Vivien turned to face him properly. “Think about it, Paul. Put yourself in your mother’s shoes. Ask yourself how you would feel.”
“My mother doesn’t have to go out and find work, for god’s sake. We—her family—can look after her. None of us is destitute.”
“No.” Vivien shook her head. “That’s just it. She doesn’t want you to look after her. She wants her life to have meaning, Paul. She wants to be useful.”
“She is useful, helping Kathleen,” Paul replied.
“Kathleen doesn’t want to be helped. She is too much like your mother. It’s her home, her kitchen. She might even resent having your mother there, in the end.” Vivien touched his forearm, trying to reassure him and emphasize her point at the same time. “Just because your father is dead doesn’t mean that Maria should be consigned to a life of retirement. Times have changed since Maria was a girl and being dependent on the men in your family is no longer realistic. It’s debilitating. Your mother was trying to express her frustration at her own limitations today. Carlos and Kathleen were simply catalysts. Even Maria didn’t really understand why she was so dissatisfied—she’s too bound up in the old ways of doing things. It hadn’t occurred to her that there was an alternative. All I did was show her that she does have choices, if she has the courage to change.”
“So you’re going to find her a job?” Paul asked, his voice calmer. The first astonishment had worn off now and he was listening to her. Vivien was glad it was Paul she was trying to explain it too. He may have soaked up traditional family-oriented values with his mother’s milk but he was his own person and willing to listen to new ideas.
“No, Maria is going to do that. She has to do it herself, Paul, or it will be a waste of time. I just helped her see what her options were and helped her draw up a list of things she has to do and find out about. I won’t make any decisions for her and neither should you. You can help her all you like, if she asks for help. You can give her all the advice she wants. Just don’t try to run her life for her. Don’t make her decisions. Treat her like the fully fledged adult she is.”
Paul studied her, mulling over what she said. Vivien tried to remain calm under his scrutiny. It was important that, of Maria’s family, at least Paul understood what it was that his mother really needed. Paul had always been the revolutionary in the Levissianos family and he had considerable influence with Carlos, who was the only other male member who might buck at Maria’s grand new plan. With Paul on her side, Maria would get her way.
Finally, he smiled at Vivien. “I knew you would be able to help her,” he said. “It sounds like an ambitious plan and it’s different—it’s the last thing I would have expected but if my mother wants to do this, then that’s fine by me.” He turned back to the controls and put the car in gear and steered it back onto the road once more.
Vivien had to admire Paul’s self-restraint and openness. There was no other woman in his extended family who was anything other than a wife and mother. Even Paul’s only sister, Estelle, who had been exposed to the same social changes as Paul throughout her education, stayed at home caring for her children. Estelle had made a choice and was happy as she was, but that life didn’t suit all women, or even one woman for all of her life. Traditional values no longer served Maria. She was the first Levissianos woman to rebel against the status quo and late in life at that. In comparison, Paul was accepting it with remarkable calmness.
They had reached the airport turn-off before he spoke again. “Thank you for your help, Vivien. I’m sorry I wasn’t more grateful at the beginning.” He steered the car toward the distant glider club hangar. “Have you realized that you’re the only one who could possibly have helped my mother today? You are so patently unlike Estelle and Kathleen. Your solution would never have occurred to them.”
“Or Carlos,” Vivien added.
“Or Carlos,” Paul agreed, with a grin. “It was only a hunch I had that you could help. I’m glad I was right, even though the outcome is not what I expected.” He shook his head at the thought, still dealing with his astonishment over his mother’s new plans.
“I never have been like Estelle and Kathleen,” Vivien said gently.
Paul pulled the car up next to Vivien’s Range Rover and turned off the engine. “No, you never have,” he agreed, turning to face her. His eyes narrowed a little as he studied her. “Why did I have to fall in love with an adventurer?” He pointed at her. “You were right—that first day we met. I wanted a woman like my mother. Someone to stay at home and look after our dozens of children. Instead I got you, who plagued my life.”
“I never had the chance to be like your mother, or Estelle and Kathleen,” Vivien replied, her heart suddenly thumping. Had he used the past tense then? Or had he revealed more than he had intended? “I wasn’t given the choice. My parents were like you are—always out, camping, hiking, fishing, touring. I got their genes, so I suppose I would lose if I tried to change my nature. Then there was you. You taught me to be this way. You encouraged me. Our very first date, you took me to a beach that had bigger and better waves than Tarcoola. You took me on my first flying lesson, you took me on my first flight. You dragged me through thick and thin, demanding I keep up with you and I did. What I am is largely what you made me, Paul. If someone like your mother is truly what you wanted, why did you do all those things, why did you get so much fun out of my trying to keep up with you in all those incredible feats we used to do together?”
He lowered his gaze for a moment. “I was wrong about my mother. Maybe I was wrong about you.”
It was Vivien’s turn to be astonished now. She stared at him, hardly believing that she had heard right.
“Maybe what I thought I wanted was really what I have been taught to want,” Paul added softly. He lifted his eyes to look at her once more. “I never have quite been able to formalize the situation between Jenny and me. Maybe that’s why. Maybe you have set a precedent for me that I can’t replicate.”
This was not going the way Vivien had thought it might. She hadn’t expected Paul to learn the lesson taught to him by his mother’s situation and turn around and apply it so efficiently to his own life. Suddenly afraid of the wholesale changes she had put into motion, Vivien pulled her car keys out of her pocket and reached for the door handle. “I have to go,” she said quickly. “I have things to do.” It was a cop-out and she knew it. She was bailing out.
She climbed out of the car and shut the door. Paul got out as she passed the trunk and followed her around to the driver’s side of her Range Rover. “Wait,” he said, behind her. “Don’t rush off just yet.”
She faced him. “Do you think I can’t see where this is going? This is dangerous. It would be all too easy to fall back into the old patterns, the old behaviors. You already know how I feel about you. I can’t help that but I can control what I do about it and right now, I want to leave.”
The narrow space between the cars forced him to stand close to her—too close. She could smell his aftershave and the well-worn, warm leather of his jacket. She could see every expression that crossed his face. He had abandoned the reserved neutrality he had hidden behind all week. That frightened her even more.
“Before you go, will you come with me first? I want to show you something.”
“Here?”
He nodded toward a large olive green hangar, beyond the hangar the gliding club was using. “The company hangar.” He stepped back away from her. “Please.”
Curiosity got the better of her. Besides, Paul was asking, not demanding.
“All right.”
They skirted the glider club hangar and Paul unlocked the side door to the Batavia hangar and opened the door. Inside it was pitch black but he swept his hand across a bank of switches and five rows of fluorescent lights came on, shedding light over the entire hangar.
Closest to them was one of the light turbo-props and Vivien could see the nose of the second plane jutting out from behind the first.
“This w
ay,” Paul murmured, taking her hand. It seemed like a perfectly natural, unconscious gesture but the first contact of his hand sent a weakening charge up her arm. She knew she would never be able to pull her hand out of his.
Weakling!
They rounded the second plane and Vivien stopped, astonished, for standing in front of her was a magnificent, fully restored Tiger Moth, sparkling under the lights with polished pride.
“Oh, my...” She circled it slowly, examining every feature. “Does she fly?”
“Of course,” Paul said and his voice was full of pride.
Vivien examined the paint. “The color...is it authentic?”
“As close as I could get it.”
“And the designs, the logos?”
“Reproductions but replicas of the originals.”
Vivien stepped up on the wing and looked into the cockpit. The instrument panel was astonishingly bare, considering the numbers of dials, readouts and lights a modern plane carried. This instrument panel had additional modern gauges though, including the horizontal indicator and an altimeter, necessary for safe flying.
“She really does fly, then,” Vivien murmured, climbing down.
Paul was watching her inspection, a small smile on his face.
“You restored her, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I remember, you were talking about buying an old Tiger Moth just before I left but you changed your mind.”
“I changed it again, after you left.” His smile faded. “Working on it was one way of forgetting, for a while.”
Vivien felt her own good humor fading. He was talking about what she had done to him.
“I remember the first time I took you flying,” Paul said, his voice low. “You wore a green dress with pale pink roses on it and it floated out behind you when you walked and molded itself against your legs.” He shook his head. “Your legs are the best I’ve ever seen.”
“Paul, don’t do this,” Vivien whispered. He was too close. She should turn and step away, perhaps under the belly of the plane and put a solid metal barrier between them but an unholy fascination at the clarity of his memory and the mellow, happy expression on his face kept her still.
“I remember the way you laughed,” he said, relentlessly ignoring her weak protest. “You used to throw your head back and laugh properly. It was incredibly sexy. I haven’t seen you laugh that way since you came back.”
“I haven’t had much to laugh about,” Vivien replied shortly.
“You used to do everything with gusto. Even making sandwiches was exhilarating with you.” Paul swayed closer. “Good times,” he murmured.
“Don’t!” Vivien turned away from him, putting her back to him.
“Don’t what?” Paul asked reasonably. “You knew coming back to Geraldton would be one endless remembrance. Why are you fighting me?”
“Because things change. Time moves on.”
“The most important things don’t change,” he whispered.
She could feel his breath on the nape of her neck and feel the heat of his body, so close to hers that she imagined she could feel static sparks flicking between them.
Vivien looked over her shoulder at him. “Please move,” she told him, trying to keep her voice steady. “I’m going home.”
Instead his hand came down on the dark paint of the Tiger Moth, splayed flat, holding her at bay. She turned to face him, a tendril of dismay curling through her.
“Don’t go.” His voice was low, emerging in the rough burr she remembered so well from intimate tender moments in the past. A snapshot memory of her laying in his arms, listening to him murmur, his lips to her ear, jumped into her mind. It brought tears to her eyes and he saw them, for the smooth plane of his cheek rippled as he clenched his jaw in reaction. He had always hated hurting her, even in minor, indirect ways. “Don’t go,” he repeated.
“What do you want from me now?” She tried to keep her voice steady, to disguise the effect he was having on her. She wanted to throw herself into his arms. They already half encircled her, now, with his arm resting against the fuselage next to her shoulder.
“You know what I want,” he said. “You knew that this might happen if you came back.”
“It is not going to happen,” she said slowly, enunciating clearly so that he would understand her despite the tremble in her voice. “I don’t care what you feel or think anymore.”
He shook his head. “You do.” His other hand curled around her waist, as his voice had curled around her senses and she was being drawn very slowly to him, so slowly she thought she was imagining it.
“Don’t kiss me,” she told him. “Don’t you dare kiss me.”
“Are you afraid of what might happen if I do?”
Vivien could feel herself drawing back, the upper part of her body swaying away from him, until it touched not the old metal of the plane but his hand, protecting her head from even the slightest knock. As imprisoned as if she had been cast in irons, Vivien watched his mouth draw closer to hers, in fatalistic slow motion.
“No,” she managed to protest, in a barely audible whisper. As always, when something important to her was at stake, she had said exactly the opposite of what she really meant.
The first touch of his full, sensuous lips was a sweet, exquisite joy—a moment rich in subtle textured and layered feelings and Vivien felt herself sigh into him as the real moment eclipsed all the times she had tried to imagine what this might feel like.
His mouth grew firmer in reaction to her sigh and she felt their bodies touch as he guided her against him. He is so big, she thought inanely. I had forgotten how big he is. He always makes me feel petite and feminine... Her mental voice trailed off into a sigh just as her verbal response had, for his hand was holding her head, just as his other arm was holding her body, while his mouth was exploring hers, rediscovering every curve and driving coherent thought from her.
He drew back from her, enough to look into her eyes. “Tell me ‘no’ again,” he dared her.
She looked away from him, away from the expression in his eyes and tried to ignore both his pounding heart, which she could feel against her breast and the throbbing need that had flooded her veins.
“Don’t do this,” she pleaded.
His hands loosened their hold on her. “You want this as much as I do. Why not?”
She blinked back her tears before looking back at him. “Because if we made love, there would be no going back. You know that. It would be like closing a gate behind us.”
“Is that so bad?” he asked. “Vivvy, I know what I said in the past. God, I remember every last damn thing I ever threw at you, in Technicolor. Today you’ve made me realize that I could have been wrong—”
“But I have a life of my own!” she interrupted with a cry. “Do you think I just stepped out of a vacuum when I arrived last week? I’ve put down roots, I have friends, a job, a home. I’ve got bank loan repayments and a salary to earn. They’re all waiting for me to go back to.”
“There’s another man in your life?” he asked, his voice harsh and his jaw tight, his brows rushing together.
Vivien hesitated, casting about for an answer. Not like you, she wanted to say. But there were friends and dates. Instead of answering directly, she jumped to the attack. “You’re just reacting to the memory of good times,” she said. “You said it yourself. Both of us—we’re being seduced by the memory of happy times in the past and conveniently overlooking all the sad times. We might end up hating each other because we’ve changed so much.”
“That’s rubbish and you know it,” Paul ground out, letting her go completely. “If the past is so damned seductive, why did you wait seven years to come back? Why has it taken me so long to figure out that I was wrong?”
“Because you’re not wrong,” Vivien shot back. “I’m still not your type. You still won’t let me into your world. You’ll still keep me out of it, out of harm’s way, safely cocooned in my little box. You say all these wonder
ful things about the world but when it comes right down to it, when it comes to the people who are important in your life, you fall straight back into your Cuban-Sicilian mode. You can’t help yourself. It’s who you are.”
“I’ve agreed to help my mother change,” he said. “Won’t you allow me that much?”
“Yes,” Vivien said reluctantly.
“I can only try,” he said.
“And what about my life?”
Paul put his fist on his hip, shoving aside the leather jacket and leaned against the wing. “Let’s just take one step at a time,” he suggested softly. “Will you do that? Just deal with this for now? Any other discussions could be a waste of breath.”
Vivien could feel the opposing forces of want and fear making her heart ache. “It’s not that simple,” she prevaricated.
Paul smiled. “That’s life for you,” he said. His smile faded. “Just give me some time. That’s all. You don’t have to make any decisions yet. Just...wait. Will you do that?”
Vivien bit her lip. What was the harm in granting his request? She had to stay in Geraldton to finish her job, anyway. Yet a mental voice was screaming, Don’t do this! Think of your life, the life you’ve slogged your heart out to salvage after this man destroyed it. Despite the voice, she inclined her head. She couldn’t refuse him. Not Paul. “I will.”
“Thank you.” He looked at his watch. “Let me take you out for a late lunch—you haven’t eaten properly all day.”
Vivien shook her head tiredly. “I want to go home. I want to think.”
“Do you still think on your feet, Vivvy?”
“Yes.”
“The beach is going to be crowded. It’s Saturday afternoon,” he pointed out.
Vivien frowned. She had forgotten.
“I can offer you a private beach—deserted, long and flat.”
“Where? Whose?”
“Mine,” Paul answered.
Vivien already felt like she’d made a bargain with the devil. What additional damage could possibly come of playing on his home turf?
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