, “I hope you’ve got a drop of something for you old uncle. The long drive made me thirsty.”
She nodded sadly. “I bought a bottle of port.”
“Then let’s have a glass. It’ll loosen you up. Your body feels tight as a knot, my girl. You should come back to Hunter Valley with me. Get away from this place for a while.”
He was steering her into the living room, but she stopped and stared at him in alarm. “I can’t leave here,” she protested. “I have classes. I have a job. I have this apartment.”
“Details,” he said with a careless air. “I have a proposition for you.”
“What?” she asked suspiciously.
He gave her his most winning smile. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. After…you know. Now let us drink a toast to our Colie. And that old bat Louisa. Who might be your granny.”
