by Alison Kelly
‘Telling tales again, sis?’ Her half-brother’s amused voice rose from the foyer.
‘Darling, you’re home!’
Patricia’s singsong delight at her son’s appearance was the last straw for Amanda-Jayne’s stomach. With one hand sealing her mouth she sprinted down the hall to her room, where she used the other to defy Patricia’s, ‘Don’t you dare lock that door, Amanda-Jayne! I want to speak with you.’ Then, with the bedroom swirling around her, she dashed to her private bathroom.
She was dimly aware of her stepmother thumping on the bedroom door, but she had no idea what she was shouting at her. Considering Patricia’s vocal-amplification abilities, she could only assume that hearing impairment was a side effect of heaving one’s heart out.
Dear God, how much longer would this last?
For over a week now she’d been getting up close and personal with the commode at varying and multiple times each day. Morning sickness? Ha! She hoped whatever idiot had named it that had been exiled in disgrace from the world of medical science and was at this minute eyeballing Satan!
‘My doctor wants details of any medical problems the baby might inherit from you… When you get the relevant information you can mail it to me… And that will be the end of it.’
For the thousandth time, Reb’s mind replayed the scene at the garage.
‘Like hell that’ll be the end of it,’ he said, rolling the beer bottle he’d emptied nearly an hour ago between his palms. ‘If I’ve fathered a kid, Ms I-didn’t-need-your-financial-assistance Vaughan, I’m sure as hell going to contribute more than just a medical report to its future.’
Reb wasn’t yet sure what exactly he was going to say or precisely what demands he was going to lay on Amanda-Jayne when he fronted up at the Vaughan house tomorrow morning, but one thing was sure: she wouldn’t want to count on her New Year getting off to the start she’d planned. He might have been too shell-shocked to entirely comprehend what she’d said prior to speeding out of the garage earlier this evening, but he wasn’t giving her the satisfaction of thinking she was calling all the shots for much longer. First thing tomorrow morning he was going to be on her doorstep ready to set a few ground rules of his own and she’d better be ready to listen.
‘Hoy, Reb! Since when have you got so antisocial?’
At the wry question, Reb lowered his gaze from the inky sky and watched the approach of the woman who’d delivered it. Wearing ratty sneakers, cut-off jeans and a skimpy midriff top, the pint-size blonde looked barely old enough to be in high school, much less the mother of his two-year-old goddaughter. It was an illusion that vanished the moment she was close enough for anyone to see her eyes. At a glance they were a startling green…on closer inspection they were more jaded than green, making Debbie Jenkins seem decades older than the twenty-one Reb knew her to be.
It occurred to him that Deb’s background was the complete antithesis to Amanda-Jayne Vaughan’s. A runaway from a home life that was all too familiar to most of Reb’s friends, she’d spent a year in a juvenile detention centre before hooking up with a group of bikers that even he’d regarded as bad news. But in the best traditions of irony she’d got ‘lucky’ just over three years ago when her loser boyfriend had put her up as collateral in a pub card game and Reb had ‘won’ her. If she’d been surprised when he’d said he wasn’t interested in having her warm his bed, she’d near died of shock when he’d offered her a ride to Vaughan’s Landing and a full-time job working in the garage.
Reb had given her a chance and his mate Gunna had given her his heart. Neither man had ever been sorry.
‘So how come you’re sittin’ out here all by your lonesome?’ she asked. ‘Not like you to be on the fringes of a party.’
‘Just needed a bit of time to consider my New Year resolutions.’
She laughed. ‘Let me guess, you’re givin’ up smokin’…again.’
Reb grimaced, regretting that the best he could claim in his latest campaign to quit was having cut back and switched to an ultra low tar/nicotine brand.
‘Yeah, that too,’ he said. ‘Maybe this year I’ll manage to give them right away, huh?’
‘Well, I’m givin’ ’em away,’ Debbie asserted proudly. ‘And I’m doin’ it cold turkey. It’s time I set Alanna a good example.’
‘I wish I could’ve managed that. Good luck, Deb; take it from me, you’re in for a tough time.’
‘Mentionin’ tough… What’s this I hear about Savvy givin’ you the slip?’
Reb paused as a means of checking the anger the question reignited. His fifteen-year-old cousin was going to be lucky if he didn’t wring her neck first chance he got.
‘We had a disagreement about her going to some party tonight,’ he said finally. ‘As usual she holed up in her bedroom sulking. Then, while I was talking to Aman—er—a customer,’ he amended quickly, ‘she bolted. I didn’t know she wasn’t upstairs until about an hour later, after I finished working on Mrs Kelly’s FJ.’
‘Bolted? You mean ran away?’
‘No, no,’ Reb said quickly, responding to the alarm in Debbie’s expression. ‘She hasn’t taken any of her stuff. Just snuck off for the night. The brat left a note saying “Gone to party. Don’t wait up.” I’ll kick her butt into the middle of next month when I get hold of her,’ he promised.
‘I’m surprised you just didn’t go right out an’ haul her butt home.’
‘I would’ve if I’d had the slightest clue where the party was,’ Reb said curtly. ‘It’s because she wouldn’t give me any details in the first place that I said she couldn’t go. And her friends were predictably close-mouthed when I rang around trying to find out where it was. Her life won’t be worth living when I get my hands on her.’
‘Can’t be too tough on her, Reb,’ she said. ‘I mean, she’s a kid. Didn’t you do the same thing at fifteen?’
Reb hadn’t. There had been no point in sneaking out or even asking permission to do something or go somewhere when his old man had let him run his own race from the time he’d been able to walk. He hadn’t even started school the first time the cops had brought him home after finding him wandering along the highway. When his old man had died, he’d moved in with his uncle, but the then toddling Savannah was such a handful that Bill had relied on Reb’s self-sufficiency to extend to taking care of her as well. Trouble was, the teenage Savvy was proving more of a handful than the hyperactive two-year-old version had ever been.
‘Fairness isn’t high on my priority list right now,’ he grumbled. ‘I’ve got more than enough problems on my plate without all the stunts she’s been pulling these last few months.’
‘Problems?’ Immediate concern wrinkled Debbie’s features. ‘With the business?’
‘No, thank God! That’s the one part of my life that’s not currently causing me headaches. Although I’ll probably jinx myself sayin—’ Reb broke off at the sound of Joe Cocker’s voice cranked to a volume loud enough to shatter ice at both poles.
Debbie cursed. ‘I just told Gunna not to connect those other two amps! We’ll have the cops out here shortly.’
‘I don’t think you have to worry about breaking any noise acts tonight, Deb. Apart from it being New Year’s Eve there’s not another house for miles.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ she muttered. ‘There’s at least a dozen guys here who could get busted just on sight.’ She grimaced ruefully. ‘But then what else is new, right?
‘Now c’mon,’ she urged, grabbing his arm. ‘It’s almost time to count in the New Year and I reckon you and me are the only two still sober enough to manage it!’
It was dark when Amanda-Jayne awoke with a stomach that was mercifully settled and now craving food. Rolling over, she looked at the clock and smiled; at 11:50 p.m. on New Year’s Eve even the domestic staff wouldn’t be around, but more importantly neither would Patricia. Once again she wondered why she’d been cursed with the Cinderella version of a stepmother when other girls she’d known had got ones who would have
crawled over crushed glass for them.
She’d been very young when her father married Patricia and any hopes she’d held that, after being motherless for two years, the quality of her life would only be improved by the marriage had been dashed long before its first anniversary. By then she’d been whole-heartedly entrenched in competition with her stepmother for every scrap of her father’s affection. Yet youthful enthusiasm was no match for experienced scheming and Patricia had been so adept at concealing her dislike of her stepdaughter from her husband that it was Amanda-Jayne who’d invariably come out looking bad. For all her late father’s famed all-seeing business vision, when it came to seeing through his second wife’s charade of ‘loving stepmother’ Andrew Vaughan had been pathetically myopic and insensitive to how lonely and excluded his daughter had come to feel in her own home. The situation had only worsened when Patricia had given birth to Joshua.
On the rare occasions it was deemed convenient for Amanda-Jayne to spend a weekend home from boarding-school, Patricia had made her feel like an outsider. Therefore, as soon as she’d turned eighteen Amanda-Jayne had chosen to move permanently to Sydney, returning to Vaughan’s Landing for only brief command visits to please her father. Since his death, she only returned to meet the terms of his will, but all that would change in forty-four months’ time. Come her thirtieth birthday, she’d have full legal title and control over the house.
Making her way down the small staff staircase leading from the upper floor to the kitchen, she couldn’t suppress the satisfaction she felt at knowing that Patricia knew she was on borrowed time as head of the house. Thanks to Amanda-Jayne’s great-grandfather’s very un-Victorian sense of equality, his will stated that in all future generations the Vaughan Hill house must pass to the eldest child regardless of sex. So, although the income from the Vaughans’ prosperous, century-old horse and cattle stud was to be equally divided between Joshua and herself, Amanda-Jayne was the heir to the family home. A situation which peeved Patricia no end since it granted her stepdaughter the power to exile her to the small cottage at the other side of the property once she assumed full control of her inheritance. In fact if her father hadn’t unreasonably stipulated that Amanda-Jayne couldn’t take full control until her thirtieth birthday, Patricia would have been ‘slumming it’ in the much smaller four-bedroom residence right now instead of still playing lady of the manor.
Some people might think it was mean to force Patricia to move to the smaller house, but Amanda-Jayne refused to acknowledge any guilt about what she intended to do. Considering the way she kicked me into boarding-school, she thought, why should I? By her father’s own admission the decision to send her away to school at age ten had been entirely her stepmother’s.
‘Patricia feels your mother and I were being extremely short-sighted and selfish in deciding to keep you in day school until senior high,’ he’d told her the day before she’d been shipped off to Sydney. ‘Patricia did two years of an education degree at university so she’s better qualified to make this decision than I am. You’ll thank her in the end.’
Well, ‘the end’ was still out of sight in any direction Amanda-Jayne looked, especially since whatever arguments her stepmother had used to convince her husband that she was an ‘education expert’ must have exceeded their use-by date when it had come time for her son’s education. Joshua hadn’t started boarding-school until this past year and already Patricia was dropping hints—the largest being the Ferrari Josh had got the day he’d gained his licence—that he wouldn’t be returning for his final year and silently daring Amanda-Jayne to challenge her on the subject.
Amanda-Jayne had refused to rise to the bait by demanding to know how much driving a kid could do with only one weekend away from school every four weeks. She’d outgrown playing Patricia’s little games; they took more enthusiasm than she could muster for the woman. As for Josh…well, for all that he was spoilt and arrogant, deep down Amanda-Jayne actually liked him, and there had been occasions in the past when she’d suspected he felt the same way about her, despite the fact Patricia had made it her life’s work to prevent any sibling affection developing between them.
While she wanted to think maturity was the reason she was now able to handle her stepmother’s obvious manipulation and open antagonism without immediately becoming defensive or losing her temper, it was more likely her tolerance stemmed from knowing her visits home were irregular and blissfully short. The exception being this dumb, annual two-week Christmas/New Year family reunion, which her father had so embraced he’d actually made it a condition of his will that the remaining members of his ‘loving family’ maintain the tradition. Amanda-Jayne might have laughed at the irony of that had she been able to understand anything of what her father had been thinking when he’d drawn up his last will and testament.
While she’d fight anyone who said her father hadn’t been of sound mind when he’d drawn up the document, her own opinion was that he must have been at least midway through a crate of imported cognac when he’d insisted the family solicitor couldn’t pay her monthly allowance until Patricia had verified she’d fulfilled their family obligations. She wondered if her father would be surprised to learn his precious wife had conveniently forgotten to instruct the solicitors to transfer Amanda-Jayne’s allowance every month since his death?
In the past it had taken no more than a couple of curt phone calls to rectify the problem, but Amanda-Jayne hadn’t seen a cent of her trust money for three months. If it wasn’t in her account when she got back to Sydney her father and every soul in both heaven and hell would hear the commotion she was going to kick up. Her ex-husband had already cost her the money she’d taken into their marriage; she wasn’t about to placidly sit around showing ‘good faith’ while she got financially routed a second time.
For the life of her she had no idea why her father had tied up her inheritance the way he had. Sometimes she thought it was because he’d had his own doubts on the success of her marriage and had wanted to safeguard her income, but that didn’t really make sense since he’d practically hand-picked his son-in-law. Which just went to prove, she thought ruefully, that his judgment in son-in-laws had been every bit as appalling as his taste in second wives.
Opening the refrigerator, Amanda-Jayne studied its contents for several moments before deciding that strawberries and cream along with some non-alcoholic wine from the cellar was as good a way as any to celebrate the New Year solo. No sooner had the self-pitying thought flashed into her head than an inner warmth and the recollection of precisely why she was spending the night at home ousted it.
‘Sorry, sweetie,’ she whispered, looking down and placing a hand on her still flat belly. ‘You’re a wonderful surprise… It’s just that I’m still getting used to you.’
‘You tart! You cheap, good-for-nothing tramp! How dare you humiliate—?’
Amanda-Jayne’s first, sleep-clouded thought was that she’d forgotten to switch off her TV. It wasn’t until her arm was almost reefed from its socket that it registered the diatribe of abuse was being directed at her!
Instantly awake, a startled scream burst from her as her eyes fought the sudden intrusion of light and her body resisted Patricia, who for some reason was trying to drag her from her bed.
‘Patricia, stop it!’ she demanded.
‘Get out!’ Patricia shouted. ‘Get out now!’
‘Let me go! Let—’
Though her stepmother released her arm, it was only to snatch the doona and pillows from the bed and hurl them to the floor. ‘Get out!’ she screeched again. ‘Out of bed! And out of this house!’
Amanda-Jayne was only too willing to concede that Patricia had a lot of vices, but drinking wasn’t one of them, so she could only conclude that the teetotalling witch had rabies. Except rabies didn’t exist in Australia, which meant—
‘Mum! Stop!’
As Josh grabbed his mother’s wildly flaying arms, survival instincts sent Amanda-Jayne scampering off the far side of the mat
tress.
On the other side of the bed a worried-looking Joshua was restraining his vermilion-faced mother, but shock was making it hard for Amanda-Jayne’s sleep-hazed brain to get any handle on what was going on. In all the years of their mutual animosity Patricia had never done anything this…this bizarre. But then again Amanda-Jayne had never imagined so much anger and contempt could radiate from a person’s eyes as was being directed at her now.
It was a hatred so intense Patricia was physically shaking from it and it didn’t require too much mental effort to work out what had triggered it; somehow her stepmother had discovered she was pregnant.
‘How dare you humiliate Joshua and me like this?’ she berated her. ‘How are we supposed to maintain our dignity in this town when you’ve disgraced the family by…by bedding common scum? A loutish, barbaric hoodlum!’
Amanda-Jayne reeled at her words. It was one thing for her to have found out about the baby, but the baby’s father…! Dear God, how had that got out? Yet even as she asked the question she knew. Why should she have thought that Reb Browne was above recounting his sexual conquests and the consequences thereof? Yet the irrational sense of betrayal she felt was a thousand times worse than that which her philandering ex-husband had ever caused her.
Anger at her own naivety, her stepmother and men in general rose up until she tasted its bile. Until—
Hand across her mouth, she flew to the bathroom, slamming the door against Patricia’s judgmental words. She wanted to cry. And at the same time wanted to punch something—or better yet someone who wasn’t female and was responsible for getting her into this condition!
When she re-entered the bedroom fifteen minutes later with an empty but still queasy stomach and a thumping headache Joshua had left, but her stepmother was still there and had obviously managed to keep herself busy; all the wardrobe doors were wide-open and dresser drawers pulled out and emptied. What clothes weren’t tossed on the bed lay in hateful disarray on the floor.