Maid of Dishonor

by Heidi Rice

  Ellie’s brows rose as she spotted him, standing off to the side of a long display of glass-fronted fridges, a rucksack hanging off his very broad shoulders. Week-long stubble covered his jaw and his auburn hair was tousled from finger raking.

  Jack Chapman. Okay, she was officially surprised. Any woman who watched any one of the premier news channels would recognise that strong face under the shaggy hair. Ellie wasn’t sure whether he was more famous for his superlative and insightful war reporting or for being the definition of eye candy.

  Grubby low-slung jeans and even grubbier boots. A dark untucked T-shirt. He ran a hand through his hair and, seeing a clasp undone on the side pocket of his rucksack, bent down to fix it. Ellie watched the long muscles bunching under his thin shirt, the curve of a very nice butt, the strength of his brown neck.

  Oh, yum—oh, stop it now! Get a grip! The important questions were: why was he here, what did he want and what on earth was her father thinking?

  Ellie lifted her head as Samantha tapped on the doorframe again and stood there, shuffling on her feet and biting her lip. She recognised that look. ‘What’s up, Sammy?’

  Samantha looked at her with big brown eyes. ‘I know that I promised to work for you tomorrow night to help with the petits fours for that fashion show—’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But I’ve been offered a ticket to see Linkin Park and they are my favourite band...it’s a free ticket and you know how much I love them.’

  Ellie considered giving her a lecture on responsibility and keeping your word, on how promises shouldn’t be broken, but the kid was nineteen and it was Linkin Park. She remembered being that age and the thrill of a kick-ass concert.

  And Samantha, battling to put herself through university, couldn’t afford to pay for a ticket herself. She’d remember it for for ever...so what if it meant that Ellie had to work a couple of hours longer? It wasn’t as if she had a life or anything.

  ‘Okay, I’ll let you off the hook.’ Ellie winced at Samantha’s high-pitched squeal. ‘This time. Now, get out of here.’

  Ellie grinned as she heard her whooping down the stairs, but the grin faded when she glanced at the monitor again. Scowling, she reached for her mobile, hastily scrolling through her address book before pushing the green button.

  ‘Ellie—hello.’ Her father’s deep voice crooned across the miles.

  ‘Dad, why is Jack Chapman in my bakery?’

  Ellie heard her father’s sharp intake of breath. ‘He’s there already? Good. I was worried.’

  Of course you were, Ellie silently agreed. For the past ten years, since her eighteenth birthday, she’d listened to her father rumble on and on about Jack Chapman—the son he’d always wanted and never got. ‘He’s the poster-boy for a new generation of war correspondents,’ he’d said. ‘Unbiased, tough. Willing to dive into a story without thinking about his safety, looking for the story behind the story, yet able to push aside emotion to look for the truth...’ Yada, yada, yada...

  ‘So, again, why is he here?’ Ellie asked.

  And, by the way, why do you only call when you want something from me? Oh, wait, you didn’t call. I did! You just sent your boy along, expecting me to accommodate your every whim.

  Some things never changed.

  ‘He was doing an interview with a Somalian warlord who flipped. He was stripped of his cash and credit cards, delivered at gunpoint to a United Nations aid plane leaving for Cape Town and bundled onto it,’ Mitchell Evans said in a clipped voice. ‘I need you to give him a bed.’

  Jeez, Dad, do I have a B&B sign tattooed on my forehead?

  Ellie, desperate to move beyond her default habit of trying to please her father, tried to say no, but a totally different set of words came out of her mouth. ‘For how long?’

  God, she was such a wimp.

  ‘Well, here’s the thing, sugar-pie...’

  Oh, good grief. Her father had a thing. A lifetime with her father had taught her that a thing never worked out in her favour. ‘Jack is helping me write a book on the intimate lives of war reporters—mine included.’

  Interesting—but she had no idea what any of this had to do with her. But Mitchell didn’t like being interrupted, so Ellie waited for him to finish.

  ‘He needs to talk to my family members. I thought he could stay a little while, talk to you about life with me...’

  Sorry...life with him? What life with him? During her parents’ on-off marriage their home had been a place for her mum to do his laundry rather than to live. He’d lived his life in all the countries people were trying to get out of: Iraq, Gaza, Bosnia. Home was a place he’d dropped in and out of. Work had always been his passion, his muse, his lifelong love affair.

  Resentment nibbled at the wall of her stomach. Depending on what story had been consuming him at the time, Mitchell had missed every single important event of her childhood. Christmas concerts and ballet recitals, swimming galas and father-daughter days. How could he be expected to be involved in his daughter’s life when there were bigger issues in the world to write about, analyse, study?

  What he’d never realised was that he was her biggest issue...the creator of her angst, the source of her abandonment issues, the spring that fed the fountain of her self-doubt.

  Ellie winced at her melodramatic thoughts. Her childhood with Mitchell had been fraught with drama but it was over. However, in situations like these, old resentments bubbled up and over.

  Her father had been yakking on for a while and Ellie refocused on what he was saying.

  ‘The editors and I want Jack to include his story—he is the brightest of today’s bunch—but getting Jack to talk about himself is like trying to find water in the Gobi Desert. He’s not interested. He’s as much an enigma to me as he was when we first met. So will you talk to him?’ Mitchell asked. ‘About me?’

  Oh, good grief. Did she have to? Really?

  ‘Maybe.’ Which they both knew meant that she would. ‘But, Dad, seriously? You can’t just dump your waifs and strays on me.’ He could—of course he could. He was Mitchell Evans and she was a push-over.

  ‘Waif and stray? Jack is anything but!’

  Ellie rubbed her temple. Could this day throw anything else at her head? The bottom line was that another of Mitchell’s colleagues was on her doorstep and she could either take him in or turn him away. Which she wouldn’t do...because then her father wouldn’t be pleased and he’d sulk, and in twenty years’ time he’d remind her that she’d let him down. Really, it was just easier to give the guy a bed for the night and bask in Mitchell’s approval for twenty seconds. If that.

  If only they were normal people, Ellie thought. The last colleague of her father’s she’d had to stay—again at Mitchell’s request—had got hammered on her wine and tried to paw her before passing out on her Persian carpet. And every cameraman, producer and correspondent she’d ever met—including her father—was crazy, weird, strange or odd. She figured that it was a necessary requirement if you wanted to chase down and report on human conflicts and disasters.

  Mitchell’s voice, now that he’d got his own way, sounded jaunty again. ‘Jack’s a good man. He’s probably not slept for days, hasn’t eaten properly for more than a week. A bed, a meal, a bath. It’s not that much to ask because you’re a good person, my sweet, sweet girl.’

  My sweet, sweet girl? Tuh!

  Sweet, sweet sucker, more like.

  Ellie sneaked another look at Mr-Hot-Enough-to-
Melt-Heavy-Metal. He did have a body to die for, she thought.

  ‘Have you met Jack before?’ Mitchell asked.

  ‘Briefly. At your wedding to Steph.’ Wife number three, who’d stuck around for six months. Ellie had been eighteen, chronically shy, and Jack had barely noticed her.

  ‘Oh, yeah—Steph. I liked her...I still don’t know why she left,’ Mitchell said, sounding plausibly bemused.

  Gee, Dad, here’s a clue. Maybe, like me, she hated the idea of the man she adored being away for five of those six months, plunging into the situation in Afghanistan and only popping up occasionally on TV. Hated not knowing whether you were alive or dead. It’s no picnic loving someone who doesn’t love you a fraction as much as you love your job.

  She, her mother and Mitchell’s two subsequent wives had come second-best time after time...decade after decade. And she’d repeated the whole stupid cycle by getting engaged to Darryl.

  She’d vowed she’d never fall in love with a journalist and she hadn’t. But life had bust a gut laughing when she’d become engaged to a man she’d thought was the exact opposite of her father, only to realise that he spent even less time at home than her father had. That was quite an accomplishment, since he’d never, as far as she knew, left London itself.

  She’d been such a sucker, Ellie thought. Still was...

  Maybe one of these days she’d find her spine.

  Ellie looked down at her mobile, realised that her father hadn’t said goodbye before disconnecting and shrugged. Situation normal. She glanced at the monitor again and saw the impatience on Jack’s face, caught his tapping foot. The muscles in his arms bulged as he folded them across his chest. Although the feed was in black and white she knew that his eyes were hazel...sometimes brown, sometimes green, gold, always compelling. Right now they were blazing with a combination of frustration, exhaustion and a very healthy dose of annoyance.

  He was different from the twenty-four-year-old she’d met a decade ago. Older, harder, a bit damaged. Ellie felt an unfamiliar buzz in her womb and cocked her head as attraction skittered through her veins and caused her heartbeat to fuzz...

  She tossed her mobile onto her desk and pushed her chair back as she stood up and blew out a breath.

  It didn’t matter that he was tall, built and had a sexy face that could stop traffic, she lectured herself. Crazy came in all packages.

  * * *

  ‘Jack?’

  Jack Chapman, standing in the front section of the bakery—aqua stripes on the walls, black checked floors, white cabinets, a sunshine-yellow surfboard—whirled around at the low, melodious voice and blinked. Then blinked again. He knew he was tired, but this was ridiculous...

  He’d been expecting the awkward, overweight, shy girl from Mitch’s wedding not this...babe! This tropical, colourful, radiant, riveting, dazzling babe. With a capital B. In bold and italics.

  Waist-length black hair streaked with purple and green stripes, milk-saturated coffee skin, vivid blue eyes and her father’s pugnacious chin.

  And slim, curvy legs that went up to her ears.

  ‘Hi, I’m Ellie. Mitchell has asked me to put you up for the night.’

  His pulse kicked up as he struggled to find his words. He eventually managed to spit a couple out. ‘I’m grateful. Thank you.’

  Whoa! Jack dropped his pack to the floor and resisted the impulse to put his hand on his heart to check if it was okay. With his history...

  You are not having a heart attack, you moron! Major overreaction here, dude, cool your jets!

  So she wasn’t who he’d been expecting? In his line of work little was as expected, so why was his heart jumping and his mouth dry?

  Jack rocked on his heels, looked around and tried not to act like a gauche teenager. ‘This is a really nice place. Do you own it?’

  Ellie looked around and the corners of her mouth tipped up. ‘Yep. My mum and I are partners.’

  ‘Ah...’ He looked at the empty display fridges. ‘Where’s the food? Shouldn’t there be food?’

  Her smile was a fist to his sternum.

  ‘Most of the baked goods are sold out and we put the deli meats away every night.’ She fiddled with the strap of her huge leather tote bag. ‘So, how was your flight?’ she asked politely.

  Sitting on the floor of a cargo plane in turbulence, with bruised ribs and a pounding headache? Just peachy. ‘Fine, thanks.’

  The reality was that he was exhausted, achingly stiff and sore, and his side felt as if he had a red-hot poker lodged inside it. He wanted a shower and to sleep for a week. His glance slid to a fridge filled with soft drinks. And he’d kill someone for a Coke.

  Ellie caught his look and waved to the fridge. ‘Help yourself.’

  Jack grimaced. ‘I can’t pay for it.’

  ‘Pari’s can afford to give you a can on the house,’ Ellie said wryly.

  The words were barely out of her mouth and he was opening the fridge, yanking out a red can and popping the tab. The tart, sugary liquid slid down his throat and he sighed, knowing the sugar and caffeine would give him another hour or two of energy. Maybe...

  He swore under his breath as once again he realised that he was stuck halfway across the world. He couldn’t even pay for a damn soft drink. He silently cursed again. He needed to borrow cash and a bed from Ellie until his replacement bank cards were delivered. He grimaced at the sour taste now in his mouth. Having to ask for help made him feel...out of control, helpless. Powerless.

  He hated to feel beholden, but he reminded himself it would only be for a night—two, maximum.

  Jack finished his drink and looked around for a bin.

  Ellie took the can from him, walked behind the counter and tossed it away. ‘Help yourself to another, if you like.’

  ‘I’m okay. Thanks.’

  Ellie’s eyebrows lifted and their eyes caught and held. Jack thought that she was an amazing combination of east and west: skin from her Goan-born grandparents, and blue eyes and that chin from her Irish father. Her body was all her own and should come with a ‘Danger’ warning. Long legs, tiny waist, incredible breasts...

  Because he was very, very good at reading body language, he saw wariness in her face, a lot of shyness and a hint of resignation. Could he blame her? He was a stranger, about to move into her house.

  ‘Funky décor,’ he said, trying to put her at ease. Hanging off the wall next to the front door was a fire-red canoe; its seating area sprouting gushing bunches of multi-coloured daisy-like flowers. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen surfboards and canoes used to decorate before. Or filled with flowers.’

  Ellie laughed. ‘I know; they are completely over the top, but such fun!’

  ‘Those daisy things look real,’ Jack commented.

  ‘Gerbera daisies—and I don’t think there’s a point to flower arrangements if they aren’t real,’ Ellie replied.

  He’d never thought about flowers that way. Actually, he’d never thought about flowers at all. ‘What’s with the signatures on the canoe?’

  Ellie shrugged. ‘I have no idea. I bought it like that.’

  Jack shoved his hand into the pocket of his jeans and winced when the taxi driver leaned on his horn. Dammit, he’d forgotten about him. He felt humiliation tighten his throat. Now came the hard part, he thought, cursing under his breath. A soft drink was one thing...

  ‘Look, I’m really sorry, but I’ve got myself into a bit of a sticky situation... Is there any chance you
could pay the taxi fare for me? I’m good for it, I promise.’

  ‘Sure.’ Ellie reached into her bag, pulled out her purse and handed him a couple of bills.

  Jack felt the tips of his fingers brush hers and winced at the familiar flame that licked its way up his arm. His body had decided that it was seriously attracted to her and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Damn, Jack thought, as he stomped out through the door to pay his taxi fare. He really didn’t feel comfortable being attracted to a woman he was beholden to, who was his mentor’s beloved daughter and with whom he’d spend only two days before blowing out of her life.

  Just ignore it, Jack told himself. You’re a grown man, firmly in control of your libido.

  He blew air into his cheeks as he handed the money over to the taxi driver and rubbed his hand over his face. The door behind him opened and he turned away from the road to see Ellie lugging his heavy rucksack through the door. Ignoring his burning side, he broke into a jog, quickly reached her and took his pack from her. The gangster bastards had taken his iPad, his satellite and mobile phones, his cash and credit cards, but had left him his dirty, disgusting clothes.

  He would’ve left them too...

  ‘Here—let me take that.’ Jack took his rucksack from her.

  ‘I just need to lock up and we can go,’ Ellie said, before disappearing back inside the building.

  Jack waited in the late-afternoon sun on the corner, his rucksack resting against an aqua pot planted with hot-pink flowers. He was beginning to suspect—from her multi-coloured hair and her bright bakery with its pink and purple exterior—that Ellie liked colour. Lots of it.

  Mitchell had mentioned that Ellie was a baker and he’d expected her to be frumpy and housewifey, rotund and rosy—not slim, sexy and arty. Even her jewellery was creative: multi-length strands of beads in different shades of blue. He could say something about lucky beads to be against that chest, but decided that even the thought was pathetic...