by Nikki Logan
She picked at her gnocchi and waited for him to continue.
‘You don’t look very surprised,’ he said, offended.
‘The most surly and closed-in man I’ve ever met has a shady past. What a shocker!’
His glare only intensified.
She scraped off half the butter from her bread. ‘Drugs?’
‘Why would you assume drugs straight up?’
Was it because that was the rebellion of choice in her social circle? Or was it because it was the last thing in the world Drew would have become involved with and Flynn was fast becoming the yang to Drew’s yin in her mind. ‘You seem like an ideal candidate for chemical escapism.’
‘Actually chemicals were about the only thing I wasn’t into.’
That got her attention. ‘When you said trouble I assumed you meant of the suspended-from-school-for-shaving-your-head variety. What are we talking about?’
His eyes dropped away. ‘The only time I shaved my head it was a requirement of the … institution I spent some time in.’
Bel blinked. ‘You were in prison?’
‘Juvenile Detention. Three months. When I was fourteen.’
She pushed her plate away. ‘What did you do?’
‘It’s more a question of what I got caught for. I had a slow start at school, had some trouble reading, struggled with grades. Eventually I got in with the wrong crowd, tried to keep up with the ringleaders and did too good a job of it. Got busted joyriding and took the heat for my friends.’
She spluttered. ‘Did Drew know?’
His eyes hardened. ‘It was Drew that dobbed me in to the police. I gather my … exploits were reflecting badly on him.’
‘Drew reported you?’ She couldn’t imagine that of the man she’d known. Not her Drew.
‘He thought it would be character-building.’
Wow. ‘That must have been tough to get past. As brothers.’
His eyes dropped for a moment. ‘In those early weeks in detention I really felt it.’
‘Did you ever resolve it with him?’
He shook his head after a long pause.
‘You two never even spoke about it?’
He frowned. ‘What was there to say? He ratted me out. And he wasn’t all that interested in making up for lost time when I came out of Rangeview. While I was in there my whole family upped sticks and moved to Oberon and they brought me here the day I was released.’
‘Far away from all your shady friends?’
He shook his head. ‘Away from everyone’s friends.’
Bel vividly remembered the day she’d dropped out of the school she’d never fitted in, moved out of her parents’ world and into a grown-up flat, alone. How cut off from everything she’d felt until she started building her own life. And that had been her choice. In Flynn and Drew’s case … ‘That must have been really hard on everyone.’
Tiny crescent creases formed at the corners of his tight lips.
‘That wasn’t a criticism, just an observation. You didn’t ask to be moved away.’ She tipped her head. ‘Is that why your parents tiptoe around you? Because of how they ripped you from your world?’
His eyes came up, blazing. ‘They traded their lives for mine. I always understood it. I never judged them.’ And just like that, his great affection and loyalty to his family made perfect sense. Except for one thing.
‘Unlike your brother.’
He sighed and pushed his dinner away. ‘Drew was never happy here. He loved the city. He knew our whole lives were revolving around me at that time.’
‘Did he blame you?’
‘He didn’t need to.’ That was Flynn-speak for yes. ‘He toughed it out here for two years, then got the Oxford scholarship. Everyone was so flat-out proud of him. No one from Oberon had done anything like that.’
‘That’s when he lost touch with you all?’
His eyes drifted out to the rapidly darkening skies. ‘The truth is he started losing touch from the moment we drove through the property’s gates.’
Understanding began to dawn. ‘Until he came to us.’
‘A shiny new family across the ocean.’
Bel clamped her hands together under the table. ‘They’re not so shiny, let me tell you.’
‘Regardless, they were a clean slate. He could be anyone he wanted with them. Tell them anything.’
Or not tell them. Bel took a deep breath. ‘You missed him.’
‘He did what he needed to survive. I was in no position to challenge that, given the lengths my family went to to make sure I did.’
‘Meanwhile, I would have given anything to get out of my family and into one like Drew’s. Like yours. A family who loved each other enough to move the earth for one another.’
‘You loved your sister,’ he pointed out.
‘Yes, and my Gran. But they were highlights in an otherwise unremarkable set of relationships. And I lost Gran early.’
‘You didn’t get on with your parents?’
‘Gwen and I … We were very different. She fitted and I didn’t—it was that simple.’
His eyes were steady and cautious. ‘It’s never that simple.’
She shrugged.
‘You two sisters were physically very different …’ he started.
She knew what he was saying. Or not saying. Lots of people had not said it in the past. Someone else’s egg in the nest.
The room was darkening as rapidly as the skies outside. Flynn reached behind him for the box of matches that sat next to the stove and lit the fat warped candle that sat on the timber table top between them. It meant he didn’t leave the table. It meant he was still listening. It meant his face suddenly became all sharp angles and flickering shadows caused by the single light source, and it only made her breath catch more.
So ridiculous.
‘I longed to be adopted,’ she went on. ‘I even had my DNA checked.’
He paused, the still-burning match in his fingers. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘When I was thirteen. I faked my mother’s consent and had a bunch of hair samples analysed.’
Betcha thought you were the only bad kid on the block …
‘And?’
‘Sadly, no. I wasn’t illegitimate either, no matter what the glitterati hinted. I wouldn’t for a moment think my mother was above cheating on my father but … no … the truth is a lot less glamorous.’
‘Just a regular black sheep?’
‘A red sheep.’ With her grandfather’s ginger colouring in an otherwise all-blonde family.
His eyes creased.
‘It took me years to work out why I felt so out of place there, and then years more to accept the truth.’
‘Which was?’
She shrugged and hoped the candlelight would disguise a whole lifetime of hurt. ‘My parents wanted a little girl, and they got Gwen.’ She took a breath and straightened. ‘And then they got me.’
Realisation hit. ‘You were unplanned?’
‘Mother blamed a dodgy IUD back in the days of shonky contraception. She didn’t like anything about the pregnancy process the first time. She didn’t like getting sick, she didn’t like getting fat once the novelty of the whole pregnant-glow wore off. She wasn’t interested in doing it again. I felt about as welcome as an STD.’ If conception could be called a disease.
Flynn stared at her long and hard. ‘Is that why you were so eager to have the embryos implanted?’
‘I knew they’d be loved and valued by whoever they went to. I knew how desperate the recipients would be for children. But I didn’t want them ever feeling the way I had. Not fitting. Not while they had biological family who would love them.’
‘Two families in this case.’
She lifted her eyes to his across the golden flicker. ‘I thought you weren’t going to tell your family if your suit wasn’t successful?’ And if he could change his mind about that … She leaned forward. ‘Why can’t we just tell them? They’re good people, they’d understand.’
‘I won’t do that to them. Build their hopes up. Give them back Drew, only to possibly lose him again …’
He shook his head. ‘Explain something to me. How does a twenty-three-year-old woman give up her own life for unborn children?’
She stared at him, at a loss. ‘The future seems such an abstract thing. Whereas their needs were immediate.’
‘They were on ice. They could have waited years.’
Bel frowned and couldn’t answer that. All she’d been aware of was the urgency of her court petition and, once it was granted, the pressing instinct to act before anyone took it away from her. Rightly, as it turned out.
She hedged. ‘It’s not that different to what your parents did. Detoured their own lives to save yours.’
‘You didn’t have anyone to consult with? No one that was affected?’
Was he asking if she had a boyfriend? ‘You think I would have just blown someone off to follow you here, if I was in a relationship?’
‘You thought as much of me.’
Painfully good point. ‘I didn’t know you then.’
He crossed his arms and rested them on the table in front of him, bringing his face closer to the soft light of the candle. Much closer to hers. ‘You think you know me now?’
She didn’t pull back. ‘A bit. You’re not quite what I thought.’
‘And what did you think?’
‘That you just didn’t like being told what to do …’ This close she could see the machinations of his mind behind his stormy eyes. And her unsteady breath practically made the candle flame dance.
‘I don’t.’
‘… and that you were doing this for your mother.’
‘I’m doing this for my whole family.’
‘I don’t think it’s that simple.’
‘Really?’ His raised eyebrows said go on but the darkened eyes beneath them glittered dare you. Bel had always appreciated a good dare.
But then, just as she opened her mouth to speak, he lifted one of his large hands off the table and reached up to drag the backs of his fingers along her jaw. The unexpected caress stole the air out from under her and made it impossible to speak. Not that she could remember what she’d been about to say.
All she knew was the feel of those work-roughened fingers brushing along her skin. The riotous tingles it caused. The strength in his hand as she leaned her face just slightly into him on instinct.
She pulled back, blinking. Flushing. ‘What are you doing?’
Flynn curled his fingers tightly into his palm and cleared his throat. ‘Experimental touching. They’re not going to buy it if you jerk away whenever I get close.’
More heat flooded her cheeks. The way she’d pressed her cheek into him at first … Though she knew he was right. His family were perpetually on the edge of asking uncomfortable questions now. ‘A little warning next time, huh?’
‘Maybe we could use a coded signal.’ His lips twisted. ‘What say I quack like a duck when I’m about to touch you.’
Despite the baffling sensations still rippling through her, despite the tense conversation they’d just been having, Bel found it hard not to smile at the image of a man like Flynn imitating a duck. The widening of her lips caused fissures to open up in the serious mask she often wore around him and tiny chunks broke free and fell away. Her skin hauled in a relieved breath for the first time since she’d arrived here.
‘And what if I’m about to touch you?’ she asked.
‘Are you planning on it?’
‘Well, it’s going to look a little strange if I don’t ever reciprocate …’
‘Just go ahead and touch. I don’t need a code.’
‘I was thinking more along the lines of a subtle glance five seconds out.’
‘So you can get all tense in those five seconds? Maybe better that we just get all the touching out of the way now so the ice is well and truly broken.’
‘Yeah,’ she muttered. ‘Because that’s not weird at all.’
He pushed his chair back from the table and Bel flinched. What was he going to do, embrace her?
‘Let’s go check on the platypus.’
Her eyes flew immediately to the clock. Where had those hours gone? They were nearly an hour late for prime platy-viewing time. Damn …
Bel was up in a heartbeat and Flynn could feel her presence following close behind him, out onto his back deck. As she went to skip down the steps ahead of him he reached out and stalled her with gentle fingers around her forearm. She paused and glanced back up at him.
‘Quack,’ he said, far too late, and then his fingers slid down the bare skin of her wrist, across her palm and interlaced with her shock-stiffened ones. ‘Relax. It’s just in case anyone watches us crossing the lower paddock.’
She lifted an eyebrow. ‘You think they’ll be sitting by the window with binoculars waiting for signs of us being cosy?’
‘I wouldn’t put it past Nan.’
‘Holding hands isn’t exactly caught-in-the-act material.’
‘Holding hands is as good a place to start as any.’
She was as stiff as the freshly starched sheets they used in the chalets, walking beside him, her careful hold limper than a dead fish in his. That wasn’t going to fool anyone.
‘Now who’s got the plague?’ he said in a low voice.
She responded a moment later by resettling her fingers more comfortably in his and taking a deep fortifying breath. It was a start. The two of them were going to have to do much more before the month was out if his family were going to believe they’d been intimate enough to create a new life. Somehow he had to infuse his casual touches with enough subtext to convince his wily nan that touching was a poor substitute for what he really wanted to be doing to the woman who was supposed to be his girlfriend.
Soon-to-be fiancée …
And she was going to have to get used to having his hands on her.
Which made him smile. Unaccountably.
Flynn took the lead on the darkened pathway and kept Bel’s hand tucked in close to his thigh, his fingers tangled firmly in hers. They were slim and warm and neatly manicured and they fitted his perfectly. She wasn’t a jewellery wearer, unlike her bling-happy sister, and so it was skin on unbroken skin wherever they touched.
The cheek thing had been an impulse. Nothing at all to do with ice-breaking and everything to do with being drawn to the fiery challenge in her eyes and the flush of colour their spirited discussion had caused. He wanted to touch the place in her skin that the colour came so richly to life. The place she bled her emotion.
And he was a man used to acting on his impulses. Even the bad ones.
Her footsteps fell into line with his own as they wandered down towards the spring, ending the push-pull of being out of step. It made their whole movement more easy, less like a tug-of-war and more synchronised. Fluid. Like good sex.
And they were only walking.
That boded well for some casual contact over the next few weeks. It was the show that counted, but some visceral enjoyment was pure bonus. Perhaps not surprising; regardless of everything else he’d thought about up-herself Gwen Rochester, he had always understood what Drew saw in her physically. Petite and stacked and blonde.
His fingers tightened around Bel’s. Maybe the chemistry between the Rochesters and the Bradleys was universal, regardless of what sister it came in? Chemistry wasn’t something he would have expected to discover with Bel.
Any more than her genuinely meshing with his family.
He’d seen enough of her interactions with them to know her protestations that first night were true. She did enjoy their company. And though she wasn’t enjoying the deceit that was necessary for the moment, she wasn’t hating it here in Oberon and she wasn’t looking down her nose at them all the way her sister had. Small mercies. But, despite her apparent bad fit in her own family, this apple wouldn’t have fallen too much further from the Rochester tree than her older sister.
Differe
nt, but the same.
He glanced behind them to make sure the line-of-sight from the house was interrupted by the trees along the banks of the spring and then loosened his fingers and let hers fall free. She shifted away immediately.
‘Have we missed them?’ she asked, disappointment staining her voice.
Despite growing up in a cosmopolitan megalopolis, she did get appealingly excited by small moments of simple pleasure. The platypus foraging. Releasing a hand-reared joey into the juvenile roo paddock. Sunrises. He had to remind himself that while her grandmother’s money meant she could lie around and do nothing all day if she wanted to, she chose to work with injured wildlife back home rather than party with the beautiful people by night and sleep by day.
Just like she chose to have herself implanted with her sister’s babies.
She was a whole mass of contradictions wrapped up in a tall, lean, flaming package.
‘Let’s give it a few minutes. Sometimes they wait for the moon to get higher.’
She sank down onto the bank below a eucalypt tree and stared at the water as if her focus would make the platypus materialise through sheer perseverance.
‘So …’ she finally said, not looking at him. ‘About this touching …’
Here we go …
‘I agree we need some ground rules. Boundaries really. What kind of touching are you talking about?’
Her voice was a low, husky whisper to keep from disturbing the platypus but it did a mighty job of disturbing him. He shook the thought free. ‘You want me to spell it out?’
‘Yes. Please. So I know what to expect.’
And what to slap him for, probably.
She took a deep breath. ‘Hand-holding, obviously.’
‘Obviously.’
She turned to stare at him expectantly. She seriously wanted him to list it. Okay … ‘Ah, my hand on your lower back, maybe. Or your shoulder.’
‘All right …’
Okay, this was good. Weird but manageable. ‘I might … brush your thigh.’
‘Really?’
‘Not saying it’s guaranteed.’
‘Thigh-brushing. Check.’ The husk in her voice seemed a hint tighter.
Which matched the tautness of his body perfectly. He pushed to his feet and moved next to her and sank down, sliding his glance sideways at her. ‘Chances are I’d lean into you at some point. Just briefly.’
