by Emma Darcy
“I am calling out of consideration for you, Nicole. I didn’t think you’d like coming to my apartment tonight and not finding me there.”
Not there tonight? The sexual excitement she had been trying to contain all day took a dive into disappointment. Anger at herself stirred. She was letting Quin get to her far too much. A determination to halt that process put a coolness in her voice.
“Thank you for letting me know you’re forfeiting the twelfth night of our deal in favour of something else.”
“I have no intention of forfeiting any night,” he whipped back.
“You just have, Quin.”
“I’ll be home tomorrow. A mere postponement.”
“We made the arrangement—Fridays and Mondays. I’m not available to you on any other nights.”
“Be reasonable, Nicole.” His voice was very terse now. “I’m in Melbourne. A business meeting ran over and—”
“And, as always, making money comes ahead of being with me,” she cut in bitingly. “That’s fine, Quin. Your choice. But don’t expect me to accommodate your choice.”
She could hear him exhale a long breath of exasperation at her refusal to oblige him. Nicole felt pleased with herself for not giving in to him. Score one for me, she thought, remembering how she’d done whatever was needed to fit around his work in the past.
However, her moment of grim satisfaction was abruptly ended by Zoe rushing in from the living room, calling, “Mummy! Mummy! Come and see what’s on television.”
Nicole swung around from the kitchen bench, caught sight of her mother in the doorway and shot her a wildly pleading look.
Zoe was swiftly scooped up in her grandmother’s arms. “I’ll come and look,” she was assured and carried back into the living room.
“But I want…”
“Shh…”
The door was shut behind them, keeping them both out of earshot.
Nicole was gripped by shock, the childish voice of her daughter still ringing in her ears as she fearfully wondered if Quin had heard it. The suspended beating of her heart broke into an erratic pounding when he spoke again.
“Mummy?” The puzzled query was followed by a sharper question. “Whose child was that, Nicole?”
Her mind wrenched itself out of its distressed daze and flew to desperate defence stations. “The daughter of one of my friends. They dropped by to—” she deliberately huffed over the lie before adding “—but that’s none of your business, Quin. Thank you for calling to warn me tonight is off. Is Friday night a firm date or can I expect another cancellation?”
He huffed. Or rather a long heated breath hissed through his teeth. “You’ll be seeing me,” he said curtly, and ended the connection.
Nicole fumbled the receiver back onto its holder and sagged against the bench. That was too close a call. The relief of having come up with a swift explanation for Zoe’s presence still had her trembling inside.
It hadn’t occurred to her that Quin might contact her at home. He never had in the past. But then they’d been living together and working for the same bank. When she’d visited her mother, he had viewed it as time out from their relationship and didn’t intrude on it.
This was a different situation and she could hardly criticise Quin for giving her a courtesy call. She should have been more prepared for possible glitches in their arrangement. Although he had her e-mail address, e-mailing was not an immediate means of communication unless one was sitting at the computer all the time. And she would not have logged on before leaving this evening.
Shame wormed through her as she thought of how fixated her mind had been on having sex with Quin. He was starting to dominate her life again and she had to protect herself from that. Fourteen more nights…what if she didn’t want to end it?
Nicole shook her head angrily. That was crazy thinking. Right now she was caught up in indulging her sexuality. Quin was good for that but not for anything else. If she didn’t keep everything in perspective she’d be in bad trouble. And right now Zoe needed her attention.
She quickly entered the living room to find her daughter sitting on Nanna’s lap, placidly watching “The World Around Us” program on television—no apparent upset at having been ignored by her mother. Nicole paused for a moment, taking in the two people who did occupy the central core of her life.
They personified love, not lust. Without her mother’s ready support, Nicole knew she could not have managed the period of Zoe’s illness nearly as well. Then for Harry to have been hit by cancer…Nicole could not begrudge the extreme lengths her mother had gone to in search of a cure. It had been done out of love. And it had to be very hard to lose two husbands. Losing out on Quin’s love had devastated her five years ago.
We three are the survivors, Nicole thought, three generations of the one small family.
In the past few weeks her mother had pulled herself together and was back managing the dance school. The grey had been dyed out of her short curly brown hair and her trim dancer’s body and still pretty face belied her fifty-five years. Occasionally Nicole glimpsed a haunted look in the generally warm hazel eyes, but at least the depression that had followed Harry’s death had lifted.
As for Zoe, she was always a delight—a wonderfully healthy delight—and to Nicole’s mind, the most beautiful little girl in the world with her large smoky grey eyes and the amazingly thick, glossy, black hair which Zoe wanted to grow long so it could be braided. Nicole was smiling over this ambitious aim as she walked over to the three-seater sofa facing the television screen.
“You missed it, Mummy,” Zoe informed her, heaving a disappointed sigh.
“I’m sorry, darling. I was busy on the ’phone and couldn’t cut off the person calling me.” She sat down beside her daughter, smiling encouragingly. “Tell me what you saw.”
Her little face lit up with awe. “It was a butterfly farm.”
“An enclosure, like an aviary,” Nanna supplied.
“And there were lots and lots of big pretty flowers for the butterflies to land on.”
“Tropical flowers,” Nanna chimed in. “Most of them hibiscus.”
“It was near the rainforest at Kranda. Could we go there, Mummy?”
“Kuranda,” Nanna corrected. “Up above Cairns in Far North Queensland.”
Nicole shook her head. “That’s too far away, Zoe. It was lucky you saw it on TV.”
Zoe heaved a sigh but didn’t argue. She knew only too well that some things could be done and some things couldn’t. “They were all blue, the butterflies. The man called them—” she frowned, trying to recall the word “—Issies.”
“Ulysses,” Nicole recollected with painful irony. The glass one Quin had bought was still prominently displayed in his bedroom—a tormenting reminder of what he didn’t know, what he wouldn’t want to know.
Zoe cocked her head appealingly. “If we can’t go and see them, could you make one for my tree, Mummy? We haven’t got a blue one. Not all blue like the Ulysses.”
Nicole inwardly winced, knowing it would be forever connected to her nights with Quin. “Butterflies mark special occasions, Zoe. You’ll have to wait for one,” she said, hoping her daughter might forget about the blue Ulysses. “Now I must go finish drying my hair before I tuck you into bed for the night. Okay?”
“Okay, Mummy.”
Nicole caught a frown from her mother, worry in the hazel eyes. “Are you…going out?” she asked warily.
“No. I just want to finish doing my hair or it will end up frizzy,” Nicole rattled off carelessly, hoping to dismiss anything her mother had overheard from the kitchen doorway.
However, after she’d put Zoe to bed and read her a story, she found her mother pacing around the living room in an agitated state, the television switched off. “What’s wrong, Mum? You’re missing your favourite crime show.”
“I don’t like this, Nicole,” was shot back at her. “On the ’phone to that man, you sounded so bitter…vengeful.” She wrung her hands. “It’s
wrong, wrong. I shouldn’t have let you do this.”
“You didn’t let me, Mum. I did it on my own. My choice,” Nicole insisted quietly.
“It’s not good for you.”
“Oh, I don’t know. In a weird kind of way it is.”
“How?”
Nicole managed a wry smile. “I doubt there’s a man alive who’s as good as Quin in bed. It’s not exactly a hardship to spend twenty-six nights with him.”
“Do you still love him?”
“No.”
“I don’t believe you can have really good sex without loving your partner,” her mother argued heatedly.
Nicole tried to shrug off the point. “Well, Quin and I still have a strong physical connection. It’s okay, Mum. Don’t worry about it.”
“No, it’s more than that. You’re getting hurt by him again. I heard it in your voice. You can’t change people, Nicole. They are what they are. And paying them back for not living up to what you want of them…”
“It’s not about what I want,” Nicole cut in fiercely. “Quin and I have a deal. A deal is a deal. No changes. That was all I was insisting upon, Mum. Now please…leave it alone. I do not wish to spend any more of my time on Quin than what he’s paid for.”
But, of course she did. He was on her mind more often than not. Her mother respected her wishes enough to drop the subject for the time being but her silence didn’t stop Nicole from thinking about him, nor brooding over what her mother had said.
When they both retired for the night, Nicole lay awake and very acutely alone in her own bed, hashing over what she did feel about Quin Sola. The bottom line was she did wish he would change and her bitterness stemmed from having her wishes thwarted. Her mother was right. Being vengeful did not bring about some magical transformation. On the other hand, it did satisfy a dark sense of justice to belittle his role in her life, as he had belittled hers when she’d desperately needed something else from him.
There was no good answer to any of this, she finally decided, and set her mind to counting sheep in the hope it would send her to sleep. It must have succeeded because she was jerked awake by the loud and persistent ringing of the doorbell.
She looked at her bedside clock: 23:17. Was the house on fire or something? She sniffed but didn’t smell any smoke. Nevertheless, there had to be an emergency to account for such determination to arouse the people in the house. She tumbled out of bed and met her mother in the hall heading for the front door. She stopped as she heard Zoe calling out, alarmed by the bell which was still being rung aggressively.
Not for one second did it occur to Nicole that Quin Sola might be at the door, that a determination not to forfeit one night with her had caused him to cut his business meeting short, catch a plane from Melbourne to Sydney and come to this house in Burwood to collect her before midnight!
CHAPTER NINE
HAVING jettisoned his plans and travelled hard for the past few hours to get here, Quin was not a happy man to find the house in darkness. It was an old but solid red brick Federation-style home with a neat front lawn and garden—typical of the whole street—yet with no light on anywhere, its old-fashioned respectability felt forbidding. Definitely unwelcoming.
And this was the house he’d saved for her!
So what had Nicole done, having thrown down her challenge about his priorities? Gone out with her mother for the night? Taken herself off to a bed that didn’t have him in it? She certainly hadn’t been waiting around to see if he’d turn up. Which made Quin fighting mad. She wanted the deal kept to the letter, then let her keep it, too. Tonight she had to be available to him!
The worst of it was he’d thought she’d been softening towards him, actively wanting to spend time together, enjoying their nights. He’d believed he’d been making headway towards drawing her into the same close relationship they’d had before. Tonight it had struck him forcibly that he now had more than enough money to do anything he wanted, and what he wanted most was Nicole Ashton. It didn’t matter if he lost a lucrative client. It did matter if he lost Nicole again.
If she needed a demonstration of how important she was to him, fine…but it wasn’t fine to have his demonstration shown up as totally irrelevant to her. A fierce resentment put a savage twist to his ringing of the doorbell, which was an old-style metal mechanism, not a modern button, and much more satisfying to operate—snapping it back and forth, back and forth. However, the loud clanging seemed to echo through an empty house, which drove his frustration higher.
If Nicole had gone out, he’d camp on this porch until she returned and insist she make up the time he’d been kept waiting. His gaze skated around, looking for a chair. No chair. But in the far corner…a doll’s pram? Must have been overlooked and left behind by the friend who had the little girl.
His hand was still working the bell when light suddenly shone through the glass panels of the door. So someone was at home! He kept the loud ringing going to encourage a fast response to it. The blurred image of a woman appeared behind the stained glass. The door rattled as it was hastily unlocked. Quin dropped his hand to his side and composed himself to confront Nicole with his refusal to forfeit.
The door opened.
The woman facing him was not Nicole.
She had short hair and was middle-aged. Her dressing-gown had not been properly adjusted and her hair was mussed—clear indications that she’d been disturbed from sleep. Her initial expression of confused alarm changed to sharp annoyance as he simply stared at her, coming to the realisation that this had to be Nicole’s mother, Linda Ellis.
“Who are you? What’s the problem?” she rapped out.
He looked her straight in the eye and said, “My name is Quin Sola and I have business with your daughter, Mrs. Ellis.”
“You!” It was a gasp of shock. In the next instant her whole body was recoiling from him as though he was the worst possible news.
Quin frowned over the reaction. Although they’d never met, Linda Ellis certainly knew his name and obviously it didn’t conjure up good feelings. Which raised the question…what had Nicole been telling her about him? Didn’t being rescued from financial ruin give her mother cause enough to be more welcoming towards her benefactor?
“Is Nicole here?” he asked, deciding quite a few things needed to be confronted and settled in this household.
Linda Ellis didn’t answer.
She didn’t have to answer.
Over her shoulder he caught sight of Nicole stepping into the hall from a room at the back of it. She carried a child, a little girl whose head was snuggled into the curve of her neck and shoulder. Both of them were wrapped in hurriedly donned dressing-gowns.
“What is it, Mum?”
The words had tripped off Nicole’s tongue before she saw him. When her mother stepped back to reveal his presence and recognition hit, her forward momentum along the hall came to a dead halt, shock radiating from her frozen stillness.
The little girl lifted her head and looked directly at Quin, wanting to find a reason for the sudden stop, the silence. She had short black hair, cut in a bob. Her large and thickly lashed eyes were surprisingly light—a smoky grey—and Quin thought there was something familiar about her face, but…
“Do you know this man, Mummy?” the child asked.
Mummy!
Quin’s gaze jerked to Nicole’s. Anguish in her eyes now, not shock. A flood of heat turned her cheeks scarlet. Her throat moved convulsively, swallowing hard, needing words to emerge from it but not finding them easy to form. Her chin lifted, signalling defiant pride before she finally spoke.
“He’s just someone passing by, Zoe.” This relegation to insignificant status in her life was accompanied by a glare that rejected any other possibility in the future. “Please excuse me while I put my daughter back to bed.”
The child looked curiously at him over her mother’s shoulder as Nicole wheeled and headed back down the hall. There was something about the little girl’s eyes, her face…the odd fa
miliarity niggled past the stunning fact of her existence in Nicole’s life. His mind almost burst with the intuitive leap that speared through it.
My child!
Certainty gripped him as he judged the little girl to be about four years old. Mother and daughter disappeared from view, re-entering the room from which they had emerged. He switched his attention to Linda Ellis, his eyes boring into hers for the truth.
“She’s mine, isn’t she? My child!”
Her hand lifted to her throat as though instinctively moving to choke off any admission. She shook her head in frightened agitation. To Quin’s mind there was no reason for fear unless the connection was true and the plan was to keep him in ignorance. As they had for the past five years!
He brushed past Nicole’s mother and charged down the hall, the need to have his certainty absolutely confirmed pumping through him. The door to the bedroom had been left slightly ajar. He pushed it open.
The overhead light was still on and Quin was momentarily distracted by the startling vision of the butterfly tree, set in front of a bay window, its long, twisted, greyish white driftwood branches loaded with dozens of beautiful butterflies in all sizes and colours. A wonderful decoration for a little girl’s room, he thought, wrenching his gaze away from its fascination to target the mother and child who’d just flipped his life into another dimension.
Nicole was by the bed, bent over in the act of removing the little girl’s dressing-gown, blocking him off from her daughter—their daughter. The urge to stake a claim here and now was far too strong for Quin to deny.
“Your mother is mistaken, Zoe,” he said.
Nicole straightened up and whipped around, shooting him a killer look for intruding on what she considered her territory.
Not just hers any more, he silently resolved, strolling forward, his gaze fastened on the child who was so clearly flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. She was not frightened of him, not his daughter. She stood her ground, looking gravely at him, waiting to hear what the mistake was, and Quin was flooded by a tumultuous mix of emotions—wonder, pride, tenderness, a fierce need to protect, the desire to hold her close, hug her tight.