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He didn’t reply, yet somehow this time his silence was much stronger than some bleating protest would have been. Her spine prickled suddenly.
They reached the back veranda, which was shaded by the riot of tropical growth that threatened to encroach upon it. Along the paved path, Duncan was still making truck sounds, while the small and securely fenced swimming pool beckoned invitingly in a patch of sunshine. Hibiscus and frangipani gave bright and sweetly scented accents of colour, and the wooden floor of the veranda was cool and smooth under Annabelle’s bare feet.
From somewhere, as she invited Dylan to sit in one of the cane-backed chairs, came the thought, At least now I don’t have to move. To Alex’s large, air-conditioned and professionally decorated river-front house. They’d been planning to sell this place, or rent it out as an investment.
‘You have a nice little place,’ Dylan observed.
‘I’m fond of it,’ she agreed.
That was an understatement. She loved this small eighty-year-old cottage, perched on an absurd patch of land that had a cliff for a front garden and a crooked walkway of twenty-seven steps up from the street to the front door. This was one of the older areas of Brisbane, just a few kilometres from the city centre.
She didn’t mention to Dylan that the mortgage on the house was stretching her finances far too thinly, now that she had child-care fees for Duncan on top of it.
Change to night shifts if I can. Mum’s health is only going to get worse, but hopefully she’ll have a few good years yet, and by then Duncan will be at school. As for the money…
The repetitious thoughts droned on in her head. Cutting them off, she offered, ‘Would you like tea or coffee? Or something cool?’
‘Coffee would be great.’ The cane chair creaked a little as he shifted his weight.
‘Can you keep an eye on Duncan for me while I get it?’
‘Of course.’
Mad. She had been stark, raving mad to invite him in, Annabelle decided in the kitchen. He didn’t particularly deserve a fair hearing, she considered, so why give him one?
Habit.
This was how she’d first become involved with Alex. He had been particularly brutal during surgery one day several months ago. Had had her on the verge of tears, which not many surgeons could have done. And he’d invited her out to dinner as an apology. ‘And to prove to you that what you see in surgery is only a small part of who I am. I should probably invite the entire theatre staff in rotation!’
Although it had seemed a little out of character, she had taken the invitation at face value, and had been surprised at the ultra-expensive restaurant he’d chosen. She had been even more surprised when he’d kissed her at the end of the evening. She hadn’t picked up on his intention until it had happened.
It probably hadn’t been until their fourth or fifth date that she’d gone beyond the fair hearing thing and had really started to appreciate Alex for who he was. His clever mind, his knowledge of wine and food, his informed opinions and the fact that he’d made his approval of her very clear.
It had been like an audition, or a job interview. She’d realised that. He’d been making sure she was suitable. He had been impressed to discover that her mother was that Helen Drew, the widow of Sir William Drew, QC, and when he’d then heard from Annabelle that her father’s finances had been in a disastrous state on his death several years ago, it hadn’t put him off.
At the same time, Annabelle had been assessing Alex in a similar way. For a start, they’d got on well. Always had something to talk about. Never yelled at each other, if you didn’t count surgery. Annabelle didn’t like the way Alex behaved in surgery, but he defended himself.
‘Sorry. It’s bloody hard. I’m a prima donna, I know. But there’s too much at stake, Annabelle, during a difficult operation. I’m going to swear if something goes wrong, and I’m going to yell at whoever’s responsible. That, by the way, is never me! Don’t try and get me to change.’
OK. Fair enough. She could tolerate it.
More importantly, from her point of view, Alex realised that Duncan was a permanent fixture in her life, and always took him into consideration. He was happy about supporting both of them, and understood that her mother required a huge amount of Annabelle’s time and care as well. He actively preferred that she give up work.
‘If you never go back at all, that’s fine with me.’
This wasn’t quite how she felt. She loved her career but, even leaving aside Mum’s needs, Duncan just wasn’t the kind of child that did well in the structured environment of a child-care centre, and she couldn’t ignore that. She had begun to see unpleasant shifts in his developing personality that upset her deeply, and she knew that the overworked and underpaid child-care centre staff breathed sighs of relief when he went home each day.
Duncan had been carelessly conceived during a holiday fling with a Greek barman, carelessly brought into the world and casually abandoned by his mother, Annabelle’s sister Victoria. Vic hadn’t intended to abandon him permanently, of course. She’d simply left him in Annabelle’s care when he was ten months old, while she went on an adventure holiday in Borneo.
‘Eleven days. You don’t mind, do you, Belle?’
No, she didn’t mind. She loved her baby nephew, and she had days off work owing to her.
Six days into the trip, Victoria had been killed in a landslide on the side of a jungle-clad mountain. It was an exotic end to an exotic life, and a difficult start for a little boy. He deserved better, and he was going to get it in future, Annabelle had vowed.
Only now, because of Dylan Calford, he wasn’t.
The electric jug boiled and she poured steaming water onto the little mounds of shiny granules at the bottom of each mug, creating a hissing sound. The coffee smelled good and rich and fresh, but unmistakably like instant. She had real ground beans, and a whiz-bang Christmas-gift coffee-machine, but wasn’t going to waste either the coffee or the machine on Dylan Calford today. The coffee took longer to make that way, and might give him the mistaken impression that she wasn’t furious.
‘Here.’
She handed him the muddy black brew, and plonked a plate of sweet biscuits onto the coffee-table. There wasn’t much room on it at the moment. Duncan was running back and forth between his toy chest and the table, depositing his trucks and cars there one by one in a long, snaking row. His sound effects were loud.
‘Active little boy,’ Dylan commented.
‘He doesn’t have ADHD,’ Annabelle said.
‘Did I say—?’
‘A lot of people have said it. The manager of his child-care centre wanted him assessed.’
‘But you didn’t think it was necessary?’
‘No. Because when he’s with me, he’s fine. Active, yes. Top-of-the-chart active, but I read up on the subject when the issue was first raised, and he doesn’t show any of the other signs of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The psychologist I finally took him to agreed. His concentration is fully engaged when he’s interested in something. He’s not aggressive, unless he’s handled aggressively first.’ Or not often, anyway, she revised inwardly, thinking of a couple of recent incidents at child-care. These were the reason she’d consulted the child psychologist, and she’d found his ideas on the issue very sensible. She summarised them briefly to Dylan.
‘He can’t express his feelings very well yet. His language skills aren’t good enough. So he gets frustrated in a situation where he’s not happy, and there have been a couple of incidents of biting and kicking at his child-care centre. A lot of young children go through a similar stage, and they grow out of it, if it’s handled in the right way.’
If. A big ‘if’, in this case, when Annabelle herself couldn’t be with him, and the staff at child-care didn’t have the resources to give him the extra attention he needed.
Knowing she could talk for minutes on end about Duncan, his difficulties and her feelings, she finished, ‘He just likes to be on the go, to head for the horizon and explore.’
Like Vic had. Perhaps he had received his temperament from her.
‘Parents usually know best,’ Dylan said.
‘I am his parent!’ She glared at him. ‘Or the closest thing he’s got to one, anyhow.’
‘Yes, that’s what I meant. You’d know, and I’m guessing you’re not influenced too much by wishful thinking either. Or not usually.’
He frowned, and Annabelle flushed. Was that a reference to Alex and their marriage plans? It was! She’d blurted out far too much to Dylan yesterday in her anger.
‘Why are you here, Dylan?’ she asked him coldly.
‘To make an offer. Some kind of compensation. I want to cover the cost of the reception at least.’
‘Alex is the one to approach about that, although I doubt he’d accept it. I wouldn’t!’
‘And ask you if there’s any other way I can make up for—’
‘There isn’t,’ she snapped. ‘Short of offering to marry me yourself.’
It had to be one of the most ill-thought-out suggestions she’d ever made, a product of fatigue and stress, and disappointment and anger, and something else she didn’t have a name for. Something new. She didn’t usually come out with wild statements like that.
Dylan laughed. It was a rich, confident sound. In any other circumstances, she would have wanted to join in. ‘Perhaps that’s exactly what I should do,’ he said. ‘The only thing that would really make the grade, right?’
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘Thanks. You’ve made me feel better.’ He was still grinning at her, his dark gaze sweeping over her like a caress. It disturbed her.
‘How?’
‘By proving to me that I did the right thing. The insane thing, under the circumstances, and I hadn’t realised it would be the show-stopping announcement that it was, but if you could propose me as a substitute husband—’
‘I wasn’t serious.’
‘One day later.’
‘I wasn’t serious!’
‘Even as a joke, then doesn’t that tell you—?’
‘Nothing.’ She shook her head sharply, clenched teeth aching. ‘It was a stupid, meaningless thing to say. It doesn’t tell me anything.’
‘I dare you, Annabelle.’ There was a light of challenge and determination in his expression now that made her uncomfortable. He was leaning forward in his seat, his strength casually apparent. ‘I dare you to consider the proposition. I’ve got just as much to offer you as Alex does. Not exactly the same things, perhaps, but equivalent. Better, possibly, in some areas. Think about it.’
And suddenly, graphically, she was.
She was thinking about a wedding—symbol of solved problems—and a wedding night, and a bed with Dylan Calford in it. Naked. Or possibly not quite naked yet, but with some snug-fitting black stretch fabric across his groin. And smiling. The way he was smiling now, with a challenge glinting in his eyes, and a wicked, delicious expression that said, I can read your mind.
She went hot all over. My sainted aunt! She’d never thought of Dylan Calford that way before! He’d been engaged or married or absorbed in his divorce for the entire three and a half years she’d known him, and that had meant he’d been off limits. Not just in her eyes, but in his own.
He didn’t give off the knowing, overtly sexual vibe that available, good-looking men so often exuded. And, anyway, they rarely encountered each other outside the demanding environment of surgery, and never away from the hospital. When they worked together, there was always too much else to think about.
Today was different. There were no patients, no colleagues. His property settlement was at the negotiation stage, with the one-year anniversary of his separation already past. The vibe was there, singing and throbbing like the strings of an instrument. Two contradictory feelings warred inside her.
The first was instinct more than thought, and insisted, You’ll learn more from this than you ever learned from Alex. The second was an impatient need to reject the whole thing as dangerous, untrustworthy and insignificant.
The second feeling won.
‘You don’t mean it,’ she told Dylan flatly.
Hardly aware of what she was doing, she wrapped her arms across her body to try and stroke away the goose-bumps that had risen on her arms. Her nipples ached, and deep inside her there was a heaviness and a heat that hadn’t been there a few minutes ago. Definitely, she didn’t want any of it. Not now.
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘You’re right. I don’t. But you thought about it, didn’t you?’ His eyes were still fixed on her face.
‘Not in the way you mean.’
Or, possibly, exactly in the way he’d meant.
Had he been aware of the vibe he’d given off? The potency of it? The delicious wickedness of it? The fact that she’d absorbed it, wrapped herself in it and reflected it right back at him? Or was he giving it off unconsciously?
‘Well, think about it some more,’ he said. Or, rather, ordered.
He took what had to be a scorching gulp of his coffee, without apparently noticing the heat. If he had a tendency not to notice heat, that was good, a relief…and a reprieve.
‘There’s no need to think about it any more,’ she said sharply. ‘Not for a second.’
‘I wonder.’
Meanwhile, Duncan had become bored with the car and truck game, and every vehicle he owned was now lined up on the coffee-table like a peak-hour traffic jam. ‘Go inna pool, Mummy?’ he said hopefully.
‘In a little while, love,’ she answered.
A swim would be great. Bruising, with the way Duncan liked to hurl himself off the edge and into her arms in the water. His eager little legs always collided painfully with her thighs as he held her tight and instinctively kicked like a frog beneath the water. But it would cool her down. The building heat in the air was extra sticky today.
Duncan had already run off in search of towels. He’d probably come back with six of them.
As soon as he had gone, Dylan asked curiously, ‘He calls you that? Mummy?’
Annabelle went on the defensive at once. ‘Mum and I talked about it. We agreed it would be best at this stage. He has no memory of Vic—my sister. We haven’t decided when we’ll tell him.’
‘Tell me how it happened,’ he invited quietly. ‘Do you mind?’
She stifled a sigh. Sometimes she did mind, especially when the questions were nosy, tactless or judgmental. But somehow Dylan Calford seemed to be in her life now, since yesterday. Arrogant in his presumptions, dictatorial in his advice. She was still angry about it, yet at the same time felt her usual over developed need to be fair. Beyond the arrogance, his desire to make amends as far as possible was apparently genuine.
Not that he can make amends, she considered inwardly. Is it the thought that counts? Aloud, she said, ‘No, I don’t mind. She’d gone trekking, and there was an accident. In Borneo. It was in the news. You might have read about it.’
He thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘Mmm, yes, I remember now. I’m sorry, I didn’t realise that was your sister.’
‘I didn’t want to talk about it much at work.’
‘It must have been hard. For you and your mother.’ They weren’t flowery words, but she appreciated the depth of sincerity behind them.
‘Still can’t believe it sometimes,’ she admitted. ‘Sometimes I—’ She broke off and shook her head.
Sometimes she’d hear a voice in a crowded shopping mall and instinctively turn her head because it sounded like Vic. Sometimes, with news or a funny anecdote to tell, she’d pick up the telephone and stop with her finger poised over the first digit of Vic’s old phone number, her whole body frozen and a stabbing pain in her stomach.
But she didn’t want to tell Dylan Calford about any of that. He didn’t prompt her to finish, and she felt a small stirring of gratitude for the fact.
‘And there was no father around?’ he asked after a moment.
‘Not one that we could trace. Vic never even told Mum and me his last name. He didn’t know about Duncan and wouldn’t have cared, Vic said. It was a holiday romance. She travelled a lot.’
‘The adventurous type. Like her son.’
‘I’m starting to see that, yes, although at the end of a long day, I always blame his father for the high energy levels!’
‘How do you deal with it? How do you know that your full-time care will be better than a child-care centre?’ Evidently he remembered exactly what she’d said to him yesterday.
