‘If he doesn’t marry again soon, I’m thinking that Jess will either have to come and live with us—I know Mark wouldn’t mind—or, if Raefe can’t bear to be parted from her, he might have to move south. At least he could get decent help so much more easily there!’
Francesca studied Sarah’s earnest face, then she looked around and tried to imagine Raefe leaving Bramble—and what would happen to Banyo Air?
She said abruptly, ‘What did happen to Jess’s mother?’
‘Sarah.’ looked surprised. ‘Hasn’t he told you?’
‘No.’
Sarah sighed. ‘I was hoping it would be getting easier for him—at least to talk about. It’s been, well, I guess it’s eighteen months now since Olivia… They might have been made for each other, you know. Which was strange, in a way, because she wasn’t glamorous, and Raefe’s been pursued by glamorous women ever since I can remember! But Olivia was a vet—that’s how they came to meet. She specialised in cattle.’
Francesca’s eyes widened.
‘Not that she wasn’t attractive, in a lean, boyish sort of way,’ Sarah continued. ‘She just didn’t care much about clothes and so on.’ But they just clicked—they were lovely together. And it was the ideal sort of partnership because she had plenty to occupy herself with here and she had the same sort of daredevil streak in her Raefe has. He taught her to fly.’
‘So—why did she leave him?’ Francesca heard herself ask.
Sarah blinked. ‘She didn’t. She was killed in a car accident.’
Francesca’s mouth fell open. ‘Then why,’ she whispered, ‘is there no… is there nothing around to remember her by?’
‘That’s because of Jess,’ Sarah said sadly. ‘She was in the car too, although she wasn’t seriously injured, and every time Olivia was mentioned or she saw a photo of her, or saw her clothes or anything, she became so absolutely distraught and suffered such shocking nightmares, we decided—with medical advice too—to remove all reminders for the time being. They say that eventually she’ll be able to remember her mother without the trauma.’
There was a long silence. Then Francesca said very quietly, ‘I wish… someone had told me this sooner.’
‘But you’ve been so marvellous with Jess!’ Sarah objected. ‘I mean, I’m sure you couldn’t have been any better even if you had known.’
‘Perhaps,’ Francesca murmured. ‘I haven’t been so marvellous with her father, though.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘I—I DIDN’T know what to do,’ Francesca said the next morning. ‘She was so happy. She said she could go with a clear conscience if she knew I was here for Jess—I didn’t know what to do,’ she repeated.
They were on the beach. Once again Raefe had arrived very early by four-wheel drive, and once again he’d made straight for the beach. Francesca, just up herself and the only one to be so, had seen him. She’d pulled on a pair of shorts and a halter-top, washed her face, dragged a brush through her hair and, taking a deep breath, had walked outside. She’d caught up with him just as he’d reached the enclosure, gate and told, him abruptly that she needed to talk to him.
His eyes had narrowed, his hands, had stilled on the buttons of his shirt, then he’d suggested, they walk for a bit.
‘You didn’t mention the couple from Tallai—the neighbouring property?’
‘No. Well, no,’Francesca said as they walked side by side in the sunrise. A dawn chorus of Torres Strait pigeons in the trees fringing the beach greeted the day with their strange hoo-hoo call. ‘Sarah
didn’t mention them so I assumed you hadn’t told her—anything,’ she added rather drily.
‘No, I didn’t. I…’ He paused and frowned. ‘Like you, I suppose, I didn’t want to dent her happiness in the slightest. But why didn’t she tell me about this second honeymoon?’
‘I think she’s a bit embarrassed and shy—she maintains that she’s middle-aged.’ They looked at each other and smiled wryly. Francesca added after a moment, ‘You should see her now, though. She looks just lovely.’
Raefe stopped walking and stared out to sea. After a few moments, Francesca sank down onto a smooth log and watched the sun rise, turning the water from pale grey to apricot. And when Raefe didn’t move she transferred her gaze to him, where he stood half turned away from her, with his hands shoved into his pockets and a delicious little breeze lifting his fair hair off his forehead.
He seemed totally unaware of her regard and deep in thought, and her heart started to beat heavily in the way she was coming to know well. Because, however much this man contrived to infuriate her, at the same time he attracted her deeply—she could no longer deny it.
Not that I’ve tried to deny it for a while, she mused. I just didn’t realise the strength of it. I didn’t anticipate that Sarah saying something about him marrying again would hit me like a hurricane and make me ache to think it couldn’t be me. But why couldn’t it be me? If I told him the truth,‘ laid to rest all the rumours and the gossip, didn’t get carried away. and make out I’m as bad as I’m painted…
She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth.
But what would be the point? she thought wearily after a moment. The real problem is—could I ever take the place of the wife he loved so much? If I couldn’t, I think I know myself well enough to know that it would frustrate me unbearably. And he must have loved her very much. It explains so many things…
‘Chessie?’
She stared and focused on him. ‘Sorry, did you say something?’ she murmured.
‘No, but you looked…strangely sad,’ he said slowly, and with a frown in his eyes.
‘Did I?’ She shrugged and gathered her defences. ‘Perhaps it was a trick of the light. What will we do?’
He hesitated, then came to sit beside her on the log, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands between them. ‘I seem to be thoroughly jinxed at the moment,’ he said ruefully. ‘First Sarah, then Bob, on top of all the problems of being a single parent are thoroughly exacerbated by living in the back of beyond. What I really need is a wife.’
‘Francesca winced inwardly, but managed to say composedly, ‘She would have my sympathies if those were the only reasons you needed her.’
‘You’re right, of course, Chessie. It was a stupid thing to say. Be that as it may, what we’ll do rather depends on you.’
‘Are you asking me to stay?’ she said abruptly.
‘Yes, Chessie, once again I’m asking you to stay.’ The self-directed irony in his voice was plain to hear.
‘What about the couple from Tallai?’
He moved. his shoulders restlessly. ‘They’re coming, but I wasn’t really intending to foist them on Jess cold turkey, if you know what I mean.’
‘Until I enraged you the night before last?’ she suggested after a moment, with a certain amount of cynicism, but went on before he could speak. ‘But you must have had some plan—that didn’t include me,’ she added deliberately.
He glanced at her and smiled slightly. ‘The plan I had didn’t include Sarah going to Tahiti on a second honeymoon,’ he said wryly. ‘I was hoping that even if she and Mark did make it up she’d come up, or both of them, for a transition period, so to speak.’
‘I could do that,’ Francesca said quietly. ‘But it’s up to you. The longer I’m here, the harder it’s going to be for Jess,’ she added, and felt a shaft of guilt pass through her that caused her to jump up suddenly and pace a few steps agitatedly. I did start this, she thought miserably. Not that I was to know how hard it would be for me, but Jess…
‘Chessie, I’m as much to blame,’ he said quietly, from right behind her.
She turned convulsively. ‘No—sometimes I just don’t stop to think.’
He stared down at her. ‘Nor, I’m afraid, do I—,
‘And you see, ’she went on, overriding him tautly, ‘I didn’t know‘, and if I’ve offended you with any of my behaviour I apologise.’
‘Didn’t know what?’ he s
aid after a moment.
‘I thought—I assumed,’ she said stiffly, ‘that your wife must have left you.’ She saw him tense involuntarily then deliberately relax.
‘Why did you assume that?’
‘I…’ She gestured a little helplessly. ‘There was no evidence that you’d ever had a wife. And you treated me right from the start with such—such cynicism, I couldn’t believe that it was only based on… seeing me in the social pages.’ She couldn’t help the trace of bitterness that crept into her voice, but made herself add with honesty, ‘Or the fact that sometimes the worst of my father’s arrogance comes out in me.’
‘But now you know differently—-how?’
‘Sarah told me yesterday. I asked her,’ Francesca said bleakly.
‘I see.’
‘There’s no reason why I shouldn’t know—is there?’ she said, after a long, strangely tense pause.
‘No, of course not,’ he said briefly, but somehow Francesca didn’t believe him. And then, quite suddenly, she knew why, and although it was only a confirmation of what she’d already told herself it came like a blow to the heart.
She understood, with no hope of there being any two ways about it, that Raefe Stevensen couldn’t bear to share the memory of his beloved Olivia with another woman—least of all her. Was it because she’d forced him to face the fact that while he might not love another woman he could. still want her physically?
As the thought took root there seemed to be only one thing to do—run. As if to escape it, as if to… She whirled on her heel and did just that—ran away from him and the horror of what she’d done, ran up the beach away from the homestead as if pursued by all the demons in hell.
She heard him swear, then start after her, but when, inevitably, he caught her she fought like a demented tigress and managed to break away from him. This time he dived after her in a classic rugby tackle about the knees and felled her onto the soft sand, then imprisoned her by the simple expedient of lying on top of her with his arms firmly around her.
‘History repeats itself,’ he said softly, when her energy finally gave out and she lay still and panting for breath beneath him. ‘Although I got that bit wrong, didn’t I?’
‘If you’re talking about Jericho, yes,’ she gasped. ‘But that wasn’t the only bit— Will you let me go?’
‘No.’ But; he rolled off her, although he still kept her firmly clasped in his arms. ‘Not until you tell me what that was all about, anyway.’
‘I’m telling you nothing,’ she shot back through her teeth. ‘And if you don’t let me go I’ll bite and kick and scratch—’
‘You’ve already done some of those things,’ he pointed out ruefully. ‘But it’s getting you nowhere—other than exhausting yourself.’
Francesca made one more desperate effort to free herself, only to have him laugh quietly at her, then drawl, ‘I can see there’s only one remedy this. And don’t bite, Chessie,’ he added wryly. ‘It’s a bit undignified, surely?’
And he ran one hand through her hair, pulled her closer with the other, and started to kiss her.
Fight this, Chessie, she told herself dimly. If nothing else, fight this … But it was too late—she had exhausted herself—and with a sob of pure frustration she lay still beneath his hands and mouth.
He kissed her brow and her throat, pausing only to dust some sand from her cheek. He caressed her hip and thigh in a slow, rhythmic and increasingly intimate exploration that gradually caused a tingling of her nerve-ends and brought a taut, lovely sense of expectancy to her. It caused her nipples to ache and flower, caused her to feel herself grow warm and wet with desire. And only then did he kiss her mouth.
When she was helpless beneath this sensual onslaught,not only from what his hands were doing to her but also the feel of his body against hers, the warmth and strength of it—only then did he start to kiss her properly.
And she knew she was lost when her lips parted willingly and she moved against him with a kind of hunger.
Ten minutes later she sat on a grassy outcrop beside the beach and watched as Raefe swam vigorously. Then she looked away, down at her hands clasped between her knees, feeling hollow and tormented because she had stopped on the brink and he had accepted it.
But it hadn’t been what she’d wanted to do at all, and it was only the fact that she’d never been made love to that had given her strength to achieve this reluctant victory.
‘Chessie?’
She looked upto see him standing in front of her in his underpants, drying himself perfunctorily with his shirt.
‘Yes?’ she whispered.
‘You’d feel better for a swim too.’
‘Would I?’ She smiled mechanically. ‘Thanks, but I’ll make do with the proverbial cold shower.’
He dropped down to the grass verge beside her and pulled on his shirt. ‘It wouldn’t work—do you know why it wouldn’t work?’
‘You and I?’ she said after a long pause.
‘Probably—you don’t have to give me a catalogue.’
‘You stopped,’ he said after a brief hesitation.
‘And if I hadn’t?’
She wasn’t looking at him but out to sea, nor did she move as the silence lengthened, and he took his time to study her—the lovely line of her throat and the smooth curves of her shoulders just brushed by that glorious hair, the sweep of her golden legs which she’d pulled up and clasped with her hands.
The knowledge, he thought with brutal honesty, that her breasts lay beneath whatever she wore like the perfect, tantalising fruit he’d first thought them tormented him awake and asleep, as did the slenderness of her waist, the curves of her hips, the narrow elegance of her hands and feet.
He found himself wondering suddenly, for the first time, if she knew just how beautiful she was, and just how much self-control he’d had to exert over these past days. He wondered it with a frown in his eyes, and the odd feeling that he’d missed something.
‘Would you? Have stopped if I hadn’t?’ She looked around, catching him by surprise, and her eyes were a breathtaking deep blue.
He grimaced and acknowledged that he might not have been able to. ‘I don’t know,’ he heard himself say. ‘Not if you were willing. Chessie—well, we’ve already decided I’m not a block of wood, haven’t we?’
He heard her breath expel sharply, and knew with an unexpected pang that he’d hurt her. But she said nothing, only looked away to sea again. And that surprised him as well. He sighed inwardly and said, ‘Perhaps we should not so much catalogue anything, but discuss why it wouldn’t work.’
‘I know why,’ she responded briefly.
‘Do you? Want to tell me?’ he said quietly.
‘No.’
‘Even if I were to tell you that it wasn’t purely an idle remark about my needing a wife?’
That brought her up short, he noticed, with a strange kind of satisfaction.
‘What do you mean?’ She turned to him again, her eyes wide.
‘I mean it crossed my mind that you could solve all my problems in one fell swoop.’
Her lips parted and she could only stare at him.
‘But,’ he went on, ‘in the next breath it occurred to me that this was Francesca Valentine I was having these thoughts about. Not a girl who would be happy tied to a cattle station for the rest of her life.
Not a girl— Look at me, Chessie,’ he commanded softly, and made himself go on the best way he knew how, the only way to hurt her the least in the long run. ‘Not at girl you could offer second best to. A girl, in other words, who deserved to be loved whole-heartedly.’
There was a heart-stopping silence. Then she said huskily, ‘You don’t really believe that about me, do you?’
‘Which bit?’
‘That I deserve anything. You’ve made that plain enough.’
It was this turn to look away briefly and force himself to concentrate. ‘Whatever else I may have accused you of or suspected you of, Chessie, there’s a side to
you that is pure gold. The side that made you take a motherless, traumatised little girl and bring her ease and warmth and companionship in a way that’s been…lovely to see.’
Francesca stared at him, then looked down at her knees.
‘But,’ he went on, ‘do you know what the real appeal. of these last weeks has been for you, Chessie?’
‘No. What?’ she said, barely audibly, and suddenly laid her cheek on her knees.
‘What may have been the first taste of normal family life for you—or what could be a normal family life.’
She said after an age, ‘Of course, you’re right. About that.’ Then she sat up straight. ‘Not to be confused with anything else. It’s all right, Raefe, I know you’re trying to let me down lightly, and don’t think I’m not grateful. But that doesn’t get us much further forward. I—’
‘I spoke to your father the other day, Chessie,’ he said abruptly.
Sheer shock. held her speechless suddenly. Then she found her voice, but it came out strangled and amazed. ‘Why?’.
‘I didn’t want to be accused of keeping you here against your will—and nor was I wrong. For whatever reason, he was not about to put up with you disappearing off the face of the earth, to all intents and purposes, for much longer.’
Francesca laughed coldly. ‘Don’t tell me he was about to mount a rescue campaign!’
‘As a matter of fact he was.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes. He…’ He paused, then shrugged. ‘He was thoroughly exasperated to think, amongst other things, that you might not realise how open to exploitation you are.’
‘And you managed to set his mind at rest?’ she said caustically.
‘Not entirely. He either wants you home by the end of the week or he wants to speak to you personally by then.’
‘You must have made an impression—why are you telling me this now?’
‘Because I very nearly blotted my copybook,’ he replied drily. ‘And because you seem to doubt that I could have any regard for you other than as a means to relieve my physical frustrations.’
Accidental Nanny Page 10