CHAPTER SEVEN
A WEEK later Aurora got to meet Leonie Murdoch.
It happened by accident, literally.
Aurora was at a junction in her car, not far from Luke’s house as it happened, on her way home from work for lunch. It was a busy intersection and she was turning across the traffic. She’d been waiting a couple of minutes when the car behind her, also there for a couple of minutes, suddenly accelerated and crashed into the back of her. Fortunately her car was not propelled forward far enough to be thrust into the stream of traffic, but it was enough to give her quite a fright.
So she was fuming when she got out of her car, and more so to see the crumpled back of it with a sapphire-blue BMW nose buried in it.
‘Where did you get your licence—out of a cornflake packet?’ she yelled at the BMW driver, a tall, elegant woman with red hair.
‘Where did you get yours?’ the woman responded coldly. ‘I could have driven six buses across the road by now!’
‘If you were at Le Mans,’ Aurora shot back, ‘driving a Formula One car, but this is suburban Le Manly! So, what were you planning, you dangerous idiot? To drive over the top of me?’
‘Not at all.’ The other woman closed her eyes in supreme frustration. ‘I’m late for a meeting, I don’t have time to sit behind dawdling suburban drivers and I…well, I was concentrating on the traffic, I saw a gap I could have got through and I just put my foot down.’ She shrugged her silk-clad shoulders. ‘It was one of those unfortunate lapses.’
Aurora studied her. Fabulous skin, gentian-blue eyes, smooth silky hair expertly cut to curve beneath her chin plus a dream outfit of a wild rice silk suit, but one very uptight, superior woman inside it, she decided. And said, ‘This “unfortunate lapse”, which could have been fatal, incidentally, is going to cost you and your insurance company, lady! Name and address, please?’
‘Naturally,’ the woman replied, and reached through the window of the BMW for her purse. ‘I have full insurance so there’ll be no problem at all.’
‘Thank you! Your lack of apology has been noted too.’ Aurora accepted a business card but didn’t read it. ‘Got a pen?’ And when that was produced, a gold one, she wrote the registration number on the back of it and asked for the name of the insurance company. ‘What happens if my car is not drivable?’ she enquired then.
‘For heaven’s sake—let’s see!’
‘Your concern has also been noted, Ms—’ Aurora said acidly, and flipped the card over, only to stiffen.
‘Look, I am sorry but this has been a really bad day,’ Leonie Murdoch said, a little wildly, ‘and I do need to get going, but if your car won’t go, I could call a tow truck for you on my mobile phone, and I’d be more than happy to pay compensation or whatever while it’s being fixed. Could we try it now?’ she asked intensely.
Aurora hesitated for a moment and looked up the hill towards her old home, only a couple of blocks away. Then she studied the card again, but all it had was a business address on it. She said, at last, in a different manner, ‘OK. You reverse a bit and I’ll see what happens.’
As it happened the damage to her car was only superficial and the BMW had a couple of minor dents. So when they’d established this, Aurora drew one of her cards out of her purse and handed it over. But Leonie Murdoch didn’t even glance at it before they parted company.
And whether Leonie, when she’d calmed down, would associate the name of the girl she’d bumped into with her ex-lover, Luke Kirwan, Aurora had no way of knowing. But she couldn’t shake the strong feeling that Luke might have contributed to Leonie’s bad day. Why else would she be so close to his home—unless she lived in Manly herself? But even then—why else would she make a basic driving error of the kind she had unless she really was distraught about something?
‘Neil,’ Aurora said later that day, ‘does Leonie Murdoch live around these parts?’
Neil blinked. ‘No, she has a unit at Kangaroo Point, right on the river. Why?’
‘Just wondered. How’s it going with Mandy?’
Ten minutes later, she had the latest, detailed account of Neil’s turbulent affair with Mandy Pearson, and Neil had forgotten about her earlier question.
But that evening, before Aurora could make up her mind whether to tell Luke about what had happened, he called to see her unexpectedly. Her car was parked in the drive because she’d been planning to go out again, and he came in with a quizzical little smile on his lips and an attitude that annoyed her and provoked her into revealing it.
‘Did you reverse into something, Aurora?’
‘Why would you immediately assume that?’ she asked exasperatedly.
He smiled crookedly, taking in her hot pink bike shorts and tiny knit top with narrow pink and green diagonal stripes that tied behind her neck and around her waist. Her hair was gathered back with a bright green plastic grip and her feet were bare. ‘Women drivers have a reputation for it.’
‘I’ve never reversed into anything in my life! I got run into, as it happens, and by your ex-mistress…’ She stopped and looked heavenwards.
Luke had already got his hands around her waist and they tightened unexpectedly. Aurora winced and he said immediately, ‘Sorry,’ and released her. ‘You surprised me,’ he added. ‘Are you serious?’
She shrugged, ‘I wasn’t going to tell you, well, I don’t think I was but—yes, one Leonie Murdoch, stockbroker, did drive her sapphire BMW into the back of me, although I don’t think she had any idea who I was.’
He frowned. ‘Why weren’t you going to tell me?’
Aurora sat down on the settee and curled her legs up beneath her. ‘I’m not sure, Luke.’
He stood quite still for a moment, then came to sit beside her. ‘You must have some reason.’
She pulled a cushion into her arms, then raised her eyes to his. ‘I could be quite wrong, but she was coming from the direction of your house—it was at that intersection just down the hill. She was in a state otherwise it would never have happened, she said as much herself, so I couldn’t help wondering if you were the cause of her distraction.’
‘Would this have been around lunch-time today?’
‘Yes, Luke.’ She hesitated. ‘Another attempt to patch things up?’
He sat forward with his hands clasped between his knees. ‘She came to see me with something like that on her mind, yes.’
‘So it’s not all over for her?’
‘Aurora—’ he turned his head to look at her and his eyes were sombre ‘—no. But there’s not a lot I can do about it.’
‘Except, perhaps, never having let it get to the stage it did before you decided to run for cover?’
‘I didn’t—’ he paused ‘—I don’t think this will blight Leonie’s life, although it’s obviously going to take some adjustment. Would you rather I’d married her and then conceded that it wasn’t going to work?’
‘How do you know that?’
He glinted her an ironic little look.
Aurora moved restlessly. ‘I just…feel, I don’t know. Uneasy!’
‘What did you think of her?’
‘Not much at first,’ she said ruefully. ‘I called her a dangerous idiot and asked her if she’d got her driver’s licence out of a cornflake packet, but I did get a fright and she was quite…snooty. At first. Then…kind of desperate. But extremely beautiful.’
‘Beauty can be in the eye of the beholder,’ he observed.
‘It can,’ Aurora agreed tartly, ‘but no beholder would quibble with her beauty!’
‘I meant, I guess, beauty is not the only thing to take into consideration, nor are brains, which she has plenty of, but there are other things that count.’
‘Of course.’ She shrugged after a long moment. ‘How are you getting on with Newton’s wife?’
He blinked. ‘He didn’t appear to have one…’
‘I know. I looked him up. His mother abandoned him to his grandmother until he was about nine, he was always cantankerous by
the sound of it and had at least two nervous breakdowns. I can’t find any reference to Halley having a wife, or Ptolemy, either. No one’s even sure when he was born or died!’
‘You have done a bit of research,’ he commented. ‘But Marie Curie was both a wife and a physicist.’
‘Her husband was a physicist too,’ she said a shade bleakly.
‘Aurora, are you trying to tell me again that I’m wedded to my science? If so, may I point out that I’m in no way comparable to Newton, Galileo, Halley or any of those wifeless wonders? If, indeed, they all were. And there must be many more who weren’t.’
Aurora chewed her lip. ‘I think, though, I need a bit of breathing space, Luke. But more than that, I think you should have some.’
‘Breathing space?’
She nodded. ‘Three years is a long time to be cast off so…so—’ she shrugged ‘—precipitately.’
‘Only a week or so ago, you were of the opinion that we should continue to get to know each other,’ he pointed out dryly.
‘I hadn’t bumped into the woman then, I hadn’t seen her—distress,’ she said intensely.
‘All right.’ He stood up. ‘How long did you have in mind?’
Aurora stared up at him a little nervously, as, by some mysterious process, the man she’d first laid eyes on beside the piano in her old home came into play. He was nowhere near as formally dressed as on that occasion—cargo pants, a sky-blue polo shirt and trainers—and his sleeked-back hair was falling in his eyes, but all the bored arrogance she’d seen that night was suddenly back.
‘Until you—I don’t know,’ she said helplessly.
‘Do you remember walking out on me the other night?’ he asked abruptly.
‘I…I remember leaving you,’ she said. ‘Why? Did I do something wrong?’
He looked at her with a tinge of mockery. ‘Yes and no. You left me to meditate on a lovely slim body, you left me with the feel of the curves of your breasts and hips beneath my hands, the silk of your skin under my fingers and the delicious taste of you on my lips—what’s more you knew it, Aurora.’
‘I…perhaps,’ she conceded with her eyes wide and her own memories flooding her, ‘but….’
‘Did you—’ he indicated the fish tank ‘—confide some thoughts on the subject to Annie and Ralph? Your diary perhaps? Or did you fall immediately into a deep and dreamless sleep?’
She got up slowly and walked towards the kitchen, feeling hot and uncomfortable all over.
He trapped her against the two-way counter that served as a breakfast bar on the lounge side. He simply rested his hands on it around her. She looked down at their lean strength on either side of her, then concentrated on a brightly painted china bowl laden with apples, oranges and grapes in a bid to control the wave of desire just the sight of his hands and the remembered feel of them on her breasts did to her. But when that little battle was over, she turned to him. ‘If you must know,’ she said evenly, ‘I felt so good, I did just that.’
He still had her pinned against the counter, and the impact of the rest of him so close to her was even worse than the sight of his hands. His polo shirt moulded the lines of those wide shoulders and the sleek muscles beneath. She knew his chest was hard and powerful but that to nestle against it was unique for her. She knew that she loved to lay her lips on the strong column of his throat and that she sometimes felt as if she were drowning in a sea of lovely sensation when he handled her and drew her into his arms.
His gaze roamed from her serious expression to a little pulse hammering away at the base of her throat. ‘Well, I didn’t feel so good,’ he murmured. ‘I tore up three speeches, although there was nothing wrong with them. I would have given anything for a couple of goldfish to…say a few choice words to.’
She swallowed, although there was a flicker of humour in his eyes. ‘I’m not sure what this is leading up to, Luke,’ she said at last, ‘although I apologise for inconveniencing you. It wasn’t an intentional…leading-you-down-the-garden-path-then-slamming-the-door-in-your-face kind of thing. It was…’ She broke off frustratedly.
‘I know it wasn’t deliberate. It was the pure joie de vivre of Aurora Templeton, it was delightful and it was my problem that it—made life a little difficult for me for a few hours. It also, surely—’ he gazed down at her ‘—demonstrates that you’re in command, Aurora.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Why do I get the feeling that’s a real trap for the unwary?’
‘How so?’
‘Never mind.’ She looked distracted for a moment, then frowned. ‘Why did you come tonight?’
‘To ask you to come to the opening of the astrophysics conference.’
Her lips parted.
‘Next weekend,’ he went on, ‘at the Mirage, on the Gold Coast. It’s a dinner dance kind of thing. I thought you might like to spend the weekend down there, in your own room…’ he paused as if to emphasize it ‘…but I guess not.’
‘Luke…’ she hesitated, then went on a little desperately ‘…don’t you have any understanding of how I feel?’
He straightened and studied her. ‘A sense of solidarity with your sex which countermands going to bed on the night in question without having to talk to your fish or your diary because you felt so good?’ he suggested.
She looked exasperated, then wry, and in the end could only shrug.
He smiled slightly and traced the frown lines on her brow. ‘I must tell you I don’t think Leonie would reciprocate your sentiments were your positions reversed,’ he remarked, however.
‘Why not? I mean, that’s not all it’s about, but—’ She stopped.
‘Because Leonie, my dear Miss Templeton,’ he said satirically, ‘has no sense of solidarity with her own sex. She’s fond of claiming she much prefers the company of men to women. And, in relationship to yourself, for example, she—’ He broke off. ‘No.’
‘What?’ Aurora insisted. ‘She doesn’t know me from a bar of soap—until yesterday—do you mean, she knows about me?’ Aurora blinked several times as her mind spun. ‘Through Mandy Pearson?’
‘The same,’ he agreed tonelessly.
‘Who I’ve met once,’ Aurora stated through her teeth.
Luke shrugged.
‘But I know Neil a lot better,’ Aurora went on as if talking to herself. ‘OK,’ she commanded imperiously, ‘spill the beans. Leonie has obviously formed some opinion of me… Let me even guess! That you’d get bored with me in no time at all?’
For some reason he smiled briefly. ‘To give her credit, she hadn’t met you herself, then, so she was talking second hand.’
‘All the same… Would you and Leonie have some mutual friends going to this astrophysics bash on the Coast, by any chance?’
‘Aurora, yes, there may well be, but—’
‘All the better,’ Aurora said, with that certain glitter in her green eyes. ‘So thank you for the invitation, Prof, I will come! Mind you…’ She stopped and studied him suspiciously. ‘Have I been set up?’
‘How so?’
‘I have to ask myself this—why, when only moments ago I was seriously concerned about Leonie Murdoch, am I now, following some well-planted insinuations from you, all set to give her a run for her money?’
‘You can still change your mind.’ His eyes laughed at her and he put his fingers beneath her chin and tilted it gently.
‘Don’t kiss me,’ she warned. ‘I’m not in the mood.’
‘All right.’ But he stroked her cheek.
‘I don’t think you should do that either,’ she said after a moment. ‘It’s counterproductive to my state of extreme annoyance with you.’
He laughed softly. ‘What can I do? How about this?’ he went on before she could speak. ‘In answer to your question, perhaps you’ve agreed to come because you can never resist a challenge? But, the real reason I asked you to this bash—’ he looked rueful ‘—is because you’re a constant source of delight to me.’
‘Luke,’ she whispered an
d licked her lips, ‘am I really?’
‘Believe it, Aurora.’ He bent his head and kissed her very lightly.
‘But I’ll take no further liberties. Goodnight. I’ll be in touch.’
They didn’t see much of each other until the day before the conference.
Aurora was flat out herself and extremely relieved when the first session of her talk-back programme went smoothly and it got plenty of calls. Her interviewee for this occasion was an author who lived on Lamb Island in Moreton Bay and, between calls, they chatted comfortably about his tastes in music and food, his muse, as he put it, and the preservation of Moreton Bay and its islands, about which he was passionate.
The next morning a large bouquet of flowers arrived for her from Luke. The card said simply, ‘Well done, Miss Sparky! Luke.’
‘He listened to it,’ she marvelled with the card in her hands and the flowers on her desk.
‘Luke Kirwan?’ Neil responded, having squinted at the card over her shoulder. ‘Why wouldn’t he?’
‘Compared to Ptolemy, Galileo, Copernicus, Halley and Isaac Newton, not to mention stockbroking, what I do for a living is small potatoes, Neil,’ she said solemnly. She waved the card. ‘And this is a professor who can be—extremely scholarly and forgetful at times.’
‘Didn’t think that was how you saw him, Aurora,’ Neil teased.
‘Well, I do now. Although, that isn’t all there is to him, I will concede.’
Neil laughed. ‘Don’t we all know it? Leonie is…in a state of contained frenzy, apparently,’ he added more soberly.
‘So I gather.’ Aurora sighed. ‘Does she know it was me she ran into?’
Neil did a double take. ‘You didn’t tell me that’s what happened to your car!’
‘I know. I just wondered whether, seeing as she and Mandy are such bosom pals, she’d connected it up.’
A Question of Marriage Page 12