“I don’t mind, honest. You go and enjoy yourself. I’ll take her down to the beach and introduce her to the water. It’s much warmer now than last time we came.”
“You’re an angel, and I love you!” Danella said fervently.
Glen grinned back at her.
Danella ate quickly and skipped coffee. Magnus was still lingering over his, and Jade was pouring her first cup when the others left the room. “You’re right,” she said. “Glen does know how to handle Danella. They seem very happy.”
Magnus put down his cup. “I’m just glad she’s not my responsibility any longer.”
“You take your responsibilities very seriously.”
“Is that a criticism?”
Jade looked at him, finding a slightly bitter little curve on his mouth. “What makes you say that?”
His eyes searched hers. “Things might have been a lot easier for you if I hadn’t been so engrossed in my responsibilities to my family.”
“But if you hadn’t been the sort of person you are, I wouldn’t have...married you.” Fallen in love with you, she’d been going to say, but a new shyness with him held her back.
“Security? Is that what you were looking for? I wasn’t such a good bet, then, was I?”
She opened her mouth to deny both suggestions, but perhaps there was some small element of truth in the first, at least. Wryly, she said, “Maybe I fancied the idea of having a family again. A mother, brothers, a sister...and a real home.”
Magnus gave a crack of laughter. “Sarcasm. That’s new, from you.” He regarded her thoughtfully. “You’ve changed,” he said with a kind of respect. “Grown some kind of shell.”
“You mean I’m harder?” It might be true. She’d had to fight to regain her health, and it hadn’t been easy. She felt battle-scarred. And determined not to let anything or anyone send her spiralling again into a pit of despair and illusion.
“Harder?” Magnus considered. “Less...accessible, perhaps.”
Jade said involuntarily, “You’re the one who’s running away.”
“Running away?” His shoulders stiffened, a frown in his eyes.
She hadn’t meant to say that, but now that the words were out, she wasn’t going to retract them. “You moved out of our room, suggested we wait—”
She broke off as Mrs. Gaines entered the room. Magnus cast an impatient glance at the woman and shoved his chair back, standing up. “We’ll finish this discussion some other time.”
Jade stood up, too. “When?”
The housekeeper hesitated inside the doorway, her expression flustered. “I didn’t realise you were still here. I’ll come back later—”
Magnus shook his head. “It’s all right, Mrs. Gaines,” he assured her. “We were leaving now, anyway.”
Jade followed him to the door, so that he was obliged to step back and let her through. In the hallway, she turned to face him. “When?” she repeated.
His eyes flickered. He glanced back through the doorway, and grasped her arm, propelling her along the passageway to his office. There he closed the door on them and dropped her arm. “What are you trying to do, Jade?”
“I’m trying to—” she groped for the right word—save? renew? resurrect? “—get back our marriage,” she finished. “If you won’t sleep with me, and you won’t talk to me—”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t talk,” he interrupted. “I said we’d discuss it some other time. You surely don’t expect me to spill my guts in front of Mrs. Gaines?”
“You know I don’t!”
“So stop trying to goad me,” he said. “Unless you want a repeat of what happened last night.”
Jade’s head snapped up. “Is that a threat?”
She thought the expression in his eyes was surprise, but they quickly narrowed so that she couldn’t be sure. He said softly, “It’s a warning. Back off, Jade.”
Her heart pounding, Jade swallowed, but she wouldn’t let her gaze drop from his. “I wasn’t trying to goad you,” she said steadily. “But I won’t be intimidated by you, Magnus. You said we’d talk.”
He gave a sharp sigh. “I know.” One hand jammed into his pocket, he thrust the other over his hair. “Look, it wasn’t my idea to have Danella and her family here this weekend. But you can see that it’s hardly the time for the kind of discussion we need.”
If they’d been sharing a room, she thought, things might be different. But she conceded his point. She could hear the baby’s distant wail, and Danella’s voice calling something to Glen. A rattle of dishes and a succession of brisk footfalls denoted Mrs. Gaines’s progress towards the kitchen.
“I’m trying to clear myself some space,” Magnus said. “I thought we might take a week, get away from here, spend some time together and sort ourselves out, you and I.”
“That sounds like a very good idea.” Surely once they were alone their problems would resolve themselves. She was heartened that Magnus was willing to make time for her, for them. It had never been easy for him to put his business, or the farm, aside. And of course his family commitments had complicated matters still further.
“Let’s just get through this weekend, first,” Magnus suggested. “Then we’ll decide where you’d like to go.”
Jade quelled the thought that his promise was a kind of sop, something to keep her quiet meantime. “All right,” she agreed. If Danella continued to be as amenable as she had been at breakfast, maybe the rest of the weekend wouldn’t be too difficult. Particularly if Danella was to spend most of it visiting her friends instead of remaining about the house.
Magnus looked at his watch. “I have to see the farm manager before lunch,” he said. “Do you want to come along and meet Dave and his wife?”
Surprised at the offer, Jade agreed, overcoming her instinctive cringing from meeting strangers who must know something of her history. It was nothing to be ashamed of, she reminded herself. “I’d like to,” she said. “When do you want to go?”
“If we walk, it should be soon. But I can take the car if you don’t feel up to that.”
“I can walk easily. It’s only about a mile.”
“Good. I’ll let my mother know. Glen may like to come with us, as he’s left literally holding the baby. You wouldn’t mind?”
Some of her pleasure in the prospect dimmed, but she said brightly, “Of course not. Rose-Lee will probably enjoy it.”
* * *
Of the four of them, Rose-Lee seemed to enjoy the outing the most. She was passed from her father to Jade as they walked along the sand towards the headland. Then Magnus took her while they climbed a steep path bounded by blue-tinged, sword-leaved flax and wind-driven marram grass.
A seagull angled its wings above them, swooped to the cliff face and rode the wind up again, and Rose-Lee, squinting against the stiff, salty breeze, followed its flight and cooed approval. The gull opened its beak and quarked. Rose-Lee, her arms waving, emitted a similar cry, setting the three adults laughing.
Watching Magnus with the child in his arms, his eyes warm with humour, Jade felt the laughter catch in her throat, turning to tears. Abruptly she brushed her eyes in a pretence at fighting the wind that dragged her hair across her face.
At the top of the path a stile over the wire fence led them to sheep-shorn, uneven grassland, and they could see the farmhouse on a small rise about half a mile further on, red-roofed and with a grove of trees protecting it from the sea winds.
Glen said, “Here, I’ll take Rose-Lee now. You wouldn’t think a baby could be that heavy, would you?”
Jade heard Magnus say, “Coming?”
Glen had gone ahead. Magnus waited for her in the shade of a shaggy, silver-leaved pohutukawa with tightly closed buds, and as she drew level with him he caught her arm. “Sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine.” She threw him a smile, not looking directly at him, and pulled her arm from his light grip as she passed him. Hurrying, she caught up with Glen and chatted with him and Rose-Lee the rest of the way to the farmhou
se.
The manager’s wife, a sturdy, fair-haired woman in her thirties, gave them tea and biscuits on the wide veranda while her husband and Magnus talked. If she was curious about Jade she didn’t show it. Magnus must have prepared them for her homecoming, Jade realised. He had, in his way, done everything he could to make it easier for her.
They walked back along the road, arriving a little hot and dusty in time for lunch. Danella, Mrs. Gaines told Glen, had phoned to say she was invited to eat with her friends. Jade felt a distinct relief, followed by a twinge of conscience.
Glen fed the baby and put her down for a nap before joining them at the table. “I’ll just stick around and read a book until Rose-Lee wakes up,” he answered Magnus’s enquiry as to his plans for the afternoon. “Later I might take her down to the beach and see how she likes the water.”
“You’ll excuse me if I go and do some work in my office, then?” Magnus asked. After the barest hesitation, he added, “Jade, could I impose on you to type a few more letters?”
“Of course,” she said instantly. “No problem.”
It didn’t take long, and his manner was so impersonal that she found herself being the brisk, capable secretary, the face she’d presented to him when she’d first worked for him. It had been a conscious thing then, an eagerness to impress him with her skills, her business acumen, her ability.
From the first she’d been aware that she was attracted to her new boss, but wary of betraying it, knowing how messy office affairs could be, and how one gone wrong could damage her future prospects. She’d had a casual boyfriend when she began to work for Magnus, and for a while had gone on seeing him despite her waning interest, using him as a sort of buffer.
It had helped, of course, that Magnus had not made any moves in her direction, although occasionally she’d thought his gaze lingered on her when she wasn’t looking. She’d feel a faint prickle of awareness, and perhaps look up to find his eyes on her, but always he either looked away, his face quite expressionless, as though he’d been dwelling absentmindedly on a pot plant or a piece of furniture, or he’d ask her to bring him a file or a cup of tea, or note something down.
Only a week before his father died, Magnus had taken her to dinner after asking her to work late one evening. Fearful of jumping to unwarranted conclusions, she’d been careful to act as though it were nothing more than a business meeting. Towards the end of the meal Magnus had asked about her parents, and she’d told him briefly about the accident that had taken both them and her sister when she was barely sixteen.
“It must have been rough for you,” Magnus had said with appalled sympathy, “losing your family at that age. Did you have any other relations?”
“Only in England. Mum and Dad had emigrated before I was born. My mother’s parents were dead before then. My other grandparents suggested I should come to them, but I’d never met them. Everyone I knew was here in New Zealand, and besides, my parents had come here because they wanted their children to be New Zealanders.” And she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the three graves on one side of the world while she lived on the other.
“So what did you do?”
“I boarded with a friend’s family for a while, finished my schooling, and used some insurance money for secretarial training.”
“Are you in touch with your grandparents?”
“I write to them, let them know how I’m getting on.”
“And...are you living with anyone at the moment?”
“Yes,” Jade said briefly.
“Female?”
“Lida Farrell, from the office.” She was so anxious not to read any personal meaning into that question that he obviously misunderstood the crisp brevity of her reply.
He said, “It’s none of my business, of course.”
“It’s all right—”
But before she could think of anything more to add, to soften what he’d obviously regarded as a snub, he’d steered the conversation back to some innocuous subject, and it remained on that plane for the remainder of the evening. Then he’d got her a taxi and given the driver some money to get her home.
The next day she’d made a point of thanking him again for the dinner, but he’d just given her a searching look and she wondered if she’d overdone it, made him think that she was hinting at a repeat performance that he had no intention of providing. She reverted smartly to her office manner, and Magnus remained aloof and businesslike.
“You terrified me,” Magnus had teased her, after they were married. “For a minute or two I thought I’d got through the efficient-secretary armour to the warm, real woman underneath. And then, when I tried to find out if there was a man in your life, you froze me out.”
“I didn’t want you to think I was a designing female, angling to hook the boss,” Jade had confessed. They were in bed, and she was leaning on his shoulder, smiling down at him with her fingers idly playing over his bare torso, while his toyed with the strap of her nightgown.
“Well, you did, didn’t you?” Magnus raised his brows and grinned at her. “You had me panting after your body from day one—”
“I what?“ Outraged, Jade pulled away.
Magnus hooked a lazy arm about her and hauled her against him. “Are you offended? The first time you walked into my office I thought how attractive you were—” He stopped with a small laugh. “No, it wasn’t ever that lukewarm. I lusted for you, but I told myself it was only a perverted—”
“Perverted?” Jade raised her head.
“Perverted—” Magnus repeated “—attraction to a mind like a steel filing cabinet, combined with the body of a houri—not to mention a face that was all my adolescent dreams come true.”
“You dreamed about a face when you were an adolescent?”
He laughed. “I was very innocent.”
“Hmm.” Her expression was sceptical, and he laughed again.
“I’d never have known,” Jade told him. “If you felt like that, you hid it awfully well.”
“I didn’t want to frighten you off. I forced myself to give it three months, to convince you that I wasn’t the sort of man who habitually made a play for his employees—”
“Lull me into a false sense of security, you mean?”
Magnus grinned. “Something like that. Then I took the plunge and asked you out to dinner and you accepted as though I’d asked you to take a letter—”
“You said it was only because you’d kept me working past dinner time.”
“Part of the plan,” he explained. “The next time, I was going to suggest we did it properly.”
Jade widened her eyes. “Wouldn’t that have been a bit premature?”
He tugged at her hair, his chest shaking with laughter. “You know what I mean—do dinner properly. A date. And then...”
“Your father died,” she said soberly.
“Yes.” His hold on her tightened, his hand stroking her hair as she laid her cheek against his shoulder. “All my plans went overboard. I just knew that I needed you—your quiet strength, your sympathy, your love.”
“You already had that.”
“You’d never let me see it until then. And I was selfish enough to take advantage of it when you did.”
“It wasn’t selfish. I was longing to help you, to comfort you.”
“You were so utterly generous,” he said. “When I asked you to have dinner with me again, on my first day back at the office, I didn’t dare hope that—well, that what happened would happen.”
It had been a subdued dinner, but he’d talked a little, haltingly, about his father. “I don’t think he ever felt really at ease with children. We got on much better after I grew up. Andrew looked to me rather than Dad, even though I’m living in Auckland now. And I don’t think Dad has—had any understanding of Danella at all. Laurence was the closest to him. He’s the one who’s interested in farming. Dad can—could relate to that.”
At the end of the dinner he’d paid the bill and walked her out to his car,
and when they got in he turned to her and blurted out as though he couldn’t help it, “Jade—I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
She’d let hardly a second elapse before she said, lifting a hand to his cheek, “You don’t need to be, Magnus. I’ll come home with you.”
She’d gone home with him that night and other nights, shared his bed and brought him, she hoped, a measure of comfort, of forgetfulness, of happiness. “It wasn’t selfish,” she insisted. “I wanted it as much as you did.”
“I should have waited—at least before asking you to marry me. I rushed you into it, without even a proper wedding. Took advantage of your...compassion.”
“It wasn’t just compassion, Magnus. I’ve never been so happy in my life as I am now.”
“Is that true?”
“It’s true.” She turned a little and kissed his cheek.
“Well,” he said, sliding down the strap he’d been playing with, “let’s see if I can make you still happier.”
He turned her in the bed, his fingers stroking down her arm, his eyes on the curve of her breast where he’d bared it. Then he bent his head and kissed her there, his lips lingering. Jade gave a sigh of content, and he lifted his head, replacing his lips with his hand, his mouth capturing hers.
* * *
“Jade?”
She found herself staring into space, her fingers idle on the keyboard, her body tingling and her cheeks flushed with remembered desire. Magnus was standing in front of her.
“Yes, Magnus.” She raised her eyes languorously, and saw his pupils darken in response before his gaze narrowed.
“You’ve finished?” he asked, his voice grating.
“Oh—yes. Just this last envelope.” Flustered, she rapidly typed the address, found that she’d made two mistakes, and said, “Sorry, I’ll do it again.”
He waited until she’d done it, then said, “Are you tired?”
Jade shook her head. “A bit out of practice.” She wished he’d stop standing there. Her body was still warm, and her fingers not quite steady as she straightened the stack of letters and envelopes. “You can sign them now.” She picked them up to hand them to him, but he’d come around the desk to stand beside her chair, taking a pen from the container by the typewriter. His shoulder brushed hers as he bent to skim the work and put his signature at the bottom of each sheet.
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