Belle's Secret

by Victoria Purman

  “Does she get these a lot?” Harry asked.

  “She hasn’t had one here for … just over a year. She was hit the first week she arrived here at Wirra Station. It was a few weeks after she got back from Vegas and her first day in town. She just, well, fell in a heap. I put it down to the stress of the move and coming to a new town and all the worries about establishing her business …” Maggie’s voice trailed off.

  One year ago. He knew what that meant.

  One year ago they’d got married. Well, they were two days short of their anniversary but the timing all clicked in Harry’s head like cogs turning. She’d fled Vegas, landed here at Wirra Station, started a new business venture. Stress. Stress had done it. His unexpected arrival had done this to her. It was his fault. How the hell was he supposed to live with that thought? Love shouldn’t be like this.

  Love. He still loved her. He loved her more than he thought possible.

  “Maggie …”

  She didn’t give him the chance to finish. “Damn it, Harry.”

  “What?”

  “Look. I’m going to be straight with you.” She paused for half a second. “I know everything.”

  He felt as deflated as a day-old helium balloon.

  How had Belle described Maggie—as the sister she’d never had? Was it any surprise that she’d talked to her about this whole crazy mess? He couldn’t be pissed off about it. He was glad Belle had had someone to talk to about it. He hadn’t had anybody. If he’d told his siblings, he knew how they would have reacted: Everett would have told him to forget about Belle; Amy would have scolded him for being such a foolhardy idiot and Tess? She would have insisted he scour the world to find his wife. Turns out, Tess knew him better than anybody. He had searched the world for Belle.

  And, at the moment he’d decided to stop looking, he’d found her. And he was here now, when she needed somebody to look out for her. He had the chance to prove himself. Not only to tell her that he loved her, but to prove it to her as well. She had Maggie and Max and him.

  And he was right here.

  And for the life of him, he couldn’t think of anything that would blast him from her side.

  Harry ran a hand over his stubbled jaw. “Maggie, let me explain about what happened in Vegas.”

  “You don’t need to. I know she ran out on you without leaving a trace. I know her better than she thinks I do. She was scared. I’m just …”

  Maggie stopped. He heard sniffing down the line. Was she crying? “I’m just so glad you found her.”

  “I am, too.” Harry slumped back against the kitchen counter. His toast sprang up from the slots in the toaster with such force that one bounced high and then toppled to the floor. He left it right there.

  “Well, if that’s the case, Harry Harrison, my question is: what are you going to do about our girl?”

  He knew what he had to do. And he was about to say, I have a plan, when Belle’s voice interrupted him.

  “Who are you talking to?”

  He looked up from the toast on the floor. Belle stood in the doorway to the kitchen, yawning, stretching her arms up high. Her hair was a tangled mess. She probably had stinky morning breath. And goddamn she needed a shower.

  And he’d never loved her more. Something hit him deep inside, something pounded against his ribs. He couldn’t let her get away again. Whatever it took. He would do it.

  “Is that her?” Maggie demanded on the other end of the line. “Put her on, Harry.”

  “It’s Maggie.” He couldn’t move. Belle came to him instead, her hips swaying, her long legs taunting him without even trying. She leaned into him, her belly pressing against him, one hand splayed on his chest. He took her weight, slipped an arm around and let it rest on the bare skin at the small of her back where her singlet top had left a tantalising gap. She took the phone from his hand and pressed it to her ear.

  “Hey, Mags.” She met his gaze. “I’m better.” Maggie’s voice was muffled. Belle waited. She searched his face. “Harry said you’d taken care of everything?”

  He cupped her cheek. Her skin was soft and warm and home. She was home to him.

  “I’m so sorry, I … I know, I know. I hope you explained? Thank you for doing that. I’ll make it up to them, I promise. Maybe I’ll do their first child’s naming ceremony or something. And Callen filled in for me? Oh, he’s great. That’s really great.” Belle rubbed at her eyes. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Or anyone. He’s right here.” She listened to something Maggie said and her eyes widened. “He has? He did?” And then her cheek warmed under his touch. “Here he is.” She passed the phone back to him. “Maggie wants to talk to you.”

  “Yeah?” He leaned down. He wanted to kiss Belle so damn bad. “Done it. Got it. I’ll think about it. Okay, see you soon.”

  Harry ended the call and set the phone on the counter then enveloped Belle in his arms.

  “You scared the crap out of me,” he whispered as he gently pressed his lips to hers in a comforting kiss.

  “Have you really been here the whole time?” she asked softly.

  “You bet your sweet ass I’ve been here.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s what we promised each other, remember? For better or for worse, in sickness and in health.”

  He wanted to make her safe. He wanted to stay right here in this little cottage in the middle of nowhere, Australia, and make sure she was safe.

  When she buried her head in his chest, they stayed there like that, entwined, for a long, loving moment, which was enough time for Harry to think about how the final pieces of his plan would fall into place.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Isabella was glad Sunday was almost over. She was feeling so much better, thanks to sleep and medication and Harry’s care and all Saturday off, but today’s heat was unrelenting and a stifling north wind blew over the station and Wirralong.

  She’d just married a couple in their thirties—Andrew and Sally—and had tried not to hug the flower girl, their daughter Rachel, the brightest little thing with blonde curls and a determined attitude when it came to distributing the petals around the gazebo. Rachel had been whisked off to her grandparents for a sleepover and the happy couple and their guests were about to kick off the celebrations at The Woolshed.

  Isabella had driven into her office in Wirralong to file her paperwork and move all her online files into the “Completed Weddings 2018” folder on her computer. She kept everything: copies of emails during initial discussions, formal agreements for her services, invoices, records of deposits and final payments, and the wedding vows. Of course, it could have waited until the beginning of the working week, but she’d needed a distraction. She needed to think.

  She pushed her chair away from her desk and leaned back against the headrest, linking her fingers over her stomach, which felt as if she’d swallowed butterflies and they were trying to escape. She counted the squares in the design of the pressed tin ceiling in her historic office.

  It wasn’t butterflies at all. It was all about Harry.

  *

  Isabella wanted to joke that they were doing what old married couples did, but had been too nervous to say it. On Saturday afternoon, Harry had scoured through her DVD collection and they watched old episodes of Seinfeld for hours, laughing, commenting on the height of Elaine’s hair and the whiteness of Jerry’s sneakers. She put her feet in his lap and he rubbed them so hard she’d complained. He’d slipped an arm around the back of the sofa and she relaxed into him, and they made out like crazy teenagers when they couldn’t hold back any longer. When she felt him hard against her, and slipped her hand up inside his shirt, he pulled back just enough to speak.

  “I’m no doctor, but an orgasm on top of a migraine might not be such a great idea,” he said, biting her lip. “And two would be worse.”

  “Two?” She laughed and her stomach flipped. She knew he could do that to her. She missed that so much. But she’d missed this more. She’d imagined sometimes what
this kind of intimacy would be like: this simple act of sharing your life with someone. With someone who held you when you were sick and made you coffee and rubbed your feet and shared their stories with you. And loved you.

  Harry sighed, ran a hand through his hair and closed his eyes for a long moment. “Just so you know, I want you so damn much.” He dropped his forehead to hers.

  “Me too,” she whispered in reply.

  After that, he made her something to eat—a plain cheese sandwich was all she could stomach—and then kissed her goodbye, saying he had some things to take care of. It was only after he left that she realised how much he’d done for her while she’d been knocked out. They were only little things, but they counted. He’d ran and unloaded the dishwasher and put through a load of washing: the sheets he’d used to sleep on her sofa. She’d found them folded—yeah, kind of messily but it was the thought that counted—in the cupboard at the end of her hallway. Her kitchen was as spotless as she always kept it but there was a small bunch of flowers, gum leaves and lavender (not much else grew in northern Victoria in the sweltering summer) in a vase in the middle of the kitchen table.

  Her little house was empty without him. And now that he’d come back into her life, Isabella realised her life was empty without him, too. She thought she’d made peace with being alone, with the loneliness of her life in Wirralong, with being a witness to other peoples’ love stories. But that wasn’t true.

  She wanted her own love story.

  And she knew exactly who the hero of her love story was.

  *

  A bell tinkled and the doorway to her office swung open.

  It was Harry.

  The ache she’d felt ever since he’d arrived in Wirralong surged; it pressed itself against her rib cage, squeezed her heart and came out in leaky tears. A week ago she’d looked at him with regret because she’d married him. Now, she looked at him with regret because she was going to divorce him.

  She loved him.

  It was that complicated and that easy.

  “Hey, Isabella.”

  She swallowed the lump in her throat. He’d used her real name. “Hey.”

  Harry strode towards her, his gait easy, his expression unreadable. He held a large white envelope in one hand. Her eyes darted to it and he noticed.

  “How was your day? You feeling okay in this heat?”

  “It’s been good. The wedding went off without a hitch.” And then she couldn’t help it. “What’s that?” Why on earth was she asking? She knew full well what was in that envelope. The very thing she’d asked for. A clean break. A fresh start.

  He lifted the envelope, read the wording on the front of it. “Oh, yeah. The divorce papers arrived. Express from California. Personally escorted, as a matter of fact.”

  She worked so hard to hold herself together. “Just in time then. For you to leave, I mean.”

  “Just in time,” he said. “Yeah.”

  It was hard to be with him now and not touch him. The tips of her fingers tingled and that ache became a longing and a sense of loss almost too much to bear. So much had changed for them during the past week. She now knew what she was about to lose forever if she signed her life away. Yes, that’s what it felt like. Signing the rest of her life away.

  Isabella cleared her throat. “I’ll just grab a pen. Why don’t you take a seat over on one of the sofas?” She opened the top drawer of her wooden desk and there they were, the gold pens she used for her weddings, sitting in a velvet box. They were the special ones she took to ceremonies for couples to use when they signed their official wedding documentation. It would be so traitorous to be using one of them for a divorce.

  Another sign.

  She took a pen from its nest and followed Harry to the front of her office, where the sofas were set around an antique wedding table. A pile of wedding magazines sat traitorously next to a potted plant.

  Harry stood with his back to her, staring out the window. She waited, wanting to look at him for the last time. His strength, his comfort had been so important to her in the past few days. She would miss being in his arms, feeling that sense of belonging, of warmth, of love. At least it had felt like love to her.

  She cleared her throat. “Harry?” She had to get this over with before she burst into messy tears.

  Harry turned. He opened the envelope, slipped out some papers and studied them. He mussed his hair some more by running his fingers through it. His expression was unreadable.

  “So what do I have to do?” Isabella smoothed down her skirt to disguise the fact that her palms were clammy.

  “Divorce me.” Harry passed her the papers. She looked them over. There were tiny pink coloured Post-it notes in various spots denoting where she should sign. There were blue ones, too, and she figured that was his lawyer’s idea of indicating where Harry should sign. She flipped through the pages. His dotted lines were still blank.

  She slowly sat down, took a deep breath, poised her pen over the first page. Her stomach was churning and her hand shook so much she wasn’t sure she could even put it to paper without smudging her signature.

  “So this is it,” she said and gathered the courage to look up at him. His arms were crossed over his chest, his expression a poker face now.

  “This is it. All you have to do is sign where it’s pink.”

  “I got that.” Her pen hovered. “Well, it was nice being married to you, Harry Harrison.”

  “And you, Isabella Martenson.”

  Isabella couldn’t delay this any longer. She would finally give him what he wanted; what he’d travelled eight thousand miles for. She signed the first page and flicked the pages over to sign everywhere else she needed to. When she could finally breathe again, she tidied the stack of papers by tapping them on the table, and handed the neat pile back to Harry.

  “Thanks for keeping my secret,” she said quietly. “You’ve not only saved my career but probably Wirra Station, too.”

  “You don’t need to thank me.”

  “I do. I really do. Now you’ve seen it for yourself, you know what we’ve created here and how important it is to Wirralong. This business is important to me. It’s everything to me, actually.”

  It was going to have to be everything because the only other thing she cared about was now over.

  “Well. Nice knowing you, Isabella.”

  She stood. It seemed ridiculous to extend a hand to him for a handshake, given they’d seen each other naked and he’d sent her soaring into too many orgasms to count in just a week. “And it was lovely knowing you, Harry.”

  He took a couple of steps backwards, his gaze not leaving hers, and then he turned. Isabella squeezed her eyes closed. She listened to his footsteps, the sound of the front door opening and closing and then she fell backwards into the leather sofa and buried her head in her hands. The tears flowed and her shoulders shook. Everything she’d been holding in her whole life poured out of her in great, shuddering sobs. She had lost “the one.” Her only.

  “Belle.”

  She froze. Looked up through her tears. Harry was back.

  “What the—”

  The envelope in his hands, the one with her signature all over the divorce papers? He gripped each end of it and ripped it clean in half. He tossed what was left on the wooden coffee table.

  “I don’t want this fucking divorce.”

  She sprung to her feet, half in shock, more in love with him than ever. “Neither do I,” she stammered.

  “But you just signed the damn papers!”

  “Because I thought that’s what you wanted. And … and I owed it to you after what I did to you.”

  “What you did to me?”

  “You know, marrying you. Lying to you. Running off.” She paused. It was about time to tell him the truth. “I was so scared of turning out like my mother that I ran sooner rather than later. You see, I didn’t trust what I’d found with you. I wanted to hide from what I’d done to you, what I’d done to myself.”


  He came to her then, reached for her hands and pulled her close. She looked up into his eyes, shining, so true, so full of love for her that she didn’t need to hear any words to know what he was thinking.

  “You know what you’ve done for me, Isabella Martenson?”

  “Tell me,” she breathed.

  He smiled and his eyes sparkled. “My heart was forever changed the day you walked into that bar in Vegas and swept me off my feet.”

  Isabella gasped. “You saw that?”

  “I did and I took it as a sign that there might be something here I could fight for. It gave me hope that I hadn’t come all this way to accidently find you just to lose you all over again. Because losing you once nearly killed me, Belle.”

  “Oh, Harry.” On tiptoes, she kissed him and Harry slipped his arms around her waist, held on tight and lifted her off her feet.

  “Well.” Isabella’s breathing was hard and fast, too. “You don’t want to divorce me.” She had to say it out loud to let the reality of it sink in.

  “Hell, no.”

  “You want to stay married to me.”

  “That’s for damn sure.” He kissed her again, softly this time, and she drank it up like the finest wine. When he put her back on solid ground, her knees wobbled but she clutched on to him to steady herself. He slipped a hand into the pocket of his jeans and then held it palm up, his fingers outstretched.

  She laughed. “Your ring?”

  And then he was on one knee on the polished floorboards.

  Isabella laughed and clapped her hands over her mouth to stop herself from squealing so loud the whole of Wirralong’s main street would hear it.

  “The first time round, you proposed to me. This time, it’s my turn.” Harry reached for her hand and she gave it to him, willingly, lovingly.

  “Isabella Martenson, will you stay married to me?”