‘I might not want you to,’ she replied barely audibly.
‘All the same…’ He stopped abruptly.
‘Luke, I can cope,’ she said gently. ‘I’m not breakable. I can even help. Take my hand.’
He got up slowly and put his hand in hers.
She raised it to her mouth and kissed it. ‘Come, sweet prince, let’s go to bed.’
He hesitated a moment longer, then swept her into his arms and buried his head in her hair.
When she woke the next morning, it was to see that Luke was still fast asleep. She moved cautiously, then sighed voluptuously and stared at the old-fashioned, pressed iron, intricately designed ceiling with a feeling of extreme satisfaction. Not only because of how thoroughly and marvellously sated she felt, but because, for the first time, she had been the one to bestow the fulfilment Luke had been desperate for.
It made her feel like the cat that had got the cream, she reflected ruefully. It made her feel an equal now, rather than a pupil in the hands of a master; it made her feel as if she might have taken him to the moon—instead of the other way around.
Then he stirred, sat up, running his fingers through his hair, and turned to her with sudden, obvious concern. ‘How…Aurora? Are you OK?’
‘Fine, Luke,’ she said complacently. ‘Quite fine!’
He threw back the blankets and sheet and examined her minutely.
‘Luke,’ she protested. ‘It’s cold!’
He ran his hands down her body, then pulled the covers up so they were buried beneath them to their chins. ‘Thank heavens. I thought I might have been a bit heavy-handed.’
‘You were awesome.’
He gathered her close and breathed deeply. ‘I certainly got a bit carried away.’
She kissed him lightly. ‘It would be fair to say I loved it.’
He smiled at her. ‘Sure?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said a little dreamily. ‘I was thinking only moments ago that I felt like the cat who got the cream. Positively smug, Professor!’
This time he laughed. ‘Then how about agreeing to marry me, Aurora?’
Her expression changed slowly. ‘I…’ she said uncertainly, ‘…I don’t know about that, Luke.’
CHAPTER TEN
THERE was a breakfast room leading off the kitchen in the Beltrees homestead. It overlooked the lake and, unlike the rather grand decor of the rest of the house, was country cottagey with a pine dresser laden with blue and white crockery. There was a hatstand laden with Akubras and other hats and a rack for coats, as well as baskets, and on a side-table lay the odds and ends of a riding family: whips, bits and the like.
Aurora was sitting at the breakfast table contemplating bacon, a poached egg and a fried tomato. It was a chilly, overcast day with the lake reflecting the leaden sky above. The swans, which she had seen engaging in a love dance that had made her think of the ballet, Swan Lake, were tucked into the reeds on the far bank.
She wore a forest-green pullover with navy track-suit trousers and her hair was tied back severely. Her green eyes mirrored the chaotic emotions that had claimed her since Luke had reacted so savagely to her uncertain reaction on the subject of marrying him.
For a moment she’d wondered whether she might break when his arms had tightened around her like a steel trap. Then he’d sworn ferociously and, if you could slam out of a bed, that was what he’d done, leaving her entirely to her own devices.
She’d tried to think about it for some time, then got up and had a shower and dressed. She’d found him in the breakfast room, also showered, from the damp look of his hair, shaved and dressed in jeans and a navy sweater. But the look he’d cast her as she’d come in had been so damning and dangerous, she’d paused in the doorway and contemplated flight.
Causing him to say caustically that he wasn’t going to eat her, but breakfast was served.
Now, she picked up her knife and fork and started on her meal.
‘Would you care to enlarge on your earlier statement, Aurora?’ he drawled as he pushed his plate away and reached for the marmalade.
‘If you didn’t know what was on the cards, why did you come here with me? I did tell you, though. Coffee?’
‘Yes, thank you. Uh…’ She looked pointedly at the open door leading to the kitchen where she could hear the housekeeper, a voluble, friendly matron, clattering about. ‘I don’t think this is the right time or place—’
‘There’s never going to be a better time,’ he interrupted, but got up to close the door, not gently.
Aurora grimaced. ‘You actually said you were contemplating asking me to marry you, Luke, but in the four days since then you haven’t mentioned it again. All right…’ she shrugged ‘…semantics, perhaps, but—why did I come? I couldn’t help myself.’ She returned his gaze directly. ‘That doesn’t mean to say marriage is the answer for us.’
‘If you’re about to cite Leonie, I have it on good authority that she has a new man in her life,’ he said coolly. ‘If you’re about to cite how you came into my life virtually on her heels, we’ve now known each for something like five months, the last two of which we’ve spent apart. Time, don’t you think,’ he said sardonically, ‘for me to have sorted myself out?’
Aurora finished her bacon and eggs and reached for her coffee-cup. ‘And yet, Luke,’ she said steadily, ‘if my father hadn’t got himself lost, we would still be apart. You’ve put the house on the market—’
‘How did you know that? It hasn’t been advertised.’
‘Remember Mrs Bunnings? She used to be our housekeeper and Miss Hillier employed her as a cleaner—until a month or so ago when she went to Adelaide to look after her sick sister. We keep in touch.’
He digested this, all the while allowing that dark, arrogant gaze to play over her. ‘All right, let’s take another tack. Do you usually sleep with men in the uninhibited way you sleep with me, then walk out on them? Or—are you offering to be my mistress?’
Aurora took an unsteady breath and a glint of anger lit her eyes. ‘I’m offering you nothing at the moment, Luke. This all happened because I was under extreme pressure one way or another, and because you came to my rescue when I never felt more alone or bereft in my life. I—’
‘Only because of your father, Aurora? Or because you were missing me as well?’
She swallowed some coffee, then tilted her chin at him. ‘Both. That’s my problem, however. But I walked away from you once, Luke, when I wasn’t sure you wanted a wife, when I was quite sure things weren’t over between you and Leonie—and I’m quite capable of doing it again.’
‘I haven’t seen Leonie from that day to this,’ he said.
Her eyes widened.
He smiled satanically. ‘What exactly do I have to do to prove to you I want not only a wife but you?’ he asked lethally. ‘Who took whom to the moon last night, incidentally?’ His eyes were suddenly mocking.
Her hands trembled around her coffee-cup.
‘Don’t you think that proves anything?’ He eyed her satirically. ‘I rather thought it proved something to you when you woke up this morning looking, anyway, so gloriously serene. You could almost say the joke was on me.’
‘It’s still no reason to rush to the altar, Luke,’ she said barely audibly.
‘How long would you like, then? A couple of months? Three? That might be a bit hard to arrange because I’m moving up here for the next three months, but I guess we could commute.’
Aurora stood up carefully and for a moment, before she blinked, tears glittered in her eyes. They were gone, however, when she said crisply, ‘I’d like to go home today, please. Because I’m now quite sure we wouldn’t suit, Luke.’
His mouth was hard. ‘I hesitate to repeat your often-spoken phrase, Aurora, but is that all you’ve got to say?’
‘No, it isn’t. You should never confuse lust with love, Luke. I would have thought, to be honest, you wouldn’t need that explained to you.’
‘Lust?’ he said softly and incred
ulously.
She clenched her hands. ‘As well as friendship, of course—I’ll always be grateful for the way you came to me that night. But since there’s no way I can prove to myself it wasn’t a bit of both for a girl who also tugged a chord of pity in you, I think we should leave it there.’
‘Lust,’ he said again, and this time there was so much sardonic irony in his eyes, she flinched. But he stood up too and came round the table to be directly in front of her, so she was literally being towered over. ‘If that’s how it came across, Aurora, if that’s what you feel you yourself were indulging in…’ he paused and waited while her eyes flickered beneath the insult, then went on ‘…I think you should go home this morning. The plane is going down to Brisbane to pick Dad up, leaving in half an hour. Would that suit you?’
He’d spoken quite mildly but Aurora knew she was on the receiving end of the full force of Luke Kirwan at his most bored and dismissive.
‘It would suit me fine,’ she whispered, so hurt but also so angry, she was amazed she could speak at all. ‘Please don’t wait around to see me off. I’m sure someone could run me to the airstrip.’
‘Why not,’ he murmured, ‘if that’s what you want?’
‘It is.’
He smiled, taking in the strained lines of her face, the sudden pallor, but the fire in her eyes. ‘Well, goodbye, Aurora. You’ve been a few things to me, a cat burglar, a pocket señorita, an unusual lover, a girl who could never resist a challenge—until it came to this. Or perhaps you meant it when you said you intended to stay into “fun” for a good while to come?’
She refused to speak.
He drew the outline of her face with his fingers, then formed a fist to rest it beneath her chin. ‘Stay safe, little one.’ And he turned away to stroll out of the room.
Aurora was able to hold onto her anger as a means of keeping her composure until she got home. Then it fled away from her as she stared at her goldfish—her neighbour had fed them while she’d been away—and it came home to her that, even while she hated Luke Kirwan, her life seemed to stretch before her in a succession of long, lonely days with only two fish to confide in…
How could he not have understood that, if nothing else, she needed time to think? He was the one who had stepped back from marriage at almost the last moment. He was the one who got these ‘calls’ to go off and do his own thing, and hadn’t been able to see how a wife could understand without feeling slighted. He was the one who had accepted her reasoning the last time and rearranged his life accordingly—until her father had got himself lost.
She dumped her bag down at her feet and went to make herself a cup of tea. It was no nicer a day on the coast than up beyond Charleville. Grey, cold and miserable, which was exactly how she felt, she mused as she curled up on the settee with her cup in her hands.
But why did she also feel as if she’d done something wrong?
The thought came to her from nowhere and the word ‘lust’ followed straight on its heels. She swallowed a mouthful of tea. She hadn’t really meant that, she reflected. It had been a jibe uttered out of anger as well as despair because he had not even attempted to understand how she felt. Yet it had never felt like lust between them…
It had been too wonderful to describe in that term, but she had, and had it turned lethally back on her. Deservedly? Perhaps. Did it make much difference though? she asked herself sadly. Did it alter her conviction that circumstance and pity, rather than real love, had caused Luke to offer her marriage? Or, even if it was real love, could it survive between them?
She finished her tea and contemplated the fact that she had three more days before she started work—and had it to sustain her. And knew suddenly that she couldn’t bear three days home alone brooding, she couldn’t bear the thought of going to bed alone upstairs because the last time she’d slept in her bed had been the first time she’d slept with Luke Kirwan.
It was so strange, she thought. Once she’d got to know him that arrogant, damningly bored man had become someone quite different, someone she adored—she couldn’t deny it as, at last, the tears began to fall. But that dangerous side had come back and she’d run headlong into it.
She put her cup down, wiped her streaming eyes with her fingers and came to a sudden decision. Ten minutes later, after having asked her neighbour to feed the fish again, she was in her car driving north to the Sunshine Coast, hoping to find some sun and solace for the next three days.
‘Welcome back! You’re looking well, Aurora,’ Neil said the next Monday morning. ‘All set and rarin’ to go? Did you have fun with your father?’
‘Thanks, thanks, yes and yes in that order, Neil,’ she replied jauntily. ‘But I didn’t persuade him to come home.’
Neil grimaced. ‘Let’s hope he’s got all the bad luck behind him, then. You have been missed, Miss Templeton! Lots of calls bemoaning the lack of your golden voice on the airwaves.’
‘That’s…gratifying!’
‘There is another piece of news I thought might be of interest to you.’ Neil watched her thoughtfully for a moment.
Aurora raised an eyebrow at him.
‘Leonie Murdoch has got herself engaged. When she began to be seen in the company of a new man we all thought she was giving Luke the old sauce for the gander, sauce for the goose routine. But Mandy reckons she’s really fallen for this bloke.’
‘Good,’ Aurora said slowly.
‘You don’t sound too sure,’ Neil commented.
Aurora had been staring unseeingly at the console. She shrugged. ‘It’s none of my business.’
Neil stared at her penetratingly, opened his mouth, then apparently decided against commenting. ‘How would you like to interview the Leader of the State Opposition?’
Aurora blinked. ‘As in talking politics?’
Neil shook his head. ‘As in discussing her pet hobby—growing native Australian bush tucker. Which is not to say the coverage won’t provide some political coverage for her, but all you have to be is strictly neutral. When I say “all”, it’s a bit of a challenge, actually,’ he added, casting Aurora a fleeting glance. ‘If you were to have any strong political leanings one way or the other, for example.’
But Aurora intercepted that fleeting glance and got the uncomfortable feeling that Neil had seen through her carefully erected defences on the subject of Luke Kirwan, and was offering this as bait to help her over it.
Which was just what she needed, she reminded herself. ‘OK! How long have I got to prepare for it?’
‘That’s my girl,’ Neil said quietly. ‘Three days.’
Two weeks later, on her way home from work, Aurora saw a yellow Saab turn the corner ahead of her, the corner that led up the hill to her old home.
Perhaps Luke was back for a quick visit before the house was sold, she told herself. Or perhaps it was one of any number of yellow Saabs there might be around. But they were not that common, she knew…
That same night she got a phone call from Bunny, back from visiting her sister in Adelaide and full of the news that she’d got her old job back.
‘The dragon lady told me the woman they hired to replace me was a disaster and there’ve been two more since,’ she said triumphantly down the line. ‘Mind you, you have to be something special to put up with her, but I can’t help feeling as pleased as punch.’
‘That’s great, Bunny,’ Aurora said slowly, ‘but I thought the house was up for sale?’
‘It was for a while but the professor has changed his mind, it seems. And he’s spending a lot more time at home these days. Actually, he’s a lovely man, not at all what I first thought he was, but then I didn’t get to meet him for ages, did I?’
‘I…I thought he was spending three months or…thereabouts out west on the family sheep station,’ Aurora said raggedly.
‘Miss Hillier reckons he’s had a change of plan, but how’s my little girl going?’ Bunny asked breezily.
Aurora stared at the phone for ages after she put it down.
She couldn’t sleep that night and was incredibly restless for the next couple of days, but nothing happened. No yellow Saab pulling up in front of her house, no phone call, no nothing. And she couldn’t believe the pain it caused her to put her hopes to rest once again. Her life reminded her of the autumn equinox: short, desperately busy days, long cold nights and the chill feeling it would be like this for the rest of her life…
Then she got a cold, lost her voice, and had to take a few days off work. At the same time Neil decided to cut her workload so she could concentrate on her music and talk-back programmes. She was in two minds about it—not having to get up at five-thirty in the morning to read the news would be a relief in normal circumstances, but pushing herself to the limits in these circumstances seemed to be about the only way she could cope with life without Luke.
It was a Friday and she was due back at work on Monday, when a lovely basket of fruit and flowers was delivered.
She answered the door and the delivery man said cheerfully, ‘Mrs Newton? These are for you.’
‘I think you’ve got the wrong address, I’m not Mrs Newton—’ She stopped abruptly.
The man scratched his head and consulted his clipboard. ‘Nope, this is the address I’ve got here.’
‘Is there a message?’
They inspected the basket together but there was nothing. ‘OK, I’ll check back with the shop,’ the delivery man said, and pulled out his mobile phone.
Two minutes later he switched it off and pushed it into his pocket. ‘The address is right and it was ordered by a man who came in and paid cash for it but he didn’t want to send a message—said you’d know what it was all about. He did give his name, though—Isaac Newton.’ It was his turn to stop abruptly and look at her acutely. ‘Got to be some kind of a joke, right? Even if they didn’t twig at the shop, I’m pretty damn sure Isaac Newton isn’t wandering round Manly!’ He laughed.
A Question of Marriage Page 17