‘Why?’ She glared at him. ‘So you can inspect the goods daily to make sure you aren’t being short-changed?’
His dark eyes flashed a gentle but firm warning.
‘Are you premenstrual?’
‘What?’ she gasped.
‘Are you—’
‘I heard you the first time!’ She stomped to the other side of the tiny lounge and, crossing her arms over her chest, faced him. ‘Why is it that women’s anger is nearly always relegated as hormonal? Why can’t women be allowed to be angry without a biological reason?’
‘What are you angry about?’
‘Everything.’ She let out her breath in a rush.
‘That’s pretty broad.’ He perched on the edge of her old sofa. ‘Want to narrow it down a bit?’
She was close to tears and hated him for it. She turned her back and addressed the dismal brown curtains with the silver fish holes in them.
‘One of my clients went back on the streets last night,’ she said, her voice sounding hollow and defeated. ‘No one can find him.’
‘Then how do you know he’s back on the streets?’
She turned to look at him. ‘We have it on reasonably good authority he bought some drugs at about midnight. No one has seen him since.’
‘Has someone checked where he lives?’
‘He doesn’t really live anywhere.’ She sighed heavily. ‘Occasionally he stays overnight at one of the homeless hostels, but…’
‘It’s hard to believe that in this western civilisation of ours, people still choose to live on the streets,’ he commented.
‘It’s not a choice!’ She rounded on him hotly. ‘Oscar’s family kicked him out when he was barely fourteen! His stepfather abused him repeatedly and his mother is an alcoholic. He’d been on the streets for three years before we came across him and began counselling him, to help him kick his heroin habit.’
‘With any success?’
She sighed again. ‘He’d agreed to go on a methadone programme but he’s got a lot of anger stored up and whenever things get him down he has a relapse.’
‘You really care about these people, don’t you?’ His question brought her head back up.
She met his eyes across the room and was surprised to find warmth in their depths.
‘Yes, I do care.’
‘So you work with them for next to nothing to do your bit to change the world?’
She hunted his face for signs of criticism but his expression remained largely impassive.
‘I don’t need a lot of money,’ she answered.
‘What about clothes?’ His eyes ran over her worn jeans and faded pink T-shirt.
‘I’m not a fashion follower.’
‘Don’t you ever wish you had what your sisters have?’
She found his question unsettling.
‘My sisters finished their education. I didn’t. Employment for me has been difficult.’
‘Why didn’t you finish your education?’
‘Why all these questions?’ she fired at him. ‘You read the story in the press of how I nearly ruined Roy Holden’s teaching career. You don’t need to hear it all again from me.’
‘On the contrary, I’d very much like to hear it from you.’
She was angrier than she’d ever been at being so cornered.
‘It’s an old story.’ She gave him a blistering look. ‘A young, impressionable sixteen-year-old student spends too much time with one of her teachers. We were caught in what the witness claimed to be “a compromising situation”. He was transferred to another school, his career prospects in shreds.’
‘And you?’
She lowered her eyes. ‘I left school the same day. I couldn’t bear the furtive looks and whispered comments, so I quit.’
‘Why are you still punishing yourself after all this time?’
Her eyes flew to his once more. ‘I’m not punishing myself.’
‘You were a child,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have been cast as the wrongdoer if it was Roy Holden.’
‘Roy Holden wasn’t any such thing!’ Her protestation was vehement. ‘He did nothing wrong, nothing.’
Connor looked at her intently for a long moment.
‘So you took the rap?’
She looked away. ‘It was my fault.’
‘Teenage girls are notorious for harmless flirting. It’s natural.’
‘I didn’t flirt with him,’ she said. ‘I…I liked listening to him. He was knowledgeable and made the books we read come to life. I’d never had a teacher like him before. From the first moment he looked at me, I felt as if a part of me had come alive, and…’ She suddenly realised how much she’d given away and clamped her mouth shut.
What was it about Connor Harrowsmith that made her speak so unguardedly?
‘What was your parents’ reaction when your relationship with Holden became public?’ he asked after a stretching silence.
‘They were devastated.’ She sat down on the chair opposite. ‘Especially my mother. She had a migraine for three days. My father simply brushed up on all his moralising lectures on why good Christian girls shouldn’t give in to the temptation of fleshly desires and delivered them at every available opportunity.’
‘But you hadn’t, had you?’ His dark eyes never left hers for an instant. ‘Given in to fleshly desires,’ he clarified when she remained silent.
She felt two flags of colour on her cheeks.
‘Certainly not with Roy Holden,’ she said. ‘But after all the drama, as an act of rebellion, I had a one night stand with the captain of the football team.’
‘And?’
She gave him a rueful look. ‘It was dreadful.’
He smiled in empathy. ‘My first time was a shocker too.’
She felt a smile tug at her mouth and quickly suppressed it. ‘What did Mrs Holden say in the television interview?’ she asked.
‘Just that she supported her husband in his claim of innocence of any impropriety.’
‘’Did she say anything about me?’
‘Not really.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘Nothing too damning, if that’s what’s worrying you, but I think our marriage will definitely put out the remaining embers of gossip.’
Jasmine gnawed at her bottom lip. ‘It was all so long ago. Eight years, in fact. I can’t understand why anyone would be in the least bit interested after all this time.’
‘Your father’s a bishop,’ he pointed out. ‘Anything any member of his family does or has done is fuel for gossip. If he were a milkman no one would be interested.’
‘I guess you’re right.’
‘Come on.’ He got to his feet. ‘Let’s find somewhere to have a quick meal and then we can take a drive around the haunts you think your young absconder might be frequenting.’
Jasmine picked up her bag from where he’d placed it earlier and followed him to the door, all the time her feelings for him undergoing a rapid turnaround. Apart from her colleague, Todd, at the clinic she didn’t know of a single man who’d willingly take out a weeknight of his time to trawl the downtrodden end of town to look for a person he didn’t even know.
It made her see him in a totally different light.
It made her hatred retreat to a place where she could no longer access it.
It made her afraid.
After trawling the streets for an hour or so they stopped to share a Chinese meal in a small café in Chinatown. Jasmine picked at her food, her eyes avoiding Connor’s across the small table.
‘Are you nervous about Friday?’ he asked after a few minutes of silence between them.
‘Why should I be nervous?’ She lifted her gaze to his, her chin slightly raised. ‘It’s not as if it’s a real marriage, it’s merely a formality so we both get what we want. I want to get my parents off my back and you want to secure your late mother’s trust fund.’
He watched her face for endless seconds.
‘I have every intention for thi
s to be a proper marriage, Jasmine, and you know it.’
‘You can hardly force me.’ Her chin went a little higher.
A small smile lifted one corner of his mouth.
‘No, but I have some persuasive tricks in my repertoire that should have the desired effect.’ He picked up his wine. ‘They haven’t let me down in the past.’
She could feel the heat rise in her cheeks as she imagined him in the arms of God knew how many women, all of them gasping for the release only he could provide with his masterful mouth and intensely male body.
She covered her discomfiture with sarcasm.
‘I suppose you’re leaving a veritable legion of disappointed women behind you now that you’re so intent on removing yourself from bachelordom?’
‘Not as many as you probably think.’ He smiled. ‘But enough to make you jealous.’
‘I’m not jealous!’ Her insistence was perhaps a little too emphatic and she could tell from the glint in his eye he’d noted it.
‘Of course you’re not.’ He leant back in his chair and surveyed her flushed features in a leisurely manner. ‘You’d have to care about me to be jealous, wouldn’t you?’
Without answering, she poked at a grain of rice with the end of her chopstick.
‘How many lovers have you had?’ he asked after a little pause.
She squashed the grain of rice before lifting her eyes to his.
‘Not as many as you probably think but enough to make you jealous,’ she threw his own answer back at him.
His dark eyes twinkled with amusement as he twirled his wine glass in his hand.
‘Nice come-back. I’m impressed.’
She toyed with her own glass, her fingers restless and fumbling.
‘It wasn’t a come-back, it’s the truth. No man wants to hear the intimate details of his future wife’s past sexual exploits.’
‘I don’t know.’ He put his glass down and leaned his elbows on the table to look at her closely. ‘I think I’d be very interested to hear who’s been in your bed.’
Hot colour suffused her face and she turned away to disguise it. He had seen too much as it was, and it wouldn’t do to be too transparent; her pride would never survive it.
The waiter came to clear their plates and she was saved from having to respond. They declined dessert and, after the bill came and was settled, Connor got to his feet and, taking her arm, tucked it through his.
‘Come on, where shall we look for Oscar now?’
Jasmine walked with him back along the streets of Darlinghurst and King’s Cross, occasionally stopping to talk to someone she knew, but all the time she was conscious of Connor’s arm linked through hers.
No one seemed to know where Oscar was, or if they did they weren’t saying. They’d walked back and forth along the main thoroughfares and into some of the less frequented ones. Even Connor began to balk as someone looking a little the worse for wear leered at Jasmine, making an obscene comment about her availability and price.
He quickly ushered her back into the brighter lights of the main street and, standing under the nearest street-light, frowned down at her.
‘I want you to promise me you won’t ever come here again by yourself. Do you promise?’
She met his determined gaze, her expression undaunted.
‘Don’t be silly, that was only Reggie. He’s totally harmless, and besides—’ she gave him a reassuring half-smile ‘—that was just the sweet sherry talking.’
‘Sherry or not,’ he growled as he led her back to his car, ‘this place isn’t even safe for the police, let alone civilians.’
‘Are you frightened?’ She gave him a teasing glance.
He glowered down at her, but she could see behind the frowning expression the glint of amusement in his eyes.
‘Of course I’m not frightened, but I don’t like the thought of you out here wandering amongst goodness knows what desperadoes.’
‘They’re people like you and me, Connor,’ she said, her tone now serious. ‘They’ve just made a couple of bad choices here and there. Any one of us could end up the same, given similar circumstances.’
He looked at her speculatively for a long moment before sighing. ‘You’re right, of course.’ He took her arm again and continued walking the two blocks back towards his car.
Somehow she sensed a certain quality in his statement, as if he himself had at some point been in difficult circumstances but had managed to right himself. She realised with a prickle of conscience that she still hadn’t asked him anything about his family. Most of the conversations they’d had about family members had concentrated on hers.
‘What was your mother’s name?’ she asked, when they were back in his car.
He shot her a quick glance before turning back to start the engine.
‘Ellen.’
‘Do you remember her?’
‘A bit.’ His voice was gruff.
‘What sorts of things do you remember?’
His car lurched forward with a jerk as if he’d let the clutch out too early.
‘What is this?’ His look towards her was frowning. ‘Why the sudden interest in my background?’
‘I was just making conversation.’ She folded her arms defensively. ‘You ask me intimate questions all the time so I don’t see why I shouldn’t do the same to you.’
‘My mother has been dead for nearly thirty years,’ he said after a tight little silence. ‘I don’t see any point in bringing it all up now.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Look.’ He turned the car into the kerb and once it was stationary faced her. ‘The script of my family doesn’t exactly read like the happy families on TV.’
Even in the subdued lighting within the car she could see the normally handsome lines of his face grow harsh in remembrance.
‘For most of my childhood it was a fight for survival,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t wait to get away.’
‘What about Finn?’ she asked. ‘Weren’t you two ever close?’
His eyes hardened. ‘Finn’s my stepbrother, the child of Julian and Harriet. No blood relationship to me and I don’t think a day went past without one or both of my step-parents reminding me of it.’
‘It must have been so lonely for you.’
‘Probably no lonelier than for you,’ he said, his tone softening as he turned the car back into the traffic once more.
‘What do you mean?’ She gave him a narrow-eyed glance.
‘It can’t have been easy for you, surrounded by sisters who couldn’t do a thing wrong.’
‘I wasn’t bad all the time.’
‘You didn’t need to be,’ he said. ‘Just being different was bad enough.’
Jasmine felt a trickle of alarm slide down her spine.
‘W…what do you mean by that?’
He flicked another quick glance, taking in the tight clench of her hands in her lap, the worried look in her blue eyes and the anxious set of her slim body, sitting upright in the seat.
‘I mentioned to you before that you don’t seem to really belong in your family. Does that worry you?’
‘I’m not a believer,’ she answered quickly, ‘in a church family. That is about as isolating as you can get.’
‘The black sheep, eh?’
‘You’d better believe it.’ She tried to make her tone light to cover her unease at his probing questions.
‘Good for you,’ he said, surprising her yet again. ‘Good for you.’
Jasmine opened her mouth to say something in return but just then she noticed a familiar figure out of the corner of her eye.
‘Stop the car!’ she cried.
‘What?’ Connor braked and she lurched forward. ‘Here?’
She already had the door open and was half out before the car had completely stopped.
He watched as she disappeared down a dark alley off the main drag of The Rocks. He quickly parked in a loading zone, hoping his car wouldn’t be towed away for contravening the parking restrict
ions, even though it was getting on for one a.m. in the morning.
He found her at the end of the alley with her arms around a scraggy-looking youth who smelt as if he’d recently been sick.
‘Should we get an ambulance?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘He’s fine, just a bit of a hangover.’
He helped her get the youth on his feet, carefully sidestepping what appeared to be the recently evacuated contents of his stomach on the cobblestones.
‘Where to now?’ he asked, looking at Jasmine.
‘We’ll have to take him to the hostel.’
‘In my car?’ He winced at the thought of whatever else was left in the lad’s stomach waiting to make an untimely appearance on the leather interior.
‘Of course in your car.’ She hitched the boy’s floppy arm across her shoulder and then eyeballed Connor with an accusing eye. ‘Unless you’d rather not?’
Somehow he sensed it was some sort of test.
‘My car it is.’ He took the boy’s other arm and half carried, half dragged the lad to his less than three months old, showroom perfect Maserati.
The hostel was a short drive away and as they hauled the lad inside a large man of Maori extraction greeted Jasmine warmly.
‘Hey, girl. So you found him, eh?’
Jasmine handed over her young charge, who was mumbling something unintelligible as he flopped on the nearest chair and dropped his head between his knees. She absently stroked his straggly hair as she spoke to the hostel supervisor.
‘I don’t think he’s had a fix, just a little too much to drink. He’ll probably sleep it off.’
‘I’ll get the Doc to give him the once over. Just in case.’
‘Thanks, Rangi.’ She smiled up at him and then, turning to Connor, introduced them.
‘Rangi, this is Connor Harrowsmith.’
The men shook hands and exchanged one or two comments about the All Blacks rugby team, which made them both laugh.
Jasmine watched the little exchange with interest. She hated to admit it but Connor wasn’t exactly as she’d assumed he’d be. There was no sign of snobbery about him and he seemed at ease talking with anyone, from members of the clergy like her father to street kids, and those who looked after them, like Rangi. Just when she thought she’d got him all figured out he’d say or do something that would totally surprise her.
The Australian's Marriage Demand Page 6