‘You took advantage of me.’
‘And you loved it, Bright Eyes.’
A dismayed gasp broke from her. Spinning on her heel, she hurried away from him. He didn’t try to follow and once she reached the end of the hall she didn’t dare to look back.
She almost ran to her bedroom. And it was only there that she remembered. Instead of thoughtlessly letting Luke kiss her she should have been trying to talk to him. She’d messed up a perfect opportunity to have a mature and meaningful conversation.
Now she only had one day left.
CHAPTER NINE
ERIN SPENT A restless night. She couldn’t lose the feeling of Luke’s kiss, the amazing rightness of it, couldn’t forget the magic of his arms about her. Couldn’t shake off the longing.
She dreamed of him sharing her bed, but when she woke early she found, of course, that there was only an empty space beside her. Looking at the cold pillow that had once been his rightful place she felt a wave of misery sweep over her.
What a mess she was. Today she had to speak to Luke to clarify—
To clarify what exactly?
She wasn’t sure, but she knew she had to find a way to let go of the guilt and the regret that still tore at her. She and Luke had to talk about the past five years, to make decisions about the future and Joey and, face to face, they had to find a clear way to let each other go.
Maybe then she would be released from this terrible yearning.
With a soft groan she swept the bedclothes aside and prepared to face the day.
* * *
‘Joey, have you seen your Dad?’
Erin heard Joey’s voice and his bubbling laughter coming from the bathroom and she stopped in the doorway.
Big mistake.
Joey and Luke were standing side by side in front of the basin, both stripped to the waist and with their faces half-covered in white lather. Oh, help. The last thing she needed this morning was a close encounter with Luke’s bare shoulders and chest.
‘Hi, Mommy,’ giggled Joey when he saw her. ‘Dad and me are shaving.’
‘So I see.’ Erin swallowed nervously. The two of them looked so happy together. Father and son. Two gorgeous males. A perfect unit.
Again, as had happened so many times this week, she was guiltily aware of how much Joey had missed by being separated from Luke.
And again she wondered how Joey would react when it was time to go back to New York with her. She’d told Luke from the outset that there was no chance Joey could stay with him. She was their son’s primary care-giver. His mother.
But was she being fair to the boy?
The answer was becoming less and less certain.
Her gaze intersected with Luke’s in the mirror. He didn’t smile. ‘Did you want something?’
‘I don’t want to interrupt the male bonding session. I can catch you later.’
‘No need to dash off. I’ve almost finished here.’
She didn’t mean to stare, but she couldn’t help watching the way he tilted his head as he scraped his razor through the white foam, leaving tracks of clean tanned skin.
Almost in a daze, she watched the way his muscles bunched in his upper arm as he worked. And she couldn’t drag her eyes away when he shaved the edge of his jaw. Oh, man. It was such a beautifully masculine action—the way he jutted his jaw forward and stretched his neck, accentuating the rugged bones of his face, the strong column of his throat.
Another minute and she’d be drooling.
‘Joey,’ she said, bending quickly to snatch a damp facecloth from the side of the bath. ‘Why don’t I help you to tidy up?’ She knelt beside the boy and wiped the remaining lather from his face.
‘Do you have a shirt?’
‘Over there, on the hook with Dad’s.’
She helped him into it, pinned on a smile. ‘I think breakfast must be almost ready. Do you want to run along?’
‘You coming?’
‘In a minute. As soon as I’ve had a quick chat with Dad.’
As Joey left she told Luke, ‘I’ll wait for you outside.’
‘Hang on. I’m done.’ Luke gave his jaw a quick splash with cold water and a hasty once-over with a towel.
She sucked in her breath as he reached past her to retrieve his shirt from the hook.
As he shrugged on the shirt and began to do up the buttons she stepped out into the hallway. Luke followed.
And then, before her courage failed, she said, ‘Luke, we really should have a talk before I leave here.’
His grin faded. ‘You want to talk about Joey? How we can share him?’
‘Well, yes, I guess that’s part of it, but—’ She drew another breath. ‘I think we should talk about us too.’
A dark tinge stained his cheekbones. ‘What about us? If you’re planning to deliver another lecture about kissing, forget it. I’ve got the message.’
‘It’s not that!’
‘So what exactly do you want to discuss?’
Erin swallowed. It was so hard to explain, but she knew she had to try. ‘To be honest, I—I’m not exactly sure, but I feel as if I’m—as if we’re—kind of dangling.’
‘Dangling?’
Her hands lifted in a gesture of helplessness. ‘That mightn’t be the right word, but it’s almost as if—as if we haven’t really cut loose from each other.’
Luke jerked his gaze away from her to stare across the paddocks of softly shimmering biscuit-coloured grass. ‘We’re divorced, Erin. We live on opposite sides of the globe. What more do you want?’
Closure.
Chicken that she was, she couldn’t quite bring herself to say that out loud.
‘Don’t you think that after five years of silence there are things we need to discuss? I don’t have a particular agenda, Luke. I just think a little communication would be—’
Luke waited while she groped for the right word.
‘Healthy.’
A hint of amusement sparked in his eyes, but his mouth didn’t twitch into anything remotely like a smile. ‘All right. In the interests of healthy communication I’d be happy to talk to you. Two-thirty this afternoon,’ he said. ‘We can talk in my office.’
Erin’s heart was racing like a runaway’s when she knocked on Luke’s office door at precisely two-thirty.
If everything went to plan, at some stage in the next hour, during a civilised conversation, she and Luke would arrive at the ultimate closure of their relationship.
Everything would be settled and then she would at last be able to step away from her cloud of guilt. Her lingering regrets.
After this talk she would be composed and calm. She and Luke would have negotiated an amicable basis for friendship. For Joey’s sake. Her tumultuous emotions would be a thing of the past.
But, more importantly, at the end of this holiday she would be able to take Joey home with a clear conscience, knowing that she and Luke had a plan that would allow Joey to continue to see his father in a friendly arrangement that suited all three of them.
These outcomes were her goal, her focus.
‘Take a seat,’ Luke said, greeting her with a cautious smile. He pointed to a corner of his office set aside as a conversation area with two dignified brown leather armchairs on either side of a coffee table.
Looking about her as she sank into the luxurious soft leather, she couldn’t help noticing how much the room had changed.
Once it had held little more than a desk by a window with a telephone and a computer. Now it was a very businesslike and efficient affair, somewhat at odds with the old-fashioned country charm of the rest of the Warrapinya homestead. The large, airy room was painted in rich urban coffee tones. It was equipped with a desktop computer as well as a laptop, two telephones, a fax machine and three filing cabinets.
One wall displayed huge charts of Warrapinya’s cattle grazing system, while another wall housed floor-to-ceiling shelving filled with rows of ring binders, neatly labelled, as well as a library of textbooks a
nd cattlemen’s journals. There were also books on scriptwriting, she noted with some surprise.
‘This is different.’
Luke looked about him, as if he was seeing his domain through her eyes. ‘I had to get better organised when I built up the business.’
‘I take it you’ve been very successful?’
‘I think so. I run three properties these days.’
She almost choked. ‘Three?’
‘If you remember, I always wanted to expand, and after you left I worked hard. Damn hard. And I had luck with a nicely timed spike in the market.’
He shrugged. ‘It was quite a surprise really. I couldn’t put a foot wrong. I had to work hard for the first success, but then the others came easily. Two years ago I bought some prime grazing land down near Rockhampton and that turned out to be a stroke of brilliance. And last year I bought another block in the Northern Territory. It’s paying its way already.’
‘Well done,’ Erin said, fearing that her praise sounded hopelessly inadequate. ‘You’ve always worked very hard.’
Luke’s eyes narrowed. ‘Most people don’t consider that a fault.’
‘I didn’t mean it as a criticism, Luke.’
Frowning, he tapped at one of the copper-toned studs on the arm of his chair. From outside the house came the gleeful shouts of boys and the sharp little barks of puppies as they chased each other across the lawn.
‘Anyway, we’re not here to discuss my business,’ he said. ‘We’ve got some serious communicating to do.’ He glanced at her warily. ‘Where do you want to start?’
Erin blinked. She was still coming to terms with the busy and successful life Luke had led since she’d left him. He was such an unknown quantity these days. In many ways they were strangers.
It was hard to know the best place to begin.
‘Why don’t you tell me more about your life now,’ Luke said, as if he’d sensed her dilemma.
‘I’m not sure there’s much left to tell.’ Luke knew about her jewellery business with Angie and about her concerns for Joey. He even knew about her former boyfriend, Sebastian.
His grey eyes pierced her. ‘Are you happy, Erin?’
Oh, man. Of all the questions he could have asked, this was the hardest. Erin dropped her gaze. Her automatic response was to say of course she was happy. Her life was great.
There were plenty of positives she could share with Luke. She’d found another roomier apartment, almost as nice as the one with the window-seat eyrie. She was surrounded by friends and the familiar buzz and exciting rush of Manhattan. She had a fulfilling, creative career.
She could tell him about days when the beads and wire and stones she worked with took on a life of their own, guiding her fingers, so that she found herself looking at a beautiful necklace in awe and saying, ‘Did I really make that?’
And she could talk about the happiness Joey brought into her life, how their little boy had always been happiness on a stick, bouncing with life, with energy to burn, bursting with curiosity about the world…
Oh, yeah. She could tell Luke she’d managed just fine as a single mom…until she’d discovered the black hole in Joey’s world…created by his father’s absence.
‘Erin?’ Luke was waiting rather impatiently for an answer.
‘Sure I’m happy,’ she said quickly. ‘Actually, I’m very happy.’
He was watching her intently, his grey eyes moody and deep. ‘I’d say that’s the saddest version of happy I’ve seen in a long time.’
She struggled to defend herself. ‘No one’s life can be perfect, Luke. We all have to compromise.’
‘So what’s making those blue eyes so sad?’
She gulped. Time to come clean or this whole discussion was a waste of time. ‘You really want to know? You want the unvarnished truth?’
‘Yes,’ he said quietly.
‘Okay.’ Taking a deep breath, she stared at her hands, curled rather tightly in her lap. ‘I’m carrying a lot of guilt, Luke. There are a bunch of things I’m not happy about. I’m not happy that I couldn’t cope better here at Warrapinya. I’m not happy that I made a mess of my marriage, and I’m certainly not happy that my son hasn’t known his father or that I’ve had to bring him up alone. I failed at things that are important to me and that’s hard to live with.’
Now that she’d started, the words spilled in a rush, like beads from a broken necklace. ‘And I’m not happy that you were so mad at me you retreated into proud, angry silence. I failed there too. I couldn’t even have an amicable split with you. There was nothing but silence from you, Luke. Nothing. Afterwards, if I sent you a photo of Joey or a Christmas card, all I got was a freaking reply from your lawyer. And—and—I never quite understood how we actually got into such a mess.’
At first Luke didn’t answer. He sat so still he might have been carved from granite. Only the tiny flicker of muscle near his cheekbone gave him away.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said softly without looking at her.
Oh, God. That was not what she’d expected to hear.
His eyes met hers briefly and then he looked away. ‘I was so angry and bitter when you left that I couldn’t think straight. I was besotted with you, Erin, and I was besotted with Joey, and I’d lost you both.’
Erin pressed a hand to her mouth to hold back a cry. She had to swallow three times before she could speak. ‘I’m sorry too, Luke. I know it was terrible the way I ran off without talking to you. I—I think, even though I told you not to, I was hoping you’d come after me.’ She forced a weak smile. ‘At the time I didn’t really know what I wanted. All I knew was I had to get out of the Outback.’
‘And that was entirely my fault.’
Another surprise.
His confession set a strange thrumming in her heart. She lifted her head and looked across at him and he sent her the bleakest of smiles.
‘I knew how hard it was for you, coming from Manhattan. I knew you wouldn’t be able to slip straight into the Australian Outback. But I didn’t do nearly enough to help you settle in here.’
‘You did warn me that I’d find it hard,’ she felt compelled to acknowledge. ‘I was the one who pleaded and bullied you into marrying me.’
He shook his head. ‘As I remember those weeks in New York, I never gave you a chance to think straight. I couldn’t keep my hands off you.’
A bright blush swept up her neck and into her cheeks as she remembered the blazing, limitless passion of those days in Manhattan when her every thought had been centred on Luke. It hadn’t mattered then that their lives were based in separate hemispheres. She’d been confident their love would conquer all their problems.
‘I was flaming stupid,’ Luke said. He looked down at his fist clenched on the arm of his chair and he opened it, spreading his fingers wide. ‘You see, we have this bush tradition of tackling tough jobs first up, and I had the crazy idea that if you were going to cope here you shouldn’t be mollycoddled. I guess I went too far.’
His mouth quirked in a half-smile. ‘Maybe I misinterpreted a comment from my father.’
‘What was that?’
Drawing his brows low into an exaggerated beetling frown, he said, ‘Just remember, son, you can’t have a bed of roses in country that’s too tough to grow roses in the first place.’
A helpless little laugh escaped from Erin. ‘It might have helped if your father had told me that too.’
‘He wouldn’t have dared. My mother was totally hung up about interfering in-laws. She wanted to give you space. That’s why they stayed away.’
Erin sighed, remembering how Luke’s parents had retired to the Gold Coast. Their visits to Warrapinya had been infrequent and cautious when, in fact, she would have been grateful for her mother-in-law’s company and support. ‘The awful thing for me was that I knew everyone thought I didn’t fit in here,’ she said. ‘And I didn’t know what to do about it.’
‘You put on a brave face.’
‘At first I might have. But th
en I turned into Annie Anxious.’
‘While I played Buffo the Clown.’
Their gazes met. They smiled shyly. Sadly. It was so easy to imagine now that they would do things so much better if they had another chance.
‘You were away so much,’ Erin said and she held her breath.
‘That was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it?’
‘A capable Outback woman wouldn’t have minded.’
‘I’ve never forgiven myself for letting you down.’ Luke stared at the floor. ‘When I asked you to marry me, I wanted to be the perfect husband.’
Oh, God. That was not what Luke was supposed to say. He was breaking her heart.
‘This—this is dangerous ground, Luke.’
‘Is it?’
Sure. He was making her want to leap into his lap and throw her arms around him.
But how crazy was that? Even if Luke felt the way he sounded, even if he felt the way she did, they had to accept that strong emotions—even love—were not enough to surmount their huge problems.
Nothing about their situation had changed. She was still a New Yorker and Luke was still an Australian Outback cattleman. They were oil and water—an impossible mix.
‘Maybe we should talk about Joey,’ she said, struggling to sound matter-of-fact. ‘I guess we should work out some kind of arrangement. For the future.’
‘Ah, yes. Joey.’ Luke offered her an unhappy smile. ‘You’ll feel less threatened if we talk about Joey, won’t you?’
‘It’s because of Joey that I’m here in Australia, Luke.’
She watched the chill return to his eyes. His throat worked and she knew that he was dealing with emotions as conflicting as her own. Oh, why did their lives have to be such a mess? If only things could be as simple as Joey wanted them to be, with the three of them living together. Happily. Somewhere. Anywhere. Ever after.
‘There are a few things I need to explain about my plans for Joey.’ Luke spoke with such quiet decisiveness she felt suddenly cold all over. ‘I know you don’t want anything to do with Warrapinya, Erin, but Joey will inherit my shares in the company and if anything happens to me before Joey comes of age you will have to be involved. In my will I’ve left everything to you until Joey’s old enough.’
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