Zo

by Leanne Owens

  For a long moment she stared into his eyes, recognising him, seeing more than words could say. She raised her free hand and gently placed a finger across his lips to silence him. The touch caused his eyes to half close for an instant as a surge of brain chemicals coloured his mind, and an explosion of hormones hit his system, surprising him with their intensity. He was aware of the slight shiver that ran through her body, so he was sure she felt the same reactions.

  ‘Believe me, I am the lucky one,’ she leaned in closer to whisper to him, still gently holding his lips silent. ‘I would not exist if she had not given me life. Perhaps I’ll have the chance to tell you about it, sometime. I really must leave – and I sincerely regret that. If you want to discuss anything, David and the other team members will be here.’

  Removing her finger from his lips, she murmured, ‘Goodbye, Nick.’

  She gently pulled her wrist from his warm hold and walked away, feeling his eyes on her back, and feeling regret in her heart. Not only was she walking away from one of the most important events of her career, she had turned her back on a man who made her want to stay, and that was a rare experience for her.

  She found David, and told him about the change in circumstances. He was shocked, as were the other members of her team, but she knew they would rise to the occasion. She made her excuses to the officials who were hosting the conference, as well as to some of the delegates with whom she had expected to be negotiating, and retired to her room to pack.

  After half an hour of phoning airlines as she crammed her clothes into suitcases, she changed into a light weight travelling suit of grey skirt and jacket with a white shirt, and tried another company. She was beginning to despair of finding a flight within the next twenty-four hours, as the best she had found, so far, was a flight to London, then a long wait for a connecting flight to Brisbane.

  She kicked at the bed and grumbled to herself - she may as well have put her career first and stayed for another day. The recorded message from the fourth airline prattled away in the background as she tied a pink scarf around her neck, deciding that looking like a pink, white, and grey galah wasn’t such a bad look.

  A knock at the door disturbed her thoughts about her galah colour scheme, and she pulled the door open expecting to see David or another member of her team. Nick Carter stood there - ridiculously handsome and sporting a disarming smile as he looked down at her as though they were old friends, or lovers.

  ‘All ready to go?’ he asked, his gaze dropping to her lips.

  Disguising the leap in her heart and rise in blood pressure, Lynette waved at the phone on the bed that was now playing muzak to all those waiting in the queue. ‘I’m still trying to organise a seat. I’m ready, but I’m not having much luck in finding my way home. I haven’t found any seats within the next day and a bit, but I’m still hopeful. I’ll start pulling in some favours soon, and it will be fine.’

  ‘I thought that might be the case,’ he nodded. ‘It’s soccer. France plays Australia in Sydney this weekend, and everything’s booked out.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ she asked, thinking it was strange for a Texan to know about a French and Australian game.

  ‘I just checked,’ his eyes twinkled as he smiled down at her. ‘Call it professional interest, if you like. I was curious about your chances of getting a flight at short notice.’

  Lynette’s shoulders sagged visibly as she faced the prospect of not finding a flight to Brisbane. ‘I’ll have to dog-leg home if there are no direct flights.’

  ‘Or not,’ he waggled his brows at her. ‘I thought I might cut the conference myself, and give you a lift home.’

  The word ‘home’ hung in the air as Lynette narrowed her eyes, considering the implications. Did he mean a lift to the airport, or was he talking about taking her all the way to Australia?

  ‘To Australia?’

  ‘Why not?’ he grinned boyishly. ‘We can talk alternative energies without interruption, and I’m curious. It’s not often I get curious like this - I want to know how this friend gave you life, because, I’m assuming, she’s not your mother. So, I’ll give you a ride home, and you can tell me about it. Deal?’

  The muzak from the phone threatened to play for hours before someone from the airline spoke to her, and she weighed that option against accepting help from this man. The business side of her brain threw up possible consequences of this action. She would be in his debt. People would assume they were in a relationship. It could impact on negotiations between her government and his organisation. It could affect all her negotiations. He could be a murderer. He could hit on her… a smile played at her mouth at the last thought. She hoped he would. The emotional side of her brain told her to accept anything from him without question.

  ‘Your own jet?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course, well, company jet – that looks better for taxes. It’s the only way to fly.’

  ‘I’m not in the habit of accepting rides from strangers,’ Lynette gave him the wide-eyed look of an innocent teenager about to get into someone’s car on the side of the highway, ‘but I think you look safe.’

  ‘Y’know, ma’am,’ he drawled in his best Texan voice, offering her a lopsided smile, ‘I can’t say how safe I’ll be when we’re a mile high and no one is watching.’

  Lynette burst into chuckles, pure amusement chortling from her. This was madness, she knew, and yet it seemed so right.She learned a lot about this man during her research of likely investors, and, no doubt, he investigated her for the facts about her career, business dealings, and anything else that could give him an edge in discussions. Billion-dollar negotiations were the battles of the twenty first century, and combatants needed to learn about each other before they squared off across the table. No amount of information on a screen or print-out could capture the magic of two strands of the rope finding each other. Ally would be proud of me, she thought.

  ‘The friend I’m going to is Ally,’ she told him as she dropped the phone into the pocket of her jacket, and slipped her stockinged feet into comfortable pumps. She wanted to give him a quick concept of the importance of this journey. ‘She told me that I would become one of the most powerful women in Australia. She said I would ride in jets around the world and have millions of dollars, and men would worship me.’

  ‘Seems like she could be right, on all counts,’ he spoke lightly. Then, looking into the sudden seriousness of her eyes he realised she was about to tell him something of significance. He waited.

  ‘At the time, I was twelve. I lived in an orphanage, and I had such a low opinion of myself that I thought if I died, maybe things would be better,’ Lynette’s voice faltered. These were things she kept secret, but she felt the need to confess to the Texan.

  She shook her head slightly at the memory of those hunch-shouldered, miserable years. ‘I was a failure at everything from school work to personal hygiene. No one now would ever guess at the child I was. I was disappearing, slowly, piece by piece. Gradually vanishing below the surface of life. A nothing, becoming less than nothing. And then I met Ally. Alice Lamore. She was like an angel who held out a hand to drowning people and pulled them to safety. She wasn’t a normal child. She lifted a raggedy group of sad children up on her wings, and helped us soar above everything, even though she was the same age as us.’

  She took a breath and drew strength from his steady gaze that didn’t waver. ‘Sandy L. Martin, the actress, she is one of the Lamore Crew.’

  Nick looked surprised, and impressed.

  ‘And Andrew Lee,’ she added.

  ‘World Bank Andrew Lee?’ he raised his brows. He had seen his name on a list of ‘known associates’ when he was learning about Lynette before the alternative energies conference, but hadn’t realised it was a childhood connection. He was acquainted with Andrew.

  She nodded, ‘And Peter Barker. He has that wellness centre in Australia, Kamekura – it’s the hottest recovery centre in the world for celebrities.’

  ‘I’ve h
eard of it.’

  ‘You look at us now, and you can’t imagine what our childhoods were like. Ally created us, and she never wanted anything in return. She fought her demons alone, and we couldn’t help her. We didn’t help her. If this is the one time I can help, I will give up everything right now to do that.’

  ‘Then I’m glad I’m here to help you,’ he held out his hand and touched her gently on the shoulder in a gesture of support. ‘It sounds like I’m going to be rewarded with some good stories on our trip Down Under. Any chance the movie star and banker will be there?’

  Lynette snorted, ‘It’s beginning to sound like the gathering of characters for a three-hour tour. And, yes, without even thinking about it, I know they’ll be there. It was a pact the four of us made decades ago – if Ally needed us, we would drop everything.’

  ‘Then let’s go. The jet is fuelled up and ready for take-off, and a car’s waiting below.’

  ‘What? No chopper on the roof?’ she joked.

  ‘Don’t laugh, I had considered that, but by the time I had someone organise it and put in flight plans, we’d almost be at the airport in a car, so wheels it is.’

  Lynette handed him a Louis Vuitton case and picked up a handbag, motioning towards several other pieces of luggage, ‘David will bring them home when the team travels back. This is all I need for now.’

  ‘I’ve always thought there was something sexy about a woman who can travel light,’ he held the door wide for her as she exited the room. ‘I don’t know why that is, though.’

  ‘The less clothes she has, the higher the chance of seeing her naked, perhaps?’ she grinned up at him as she ducked out the door.

  His eyes sparkled appreciatively at her humour, and he lowered her suitcase to the carpet, ‘Then I’ll just leave this here, shall I? To increase that chance?’

  She cast him a saucy wink, looking at him hungrily from head to toe. ‘Chance can be a cow, Mr Carter, you should deal in certainties.’

  ‘Then this flight sounds like it will certainly be interesting.’

  Several hours later, sitting across from him in beige leather chairs that were so comfortable it seemed as if sleep slid out from the stitching to pull her back into their dreamy softness, she told him about her childhood. As they winged across the world to Australia, she gave him a summary of those early years so he could understand why she had dropped everything to go to Ally’s side. She knew that he had no inkling of that part of her life, as an investigation would only take the enquirer back to her university years when she became active in the Student Union. Prior to that, it would merely turn up the fact that she had attended Belmont High and was an orphan.

  ‘I don’t know anything about my parents. It was the fashion of the day to take babies from single mothers shortly after they gave birth, so I’m guessing that was the case with me since I was an orphan from birth. I was put up for adoption straight away but the family who had me for the first two years weren’t…’ she hesitated. She had no memories of them but still bore the pale spots from cigarette burns to her body, ‘...well, they had a few anger management issues, and I was a colicky baby, apparently, so I ended up back at the orphanage when I was two, and no one wanted an angry little girl.’

  Unspoken were the details of the night terrors, the bed wetting, the screaming child who refused affection from anyone, but craved it all the same, creating a schism within her soul that prayer and discipline in the orphanage could not mend. Nick didn’t have to hear her say the words, though, he saw the story in Lynette’s grey eyes that momentarily released the ghosts of those years. He wanted to fast-forward their relationship to the point where he was holding her in his arms, smoothing away the faint echoes of that trauma, and keeping her safe.

  ‘Most of the nuns at the orphanage weren’t that bad,’ she shrugged, and took a sip of the cocktail Nick had given her. ‘Of course, some were sadistic bitches with as much love in them as brown snakes on hot bitumen, but there were plenty of kids in the world who had it worse. And the priests… I only hope there is a hell for them. By the time I started high school, I wasn’t a very pleasant person. Smart as a whip, cunning as a fox, but cold. I had no sense of humour, no sense of fun…’

  Her voice trailed off as she saw her eleven-year-old self through the eyes of others. A pinch-faced girl who never cried, never laughed, and rarely showed any emotion apart from those that fell somewhere between rage and indifference. She entered high school with a personality cloaked in razor wire to keep others away, as she slowly collapsed in on herself.

  Nick remained still and silent, regarding her over the rim of his glass, intuitively understanding that she didn’t need prompting or sympathetic sounds, she just wanted to talk.

  ‘I wasn’t likeable. I didn’t like myself, and no one else did, either. I had started my second year at high school when Alice reached out for me. She hung out with the stutterer and the plump girl,’ she gave a light snort at the memory of Ally’s misfits, ‘so she may as well gather up the sour little orphan girl who didn’t have any friends. Then there was Andrew Lee, one of three Asian kids in the whole school, reviled as a Nip even though he was a fifth generation Australian of Chinese heritage. If you stuttered, you were retarded. If you were overweight, you were fat. If you were Asian, you were a Nip. And, if you were a sour-faced loner, you were evil. And Ally loved us all.’

  A brilliant smile surfaced at the memory of Ally’s love. She leaned forward and put a hand on Nick’s knee, her eyes shining as she tried to communicate what that meant. He felt his flesh burn under her touch, even though there was a crisp layer of material between her hand and the skin of his leg. It was difficult to stop the urge to take her hand in his, but he restrained himself, allowing her to continue unhindered by his input, her voice increasing in intensity.

  ‘She loved us. You cannot imagine what that meant to us. She wasn’t just a child loving her friends - she was like a mother and sister, a best friend, a protector, and mentor. God! She was our age, but she was timeless. She was like someone who had lived a hundred lives, and was there to guide us and help us. She had so much belief in us that we began to believe in ourselves. She loved us so much that we began to love ourselves. She told us that we had wings and we would fly, and she was right – we spread our wings and flew. But she gave us our wings. She showed us the sky. She gave us the courage to fly.’

  Lynette removed her hand from his leg, closed her eyes and leaned back. ‘Peter stopped stuttering, and went on to medical school, and now he has his own hospital. Sandy lost weight, found confidence, and became one of the most sought-after actors in Hollywood. Andrew overcame all the racial and homophobic barriers, and is changing the world for the better. I learned about love and friendship, and became who and what I am. Without Ally, we would have ended up on some trash heap of forgotten humanity, because that was our destiny until she stepped in. Some might think otherwise, but you had to see what we were like before Ally changed us. Every day, kids like us, end up in lives without hope.’

  Putting her glass down, she clasped her hands in front of her mouth as though she was praying, her eyes focused on some point from long ago, her voice a hoarse whisper. ‘But we failed her. We failed to see how damaged she was. We were broken and she fixed us, and we thought she was the strongest person we’d ever known. We thought she was perfect and happy, and we soared away to our wonderful lives without seeing the demons that were eating her.’

  Pausing to shake her head at the memories, she sighed softly, ‘I don’t know when it began. She always seemed fine. She had some funny ideas about reincarnation and past lives, but when we were teenagers, it was just talk and ideas. It didn’t seem to mean anything. She had a fixation about Renaissance Florence and the people who lived at that time. It seemed a bit unconventional, that’s all. Then her parents died when she was fifteen, and she changed after that. She obsessed about life after death, and wanted to know where souls went when we died. I thought she was grieving. I didn’t realise that he
r mind was sick with thoughts about life after death, and that she imagined she was in love with someone who was dead.’

  That revelation was unusual, but Nick managed to remain silent, encouraging her to continue.

  ‘She was there for us all through our school years and then the four of us followed our dreams after school. Ally came to Melbourne with us when we started uni. She helped Sandy in the States for a while and we began to see less and less of her as we became more involved in our own lives. I guess she was weaning us off her after being so dependent at school.

  ‘She said she was OK, but I should have known. She’d set us free, but she remained trapped in this crazy belief that she lived two lives – one now and another in a whole different time and place. She’d talk to me about these dead people as though they were friends she met on the weekend. She said she was in love with the most amazing man who ever lived, and she couldn’t fall in love with anyone in this life because she could only love him.

  ‘It was crazy. I mean, any person could see it was insane. In our late twenties, we tried to get her help because we wanted to fix her, but it went horribly wrong. I feel sick when I think of it. She felt we’d let her down because we thought she was mentally ill, while, in her mind, it was all real. To her, it was real. We didn’t believe her or believe in her. And she disappeared. She said she’d go on watching us from a distance, and she was so proud of us, but her other life was better than one where the people she loved couldn’t accept her…’

  Lynette’s voice broke and she stopped to take a couple of deep breaths before leaning over to take an envelope out of her handbag, and handed it to Nick.

  ‘She sent each of us a letter. You read it. I can’t without crying. I can’t even explain what’s in the bloody thing without bursting into tears.’

  Reaching for the envelope, Nick carefully opened it and withdrew the folded pages. The writing was elegant script in fine black ink. Before reading, he glanced at Lynette, meeting her eyes with a silent acknowledgement of the importance of this act of sharing something so personal. He offered a wordless promise that she had not misplaced her trust in him.