An Indecent Proposal

by Margot Early

  “All right, Wesley,” said Louisa Fairchild. “I’m Louisa. Your job is to keep that animal out of the kitchens. We’ll see if we can find him something to eat. Welcome, Bronwyn,” she finally said, and Bronwyn detected no sign of recognition in the other woman. “We’re glad to have you.”

  As she hurried away, toward the big house, Bronwyn released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Louisa’s attitude put to rest both her greatest fears, that she would be identified as Ari’s widow and that Wesley would be in the way and unwelcome.

  “Let’s go see where we’re going to be living, Wesley,” she told him. “I guess you better bring the dog. You can keep him outside, though.”

  “There have been dogs in the employee quarters before,” Mrs. Lipton said. “In fact, there’s a Lab mix who considers himself part of the place. You’ll meet him. His name is Sergeant.”

  Things were looking up, Wesley decided as his mother went off to her job. The puppy wasn’t his, but he would get to look after him, because the big boss had told him to. Wesley decided to call him Beckham, and he played with him outside the house where he and his mother were now going to live.

  Halfway through the afternoon, a blond woman he’d seen the day before strolled back to the bungalow. She stopped beside the steps, where Wesley sat, bored from watching the dog. “I’m Marie,” she said. “Your mum already told me you’re called Wesley.”

  “Yes.”

  “So it looks like this is your dog now. He’s a nice little guy. What are you going to call him?”

  Wesley told her.

  She took in his soccer uniform and smiled. “Very appropriate. Well, let’s see if we can find Beckham a collar. If you take him over to the stables, you can ask Mike, the head groom, if he has something that will work.”

  “Thank you,” Wesley said, keeping in mind that he had to be polite so that his mother didn’t lose her job.

  Marie squinted at him. “You remind me of someone.”

  “My dad always said I looked like my mum.”

  He saw her face soften into a curious and sympathetic expression. “Are your parents divorced?”

  “No, my dad died,” Wesley said. His mother had instructed him not to tell anyone who his father was. Still, he couldn’t help saying, “He was murdered.”

  Marie exclaimed, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I had no idea, Wesley. You must miss him.”

  Wesley nodded, glad that someone, at least, understood how he felt. Not that his mother didn’t understand.

  Just before he went to sleep last night, she’d said, “I know you miss him, and I’m sorry, Wesley. I know it hurts. I’m really sorry.” But his mother was also preoccupied and worried, anxious about money. He liked this sympathetic stranger.

  He patted Beckham, and the dog huddled against his legs.

  Patrick didn’t see Bronwyn in the morning. He imagined she’d gone to her job interview. He hoped she wouldn’t be hired. He hadn’t slept well. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d slept at all. Bronwyn was the reason. He didn’t need some woman scheming around him, and her intentions, whatever they were, couldn’t be good. It must be money she wanted, no matter what she said to the contrary. Nothing else made sense.

  At the breakfast table, Louisa talked about An Indecent Proposal’s recent win at Warrego Downs and about Jacko Bullock’s upcoming campaign gala. She did not talk about the murder investigation or her relief that Dylan Hastings had finally found Sam Whittle-son’s true killer. Patrick knew his great-aunt had a gift for holding a grudge, but she held none against Dylan for suspecting her. After all, he’d helped save Fairchild Acres from a recent fire, and he loved Megan.

  “Patrick, did you hear me?” she said.

  “What?”

  She barely suppressed a look of irritation. “If you’re not going to bother listening, I won’t bother talking.”

  “I’m sorry. I was preoccupied.”

  “I noticed.”

  He found himself smiling, feeling terribly fond of her. “I was marveling over your attitude toward Dylan. You’ve certainly managed to forgive and forget.”

  “Well—forgive, anyway,” she said tartly. “I’ve spent too much time harboring grudges.”

  Patrick lifted an eyebrow. People who’d known Louisa longer than he had remarked on the way her recent illness seemed to have changed her.

  “Why should I expend energy thinking about someone who has wronged me?” she demanded. “If it’s past, it’s past. Dwelling on it just makes me a prisoner.”

  This made sense to Patrick. So why should he expend energy thinking about Bronwyn Davies Theodoros? Because she’d jilted him and accepted another man’s proposal of marriage just weeks later? She’d said, “I’m marryingAri, Patrick. I couldn’t marry you because you’re still planning a future that’s incompatible with marriage— marriage to me, anyhow. You and I have different priorities, different values. Ari’s and mine are the same.”

  Their values, Bronwyn’s and Ari’s? Money, money, money. When he’d said that, Bronwyn had shot back with unforgettable words. Wrong, Patrick. Ari is a grown-up. And I’m in love with him.

  “Patrick, did you hear me?”

  “I’m sorry, Louisa.”

  “I said that Megan called this morning. She and Heidi are coming up today to ride, and Dylan is coming with them. Will you have time?”

  “Time for what?”

  “To get to know the man your sister plans to marry.”

  “I do know him.”

  “Megan wants the two of you to be friends.”

  Patrick made a quiet, inarticulate sound.

  Louisa sighed.

  “He’s fine,” Patrick said. “She can marry who she likes.”

  “You know that he thought I’d covered up for the man he believed murdered his brother. When they were both children.”

  “I do know it,” Patrick agreed.

  “I know that must have prejudiced him against me, but it’s all in the past now. At least make an effort, Patrick. For Megan.” Then, before he could reply, she changed the subject. “There’s a stray dog around,” Louisa said, “and I’ve encouraged the son of one of our employees—a new hire—to look after him. Though I suppose he’ll be going to school. The boy, I mean.”

  Patrick felt the force of all his unreasonable prejudice against Bronwyn, and he wanted to warn Louisa to watch out for the woman’s machinations. Yet he wasn’t sure how to broach the subject. And how would Louisa react to having Ari Theodoros’s widow at Fairchild Acres? Surely she wouldn’t like it, and perhaps he had a duty to tell her who Bronwyn was. But it seemed unfair. Bronwyn certainly wasn’t going to dope horses.

  Or was she? Was that what had brought her to Fairchild Acres, some scheme cooked up with the help of her late husband’s nefarious business associates? And had she chosen this venue because he, Patrick, was here and she hoped for more leniency? Surely her college boyfriend would never suspect her of doping—or otherwise harming—horses.

  The possibility alarmed him. She’d applied for work in the kitchens, but wasn’t that an ideal place from which to influence operations in the stables? If something happened to a horse, who would think to question the kitchen staff?

  But Bronwyn, hurt an animal?

  “About the new hire,” he began, uncertain what he was going to tell Louisa.

  His cell phone vibrated on his hip. He looked at it, recognized the number of a client, and excused himself from the table to take the call.

  “Patrick,” said the man, a Sydney attorney. He and his wife had recently engaged Patrick to help them with some investment decisions. That morning, during his usual initial look at the stock exchanges, he’d seen how well those choices had paid off. “You’ve done terrifically, mate. Do we sell now?”

  “I don’t think so. You’re in a very solid market. Let’s sit on it and let things grow,” Patrick replied. He knew that this client’s satisfaction would become word-of-mouth advertising and that he himself would gain more client
s because of it. Yet today, it was hard to feel satisfaction about that—or about his own wealth, which certainly would never rival the empire Ari Theodoros had commanded.

  It was as though Bronwyn’s arrival had changed everything, making Patrick question who he even was. It shouldn’t have that effect. Wasn’t it her rejection of him and his youthful dreams that had galvanized him into pursuing finance?

  After Patrick concluded the call, he found Louisa had finished her breakfast and gone out somewhere, probably to the stables. The horses of Fairchild Acres were her lifeblood.

  I can’t imagine Bronwyn hurting an animal, Patrick told himself again. Surely life with Ari Theodoros couldn’t have changed her that much. But if something happened to one of the horses at Fairchild Acres, and if Bronwyn turned out to be responsible…

  He was borrowing trouble. But he also realized he was protecting Bronwyn from possible consequences of Louisa’s learning that she was Ari’s widow. She didn’t deserve his protection.

  I’m going to tell Louisa, he thought. Bronwyn wasn’t cut from the same cloth as Ari, and Louisa would take his word on that.

  “This should do for a collar,” said Walt, one of the grooms. He had found a leather piece of bridle, complete with a buckle, which fitted Beckham and left some room to grow. “And I know we’ve got leads you can use. Let’s see.” He sorted through the older tack hanging on the wall and pulled out a blue nylon one. “See how this suits you, mate.”

  Wesley took the lead and fastened it onto the collar Walt had found him. “Thanks. It’s perfect.”

  Beckham, however, obviously didn’t know the first thing about walking on a leash. As Wesley tried to lead him out of the barn, he preferred to sniff the straw and everything he could find.

  “That’s a sign,” Walt said, “that he probably needs to go outside.”

  “Yes.” Wesley managed to drag the puppy out of the barn. Then Beckham sat down in the dirt and scratched himself.

  Louisa Fairchild walked toward Wesley, making her quick, precise way. “It looks like he’s all set now,” she said.

  “His name’s Beckham.”

  “That’s an interesting name.”

  “For David Beckham, the soccer player.”

  “I don’t know much about soccer.”

  Wesley expected the older lady to move off. She wouldn’t be interested in the things he was.

  But she said, “Do you like horses, Wesley?”

  “I haven’t been around them much. My dad—” Abruptly he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to talk about his father. But that seemed so silly. Wesley knew that his father hadn’t drugged any horses himself. He knew this because he read the papers, though his mother had tried to keep them out of sight. He used to find and take them from the garage and take them to his room.

  “Yes?” Louisa Fairchild arched her eyebrows.

  “He knew about horses,” Wesley decided to say.

  “Where is your father?”

  “He died.”

  The look of sympathy the old lady gave him made Wesley feel warm inside, and suddenly he felt tears come to his eyes. He turned away so that she wouldn’t see.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Perhaps you’d like to learn about horses, too. You can remember your father that way, by doing something which interested him.You can be like him. Our loved ones, after they die, live on in us.”

  You can be like him.

  Wesley wasn’t sure he wanted to be like his father. Once, he would have said that, yes, he wanted to be just like him. But everything had gotten confused when his father went to jail. It didn’t seem okay to want to be like him, because he had stolen people’s money, basically, or cheated them out of it. Just regular people, too, not especially bad people. Just…anyone.

  His mother had said once, “He was weak, Wesley.”

  Weak? Or bad? He’d asked his mother, and she’d said, “The hell of it is, I don’t know and I can’t tell you. Only your father could answer that question.”

  But, in any case, the old lady was being nice, and maybe she was one of those lonely old people his mother sometimes talked about, people with no one left who loved them.

  So he said, “I’d like to learn about horses.”

  “I’ve just got to lose some weight,” said Helena, one of the prep cooks, as she chopped carrots by the sink where Bronwyn was washing dishes.

  Helena was more than heavy, Bronwyn could see, with almost three chins. Pity stirred in her heart, along with an old urge—it felt very old, pre-Ari—to do something to help. It was, in fact, the desire to help obese people that had led Bronwyn to study sports nutrition and physiology at university. She had done this because her own mother had been obese. Not back when they’d been homeless and living on the streets. Later, when, because of Bronwyn’s first job, they were finally safe. Suddenly, her mother had experienced a weight gain of almost a hundred pounds, then diabetes and health struggles and sudden death.

  Bronwyn had vowed to always stay in good shape herself. But she’d really wanted to do something for other people like her mother.

  “I wasn’t always like this,” Helena volunteered. “I used to be closer to your size.”

  Bronwyn eyed the diet soft drink at Helena’s elbow and said, “You might try drinking some juice instead of those.”

  “But the calories!”

  “The thing is, if you eat something with nutritional content you’ll probably be less hungry. In fact,” she added, “studies have linked diet soft drinks with weight gain. They seem to make people crave more calories.”

  “You think? I sure wish I could lose weight. But every time I diet, I just end up putting it right back on.”

  “For me, anyhow,” Bronwyn said, “nutritious food makes me feel better than things that are bad for me. So I’d rather have fresh fruit or vegetables or whole grains than things that have a lot of nonfood junk in them.”

  “You might be right about that.”

  “She’s right!” chimed in Howard, the sous-chef. “You eat too many crackers, Helena.”

  “But they’re low fat!”

  “And there’s nothing in them,” he told her. “No nutritional value.”

  “I bet you work out, too,” Helena said to Bronwyn.

  “Not now. Back when I was married—” Bronwyn stopped abruptly.

  “Wesley told me your husband died,” said a woman’s voice beside her.

  Bronwyn started, but it was just Marie, sticking her hands beneath the tap to wash them.

  “Oh, you poor thing,” said Helena. “How did that happen?”

  Omitting to tell her employer that she was Ari Theodoros’s widow was one thing. But she didn’t want to lie to coworkers, to people Bronwyn hoped would become her friends. After all, both Marie and Helena lived in the employee cottage where Wesley and Bronwyn would be staying. So Bronwyn said quietly, “He was murdered.”

  “Oh, God. I’m so sorry I asked you about it!” Helena exclaimed. “How terrible for you. But you don’t have to talk about it anymore.”

  They were probably curious—Australia had few murders—but no one asked more.

  Howard changed the subject. “You know, I think we should have an exercise class here, for employees. Do some yoga or something.”

  Howard was American. Besides working in the kitchen he was apprenticing to a local farrier. Louisa had a large kitchen staff for the size of her business, but Helena had explained that she did a fair amount of entertaining.

  Marie asked, “Where could we have a yoga class, and when?”

  “Before work in the morning or after we finish up at night,” Howard suggested. “I bet Louisa would find some place for us.”

  “Yeah, you ask her,” François, the chef, suggested, with the air of baiting him.

  “All right, I will.”

  “But who’s qualified to teach something like that?” Helena asked.

  Bronwyn hesitated. Her leisure activities, while married to Ari, had been Iyengar yoga and run
ning, things she’d done at university as part of her own physical fitness regimen. She’d also played on several teams at university and had volunteered coaching a girls’ hockey team. She certainly had a strong sports background, and the course of study she’d pursued at school made her better qualified than most.

  “I suppose I could,” she said.

  “I think Louisa has been surprised by what a fine horsewoman Megan is,” Dylan Hastings told Patrick as the two men sat on Louisa’s veranda late that afternoon.

  “She ought to be good,” Patrick replied. “She’s been riding all her life.”

  The topic petered out, and Dylan raised his beer bottle to his lips again.

  “I don’t suppose, in your line of work,” Patrick said, “You could check out someone’s criminal background.”

  “It would depend on who—and why. What’s on your mind?”

  “Jacko Bullock. Louisa’s supporting him for the ITRF presidency, and I’d hate to see her reputation suffer because of the guy.”

  “He’s beyond my reach,” Dylan replied. “He and his father are pros when it comes to self-protection. I doubt anything will come up in a routine check. What do you suspect him of?”

  “Potential ties to organized crime. The members of the ITRF need to know who they’re voting for. Louisa, for one, would never vote for a candidate she knew had links to organized crime.”

  “Well, you’re not the first person to suggest it,” Dylan agreed.

  Patrick’s eyes caught movement on one of the lanes that wound between the big house and the employee bungalow. It was Bronwyn’s son, kicking his soccer ball. Kicking it back to his mother. He appeared to be attempting to score a goal between two trees beside the bungalow. Bronwyn was doing an admirable job defending the goal. A small dog sat nearby, sometimes running out to chase the ball.

  “Who’s that?” Dylan asked.

  “A new employee and her son.”

  “Ah.”

  “Kitchen help,” Patrick added, as though this was important. “Actually, I knew her at university. Old girlfriend. A little odd, her showing up here. To be honest, I don’t like it.”