Verna’s astonishment at having been the subject of discussion between Con Bradley and his lady love made her speechless for an instant, but if Madeline Cunningham noticed she gave no sign.
Tm just calling to say that I’ve had some studio booking cancelled, so I’m coming early,’ she said. ‘I leave Sydney at some absolutely ungodly hour of the morning, and I’ll be there on the first evening Ansett flight.’
Verna duly noted the times and promised to pass on the message, expecting with every passing second to have Madeline ask for an explanation of her presence. But there was no such request, and when Madeline rang off Verna returned to her book and her own thoughts, troubled ones that seemed intensified by her experiences of the past few days.
How would this stunning woman react when she found out that her lover had been nursing another woman in his bed? she wondered. Nursing, but still ... The intimacies involved could not be ignored, and certainly not by Verna herself. She had no secrets left from Con Bradley now — except the knowledge that she loved him to the very soul of her being, and that secret she must keep.
Con didn’t make it any easier when he returned with the fresh laundry and gratuitously allowed Verna to watch as he remade the beds and cleaned up the supper dishes. He accepted the news of Madeline’s changed plans with no more than a grunt, and said little until the work was done.
‘I’m getting so well housebroken I can hardly believe it myself,’ he grinned after pouring them fresh drinks and re-establishing Verna beneath her blanket on the sofa. ‘Although I will admit I’ve been practising lately.’
He leaned back in the armchair he’d chosen and looked across at Verna with sudden seriousness. ‘You joked that I’d make a wonderful wife, Verna, but, seriously—how do you reckon I’d be as a husband?’
Verna almost choked on her drink. So it was this serious, she thought with a jagged knife ripping at her heart. And obviously, that was why he’d bought the house, although somehow she couldn’t visualise the sophisticated Madeline Cunningham settling down in Bundaberg. She tried her best to throttle the demons in her middle as she answered lightly.
‘Oh, you’d make an even better husband. What wife could object to a man who cooks, cleans, does the laundry and even does home nursing on the side?’
It had been too light, she thought for an instant as his eyes narrowed speculatively.
‘I did say seriously,’ he repeated in flat tones that echoed the sudden chill of his glance. ‘But if you want it this way, okay. How would you fancy me as a husband, Verna?’
She hid it beautifully, she thought, despite her recent illness. ‘If I was looking for a husband, which I most emphatically am not,’ she said sternly, I’d put you at the top of the list. Seriously.’
He raised one eyebrow for an instant, then lowered it with the acceptance of her words. ‘And why aren’t you looking for a husband?’ he asked in the serious, friendly tones of a favourite uncle. ‘You’re not getting any younger.’
‘I’ve got plenty of time,’ Verna replied, her mind racing in neutral as she searched frantically and futilely for a way to change the subject, ‘And besides, I’m very happy with my career.’
‘So’s Madeline, but I don’t expect she’ll be all that sorry to give it up for love,’ he replied with a sober visage.
Oh, stop it, stop it, stop it! Her mind felt sluggish and she couldn’t halt the jagged pains as her heart splintered into millions of fragments. She couldn’t take much more of this without breaking down entirely, and she knew it only too well.
‘Yes, but I’m not Madeline, obviously,’ she replied. ‘What I am is exhausted; if I don’t get to bed soon I’m afraid I’ll lose that lovely dinner you cooked.’
‘Of course, I should have realised that,’ Con replied with sudden tenderness. ‘Come and I’ll help you up the stairs. Are you sure there’s nothing you’d like first ... a shower, maybe? So long as you don’t get your hair wet it should be okay.’
Subject changed — and hopefully closed. Verna didn’t feel half so tired all of a sudden. ‘Yes, I think a shower might help a great deal,’ she said graciously.
The shower was heavenly, once she’d laughingly rejected Con’s offer to scrub her back. Verna lazed in the warm spray that seemed to strip away every vestige of her illness. The first wetting of her hair was accidental, but it was temptation enough; she quickly fumbled for the shampoo and gave her long tresses a thorough scrubbing.
"And if you don’t like it, well, too bad,’ she muttered, sticking her tongue out at an imaginary Con Bradley.
The reality was less easy to handle. When she returned to the bedroom swaddled in a clean nightie and fresh- washed housecoat, she barely made it into the bed before the bedroom door opened to admit her nurse and host bearing a tea-tray.
‘Hell’s bells!’ he cried. 1 thought I told you to keep your hair dry. Oh, Verna, my love, what a damned nuisance you are sometimes! And to think I actually trusted you!’
Stepping into the still-steamy bathroom, he emerged a moment later with her hair brush in his hand. ‘Right ... out of the bed,’ he ordered, practically dragging her up to position her on the edge of the bed beside him.
‘You may drink your tea while I do this, but you will not go back to bed until it’s dry,’ he muttered angrily, bringing in a fresh towel and scrubbing as much moisture from her long hair as he could manage.
What followed was so incredibly, unbelievably sensual that Verna knew she would remember it for ever. Con sat himself down and proceeded to brush her hair dry, pushing aside her objections with a brusqueness she could hardly credit.
His hands were so gentle, his every touch so hypnotic, and his entire presence so stirring to her own sensuality, that by the time he had finished Verna felt almost as if she’d known sexual fulfilment. His fingers touched at her neck, her flimsily-covered shoulders, at the lobes of her ears. His voice touched at her soul.
At first he chastised her for getting her hair wet, then he talked to her of his childhood, of watching his father brush his mother’s long hair in this same way, and when she was almost asleep, her every nerve softened to a soul-destroying need for him, he countered by telling her jokes.
They were funny jokes, too, if slightly bawdy. But their humour couldn’t compensate for her certain knowledge that he was doing it deliberately to stave off the effect he knew very well he was having on Verna’s body and heart. Keep your distance, he was saying, regardless of the sheer cruelty he displayed by so intimate a gesture as the currying of her long, red-gold mane. When it was over, he didn’t have to kiss her goodnight as he did, because they both knew he’d been kissing her with his hands for what seemed like forever as her hair dried beneath them.
Morning arrived with a shocking clarity, Verna was fully recovered, and woke to the scream of kookaburras with a clear head and a painfully wounded heart. It would have taken only one hint of encouragement the night before and she’d have given herself to Con Bradley with a deliberate wilfulness that surprised even herself, but he hadn’t given her that hint, only the delicious torture of his voice and his gentle hands. Today she would leave.
That was what she thought until the whines of a plaintive and obviously upset Sheba brought her down the hall to Con’s own bedroom, where the retching sounds from the adjoining bath told their own story.
‘Oh, Con ... I’m so awfully sorry,’ she cried as he lurched from the bathroom with his face pale as death and the sweat beading on his brow.
‘Not your fault,’ he gasped, then diverged on a long- winded explanation about where she could find the extra columns he’d written to keep ahead in just such an emergency.
‘That doesn’t matter right now,’ she said angrily. ‘You just get yourself back into that bed. I’ll get you some pills; they helped me a little bit, I think.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ he groaned. ‘But you must stop Madeline; don’t let her come here or she’ll have it too. Get her into a hotel or something.’
�
�I’ll take care of everything,’ Verna said with growing exasperation. ‘Now get yourself into that bed before I get angry. You’ve had your turn at being nurse — now it’s mine — and I expect you to behave.’
‘Not ... likely,’ he muttered. ‘And not as pretty a patient, either ...’ His voice trailed off alarmingly, but Verna could see that he was only sleeping. She went to her own bathroom to get the pills, and when she looked into his for a glass of water, she judged he’d been in there most of the night with the early symptoms of the wog.
He came awake long enough to swallow the pills, then drifted away again, leaving Verna free to feed the dog and herself between checking on him.
By early afternoon, her worst fears were confirmed as he slid into a raging fever, and she spent most of the time bathing his sweat away. But she took time to telephone Reg Williamson and arrange for somebody to pick up the extra columns, and to inform him that she’d be staying off work, likely for the rest of the week.
Reg’s objections gained him a savage reply that shocked both of them, but he accepted it willingly enough. That left Verna with only one call remaining, and she held it off until four o’clock. The clerk at the airport readily agreed to have Madeline Cunningham telephone Verna as soon as she arrived, and also to ensure that she didn’t attempt to come to the house by herself.
Verna returned to her continuing battle to keep Con from flinging off the bedclothes and risking a chill on top of his fever. Her continuous sponging seemed to ease him somewhat, but as the sweat poured from his body she knew she’d soon be faced with trying to change the sheets underneath him. Rolling him over and accomplishing the tricky task turned out to be less difficult than she had imagined, but once he had stretched out to sprawl on his back against the fresh, clean lines, he seemed to settle just a bit.
It wasn’t until then that Verna’s own mind seemed to return to full capacity, and she was able to fully appreciate the beauty of the large naked body she was sponging at with trembling fingers. The dark hair curling at his chest flowed down across a muscular flat stomach to his groin before changing texture and colour on his suntanned legs.
Even in repose, the tremendous muscles of the man were impressive, and so, she realised, was his nakedness. Verna wasn’t totally ignorant of male anatomy, but she’d never before been in a position to so closely examine any specimen, let alone one whose sheer physical beauty could so easily arouse her.
With a knowingly blatant deliberation, she examined Con’s entire physique, memorising every detail of his face and body until he was etched into her memory like an engraving. A memory, for her old age, she thought.
So engrossed was she in her own daydreaming that she didn’t realise, at first, that his ice-chip eyes had opened, and he was frankly watching Verna watching him.
‘Am I beautiful enough for you?’ he whispered in a strangely tremulous voice, and Verna’s mind saw a very small boy seeking desperately for reassurance.
‘Truly beautiful,’ she whispered in return with a light kiss on his fevered brow. ‘Now go back to sleep.’
Fortunately, he did, unaware of the tears that sprang to Verna’s eyes as she looked at him. And even more luckily, the sound of the telephone didn’t rouse him.
Madeline Cunningham took the news with a casualness that somewhat surprised Verna. ‘I certainly don’t want to catch whatever it is,’ the model said with definite bluntness. ‘And are you sure you should be playing nurse? What if you get it?’
‘I’ve already had it,’ Verna replied without really thinking ‘That’s where he got it from ... nursing me.’
‘Oh,’ came the rather flat response. ‘Well, better you than me, darling. He’s an absolute horror when he’s sick. Half the time he wants to be mothered and the rest of it he’s like a dog; he just wants to crawl off into a hole somewhere and be left alone.’
This particular confidence did nothing for Verna’s own peace of mind, but she was nonetheless glad when Madeline agreed to check by telephone each day until it was judged safe for her to come to the house.
The few times that Con was awake during the following two days proved to Verna exactly how well Madeline knew him. He was an absolute horror and worse, for some reason resenting his own weakness and taking it out on Verna until she finally lost her temper entirely and silenced him with blast of abuse that left both of them shaken.
Thereafter he was less fractious, but still so difficuIt to control that Verna knew a growing pity for every woman fool enough to consider being a nurse. Had she herself been even remotely this difficult? she wondered at one point, and then dismissed the possibility as being quite ridiculous. Nobody, in her experience, could possibly match Con Bradley for sheer, bad-tempered stubbornness and wilful disobedience. Literally minutes after he woke with the fever broken he wanted to be out of bed, and when she threatened to set the dog on him if necessary, he complied only on the agreement that she would read to him. It wouldn’t have surprised her if he’d demanded that she read his own books, although luckily he didn’t go that far. He chose instead some by the most romantic of his female contemporaries, and complicated the readings by interjections that were either embarrassingly personal or so cynically cutting that Verna could have throttled him.
And by the Saturday morning, there was absolutely no holding him down. When Verna, in desperation, threatened to hide his clothes, he said he’d roam the house naked, but he’d get up, and he did.
His first move was to telephone the motel where Madeline was staying, almost demanding her presence as quickly as she could arrange a taxi. This didn’t impress Verna, who had planned to be away to her own home before Madeline arrived on the scene. Con’s actions made that impossible, not least because of the immense pile of bed linen that required a lengthy stint at the Laundromat.
But even more significant, in his eyes, was the need for food — man-sized food like steak. ‘We don’t have any,’ she said, ‘and besides, you shouldn’t have such food yet. You need light, easily-digested food like eggs and things.’
‘Hogwash,’ he replied with what seemed to Verna to be genuine contempt. ‘I’ll starve to death on that kind of thing. Lord love us, I even gave you oysters, even if they didn’t work, and now you offer me eggs. I want steak!’
‘All right, I’ll get some when I do the laundry," she replied angrily. ‘But I think you’re wrong, and what’s more I think you’re still delirious. What’s this nonsense about working oysters?’
She could have shot herself for walking into that trap. And for missing the gleam in his eye that expanded vividly as he told her the story of the man who ate a dozen oysters to improve his sex life, but only nine of them worked.
Whereupon he absolutely howled with laughter, not so much at the joke, but at Verna’s expression when she realised he’d been having her on.
‘It wasn’t funny; it was typical male chauvinist piggery, which is all I’d expect from you,’ she blazed in return. ‘You are the most insufferable, arrogant, demanding, childish, boorish man I’ve ever met! I take back everything nice I’ve ever said about you. You wouldn’t even be a fit husband for Dragon Lady the Editor. If she were real she’d turn you into a cane toad, and in my opinion that would be an improvement. I don’t know what Madeline Cunningham has done to deserve you, Mr Bradley, but it must have been something absolutely awful, and the next time you’re sick, well ... she can nurse you, and welcome to it!’
‘Spare me that, for pity’s sake,’ he responded drily. ‘Verna my love, you have no sense of humour sometimes. I honestly don’t know why I love you like I do.’
‘You don’t, and you know you don’t,’ she flared, grabbing up the laundry basket and stampeding for the door.
Astonishingly, he was there before her, arms reaching to clasp her own even tighter around the basket as his whiskery chin nuzzled her neck.
‘Dear Verna. It doesn’t matter what I say to you, I’m always wrong,’ he murmured as his lips caressed her ear lobe. ‘But I do love you, espec
ially when you’re angry.’
Verna’s anger melted with his touch, but she didn’t dare to let him see that. ‘You’re just trying to butter me up so I won’t forget the steak,’ she replied, wishing he’d stop nibbling at her ear so distractingly. ‘Now if you’ll stop mauling me, I’ll get out of here before Madeline arrives and catches you at it.’
To her immense relief, he did release her, and she flew out the door in her haste to try and outrun her emotions. It wasn’t until she was halfway to the Laundromat that the image of Madeline arriving to find Con in his under-shorts, snuggling up to a laundry-laden Verna crossed her mind. Then she laughed, because it would have been so terribly funny and so terribly terrible.
She dreaded having to return to Con’s house, knowing what she’d find on her return, but there was no way out of it, considering she had every sheet in the place with her, along with many of her clothes and some of Con’s. She could only hope that Madeline had long since arrived, and that the expectable hugs and kisses were over and done with. Verna felt she simply couldn’t bear to watch any soppy reunion scenes between the man she loved and the woman he had obviously chosen for his wife.
But she could, and did, bear it. Madeline’s taxi arrived almost in unison with Verna in Con’s huge car, and Verna was treated to the sight of Con — fortunately dressed — rushing out to enfold the new arrival in his arms.
She sat like a statue, unwilling to watch the reunion embraces and unable not to, and when it was over she forced herself to get out of the car and open the rear door to pick up the high-piled laundry basket. Only she never got quite that far before Con had turned and gripped her by the wrist, literally dragging her to where Madeline Cunningham stood looking at them with the strangest look on her lovely face.
Up close, she was even more beautiful than in her photographs, beautiful with that classic kind of loveliness that can only be enhanced by maturity. Dark hair was coiled stylishly above a veritable swan’s neck to emphasize her well-cast features. Her clothes, as might be expected, were stylish in the extreme, and the body beneath them was slender but incredibly feminine. But it was her eyes that struck Verna most immediately, huge, pale blue eyes that were almost exactly the colour of ... Con’s eyes, and Verna felt an immediate flash that their children would be similarly blessed. The thought shook her, but not so much as Madeline’s reaction.
The Sugar Dragon Page 14
