by Lilian Darcy
‘Yes, well,’ she said awkwardly, then protested for the third time, ‘I’ll be fine.’
Only she wasn’t.
There must have been a hold-up at the traffic lights on the main road just beyond the hospital driveway. Alex and Stephanie were only just coming past now. The attractive blonde was laughing, the lenses of her sunglasses flashing in the bright light. As he drove, Alex took his eyes from the road and shot a long, searching look across towards the car park where Annabelle sat.
Although she was facing the road, she would be hidden from his view behind the glare of her windscreen. Was he hoping to see if her car was still here? To check out the effect of his unpleasant game? What would he have done if their paths hadn’t crossed outside the hospital doors as he’d hoped? Repeated the scene in a week’s time? Or found another way to rub her nose publicly in his sexual success?
It was so petty, and yet it had worked. She felt exactly as he, no doubt, wanted her to feel.
A mess. As if this were her fault. Sullied and hunted and hurt.
Starting the engine, she reversed out of the space in a series of jerks, then turned the steering-wheel and cruised along the row of parked cars. The space at the end was empty. Turning left, she misjudged the distance, misjudged her speed and felt her hands slipping on the hot steering-wheel. Her left wheel rammed hard against the low concrete marker that edged the final space in the row, and there was a loud, violent sound.
She reversed again, as clumsily as before, then heard the sticky, rubbery noise of a rapidly deflating tyre wobbling over the asphalt.
Dylan appeared in her field of vision before she was out of the car. Annabelle leaned her elbow on the open window and yelled at him with a satisfying lack of control. ‘If you say “I told you so,” Dylan Calford, I’ll reverse my car over your foot!’
‘With the driving skill you’re showing at the moment, I’m not worried,’ he answered. ‘You’d miss. Come on. Let’s make a rational decision about what we’re going to do.’
He strode closer, reached in and flicked up her lock, then opened the door and hauled her out, gripping her upper arm. Her breasts fetched up against the hard plane of his chest, and his mouth was close enough to kiss. Desire rocked her like an earthquake, making her gasp aloud. Their eyes met, and she saw his pupils start to dilate. No doubt—he was feeling this, too.
Then a car hooted, and he let her go. They were blocking the way, and so was her car.
‘Got a spare?’ Dylan asked.
‘Yes.’
‘And a jack?’
‘Yes.’
‘And both are in working order?’
‘Yes, Dylan!’
‘But you’re still not.’ His eyes narrowed again, and his gaze flicked up and down. ‘This is what we’ll do. And no arguments this time. I’ll park your car and give you a lift back here later on. We’ll change the tyre then. Right now, I’ll run you wherever you need to go. I’m out of surgery for the day. Technically, I’m still on call, but Brian Collins is here, finishing off some stuff, and he’ll cover for me if something comes up. He owes me for when I’ve done the same for him.’
‘I’m not going straight home.’
‘Didn’t think you were.’
‘I mean, even after I’ve picked up Duncan.’
‘I didn’t think you were,’ he repeated steadily. ‘To your mother’s, right?’
He took her keys, and this time Annabelle didn’t protest at all. Instead, she got lost in wondering how just that one light, brief and slightly ticklish touch, as he’d coaxed the keys from her hand, could have delivered such a jolt of pure, longed-for sensation. She stood there helplessly, watching him ease the crippled car into the empty space, then let him drop his arm around her shoulder.
If she’d turned just a little, if she’d leaned closer against him, she could have rested her head beside his neck and felt his cheek against her hair. He smelt so good. Like soap and coffee and eucalyptus. Comfortable and sexy at the same time.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Sit with your eyes closed and make a mental shopping list while I drive.’
‘It’s not shopping today,’ she answered. ‘It’s cleaning the kitchen and bathroom, changing a couple of light bulbs and paying some bills.’
‘Your mother can’t do the bills?’
‘She gets flustered, and presses the wrong buttons.’
‘Does she do them by that new automated phone system, with a credit card?’
‘Yes. She was proud of herself originally for mastering it when they first introduced it, but she’s been getting less capable lately. The breathlessness just wears her out, and she worries about the future for Duncan and me. She gets very anxious about all sorts of things. Silly things like keying in the right numbers when she’s paying bills. Some days, she just goes to pieces about nothing at all.’
‘Annabelle, did she push you to marry Alex?’ Dylan asked quietly. He slid his arm away again as they reached his car.
‘No.’ Annabelle shook her head, then added reluctantly, ‘She knew his mother, though. Always told me I could trust a man who was Lynette Sturgess’s son.’
‘I’m sure he wasn’t involved with Stephanie before the wedding,’ Dylan said, opening the passenger door for her.
‘There are other ways to betray someone’s trust. It’s the pettiness of it that I hate, I think. Or the desire to punish. Oh, I don’t want to talk about this any more!’
‘Then we won’t,’ Dylan said simply, as he slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine. ‘If you want, we’ll never talk about it again.’
‘Let me do the light bulbs and the bills,’ Dylan offered when they reached Helen Drew’s building. Annabelle frowned at him and he said, ‘Traditional man stuff. Less margin for error.’
She laughed. ‘True! OK, I’ll show you where the spare bulbs are, and I’ll put Mum’s credit card by the phone.’
She looked a lot better than she had half an hour ago. The sour taste no doubt left in her mouth by Alex’s petty hurtfulness was slowly wearing off. Dylan understood how it felt. He’d been through the same thing with Sarah, but both the divorce and the property settlement were finalised now, and he could see it with a cooler perspective.
As Annabelle had suggested, the nastiness of it was degrading, somehow, to both parties, until the passage of time gave you some relief. He’d spent months wondering what it said about him that Sarah was so eager to go out of her way to exact various forms of petty revenge. She had been the one to leave their marriage. He was the one, surely, who should be seeking pay-back!
‘You only care about your work,’ she had accused him. ‘You never have time for me.’
True. Of course it was. Partly. He’d warned her about that—about the fact that you paid a price for such a satisfying career and such a healthy income. And he’d done his best to compensate for it. Phone calls to her every time he had a break from surgery. Great holidays and getaways—expensive and luxurious and with no need for Sarah to lift a finger—whenever he had more than three days off in a row.
He had made the effort to take her out when he was way too tired to want to go. He’d even thought ahead to the distant possibility of kids. ‘By then, I’ll have my own specialist practice, and more control over my hours,’ he’d told her. ‘We’ll be able to afford a housekeeper and a nanny, so that when I do have to put in long days, you won’t be stranded at home with no help.’
Not enough, apparently, despite the fact that Sarah had always spoken so confidently about ‘independence’ and ‘our own lives’. He had come home late one night when he’d been on call to find their townhouse stripped of anything Sarah could claim as hers, and a note reading, ‘It’s over. You’re never here, and I’m sick of it. Sarah.’
That at least had been honest, and necessary, if she’d felt that way.
But did she have to let him know exactly when, and in what circumstances, she’d first slept with the new lover she already had in tow? Did she have to ‘accident
ally’ sell off his small but much-loved collection of old blues record albums at a garage sale for a fraction of what they were worth?
If there was that much bitterness stored up, couldn’t she have expressed it earlier, in a way that would have let him at least try to take some action?
It was only over the past few months that he’d learned to see all of this as her problem, rather than a reflection on himself. He felt freer now. And he understood Annabelle’s current feelings better than she could know.
Meeting her mother, he was a little self-conscious, remembering the circumstances of their first encounter. But all Helen Drew said, in her wheezy voice, was, ‘Thank you for driving my daughter here.’ She offered him a drink, but he declined. Playing things cautiously.
‘The new light bulbs are in the laundry cupboard,’ Annabelle told him. ‘The one in the bathroom has gone, one in the bedroom and one in the hall.’
‘Won’t take long,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll take care of the bills.’
‘I’ll be in the kitchen,’ she answered. ‘Duncan and Mum are going to read some stories on the balcony.’
It took Dylan five minutes to do the light bulbs, and then he keyed in the pay-by-phone number for the first of Helen’s bills. He understood how she could get flustered with this. He’d once calculated that he needed to press over fifty digits to pay his electricity bill—still cheaper and easier than writing and mailing a cheque, however, and he had it down to a fine art now.
Such a fine art, in fact, that he automatically began keying in his own credit-card number instead of Helen’s, since hers was with the same company and the first four digits of both cards were the same.
‘Damn!’ he muttered, then finished the number and waited for the recorded voice to repeat it back to him, ask if it was correct and offer him the opportunity to try again if it wasn’t.
Strange that your whole perspective could change in the space of a few seconds, while listening to the meaningful phrase, ‘If yes, press 1.’
If yes, press 1.
‘Yes’ would make things easier for Annabelle and her mother by saving them hundreds of dollars on utility bills which Dylan himself could easily afford. Eventually, when Helen’s credit-card bill arrived—assuming she checked it carefully enough—she would realise that the payment hadn’t gone through on her card.
‘Yes’ wasn’t just about money, though. In fact, as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t about money at all. He knew that Annabelle Drew was a woman he had to take seriously. ‘Yes’ amounted to a clear and deliberate decision on his part to do exactly that.
His index finger hovered over both digits for a second longer.
If ‘Yes’ press 1, to re-enter press 2.
When his fingertip touched the 1 button, and the electronic beep sounded in his ear, he suddenly felt very, very good.
Moments later, a voice told him brightly, ‘Payment has been accepted.’ He scribbled the date and the electronic receipt number on the bill. He dealt with two more bills in the same way, using his own card each time, then saw that Helen and Duncan were still reading on the balcony and went in search of Annabelle.
She was wearing pink rubber gloves, and was squirting an abrasive cream cleanser onto the stove top.
‘All done,’ he told her, coming across to lean against the adjacent stainless-steel sink. ‘Could I take Duncan to the playground, or something?’
‘That would be great,’ she answered. ‘Any second, he’s going to get sick of reading and want to “help”, and we’ll be here forever.’
‘Forever sounds good,’ Dylan said, then leaned his body and tilted his face, met her slightly—but not very—surprised look in his direction, and kissed her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ANNABELLE didn’t hesitate, or push away. She kissed Dylan back.
Wrapping her arms around his neck and keeping the gloved parts out of the way, she stepped closer so that they were hard against each other. She drank the taste of his mouth like wine, with eager, parted lips. She closed her eyes.
It felt so good. So right. As if it should have happened days ago, and, at the same time, as if now was the perfect moment.
Dylan spread his hands and ran them across her ribs, then up to her breasts. He took their weight and lifted them, searing his thumbs across her hardened nipples. She felt his fingers whisper just above the neckline of her top, then climb to stroke the loose hair back from her hot neck.
She had to stretch up on tiptoe to hold him without getting the wet gloves on the back of his shirt, and she teetered. It was a very satisfying form of unsteadiness, with his solid support against her. He whispered hotly in her ear, ‘I’ve got you.’
‘I know.’
‘Not letting you go.’
‘Don’t. Please.’ She printed kiss after kiss on his mouth—kisses that were hot and hungry and eager for more. His response swept her away. His kisses were imperious, confident, teasing and meltingly sweet.
‘Hold me, Annabelle,’ he said fiercely against her mouth. ‘I want to feel you.’
‘I can’t. The gloves…’
‘Doesn’t matter.’ He gathered her more tightly against him, driving the breath high into her lungs. She felt giddy. Just wanted to laugh and cry and kiss him for hours.
‘Mummy! Clean a baffroom now?’
She heard Duncan’s running feet on the carpet, and Mum’s smoke-darkened voice, still on the balcony. ‘One more story, Dunc?’
‘No. Help clean a baffroom now.’
Annabelle pulled away from Dylan, her breathing still fast and high. Dylan turned to face the sink and grabbed a sponge. There were wet splodges on the back of his shirt.
‘I’ve dripped cleaning stuff on you,’ she said.
‘I told you, it doesn’t matter.’
Duncan arrived, oblivious to the struggle going on in both of them and to the nuances beyond their trivial words. ‘I need a sponge,’ he announced.
He loved helping to clean the bathroom, because it was such a lovely messy job, and the more enthusiasm he displayed, the messier it was.
‘Take him for a walk?’ Dylan suggested. ‘I’d like to.’
But Duncan was stubborn, and wouldn’t go. He was going to help clean that bathroom or collapse in a screaming heap, and that was that.
‘I’m not going to push it,’ Annabelle told Dylan quietly.
Mum had also arrived in the kitchen now, and she nodded. ‘Best not.’
‘I’d win eventually—I’m bigger than you, Duncan!’ Annabelle went on. ‘But the price is pretty high, late on a Friday afternoon. Can’t send him with you, Dylan, if he doesn’t want to go, since he doesn’t know you that well.’
They got the cleaning done eventually, with Mum in the background berating herself for being so useless.
‘Now, about dinner,’ Annabelle said to her finally.
‘Don’t worry. I’ve still got a couple of those lovely leftover take-away meals you brought me a few weeks ago. I’ll thaw one out in the microwave.’
When Annabelle finally reached Dylan’s car—Duncan still had a streak of dried cleanser running down his arm—she only wanted one thing. Dylan Calford, holding her in his arms and kissing her silly.
‘We have to go back and fix the tyre so I can drive my car. After that, are you…coming back to my place?’ she asked him. Didn’t even try to pretend it was a casual suggestion.
He glanced across at her, and her heart caught in her throat at the look in his eyes. ‘Am I invited?’
‘Yes. You are.’
It was still fairly early when they got home. Dylan had followed her all the way from the hospital. Because he was still unsure of the best route, or to check that she was driving safely? After they’d changed the flat tyre, he had commented on a strange noise her engine was making. At the moment, she didn’t care about either the noise or Dylan’s motivations.
Duncan wanted a swim. ‘I’ll take him,’ Dylan offered. ‘I’ve got a pair of board shorts in the back of m
y car this time.’
‘Want to go in the pool with Dylan, Dunc?’
He nodded energetically, which surprised Annabelle a little. He didn’t always take to other people straight away.
While they were swimming, she tossed some salad, heated garlic bread in the oven and made a quick pesto out of a big bunch of mint leaves from the garden, crushed walnuts, parmesan cheese and olive oil. The three of them ate beside the pool at the rickety white plastic table and chairs which Annabelle was desperate to replace but couldn’t afford to.
That didn’t seem so important any more. There was a satisfaction in knowing that everything around her was her own, and that she was finding ways to manage without the effortless luxury of Alex’s wealth.
Alex had never spent more than a few minutes at her house. ‘Best if we go to my place.’ But that wasn’t always true. It wasn’t ‘best’ every single time, even if Alex’s pool was twice as big, and his house was cooler, his fridge had more drinks in it and his housekeeper would clean up after them. Eventually, always going to his place created an imbalance.
Dylan doesn’t seem to mind coming here, she thought.
By the time they’d finished eating, Duncan was ready for bed. ‘Quick as we can tonight,’ she promised Dylan.
‘I’ll still be here when you get back,’ he said.
‘I hoped you would be,’ she answered, a little shyly.
He was still wearing only the pair of baggy, colourful board shorts he’d put on to swim with Duncan, and she had to fight to keep her gaze from lingering on the muscular contours of his tanned shoulders and chest. He seemed casual about it, not showing off.
Too distracted by her own body, perhaps. She recognised the way he was watching her, eyes softly alight, and it made her feel alive, expectant, more sensual than usual. She wasn’t used to the feeling, but she liked it.
‘Thank you, Duncan, sweetheart,’ she whispered to her little boy, when he drifted off to sleep before she’d even finished his story. ‘This was a good night for getting sleepy early.’
She kissed his smooth little forehead, brushed back some sweat-dampened tendrils of hair, adjusted the position of the cooling fan that played over him while he slept, and went out to Dylan by the pool.