The Secret Years

by Barbara Hannay

  Had she imagined she felt a sudden tension in him?

  Her stomach knotted unpleasantly as she waited for him to reassure her that his plans to marry her hadn’t changed. She willed herself to stay calm.

  I won’t be like my mum.

  Her mother had never trusted any of her relationships to work.

  I trust Sam. I know we’re okay. He’s never given me any reason to doubt.

  After all, Sam had coughed up the suggestion of marriage without any special prompting.

  ‘I bought Thai takeaway for dinner,’ he said now. ‘But I guess it’s probably gone cold.’

  Lucy let out a small huff of relief. Here she was fretting over their relationship status while Sam – typical man – only had thoughts for his stomach.

  ‘Well, I bought beer and champagne, but they’ve probably gone hot. They’re still in the car.’ She rolled onto her back and stretched luxuriously, then smiled towards him through the dim light. ‘A microwave and a freezer can soon fix both our problems.’

  ‘Of course.’ There was a weird note in Sam’s voice and he sighed heavily.

  Lucy wished she could see his face clearly. Leaning in, she tentatively touched her lips to his shoulder again and then to the grainy rough skin on his jaw. ‘You okay, mate?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ Turning, he dropped a hasty kiss on the tip of her nose. ‘Just hungry.’ A beat later, he sat up and snapped on the bedside lamp.

  Blinking in the sudden brightness, Lucy squinted at the tangled bed sheets and their discarded clothing littering the floor. She told herself this was pretty clear evidence that everything was fine.

  Just the same, she tried to check Sam’s expression as he pulled on jocks and jeans but he had his back to her, so she couldn’t see his face, couldn’t completely shut off another niggle of disquiet.

  Annoyed with herself for potentially spoiling a perfect evening, she followed his lead and hunted for her knickers and bra. By the time she was dressed and had visited the bathroom, Sam had brought the drinks from her car and their dinner was circling in the microwave.

  Sam didn’t look particularly tense, but then he didn’t look over-the-top happy either. Perhaps it was the absence of any definable emotion that bothered Lucy most.

  Or perhaps I’m being totally neurotic.

  ‘What would you like to drink?’ he asked as he opened the fridge. ‘There’s a sav blanc here.’ He flashed Lucy a quick smile. ‘You usually like white with Thai, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks.’ They could save the champagne for a proper cele­bration. She found two glasses in an overhead cupboard, set them on the counter and watched Sam’s cute frown of concentration as he poured.

  ‘So what’s it like to be back?’ he asked.

  ‘Fan-bloody-tastic.’ Lucy grinned.

  ‘But does it also feel weird, to no longer be in a war zone?’

  ‘A bit, yeah. I miss having my pistol.’

  He shot her a sharp frown. ‘Really?’

  ‘We had to carry a weapon all the time – couldn’t go anywhere without it – or we were charged. So yes, it feels strange to not have it with me now. Makes me feel a bit anxious, to be honest, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.’

  The pained expression on his face sent a chill down her spine. Had she said something terribly wrong?

  ‘So what’s been happening lately?’ she asked, quickly changing the subject. ‘Anything exciting?’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’ He shrugged. ‘Just the usual media circus.’

  His job involved plenty of interaction with the local media, including drinks with journos and with advertising agencies and TV crews. He partied with them, too, and it seemed to pay off. Most of the local coverage of the army was positive.

  Now he touched his glass to Lucy’s. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Here’s to us,’ she said brightly.

  ‘Welcome home.’ Sam’s gaze didn’t quite meet hers, but she refrained from asking yet again whether everything was okay. At least she’d learned something from her mother’s mistakes. Guys hated to be pestered, and she would have hated to spoil their first meal together after six long months.

  When the microwave pinged, she and Sam gathered plates, cutlery and mats to put beneath the heated food. He’d ordered her favourites – seafood curry and steamed fish in an exotic coconut and chilli sauce. Sensational aromas filled the flat as they lifted the lids on the containers.

  ‘I suppose you’ve heard that my mum’s moved into a new apartment on Palmer Street?’ Lucy said as she helped herself to a heaped spoonful of steaming jasmine rice.

  ‘She mentioned it when I phoned her this morning. So what do you think of it?’

  ‘The apartment? It’s —’ Lucy shrugged. ‘It’s beautiful, I guess, but it takes a bit of getting used to.’ She added a helping of the seafood curry to her plate. ‘Mum has a new man as well. He’s already moved in with her.’

  Sam’s eyebrows rose. ‘Anyone we know?’

  ‘I’d never met him before. His name’s Keith, um . . . Keith Hayes. Have you heard of him?’

  ‘I’ve heard the name.’ Although Sam had only been in Townsville for two years, he’d developed masses of contacts and he seemed to know most of the movers and shakers around town. ‘I’m pretty sure he’s in business – Chamber of Commerce and the like, so he’s probably reasonably successful.’

  ‘Well, that would make a nice change,’ Lucy couldn’t help commenting. And then, against her better judgement, ‘It would be even better if he actually stayed with Mum for more than a few months.’

  This time there was no missing Sam’s reaction, and at the sight of his frowning, narrow-eyed tension, a chill ran through Lucy. A lump in her throat made it hard to swallow and she took a quick sip of wine.

  As she set the glass down she felt compelled to say something. ‘You seem very on edge, Sam.’

  ‘Do I?’ His expression went blank, a sure sign that he was desperately trying to look innocent.

  Lucy couldn’t hold back a moment longer. ‘What’s the matter? If there’s anything wrong, I’d rather you told me, before I start imagining things.’ Of course, she was already imagining the worst – another woman. Nevertheless, she forced herself to broach this. ‘If there’s someone else, I’d rather you just spit it out now.’

  His blue eyes blazed with unexpected fire. ‘Of course there’s no one else.’ He gave an angry shake of his head. ‘I swear there’s no one. Jeez, Luce, you sure know how to spoil a good meal.’

  She dropped her gaze to her plate where the brightly coloured curry was piled over snowy white, perfect rice. Sam was right about spoiling it. Already, she’d lost her appetite. But she wasn’t prepared to apologise. Not yet. ‘So you’re saying that everything’s fine? With us, I mean. There’s no change to our plans?’

  Sam grimaced and stared at his plate and Lucy’s chest and stomach tightened uncomfortably.

  Then he gave a fed-up kind of sigh as he set his fork down and lifted his hands in surrender. ‘I didn’t want to bring it up the minute you walked in the door.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ Lucy said crisply and their gazes met again, this time in silent, bristling acknowledgement of exactly what had happened the minute she’d walked in the door.

  Sam had the grace to look embarrassed and he swallowed. ‘It’s just . . . I’m just not sure we should hurry into, you know, the next step.’

  The tendril of fear that had first sprung to life at the airport this morning took off now, exploding through Lucy’s veins.

  ‘So you don’t want me to move in with you?’ She was surprised that she managed to sound so calm.

  Sam gave a helpless shrug, as if this was all completely beyond his control. ‘I think we should give ourselves a little time to adjust. I’m not just saying this for my own benefit. I reckon you need time, too, to get used to being back here.’

  ‘Sounds to me like you’re getting cold feet.’

  ‘That’s not how I’d describe it.�
� Sam’s handsome jaw squared as he grimaced. ‘Hell, I don’t know. Maybe. It’s kinda hitting me now that you’re back here fulltime and with no plans to leave the army. I’m just not sure that I’m comfortable with the balance.’

  ‘What balance?’ she asked quietly, trying to be reasonable, despite the sick churning in her stomach.

  ‘It’s not easy to explain.’

  ‘Sorry, but you’re going to have to try.’

  His smile was more a scowl and he shifted in his seat. ‘Now that you’re here all the time, we’re going . . . Ah, it’s going to be more like an office affair, isn’t it?’

  ‘I guess, but plenty of people have office affairs. Office romances,’ Lucy amended with deliberate emphasis.

  Another shrug. ‘I know this probably sounds sexist, but usually the guy in the relationship is, you know, senior, the boss.’

  This time Lucy almost laughed. With shock. Sam couldn’t be serious, surely? Had he time travelled back to the fifties? ‘I’m not exactly a brigadier, Sam.’ Anyway, he’d been commissioned as soon as he joined the army. ‘We’re both the same rank.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I guess it’s purely an ego thing then.’

  ‘But I still don’t get it. What’s the problem?’

  With a small, self-conscious smile, Sam tapped the centre of his chest. ‘I might wear a uniform. I might work my arse off to present the best possible image of the army to the public, but I’ve never had to carry a weapon to work, never heard a shot fired in anger.’

  ‘So?’

  He held up a hand, as if now that he’d started, he was keen to keep going. ‘I’ll be writing articles – “Training in the High Range” or something similar – but you’ll actually be up there, doing the training.’ He lifted both hands in another gesture of helplessness. ‘You’ll be Action Woman, while I’ll be nothing more than a fucking desk jockey.’

  Wow.

  Lucy drew a stunned breath. She was back in a war zone. Incoming direct fire.

  ‘I guess,’ Sam went on, ‘I’m not very good at dealing with the fact that you’ll always be the real thing while I’m just the reporter, the reflector.’

  ‘I had no idea it bothered you.’

  This had certainly never bothered Lucy. If she’d wanted a tough, hard-eyed combat soldier for a boyfriend, she could have had one. There’d been plenty of opportunities, plenty of soldiers who’d felt compelled to make a pass at her and then expected her to be flattered. She’d given them short shrift, and she’d chosen her gorgeous, charming Sam. Yet now, the scary thing was that she believed Sam. She could understand where he was coming from.

  Even though he’d never voiced this concern before and even though his arguments would be dismissed by most as outdated, sexist crap, to Lucy his backflip suddenly made a crazy kind of sense.

  Sam had always been into speed and he loved a hint of danger. In Europe he’d worked with a Formula One team. When he was in Canberra, he’d raced in two Sydney to Hobart yacht races. In north Queensland he’d taken up skindiving on the reef. So yes, working in a desk job while living with a female partner who was a fully trained soldier and had served in a war zone could quite possibly put a major dent in his masculine ego. Even if she was never in the frontline.

  Just the same, there were plenty of other things Lucy didn’t understand. Like, Sam’s lousy sense of timing. ‘Why did you wait to tell me this now? Couldn’t you have raised it before I was deployed?’ Instead of dangling an engagement ring under my nose?

  ‘It . . . it was complicated. And I don’t think it really hit me till you were on your way home.’ He had the bad grace to scowl at her. ‘Be reasonable, Luce. I haven’t been unfaithful. If you must know, I’ve knocked back offers.’

  ‘Oh, how bloody heroic!’ Lucy was so suddenly furious she jumped to her feet. ‘And I guess I’m supposed to be grateful.’

  It was pathetic that he’d had to tell her about the offers, to protect his stupid ego, his wounded masculine pride.

  Stuff him.

  Lucy wanted to howl, to thump the table, to scrape the chair noisily over the tiles. Thump Sam.

  But there’d been too many times when she’d seen her mother lose her dignity over romantic disappointments and she knew that tears, pleas and fury only made things uglier. So she managed to keep quiet and just stood there, not uttering a word, but trembling inside.

  ‘Lucy, you do understand, don’t you? Can’t we take things slowly, play it by ear?’

  ‘But nothing’s going to change. I’m not going to give up being a soldier.’

  ‘You never know, you might.’

  ‘Is that what you’re hoping? That I’ll leave the army?’ It was impossible to ask this calmly.

  ‘Hey, don’t lose it.’ Sam looked nervous now. ‘I just thought a resignation might be on the cards. You’ve worked your way up the ranks. You’ve had your deployment to Afghanistan. What do you want now? To grow old in the forces?’

  ‘Possibly,’ she said tightly, although if she was honest, she’d been wondering about her future career. One thing was definite, though. She would only leave the army when she was good and ready and not as a salve for her boyfriend’s fragile ego. ‘I’m certainly not happy that you’ve just assumed I’ll give it up.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sam said, but he didn’t look particularly sorry. There was hardness in his eyes, a lack of sympathy that scared Lucy.

  With an angry grimace, he picked up his fork and poked at the food on his plate, then dropped the fork again with a frustrated sigh. ‘I told you I didn’t want to talk about this now. I knew you’d take it the wrong way.’

  Was there a right way to react to his bombshell?

  Perhaps if he’d come to her at that moment, put his arms around her and told her he still loved her, she might have weakened. Actually, it was pretty much a given that she would have caved and agreed to take things more slowly, to talk it all through. She might even have been prepared to work out some kind of compromise.

  But Sam made no move to come to her. He simply sat there, looking stubborn and petulant, rather like a teenager who considered himself hard done by.

  Watching him, the small kernel of sympathy inside Lucy shrivelled. She glanced to where he’d left her car keys, and then to her dismay, her vision blurred and she was frantically blinking back tears as she hurried across the room.

  ‘You’re not leaving?’

  With her back to him, she widened her eyes, keeping them hard open until the threat of tears passed. Finally, she turned. ‘I’m sorry I’ve spoiled your dinner, but I’m not hungry, and I’m actually pretty tired. Jet lag’s catching up with me.’

  Then she picked up the keys and walked out, closing the front door quietly behind her.

  6

  Ro Hunter couldn’t decide which of the views from her new apartment she liked better, the daytime vista of the river and the distant sea, or the scene at night-time when the city lights shone in silver-and-gold splashes on the black silky water. The best thing was, she could enjoy any of these views from her beautiful new kitchen, which offered a perfect line of sight across the living room and the balcony to the water.

  Even now, as the dishwasher hummed gently and Keith retired to their bedroom to read, Ro was able to give her gleaming granite benches a final wipe down and still keep an eye on the lights of a yacht as it slipped silently downstream and out to sea. She absolutely adored living here.

  Even without the views, the apartment was lovely and it was wonderfully easy to look after. Ro had never been motivated to keep her living space especially neat and tidy and she was revelling in her transformation into domestic goddess. Now that she was retired, she had enough time to keep the apartment looking like a photograph in Home Beautiful.

  The word retired had such a wonderful ring to it, Ro thought, especially as her working life had been haphazard at best. There’d been times when she’d really struggled to keep a roof over her and Lucy’s heads. Her boyfriends had always been such bloody no-ho
pers.

  She had a talent for attracting classic problem partners. It started with Lucy’s father, who’d had a gambling addiction. By the time he left them, her money was gone, except for a few grand in an old account he couldn’t access.

  All of the men in her life had been tarred with a similar brush – deadset charming at first, but with major flaws that were only revealed after they’d shacked up with her. Not one of them had been a breadwinner’s toenail.

  Just thinking about them sent a nervous shudder through her. She’d plugged away at all kinds of jobs, trying valiantly to make ends meet, starting with secretarial work, then a job in real estate for a few years – before the boom, of course – and she’d sold ads for the Townsville Bulletin. Finally, she’d managed a boutique shoe store in the Mall, but it had struggled to compete with all the big shoe barns and outlet stores.

  So her new retired life with Keith was a huge relief. Damn near perfect, in fact. The apartment’s location was amazingly convenient. She could wander with Keith down Palmer Street to the restaurant of their choice, and they could enjoy a few drinks and then amble home again without having to worry about a designated driver.

  At other times, if she was feeling energetic, she could even walk to the shops in the city centre, or she could accompany Keith to his office.

  Then there was the unexpected joy of a balcony garden. Ro had brought only the showiest of her pot plants from Mango Avenue. If she was honest, she’d been relieved to leave behind the rest of the tropical jungle she’d called a garden, which had become wilder and more overgrown with each passing wet season.

  Since she left the old place, she’d driven past just once and she’d noted with interest that the new owners had already begun to heavily prune the duranta hedge, a task that Ro had never quite got around to tackling.

  So yes, this new lifestyle really suited her.

  The only disappointment for Ro, so far, had been Lucy’s lukewarm reaction to the apartment. Her daughter’s distinct lack of enthusiasm had stung, but when Ro shared this disappointment with Keith, he’d merely slipped an arm around her shoulders.