‘Yes?’
‘I don’t know.’ He dug his hands deep in his pockets and swore. ‘You cook a mean chocolate cookie.’
‘I do, don’t I?’ She paused, and then softened. Anger was getting her nowhere. He couldn’t see what was in front of his eyes-that she was falling hopelessly in love with him, and every minute spent with him was making her more miserable. For he didn’t have a clue how to reciprocate such love.
‘Pierce, I’m an art curator,’ she said gently. ‘I’m not a housekeeper. I used you as an emergency stop-gap, and now the emergency is over.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes, for I’ve pulled myself together.’ She gave another sniff as if to prove it. ‘So I’m off back to my world, leaving you to get on with yours.’
‘I still don’t want you to tell Ruby.’
Great. Back onto neutral ground. Well, it was okay with her-if that was all there was.
‘You can’t stop me,’ she said flatly. ‘I won’t be a party to hurting my Aunty Ruby. You’ve hurt her by not telling her about the kids. She knows I’ve been with you, and I’ll be grilled. I won’t lie.’
‘Just don’t go near her.’
‘My lovely Aunty Ruby? Avoid her? Like you have for the last year? I love my Aunt Ruby, and you have rocks in your head for suggesting such a thing.’
‘She’ll give me a really hard time.’ He looked so hangdog that suddenly, despite her heartbreak, she chuckled.
‘She will, too,’ she said. ‘I remember when I was twelve I stayed with her. She was having a time out from fostering-there’d been a couple of heartbreaks and she needed time. So my family sent me to keep her company. You remember that white poodle she had?’
‘Miffanwy.’
‘That’s the one. It spent its days preening itself in front of the front-room mirror.’
‘So…’
‘So I wanted to have a go at dying my hair, but I wasn’t game. So I tried it out first on Miffanwy.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘Flaming scarlet, the packet said, though fire-engine red might be a better description. Anyway Miffanwy darn near had kittens and hid under the bed for days. And I laughed, and Ruby took a mop to me.’
‘A mop?’
‘She was mopping the kitchen floor when Miffanwy came flying out of the bathroom-bright red-and hid behind her legs. I was giggling and she raised her mop. Well, I went flying out of the house and she chased me and chased me. She was a little tub on legs, without a snowball’s chance in a bushfire of catching me. Finally I legged it up a huge eucalyptus in the back yard. Then I was dumb enough to jeer, “You can’t catch me.”
‘And so…?’ he said, and he was smiling. She loved his smile, she thought. She just loved it.
‘And so she simply smiled, put her mop back over her shoulder and marched away. “You’ll be home for dinner,” she said as she left, and I still remember the sinking feeling I had in my stomach as she walked inside.’
‘But she wouldn’t have hit you.’
‘No. Oh, I might have got a faceful of soggy mop and that’d be it. Instead of which, I had to spend three hours every morning for the rest of my holidays scrubbing out kennels at the local dog shelter.’
He grinned. ‘Good old Ruby.’
‘The punishment fits the crime.’
‘It always did.’
‘Shanni, stay.’
It slammed back at her. He was still smiling, that wobbly, endearing smile that had her heart turning somersaults. But she wasn’t going to be drawn in. She wasn’t.
She forced herself to deliberately look behind her. Queen Victoria in widow’s weeds looked sternly down upon them. Victoria, who’d fallen so deeply in love that she’d spent almost half of her life in mourning.
And here was Pierce. A man she could fall for, just like that.
A man she had fallen for.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Because?’
‘Because you don’t understand.’
‘Because of the kiss?’ he demanded.
‘Kisses. If you like.’
He stared at her, baffled. ‘Hell, Shanni, no I don’t understand.’
‘Neither do I,’ she said sadly. ‘I only know I don’t have a choice. I’ll go down to the beach and say goodbye, and then I’m leaving. Please, Pierce, don’t stop me. I just have to…go.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JULES’S floor was really hard. They padded it with cushions, even going out to the shop to buy more, but as a luxury hotel it lacked a certain something.
‘It’s only until my parents are within phone range,’ Shanni reassured her shocked friend. ‘They keep going off to digs in the middle of nowhere.’
‘Then let me lend you some money.’
‘No,’ she said, horrified. Pierce had offered her a loan, too. He’d tried to give her far more than her few days’ work were worth, but she’d refused to take it. She had enough to feed her for a few more days yet. She’d visited the employment agency-‘We don’t get a lot of call for art curators, dear, but if you’d consider waitressing…there’s two positions coming up early next week.’
So she lay among Jules’s cushions, waiting for the waitressing jobs to happen, or for her parents to come down from their mountains, and she tried really hard not to think of how wonderful a time Pierce and the kids would be having at the castle.
She failed.
‘You look like you’ve been hit by a bus,’ Jules said as she flitted in to change on the fourth day Shanni was there. Jules used her apartment as a base for a frantic work and social life. She’d invited Shanni to join her but a round of drinks was higher than Shanni’s budget-and how could she drink when she had a broken heart?
‘I have a broken heart,’ she told Jules.
‘Mike was a fink,’ Jules said. ‘Get over it.’
It wasn’t Mike, but she didn’t tell Jules that. More questions would ensue-questions she couldn’t answer.
On the fifth afternoon at Jules’s the doorbell sounded. She was in the middle of watching a particularly gripping episode of Dallas. It was rerunning for the thirtieth time, but she hadn’t watched it the first time. Or she hadn’t watched it much.
She was in her pyjamas.
She nearly didn’t answer the door, but then got conscientious. Jules’s boyfriend was a romantic who solved arguments with flowers. And they argued often. There were roses in various stages of decomposition all round the apartment. It’d be a delivery person, and surely the least she could do for her friend was accept deliveries.
She stalked over to the door, trying not to think dark thoughts about best friends with a surfeit of roses. She hauled the door open.
Pierce.
‘I thought you were roses,’ she said. Stupidly. He looked fabulous, she thought. Hip-hugging, faded jeans. Open-necked shirt with a button missing. His hair doing this floppy thing over one eye. He was a bit sunburned.
He’d been at the beach. Of course he was sunburned.
He was…Pierce.
‘Roses?’ he asked, and she flinched.
‘They keep arriving.’
‘Roses do?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry I’m not roses. Should I fetch some and bring them back?’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Okay.’ He paused and took in the total package. Bare toes. Pig pyjamas. Hair that hadn’t quite been brushed today.
She wasn’t absolutely sure that the chocolates she’d been eating weren’t evident up there somewhere.
‘You have a brown splodge on your nose,’ he said.
There you go. ‘What of it?’ she muttered.
‘You’re doing a Miss Haversham for Mike?’
‘Miss Haversham?’
‘Dickens’s bride, who sits in her wedding finery for ever and for ever, watching mice run through the last vestiges of wedding cake.’
‘I’m wearing pyjamas and I’m watching Dallas.’
‘So you are. Can I come in?�
��
‘It’s Jules’s apartment.’
‘I promise I’ll keep it neat.’ He looked over her shoulder at the mound of cushions on the floor. Chocolate wrappers. Dying roses.
JR before someone shot him.
‘What do you want?’ she demanded before things went any further. ‘Let’s get this on a business footing. Don’t count chocolate wrappers.’
He smiled. ‘I have good news.’
He shouldn’t smile. It messed with her equilibrium. ‘The kids are happy?’
‘They’re missing you.’
‘They can hardly miss me when I knew them for less than a week.’
‘Yeah.’ He looked hesitant. ‘I guess. They’re having a great time at the castle. The last of Bessy’s chicken pox has disappeared. The kids are living on the beach. Oh, and Kirsty had a baby last night. A little boy. They called him Angus.’
‘That’s lovely.’
‘No, Susie says Angus is her name because that’s what the old earl was called. But Kirsty says she’s loved it for ever, and she met old Angus before Susie did. And Susie’s baby might be a girl.’
‘So…’
‘So all of Dolphin Bay has a view on whether it’s right or wrong. The current thinking is that if Susie’s baby is a boy they should just call him Earl and be done with it.’
‘Right.’ She swallowed. Why did she feel he was talking for the sake of talking? ‘I…Why aren’t you there?’
‘I’m surplus. The kids are happy and I needed to come to a meeting in town.’
‘So you drove up this morning.’
‘And I’m going back tonight.’
‘Right.’
Pause. JR was being icily sarcastic from the television behind them.
‘You’re not depressed, are you?’ Pierce asked, cautious.
‘No.’
Yet another moment’s loaded silence. She should ask him in, she thought.
She couldn’t. The idea was just too dangerous.
Scary.
Almost irresistible.
‘Would you…?’
‘I came to talk to you about Mike.’ He cut across her invitation before she could finish, and she blinked.
‘Mike.’
‘There’s news from Blake.’
‘Blake.’
‘Cut it out with the parrot thing,’ he said, and she managed a smile.
‘Right. Mike and Blake. What have they got to do with the price of eggs?’
‘Nothing, but they have everything to do with your financial situation,’ he told her. ‘Which is solved.’
‘Solved.’
‘Hey, didn’t I tell you-’
‘The parrot thing. Sorry. It’s just you’re so slow.’
‘Blake’s got your money back.’
She didn’t parrot that. She couldn’t. All her breath was knocked out of her.
‘You want to know how he did it?’ He was leaning against the door jamb looking so sexy she could just melt.
‘Of course.’ He ought to sew that button back on, she thought. It was doing her head in.
‘You had a credit card specifically for paying your artists,’ he said, and she somehow hauled her thoughts away from that missing button. Almost.
‘Y…yes.’
‘So your credit limit was huge. You’d buy and sell on almost straight away. The bank was happy with that because your professional reputation was impeccable.’
She found herself blushing. Ever since she’d met this man she’d felt wrong-footed-a dopy adult-cum-kid who was relying on her parents to bail her out. To have him say that…
‘Everywhere Blake enquired he got the same story,’ he said gently. ‘You’re brilliant.’
‘But not with money! Or with trusting. She’d given Mike a duplicate and made him a signatory.
‘See, here’s the thing,’ he said. ‘Blake used the consent forms you signed to track where the money went. If Mike had blown it at the casino you were up the creek without a paddle, but he didn’t. He’s astute, your Mike.’
‘He’s not my Mike.’
‘No.’ Pierce glanced across at JR, who was still not shot. Surely it should be soon? JR was beginning to bug her.
She wanted to focus exclusively on Pierce.
‘What he did was buy paintings,’ Pierce said. ‘Three paintings. Each worth a fortune.’
‘So…’
‘So we’ve got them back,’ Pierce said, not bothering to hide his exultation.
‘You got them back.’
‘You’re doing the parrot thing again.’
‘Will you cut it out?’ She was suddenly yelling. The woman behind her was yelling as well. Daytime soap-it had come to this.
She choked on sudden irrepressible laughter, and Pierce looked gobsmacked.
‘What?’
‘No. Something on telly.’
‘On telly.’
‘Now you’re doing it.’
‘Oh.’
‘Tell me about the paintings.’
‘Blake got an injunction,’ he said-with a visible effort. ‘On those forms you signed you said the partnership was over the day of the water tossing. Blake cancelled the card retrospectively, claiming Mike had no legal right to use a card in your name once the partnership was void, and anything he did buy certainly shouldn’t be his. On that basis Blake got an injunction to seize the paintings, and he moved so fast Mike had no room to object. The paintings will be sold on and used to pay off the card. Seeing Mike bought astutely, Blake seems to think they’ll more than pay off the card, with quite a lot left over. Legally you might have to spilt the profit with Mike, but with records showing you were paying him a salary then there’s a strong case for the entire profit being yours.’
‘Oh, Pierce…’ She was suddenly holding onto the door jamb herself. ‘Oh…’
‘He’s good, our Blake.’
‘He is.’ She wanted to cry.
‘Anyway that’s all I wanted to tell you,’ he said, sounding uncomfortable. ‘I’ll go.’
She wanted to throw her arms round his neck. Dammit…Dammit…
She did throw her arms round his neck. She indulged herself, for one wonderful moment, in burrowing her face in the lovely deep hollow above his collar bone, smelling the clean salt smell of him, feeling his warmth and his strength.
‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ she said, her voice muffled by neck.
But he was putting her away from him, gently but firmly, setting her at arm’s length.
‘That’s fine. You rescued Donald. I rescued you. We’re square.’
Right. Why did she feel like sobbing?
‘Oh, and the letters you wrote to my foster brothers…’
Whoops. Was this why he was holding her at arm’s length? She was so interfering. That was her life skill. To butt into other people’s lives, even if in the process it destroyed her own.
‘They’ve accepted it,’ he said. ‘They don’t understand, but they’ve agreed.’
She’d written to every one of them. Bullied into it, Ruby had given her their email addresses. Blake’s, Connor’s, Sam’s, Darcy’s, Dominic’s and Nikolai’s. She’d said simply that Pierce had adopted five children and had not told Ruby for fear of her wanting to be involved. She’d said that she was Ruby’s niece, that she’d discovered what was going on and that she’d told Ruby. She’d said the biggest way they could hurt Ruby was not to let her share their lives, and that what Pierce had done was cruel. She’d also said their stipulation that Ruby not share her home with whom ever she wanted was leaving Ruby with a lifetime of macramé and no pleasure. So could they please lift their stupid stipulation.
Uh-oh.
‘You read it?’ she whispered.
‘The whole six of them sent it on to me,’ Pierce said. ‘They’ve agreed. The stipulation’s lifted.’
But there was no pleasure in his words. ‘They don’t get it?’
‘They don’t get it.’
‘But you do?’ She held her breath
.
‘Maybe I’m beginning to,’ he said. ‘You’ve taught me a bit. Ruby and her niece Shanni-taking in the waifs and strays of the world.’
‘Hey, it’s not me who’s taught you anything. I’d have hoped the kids could.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘If you have to ask then you really don’t understand. It’s just…’ She took a deep breath. ‘You know, being part of a family, a proper family, leaves you open for all sorts of hurt.’
‘Like when your parents change the locks?’
‘Exactly,’ she said, struggling to figure out what to say next. She was feeling more than a little disadvantaged. He was looking so damned sexy and she was in pyjamas. And she was in no position to lecture him when he’d just saved her financially.
‘But it’d hurt worse if I didn’t have them to change the locks,’ she said.
‘That’s because you haven’t learned to be independent.’
‘I hope I never have to.’
He didn’t reply. He was looking at her but he was looking through her, she thought. Holding himself in check. Not making real contact…
‘What will you do now?’ he asked, and she started, jolted out of preoccupation.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ve lost the lease on your gallery, but there are others. Blake has contacts in the art world. The story about what happened is already in circulation. I think you’ll find it’s Mike who’s the bad guy in all this.’
‘And I’m just the dope.’
‘The story doing the rounds is that he swindled you out of what was legally yours. Your artists would be more than happy to start sending work your way again.’
‘You have been busy.’
‘Blake has.’
‘Wow.’ She hesitated. ‘I’ll write and thank him. And try and explain a bit more about Ruby.’
‘He still won’t understand. And no thanks are necessary. Maybe you could have a drink with him when you go back to London.’
‘Maybe I won’t be going back to London.’
‘No?’
‘I don’t know. I have this fantastic position here, starting Monday.’ No need to tell him it was as a waitress in a railway café.
‘Oh.’
‘But thanks,’ she said awkwardly, and he nodded.
‘My pleasure.’ He hesitated. ‘If you stay…the kids would like to see you again.’
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