by Diana Palmer
“I told you he was cool about it.”
“It’s not the point. I need you to pick your socks up. No more fiascos like today. This is a five-star operation, and our guests don’t want excuses. They want professional courtesy. Excellent facilities. Punctual service.”
Exasperation, something she rarely gave in to, bubbled to the surface. “You should have confirmed the time. That’s our deal. And do you think I can just conjure up vehicles out of nowhere?”
He scowled. He was a big man, like their father, but lately he had appeared more beefy than powerful.
“We need the club, Lucy. We cannot afford not to be on the Global List.”
She rolled her eyes. “Seems to me we’d be a lot busier if we were allowed to advertise in the normal places, instead of just the stupid list.”
“The Global List is regarded as one of the top three accommodation publications in the world. I don’t think you appreciate the honor it is to be included.”
Lucy privately thought it was a bit high-handed of the club to demand exclusive advertising rights. “Honor is all very nice, Tom, but it won’t pay the bills, and you do seem worried about money all of a sudden.”
“Which is something you have never given the slightest thought to,” Tom retorted. “Swanning off all over the world for years with your hand out.”
That stung, even as she recognized the truth in it. She loved traveling, and goodness knows she hadn’t been wanted around here since her mother had left. But the moment she’d heard of her father’s stroke, she had come home.
Never mind that it served as a timely escape from a tricky entanglement.
And when Tom had asked, she was only too pleased to help him with the business. But the truth was, she didn’t really care about the lodge. Of course she would hate to see it fail, but her love was the forty thousand acres of countryside. Her birthright—and Tom’s.
“I’m sorry for that, and I’ll do anything I can to help.”
Trouble was, with the life she had led so far, she didn’t know how much help she would be.
“Anything?”
She touched his hand, feeling sorry he’d had to carry this burden alone. “Anything. You’re really worried, aren’t you?”
“I am. If you want to help, I’d like you to think about selling the land. Part of it, anyway.”
Lucy jerked her hand back. “The land? Our land?”
“Lucy, since the farm manager quit a year ago, I’ve let the farm run right down. Half the stock that’s left is wild. And the rest I pay next door to drench and move. We either need the farm to pay its own way or get the money for it. Otherwise how will we keep this place up to scratch?”
She could hardly believe her ears. Foreboding, deep and menacing, hollowed out her stomach. “What’s going on, Tom? Why are things so bad?”
He turned away from her, his shoulders slumped. “It’s a downturn in the market, that’s all. We have to be prepared to explore other options.”
“I’d sell the lodge before the land any day,” she declared. “This is farming country. It’s McKinlay farming country.”
“It’s a last resort, Lucy. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. We have to make sure Magnus has a great hunt and his wife has an equally good time.” He turned off the lights to the bar and stood at the door, impatiently waving her through.
“You wouldn’t…You can’t be serious.” How could he drop a bombshell like that and then just expect her to go to bed? She stalked past him, fingers of agitation squeezing her throat.
“And try to organize a tour or something for Rae,” Tom ordered, his imperious voice riling her further. “I don’t like the idea of him sniffing around while I’m on the hunt.”
“Perhaps I should give him a tour of me,” she told him snippily. “I could seduce him. Get him on our side that way.”
She almost laughed at her half brother’s shock.
“You will not! You’ll keep your distance and be totally professional with that guy. I know his type—all business. He’d eat you for breakfast.”
Lucy turned her back on him. “Man, I wish I knew what was bugging you lately.” She shot him a scowl as she stomped off down the hall. “I was joking.”
“I mean it, Lucy,” Tom called after her. “Keep away from Rae. He’s dangerous.”
Chapter Three
Lucy rose in the half light, too restless to sleep. As was her custom when she stayed at Summerhill, she put her swimsuit on under a warm track suit, tossed a towel around her shoulders and skipped downstairs and out to the pool. It was just past six-thirty and she expected to have the pool to herself, but, to her dismay, she had been superseded.
A dark-haired figure made short work of the thirty-three-meter pool, long powerful arms scything effortlessly through the water.
Yes. She had wondered if he might be a swimmer or long-distance runner. Ethan would not lift weights or play a stop-start team sport. His body had the long clean lines that epitomised endurance, power with leashed—as opposed to explosive—energy.
She watched from the door as he executed a perfect turn: sleek, smooth, long-reaching. Lucy could not tear her eyes away and just as she was about to step fully into the room, Tom’s comment of the night before came back to her. Keep away…He’s dangerous.
The whole upsetting conversation returned and she backed away.
It was necessary to release some tension, get moving. If swimming was out, an early-morning ride was the next best thing. Ten minutes later she exited the house and walked quickly to the stables. Monty, her horse, nickered in greeting. She lifted the pail of water to his gray nose and dug a couple of sugar cubes, filched from the breakfast tables, from her pocket.
“Monty the Monster,” she chanted as she saddled him. He tossed his head and nudged her, looking for more sugar. “Frisky today.” Lucy raised the pail again. He’d need a drink. She intended to use him hard.
They set off into the cool, dim morning, the struggling sun unable to pierce the clouds. The first part of the trail was tricky, especially in the dawn light. But about half an hour up, the trail planed out into a fast ride along the top of the huge gorge that ringed the valley. And when Monty took that final step up out of the scree and thistle and onto the plateau she pulled him up, patting and talking for a minute, and then gave him his head.
“Go boy, go!”
Lucy hunched forward, every muscle in her body screaming. Cold tears stung her cheeks. Her mouth twisted in concentration and velocity and her eyes squeezed into thin slits. Her Polar Fleece cap protected her ears, and sheepskin-lined gloves ensured her fingers were not stiffened with the cold.
“Ha! Good fella!” she yelled, her legs jammed hard into the horse’s flanks.
They raced just a few feet from the lip of the gorge that sliced the land down sixty or seventy meters to the river below. This gorge ringed Thunderstrike Valley for as far as the eye could see, across to the great Southern Alps.
When it was over, they slumped, heads hanging, breathing in great gulps of freezing air. Her cheek rested on the steaming neck of the animal for a minute or more until the horse moved restlessly. Then she roused herself and slid shakily down.
She loosened Monty’s saddle and drew a grubby scrap of towelling from the saddlebag, rubbing the horse’s chest and sides briskly. He seemed intent on backing away from her toward a patch of greenery. She tugged him over to a big overhang of rock. It crouched like a frog, ten meters from the edge of the gorge. Boulders and shrubs of prickly, yellow-flowered gorse clustered at its base. There was an opening that you could not see unless you stood directly in front of it.
Her special place.
She pulled off her hat and looped the reins over Monty’s neck, leaving him to fossick through the tussock for food.
Stiff-arming a clump of gorse, she bent slightly and moved fully into the aperture. There was a large flat rock, fully three square meters and slightly elevated, so the view was unhindered above the foliage at the entrance.
And the view was spectacular.
Her mother had sometimes brought her here as a child, placing her in front of her on the saddle. Lucy remembered the smell of her, her mother’s long hair tickling Lucy’s face, the thrill of clinging to the horse, as it climbed almost vertically up the steep cliff.
“I spy, with my little eye—” her childish voice would ring out in the semicave “—something beginning with…”
She’d help unwrap the sandwiches they had brought. They would play for hours. Once they’d been caught in a storm. Her mother pulled her well back into the cave and held her close, pressing her head into her bosom. But Lucy wasn’t having it. “I want to see!” She squirmed and managed to ease her head around to watch the tongues of electricity lashing the valley. She exulted at the show, but her mother had trembled.
Now, a watery sun eased out of the dawn, and the early winter snowcaps of the mountains were hidden in thick pearl clouds. It was so quiet, the silence surged at her. She strained to see the snaking river below. Her eyes prickled and blurred, like the mist that snagged on the tops of the trees on the foothills.
She could not lose this. Her whole aimless existence came down to this, the panorama laid out in front of her. She had carried it all over the world inside her, and it far surpassed any landscape she had seen. Somehow, this view intermingled with her need to belong. Her last resort.
In truth, she knew that the times up here with her mother were the last times she had felt truly cherished. Had felt lovable.
Monty nickered and blew and was answered in kind. Alarmed, Lucy craned her neck around the gorse in time to see Ethan Rae dismount from Tilly, one of Summerhill’s mares. A jolt of pleased agitation surged through her. Would this man not leave her in peace?
Ethan walked straight up to Monty and placed a confident hand on the gelding’s neck.
Fighting a wild urge to stay hidden, Lucy slid along on her bottom to the entrance, then stood, using her arm to brush back the gorse. She didn’t want him to worry. “How did you find your way up here?” she called.
His dark head snapped up and swiveled to find her. Was it pleasure causing her blood to race in her veins, or irritation at being disturbed while in an emotional mood?
“Followed you when you left the pool.” He turned his back momentarily to loop his mare’s reins around her neck and give Monty another pat.
As he approached, he made a thorough perusal of her warm sheepskin jacket and riding boots over black denims. “Beautiful place.”
Lucy nodded. “My special place.”
“Can see why.”
She noticed he was still looking at her rather than the view. “I used to come up here with my mother.”
Lucy tugged off her gloves, tossed them down and dug her bare hands deep into her pockets. Without invitation, he sat himself down on her rock. It was a big rock with more than enough room for two, but she remained on her feet. Somehow sharing her rock in this place, her special place, seemed too…intimate. Especially with someone who tickled her hormones the way he did.
If he had even an inkling of the thoughts racing through her mind, he seemed at ease with it. He made himself comfortable and peered up at her. “Are you like your mother?”
She kicked her toe into a tussock. “Physically.” Too much, she thought. She nearly smiled, remembering Ellie’s screams, as if there’d been a murder, when she’d found Lucy in the kitchen, scissors in hand and a pile of silvery locks slithering around her feet.
“Are you close?”
Lucy felt her mother’s hands in her hair, braiding it. Remembered the smell of the rose-scented lotion she liked to wear. “I thought so.”
There were many happy memories. All the neighboring farms got together and helped each other at busy times. The big old table in the dining room was often crammed to over-capacity, and elbows cracked and nudged. Loud and raucous laughter rang out, exciting the array of dogs banished to the step. And Thomas would be at the head of the table, louder and happier than everyone.
“I haven’t seen her since she left.”
He raised his dark brows.
“I was eight,” she told him. “She ran off with one of the cowhands.” She folded her arms around herself. “She was twenty years younger than Dad,” she told him, as if to qualify it.
In the pause that followed, Lucy felt a confusing disquiet that she had just divulged her mother’s true behavior to a virtual stranger. It had long been her way to make up the most extravagant fairy tales to her foreign friends. Her loving indulgent parents. Wonderful homelife. Mother-daughter shopping excursions to London and Paris.
Somehow it seemed wrong to lie here, in this place. Maybe it was because it was not only the last place she had felt lovable, but also honest.
Ethan nodded. “He never remarried?”
“No. It knocked the stuffing out of him.”
Belle’s defection had stunned the small community where the McKinlays were practically royalty. Thomas McKinlay was a big man in the district. Many had warned him about taking such a young bride.
“You were close to your father?” he asked.
Lucy considered. Close? After his stroke, he could hardly tell her he didn’t want her around. When her mother had left, so had he in a sense. His withdrawal from her was nearly complete, as if she wasn’t worthy of his regard. “Not really. Not since I was little.” She shrugged and turned away. “I looked too much like Mum.”
Cutting her hair short hadn’t changed anything. Not in her father’s embittered eyes. “It wasn’t his fault. He was heartbroken. Humiliated. Before he had the stroke six months ago, I hadn’t really been home, except for the odd weekend, since I was sent away to boarding school.”
She liked it that he didn’t mutter trite platitudes. Why should he care that her parents hadn’t loved her?
“Were you good at school?”
Distracted by his interest, she eased down onto the rock, careful to keep plenty of distance between them. “Terrible.” She grinned. “I mean, really.”
“Academically or behaviorally?”
“Both. I’m dyslexic.”
Ethan blew out a long breath. “Not a hanging offence.”
She pointed her pert nose in the air and put on an aristocratic tone. “Not allowed at my school. It didn’t happen to high-class, privately educated ‘gels’ like me. And we dyslexics became expert at covering it up.”
“How?”
“By being naughty, of course,” Lucy replied promptly.
Like most dyslexics, she had mastered any number of ways to cover up her disability so as not to be singled out as different. Usually, this involved getting into trouble or charming people. She laughed a lot, chattered a lot and found that teachers and schoolmates overlooked homework not done, exams failed or not attended.
“Not one teacher tried…?”
“Listen, I was rich. I suppose they thought I’d be all right. We high-class ‘gels’ are only biding our time till our posh wedding to some rich guy anyway, right?” She laughed. “Who needs education?”
Ethan drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around them. “Yesterday—you said you’d mixed up the times.”
Lucy rolled her eyes. Because of his reaction last night, she didn’t feel embarrassed. “See, it seems perfectly logical to someone like me to take the seven out of seventeen hundred hours and translate that to 7:00 p.m.”
He nodded, a smile tugging the corner of his mouth. “Of course. My fault.”
She liked him for saying that, even though it wasn’t true. Then she remembered who he worked for. “You don’t have to worry, Ethan. Tom takes care of all the office stuff, the bookings and so on. Yesterday was just a misunderstanding. It was me that goofed.”
He held up his hands. “Not worried.”
A faint pole of yellow light slanted between them from the entrance, distracting her. She pushed herself to her feet. “The sun’s arrived.”
Ethan watched her walk away to stand at the edge of the gorge. �
��Poor little rich girl” went through his mind. Beauty, money, prestige. But it wasn’t all roses in this garden of Eden. Dyslexic. Cut off from the love she craved, the love of her parents. Maybe, he thought, the two of them were not so different after all.
Except that she still found it within herself to be loyal toward her jerk of a brother and compassionate in the face of her parents’ indifference. Could he?
His own proud and aloof attitude toward his father had never softened over the years. He had long ignored the resignation in his father’s voice when Ethan once again cancelled a family dinner or rushed off ten minutes after arriving.
He knew he didn’t have it in him, like Lucy, to be compassionate toward a man he had no respect for, purely because that man was his father.
“Look!” Her voice, girlishly excited, roused him. He rose from the rock and walked to her.
“A rainbow.” She pointed out over the valley, squinting a little in the silvery haze.
Ethan exhaled, coming level with her. “You can see forever.”
Lucy nodded and let her head loll back a little.
“Where does your place end?”
Her arm, still outstretched, made a long sweep. They stood at the head of the valley with the Alps at the far end. It was not a picture-perfect postcard; it was too rugged. The mountains jutted from the milky water of the winding river. Gouges, crude and immense, were hewn into closer, dun-coloured foothills that had their own kind of magnificence. Great swatches of dark, dull green denoted forest that halted and then started up again without any sort of order.
He could barely take it all in. The vision seemed magnified, too big for a country the size of New Zealand. A long-buried scrap of wonder rose up from his jaded mind and soared from the bottom of the faroff rainbow, which curved down to kiss the silvery rock, to the hazy tips of the mountains.
It was another world from the one he knew. He was used to taming land. It was his profession. But the lands that attracted tourists were calm and tranquil places. There was no calmness here, it was savage in parts.