by Valerie Parv
Inside were more reminders in the shape of state-of-the-art computers and other equipment she couldn’t identify. There was little of the coach house atmosphere remaining here. The rough-hewn boards had been lined and painted a gleaming ivory, but the floorboards remained uncovered, polished to a glowing patina. A pair of telephones had gadgets attached to them, presumably for extra security. In curious contrast to the messy state of his housekeeping pre-Kylie, this place was a model of neatness and order.
The only place where chaos reigned was a corner fenced off by a childproof barrier behind which was a collection of brightly colored toys and cuddly animals. “For Maree?”
He nodded. “When I couldn’t find a nanny, I started bringing her in with me while I worked. She enjoys the bright lights and chirping sounds of the equipment, and I talk to her. Sometimes if I’m stuck on a project I get in there with her and we play together. It blows the cobwebs away and she adores it.”
The image of Nicholas playing baby games with Maree behind the barrier brought a lump to Bethany’s throat. It wasn’t that she couldn’t imagine him down on the floor playing This Little Piggy Went to Market. She could imagine it all too vividly, and a longing for such a simple, elemental experience with her own child tore through her and she turned away to avoid letting him see her distress.
He misunderstood her sudden withdrawal. “I realize this isn’t what you want to see.” He directed her toward a timber staircase leading to the loft. It wasn’t the original staircase, being too modern and sturdy, but upstairs was another matter. The loft looked as if it was a repository for everything the household no longer used. Period furniture, old trunks and framed pictures peeped out from under dustcovers. It wasn’t really dusty. In fact the area was spotlessly clean in deference to the computer equipment in the lower room. But the impression was of a rarely visited attic, and she had to suppress an urge to sneeze at the dust, which existed only in her imagination.
She waited at the head of the stairs as Nicholas went to one of the covers and pulled it away. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”
A cry of astonishment was wrenched from her. “Nicholas, it’s beautiful.” The dollhouse was the most perfect example of colonial architecture in miniature she had ever seen. It stood about two and a half feet tall and almost four feet wide with a colonnaded portico supporting a balcony. The windows were evenly spaced in the style favored by English designers of the post-Waterloo period.
The entire front opened to reveal a Palladian villa in miniature.
She dropped to her knees and peered into the central staircase saloon, which had an arcade circling it on the floor above. The saloon’s flagging floor was designed to look like sandstone, while brass hardware and cedar joinery faithfully reproduced the style of the period. Eight perfectly proportioned rooms opened off the saloon.
A dining room had dark red walls and Victorian-style mahogany furniture. A perfect replica of an 1841 John Broadwood piano looked as if it could be played, and a tiny marble fireplace surrounded a perfectly set fire, awaiting only the touch of a match to bring it to flickering life.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said hoarsely, touching each small piece of furniture with a fingertip. It was a faithful record in miniature of life in early Australia during the colonial period. How could anyone hide away such a treasure? But when her entranced gaze went to Nicholas’s face she was shocked to find none of the awe she felt, but only cold rejection of the house and its marvelous contents.
She closed up the house and stumbled to her feet. “What is it, Nicholas? You said this house almost destroyed your family.”
He threw aside another dustcover, revealing a carved love seat which his gesture invited her to use. Instead of joining her he began to pace the length of the loft. “There’s not a lot to tell, and perhaps it’s less dramatic than my memories want to make it. The dollhouse was made for my great-great-grandmother by one of the colonial architects who also designed Elizabeth Bay House. When I was a boy the thing was kept in a place of honor in the formal living room.”
Now Bethany understood why the design looked so familiar. Elizabeth Bay House still stood on the shores of Sydney Harbour, and historical records described it as “the finest house in the colony.” If the Frakes Baby House was modeled on it, it was a find indeed.
But to her surprise she found the house concerned her less than Nicholas’s reaction to it. “What happened?” she prompted, releasing the breath she was unaware she’d been holding. She felt as if she stood outside a locked door and Nicholas held the key. Opening it would either bring them closer together or drive them apart for all time, she sensed.
He pulled in a deep breath. “Word got around about it, and people frequently came asking to see it. My mother loved the company and was happy to show it off to anyone who came by, but Dad hated strangers dropping in. After my grandparents died he wanted to pack the house away out of public view. It was the source of more arguments between my parents than anything else.”
It was an unpleasant association but it hardly explained the extent of his aversion to the lovely object, she thought. She schooled herself to silence, sure Nicholas had more to tell her.
She was right. “When I was about eleven, a man called from Sydney to ask if he could see the dollhouse. My father was away but my mother encouraged the visit.” There was a long pause before Nicholas said in a low voice, “He came several times, supposedly to see the house. I didn’t realize it was my mother he really wanted to see until the day she ran away with him. She never came back.”
“You can’t think there was anything you could have done?” Bethany offered, although it was obvious that Nicholas did think so. There was self-reproach in every line of his expression.
He dragged stiff fingers through his short-cropped hair. “It hardly matters now, does it? She and the man moved to England, and the only contact we have is an occasional card at Christmas.”
“How did your father take it?”
Nicholas’s answering look was bleak. “He was never exactly outgoing, but after she left he withdrew completely into a shell and wouldn’t let anyone near him emotionally. It took him another ten years to complete the job, but I believe he began to die from the time my mother told him she was leaving.”
Coming from a large, supportive family herself, she found it hard to imagine how lonely life must have been for Nicholas and his brother, abandoned by their mother and cut off from their father by the depth of his own grief. No wonder he found no joy in the dollhouse which had brought only misery to his family. “Didn’t your father have friends or relatives he could turn to?”
Nicholas shook his head, his eyes like chips of ice. “There’s only his sister who lives in Queensland and has a large family. Rowan and I spent occasional holidays with her, but Dad preferred to stay here alone. Thank goodness Aunt Edna showed us that it wasn’t normal to cocoon yourself away from the rest of society, otherwise Rowan and I might have turned into hermits like our father.”
She hadn’t known Rowan, but his plans to turn Yarrawong into a bed and breakfast for travelers suggested he had been far from hermitlike. And Nicholas wasn’t the type to cut himself off from life, she would swear to it. She had never met a man with a greater zest for living or a more powerful ability to love. Her own brief taste of his passion filled her with a yearning so strong it took her breath away. “I don’t think you have it in you,” she denied softly.
His eyebrow angled upward cynically. “So you’re an expert on my character now?”
She linked her hands in her lap to conceal her rising tension. “Two kisses hardly make me an expert.”
Some of the coldness left his expression, and he took a step toward her, his pewter eyes glittering a challenge. “That sounds a lot like an invitation, Bethany.”
She hadn’t intended it as one, at least not consciously, but in any case it was too late. He loomed over her on the love seat, planting an arm on either side of her body, effectiv
ely trapping her. When she started to rise, his arms closed around her and he lifted her against him. She felt his strength melt whatever resistance she might have offered.
“What are you doing?” she whispered around a throat tight with emotion.
“Making you an expert on Nicholas Devlin Frakes,” he ground out, tasting her with his lips between each word until she trembled with the delicious eroticism of it.
She wasn’t alone, she realized as she felt his body harden against her. Desire more powerful than anything she’d ever experienced roared through her, starting somewhere at the base of her spine and surging all the way to the top of her head. Her gasp of astonishment opened her mouth against his, and he made the most of the chance to weave a dance of delight around the moist cavern with his tongue.
She didn’t pull back although distantly there was the thought that she should. It was far more pleasurable to answer his kisses with her own, while his hands played a melody of tactile delight along her spine.
Nicholas felt his own senses start to spin. He had meant to demonstrate that Bethany was no expert on his innermost feelings. Women always thought they understood a man as soon as they learned a few things about his history. He had read it in her face as he told her about his mother running off with the man who came to see the dollhouse. Bethany had decided instantly that it was the reason why he hated the house.
It would never occur to her that he hated the role it had played in destroying his father, more than anything it had done to Nicholas himself. Long before his mother ran away she had used the house as leverage to annoy his father. The more his dad had objected to strangers traipsing through their home, the more his mother had put out the welcome mat. The baby house, as Bethany called it, was a symbol of everything that had been amiss in his parents’ marriage, and that was why he didn’t want it in his sight.
He had kissed her by way of making a point, never expecting his heartbeat to start pounding as if he’d run a marathon or to have a hunger so strong it was like a drug ripping through his system. It threw him completely off center.
Logic demanded he release her and apologize for letting things get out of hand. But they were already so far out of hand that letting her go was the last thing on his mind. He bent his head and kissed the sweet hollow of her throat just above the inviting shadow between her breasts. Her T-shirt had escaped the waistband of her jeans, and a whimper of pleasure leaped from her throat as he slid his hand upward to gently explore her feminine fullness.
Her skin reminded him of ice cream, smooth-textured and creamy, and rich as sin. Raiding the freezer for a spoonful of the frozen treat when no one was looking had been one of his guilty pleasures as a child. There was the same sense of dipping into something forbidden now as his questing fingers located one tiny peak of hardness and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, then bestowed the same attention to its twin. She gasped, and he felt her shudder resonate through his own body.
He no longer wanted to teach her anything except how good it would feel when they made love, he thought dizzily. He felt as if he was about to explode with the force of his arousal, and he didn’t doubt she felt the same way. The couch was behind her, practically inviting him to press her down onto it and show her how to reach up and pull down the stars from the sky.
Except that this wasn’t the place. He wanted to make love to Bethany more than he had wanted anything in a long time, but when it happened he wanted it to be special. Not rough and ready, in a loft filled with unhappy memories.
Even so it took all the resolve he possessed to set her away from him, holding on to her until he was sure her legs were steady enough. Her pupils were huge and black, and there was a red mark on her throat from his mouth. He traced it with his thumb pad, and she looked at him in a daze, her hands trembling slightly. “Why did you stop?”
“I never should have started,” he growled.
She misunderstood he saw as soon as the words were out of his mouth. “So you think it’s all a mistake?”
“I didn’t say any such thing. I brought you up here to look at a dollhouse, not to seduce you, not now, anyway.”
Her head came up, her eyes widening until she reminded him of one of the wild bush creatures. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea now—or any other time,” she said with unsteady emphasis. “You admitted the dollhouse has nothing but bad associations for you. Yet collecting them and writing about them is my work and my avocation.”
“Then maybe it’s time I changed my opinion of them,” he said in a low voice, surprising both of them, himself most of all. “You could be just what I need to make the change work.”
She looked shakily pleased but lifted her hand and gnawed the back of one knuckle. “I’m not sure I care to be used as therapy.”
The gesture did such extraordinary things to his insides that he almost wrapped his arms around her again. He held himself back by sheer effort of will. “You won’t be used at all, Bethany. Not by me or any other man. Whatever we decide to do will be by mutual consent, and I promise you it will be unforgettable.”
He was afraid he’d alarmed her when he saw her mouth drop open, although she must have been as aware of the electricity crackling between them as he was. A moment ago they’d practically been incinerated by it. “I’d better go and get Maree. It’s almost time for Kylie to go home.”
“What’s the matter, Bethany?” Her eyes, which had been bright with passion, were still softly luminous. She looked edgy, as if she almost—but not quite—regretted the last few minutes. Then he cursed himself for being an idiot. “Is there someone at home for you?”
Her head came up. “No, there’s no one.”
“But there was?” He was fishing, but instinct told him he was on the right track.
“For a while I thought there was. I was wrong.”
“It ended badly?”
“My mistake was in thinking it ever really started.”
She moved toward the staircase, but he forestalled her with a gesture. “You stay here and take a good look through the dollhouse. I’ll look after Maree. It is my day off,” he reminded her when she started to protest about it being her job. “Take all the time you like. I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”
She gave in without an argument, probably because she couldn’t wait to examine that blasted house, he guessed. What was it with women and miniature things? Every woman who’d ever crossed the threshold of Yarrawong had gone weak over the house. Maybe it brought out their maternal instincts or something.
It sure didn’t bring out his, he thought as he bounded down the stairs and crossed the cobbled courtyard to the main house. In the loft with Bethany, the house had been the last thing on his mind. It showed how powerfully she distracted him, when he had stopped noticing it was there.
He should have known there was a man in her recent past. She was too beautiful and sweet not to be fighting them off in droves. It sounded as if there was only one, past tense. Nor did it take a psychologist to work out that she had been hurt when it ended. She had said she didn’t want to be therapy for Nicholas over the dollhouse, but maybe they could help each other. He had a feeling he was just the tonic she needed to get over that affair that “hadn’t really started.”
Telling himself it was for her, he began to plan the evening. First he would get Maree fed and settled for the night. With luck and a day of fresh air, she would sleep soundly tonight. Then he would prepare a dinner guaranteed to take Bethany’s mind off any man but himself.
Candles, they needed candles, he thought as he put the finishing touches to the meal an hour or so later. He found candles in a drawer in the dining room, but there were no holders, so he dropped a couple of shot glasses into the center of a bowl of flowers Kylie had put on the table and supported the candles in them. The effect was sure to impress Bethany, he decided, standing back to admire his handiwork.
Humming under his breath he dimmed the room lights and went to fetch his dinner companion.
“It looks wonderful,” she enthused when he led her into the dining room. “I have to change. This deserves more than a T-shirt and jeans.”
“Make it quick, dinner’s almost ready,” he said. It hadn’t occurred to him to give her time to dress up. He was perfectly happy with what she had on, especially the way it outlined the full, high curves of her breasts, but he kept the opinion to himself.
He was glad he had, when she emerged a scant ten minutes later wearing a short black number that did even more amazing things for her shape. The dress had a heart-shaped front and spaghetti straps which crossed over in a pattern above the low-cut back. During the day the sun had kissed her skin with gold. It was all he could do to keep his mind on serving their dinner of fine pasta with a local delicacy made of pork and beef marinated in red wine and seasoned with pepper and spices, and a salad of greens from his own garden.
The wine was a particularly good Shiraz from Craiglea winery, close to Melbourne. For dessert he had a selection of berries from the Musk Valley, served with fresh brandy cream.
He lifted his glass to her. “To a woman I knew was special from the time she first walked through my bedroom.” It was the literal truth, but her color heightened at the reminder. It was a long time since he’d known a female who blushed as prettily as Bethany did, and it brought out all his he-man protective instincts.
“I only walked through it because the front door was locked. I didn’t stay there,” she protested.
“A problem I’ll happily rectify,” he said, meeting her eyes over the rim of his wineglass. In the flickering light of the candles she looked tiny and ethereal, like an angel at his table. He only hoped he was right and there was a touch of devil there, too.
She forked some beef into her mouth which was outlined in shell pink tonight. “This is delicious.”
“You’re changing the subject.”
She shook her head. “I’m appreciating your talents.”