LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR
by
VICTORIA GORDON
© Victoria Gordon 1990
CHAPTER ONE
Fiona stared down at the contract forms, the words and figures — especially the dollar figures — swimming in her vision. She squinted, trying to focus her sea-green eyes, but it was futile. She might have been looking through rain-washed glass.
Her fingers held the pen like a weapon, her grip so tense that her entire forearm trembled with the strain.
Was she really going to do this? Really going to sink her life savings, her entire future, into ten acres of scrubby land and a house four times older than herself?
Of course she was! She had to, having only minutes before made the final, closing bid at the estate auction in the room next door. The only bid!
‘Case of last-minute nerves?’ The voice of Rob Barron, the estate agent, held only a hint of cynicism; quite clearly he’d seen this reaction many times before.
‘A case of too much, too fast,’ she replied with a wide grin of her own. ‘I know you warned me there mightn’t be a lot of interest, but you never suggested I’d be the only one bidding.’
‘I said you might very well be the only serious bidder. And usually there’s at least somebody else who’ll come in, just to keep the game honest, as it were. And of course I expected to see Dare Fraser here...’
Too late now, she thought, and shivered just a bit inside at her own vindictiveness. Then just as quickly straightened her shoulders against the feeling. Dare Fraser.. .the name had been hanging over her head like a thunder-cloud ever since she’d first been shown over the property.
Having already fallen in love with the place, she’d been gearing herself up for the disappointment of not being able to afford it and could hardly believe her ears when Rob Barron had named the price he’d expect at auction.
‘Unless, of course. Dare Fraser decides he wants it, which wouldn’t surprise me. If he gets into the act, there’s no telling what might happen," the estate agent had said.
Fraser... Fiona had, even then, felt a tiny shiver of apprehension. But why? She didn’t know the man, had never met him, didn’t expect to, and really didn’t care. Except, she quickly realised, that if she did buy this property he’d be her neighbour! That only increased her apprehension without providing a single reason why.
‘Too late!’ This time she whispered the words, and then, keeping the pen well clear of the documents, she worked her fingers experimentally through a practice signature. It was like trying to sign somebody else’s name!
Fiona shook her head vigorously, the lengthy, honey-blonde pony-tail swishing behind her. She tried again, this time concentrating even harder, her eyes focused on every twist of the pen,
F-i-o-n-a B-o-y-d; not such a complicated name!
Nor was her signature usually so complicated. Written in the air, in fact, it didn’t look like her signature at all.
‘This is silly, I know,’ she muttered apologetically, hardly daring to meet the estate agent’s eyes. He must think her an awful idiot.
‘Not silly at all,’ he replied. ‘You’d be astonished the weird reactions some people have when it becomes time to sign on the dotted line. I had one bloke faint dead away when he sat down just where you are now. And only last week...’
His voice continued, but Fiona no longer caught the individual words. The tone was enough to settle her nerves, to white out the panic that had been writhing inside her like something alive.
Putting pen to paper properly, this time, she scrawled her signature everywhere the estate agent had pencilled in an ‘x’, then straightened up in her chair and sighed at the quite unexpected trauma involved in all this.
‘There we are! Ten per cent down and the rest on the never-never.’ She flung down the pen with a sense of physical relief at having the matter done and decided. ‘1 just hope my dogs appreciate the sacrifice.’
‘Oh, I’m sure they will.’ Something mildly caustic in the estate agent’s tone made her look up sharply, but either he’d hidden it well or she had imagined it. There was only a warm smile now, accepting blandly that anybody would put themselves into hock for years just to please a mob of lazy Labradors.
Fiona was under no true illusion. Her dogs and her lifestyle because of them had played a large part in the decision, but there was more to it than just finding a place where she could raise and train her dogs. There were her own needs to be considered; despite having a bubbly, outgoing personality, she was an essentially private person, and living as she had been in rented accommodation in an inner suburb, with or without three active dogs, was far from her concept of ideal.
There had been only one dog when she’d shifted from Brisbane to Hobart, Tasmania’s capital city, nearly four years before. At that time, fresh out of a nasty divorce and glad to have her sanity, her old black bitch Molly and her freedom despite the cost, she’d found the small house she’d rented a relative paradise. Now ... well, she’d matured a bit at twenty-five, or at least she hoped so. And she’d saved a good bit of money from her job as a television-presenter-cum-weather-girl and the motivational dog obedience school she’d been operating for the past year with phenomenal success.
It would take years to rebuild her breeding programme, for which she could thank the ex-husband who’d managed to cheat her out of several years’ work and even the kennel prefix she’d had since she was sixteen!
Fiona snarled just at the thought, her mind so buried in the anger and loathing from the past that she was hardly aware of Rob Barron’s presence. For just that moment she hated her ex-husband, hated all men, every damned one of them.
Again she shook her head, the pony-tail swishing viciously. And found the estate agent watching her nervously.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, coldly now and without any real sense of apology. ‘I ... I was thinking of something...’
‘Something damned unpleasant, too,’ he replied. ‘Not, I hope, to do with our business here.’
‘Not in any way that matters.’ Fiona shrugged, tried to force a smile back to her usually mobile features, but failed. She covered the growing awkwardness by plunging into her capacious handbag for her cheque-book.
Filling out and signing the cheque for the ten per cent deposit held none of the trauma of signing the purchase contracts, possibly because a part of Fiona’s mind was still in what she often thought of as ‘active defence mode’. Before, when her divorce and the bitterness and treachery of her brief marriage were much fresher, much more vivid, even frightening, she had learned to set herself aside, to observe her pain almost as an outsider. And to conquer it, along with the bitterness and suspicion. Usually.
Today was the first time in months that she’d let the past get to her, and the fact that it was linked to her new start on the future wasn’t a good omen, she thought. And snapped back to reality with a tinkle of wild laughter.
‘I wonder if I’m not getting superstitious after all,’ she said to the estate agent, recalling how she’d denied any such suggestion on her first discovery that the property she wanted had been owned by a woman named Boyd!
‘Pure and total coincidence,’ she’d said then. ‘Has to be, as I don’t have any living relatives and I’m not from Tasmania in the first place.’
But she was, now! Fiona had fallen in love with the island state practically in the same move as stepping down from the government-owned Abel Tasman ferry which had brought her and Molly and their battered old Holden utility across from Melbourne—a girl and her favourite dog fleeing the trauma of divorce and betrayal in search of a sanctuary.
With little money, no job and not a single contact or prospect, she had driven southwards from the Devonport ferry terminal,
staring at the broad, rugged outline of the Great Western Tiers, and for some reason felt immediately that Tasmania would be a good place for her, a happy, productive place.
After Brisbane, Hobart had seemed small, cosy, comfortable. She’d been fortunate enough to find work at the commercial television station almost immediately, along with a house to rent not far from the channel’s headquarters in the inner suburb of New Town.
Fiona’s naturally bubbling, apparently open personality had made assimilation easy. She’d quickly made friends, in her own fashion, though nobody was truly close. She wasn’t a clothes-horse, nor particularly interested in the latest fashions or styles, but she was superbly photogenic and had a gift, quickly appreciated, for working on camera with style and confidence.
Sometimes, she’d thought, it was all because of her hair. This mass of gently waving, strongly textured mane was the colour of Tasmania’s own bush honey, except when sun-streaked in summer, and it lent itself to the type of quick-change restyling so handy in television or fashion work.
Apart from her hair, which she as often cursed as enjoyed, Fiona had no strong feelings about her looks one way or the other. She had a good, if not perfect figure, small breasts, shapely legs, a pretty enough face. And she was strong and healthy enough for her chosen activities, which was of most importance to her.
Her chosen activities, almost without exception, involved dogs! Her weekends were spent at dog shows, dog obedience trials or retrieving trials, her spare time in preparations and training for them. To her it was perfectly normal that such activities occasionally meant turning up for work on Monday in a welter of cuts and bruises — and once a ghastly-looking black eye, courtesy of her youngest and wildest Labrador. Oh, she sympathised with the station’s make-up people, but deep inside she really couldn’t share their fascination with perfect appearance.
‘... say to a celebration drink?’ The estate agent’s voice brought Fiona out of her involuntary reverie. ‘It isn’t, after all, every day you buy yourself a property, and not every day that I sell one, though I wish it were so.’
Fiona met his eyes and immediately wished she hadn’t. There was that look, the last thing she wanted to see!
‘I’d like that,’ she lied. ‘But not today, I’m afraid. I had to grovel to get this much time off work, and if I don’t get back soon I’ll be trying to pay off this mortgage without even a job.’
The estate agent looked surprisingly disappointed, considering that during their relationship so far he’d never once shown a personal interest like this. Or had he? Fiona had so trained herself out of noticing that maybe he’d been making subtle passes and she’d missed them entirely, she thought ruefully.
But there it was now, for sure. Business completed, Rob Barron had immediately got that too predictable gleam in his eye. Fiona frowned inwardly, then forced a smile. At least he’d waited until the business was done. She knew all too many who wouldn’t have.
‘I’ll call you,’ he was saying, but she had already tuned him out — permanently — as she rose and moved quickly towards the door.
Her attention diverted, Fiona didn’t notice the murmur of voices in the outer office until she’d already opened the door and stepped through it. And, once through, it was too late to retreat even if she’d wanted to. The murmur clarified to become individual voices, one a growling tide of anger and the other a whining, cringing plea for mercy.
‘Fair go, Mr Fraser. 1 couldn’t help it, I tell you ... I had a flat tyre. It wasn’t my fault...’
‘It won’t be your fault, then, when you get the sack!’
The contempt was tangible. Not only in the voice, but in every aspect of the taller, older man’s very being. His voice was actually quite soft, though carrying. It was the only soft thing about him.
He loomed over his victim, standing perhaps six feet tall even without the high-heeled stockman’s dress boots that gleamed from beneath immaculate moleskin trousers. Large, powerful hands clenched and unclenched, sending ripples of muscle that even the perfectly cut Harris tweed shooting jacket couldn’t totally disguise.
‘You were hired to do a job and you’ve thoroughly stuffed it. You had weeks of notice and weeks to arrange to be here for this auction,’ the tall man’s voice growled, vibrant with menace. ‘If I’d realised how stupidly un-dependable you are, I’d have come myself in the first place.’
The voice hissed on, vitriolic in criticism of the other, smaller man, but Fiona hardly heard; her mind had focused on that name. Fraser!
Her eyes focused also, taking in every aspect of the tall, angry figure before her. She couldn’t see his face, only the sideways angle of strong jaw line and the thatch of dark brown hair. Almost impossibly broad shoulders tapered to a narrow waist above the moleskins which could not disguise the well-muscled legs beneath them.
A powerful man, and a man well used to power, she thought. Everything about him cried out in terms of strength, control.
Control? She found herself gasping in horror as one huge hand shot out to seize the smaller man’s shirt-front, half lifting him in the tension-charged air.
A squeak of dismay, but it was overshadowed by Fiona’s own voice, crackling with anger, projecting with confidence. Her dog-training voice, which had cowed German Shepherds nearly as menacing as this man.
‘Leave it! You put him down now!’ The commands snapped out of the background of a thousand obedience rings, a lifetime of retrieving trials, but Fiona was none the less a trifle surprised at how swiftly she was obeyed.
The smaller man was dropped so suddenly that he nearly fell, and Fiona was pinned in her place by dark, piercing eyes that first flashed at her like daggers, then subtly changed as they swiftly traversed every inch of her body before returning to hold her eyes.
‘What’s your part in this?’ The question was in tones so low she barely heard, but there was nothing soft in the visual appraisal he’d made. It had been like being stripped on the auction block, as if her flounce-fronted white blouse and navy office suit hadn’t even existed. And the stark arrogance of the man fired her to.speechlessness.
‘Well? Are you his mother, or what?’ Fraser’s dark eyes once again held her own as he loomed above her comparatively diminutive five-foot-three figure.
She visualised herself as a tea kettle, bubbling, burbling and finally boiling over in explosive fury.
‘Well, for starters, I’m the owner of the land you so obviously wanted,’ she began waspishly. ‘I got here in time, you see.’ The last bit she spoke in deliberately contrived sweetness, and she took a token consolation from the flash of fury that told her the blow had been felt.
‘Are you, now?’ He drawled it out, savouring each word as if it held some special, personal flavour.
‘Yes, I am,’ she snapped. ‘So it’s no good your abusing that poor man, because it’s too late. Do you understand that? Too late! Too...’
Her voice spluttered out helplessly beneath the intensity of his gaze, and suddenly it was as if they were alone in the room, as if Rob Barron, Rob’s receptionist, the other man — and was there another woman as well? — had all just been whisked away by some evil magic.
Fiona was conscious now only of this tall, arrogant, menacing figure that seemed to loom above her. She found herself wishing there were some way to chop him off at the knees, so he’d lose that tremendous height advantage, some way to mute the power that flowed from his stance, his voice, from those dark, dark, stone-hard eyes.
She was practically mesmerised. Never had she seen eyes like his; they were ice-cold and hell-hot at the same time, and somehow capable of undressing both body and mind as he surveyed her from crown to high-heeled office shoes, taking in and discarding her navy-blue suit, the pristine white blouse beneath it.
‘So you’re the lucky bidder ...’ He seemed to gloat over the words as he whispered them, combining the statement into something neither totally question nor totally accusation.
His voice, like his eyes, touched
her. Fiona felt a shudder building at the base of her spine, had to actually straighten herself away from it.
Lucky? With this for a neighbour? Fiona again suppressed the shudder. Suddenly the glow of her purchase faded to a dank, gloomy darkness, a darkness matched by the eyes that stared implacably down at her.
She found herself studying the face around those eyes, noting the strong, high-arched brows, the bold, slightly crooked nose, the harsh weather-lines around the eyes. Deep furrows connected his nose to the sides of a broad, mobile mouth, and his chin was deeply cleft.
Not exactly handsome, she found herself thinking, but definitely not pretty, either. He was far too wholly masculine to ever meet that description. Illogically, she found herself wondering what he looked like smiling, and the realisation brought a grin to her own lips.
He didn’t return it. One dark eyebrow cocked even higher and his eyes, if possible, became even darker, even more icy, more hard.
‘Yes,’ she heard herself saying. ‘Yes, I’m the buyer, though I’m not sure just how lucky ... now.’
Dare Fraser nodded curtly, the gesture seeming to accept both her status and the questionable luck involved.
‘So why not take a quick profit and get out of it?’ His voice, now so incredibly soft, somehow forced her to listen, to pay attention. But the question, with its obvious lure, was so unexpected that she found herself shaking her head as much in bewilderment as in opposition.
Fraser seemed unperturbed by the reaction. He turned to look at Rob Barron, dismissing Fiona almost as if she no longer mattered, no longer existed, even.
‘What was her final bid?’
Barron answered, and although the price could hardly be a secret — it had, after all, been a public auction — Fiona found herself furious at how easily the estate agent appeared to be dominated by this arrogant figure with his overbearing manner.
But Fraser’s next remark heaped fuel on the fire, adding insult to insult upon injury.
‘Offer her five grand more,’ Fraser said, speaking as if Fiona weren’t even present. She’s only a woman; she doesn’t matter, the tone implied.
Love Thy Neighbour Page 1