by Lilian Darcy
But what was it that she really wanted? Finally, she made a decision, and then heard Laird order exactly the two dishes that had run a close second in her choice.
‘Ooh,’ she said again.
‘Problem?’
‘I’d been thinking about the duck, too.’ Then she added, before she thought, ‘Could we swap tastes?’
‘You’d do that?’ He laughed again. ‘At a place like this?’
He’d brought her to the best restaurant at the casino, in Melbourne’s Southbank district. Just outside, marching in a row along the pedestrian walkway, a symphony of gas flames flared dramatically at regular intervals, making passing tourists and even locals pause and point and gasp, and at their window-side table Tammy and Laird could both feel the radiant heat every time the jets went off.
Which was not what made her flush.
‘Oh. N-no,’ she stammered. ‘Not if you don’t want to. I’m sorry, I’m used to—’
‘It’s fine.’
‘Eating half-finished chicken nuggets off my kids’ plates. I shouldn’t even—’
‘It’s fine, Tammy.’
‘Be at a place like this. It’ll cost more than my food budget for a week. And people would stare, wouldn’t they, if we were—’
‘I almost ordered the lamb myself. I’d love a share of yours.’
‘Passing our plates back and forth.’
‘And I don’t give a damn what “people” think, Tammy. There are enough kinds of tyranny in our lives as it is, without that. Don’t you think?’
She finally calmed down enough to take in what he’d said. He was watching her in that way he had been doing lately. Sort of thoughtful and a little bemused, as if he’d found himself in a parallel universe and couldn’t work out how and why it was different from the usual one, let alone what he was doing in it.
Sometimes she felt the same way.
‘Tyranny,’ she said, enjoying the taste of the word on her tongue, because it was Laird who had just used it.
‘You think that’s too strong?’
‘What kinds of tyranny?’
‘Time, money, rules and protocol, all sorts of things.’
‘You’re right. I’ve never used the word tyranny in that sense but, yes.’
‘What tyrannies do you suffer under?’
‘Oh, let me think…’
It was one of those rambling, odd conversations that went in so many directions you couldn’t remember where it had begun. Laird seemed to forget his bemusement, and Tammy forgot that he was spending her whole week’s family food budget taking her out to a single meal. They swapped plates twice with each course, and if anyone was staring at such gauche, terrible behaviour, Tammy didn’t notice because she was too busy looking at Laird and the plates, and laughing at something he’d said.
She lost track of time. Often, she caught Laird looking at her when he thought she wouldn’t see, and she knew, just knew, that she was looking at him the same way, even though she tried not to—with a quality of disbelief and wonder, as well as a very healthy dose of desire.
What is happening here? This is magical and crazy and I must be reading it all wrong. I must be out of my head and Laird is definitely out of his! she thought.
This was the kind of place where dinner took two hours, and you enjoyed every minute. The waiter brought dessert menus, catapulting Tammy into a should-I-or-shouldn’t-I conflict with which she was very familiar. She had a pretty good idea of the outcome, too.
It would involve chocolate.
But then her mobile rang and she heard Mum’s voice.
‘I’m sorry to be doing this. They’ve caught some kind of tummy bug, love.’
‘Have I been gone that long?’ she said blankly.
‘They were suspiciously quiet from the moment you walked out the door. Three of them so far—Sarah, Lachlan and Lucy. They didn’t eat dinner and at first I thought they were just tired, but then Sarah said she felt sick. Don’t hurry home, because I’m managing, but Lucy’s pretty miserable, poor sweetheart, and she’s asking for you. She’s already vomited twice.’
Mum had been known to send mixed signals on occasion, just like Tammy herself. Faced with a choice between ‘Don’t hurry home,’ and ‘Lucy’s pretty miserable,’ what could a good mother do?
‘I think we’ll have to skip dessert, Laird…’ she told him, her voice slowing with regret.
‘Problem at home?’
‘Stomach upset. Oh, I hope you don’t catch it! You were right in the thick of the germs tonight!’
‘What about you?’
‘Oh, there’s little doubt I’ll get it, if it’s infectious. But I’m off until Monday.’
‘So you’ll spend your precious free time feeling like death warmed up and battling to be fit for work.’
She shrugged, acknowledging that he was right. She was used to it. Kind of.
He looked at her in silence for a long moment, until she began to wonder if he was angry, or if he was going to insist they stay for dessert, but then he said, ‘What can I do, Tammy? How can I help? I mean it. There must be something. Concrete, practical help. That’s what you need, isn’t it?’
‘We’ll be fine. Kids bounce back fast. You’re used to the ill, frail ones, but my lot are pretty healthy. I was very lucky, I carried the triplets through to thirty-two weeks. Ben had a few problems, especially with his eyes, but they’re fine now.’
‘Are you changing the subject?’
‘I think I’d just like to get home. This has been the most fabulous meal, thank you.’
‘It has, it’s been great. But, yes, if you want to get home to the kids…’ After that, he went quiet. Slid his credit card into the bill folder, then signed the slip. Hooked her bag strap off the back of the chair where she’d hung it and passed it to her. All of it accompanied by just a few superficial words.
Outside the restaurant, in the casino foyer, he stopped her in a quiet corner.
‘Hang on a minute, don’t be in such a rush.’ Hand on her shoulder. Other hand pivoting her to face him. ‘There’s one more thing we have to take care of first.’
She froze, with her heart beating fast. He didn’t have to kiss her. She didn’t expect that kind of gallant finishing touch. Oh, lord, how could she let him know, tactfully, that he was off the hook, that kissing wasn’t required, and save them both from this unnecessary embarrassment? Why had his eyes gone so dark? She loved the grey hue of them in daylight, too, but this was…this was…oh.
‘I thought I’d have a better chance to lead up to this,’ he said, and she barely heard him over the pounding in her ears and the flustered whirl of her thoughts. ‘But you’re in a hurry to get home, and the moment I’m parked in front of your house you’ll leap out of the car, I know you will, and I’ll have lost the chance.’
‘I’m—’
‘You probably won’t even let me inside in case I catch something. So it’s now or never.’ His hands massaged her shoulders with a light, caressing touch. His voice dropped to a husky whisper. She could feel the heat and brush of his thighs through her dress. ‘And I’m not that interested in never.’
‘Laird, I don’t—You don’t—’
‘Shh…Come on, stop…’ He pressed his finger against her lips.
Then he pressed his mouth there.
Even though she’d known it was about to happen, it still took her by surprise. The heat of it. The sweetness. The surging need.
Oh, in both of them.
She needed this. Just this one kiss. Please. Now. In case no man ever kissed her again.
No, in case Laird Burchell never kissed her again.
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, not even thinking to hold back, or make him wait, or leave him in any doubt about her response. She parted her lips and tasted him, and he took his cue to go deeper, flooding her whole body with sensation and desire, just with the way his lips moved.
The fruit and spice of red wine mingled in their mouths. The light roughn
ess of his cheek brushed against hers. Her breasts pressed into him, and her nipples went hard and tight. Her heart beat even faster.
She just wanted to hold him and forget everything but this. She closed her eyes, giving herself up to pure sensation, already knowing that she was like putty in his hands—the hands that were running over her back, whispering against the fabric of her dress, pulling on the skirt. She was so bad at hiding how she felt. He’d know. He’d understand exactly what this was doing to her.
Oh, she had to stop. Mum was waiting for her. The kids needed her.
And she was giving way too much to this man, when he couldn’t possibly want it—when he’d kissed her because that’s just what you do, the two of you, a man and a woman, when you’ve been out and had some wine.
What was that horrible expression? Beer goggles. Almost any woman could look temporarily attractive to a man if the timing and the lighting and the amount of alcohol were right.
She had five kids, she had no money, she had a badly wounded and mistrustful heart, she had—
He’d let her go. He’d stopped. She felt the easing away of his weight and strength, the loss of his mouth. Her own lips already felt swollen, and her breathing had gone short and uneven. Opening her eyes, she found him still just inches away, his hands forming into fists at his sides.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That didn’t happen quite how I planned it.’
‘Oh…um…’
‘You’re a hard woman to stop kissing, Tammy Prunty.’
Horrified, she backed away. So it had all come from her! She’d held him so tight, she’d devoured him with her mouth because he felt so good. He’d been too polite to try to—
But he was laughing, bemused again.
‘Hey, I’m saying I liked it,’ he told her softly, brushing his knuckles lightly along her jaw. ‘Don’t you realise that? I really, really liked it. I loved it, and I couldn’t let you go. But we’re in a public place, even though there’s no one much around. Don’t want to get arrested for lewd behaviour on our first date.’
‘Mmm, could be sensible to leave that until the next one,’ she managed to say, then heard the echo of her own words in her head and realised that she’d only dug herself in deeper. Did he have the slightest intention of there being a ‘next one’?
‘Sounds great.’ His eyes and voice teased. ‘Somehow I’m seeing a fountain and splashing limbs next time. Smudged make-up.’
‘Mussed-up hair,’ she offered, thinking of her fingers running through those short dark strands of his.
‘Exactly. Discarded piles of clothing. Chocolate body paint. Disorderly conduct. That kind of thing. Are we on the same page?’
‘Um, yes…No…I hope so, I hope we are.’ She was laughing helplessly. Her blood sang. Her brain clanged with warning bells. She didn’t trust this, or him, or herself, and wanted to laugh about all of it. Or cry. ‘I have no idea. I— I—You—We—You’d better take me home,’ she finished, because it was the only sensible thing she could say.
The kids were better by Sunday night, and miraculously neither Tammy nor her mother contracted the bug at all. Tammy was gripped by a raging virulence of a different kind. She went around in a daze all weekend. It felt the way her first kiss had felt at fourteen. The memory cascaded through her whole body at the tiniest trigger.
At the sound of Laird’s voice when he phoned on Saturday to see how she and the kids were faring. At the smell of the dress she’d worn to the restaurant, when she brought it out of her wardrobe to check in daylight if it was still clean. At the taste of the glasses of red wine her mother poured for each of them on Saturday night, after they’d washed load after load of soiled sheets and clothes, and cleaned up the worst of the mess.
‘We’ve earned this!’ Mum said.
While Tammy thought hotly, He kissed me.
And he’d done it as if he’d liked it and wanted more, as if it had been the liqueur cherry on top of a big chocolate dessert, piled high with whipped cream.
Or had she read him all wrong?
I can’t be fourteen again. It’s dangerous. It’s frightening. It’s doomed. And I don’t have time!
On Monday afternoon, Tammy came home from a day shift to find the house tidier and more sparkling clean than she’d seen it in years. ‘He sent a cleaning team,’ her mother explained in a helpless tone, when Tammy reached her in the kitchen, ready to yell at her for working too hard. ‘That Dr Burchell of yours, I mean.’
‘Mum! I thought you must have done it.’
‘I couldn’t possibly have, in one afternoon.’
‘How did they?’
‘They arrived at one o’clock, three of them, and stayed until four. They said it was paid for and organised. They showed me the invoice and told me who’d done it, and it was him. That doctor of yours.’
‘He’s not mine.’
‘Love, three hours of professional cleaners!’
‘He feels sorry for me, that’s all. He—he’s being nice. It’s not all that hard to be nice when you have plenty of money.’
‘Tammy, you’re sounding angry.’
At myself. For wanting to cry about this. For wanting to read way too much into it. For knowing it’s going to go round and round in my thoughts for days.
‘I’m not angry. I’m just— I thought he was looking at me sideways a bit today. Only saw him on the hop, but the way he smiled, as if he had a really nice secret…’ She shook her head, as helpless as Mum.
Mum was looking at her, and seeing too much.
Tammy burst into rapid speech. ‘I just don’t want to assume it’s significant. We went out once. We talked all the way through the meal, and—and swapped tastes of what we’d ordered. And laughed a fair bit. It was nice, but…A man like him, Mum…’
‘What, and you have nothing to offer? My fabulous daughter?’
‘What do I have to offer? What?’ She spread her hands, then dropped them. ‘Now you’re the one looking angry!’
‘Stop me before I say something about a certain person stripping your confidence to the bone.’
Tom.
Neither of them needed to say his name.
‘This isn’t about him,’ Tammy said.
‘It isn’t? Of course it is!’
‘I’m being realistic, that’s all.’
‘What do you have to offer? You have everything to offer! You’re bright, funny, warm, giving, hard-working, a wonderful down-to-earth mother…’
‘I have a daunting, impossible number of young children. I’m at least seven kilos overweight, and that’s being kind to myself. I pinch pennies until I start to feel as if I’m pinching myself, as if my mouth is pinching tight, like a tight little purse pinched in a pair of cramped, obsessive hands…’
‘So you deserve someone who’ll send in a cleaning team after your kids have a stomach bug. You should see the bathrooms, Tammy. You should smell the bathrooms! I don’t know what products they used, but the smell is heavenly. Like daphne, or gardenia.’
‘Really?’ The anticipation of the scent in her nostrils dragged Tammy temporarily up out of her doubts. ‘I must go and look before bathtime messes it all up. It’s—it’s wonderful, isn’t it?’
She looked around. The light fittings were free of dust. The cork floor in the kitchen gleamed. The film of grease on the ceiling above the stove, where she never had time to climb up to clean, was gone.
‘Oh, sheesh, they even did the windows!’ she realised out loud. ‘I could put my hand through them if I didn’t know they were there.’
‘You should send him a card,’ Mum said. Too innocently. ‘I have some nice ones in my desk, blank, so you can write your own message. I’ll find them, and you can choose.’
So Tammy sat in her bedroom that night like a fourteen-year-old writing secrets in her diary. She waited until after the kids were asleep, and struggled over the wording on a piece of scrap paper, not daring to think that she’d get it right the first time.
‘Dear Laird, thank
you so much for sending the cleaners.’
‘Dear Laird, you didn’t have to do it, but it made my week!’
Dear Laird, please don’t ever do anything like that ever again, because I’m pretty tough and I can stand life’s struggles, with Mum’s help. It’s kindness that I can’t take, and can’t trust, after Tom. It’s wondering how much you meant by it, if it was just a throw-away gesture, or if it came from the heart. It’s thinking I could get very quickly used to being spoiled that way, and then it would be so, so hard when the spoiling stopped.
‘All the best, Tammy.’
‘Hugs, Tammy.’
‘Love, Tammy.’
No, I can’t use that word, can I? The L word? It’s way too loaded and scary, even thrown away on a signature line. I don’t love you. Of course I don’t. But I’m scared that I could, if you made it too easy for me, and then where would I be?
Writing the card, all sixty-four words, took her over an hour.
Laird felt like a child awaiting the reaction to a hand-made Christmas gift. Would she like it? Did she like it? Didn’t she love it? How could she not?
On Friday night, he’d dropped Tammy home and obeyed her strict order not to enter the house. ‘It’ll be awful, Laird, and you’ll catch something. You don’t have your resistance built up by years of pre-school. I’m not letting you near the front door.’ At home, he’d tried to catch up on some medical reading but the words had just blurred.
And then he hadn’t been able to sleep.
He knew Tammy wouldn’t be asleep either. She’d be in and out of children’s rooms all night, soothing miserable tears, changing messy pyjamas, being strong and cheerful even when she was dropping in her tracks.
The offer of help he’d made at the restaurant…ridiculous. Was he intending to follow her children around with a mop and bucket? Send in a pizza delivery when their stomachs were still in rebellion?
Then he’d thought, Cleaners! and it seemed perfect. A genuine way to help. Not too intrusive. Not too personal. A kindness, rather than the grand-piano-sized, exhilarating gesture of…oh, what could you call it…just wowiness that he really felt like making.