At first sight, when Alice had come to the hospital to meet Janey for coffee. Alice and Luke had been engaged within three weeks, and married a few months after that. They’d spent the first year of their married life in Australia, then they’d gone to London.
‘You can’t just have a nice chat to someone,’ she went on, ‘you have to open up your whole soul. You can’t just follow a vegetarian diet, you have to treat chocolate and ice cream and even cheese as if they’re poison.’
‘You can’t just get a nice, civilised divorce, you have to change your name, take your baby and disappear. I know.’
‘You loved her energy and her passion.’
‘Once. But her passion was the real poison in the end. Beneath it, there was nothing we shared. I’d never want a relationship like that again.’
‘I don’t want to dwell on the things that made her impossible.’
‘No. We have to think about Rowdy. His future. His wellbeing.’
‘Which will get a boost with a tetanus shot and his other vaccinations.’
‘And a bit more chocolate and cheese. Clean chocolate this time.’
And whole milk, some good red meat and fresh fish, lots of the fruit and vegetables and whole grains he’d been brought up on and liked, and the odd exuberant overdose of ice cream. Strawberry and mango first off, Janey thought, piled high in a waffle cone. She wanted to spoil him rotten in all sorts of ways.
‘Hey, there are some doctors coming to see you in a minute,’ Luke said.
‘Sounds good. Can’t tell you how much I’m busting to get out of here. Although I … really don’t have too much of an idea what’s happening in my life beyond this afternoon.’
‘Give it time, Janey,’ he answered gently. ‘We’ve got a lot to work out. We’re not aiming to do it all by the end of the week.’
CHAPTER FOUR
THE last thing Janey expected, when her discharge formalities had been completed, was that she’d be spending most of the rest of the day beside the pool. Luke wouldn’t allow her to hover over Rowdy at the hospital, and deep down, although she protested at first, she knew it was the right thing.
They’d paid him another visit on their way out. He was looking a little brighter, sitting up in his bed and working on a jigsaw puzzle. It was hard to know how he felt about anything when he wouldn’t speak, but he’d seemed more cheerful, obviously relieved to be feeling better.
Luke had said, ‘Listen, little guy, I need to take your Auntie Janey away for a rest, and I need to get some myself. Doctor’s orders. We had a cyclone here. I reckon you’d know something about that, right?’
A small nod. No smile.
‘Well, we’ve all been working pretty hard, or else we got clonked on the head like your auntie did, and she needs to sit in the sun for a bit and get herself better. Get healed.’
He nodded at that last word and got the little spark of questioning and hope in his eyes that Janey had seen once or twice before and wondered about. He suddenly looked as if he was desperate to speak—desperate to. Ask a question or tell them something of crucial importance or just yell.
And yet no words came.
She waited, smiled at him, squeezed his little hand between hers.
Come on, sweetheart. Nothing terrible will happen if you say it. Just spit it out.
But no.
And now, half an hour later, here she was relaxing in a borrowed swimsuit by the pool.
Watching Luke clean it.
He’d already removed about ten buckets’ worth of leaves and other debris with a big net on a pole. He’d added some chemicals, cleaned out the leaf basket, pulled a plastic poolside chair from the shallow end, near the steps. Several chairs had been thrown into the pool before the cyclone, apparently, so that they wouldn’t get turned into missiles by the power of the wind.
‘I take it you’re not going to let me help?’ she said.
‘Nope.’
‘Because I have to rest, right?’ She resisted the temptation to pull on the swimsuit to make it cover her better. Having spent the last three years dressing for Darwin’s perpetual summer, she knew that when you acted as if you thought your neckline was too low, it only looked worse. Style was eighty per cent confidence and a relaxed attitude. Alice had apparently understood this from birth, but it had taken Janey a fair bit of living to work it out.
She had a few items of clothing rescued from the bus crash, but no swimsuit, just casual tropical shorts and tops which hadn’t yet been washed, and even though it was hot it felt good to get some air and sunlight on her skin.
‘And because there’s a science to it, you see,’ Luke said. ‘You probably don’t even know what floculent is.’
‘Did have the vague idea it had something to do with liver function.’
‘I’m speaking in the context of swimming pools.’ He poured in about a gallon of the stuff as he spoke.
‘Well, this swimming pool certainly has a lot of context. Green, scummy context, from this vantage point, not to mention the floating branches.’ She watched him lift another one out.
‘And at least five more pool chairs, I’m told,’ he said.
‘You’d need to be told. Even after everything you’ve taken out, I still can’t see to the bottom.’
‘But once the floculent has taken effect, I am reliably promised it’ll be crystal clear. Although I think there are a few other steps involved first. Waiting overnight and vacuuming or something. I’ve got all the instructions written down.’
‘So you don’t actually know anything more about the care and feeding of swimming pools than I do.’
‘Not a whole lot. But my learning curve is steep.’
Just a throw-away line, with the grin to match, and yet it was true, she realised. All through their internship he’d been a quick learner—part of what had irritated her about him. No one should be able to make medicine look that easy!
He’d flaunted it, too, had shown off his sharp mind. The times he’d referred to yesterday when he’d ‘saved her backside’, as he’d phrased it. She remembered those. He’d handled himself like a magician, conjuring the right diagnosis or the right procedure like producing a rabbit from a hat.
‘There you go, Janey,’ followed by his charm-laden grin.
Through slightly gritted teeth, ‘Thanks, Luke.’
‘No worries. You would have got there eventually. Buy me a beer some time.’
She sensed he didn’t show off any more. The past few years had changed him. He’d matured in ways she hadn’t expected. He’d needed a steep learning curve in deeper and far more personal areas of his life, and he’d responded accordingly. It had been rather a humbling learning curve for him, probably.
She could imagine that for a man like Luke, it must have been a terrible shock and a bitter frustration to discover that his intelligence and charm couldn’t win him anything and everything he wanted—that life wasn’t nearly as easy and sunny and favourable to Dr Luke Bresciano as he’d once thought.
Alice had been unforgivably cruel.
But she was my sister, and I loved her, and I’ll never see her again.
It was hard, such a mess. If you’d been angry with someone you loved, the anger didn’t always die when that person had gone. It simply had nowhere to fit, and just hung around. It got all mixed up with the grief, so you had that to grieve over, too—the fact that your anger wouldn’t let you go. As time went by, her heart would have to settle, surely, but right now …
She had to blink back her tears.
Luke removed several more branches, found the arm of another submerged chair and began to heave. His white T-shirt fitted snugly over his muscular frame and emphasised the tanned arms that a man of Italian extraction would have acquired effortlessly within a week of coming to Crocodile Creek.
As always, by contrast, Janey had carefully slathered herself in sunscreen and moisturiser, under no illusions about what would happen to her skin at this latitude. It was the same in Darwin, if no
t worse. Partially shaded by the poolside umbrella Luke had unearthed from beneath the veranda, she positively gleamed with lotion from her collarbone to her toes, and yet she loved the heat.
Thinking about his olive-skinned heritage, and wanting to distract herself from those circular thoughts about her sister, she asked on an impulse, ‘Your parents, Luke, how are they doing?’
He hauled the newly rescued chair onto the pale sandstone of the pool surround and stopped work for a moment while it dripped in the sun. ‘Pretty well.’ Behind his sunglasses, she couldn’t see his eyes. ‘I only see them a few times a year. But we’re getting on a little better now.’
Janey remembered that there’d been a rift. Mr and Mrs Bresciano hadn’t liked Alice. They’d let it show, and Alice had been angry and hurt. ‘If we’re not welcome under their roof, then we won’t go. See how they feel about that! Luke fully supports me. He’s furious.’
In hindsight, Alice had always seemed to prefer burning her boats to working on a relationship.
‘So Rowdy has two sets of grandparents!’ Janey exclaimed. She really didn’t want to keep thinking about Alice when Rowdy was the one who needed her. ‘That’s wonderful!’
‘I never told them,’ Luke answered.
She didn’t understand at first. ‘Well, you’ve hardly had time.’ It was still only Wednesday, less than twenty-four hours since he’d learned the truth about who Rowdy was.
‘No, I mean they never knew we’d had a child. I wanted to tell them, all through the pregnancy and after the birth. Thought it might help.’ Heal the rift, Janey understood. ‘Alice wanted to wait. She hadn’t forgiven them for the way they disapproved of our marriage. And then she left, just decamped while I was at work. She left a note.’ He quoted bitterly, ‘“It’s over. Don’t try to find us. I can’t deal with you in my life any more. You crush my soul.”’
‘Oh, hell, Luke!’
‘And what was I going to do then? Tell my parents that they had a grandson but that they might never see him because I crushed his mother’s soul and so I didn’t have a clue where he was?’
‘I’m sorry …’
His mouth curved down at one corner. ‘For what? Arranging to have coffee at the hospital with your sister that day?’
‘So you remember.’
‘Our first meeting?’ His and Alice’s. ‘Of course I do! I was twenty-six years old and thought I had the golden touch. It never occurred to me that love at first sight doesn’t always lead to happy ever after. That the occasional five-minute conversation where you check out each other’s belief systems and long-term goals might be a good idea. That maybe this star-crossed lovers thing was, in fact, just a virulent case of—’ He stopped.
Desire, Janey understood. Stars in your eyes.
‘Yeah.’ He reached a thumb and finger beneath his reflective sunglasses and rubbed his eyes.
There was a silence.
‘So you have a lot to tell your parents,’ Janey said at last. It seemed inadequate. ‘Listen, will you please let me help with the pool? Otherwise I’m going to keep asking these awful questions.’
‘It’s fine. We probably need to get it all on the table. I’m not letting you help.’
‘I could wipe down the chairs after you get each one out. These two are unusable as they are, all slimy. There must be some rags. Seriously, I hate sitting still when someone else is working.’
He looked at her and cocked his head to one side. ‘Yeah, I remember that about you.’ From family get-togethers in the year before he and Alice had gone to England. They’d had some biting exchanges, Janey and Luke, washing dishes together. They’d actually known each other quite well.
‘OK, then,’ he said, ‘but only if you take a break every ten minutes to sip long, cool drinks.’
‘So who’s bringing me the long, cool drinks?’ she asked slyly.
He laughed, and she felt the most ridiculous spurt of pleasure because she sensed that his laugh didn’t come easily any more. It felt like a real achievement to have coaxed it out.
So Janey wanted long, cool drinks.
Luke left her lolling by the pool in the reclining outdoor lounger he’d retrieved for her from beneath the veranda. Watching from the window of the big kitchen to make sure she wasn’t illicitly removing debris from the pool, he didn’t even get as far as the fridge for several minutes. Just kept looking.
They’d bugged the heck out of each other eight years ago, had really got under each other’s skins. He’d thought she was prim and stuffy in her attitudes to medicine and study and life, and clueless about her own attributes. It had driven him mad that she could have been almost as beautiful and scintillating and fun as her sister, if she’d had the slightest inkling.
He’d wanted to drag her in front of a mirror and yell at her, ‘Can’t you see?’ Or play back recordings of the things she said and tell her, ‘Listen to yourself! How much do you think people like being lectured to about the politics of Third World malaria treatment when they’re having a Friday night drink? You don’t need to act as if your brain is the only thing you’ve got going for you, because it isn’t!’
Why did she have to hold herself so stiffly? Why did she dress to hide that fabulous Stafford figure, instead of showing it off? Why didn’t every man she met know about her incredible hundred-watt smile? Why did she use her sharp mind to bore people rigid with her knowledge, instead of making them think or laugh? She had a sense of humour, but she so rarely used it. She was so bloody serious and tedious about the world!
She frowned at men, instead of smiling at them, the way some women frowned at grubby little boys. Just a few weeks after they’d married, Alice had said to him, ‘You have to help me find a man for Janey, Luke. She’s a fabulous person, but men don’t see it, and it’s just wrong.’
And he’d seriously tried. Thought about which of his single male friends she might go for—which ones wouldn’t be too much the football-mad type, which ones had interests she might share.
They’d gone on three or four appalling double dates, him and Alice and Janey and whoever, where Janey had obviously known she was being set up, and every time she’d looked at him he’d seen her thinking, You low-life! This is the kind of man you think I’d want? Meanwhile, his friends hadn’t looked past the bad first impression, and who could blame them?
He couldn’t remember which of them had called it quits on the double dating first. Janey had, he thought. That’s right, she’d asked Alice to tell him please not to embarrass both of them any further, and he’d been deeply relieved.
Angry, too.
She’d had no clue!
Now it all seemed so long ago, and there she was by the pool, stretching her long legs in the sun, wearing a scarlet swimsuit borrowed from Georgie Turner that would have had her pulling at the fabric and crossing her arms over her chest eight years ago, because Georgie’s swimsuits were … um … minimal.
And underwired.
And if Janey hadn’t realised eight years ago that she had the fabulous Stafford figure, she knew it now. Just subtly. Satisfied about it, not showing it off. She looked more like Alice. And yet not at the same time, because she didn’t have Alice’s dangerous glitter and fire.
Janey would always be quieter, he guessed. Her confidence would always come from within, from a hard-won understanding of her own strengths and successes and the way to let them show. The confidence would get stronger as she got older, he sensed, and it would translate into a subtle glow, like old gold.
Lord, she’d probably be a complete and utter knockout when she was ninety-five!
He’d better do something about those long, cool drinks …
Checking in the fridge, he found bubbly mineral water and tropical juice, and remembered seeing a bottle of Campari lurking somewhere. He found it high in a cupboard and added a splash, as well as generous quantities of ice.
It wasn’t enough.
He wanted to see her smile, tease her a little.
OK, how abou
t pineapple and melon pieces? And someone had bought a bag of those paper cocktail umbrellas for some pre-wedding event of Emily’s and then had forgotten to use them. They were sitting under the sink. He skewered the pineapple and melon on the pointy ends of the umbrellas and put the drinks on a tray, along with a whole platter of fruit and a greenish glass jug of iced water already getting nicely beaded with humidity. The ice cubes tinkled against the sides of the jug when he picked it up.
Yeah, this was the effect he was after.
Ridiculously overdone.
Sheesh, it felt good to do something frivolous and pointless just for the fun of it, to make somebody laugh.
Even when Christina Barrett, née Farrelly, showed up and caught him at it. She raised her eyebrows. ‘Party?’
‘Private pool-cleaning party. Pregnant people don’t have to join in. But I can make you an umbrella drink.’
‘Thanks, but I’m fine.’ She added casually, ‘Joe’s not around, is he?’
‘Hospital, I think.’
‘Couldn’t see him there.’
‘Who did you ask?’
‘Well, I didn’t …’ She winced and rubbed her back. ‘How about Georgie?’
‘Picking up Max from school. Left an hour ago, so I suspect she got roped in to some cleaning up.’
‘Oh, school’s open again already?’
‘The primary school is, just a couple of classrooms,’ he answered, ‘but not the high school. They had pretty extensive damage, and they still don’t have power, I heard. Come on, I think you need an umbrella drink.’
‘Yeah, I probably do.’
He threw together another tropical cocktail, admittedly with less care than he’d taken over Janey’s, and followed Christina out to the pool. She looked pregnant with a capital P today. She and Joe had come over from New Zealand three weeks ago, thinking they’d organise the sale of Christina’s house in Crocodile Creek and have all the finances and legal formalities go through by the time the baby was old enough to travel.
It had been a sensible plan.
They hadn’t counted on a cyclone.
Joe had been working all hours at the hospital, and the house had sustained a fair bit of damage. Grace O’Riordan wanted to buy the place, but Christina had reneged on the previously agreed price because of the new damage, and Grace was still recovering from her dramatic immersion in the floodwaters, so the issue couldn’t be resolved just yet. Christina and Joe might be in Crocodile Creek for a while.
The Australian's Desire (Mills & Boon By Request) Page 23
