Their Baby Bargain

by Marion Lennox

  And that was that.

  Wendy was immovable. Solid as a rock. Luke took her home; she disappeared to her end of the house without saying a word and he didn’t see her again until everyone was seated at the breakfast table. By then she had her face nicely under control again. She was briskly, kindly formal, and Luke had been put onto another planet. One where she didn’t exist.

  ‘Are you two going to tell us you had a nice time?’ Shanni asked doubtfully, looking from one face to the other. She’d had such hopes of last night, and then when they hadn’t come home…

  ‘We had a nice time,’ Wendy told her, trying to smile. ‘We went prawning, but we didn’t catch anything.’

  And you didn’t even catch each other, Shanni thought sadly, exchanging a meaningful glance with Nick. Oh, dear. They’d given their best, but it wasn’t enough.

  ‘We’ll be off, then,’ she said doubtfully. ‘But call us again. Any time you want us to baby-sit…’

  ‘We don’t need you,’ Wendy said, concentrating fiercely on her toast. ‘What you did was lovely-thank you both very much-but Luke will be returning to the city soon, and I won’t be leaving the children.’

  ‘Will you really be returning to Sydney?’ Shanni asked, and watched Luke’s strained face.

  He shook his head. ‘I haven’t decided but…’ he shrugged ‘…maybe it’s just as well if I don’t stay much longer.’

  And maybe it was.

  For the next two days Luke tried to keep things as they’d been but it was impossible. The strain between the two of them was almost unbearable-so much so that Gabbie asked, ‘Why does Wendy always look like she’s going to cry after you go out of the room?’

  Luke couldn’t answer, but he knew. Of course he knew. It was because Wendy had fallen as deeply in love with him as he had with her-but how to say that to a child? And how to expect Gabbie to understand why Wendy wouldn’t let things ride to their inevitable, joyous conclusion when he hardly understood her reasons himself?

  ‘You want me as much as I want you,’ he said to her on the second evening after their night out, when the children were safely in bed. He’d come out to find her on the veranda and had discovered her staring out to sea with eyes that were bleak and despairing. ‘How can you deny it?’

  She looked at him with eyes that defeated him with their misery. ‘I might want you but I know where that wanting has led in the past,’ she whispered. ‘Luke, please…don’t do this to me. It’s tearing me in two.’

  ‘And it’s not tearing me?’

  ‘You’ll get over it,’ she said drearily. ‘Don’t tell me there won’t be other women.’ She wheeled to face him. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, just leave it. Can’t you see I don’t want a relationship? I was utterly mad to let myself imagine I could love you. To let you make love to me. One night’s madness…’

  ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘One night’s honesty and one night’s joy. One night’s beginning of the rest of our lives. I don’t do casual sex, Wendy. I made love to the woman I want to marry-with the woman I wish to spend the rest of my life with-and I’m damned sure under that bleak exterior that that’s what you want, too.’

  ‘I don’t want it, Luke,’ she said again. ‘And as for letting down my defences… It’s not going to happen again. No matter how long you stay here. You’re my employer. You have the cutest baby in the world. I’m desperate to stay here and stay looking after her, but I’ve told you before that if you keep this pressure on then I’ll have to go. Gabbie and I will move on.’

  She would too. He looked at her despairingly but there was nothing in her face but resolution and misery. He was making her unhappy, he thought suddenly. Hell, he loved her and he was making her unhappy!

  ‘You really want me to go?’ he asked, and watched the flare of hope behind her eyes.

  ‘This is your home. You own it. I can’t force you to leave.’

  ‘But you want me to?’

  ‘Luke, I can’t take this pressure,’ she said honestly, and she spread her hands in appeal.

  ‘Because you love me?’

  ‘I…can’t.’

  ‘And yet you do.’ He didn’t touch her. He didn’t move. They were standing four feet apart and he knew if he took one step nearer then she’d turn and leave.

  ‘I told you,’ she said steadily. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Hell!’

  ‘It is,’ she said bleakly. ‘A very special sort of hell.’

  ‘Because you can’t trust again.’

  ‘I’m all Gabbie has,’ she said simply.

  ‘You don’t think by loving me that Gabbie could have both of us? Grace could have both of us? That the responsibility and the love could be shared? You wouldn’t be all Gabbie has. She’d be a part of a family.’

  ‘Luke-don’t.’

  He closed his eyes. How to make her trust? How?

  He couldn’t. Selling his car, changing his clothes-they were just the superficial things. This was a deeper fear, and hoping that she’d change was like hoping for the moon. So face it, he told himself harshly. To drag this out was killing both of them.

  ‘Okay, Wendy,’ he said, and his voice was flat with defeat. ‘You’ve got your way. I’ll leave in the morning.’

  ‘Oh, Luke…’

  ‘It’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  There was only one answer to that. There had to be. She tilted her chin and forced herself to meet his eyes. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then, that’s that, then,’ he told her. ‘That’s that. Until you can find the courage to trust your heart…’

  ‘My heart leads me to nothing but trouble.’

  ‘That’s funny…’ he said, but there was nothing funny in the way he said it ‘…because my heart’s leading me to nothing but joy. Until it comes face to face with your damned barriers, with your mistrust, and it’s learning for the first time just how hurtful that can be. I’ll leave, Wendy. And I hope you can be happy with that decision, because I sure as hell can’t.’

  ‘We must be,’ Wendy managed.

  ‘Give me one good reason.’ He sighed and shrugged his shoulders, anger building. ‘You can’t and neither can I. This is just plain stupid, but it’s up to you to get over it.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘YOU’VE sent him away!’

  ‘He left. I didn’t send him. If he’d wanted to stay then he could have. It’s his house after all.’

  ‘But it was you who wanted him to go.’ Shanni blazed indignation. ‘You are out of your cotton-picking mind! Of all the stupid, crazy… Wendy Maher, that man is seriously in love with you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The flat reply was enough to make Shanni blink. ‘You mean you know?’ Shanni was almost speechless. ‘Wendy, what is wrong with you? He’s gorgeous, he’s rich, he’s kind. He has the most beautiful baby sister. Gabbie’s half in love with him already, he owns this place, and he loves you…’

  ‘I don’t trust him.’

  That set Shanni back. She’d driven out the day after Luke had left to find her friend staring sightlessly at Gabbie playing on the beach while Grace napped on a rug beside her. She’d never seen this look on her friend’s face, Shanni thought, and she couldn’t understand it. She looked desolate.

  ‘So what’s he done to make you mistrust him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Wendy closed her eyes and dug her fingers into her palms. ‘Nothing. Just been Luke.’

  ‘And that’s something to mistrust?’

  ‘He still drives that car.’

  ‘Oh, great. The man has an expensive car.’

  ‘It’s not entirely that.’ Wendy sighed helplessly. ‘How to make you see? It’s not just the car. Or the fact that he’s wealthy. It’s…it’s how he makes me feel. Like I’m out of control.’

  ‘Because you’re in love with him.’

  ‘Yes. No! I don’t know.’

  ‘You are,’ Shanni said, satisfied. ‘And you don’t like being not in control. You don’t like placing your trust-your hear
t-in someone else’s hands.’

  ‘I have no right to risk the children…’

  ‘Now, by saying that then you’re just being silly,’ Shanni said flatly. ‘You are my very dearest friend and I hate to say this but in sending Luke away you are acting like you’re a sandwich short of a picnic.’

  Wendy looked at her, her eyes troubled. ‘That’s what Luke thinks.’

  ‘So he knows you’re in love with him?’

  Wendy thought back to their night of lovemaking at the beach and despite herself her mouth twitched into the beginnings of a smile. ‘He might have guessed.’

  ‘I knew our baby-sitting wasn’t all in vain.’ Shanni sat back and hugged her knees. ‘How very satisfactory. So we’ve established that Luke loves Wendy and Wendy loves Luke. Now all we have to do is bang two thick heads together and make them see sense.’

  ‘Shanni, I am not remarrying.’ Grace stirred on her rug, and Wendy stooped to lift her into her arms and hug her. It was almost a defensive action. See me, her gesture said, I have my children. What else could I want? ‘I’ve been down that road before,’ she said drearily into Grace’s soft curls. ‘I am not travelling it again.’

  ‘He’s asked you to marry him?’ Shanni’s voice was an excited squeak. ‘He’s that in love?’

  ‘I told you-’

  ‘You’ve told me nothing that makes sense.’ Shanni stood up and glared. ‘You’ve been down some dangerous and eventually disastrous road with Adam, but this is Luke, Wendy. He’s a darling. Give the man some credit for being different.’

  ‘Shanni, leave it.’

  ‘You’ll be making him desperately unhappy. Does he deserve that?’

  ‘He’ll get over it.’

  ‘Will he?’ Shanni’s eyes narrowed. ‘If he’s as much in love as I think he is, he may never get over it.’

  He hadn’t got over it. Not then, and not two months later.

  Sure, he tried to fit back into his old life but it wasn’t what it was. Mostly because every waking minute his thoughts would flit to what would be happening at the farm. What would be happening with Wendy.

  He rang once a week, from wherever he was in the world which was as far away as he could make it. He figured it was easier being in New York than Sydney-then he knew he couldn’t just get in the car and drive and be with them in hours. The temptation would be irresistible. So New York-and London and Paris-became desirable places to be and he threw himself into his work harder than he’d ever done in his life before.

  Half a world away, Wendy and the kids seemed as if they were doing the same.

  His weekly phone calls told him the facts, told in a formal employee to employer tone from Wendy. The house was being totally repainted inside and out. Gabbie had started school and was loving it. Grace had cut her first tooth…

  The facts were recounted in a much more bouncy, excited way by Gabbie when Wendy handed the phone over-with a sigh of relief that made Luke feel ill. He had to haul himself together to respond to Gabbie.

  She took some responding to, and more and more his heart went out to her. The cow in the next paddock had had a calf and Gabbie had watched. Bruce could sit for a whole count to ten, and Grace had sucked Bruce’s tail and Bruce had liked it so much he’d kept sitting beside her and wagging his tail in her face so she’d do it some more…

  It made him so homesick he wanted to slam the phone back on the receiver in disgust, but he held on, soaking up every ounce of the contact that he could. And then he took his bad temper out on the futures market, and his fortune increased like it never had before because he personally was so angry he had to take it out some way. On something…

  And his secretary tiptoed around him and watched him with eyes that were concerned. The middle-aged lady liked her boss, and she wasn’t stupid. She could guess what was doing this, but there was nothing she could do to help. So she protected him as much as she could and worried in private until…

  The phone call came mid-morning New York time, and it wasn’t the normal sort of business call Luke received. The lady on the end sounded young and distressed and a little…desperate?

  ‘Is this the right number for Luke Grey-the Australian share broker?’

  ‘Futures broker,’ Maria corrected gently, and then softened. ‘Yes, dear, it is.’

  ‘This is Shanni Daniels. I’m…I’m a friend of a friend of Luke’s. The…the mutual friend is in trouble and I really, really need to speak to him.’

  Maria thought of her boss, up to his ears in paperwork and she thought of her instructions. ‘Don’t put anyone through until after lunch. No one, Maria. Is that clear?’

  It was perfectly clear. But… ‘Are you ringing from Australia?’ she asked, and couldn’t quite keep the note of hope from her voice.

  ‘That’s right.’ Shanni’s breath came out in a rush. ‘I hope the time isn’t too awful over there. I waited until really late. Nick says it’s none of my business, but, please, it’s really important.’

  ‘Is the mutual friend a lady?’

  Silence. And then, ‘Yes,’ Shanni said flatly. ‘Yes, she is.’

  ‘I’m putting you through now, dear,’ Maria said calmly and flicked the switch.

  Hell, this column didn’t make sense. He’d entered the figures into his spreadsheet three times and it wasn’t working. This is moron stuff, Luke told himself. Get a grip, Grey.

  And then the phone went and he glared at it as if it was his personal enemy. He’d told Maria he wasn’t to be disturbed…

  ‘Maria!’ he roared.

  No answer.

  Balked, he stalked over to the door and flung it open. Maria’s desk was empty. She must have gone to the bathroom and switched the phone through to his office first-which wasn’t like her.

  So let it ring!

  The figures still wouldn’t add up…

  The phone kept ringing.

  Finally, he lifted the receiver and yelled, as if it was Maria he was yelling at. ‘What?’

  ‘Luke?’ The voice at the end of the line was so faint that he didn’t recognise it.

  ‘Yes?’ He lowered his tone a notch-but not so much that you’d notice.

  ‘It’s Shanni. You know, Wendy’s friend.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Half a world away from her, his heart lurched into his boots and stayed. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s Gabbie,’ she told him. ‘Luke, I thought you needed to know. Gabbie’s mother’s coming to take her away again.’

  Gabbie’s mother’s coming to take her away… Luke’s mind went blank, fiercely rejecting what he’d just heard. No!

  He couldn’t bear it, he thought, and it was a measure of his love for his whole new little family that his thoughts went first not to Wendy but to Gabbie. After what Wendy had said about her mother, to have her dragged away…

  And after that, how must Wendy be feeling? Watching the child she loved being taken away to horror…

  ‘Can anyone do anything about it?’ Did he sound as sick as he felt?

  ‘Tom says not.’ His sickness was matched in Shanni’s tone. ‘Tom’s the head of the Home system here, and he’s feeling as bad as everyone about it, but she’s been through the courts. It’s supervised-our workers will be able to go in and check, but her cruelty in the past has been…not the kind that gets a kid taken away.’

  ‘Hell.’

  ‘Yes.’ Shanni’s bleakness reached him down the phone and he thought if this woman was feeling bad, how much more so must Wendy be feeling?

  ‘Does her mother really want Gabbie?’ he asked.

  ‘Wendy still thinks it’s a power thing,’ Shanni told him. ‘Sonia never tries to make any contact, but then she gets bored and angry and she feels like getting her own back on life, so she moves in on her daughter. If she knew Gabbie was living at the farm in almost permanent care…’

  ‘She doesn’t know that?’

  ‘No, and she mustn’t. Wendy’s bringing her into the Home office on Wednesday morning, so as far as Sonia know
s she’s still living in a foster home. Otherwise Wendy will never get her back. Sonia will see to that. Oh, but Luke…’

  There was worse to come. He could hear it.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sonia’s talking about taking Gabbie to Perth-in Western Australia.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means if she’s placed in foster care again she’ll go into the Western Australian system. Wendy…Wendy won’t get her back.’

  More silence. Luke’s mind, which had stalled into a dead halt, suddenly started up in overdrive.

  ‘Wednesday morning, you say?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  It was Monday evening Australian time now. That gave him thirty-six hours.

  ‘Can you get me this-who did you say was in charge?-Tom’s home phone number?’

  ‘I…’

  ‘Do it, Shanni,’ he told her. ‘I’d imagine Erin will have it. Don’t tell Wendy, but let’s see if we can start some wheels spinning. I may not be able to help but-’

  ‘But you’ll try?’

  ‘With everything I have,’ he said, and he meant it.

  He just wished he had more.

  It was a bleak little ceremony. How could it be anything else? Wendy wondered. For most of the kids she’d cared for, a parent coming to claim them was a time of joy. For Gabbie, it meant a white face, fiercely expressionless eyes and a hand that clung to Wendy’s as if she was drowning. Her bag was packed, she was staring across the Home administration’s front desk at her mother, and her fingers pleaded with Wendy to keep her more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life.

  But Wendy had to let her go.

  ‘Do you regard this as a long-term arrangement?’ Tom was asking Sonia Rolands. Tom Burrows, the head of Social Services for the district, was in his sixties, he’d been in this game for a long, long time but even he wasn’t case-hardened against Gabbie’s appalled face.