Hastily she dropped her gaze to her distorted reflection on the surface of her coffee.
She hadn’t really looked at Marcus since he’d been a gangling sixteen-year-old with a fuzzy dark growth on his cheeks, and limbs that seemed to have outgrown his thin body. She’d seen the changes in him then, realizing that he was turning into a grown-up, and wondered what it felt like. But she hadn’t known how to ask him.
She couldn’t remember noticing when the process had completed itself, the gradual transformation from skinny boy to well-built man.
By the time Jenna hit adolescence herself, he’d seemed very much an adult, one she saw less and less of as he went to university, gaining a commerce degree, then worked in England as a security guard for a year before coming back to New Zealand.
With a friend he’d set up a small factory making security gates and doors. As the business expanded they moved to bigger premises and branched into burglar alarms, locks, armored transport. The company was well-known now.
Katie had told Jenna with pride that her brother had “made his first million” some years ago. Since then his picture had been in the business pages of the newspaper more than once. He was a success.
But to her he had been simply Katie and Dean’s brother.
Marcus got up with his empty cup in his hand. “More for you?”
Jenna handed him hers and watched as he refilled them. He put hers in front of her and reseated himself. “You don’t have a hangover, do you?”
She shook her head. She’d been very careful after that episode under the puriri. He was right, she had not been drunk when he kissed her, and she hadn’t wanted to run the risk of being so later. If she could behave that way when she was sober, what might she do after having too much to drink?
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“About what I’ve been doing with my life.” She had friends she liked being with, and her job at the university was stimulating, often challenging, sometimes hectic, the pay enough to cover her half of the rent and everything she needed.
She was good at what she did, but had never been ambitious. While Marcus had been forging a business and Dean studying to further his career, and Katie climbed to the rank of supervisor in her office, Jenna had waited like Sleeping Beauty for Dean to return, a fairy-tale prince carrying her off to happy-ever-after.
Arrested development, Marcus had said. She winced inwardly. She’d put her life on hold for a stupid, adolescent delusion.
“You think I’ve been silly,” she said.
“I never said that.”
“It’s true.”
“We all make mistakes.” He paused. “I’ve made some pretty major ones myself.”
With exaggerated gloom Jenna said, “You’re just trying to make me feel better.”
He gave her one of his rare, restrained grins. “Dead right. Is it working?”
“Tell me about your mistakes.”
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head, then said, relenting, “I suppose not kissing Essie Ramsbottom was a mistake.”
“Essie…?”
“Braces,” he explained succinctly. “Now I’ll never know what it would have felt like.” He waited for her tiny spurt of laughter. “And I suppose,” he said slowly, “kissing you was a mistake. But I can’t say I regret finding out what that was like.”
Jenna looked away. “Forget it,” she muttered.
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
He was leaning back in his chair a little, one hand resting negligently on the table, the other tucked into the belt of his moleskin trousers. His jaw looked strong and uncompromising and his eyes oddly considering.
Chapter Five
A strange sensation feathered its way up Jenna’s spine. It wasn’t fear—of course she wasn’t frightened of Marcus, that was unthinkable. But she couldn’t help remembering that moment last night when she’d seen him looking up at her from the foot of the stairs. “What do you mean?” she asked cautiously.
The disconcerting expression vanished, and he leaned forward to pick up his cup, then looked at her again, and now his eyes were light and unreadable. “I try to learn from my mistakes,” he said. “What about you?”
Warily she sipped her own coffee. What had she learned from four years of wasted time? That she ought not to waste any more, was the logical conclusion. “Maybe I should go away,” she blurted.
“Away?” he queried sharply.
“Australia? Or Invercargill, maybe.” Where her mother was.
“Running to Mummy after all?” His jaw tightened. “I thought you had more guts than that.”
She said defensively, “It’s just a thought. I don’t need anyone to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do.”
“That’s the girl!”
“And I’m not a girl.” He’d begun to make a habit of harping on her childishness.
A gleam of sympathy lit his eyes. “No, you’re a very attractive young woman, Jenna. With intelligence and grit, when you care to use them.” He looked at her surprised and self-conscious expression and added, his eyes glinting wickedly, “And a sinfully sexy mouth.”
She opened it, trying to think of an answer, some snappy comeback, but nothing useful came to mind. Then to her relief they heard footsteps descending the stairs and heading rapidly toward the kitchen, and Mr. Crossan came in, rubbing his hands and demanding a cup of coffee.
Despite his earlier appearance upstairs, Dean and Callie were the last to come down for breakfast, pink-cheeked and happy and slightly sleepy. Replete with love.
Don’t think about it, Jenna scolded herself. And tried not to.
By lunchtime the remnants of the party were cleared away, and everyone picnicked in the kitchen. The men leaned against the counters, the women squeezed around the breakfast bar. Nobody could be bothered setting the dining table and carrying the various dishes of leftovers through.
Callie picked up a cold chicken wing and said to Jenna, “You grew up with Dean and Katie, didn’t you?”
“Mmm-hmm.” Jenna bit into a leftover sandwich. It had tomato in it and the bread had gone soggy.
“So you’re old friends. You’d have some stories for me, I bet.” Callie cast a cheeky glance at her fiancé, standing beside Marcus. “Katie’s too loyal to her twin to tell tales.”
Jenna swallowed, the soggy bread forming a lump in her throat. “I wouldn’t dare,” she said. “Dean knows too much about my childhood.” The last thing she wanted was to be drawn into recounting Dean’s youthful peccadilloes to Callie.
“Too true.” Dean grinned. “No use pumping Jenna, love.”
Katie said, “Ask Marcus. He was always pulling the three of us out of trouble.”
“Marc?” Callie appealed to him. “What about you? My folks told Dean all the embarrassing things I ever did as a kid. They even showed him my baby pictures!”
Marcus smiled at her. “If it’s baby pictures you want, I think Mum’s got one of him naked on a rug.”
“Ooh!” Callie rounded her eyes and mouth. “That I’ve got to see! Is there one of you too, Marc?”
Marcus and Dean both laughed, and Marcus shook his head.
Jenna was fighting a suffocating anger. Callie was just having fun, not flirting with Marcus. Marc. Jenna had never shortened his name. In fact, Dean was the only person who did.
And of course that was why Callie did it; she wouldn’t know that Marcus didn’t like it.
Not that he seemed at all bothered now, smiling at Callie as if they’d known each other forever. As if he didn’t care what she called him so long as she smiled back at him.
Unfair, Jenna reminded herself. Marcus, like the rest of the family, wanted to make Dean’s fiancée feel she belonged.
Jenna wasn’t even sure why she was angry. Perhaps an oversensitivity to Dean’s feelings, to any sign that Callie could possibly be interested in another man.
And Dean’s feelings were none of her business.
The others were laughing, Dean protest
ing at the idea of their mother dragging out baby pictures, Marcus saying his were of no interest to anyone.
Jenna caught Katie’s eyes, thought she saw a hint of anxiety in them, and realized she was the only one not joining in the banter. Making herself smile, Jenna turned to Callie. “I’ve got a picture of them both skinny-dipping,” she remembered.
Katie squealed. “Oh, you’ve still got that? Callie, you’ve got to see it!”
“Little sneaks,” Dean accused his sister and Jenna. “Peeping Thomasinas. Baby voyeurs.”
Jenna had been given a camera for Christmas when she was twelve, the year she was invited to join the Crossans on a lakeside camping holiday. At that age Dean’s mates had regarded hanging about with girls as suspicious. When he and a young friend went off for a swim with Marcus to supervise, the two girls had secretly followed, gleefully concealing themselves behind the scrubby manuka and orange-flowered flax that fringed the narrow shore at a secluded part of the lake, snapping the boys when they stripped and ran into the water naked.
Marcus was looking at Jenna, his head cocked slightly, one eyebrow lifting. She stared defiantly back at him. “I’ll find it,” she said, “when I get home.”
She knew exactly where it was, in a camphorwood box that held her most precious possessions. Her parents’ wedding photo and a picture of herself as a baby, held in her father’s arms. A gold-and-pearl tiepin that had belonged to him. The wedding and engagement rings her mother had given her when she married again. Photographs of Katie and of Dean, with or without other members of his family, some with Jenna herself.
Marcus turned to tip the dregs of his coffee into the sink. She wondered if he was embarrassed at the idea of the photograph being resurrected. He’d been older than the other two, a teenager, physically developed.
Not that there was much to see in the photo. He’d had his back to the camera, but she remembered watching him shuck off his jeans, and how she’d felt herself flushing behind the camera, a strange little wiggle of guilty excitement in her stomach as he straightened and the muscles of his flanks and thighs tautened before he followed the two younger boys into the water.
Callie smiled at her mischievously. “I’ll look forward to seeing it sometime.”
Already Jenna regretted the rash offer.
Marcus dropped both girls off later in the day, accepting Katie’s offer of a coffee.
He didn’t stay long, and while Katie cleared the cups away, Jenna followed him to the hallway. “I could say I’ve lost that photo,” she offered quietly, “if you don’t want Callie to see it.”
His hand on the door, he turned to look at her. “It doesn’t bother me. I’m surprised you’ve kept it all this time.”
When she didn’t say anything, he gave a low laugh. “Of course, Dean’s in it. How many pictures of him have you kept?”
“I’ve got pictures of you all.” Though his guess was too close for comfort. “You must have photos of me somewhere.” If he ever kept family photographs.
For an instant his eyes glazed. “I have…somewhere.”
“There you are, then.”
“Where are we, Jenna?” he said, his voice somehow deliberate.
She blinked, not understanding. “It was a rhetorical remark. I didn’t mean anything.”
His short sigh sounded impatient. “Yeah, I know. I guess it’s too soon.”
For what? But she didn’t ask, some instinct making her keep her mouth shut.
“One day,” he said with suppressed force, “you’ll have to come out of that cocoon you’ve wrapped yourself in. It’ll be interesting to see what emerges.”
He opened the door and let himself out, then snapped it shut behind him, leaving her staring at the smooth, painted wood.
He hadn’t even said goodbye. And he’d seemed unaccountably angry.
With her? She hadn’t done anything…
She trailed back into the kitchen, scowling.
Katie turned to her from the sink and covered a yawn with her wet hand. “Early night,” she said.
“Mmm. Me too. Shall I dry those?”
“Leave them to drain.” Katie let the water gurgle out and dried her hands. “Are you okay, Jenna?”
Jenna swallowed an unusual urge to snarl at her friend. Her concern was wearing, but she meant well. “A bit tired, like you.”
She was glad, a little later, to go to her own room and be alone at last. Wearing the big T-shirt she slept in, she slumped down on the bed, then got up and went to the secondhand rimu wardrobe that stood in a corner of the room and opened the deep drawer at the bottom.
With the camphorwood box in her hands, she climbed into bed, holding the box on her lap for a minute or two before opening it.
The bulky envelope was at the bottom. She put the box aside on the night table and sifted through the photographs in the envelope.
There it was. Two young boys in the water, thigh-deep and splashing each other, laughing. And Marcus—his dark head half-turned so that his face was in profile, his already broadening shoulders tapered to narrow flanks, his long legs fuzzed with hair.
She looked at Dean’s laughing face and felt a melting, asexual fondness for the child in his innocent boyhood.
But also in her vision was Marcus, unaware of the camera, standing tall and straight and strong. Again heat flooded her face, and guilty excitement burned as it had when she’d clicked the shutter that day. An excitement she’d put down to the fear of discovery.
This had never happened before, all the hundreds of times she’d looked at the photograph. She’d always focused her attention on Dean, cutting Marcus out of her consciousness along with the other boy, whose name she didn’t even recall. As she’d cut out—buried in her subconscious—the memory of that emotion, because it embarrassed her.
She had refused to recognize it then, but she was no longer a young girl barely embarked on the journey to womanhood and alarmed at its physical manifestations. Now she knew what the feeling was. It had been there again last night, in the garden when Marcus kissed her. When she’d kissed him back. Desire.
For a couple of weeks Jenna deliberately avoided Marcus. Time to regain a sense of perspective, she hoped. To suppress newly wakened emotions that were unsettling and somehow, she sensed, dangerous.
It wasn’t too difficult at first. Marcus always made himself available when his family needed him or they had a special occasion to celebrate, but he was the most self-sufficient of the siblings, and sometimes Katie didn’t see him for months.
When Katie told her one evening that he’d phoned and was on his way over, Jenna said she had to return some overdue library books and planned to have supper in town with a friend from work. She quietly called the friend and made the arrangement, leaving Katie with a cheery, “Bye. I might be late home—say hi to Marcus for me.”
She hadn’t seen him in sixteen days when she answered the phone and his deep, distinctive voice said, “Jenna.”
“Hi,” she said, and quickly added, “I’ll get Katie for you.”
Afterward Katie said, “I don’t know why he called. It’s not like Marcus to phone just to chat.”
In the first weeks after Dean went overseas Marcus had been around to their new flat quite often, keeping an eye on his little sister, Jenna had guessed, in case she pined for her twin. Gradually the visits had tailed off as Katie became accustomed to Dean’s absence and she and Jenna showed they could manage on their own.
Maybe he was afraid Katie was feeling left out now that Dean was engaged. Jenna herself was alert for signs of distress or disappointment. But Katie seemed fine with the situation. She talked on the telephone almost every evening to Dean and lunched with Callie while Dean was being interviewed for a job. They even arranged a girls’ night out, taking in a romantic film and ending the evening with decadent desserts at an all-night café.
Katie took it for granted that Jenna would come. “And Callie will stay the night. She doesn’t mind sleeping on the sofa. It’s okay wi
th you, isn’t it?”
Jenna said of course it was all right. And she went along for the evening, unable to think of an excuse that wouldn’t renew Katie’s suspicion.
At least during the film they didn’t have to talk, and at the café the music was too loud for real conversation. Back at the flat, Katie remembered Jenna’s offer to show Callie the nude photo of Dean and Marcus.
“I lost it,” Jenna said without even thinking about it, then felt a stab of guilt. She didn’t normally lie, but it was too late now to take it back. “Sorry.”
Katie looked at her rather oddly, and Callie seemed disappointed but soon got over it. She and Katie were still chatting and laughing long after Jenna went to bed.
Jenna recognized to her shame that she was jealous, and wondered if she had been subconsciously hoping that if Katie and Callie didn’t get on, Dean would change his mind about marrying the American girl. She decided to stop looking for signs.
Katie wanted to spend the next weekend at her parents’ home, cajoling Marcus into taking her. Jenna declined to go, saying vaguely she had things to do.
“What things?” Katie demanded.
Jenna waved a hand. “Oh…you know. Lots of things that need catching up on. Write to my mother, mend some clothes—I haven’t a decent thing to wear to work on Monday. Tidy my room.”
“Wash your hair?” Katie suggested dryly.
“That too.” Jenna flashed her a guilty smile. “It’s been a busy week at work, and I’ve got a bit of a headache. Much as I love you all, I just don’t feel up to this.”
After a moment Katie shrugged. “I suppose we’re a bit much, en masse, if you’re feeling under the weather. Will you be all right on your own?”
“Of course. It’s just a headache, nothing major.”
She swallowed some aspirin and was sitting conscientiously on the sofa with a little heap of mending when she heard the discreet toot from Marcus’s car outside and Katie went bounding past her toward the door. Marcus didn’t like being kept waiting. “Bye,” she said breathlessly.
“Give everyone my love,” Jenna called. She heard voices and the slam of the car door, but minutes later the burr of the bell sent her to the door.
Marrying Marcus Page 5
