by Rosie Vanyon
Mind you, when it came to Cara, he had to admit was getting a taste of that weird kind of emotive confusion himself. Why else had he made up that excuse about the bacon so he could drive her into town? Why hadn’t he handed over the car keys and let her drive, or better still, left her back at the house to cool her heels and find her own way into town? It wasn’t like he owed her anything. It wasn’t as if they had any obligation to one another…
“You want a coffee?” she asked, though she didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic.
If he drank anymore coffee this morning, it would probably burn clean through his stomach lining and scar his intestines, but he wasn’t going to miss the chance to sort things out with her, so they walked into the café together and settled in the same booth they’d sat in last time. He ordered a latte.
He waited for her to get settled. Waited for her to order her tea—Irish Breakfast, this time. Waited for her to set the tone of the conversation.
“So, I found something,” she told him.
He raised an eyebrow, his interest piqued but on the lookout for stray gunfire or loose cannons.
“It was in the book of faerie tales I was reading.”
“Witch? Big bad wolf? Other talking animals…” Now really wasn’t the time to wisecrack, he told himself, but he couldn’t help it. His head was all over the place—one minute he was laughing at childhood memories, the next he was sorting out the set building crew, but mostly he was careening up and down a rollercoaster with Cara’s name on it, plunging into scary emotional places and climbing to the highest physical highs of his life. Hell, maybe it was his hormones playing havoc here. Maybe he was having an early midlife crisis.
****
The waitress arrived with their order. As she set their drinks out on the table, Cara considered backpedalling. Not confessing after all. Making up some story about finding a special bookmark or a pressed flower or a sage passage in the book of faerie tales. But she needed the film to reflect the truth, and the truth was her mother had had a lover. She also needed to get Levi busy. So busy he would take his eye of the very valuable, very hidden ball. That way she could find the fortune and…
Well, she could give Mia her half and buy a new motorcycle and…donate the rest to the local film school or a girls’ education program, or even a cat’s home. As long as the sexy slime-bucket kept his clutches off her inheritance, she didn’t care.
And if, as she had previously concluded, there was no inheritance? Well, nothing would change. Levi could get his payout from their blockbuster film and sort out whatever financial mess he had made in his life. And she could get on with… What? Everything felt a bit empty, a bit pointless now. When had that happened? Her crappy apartment, her lonely work, her bare life seemed hollow and dull. Maybe she could try the pet route again. Or a potted plant. Something hardy. A begonia, perhaps. Someone had told her they were un-killable.
For a moment, her chest tightened and her eyes heated and stung. How had her life’s ambition been reduced to maintaining a begonia?
She heard Levi take a breath and forced her distress aside, blinking away the threat of tears and faking a cough.
“Note to self, don’t inhale tea,” she said with a bogus smile and no eye contact.
The future was something for later, she told herself. Right now, she needed to get the present shipshape, and the way to do that was by unlocking the past so Levi could get on with the movie.
She was grateful that he let her small lie slide. The last thing she wanted was sympathy—she would end up in a howling puddle on the floor. And the last person she wanted it from was the man before her. He was sensuous, sweet, smokin’—and slippery. She was doing her best to be cool about his deception and duplicity, after all they were two adults wheeling and dealing in the fast and fickle film industry. There was nothing but a movie contract to bind them together. She needed to accept that. If she wanted to play with the big boys, she’d have to suck it up and play hardball.
Resolutely and without comment, she handed him the letter. It looked older and more fragile than its thirteen years warranted. It felt strange to her that the contents of an innocuous-looking off-white envelope could pack such a punch.
Levi took the paper from her gingerly, as though he thought it might bite. He opened the envelope, withdrew the translucent paper, and began to read. Cara knew the words by heart.
“My darling Alessandra,
I have no way of knowing if these letters are reaching you, but I send them whenever the opportunity arises, just in case.
I miss you more than words can say. I miss the taste of your lips, the touch of your hand, and the feel of you naked in my arms. It is only these memories that keep me breathing. Without them, and the hope (though it may be fruitless) that we will one day love again, I think I would die of despair.
I pray every day that at least the Midnight Star keeps you safe while I cannot. And I wish beyond all other wishes for even one more night loving you.
I love you, Alessandra.
Styck”
Levi’s face turned pale. His eyes suddenly burned overbright.
“You know what this means?” he asked shakily.
“Yes,” she squirmed, irritated that he seemed to want to force her to spell out her mistake. “She had a lover.”
But to her surprise, he waved his hand in dismissal.
“Lover. Schlover. It’s more than that.”
She shook her head, clueless as to what he was getting at.
“More? I don’t know what you mean.”
His hands were literally trembling and his voice was strained with emotion.
“What is it, Levi?”
“The fortune, your inheritance. It’s real.”
The tsunami of emotion caught Cara off guard. The fortune was real?
From one side, Cara felt a rush of excitement and validation. Her mother hadn’t been lying. She had cared.
From another direction crashed a wave of despair. Cara had not been wrong about Levi’s priority. He didn’t give a toss about her mother’s lover and what it would mean for the film, but he was visibly moved by the news of the missing fortune. He was shaking, for heaven’s sake. There was no possible way she could misinterpret his excitement. It seemed she had been right in her theory that she was nothing more than a means to an end. He was using her to get his hands on the cash he needed. Nothing more.
He spoke in a rush of enthusiasm, barely taking a breath. “The missing fortune,” he continued, stabling at the flimsy page with his forefinger. “The Midnight Star. It’s only one of the most famous sapphires in the world. It was all over the news when it was sold back in the eighties. As an acquisitive young lad, it caught my imagination. It prompted a little stint speculating in gemstones, but the market wasn’t liquid enough for my taste.”
He studied the letter again and she turned his revelation over in her mind, slowly appreciating the implications.
“So, all this time, I’ve been searching for cash or stocks or deeds and I should really have been looking for a ginormous freaking sapphire?”
“Looks that way.”
“Sapphires… They’re the blue ones, right?”
“Yes. Is there a safe or something at Flinders’ Keep?”
“Yes, but it’s empty.”
“Jewelery?”
“There was some. I’ll have to ask Mia what happened to it. But surely someone would have noticed a giant sapphire. How big are we talking?”
He shrugged. “Guessing?” He held his thumb and forefinger apart the width of a golf ball and she whistled.
“It would be pretty hard to miss,” he conceded.
Cara sat back in her chair, perplexed. Something about the conversation just didn’t make sense. Why had he told her about the clue to the missing fortune if he was going to take it for himself? Had he inadvertently let slip his knowledge of the Midnight Star in his excitement? Was he planning to rub salt into her wounds when he found it? Or was he genuinely inc
luding her in his search?
Maybe he thought now that she knew the nature of the fortune, she would be better placed to provide him with information leading to its recovery. After all, no matter who found it, if it turned up at Flinders’ Keep, it was technically his.
“What do you say we spend the afternoon sapphire hunting?” he suggested.
Her first instinct was to agree. While her brain was all over his deviousness, the rest of her, from her heart to her hormones, wanted nothing more than to be near him.
However, both her rational side and the rest of her concurred that hunting for sapphires would be a mistake. After all, they might actually find one. Not only would that sideswipe her plans for getting the movie rolling, also, his betrayal about the treasure would no longer be hypothetical. Instead, it would be brutally, factually, starkly real. And as much as she could try denying and ignoring something that was a strong possibility, the reality of watching him cash in her mother’s jewel would be more than her heart could take.
If he sold the jewel, she would need to walk away from him. It was that simple. If she didn’t walk, she would be giving up her self-worth and morphing into the worst kind of doormat, killing everything about herself that made her Cara Jane Kelly. And if she did embrace doormat-ville and stayed with him, it wouldn’t take long for him to figure out that she hadn’t been true to herself, that the woman he had fallen for had no integrity and, thus, wasn’t worth sticking around for. And he’d be disillusioned and she’d get resentful and if the relationship was a horse you would shoot it…
Jeez, the way her miserable little daydream was playing out, she was a fifty-year-old drunk in fluffy slippers battling an infomercial addiction, and he was a wraparound baldy with a paunch and a chronic golf habit, and they were whinging and bitching at each other like a bad cartoon.
Cara didn’t want that kind of wretched downward spiral and she didn’t want to leave him. So she didn’t want them to find the jewel.
She knew avoidance was a juvenile tactic, but, for the moment at least, it was the card she decided to play.
Besides, how could she forget the other brand of betrayal on the itinerary for the afternoon?
“Don’t you have, uh, plans?” she asked him, imagining Selena Simms’ fingernails trailing down his chest. She shuddered.
“I was thinking of catching up with Selena, but she can wait.”
She could barely believe Levi’s gall in admitting to his planned assignation with Selena and that he was simultaneously brushing it off as no big deal. Maybe that’s how sex worked in Hollywood. If that was the case, Cara wanted no part of it. She was a one-man woman and, in a relationship, she expected monogamy in return. Not that she and Levi were in a relationship, per se. They had spent some time together. They had been intimate. But there had been no hint of commitment, no mention of the future. So, why did Selena’s name make Cara want to scream like a banshee?
“Maybe we should spend the afternoon making script changes and save the sapphire hunting for another day,” Cara said, suddenly, urgently needing fresh air. “But before we do any of that, I need to buy Freya a birthday gift for her party tomorrow.”
****
Ocean Ridge was not a big town. Most of the shops and restaurants clustered around one central square with a handful of outlining huddles petering out toward the beach. The beachfront itself sported a strip of surf outlets, a couple of souvenir places, ice cream parlors, and fish and chips shops, no doubt popular with weekend families and the crowd from the nearby high school.
Cara made a beeline for Saltwater Avenue to the north of the main drag where, amid the high end boutiques, specialty shops were scattered—antiques, gift shops, galleries, and jewelers. She wasn’t sure what to buy Freya, but she figured if there was something special to be found, this was the place to stumble on it. It was therapeutic to switch off her deliberations about sapphires, Selena, and the stinking sex bomb and focus on shopping for Freya.
She browsed novelty handmade chocolates, early edition hardbacks, funky tote bags, and popular perfume. She was weighing up the merits of a silver locket in the jeweler’s window when she glanced up and noticed the woman behind the counter. Belle Shepherd, née Bradshaw, had always been all big teeth, big hair, and big baby blues. Nothing much had changed.
Cara didn’t hesitate to enter the store.
“Belle!” Cara greeted her. While they hadn’t been best buddies in high school, they had worked on a few assignments together with Cara writing the words and Belle contributing the artwork. If she told the truth, Cara hadn’t really been close friends with anyone in high school. She’d been content drifting on the fringe of the fringe, casually friendly with most kids but keeping mainly to herself.
They hugged, smiled like crazy, and looked each other over appraisingly.
“You’re looking fabulous!” Cara observed, and meant it. Belle’s natural flair and flamboyance had coalesced into a brilliantly crafted persona radiating the kind of tempered ostentation Cara usually identified with celebrities.
“You can talk, Cara Kelly! You’re still skinny as dental floss and as gorgeous as a buttercup. What do you use on your skin? I need some of whatever that is. We must catch up! It’s been forever.”
“Only, what…?”
“Hell, it must be close on twelve years! What have you been doing since high school?”
Cara gave Belle the potted version of her screenwriting career to date, not wanting to get too deeply into the intricacies and dilemmas of her current project. She deftly turned the subject over to Belle.
“It looks like you’re doing very well for yourself. Your own store?”
“Yes. While I was in art school, I found my calling in jewelery making. It was a great career choice, something I was passionate about plus a practical, portable vocation. I did a big working holiday to Europe and Africa to learn, hands on, about gems. Then when I came back and had the boys, I was able to work on my pieces from home. The Internet meant I could get them out into the global market. I’m pleased to say I’ve had a fair bit of success and recognition.”
Despite Belle’s words, her enthusiasm seemed forced. Her brow was furrowed and her mouth downturned. Cara wasn’t sure whether they were close enough friends for her to pry, but she hated to see the other woman unhappy.
She probed gently, “Is it not everything you’d hoped?”
Something sharp and sad flashed in Belle’s eyes, followed by a wash of gratitude. “I was so happy. Brian was a great dad and my work was fulfilling and the boys were content. We have a lovely home just out near Mia’s place, actually. I had everything I had ever dreamed of.”
“But…?” Cara prompted.
“I agreed to teach a short jewelery making course for adults. When I was buying materials, I met a wholesaler by the name of Umberto. He was dashing and dazzling, smart and sophisticated, and he seemed to be interested in me and my work. I was flattered, of course. I was a lowly housewife slash part time jeweler and here was this expert gemmologist casually mentioning famous jewelers he could introduce me to and national awards he thought my work could compete in… It was heady stuff.”
“You must have been excited.”
“Oh, I was whisked off my feet. It was Umberto who convinced me to set up a shop. I had been saving for a trip to Australia. I won a partial scholarship through the Melbourne Gemmological Institute and planned to travel, but Umberto convinced me to sink my savings into bricks and mortar instead, establish my own ‘presence’ or something.”
“Bad idea?”
“Shithouse idea—pardon my French. Turned out Umberto was more interested in my tits than my topaz and when I turned down his proposition, he was gone like a shot. Now, all of my savings are tied up in this store, which would be okay except that even with a part-time assistant, between the admin and sales, I am run off my feet. Plus, there are the boys to care for. And with Brian moving out… I haven’t picked up a cutter or polisher in months.”
Cara cou
ldn’t miss the sheen of unshed tears in Belle’s eyes. She was about to suggest that they grab a couple of coffees from the café across the street, but at that moment, a bus pulled up and a dozen Korean tourists swarmed through the door, ooh-ing and ah-ing over Belle’s exquisitely designed rings and pendants.
Fishing in her purse, Cara quickly produced a business card and pressed it into Belle’s palm. They locked eyes and Cara did her best to convey her empathy.
“I’ll get out of your hair, but if you feel like a chat…”
Belle nodded. “Thanks, Cara. I may just take you up on that.”
****
The conversation about the script changes was surprisingly enjoyable. The threesome discussed possibilities for the story over drinks that evening—Otto into the scotch, and Levi and Cara sharing a bottle of red wine.
As it turned out, the afternoon had been swallowed up first with shopping and then some drama at the house—a water main blocked by debris from the storm, the wrong color paint turning up for the kitchen, and a worker injured when horsing around with an electric grinder. So, it was nearly eight when they retired to the study for a post-dinner chat.
Otto was enormous. Not especially tall, the man was wall-to-wall bulk that seemed to be made up of fat and muscle in equal parts. In his mid-thirties and sporting an artsy goatee, he was strong—when grinder guy was bleeding and fainting all over the place, it was Otto who picked him up like he was a doll and carried him to the first aid station. Otto also unmistakably loved his food. Despite several heaped helpings of the pasta dinner, he was happily hoeing into a plate of jelly donuts in between sips of his drink.
Pleasingly, Otto’s laugh matched his waistline—it was a glorious, resounding boom of a guffaw that was as genuine and frequent as it was contagious.
Cara couldn’t help but be at ease around the director.