A Case For Trust

by Gracie MacGregor

  ‘I’ll walk you to your car.’

  His cool authority brought her up short. ‘Thank you, but there’s really no need, Mr …’

  ‘It’s getting dark. I’ll walk you to your car.’

  Pippa wondered fleetingly if she was supposed to feel reassured by his insistence. She tried again. ‘It’s not far. I wouldn’t want to keep you from the celebrations …’

  ‘How far?’

  Pippa damned herself for all sorts of fool. She’d done the right thing and parked her car at the bottom of the hill below the lighthouse, rather than take one of the limited number of parking spots near the reception venue. She’d expected to sneak away quietly, to be able to change her high heels for the ballet flats in her briefcase before making her way down the treacherous, winding, long—and yes, dark—road to her car. But she wasn’t about to tell Mr Hostile that. She waved vaguely in the direction of the cars behind them. ‘Just over there. I’ll be a few minutes yet, I need to pack up a couple more things. Please, don’t let me keep you from the reception …’

  ‘You’re not keeping me. I’ll help you pack up.’

  Pippa almost stomped her foot in frustration. ‘Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t know you from Adam. It’s kind of you to offer, thank you, but I don’t need your help packing up and I’ll be fine getting myself to my car.’

  ‘I’m Matt Mason. And I’m walking you to your car because I want to tell you some things you’re not going to want anybody else hearing.’

  ‘Matt Mason? Justin’s brother Matt?’

  Pippa’s surprise at Mr Hostile’s identity temporarily distracted her from the rest of his statement. She’d heard of Matt, of course she had. He was the eldest of five siblings, the heir to the Mason legal dynasty, a formidable commercial lawyer and … The rest of his words, their implied meaning, caught up with her, and her delighted smile slackened. She looked at him uncertainly. ‘I can’t imagine what you want to talk to me about, Mr Mason, but I’m afraid I can’t discuss my clients with anyone, not even their brothers. It would be unethical—’

  ‘What would you know about unethical?’ The savage snap confirmed Pippa hadn’t imagined his earlier hostility. ‘You call yourself an accredited marriage celebrant, you purport to have some training in psychology and relationship counselling—oh yes, I’ve seen your website, Ms Lloyd—but you have a curious interpretation of ethical conduct when you commence affairs with your clients and destroy their relationships.’

  Alternately bewildered and horrified by his accusation, frightened by the barely suppressed violence of his anger, all the more threatening in its quiet, assured delivery, Pippa fought a lifetime’s habit to placate and appease. Instead she lifted her chin a little higher, met his glare with her own.

  ‘I will not discuss my clients with you, Mr Mason. My affairs, and theirs, are none of your business.’

  ‘You don’t deny it, then? You don’t deny your role in ending my brother’s engagement to Lucy? For god’s sake, they were going to be married, they came to you—’

  ‘I will not discuss my clients with you. Goodnight, Mr Mason.’

  Pippa was proud of the way she controlled her breath and her tone. She could do nothing about her hands, trembling as she snapped shut the lock on her briefcase, but she trusted the darkness to hide their tremors. He grabbed her elbow as she turned away, and she almost stumbled in her stilettoes as she wrenched her arm out of his grip, her skin burning from the brief contact. ‘Do not manhandle me!’

  ‘I wasn’t manhandling you.’ He shoved his hands in his pockets and glared at her. ‘We’re not done yet.’

  ‘Oh yes, Mr Mason, we are very much done.’ Pippa snatched up her briefcase, spun on her spindly heels and strode away. Her confident exit was spoiled a little when she realised she would have to pretend to walk to the car park. She was sure those laser-like eyes were burning another hole in her back. Damn the man, why didn’t he take himself inside the reception hall so she could escape in peace? She stopped at the first row of parked cars, fiddled with her handbag as if looking for keys, covertly glanced under her lashes to see if he was still watching her …

  ‘Which is your car?’

  He was right there behind her again, and she almost yelped in alarm. ‘Don’t sneak up on me like that! Will you leave me alone, or do I have to scream for help?’

  Right on cue, Pippa saw Justin Mason’s familiar figure appear, backlit, in the doorway of the venue behind them. Thank god! Relief coloured her voice as she called out to him, falsely cheerful, determinedly enthusiastic. ‘Justin! Over here!’

  Justin sauntered towards them, his hands buried in his pockets mirroring his older brother’s stance, and Pippa berated herself for not noticing the family resemblance earlier. If she had realised Mr Hostile was Justin’s brother, she might have avoided this whole unpleasant scene. Although, for the life of her, she’d never imagined she would come under such an attack simply for doing her job. Where had Matt Mason got the idea she was having an affair with Justin?

  ‘Matt, is that you? Been looking for you everywhere. And Pippa? I thought you left a while ago, or I’d have had you on the dance floor.’

  Pippa ignored the muffled, humourless snort that came from behind her. ‘I was just leaving. I’ll let you both return to the party.’

  ‘You sure? There’s champagne going begging …’

  ‘Thanks, but no. Can’t be drinking and driving.’

  ‘Shame. We should have planned this better. A few of us are staying over at Brad’s parents’ place. You could have bunked down with us. In fact, why don’t you stay over anyway, go back tomorrow …’

  Pippa shook her head. ‘Thanks, but I need to get home. Big day tomorrow, early start.’

  ‘Fair enough. I’ll walk you to your car then. Where is it?’

  Justin’s eyes were scanning the parked cars and, predictably, not spotting hers among them. Aware of the intense, silent scrutiny of Justin’s disapproving brother, Pippa wished, not for the first time that hour, the ground would open up and swallow her. Chivalry clearly ran through the Mason family veins. If she’d been smarter, she would have agreed to one soft drink and escaped both brothers at the earliest opportunity.

  ‘Pippa? I don’t see your car?’

  ‘It’s okay, it’s down the hill.’ She forced the admission through a politely tight smile and ignored the unpleasant, knowing smirk that distorted Matt Mason’s handsome face. Fine, so she’d been caught out in a lie. He could add it to the repertoire of sins, real and imagined, he seemed to attribute to her.

  ‘I was just offering to escort Ms Lloyd to her car when you appeared, Justin. There’s no need for us both to go. Why don’t you head back into the party?’

  Whether it was Matt’s words or his tone, that trace of condescension, that raised Justin’s hackles, Pippa couldn’t say, but she saw a sudden provocation, a defiant, proprietorial bristling in his face. Justin rocked back on his heels a little, considering them both. Pippa thought she imagined some electric charge passing between the brothers that suggested a couple of stallions in a corral. Surely, surely they weren’t going to fight over her? It was laughable. She wasn’t the kind of woman men fought over. But there was a tension between the two that was palpable. She put a gentling hand on Justin’s arm.

  ‘I really don’t need an escort, but while we’re arguing about it you’re missing the celebrations. Perhaps it would be quicker, easier for everyone, if you just drove me down to my car, Justin? It will only take a minute, and then nobody will have the long walk back up the hill.’

  ‘Justin’s car is parked in. But mine is right here. I’ll run you down.’

  Pippa didn’t bother to look where Matt gestured. Justin was already arguing. ‘No need for you to do it, Matt, just lend me your keys. I’ll take her, and be back in a few minutes.’

  ‘Not on your bloody life. You’re not driving my car with a bellyful of champagne.’

  ‘I’ve had one glass—’

 
Enough was enough. Ignoring the bickering brothers, Pippa turned and strode as fast as she could along the road that ran beside the cliff, slowed just a little by her sharp-pointed heels sinking into the sun-warmed bitumen. When she got to the bench seat up ahead, she would swap her stilettoes for the flats in her briefcase.

  She’d made fair progress towards her objective when she heard the low, pulsing thrum of the car engine behind her; she determinedly ignored it until it pulled ahead of her, stopped, and the passenger door was flung open.

  ‘Get in.’

  For a second she seriously considered disobeying the command. Considered running full pelt down the hill. Considered hurling herself over the cliff into the Pacific Ocean below. Anything but getting into a confined space to spend one more minute with Matt Mason.

  She got in, and let the slamming door speak for her. The car didn’t move.

  ‘Fasten your seatbelt.’

  ‘Oh, for god’s sake, we’re only going a few hundred metres!’ But she buckled her seatbelt, and stared fixedly out the window at the rolling, crashing waves that threw themselves relentlessly across the expanse of golden sand below the headland. Less than a minute later the car was slowing near the lay by.

  ‘Which is yours?’

  Pippa gestured to the battered utility truck parked at the end of the row.

  ‘The ute? You drive a ute?’

  ‘Thanks for the lift.’ Pippa had the door open and her legs out before Matt had fully stopped the car. Reaching down for her briefcase, her wrist was clamped in a grip which, try desperately as she might, she couldn’t wrench off.

  ‘I told you before, we’re not done.’

  ‘What? What do you want? Would you say whatever you think you have to say and let me go?’ Pippa’s panic was only partially allayed by the knowledge Justin had seen them drive off together. Common sense told her she would come to no harm at Matt Mason’s hands. Common sense had nothing to do with the instinctual fear that gripped her gut, even less to do with her reflexive flinching from the masculine anger that reminded her of other bruising hands. The grip lessened slightly; enough that she could feel the blood throbbing in her wrist, not enough that she could move to the safety of the air outside the car.

  ‘Look at me. Look at me. Right. You will give me your word you will not see my brother again. You will not contact him again. You will not seek him out. You will leave. Him. Alone.’

  Fury with herself and her weak response, as much as with the man’s unspeakable arrogance, made Pippa unwise. Suddenly she was thirteen again, tempting the bullying devil with stupid, rebellious bravado. ‘Or what? What will you do? Hit me?’

  Matt recoiled with a physical repulsion as obvious as her own. ‘Hit you? I’m not going to hit you. What do you think I am? I’m not going to hit you. I’m going to ruin you. You and your little smokescreen of a wedding business. You might have thought you had your own Mason wedding all sewn up, but I promise you this: if you ever go near my brother again, by the time I’m done with you you’ll wish you’d never met him. Justin’s going to marry Lucy. She’s exactly what he needs, despite what you’ve persuaded him. There’s no place for the scheming, grasping likes of you in the Mason family!’

  Shock held Pippa captive in the car. Finished with his speech, Matt had let go her wrist and she rubbed it absently with her other hand, trying to make sense of her scattered thoughts, trying to sort out the maze of ridiculous, nonsensical notions he had put to her. His anger seemed to have spent itself with his speech—or perhaps it was that, having delivered his instructions, he had nothing but certainty they would be followed to the letter. He was looking at her expectantly, and Pippa deliberately slowed her breathing. Her hair, annoyingly, kept falling across her face, and she pushed it behind her ear again, wondering at the anger that fleetingly returned to his eyes as she did so; at some point in the last half hour—was that really all the time that had passed?—her carefully upswept knot had collapsed into a tangled mess. When she was confident of her composure again, she looked him steadily in the eye.

  ‘It really doesn’t matter to me what you think of me, or my business. I’m not interested in your accusations or your threats. I repeat, I will not discuss my clients, including Justin, with you. All I will say is this: you have not the first idea what you’re talking about. And the last place—the very last place—I would ever wish to find myself is involved with the arrogant, overbearing, philandering Mason family. Thank you for the lift. Goodnight.’

  This time he let her go, and Pippa wobbled her way in her tottering heels across the gravelled surface of the car park to her ute, unconsciously holding her breath as she hoisted herself into its cabin, locked the doors and gunned the ignition. Behind her, Matt Mason reversed his car—a low-slung black Audi convertible, she now noticed; typical—and accelerated smoothly back up the hill. She watched until its tail-lights disappeared around the curve of the mountain before she remembered to breathe again. It took several minutes for her hands to stop shaking before she felt steady enough to start the long drive north to Brisbane.

  Chapter 2

  Easily the best thing about a summer Sunday afternoon in Brisbane was the oppressive, sticky heat. Pippa didn’t mind the humidity everyone else seemed to complain about. She worked steadily in her backyard, clearing the last overgrown plot of weeds (at some point it had held nasturtiums and melon vines), loosening the heavy clay soil, shovelling through some rich, crumbly compost and sand, planting and staking the delicately leafed native grevilleas in a configuration she knew would bring more butterflies and birds by spring.

  It had taken twelve months, but the gardens surrounding her shabby timber cottage were finally looking the way she’d envisaged them when she first moved in the previous summer. The house itself needed work, she knew, but for Pippa, the gardens would always come first

  As a very young child, frightened by the yelling that repeatedly drove her out of her family’s home, she had found silence and peace, butterflies and beetles, and an imaginary world of fairies and pixies under the sheltering branches of backyard shrubs. Through her pre-teen years she had retreated to the security of the garden with its mysterious patterns and predictable seasons, until she realised her mother was safer when Pippa was in sight.

  And when her mother had finally taken herself out of her husband’s shadow, out of Pippa’s limited protection, out of the reach of them both, the sixteen-year-old Pippa returned to her gardens, rediscovering quiet joy and fulfilment in turning the jungle of weeds into a showpiece. She escaped there from her father’s rages, from his destruction of her study projects, from his theft of her savings, from his raised voice and clenched fist, until he drank himself to death when she was nineteen. By that time, she was two years into a psychology degree. She’d stuck it out another year, merely to get the piece of paper that justified the time and money she’d invested, but the misery of the cases she was studying had seen her copying her father’s destructive drinking habit.

  She was smart enough, had enough self-awareness, to recognise it. Abandoning alcohol and psychology together, she turned back to her beloved gardens, fast-tracked a vocational landscaping design qualification, and for ten years now had been creating beautiful gardens for others. It was backbreaking work, and didn’t pay that well—it had taken all this time for her to build enough capital that she could leave the rented home and memories of her parents, put a deposit on her own, terror-free house, and set up her dream landscape design business. She’d worked so hard to prove herself with other people’s gardens, her own had taken a backseat in recent months. But now it was done, and the gently terraced garden beds were thriving where once there’d been nothing but a steep slope of weeds.

  She stretched her achy lower back and gazed with satisfaction at the ominous, queerly purple sky. To the west, over the tri-masted peak of Mt Coot-tha with its television towers, bulging, billowing clouds, heavy with rain, promised to dump their bounty. The breeze had picked up considerably in the last quarter
-hour, and she heard low rumbles of thunder, still a good way off, but heading her way at speed. With a very little luck, the rain would dump first, soaking the saplings in their new plot, and she could relax on the back verandah with a good glass of merlot to watch nature’s fireworks extend the twilight.

  As if she’d called them to her, the first plump drops of rain soothed her sun-flushed shoulders as she gathered up her garden tools and stashed them in the tray of her ute, ready for work the next morning. She had accepted a new landscaping commission at a kindergarten in the wealthy rural community of Brookfield, and her head was full of ideas for the flowerbeds, the vegetable plots and the miniature maze she had designed and which had been so well received by the parents’ committee overseeing her project. A mini-dozer was due on site around seven the following morning. As the heavens opened and drenched her where she stood, she ruefully hoped her wish for a good summer soaking tonight wouldn’t leave her bogged in mud tomorrow!

  But the rain was easing off as suddenly as it had started, the pounding on the corrugated iron roof of her garage settling into a comforting rhythmic patter. She would just check the saplings had survived their first rain before taking herself inside for—

  ‘Didn’t you hear me knocking?’

  The abrupt irritation in the question was as disconcerting as the shock of hearing Matt Mason’s voice so close behind her shoulder, and Pippa responded just as irritably, vigorously rubbing the elbow she’d banged painfully on the tray of her ute.

  ‘I didn’t hear you knock. I didn’t see you arrive. What are you doing here? How did you get my address?’