Yet she’d been kind to Jason…
Which raised the question of why, when he should be thanking heaven on bended knee that Jason had found a friend, he felt resentful?
He saw the impatience gathering in her eyes, and remembered she’d asked a question.
Maybe more than one.
Definitely one about whether he objected to the lad having dinner with her.
‘No, he can come to dinner if you really want him, but don’t let him become a nuisance to you,’ he said, and hoped it was an OK answer. Then, because he couldn’t tell from her expression whether it was or not, he found himself speaking again. ‘Gabi and Alex were telling me about Mickey’s Bar and Bistro. Could I buy you dinner there on Friday night? As a thank-you for being kind to Jason? We could talk about tennis coaches then.’
Various expletives sounded in Rory’s head as he heard himself issue this half-baked invitation. For a start he had enough ‘woman trouble’ with Drusilla’s arrival, so getting involved—even at the basic level of a thank-you dinner—with another one—particularly one to whom he rather thought he was attracted—was tempting fate.
He was wondering how he could sort this out when Alana did it for him.
‘I am not “being kind” to Jason, as you put it. He’s a friend—or at least an acquaintance who’s likely to become a friend. As for needing a reward like being taken out to dinner—that’s ridiculous. You can’t pay people for being friends.’
Her eyes, more grey than blue this evening, sparked with anger and a faint flush was visible beneath the lightly tanned skin on her cheeks, while her pale-knuckled grip on the door suggested she was only just holding back from slamming it in his face.
Great! He’d asked, and she’d refused, so that was that. No more obligations, no potential problems—so why was he running off at the mouth, still talking, practically persuading…?
‘I’m sorry. I put that badly. And I do want to talk about a tennis coach—and maybe a club, and whatever else he’ll need.’ Frustration with the situation—this woman, Jason, his life in general—made him sigh and he ran his fingers through his hair, remembering a haircut was one more minor thing he had to somehow fit into his life.
‘Damn it all, just come to dinner with me, won’t you? Is that too much to ask?’
Her eyes narrowed but he noticed her grip on the door had relaxed and he suspected there might even be a smile lurking around her lips.
‘Put like that, it’s an invitation that’s hard to refuse,’ she said, letting just a hint of laughter flirt around her lips. ‘But aren’t you forgetting Jason, and your visitor—his aunt, isn’t it?’
‘How can I possibly forget my visitor when every bone in my body is complaining after one night on the couch? As for Jason, he’s my sole concern, apart from work, and even that would have to take a back seat to his welfare if any more disasters occur. So asking you out to dinner, Dragon Lady, is not a date or anything even resembling a date. It’s a request for help on a night when Drusilla has already arranged to take Jason to the movies.’
Alana heard the words, and though there was no mistaking the central message—dinner but not a date—they raised so many other queries she’d probably have to eat with him every night for a week if she wanted to find out the answers.
But she could start with one night.
‘I guess it would give us an opportunity to talk about a few things,’ she conceded. ‘We haven’t really resolved the student issue, and Ted tells me you’re starting student rounds on Monday.’
His quick frown appeared, as if just talking about the students irritated him, but if he wanted her help with getting Jason settled, the least he could do—
‘Bargaining with me, Sister Wright?’ he asked, interrupting her thoughts, the frown replaced by a smile. ‘When you’ve just finished telling me one shouldn’t expect payment for being friends?’
The shift in his mood was disconcerting enough, but at the same time he leaned slightly towards her, as if drawn by some immutable force. For one riveting moment she thought he was going to kiss her.
And for one cataclysmic moment, she actually considered kissing him back.
Time expanded, stretched impossibly, imploded into nothingness, and the moment passed.
Alana felt heat rise in her body and willed it not to reach her cheeks, then, in case it did, tried a diversion.
‘We’ve got right off the subject of this evening’s dinner. Is it OK for Jason to have dinner here? Actually, it’s a wonder he hasn’t given up on you and come down anyway.’
Rory nodded as if acknowledging her tactics—and possibly something else—agreed that his nephew could eat with her and said goodbye.
Alana, now air-dried, shut the door and leaned against it.
Had she agreed to have dinner with him on Friday night or not? She rather thought she had.
But where did he get off inviting her like that? As if he assumed she’d have nothing better to do on a Friday night.
Which she didn’t, but that wasn’t the point.
Friday night?
This Friday night?
She clapped her hands to her temples and began to massage the headache she was certain would erupt any minute.
Of course she had something better—no, not necessarily better, just something else—to do on Friday night! In the panic which had followed the silly attraction attack last Saturday night—and the man still hadn’t recognised her—she’d emailed Jeremy and suggested meeting him at Mickey’s for a drink. It was the perfect venue for meeting a stranger as a number of her friends were likely to be there, so if Jeremy turned out to be an axe murderer she’d be safe.
Now—massage, massage—she’d have to tell Rory that she couldn’t have dinner with him on Friday and there was no way in the world he’d believe the truth—that she couldn’t make it because she did have a prior engagement.
Take me out and shoot me now!
The massaging wasn’t helping much, so she tried a groan, and although that eased a minuscule amount of tension from her chest, it made so little difference to her overall condition she didn’t bother trying it again.
Another knock on the door—Jason for sure, this time—put paid to having an immediate nervous breakdown, but mindful of Rory’s look when she’d greeted him in her bathrobe, she called out, ‘Just a minute.’ Then scuttled into her bedroom to drag on some underwear and a long straight house-dress, which, though split to the knees up each side, was cover enough to satisfy even the most censorious of uncles.
She let Jason in, suggested he help himself to either juice or soft drink from the fridge, then, realising the sooner she contacted Rory the better, opened her mouth to ask for their phone number.
She closed it again when she considered the implications of the question. Jason, being a teenager, would want to know why, and instinct told her he might not like the idea of her having dinner with his uncle—even when she wasn’t—particularly not when it was to discuss him. Jason him, not Rory him!
Maybe groaning would help!
‘And could you pull the meat—it’s in the pack marked “Eye Fillet” in the meat tray—out for me, please. I just need to make a phone call.’
She dashed into the bedroom and phoned Madeleine Frost, who, in between yelling at her twin boys—it must be the nanny Ingrid’s day off—found the number for her. Fortunately some catastrophe in the Frost household—signalled by a loud crash and a screaming child—prevented Madeleine from asking why Alana wanted it.
She dialled the new number and was relieved when Rory answered, though she heard herself listening for any shortage of breath that might suggest she’d interrupted what Jason called a ‘snogathon’.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t make it Friday. I totally forgot I had another…’ Help! She couldn’t say date because it wasn’t and he’d made it plain his invitation wasn’t either! ‘Engagement.’
‘Oh!’
He managed to endow the single syllable with so much downrig
ht disbelief that Alana cringed, then, remembering it was the plain, unvarnished truth, she added, ‘Well, I have! Goodbye.’
She didn’t quite slam down the phone, but it might have sounded like she had from the other end, and she didn’t give a damn.
Wretched man! How dared he disbelieve her?
Bad temper propelled her out of the bedroom and carried her on swift strides through the living room to the kitchen, where the sight of Jason, gently stroking the injured rabbit and talking softly to the frightened pet, doused the heat.
‘That’s wonderful that he’s letting you touch him,’ Alana said. ‘He’d been so badly mistreated I didn’t think he’d ever trust a human being again.’
Jason smiled at her.
‘If I pick him up, would it hurt him?’
‘I don’t know,’ Alana answered honestly. ‘But I have to take him back to the vet on Thursday afternoon. You could come with me if you like and we’ll ask him. When he was first found, one of his legs was so badly dislocated the vet considered destroying him, but the X-ray will show if it’s healed.’
‘I’d like to come,’ Jason said with such unusual diffidence that Alana wondered if Rory had lectured him on not making a nuisance of himself. But surely that would have made him more belligerent.
With Jason’s help—he insisted he was an experienced barbeque attendant—Alana prepared their meal. Jason, she discovered, ate anything and everything— ‘Mum said it was bad manners to be fussy’—and as they ate he pronounced himself in favour of Alana’s potato salad— ‘I love the crunchy bits of bacon in it, Mum didn’t do that’—and the special, not too hot chilli jam she suggested would be just as good as tomato sauce—which she didn’t have—on his steak.
She served the meal on the small table on the balcony and they ate looking out over the now quiet street and the neighbouring houses.
‘Great!’ he said, pushing away his plate and sitting back in his chair. ‘But you should get some tomato sauce—you can’t have sausages without it.’
They argued amiably about the merits of tomato sauce, moved on to other condiments, then Jason’s Siamese cat leapt down onto Alana’s balcony, startling them. Apparently finding who she was looking for, she took another delicate leap onto Jason’s lap.
He stroked the cat and held it to his face.
‘Mum loved this cat. She died, you know. One day she was picking me up from school and she had this headache, and by the next week she was in hospital with a brain tumour. She had an operation, then a lot of chemotherapy that made her very sick and then she died anyway. Rory came and stayed with us. She was his sister and they didn’t have either of their parents. Both of them died before I was born, so my only grandparents are my father’s parents and I don’t see much of them.’
The cat purred and nuzzled its nose against his head, as if intent on offering sympathy.
‘I didn’t know my father or his parents.’ Alana spoke quietly, offering a little of her own story in return. ‘Apparently, when my mother found she was pregnant he didn’t want to know about it. So my mother brought me up, with help from her family, but then she died when I was young, too, though not as young as you. I was eighteen,’ Alana told him. ‘You don’t ever forget and you don’t ever stop missing the person who dies, but it does get easier after a while. Especially if you keep busy enough to not think about it too often.’
Jason nodded. ‘Rory says that’s why going back to school will be good for me, but I won’t know anyone there, and everyone will have their own friends and won’t want a dork like me.’
He looked so desperately unhappy that Alana felt her heart squeeze tight with shared emotion.
‘It takes a bit of time to find friends that suit you, but if the school has a tennis team, they’ll be so keen to have you on it you’ll be fighting off people who want to be friends with you. What school are you considering?’
‘There’s a state high school just up the road, but Rory wants me to go to St Peter’s. It’s kind of a brother school to the one I went to in Sydney, and the one he went to, and the grandfather I didn’t know went to as well.’
Alana chuckled.
‘You don’t seem too keen on all this tradition.’
‘It’s not that, it’s no girls. It’s an all-boys school—isn’t that totally uncool?’
She was aware she was sailing uncharted waters—what did she know about adolescents? She remarked that she’d been to an all-girls school mainly because the sports programme had been better. ‘I know some of the state schools have good sports teams, but most of them can’t offer a full range of choices. I did tennis, rowing and kendo, but other girls played soccer, or netball, or went in for athletics. Before I left they were even offering golf tuition.’
Interest had sparked in Jason’s wary eyes. The cat had settled on his knee and he stroked it absent-mindedly.
‘Kendo. That’s like judo, isn’t it?’
‘There’s a certain connection with the philosophy. Kendo is a different Japanese discipline, and relates more to fencing because it’s based on swordplay. Only beginners like me don’t get to use swords. We use a long stick called a shinai, which has a piece of string from one end to the other to represent the sword blade.’
‘Sounds wicked. Do you still do it? Do you have the gear?’
Which explained why, when she opened the door to Rory for the second time that evening, she was wearing a heavy metal-grilled helmet and hard, padded body armour.
‘I guessed you’d change before he came, but is he so threatening?’
The man was smirking!
‘Ya, pow!’ Jason shrieked, advancing with the shinai.
‘At the moment, yes,’ Alana said, pulling off her helmet then shrieking herself as strands of hair tangled and stuck in the metal joins.
‘Ha. Damsel in distress,’ Rory said, stepping forward so he could take the helmet from her hand. ‘Stand still, I’m good at this. I considered surgery at one time because a professor said I had such nimble fingers.’
‘Female professor?’ Alana asked, practically squirming with embarrassment and perhaps just a teensy bit of skittish physical reaction.
Well, maybe more than a teensy bit if the goose-bumps on her arms were any indication…And the way her bones were threatening a melt-down…
Rory’s laughter made things worse. The deep rich noise held such genuine delight it once again surprised her. Was it her preconceived idea of him that made the laughter so startling?
Or the physical effect it, too, had on her.
Touch, hearing, scent—she had the lot bombarding her now.
‘It’s a kendo mask,’ Jason was explaining to his uncle. ‘Alana learned kendo at school. She went to a private school because they had more choice of sports. Have you still got the book about St Peters? Did it list the sports they offer?’
‘Yes, I have the book and, yes, I think it lists the sports they offer.’
‘Something else to thank you for, though, of course, you’d refuse to accept thanks,’ Rory added more quietly, so only Alana heard. Then, in a louder voice, he said, ‘Done.’ His hand smoothed her hair, hesitating momentarily against one of the long strands, before he stepped away.
And studied her suspiciously.
‘What?’ she demanded. ‘Have I got mask marks all over my face? Dust and dirt? These things have been packed away for ages.’
Rory realised he was staring, but as he’d settled the last strand of hair he’d had such a strong sense of déjà vu his mind had gone searching for an earlier situation where this might have happened.
It would have happened if he’d kissed her earlier, because in that mad moment in his mind, as he’d leaned towards her, there’d been an urge to slip his fingers through the golden strands and steer her head—those lips—to his.
But it hadn’t happened and, far from providing a basis for his déjà vu, what that fragment of time had achieved was a further distance between them if the phone call cancelling dinner was any in
dication.
But further distance was good…
‘No, you look fine, though I like your hair down around your face like that.’ Jason answered for him. ‘Makes you look less like a Dragon Lady.’
As if pleased by the diversion, Alana moved away, her hands going to her neck where they gathered up the pale gold strands and somehow twisted them into a neat knot behind her head.
‘Much better I keep the Dragon Lady in place,’ she said teasingly to Jason. ‘If I start looking too human you’ll take advantage of me.’
‘Like this?’
He swung the stick he held towards her and she leapt out of the way, but her movement—towards him, not away—must have put him off balance so the long stick struck wildly, collecting a table lamp and sending it to the ground where the ceramic base shattered and the lightbulb exploded with a very satisfactory bang.
Rory opened him mouth to yell at his nephew, but Alana stepped between them, taking the stick from Jason then saying calmly, ‘I’ve always hated that lamp. You know where the dustpan and brush are kept, Jason. Would you get it while I turn off the power?’
The boy was white-faced, stricken no doubt by guilt, and though Alana’s words had been intended to ease the situation, Rory could see the tension he knew so well had returned to Jason’s shoulders.
He turned to Alana, furious because with Jason he always seemed to be taking one step forward then two steps back, and right now he needed someone to blame.
But as Jason sidled back into the room and, without being asked, knelt to sweep up the shattered china, Alana held up her hand to stop whatever Rory had been about to say.
‘I know you’re furious with me,’ she said—to him, not Jason, ‘and I don’t blame you. I shouldn’t have been mucking around with kendo gear in a small flat. But Jason knows it was my fault, and he’s also learned a valuable lesson. If he does take up any sport involving swords or long sticks, practise in a gym or outdoors.’
She knelt beside the boy, and with a casual ‘Thanks, Jase’ took the tools out of his hand and finished the job.
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