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“You’re shooting yourself in the foot,” Paul said. “But maybe for you they’ll carry on. I’ve never seen a company with so few industrial relations problems.” He glanced at his watch as he tucked the rest of his papers in his briefcase. “I’ve got another appointment in Mornington—but what do you say we meet for an early lunch at the Grand Hotel?”
Just the thought of sitting in a pub, pretending to have a good time right after he’d lowered the boom on his employees, had Will shaking his head. There was only one place he wanted to be after this—alone on his surfboard between the sky and the sea. But that would have to wait until the end of the working day. “Thanks, mate, not today. Let’s get together soon, though.” He pushed himself to his feet.
And then, all too quickly, Will was facing the expectant faces of the hundred or so men and women who worked for him. There was some nervous laughter as he cleared his throat, and a few people exchanged apprehensive glances. When he began to speak, the room fell quiet. From the shocked looks on every face as his message sank in, he realized that whatever rumors had gone around, no one had expected the factory to actually close.
Shock swiftly gave way to muttered whispering. Then, McLeod, a hard-bitten man who’d been with the company only a few months but who seemed always to be complaining, demanded belligerently to know why.
Art Hodgins quelled the rising storm of protest, shouting that Will Beaumont wouldn’t be closing his doors unless he was up against the wall. When the noise died down, Art turned to Will with quiet dignity. “I’m sure we’re all sorry you’re losing what you’ve worked so hard to build.”
Will nodded briefly, fighting a rising sense of shame. Paul stepped forward to outline the steps being taken to save the company, namely, relocating to Indonesia. Rumblings of anger and betrayal echoing in his mind, Will escaped back to his office to deal with the morbid and mortifying task of burying his dead company.
MAEVE KICKED OFF her boots and pushed through the front door of her cottage. She’d just been to the wholesale nursery to order plants for Will’s garden and had gotten an excellent mid-season sale price on two dozen gardenia bushes, plus found a gorgeous specimen of a deeply scented mauve rose called Moonlight Mist. She couldn’t wait to see how they looked in Will’s garden.
“Hi, Dad,” she called. “I’m home.”
No answer. Art’s boots were in their usual place on the mat outside the front door. The mail had been collected and piled on the hall table. She walked down the long hallway, passing the shut bedroom doors, listening to the silence. “Dad?”
The house seemed unnaturally quiet. The kitchen was empty, with no signs of cooking. Or indeed, of any life at all.
Apprehension jabbed under her ribs. Quickly, she strode back down the hall to his bedroom. Wherever he was, Art was fine, she told herself. He’d walked down to the milk bar for a paper or a pouch of the tobacco he rolled his single cigarette of the day from. But if that was the case, why hadn’t she passed him on the street?
“Dad?” She knocked at his closed door. “Are you in there?”
Pressing her ear to the door she heard a grunt of assent. Sighing with relief, she opened the door. “Are you okay?”
He was lying on his bed, hands folded on his chest, staring at the ceiling. Fear clutched at her again. He hadn’t gone to bed during the day since his heart attack. When he turned his head to look at her, his face was gray and the lines on his forehead and around his mouth appeared more deeply etched.
She came farther into the room. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothin’. Was just about to fix dinner.” He pushed himself to a sitting position and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, then seemed to lose the energy to get up.
Maeve sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulders, alarmed to smell whiskey on his breath. Art liked a shot of Johnny Walker now and then, but he was too frugal to go in for drinking in a big way. “What’s wrong?” she repeated. “Are you ill? Tell me.”
Art sighed and dragged a hand over his stubbly face. “My job is finished. Aussie Electronics is closing the Mornington plant and moving to Indonesia.”
“What! When?” Her father had survived one redundancy, but at his age he’d been lucky to get hired at Aussie Electronics. For him, getting another job would be virtually impossible.
“Three months.” Art reached for the empty glass on the bedside table and swilled back the last drops of whiskey. Then he stared at the floor.
“But I don’t understand. Why?” Her father’s morose apathy scared her. The past five years had been hard on him—first Mum going, then Kristy, then his heart attack. Now this. Her father was no longer the big, bluff man she’d believed invincible when she was a child.
“Supposedly we can’t compete with cheaper imports. They claim wages here are too high. A hundred jobs gone, just like that—” he snapped his fingers “—and me only three years away from retirement.”
“But you said Will Beaumont prided himself on his company being Australian owned and operated. Why would he move it overseas?”
Scowling, Art rose and paced the bedroom. “Money, what else? He’ll make better profits if wages are lower. How do these bastards think the average Joe is going to buy their fancy imported products if they keep shipping jobs out of the country?” he demanded. “Answer me that!”
Behind the fury, she could see that Art was frightened. Not that he would admit such a thing to anyone. Especially to his daughter. “Can’t you do something?” she asked. “Organize the employees to take over the company?”
As quickly as his outrage had flared, it died. Art lowered himself into a chair with the slowness of the aged. “Buy out a multimillion-dollar electronics business that requires ongoing research and development of new products? Not a hope. Will is a proud man. He’d never agree to handing over control, much less being an employee in his own company. Nor could we carry on without him.”
“Oh, Dad.” She knelt beside his chair and put her arms around his shoulders. She’d meant to console him, but she ended up shaking him. If her father sank into inaction, he was lost. “Don’t give up. You can fight it somehow.”
Art seemed to make a conscious effort to straighten his shoulders. “I’ll be right, Sprout, you’ll see. Nothin’ for you to worry about.”
She squeezed his hand and managed a reassuring smile, knowing she would worry, even though she could do nothing about her father’s predicament.
On the other hand, she could control what she did with her life. She was damned if she would work for the man who’d dumped her father back on the unemployment heap. And to think she’d been feeling sorry she’d turned down Will’s invitation to the jazz concert.
“I need to do something,” she said, rising. “Don’t worry about dinner. I’ll pick up some fish and chips for us on my way back. I shouldn’t be more than an hour.”
She was halfway to Sorrento before it occurred to her that she could have called Will Beaumont on the phone to cancel the job. But she’d still have to mail his check back, and, damn it, she wanted to give him a piece of her mind. If she called, he could simply hang up on her.
Her hands gripped the wheel as her foot pressed harder on the accelerator and she took a curve at ten miles an hour over the speed limit. The thought of her father pottering around the house like an old man when all he wanted was to be working and earning his own way fueled her indignation. Art had a right to a job. A right to his full pension after decades in the workforce. She thumped her fist on the steering wheel. A right to dignity.
She came over the rise that led into Sorrento. Before her, the ferry dock jutted into the bay and the limestone heritage buildings mounted the hill, interspersed with trendy boutiques and surf shops.
Will Beaumont seemed like a decent man, she told herself as she drove through town. She should give him the benefit of the doubt, not blast him. But when she pulled up his long driveway and saw him untying his surfboard from the roof rack of his silver-gray Mercedes, she was outraged. While her father had been drowning his sorrows, the man responsible had been out surfing.
Bastard.
“Maeve. G’day,” Will said, his voice lifting in surprise as she got out of the ute. He was still in his wet suit, the top half peeled to his waist, exposing a chest and shoulders lean and hard with muscle. His smile faded as the look on her face registered. “I see you heard the news.”
“I heard, all right. Why are you shutting down the factory and moving it overseas?” She pulled the check he’d given her from her breast pocket, prepared to rip it into pieces. She’d been going to create a wonderland in his backyard. A special place for him and his future family. Not bloody likely.
His warm blue eyes turned cold as he spied the check in her hand. “The move is necessary to save the business.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that you’ll be putting my father and a hundred other workers out of jobs?”
His fingers curled around the edge of his surfboard, knuckles white. “I’m sorry about your father. And the others, too, of course.”
She glared at him, not bothering to hide her anger. Some things were too rotten to gloss over with the mask of politeness. “My father is fifty-seven. Where is he going to get another job at that age? Or do you think he should go overseas and work for fifty cents an hour?”
“It’s not what I wanted to happen. I’ll do my best to help my people find other employment.” His quiet voice held an edge.
“‘Your people’?” she spat. “You don’t own them. Save your hypocritical explanations and useless platitudes for the factory. Just don’t count on anyone believing a word.”
He propped the surfboard against the car and faced her squarely. “You’re a businesswoman. Surely, you can understand that if you’re not turning a profit you won’t stay in business for long.”
“Not turning a profit? How can that be? Your top-selling product is a super-duper alarm system that not even my father can afford to buy.”
“A rip-off model has come on the market, undercutting me,” he countered sharply. “I don’t want to move production offshore, but it’s that or shut the business down altogether.”
“How can you afford this house if your company is doing so poorly?” she demanded. “I don’t see you suffering.”
“I bought this house five years ago, when times were good and real estate prices were low. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“You drive a Mercedes,” she said, grasping for ammunition. She had him on the defensive, so why did she feel she was being backed into a corner?
“I wanted a car with safety features…a family car,” he said, his voice hardening with every word. “Are you finished?”
Damn it, she wanted so badly to hate him. The surfboard caught her eye. Aha, Nero fiddling while Rome burned. “Shouldn’t you have been thinking up ways to save Aussie Electronics, instead of going surfing like some irresponsible teenager?”
He didn’t flinch from her accusing gaze. “Surfing clears my mind. It puts me in a head space where I can see alternatives to problems.”
Intrigued despite herself, she cataloged the information. “Really?” she had to ask. “What is it about surfing that does that for you?”
“I’ve got a theory,” he said slowly, taken aback at her abrupt change of tack, “that the ocean’s horizontal planes promote lateral thinking.”
Was he joking? He looked serious. Yet as she stared at him, he grinned sheepishly, as though he knew that even if his theory made sense to him, it sounded crazy to others.
“But waves are vertical,” she objected.
He slapped the roof of the Mercedes. “This is the surface of the ocean.” Then he slanted his hand at a sixty-degree angle to the roof. “This is the wave.” With his other hand he intersected the wave and the ocean. “This is the surfboard with me on it. At the juncture of the two tangible planes is a third, imaginary, dimension, where anything can happen.”
It didn’t make rational sense, but, God help her, she could see it. Her mind translated his abstract notion into a vision of cascading drifts of blue and white flowers with, here and there, the unexpected blossom of red or purple—
No, it was too late for that. The check fluttered between her fingers in the light breeze.
He glanced at it, seeming to catch her thoughts. “I hope you’ll still do my garden.”
Her fingers tightened, crushing the flimsy bit of paper. With Art out of work, they would need the money. She gazed into Will’s blue eyes and saw intelligence and compassion, qualities as attractive to her as his physical appearance. He was a good man caught in difficult circumstances.
Then she thought of Art, a broken man.
And she just…couldn’t…do it.
“Go to hell.” She stuffed the check in his hand, ran back to her utility truck and tore down the driveway and out of his life, before she could change her mind.
CHAPTER FOUR
BLOODY HELL. She had no right to blame him. No one wanted Aussie Electronics to stay in Australia more than Will Beaumont.
Will watched her ute’s rear lights flash red as she braked briefly at the end of the driveway, before squealing across the bitumen and roaring down the road.
Still cursing, he hauled his surfboard to the back of the house and flung it against the wall, salt crusted and sprinkled with sand. After peeling off his wet suit, he dropped it beside the board, little caring he was committing the unpardonable sin of leaving board and suit unrinsed.
Nor did he bother rinsing himself off after discarding his damp bathing suit; he just pulled on a pair of gray shorts and a dark-purple short-sleeved shirt, grabbed Maeve’s quotation off the hall table and strode back out to the Merc.
He wanted his garden fixed up, damn it. She’d signed a contract. She couldn’t just quit because she thought he was some evil capitalist who destroyed people’s lives for fun and profit.
Glancing at the address on the letterhead, he brought the car’s powerful engine to life and sped out of the driveway, steering with one hand and doing up buttons with the other.
He caught up with her in the town of Rosebud, where traffic slowed for stoplights and beachgoers streamed across the road from the waterfront park to the takeaways and ice cream parlors on the other side. Waiting at the red light, he had a moment to wonder whether stress might be forcing him into uncharacteristically irrational behavior. He was chasing his gardener up the peninsula, for goodness’ sake.
Whether, however, his actions were foolish or merely futile, a big part of him, he realized, wanted to confront not Maeve but her father. He hadn’t had a chance to talk to Art alone after he’d broken the news to the employees, and he hated to think Art saw him as the bad guy.
So if he wasn’t the bad guy, who was? Some banker who wouldn’t be happy until he made three-thousand-percent profit? The government for relaxing import tariffs? Or did fault lie with people who bought cheap imported goods? Supporting local industry had become a luxury not everyone could afford.
He pulled up behind Maeve, but she didn’t notice him. Or refused to notice. He considered beeping the horn but decided against it. He didn’t want to appear aggressive; he just wanted to talk to her. As the light changed to green, she spotted him in her rearview mirror.
Maybe she would pull off into the small parking lot that ran parallel to the road. Then again, he mused as she sped off, maybe not.
He followed her all the way home. She didn’t look in the mirror again until she turned off the highway into the village of Mount Eliza. He smiled. She was woman enough to want to know if he was still following. Maybe to want him to keep following. Yeah, right. Just like she wanted to go out with him.
Through the leafy streets, down a winding, dead-end road he trailed her, before pulling up at last in front of a sage-green weatherboard cottage with painted wooden filigree lining the veranda roof. Wandin Cottage, proclaimed a sign above the door. The garden was a mass of flowers, shaded by huge golden-limbed gums with sun-dappled leaves.
Maeve parked and went inside, shutting the door firmly behind her without a glance his way.
A minute later Will was tapping the brass door knocker. Five minutes passed. Now she was just being rude.
Art opened the door. His hair was smoothly combed and his white T-shirt was tucked neatly into work pants.
Will suddenly felt like a sixteen-year-old facing his father. Despite their employee-employer relationship, Will had sensed that Art had always taken a paternal interest in him; even, Will sometimes thought, a fatherly pride.
Today Art was a troubled man, angry with his favorite son.
Will pushed a hand through his hair and did up his top button. “G’day, Art. How’re you going?”
Art nodded, his seamed face wary, but appeared prepared to be friendly. “What can I do for you?”
“I came to see Maeve. You may not have known, but she gave me a quote on some landscaping the other day, and I wanted to talk to her about it.”
“Maeve said she’d canceled on you.” Art looked more troubled than ever. “I want to apologize for her, Will. I told her that my job and hers were two separate things and that she should honor her contract. But she wouldn’t have it.”
Hell, Will said silently. Art wasn’t angry at him; he was upset because his daughter hadn’t done the right thing. Or maybe he was angry, too, but felt conflicted out of loyalty and a belief in fair play. Will never should have come here, invading their space, imposing on Art’s good nature. However, he would look frivolous if he left now. “May I talk to her?”
“Don’t know that it’ll do any good, but go ahead and try.” Art stepped back and allowed Will inside. “She’s in the backyard. Come through.”
The dim hallway was cool, papered with pale floral print and hung with botanical drawings of flowering herbs. In the kitchen, newspapers were spread out on the table. The employment section. Ouch. With a glance at Art, Will pushed through the screen door.
Maeve was reaching high on a bush to snip a long stalk bearing a lush white flower almost as big as her head. Peonies. His grandmother had grown them.
“Hi,” he said.
She ignored him and laid the blossom in the basket at her feet.
What flowers grew in Maeve’s garden? They were too many and various for him to identify even half of them. From brightly colored to delicately pale, they grew at every level from ground to tree. They twined along the fence, overflowed from tubs, hung in pots from the veranda. Beside a swinging garden bench of carved wood was a raised herb garden planted in a hexagram. On the other side of the yard, next to the garage, was a miniature nursery with rows of potted seedlings and baby shrubs. Behind a low hedge in what still must be her property was a greenhouse.
“This is really nice,” he said, truly impressed. The whole place was cool, fragrant and inviting. Except for her.
Aggressively, she thrust the hand holding her clippers forward; her other hand was planted on her hip. “What do you want?”
“A fair trial, for starters.”
“You chased me all the way up the peninsula just to persuade me that deep down you’re really a great guy? That none of it’s your fault. You’re ruled by global markets, free trade, forces beyond your control? Listen, mate, I’ve heard it all before and I’m sick of it. If you believe in something, you make a stand.”
“It’s not that simple,” he began. “You see—”
