The Tycoon and the Wedding Planner

by Kandy Shepherd

  ‘Sure, I’ve been to lots of other places. When I...after I...’

  She struggled to find the right words that wouldn’t reveal the back story she had never shared with anyone: the reason she’d left university in Sydney without completing her degree. The reason she felt she would always doubt her choice of men. ‘I toured all around the country in a small dance company.’

  ‘I thought you might have been a dancer,’ he said. She followed his gaze down to where her feet dangled over the edge of the pier.

  ‘Let me guess—because of the duck walk? Years of training in classical ballet tends to do that. Only, we dancers call it “a good turn-out”.’

  ‘I was going to say because of the graceful way you move.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said and the word hung still in the air.

  She blushed that darn betraying blush. She wasn’t sure how to accept the compliment. Mere hours ago she might have replied with something flirtatious. But not now. Not when all that was off the agenda.

  ‘Thank you,’ was all she said.

  ‘Would I have heard of your dance company?’

  ‘I highly doubt it. It was a cabaret troupe and far from famous. We toured regional Australia—the big clubs, town halls, civic centres, small theatres if they had them. Once we had a stint in New Zealand. We were usually the support act to a singer or a magician—that kind of thing. It was hard work but a lot of fun.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘A dancer’s life is a short one,’ she said, trying to sound unconcerned. ‘I injured my ankle and that was the end of it.’

  She didn’t want to add that her ankle had healed—but the emotional wounds from a near-miss assault from a wouldn’t-take-no-for-an-answer admirer had not.

  During the time the man had had her trapped, he’d taunted her that her sexy dance moves in body-hugging costumes made men think she was asking for it. Coming so soon after her damaging relationship with her university boyfriend, she’d imploded. She hadn’t performed since, or even danced at parties.

  ‘I’d like to see you dance some day,’ Sam said.

  ‘Chance would be a fine thing. I don’t dance at all any more.’

  Sadness wrenched at her as it always did when she thought about dance. To express herself with movement had been an intrinsic part of her and she mourned its loss.

  ‘Because of the ankle?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she lied.

  She felt uncomfortable with the conversation focused on her. That was a time of her life she’d sooner forget. She made her voice sound bright and cheery. That was what people expected of her. ‘You do realise you’ve skipped answering part two of question four,’ she said.

  ‘I did?’

  ‘You know, about why your engagement ended?’ she prompted. ‘Unless that’s off the agenda now for discussion between business associates.’

  ‘No secrets there,’ he said. ‘Two weeks before the wedding my former fiancée, Frances, called it off. I hadn’t seen it coming.’

  ‘That must have been a shock. What on earth happened?’

  Kate really wanted to hear his reply. She couldn’t understand how anyone engaged to be married to Sam Lancaster could find any reason to call it off. She could scarcely believe it when—just as Sam was about to answer her—she heard her name being called from the boathouse.

  She stilled. So did Sam. ‘Pretend you don’t hear it,’ Sam muttered in an undertone.

  She tried to block her ears but her name came again, echoing over the water. Sandy’s voice.

  ‘Over here,’ she called, then mouthed a silent, ‘Sorry,’ to Sam.

  Sandy rushed along the dock. ‘Thank heaven you hadn’t gone home. Lizzie, my sister, just phoned. She can’t make it to the hen and stag night on Wednesday. We’ll have to drive up to Sydney and have it there instead.’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘Don’t worry, Kate,’ said Sandy. ‘I promise it won’t be any more work for you.’ Sandy turned to Sam. ‘Are you okay with the change of plan?’

  Sam shrugged. ‘Sure.’

  Kate cleared her throat against the rising panic that threatened to choke her. She couldn’t go to Sydney. She just couldn’t. But she didn’t want to tell Sandy she wouldn’t be going with them. She couldn’t cope with the explanations, the reasons. She’d make her excuses at the last minute. They could party quite happily without her.

  ‘Fine by me too,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘One less thing for me to have to organise.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  UP UNTIL NOW, Sam had never had a problem with the ‘no dating the clients’ rule. Along the way there had been attractive female clients who had made their personal interest in him clear. But he had had no trouble deflecting them; the business had always come first.

  It was a different story with Kate Parker. Kate certainly wasn’t coming on to him in any way. In fact, she couldn’t be more professional. This morning she had picked him up from the hotel. On the short drive to the site of the proposed resort, the conversation had been completely business-related—not even a mention of the wedding, let alone their thwarted date.

  He was the one who was having trouble seeing her purely as a client and not as a beautiful, desirable woman who interested him more than anyone had interested him for a long time. It was disconcerting the way she appeared so easily to have put behind her any thought of a more personal relationship.

  The thought nagged at him—if Ben hadn’t appointed her as his liaison would she have agreed to that date? Might they have been going out to dinner together tonight?

  She was a client. Just a client.

  But as she guided him around the site he found her presence so distracting it was a struggle to act professionally. The way her hair gleamed copper in the mid-morning sun made even the most spectacular surroundings seem dull by comparison. When she walked ahead of him in white jeans, and a white shirt that showcased her shapely back view, how could he objectively assess the geo-technical aspects of the site? Or gauge the logistics of crane access when her orange cinnamon scent wafted towards him?

  He gritted his teeth and kicked the sandy soil with its sparse cover of indigenous vegetation, filling his nostrils with the scent of eucalypt leaves crushed underfoot.

  Truth be told, he didn’t really need to inspect the site. The company had a team of surveyors and engineers to do that. He’d promised Ben he’d take a look more as a courtesy than anything. Now Kate was standing in for Ben and it was a very different experience than it would have been tramping over the land with his old skiing buddy.

  ‘What do you think?’ Kate asked.

  She twirled around three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, her arms outstretched. Pride and excitement underscored her voice. She’d seemed subdued when he’d said goodnight at the boathouse—thrown by the last-minute change to the stag night. But there was no trace of that today. It appeared she could take change in her stride. He admired that—in his experience, not all super-organised people were as flexible.

  ‘It’s magnificent,’ he said. You’re magnificent. ‘You’re on to a winner.’

  The large parcel of land stood elevated above the northern end of what the locals called Big Ray beach, though there was another name on the ordinance surveys. Groves of spotted gums, with their distinctive marked bark, framed a view right out past the breakers to the open sea.

  ‘There was a ramshackle old cottage in that corner,’ Kate said, pointing. ‘It had been there for years. It was only demolished quite recently.’

  ‘The great Australian beach shack—that’s quite a tradition,’ he said. ‘No doubt generations of the same family drove down from Sydney or Canberra to spend the long summer holidays on the beach.’

  ‘I wouldn’t get too nostalgic about it,’ she said. ‘It was very basic; just one step up from a sha
nty. I pitied the mum of the family having to cook in it on sweltering January days.’

  ‘Maybe the guys barbecued the fish they’d caught.’

  ‘You sound like you speak from experience. Did your family have a beach house when you were growing up?’

  ‘We owned a beach house at Palm Beach—it’s the most northern beach in Sydney.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘I know it—don’t they call it the summer playground of the wealthy?’

  ‘I guess they do,’ he said. ‘Our place was certainly no beach shack. And I never went fishing with my father. He was always at work.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘She was partying.’

  He shied away from the thinly veiled pity in Kate’s eyes. ‘Did you have brothers or sisters?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I was an only child.’

  As a little boy he had spent many lonely hours over the long school holidays rattling around the palatial house by himself. Then, when he’d turned fourteen, his father had started him working as a labourer on the company building sites during the holidays. It had been tough—brutal, in some ways, as the old hands had tested the ‘silvertail’ boss’s son from the private school. But he’d been strong—both physically and mentally—and willing to prove himself. He’d won the doubters over.

  From then on, the company had dominated his life. And he’d rarely gone back to that lonely Palm Beach house until he’d been old enough to take a group of his own friends.

  ‘I envied the school friends who’d come back from a place like this full of tales of adventure.’ He waved his hand towards the demolition site. ‘I bet that old shack could have told some stories.’

  ‘Perhaps. But only the one family got to enjoy the views and the proximity to the beach,’ Kate said. She looked around the land with a distinctly proprietorial air. ‘The owners got a good price for the land and now lots of people will be able to enjoy this magic place.’

  ‘Spoken like a true, ruthless property developer,’ he said, not entirely tongue-in-cheek. He had no issue with property developers—the good ones, that was—they were the company’s lifeblood.

  ‘I wouldn’t say ruthless. More...practical,’ she said with an uplifting of her pretty mouth.

  ‘Okay. Practical,’ he said.

  ‘And don’t forget creative. After all, no one else ever saw the potential of this land.’

  ‘Okay. You’re a practical and creative property developer without a ruthless bone in your body.’

  ‘Oh, there might be a ruthless bone or two there,’ she said with a flash of dimpled smile. ‘But I wouldn’t call me a property developer,’ she said. ‘I just like hotels.’

  ‘Which is why we’re standing here today,’ he said. ‘How did your interest come about?’

  ‘When we were on tour with the dance company we stayed in some of the worst accommodation you could imagine.’ She shuddered in her exaggerated, dramatic way that made him smile every time. Her face was so mobile; she pulled faces that on anyone else would be unattractive but on her were disarming.

  ‘Let me count the ways in which we were tormented by terrible bedding, appalling plumbing and the odd cockroach or two. In one dump out west, we found a shed snakeskin under the bed.’

  That made Sam shudder too. He hated snakes.

  ‘Whenever we could manage it, a few of the girls and I scraped together the funds to lap up the luxury of a nice hotel where we lived the good life for a day or two.’

  He nodded. ‘I did the same thing in India. While we were working, we didn’t expect accommodation any better than the people’s homes we were rebuilding. When we were done, I checked in for a night at an extraordinary hotel in an old maharajah’s palace.’

  Her eyes sparkled green in the sunlight. ‘Was it awesome? I would so love to see those Indian palace hotels.’

  ‘The rooms were stupendous, the plumbing not so much. But I didn’t care about that when I was staying in a place truly fit for a king.’

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it? It doesn’t have to be bandbox perfect for a good experience.’ She bubbled with enthusiasm. ‘It can be something more indefinable than gold-plated taps or feather mattresses. On those tours, I really got to know what made a good hotel or a bad one—regardless of the room rate. When the chance came to work with Ben at Harbourside, I jumped at it. I had to train from the ground up, but knew I’d found the career for me.’

  ‘You’ve never wanted to work at a different hotel? A bigger one? Maybe somewhere else—one of those Indian hotels, perhaps? Or even Sydney?’ He fought a hopeful note from entering his voice when he spoke about the possibility of her moving to his home city. There was no point. She was off-limits.

  She shook her head emphatically. ‘No. I want to work right here in Dolphin Bay. I couldn’t think of anything else I would rather do than manage the new hotel. I want to make it the number-one destination on the south coast.’

  She looked out to sea and he swore her dreams shone from her eyes.

  But he was perturbed that her horizons seemed so narrow. In his view, she was a big fish in a small pond, too savvy to be spending her life in a backwater like this. And yet, despite that, her vision had been expansionary.

  ‘What gave you the idea for this kind of resort?’ he asked, genuinely interested.

  She gave a self-deprecating shrug but he could tell she was burning to share her story. ‘I saw friends flying to surf and yoga resorts in Bali. Others driving to Sydney to check in for pampering spa weekends. I wondered why people couldn’t come to Dolphin Bay for that. We’re well placed for tourists from both Canberra and Sydney: we’ve got the beach, we’ve got the beautiful natural environment. Get the eco credentials, and I reckon we could have a winner. Ben thought so too when I talked it over with him.’

  ‘You’ve obviously done your research.’ But as he thought about it, he realised there was something vital missing from her impassioned sell.

  ‘You haven’t actually visited the surf and spa hotels in Bali and Sydney yourself, by way of comparison?’

  ‘Unfortunately, no.’ Her face tightened and he could tell he’d hit a sore spot. ‘I’m more of an armchair traveller. I know the best hotels’ websites backwards, but I don’t have the salary to afford overseas trips.’

  He would enjoy showing her the world. The thought came from nowhere but with it the image of showing her some of the spectacular hotels he’d stayed in. Of taking her to the ones she’d dreamed of and ones she’d never imagined existed. But that went beyond the business brief of liaising on the hotel build.

  ‘Maybe you should talk to Ben about your salary.’ He couldn’t imagine his old mate Ben would rip Kate off. But he knew only too well how tight-fisted some business people could be. His father had believed in rewarding people properly for their work and he’d followed suit. It was one of the reasons the company had so many loyal, long-serving employees.

  Those people were why he hadn’t immediately accepted the takeover offer. The owners of Lancaster & Son Construction had always prided themselves on being a family company, not only in the sense that it was owned by a family, but also because the people who worked for them were a family of sorts. Many of the staff would see a sale as a personal betrayal on his part. Worry about that was keeping him awake at night.

  Kate shook her head. ‘You probably know hospitality isn’t the highest paying of industries, but Ben pays me fairly. And I’ve had the opportunity to learn the business from the ground up.’

  ‘Soon you’ll get the chance to see a hotel built from the ground up.’

  ‘I can’t wait to see it come to life,’ she said, bubbling again with the enthusiasm he found so attractive.

  She reached down for the clipboard she’d left on the bonnet of the small white van with the Hotel Harbourside logo. ‘That’s a cue to get dow
n to business.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ he said. ‘Fire away with any questions you might have.’

  ‘Okay.’ She looked up at him. ‘Do I have to include the business questions in the questions I’ve got left with you?’ She hastily amended her words. ‘I mean, those questions wouldn’t be about the actual building but about you. Uh...about you as our builder, I mean.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said. Her series of questions indicated that underneath her businesslike attitude she might still be interested in him as a person, not just a contact. Though he doubted they’d be in one another’s company long enough for her to ask them all.

  ‘How long do you think it will take to build the resort?’ she asked.

  ‘From breaking ground to when you greet your first guests?’

  She nodded.

  ‘At least a year, maybe longer. This site is out of the way with a section of unsealed road to complicate matters in bad weather. That might pose problems with transporting equipment and materials. Then there’s the fit-out to consider. You’ve specified a high standard of finish.’

  ‘But you’ll give us dates for commencement and completion in the final contract?’

  ‘Of course. But we’ll err on the side of conservative.’ It was difficult to stay impartial and businesslike when the look of concentration on her face was so appealing; when the way she nibbled on the top of her pen made him want to reach over, pluck it from her hand and kiss her.

  She scribbled some notes on her notepad. ‘I’ll include that in my report.’

  Going on what he already knew about Kate, Sam had no doubt the report would be detailed and comprehensive.

  ‘Talking like this makes it all seem very real,’ she said. ‘I’ll be out here every day after work impatiently watching it go up. Will...will you be here to supervise it?’

  He shook his head. ‘There will be a construction manager on site. The team here will report back to Sydney.’

  ‘So...you’re just here for the one week?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said.