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‘OK, OK,’ she agreed. ‘I sound like a jealous cat. So where does she come from?’
‘Lightning Ridge.’
‘The opal town way out back of Bourke?’
‘That’s the one. Nathan was out there buying opals for Byron and Gemma sold him some. It seems her father had just been accidentally killed—fell down a mine shaft—and she was selling up everything to come to Sydney. Nathan made her the offer of a job if she ever needed one.’
‘Which she took him up on, of course,’ Jade said ruefully. ‘What girl wouldn’t, after meeting Nathan? Say no more, I get the picture entirely.’
The housekeeper’s sigh sounded exasperated.
‘You can sigh, Melanie, but I saw the way that girl looked at Nathan the other week. Are you telling me she’s not smitten by our resident Casanova?’
‘All I’m saying is that she’s not a pushover.’
‘Meaning I am?’
Melanie gave her a sharp look. ‘Don’t go putting words into my mouth, Jade. You know better than anyone what sort of girl you are. I wouldn’t dream of making such a judgement. I’ve only known you two years, six months of which you haven’t even been living in this house. You weren’t home much, even when you were living here.’
Jade’s laugh was wry. ‘I don’t need to live here in person for you to have found out all the dirt on me. My mother used to adore telling everyone how bad I was. And it’s all true. The climbing out of windows to meet boys in the middle of the night when I was only fifteen. Everything! I’m a bad ‘un, Melanie. No doubt about it.’
‘You and I both know you’re not nearly as bad as you pretend to be, Jade,’ Melanie astonished her by saying. ‘Your teenage rebellions were revenge on your parents for their supposed lack of love, as well as some other imagined—or even real—transgressions.’
‘My,’ Jade returned caustically, ‘What are you? The resident psychoanalyst around here?’
‘I’ve had my share of experience with analysis,’ Melanie said with not a flicker of retaliatory emotion.
Sympathy for this sad, soul-dead creature replaced Jade’s anger. She knew about Melanie’s past, how her husband and baby son had been killed in a car accident right before her eyes. It had been a horrific tragedy.
Yet while Jade could appreciate the numbing effect that would have on any wife and mother, it had been years now, for heaven’s sake. Time to live again. Either that or put yourself out of your misery and throw yourself off a cliff or something.
Jade knew she herself would never commit suicide. She refused to let life get her that down. Life was meant to be lived, and, goddammit, she was going to live hers. To hell with her father, and Nathan, and even what had happened last night. And to hell with her mother. Irene was already probably in hell, anyway!
‘Are you all right, Jade?’ Melanie asked.
‘Yes, of course.’ She blinked rapidly, then tossed her head in memory of when her hair had recently been long and brown. After Nathan’s rejection she had gone out and had most of her hair cut off, the remainder dyed whipped-cream blonde, shaved at the sides and spiked on top. Oddly, the outrageous style and colour suited her. Men now pursued her even more than they had before. ‘I’m fine,’ she lied blithely.
‘You don’t look fine. You look terrible.’
‘Oh, that’s just because of the sleeping tablets I took last night. They always leave me dopey the next day.’
‘You shouldn’t be taking sleeping tablets,’ Melanie reproached seriously. ‘You shouldn’t even have them in your possession. They’re like having a loaded gun around. People say they never mean to shoot anyone but if they didn’t own a gun they couldn’t. Same thing with sleeping tablets.’
Jade stared at the housekeeper, and wondered if she had once overdosed on sleeping tablets. Unexpectedly, Jade felt the urge to try to make friends with this woman whom she’d always pitied but never really liked. Now, she wanted to extend the hand of friendship, to see if she could help her in some way. But what to say, how to start? They were hardly of the same generation. Melanie had to be over thirty. If not, she sure looked it!
‘Let’s not talk of nasties,’ Jade started up in her best breezy voice. ‘How’s things going with Auntie Ava? I presume she’s up in that studio of hers, fantasising about Prince Charming sweeping into her life on a white charger. Has she finished any of those infernal paintings of hers, yet?’
‘I would have thought your first concern would be your father, Jade, not your aunt.’
‘I said no nasties, remember. Hopefully, Pops will stay put in that hospital a while longer. I can just about tolerate visiting him there. It’s rather amusing seeing him trussed up in that pristine white bed with his leg in a sling. Of course, I haven’t seen him for over a fortnight. We had the most frightful row over my appearance and that was that. What’s he done? Has he been a bad boy? Banged up his leg again trying to seduce one of the nurses? He certainly wouldn’t have tried it on the matron. What a tartar that woman is!’
Melanie smiled at Jade’s ravings, shocking Jade. Why, the woman was quite striking when she smiled, with dazzling white teeth and eyes like glittering jet jewels. Not only striking, but sensual. The mock scenario of Byron trying to seduce the nurses seemed to have tickled the housekeeper’s fancy, lending a decidedly sexy flavour to her smile.
Now Jade was floored. Melanie... Sexy? The idea was preposterous. And yet...
Jade looked at the housekeeper, really looked at her, mentally stripping away that shapeless black dress, trying to see the real woman behind the sexless façde. Her slender shoulders were broad, her breasts full, her waist and hips trim. And when she bent down over the dishwasher, her buttocks showed shapely and firm through the black gabardine. Her knees—what Jade could see of them—were very nice indeed. As were her ankles. Those ghastly thick beige stockings distracted from, but not entirely hid, the slender coltish lines of the legs inside them.
Jade tried to imagine what Melanie would look like in a slinky black dress, scarlet gloss on that sultry mouth of hers and sexy earrings swinging around that long white neck she had. Everyone’s eyes round Belleview would fall right out of their sockets, her father included. He wouldn’t recognise his prim and proper housekeeper.
A sudden memory stabbed at Jade’s heart before the corner of her mouth lifted in a cynical smirk. It was just as well, perhaps, that Melanie was as she was, considering what had happened between the last housekeeper and the master of Belleview. Catching her father with that woman in his arms had come as a dreadful shock to Jade. Her god of a father, high on his pedestal—or was it podium?—always preaching about character and control and moral standards. Her father, having an affair with his housekeeper while his manic depressive wife was safely installed in a sanatorium somewhere.
He’d tried to explain everything away, saying he hadn’t actually slept with the woman, saying he’d kissed her in a moment of weakness. Jade had not accused. She’d simply stood there, not listening, refusing to understand, unable to forgive, regardless of the circumstances. She couldn’t abide parents who had the policy of ‘don’t do as I do, do as I say.’
She’d been just twenty at the time. Her father had dismissed the unfortunate woman—another injustice, she believed—and hired Melanie. But Jade had never looked at her father in the same way again. Neither had she taken a blind bit of notice of anything he tried to tell her. She went her own way, did her own thing. She had her own code of right and wrong, and had never hurt anyone as she was sure he had. He, and Nathan. They were the hurters, the despoilers.
Jade frowned as her mind shifted uncomfortably to her mother.
No, she decided abruptly. I will not make excuses. For either of them. For any of them!
An alien tap-tapping sound click-clacked somewhere in the house. Not recognising it, Jade swivelled on the kitchen stool she was perched up on, only to see her father making his way across the family-room, a walking cane in his right hand.
Their eyes met simultaneously through the open doorway, Jade’s widening as Byron’s narrowed. He looked hopping mad.
‘You didn’t give me a chance to tell you,’ Melanie said quietly from the other side of the breakfast bar. ‘Your father came home from the hospital yesterday.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘YOU’VE changed your mind, it seems, about darkening this doorstep again,’ Byron barked at his daughter.
‘And hi to you, Pops,’ Jade said with a flipness she fell into when at her most stressed. What on earth was her father doing home from hospital? A fortnight ago they’d said his leg wasn’t mending properly and he’d be stuck in there for another month at least. She should have known he’d prove them wrong. ‘You thinking of auditioning for the part of Long John Silver?’ she quipped airily, waving at the walking cane.
Byron hobbled into the kitchen, still scowling at his daughter. ‘One day you’ll use that sassy mouth of yours on the wrong person. I hope I’m around to see it. Melanie, I’m expecting a visitor shortly. A Mr Armstrong. Show him into my study when he arrives, will you? And we’ll be wanting coffee. Or tea, if he prefers. Ask him.’
‘Certainly, Bryon. Will this Mr Armstrong be staying to dinner?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll have to let you know.’
‘And who is Mr Armstrong?’ Jade asked, the name not at all familiar.
Byron’s hard blue eyes swung back to his daughter. ‘No one you know.’ He looked her up and down, his upper lip curling with disgust at her appearance. ‘Good God, girl, don’t you ever wear a bra?’ And, spinning round on his good leg, he limped off.
She pulled a face at his disappearing back. She did wear a bra...once every hundred years or so.
Admittedly, the ribbed pink vest-top she was wearing moulded her well-rounded breasts like a second skin, her nipples outlined and emphasised. But she hadn’t brought any clothes with her and all that was in her wardrobe were things she hadn’t worn for years, most of which were a little tight on her. She’d gone through a semi-anorexic stage back in her teens, till the loss of half her boobs had brought her up with a jolt. Horrified, she’d quickly eaten up till she was back to her shapely self, substituting the dieting with aerobics and weight-training. Her figure had steadily gone from gaunt to good to great. She was quite proud of it and had no intention of hiding her hard-earned shape under dowdy matronly clothes. Lord, she was only twenty-two, not fifty-two!
Sliding from the kitchen stool, however, reminded her that the jeans she had on were close to obscene, they were so tight. Maybe she should hunt out something of Auntie Ava’s to put on. The old dear was always buying things in sales that were several sizes too small.
Jade was on the way through the family-room, heading in the direction of the front hall when the doorbell rang. ‘I’ll get it, Melanie,’ she shouted back over her shoulder. ‘It’s sure to be the mysterious Mr Armstrong.’
‘Find out if he’s staying to dinner, will you, Jade?’ Melanie called back. ‘And if he wants tea or coffee.’
‘Will do.’
She was whistling when she opened the door, her whistle changing to a low wolf-whistle as she took in the man standing there. God, but he was gorgeous! Tall, without being too tall, black curly hair, olive skin, lean saturnine features and piercing black eyes. His thick dark eyelashes were curly too, the bottom ones resting on high cheekbones that looked as if they’d been carved in stone.
He looked as if he’d been carved in stone, so still was he. And so totally unaffected by her none too subtle whistle.
Jade thought she detected the slightest flicker of something when his hard gaze raked over her eyecatching form. But if he was in any way impressed by what he saw he certainly didn’t show it. Instead, there was a fractional lifting of his already sardonically arched eyebrows before he spoke in a voice reminiscent of Melanie’s for its lack of emotion.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said coolly. ‘Mr Whitmore is expecting me. Kyle Armstrong.’
I wonder if there’s a Mrs Armstrong, was Jade’s first thought, not at all put out by the man’s apparent indifference to her charms. Nothing like a good challenge. It would make for a pleasant change. But she never tampered with married men. That was one of the lines she drew.
Pity other people didn’t, she thought bitterly.
Her attention returned to the man before her. He wasn’t wearing a wedding-ring but he was too good-looking not to be married. Taking a wild stab at his age, she came up with somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-two. She was always hopeless at ages. She’d thought Roberto around thirty and he’d been closer to forty!
‘Good afternoon, Mr Armstrong,’ she greeted, holding out her hand and flashing him one of her most winning smiles. Her dentist had every reason to be proud of the perfectly even white teeth she displayed. ‘Yes, my father mentioned he was expecting you. Do come in. I’ll take you to him.’
Her smile turned slightly smug at Mr Armstrong’s startled reaction to her announcing her relationship with the man he’d come to see. Possibly, he expected any daughter of the wealthy Byron Whitmore to be dressed a little more classily. Or maybe he hadn’t known Byron had a daughter?
Now that was an interesting speculation. Still, Jade appreciated her father wouldn’t go round proudly showing her photograph to every Tom, Dick and Harry. He was probably terrified one of them might recognise her as the little bit of fluff they’d had one night. After all, if she’d slept with as many men as her father and Nathan presumed, Byron was bound to come across one sooner or later!
Jade brushed aside the jab of dismay this thinking brought and wondered for the first time what business the gorgeous Mr Armstrong was in. He had to be calling on business. Why else would he be dressed in a dark grey suit on a hot Saturday afternoon? Besides, her father was not one for male friends of the personal kind. He was close to Nathan, and had a type of friendship with Zachary Marsden. But that too was partly business. Zachary had been the Whitmores’ legal advisor for as long as she could remember.
Jade shut the front door and turned to their guest. He was no longer looking at her but was glancing around the house. Assessingly, she thought.
‘This way...’ She waved him along the downstairs hall that went under the staircase. Byron’s study being the second last door on the right. ‘Mr. Armstrong...’ She began as they walked side by side.
‘Kyle,’ he returned coolly. ‘Call me Kyle.’
‘How nice. Kyle, then.’ She smiled over at him. ‘And I’m Jade.’
‘Jade,’ he repeated, but said nothing more. He didn’t smile back, either.
Jade felt a momentary irritation. She didn’t like men she couldn’t read, or who didn’t react the way she expected them to. It came to her abruptly that she didn’t like men who were challenges after all. She much preferred men who fell victim to her charms immediately, and who pursued her doggedly. She enjoyed leading them a merry dance, making them almost beg for her favours, favours she did not bestow left, right and centre, au contraire to popular opinion.
She slid a sidewards glance over at the man beside her. In profile, he was not as pretty. His nose was sharp. His chin jutted stubbornly. He was not a man to beg for anything, of that she was certain. He was also staring steadfastly forward as they walked along the hallway together.
But if Jade’s mind found Mr Armstrong’s rude indifference highly offputting, her body did not. Just looking at him was making her stomach curl with a quite alien sensation. Dear God, but she would give anything to have him want her as she was suddenly wanting him.
Jade only managed to stop herself gasping in shock. For she had never really wanted a man like that in her entire life!
Oh, yes, she’d once been mad about the opposite sex, thriving on the dizzying excitement of being desired and needed and loved. But she’d been very young then, a teenager desperately looking for love and attention and approval, finding substitutes for all three in the kisses and arms of her boyfriends.
But she’d only had two actual lovers during her teenage years, not a zillion, her last serious relationship breaking up well before Nathan came back to Belleview to live after his separation from Lenore. That was when Jade’s hero worship for her adopted brother had flared to a full-blown infatuation, and, while her feelings for Nathan had seemed part sexual at the time, she could see now that they hadn’t touched the surface of real desire. Real desire was what she was feeling at this moment.
Yes, she’d tried to seduce Nathan, but not looking for sexual satisfaction—frankly, she’d never found intercourse at all memorable—but as a way to recapture his love and attention, the love and attention he’d once bestowed on her as a child and which had made her young life bearable. Admittedly, after that first bold kiss of hers, he’d quickly turned the tables on her, taking the initiative and managing to arouse her quite stunningly before he’d abruptly terminated the encounter. Her body had undoubtedly been left aching with physical frustration, which might explain why she’d raced precipitately into the arms of a new admirer a couple of days later.
The next morning, however, she’d felt ashamed of herself for the first time in her life. She’d only met the man the previous night at a party, where admittedly she’d had too much to drink. Not that that was any excuse. At least, she hadn’t gone out with him again.
There had been several admirers since. But none had persuaded her into his bed.
Jade conceded, however, that Kyle Armstrong would not have much trouble doing just that.
Suddenly, she hoped he was married. That would put an end to this amazingly intense desire he’d somehow managed to spark in her. Her whole body felt tense and tingling by the time she stopped outside the study door and knocked.
‘Yes,’ boomed her father.
Opening the door, she popped her head inside. ‘Mr Armstrong is here.’
‘Well, bring him in, girl. Don’t stand there looking ridiculous.’
Gritting her teeth, Jade threw open the door and waved their visitor inside.
He went, not giving her a second look. She was disgusted to find her heart was still racing and that her eyes were clinging to the back of that dark grey suit, to the way it fitted his nicely shaped shoulders like a glove. Jade had been on the end of undressing eyes from men before, but she’d never been guilty of doing such a thing herself. She was very definitely undressing Kyle Armstrong in her mind at that moment, however, and the results were unnerving. How was he managing to exude such a potent sexuality without even trying?
‘Don’t get up, Mr Whitmore,’ Kyle said when Byron started struggling to his feet behind the huge desk. Striding over, he outstretched his long arm to shake Byron’s hand. ‘I’m so glad to meet you at last, sir. Talking on the telephone is not the same, is it?’
Jade saw her father look his guest up and down. Clearly, he liked what he saw almost as much as she did.
‘It certainly isn’t, my boy,’ he said.
Jade dropped his age down to twenty-six or -seven. Her father would not call a man close to thirty...my boy.
‘You were just leaving, Jade?’ Byron snapped, making her seethe inside. How dared he dismiss her so rudely?
She delivered a saccharine smile his way. ‘Melanie asked me to ask if Kyle was staying for dinner. Also, if he preferred tea or coffee.’
‘You know Kyle here?’ Byron ground out.
‘Not till a minute ago,’ she replied sweetly. And make of that what you will, you horny old hypocrite.
‘Ah...’
His obvious relief infuriated the life out of her. ‘Well?’ she said sharply.
‘What about it, Kyle? Can you stay for dinner? I’d like you to. I doubt if we’ll have finished our discussions till then.’
‘I’d love to stay,’ he replied politely, still not looking at Jade. Suddenly, she felt like slapping his coolly supercilious face. Though poisoning would be better. She might slip some hemlock in his wine tonight.
But then she thought of a better vengeance for this snooty pair. Her father wanted her to wear a bra. Well, she would! At dinner tonight. A quite spectacular bejewelled corselette number that she’d bought for a fancydress costume a few years back and which would undoubtedly be at least one size too small. By God, if those unflappable dark eyes didn’t fall out of their sockets when she walked into the dining-room wearing that, then she wasn’t the girl voted most likely not to be a virgin in her last year at St Brigit’s girls school.
‘Tea or coffee?’ she asked with the simpering sweetness of a Southern belle, fluttering her eyelashes when Kyle turned to glance her way at last.
‘Coffee. Black, no sugar.’
Not a twitch. Not a flicker, either of irritation or amusement or anything. The man was a robot, she decided. A cold lifeless sexless robot. How could she have possibly thought he was sexy a moment ago?
