David gave a short laugh. Only last week Nick had been highly suspicious of him and ready to kill him. Now, he wanted his advice and the benefit of his experience? Whatever, David accepted it with good grace, knowing that his only real concern had been protecting Georgie, and he was with him all the way on that.
‘Sure. What do you want to know?’
Nick laughed. ‘If I knew that, I wouldn’t have to ask. You’ve seen the club, you know what we’ve got on offer, and if it works, we’re thinking of maybe building another—perhaps starting a small chain. I just wondered if you had any hints that could help make it work.’
He thought about it for a second, then shrugged. ‘I think what you’ve done so far looks pretty good. Certainly the groundwork’s all there,’ he told him. ‘I tell you what, I’ve got brochures on all the hotels in my bag. I’ll get them. That’ll be a good start. I can talk you through the services and the staffing and so on, and it’ll make more sense if you know where I’m talking about.’
He went down to the cabin, rummaged in the bag and went back with a folder full of information on the small chain he and Cal had painstakingly built up over the last eight or nine years. He’d been meaning to show it to Molly and his father, but somehow he just hadn’t got round to it.
‘Wow. I didn’t realise there were so many,’ Georgie said, sitting up and rifling through them. ‘They’re all very different.’
‘They are, and yet they’ve got a corporate identity which is recognisable,’ he said, getting into his stride. ‘That’s important in a chain, but individuality is just as important. It needs to feel familiar but different, and you’ve got to work that out. Play on the strengths of each location.’
Nick nodded, and pulled out another brochure, and Georgie gasped and took it from him.
‘Oh, is this the retreat?’
‘Yes—there’s a plan in the back, I can show you where my lodge is so you can picture me,’ he said with a grin.
‘I want to see you in it!’ she said, and turned the pages, sighing with longing. ‘Oh, I love it. Nick, can we go?’
Nick eyed her swollen abdomen and laughed. ‘What, right now?’
‘Idiot. Not now. In a couple of years, when we can leave the children.’
‘You don’t have to leave the children,’ David protested, but Georgie just laughed.
‘Humour me, here, David,’ she said with a smile. ‘I’m fantasising.’
They all laughed. All except Molly.
He’d never shown her the brochures, but as Georgie flicked through the one for the retreat, she looked over her shoulder and felt the ache inside grow.
How could he ever leave that? It was beautiful. Beautiful and remote and tranquil and exotic, quietly screaming luxury despite the apparent simplicity of it all.
Glowing wooden floors in the lodges, simple furniture, the beds draped in fine white muslin to keep out the insects so you could sleep with the walls open to the turquoise sea or the dark, mysterious rainforest.
And at night with all the lights on around the pool and dining area, it shone like a jewel—not a diamond, but amber, soft and muted and somehow hushed, with the awesome presence of the rainforest just inches away.
This was his home, she realised, and there was no way he would ever leave it. How could he? She’d always known that, but the tiny seed of hope that she’d allowed to grow was suddenly and abruptly crushed under the weight of truth.
She met his eyes, and saw the truth reflected there.
Their relationship was all an illusion—smoke and mirrors, to hide a yawning void that stretched halfway round the world…
She didn’t come to him that night.
He hadn’t really expected her to, because he’d seen the look in her eyes and known she’d retreat.
It was shocking how much he missed her. How much worse would it be when he went home?
He laughed softly in the darkness. Another home? That made three in the last week or two.
A light came on in the house, and he got up on his crutches and swung over to the window, parting the curtain carefully.
Her studio—the new one, the room where she’d started to paint again. She’d been painting the day before yesterday, and she was back in there now, at one o’clock in the morning.
So she couldn’t sleep either.
He pulled on his jeans and put his leg on, then went over to the house, filling the kettle and then going upstairs to her studio. She was standing with her back to him, slapping bold swathes of colour on to a blank canvas—turquoise and vivid green and the soft shadows of burnt umber. He thought she was angry at first, but then her shoulders drooped and she turned to him, and he realised she was crying.
He looked again at the canvas, and a sharp pain stabbed through him. She was painting the rainforest, he realised, seeing the brilliant red of a cassowary’s head above a dark smear in the midst of the soaring greens, the flat calm of the tropical sea, the rainbow colours of the reef.
‘Come here,’ he said softly, and held out his arms to her, and she walked slowly towards him, the tears sliding down her cheeks with every step.
She rested her face against his chest, and the tears running down his skin were like rivers of acid, burning all the way to his heart. He folded his arms around her and held her while she cried soundlessly, awkward with her because there was nothing he could say that would change it. Wishing there was.
‘Come downstairs,’ he murmured, and she eased out of his arms and went down, leaving him to follow. By the time he caught up with her she had the mugs out of the cupboard and was making the tea, and they went out on to the veranda and sat staring out into the night.
‘I don’t suppose there’s any point in asking you to come with me?’ he said after an age.
She looked up at him, her eyes red-rimmed and her mouth soft and swollen. ‘How?’ she asked simply.
‘You could let the house.’
‘Only after it’s finished, and that’s light years away. And the house is the least of my worries.’
‘So what are your worries?’
She stared at him blankly. ‘What are they? Uh—Charlie?’
‘Charlie would love it there.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘David, how many times have I heard you say that there are no children in the retreat? It’s an adults-only resort. That’s the whole point of it. There’s no place for Charlie there.’
‘Charlie would be fine. He’s a sensible boy.’
‘But he needs friends. He’d have to go to school. Where’s the nearest school?’
He was silent for a moment, then sighed. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
‘No, of course you haven’t. The staff must live nearby, though. Where do they send their kids?’
He shifted uncomfortably. ‘They all live on site. They’re mostly young, single and there for the diving.’
‘Right. And Cal?’
‘Cal’s single—well, technically. He doesn’t live there, anyway. He’s got a base near Port Douglas, but he rotates round the hotels.’
‘And do you ever do that?’
‘Oh, yes, all the time. The retreat’s my base, but we’ve got a management suite in all the other hotels.’
‘And how many of them take children?’
‘Three,’ he said heavily. And he didn’t like any of them enough to live in them.
‘Just three. Out of—how many?’
‘Eleven. Well, nearly twelve. We’ve got one we’re commissioning soon.’
She shook her head and stared out over the moonlit river. ‘And it’s not just that. It’s what we’d be leaving behind.’
‘This house?’ he said, perhaps a little foolishly because she glared at him.
‘It may not be up to your standards, but it’s the best I could do with Robert’s life insurance, and I’m getting there.’
Oh, hell. ‘Molly, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant—it’s just a house, an inanimate object. It’s not—’
‘What? A person? No. It’s not. And I didn’t mention the house, you did,’ she pointed out. ‘Actually, I was thinking of Robert’s parents. They’ve already lost their son. I can’t ask them to lose their grandson, too. Or my parents. They’d all be devastated.’
‘They could come and stay—’
‘What, once or twice a year? They’re getting old. It’s too far. No. It wouldn’t work.’
‘They could fly business class.’
‘What part of no don’t you understand, David?’ she said, a break in her voice. ‘We can’t do this! It won’t work. We both knew that this was only going to be—’
‘Don’t say fling,’ he said, suddenly desperate for her not to trash what they’d had. ‘Please, don’t say fling.’
‘I wasn’t going to,’ she said softly. ‘It’s much more than that, at least for me. But it was only ever going to be for now, and not for ever. We both knew that.’
He sighed raggedly and scrubbed a hand through his hair. ‘There’s knowing, and there’s knowing, though, isn’t there?’ he said, and she nodded.
‘I’m going to miss you.’
She nodded again.
‘Come to bed. Let me hold you.’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t. I’ll just cry.’
‘So cry. Maybe I’ll cry, too. I just need to hold you, Molly. I need to love you.’
I do love you, he thought, and it took his breath away. In all the years since he’d first realised that girls were his for the asking, he’d never once been in danger of losing his heart. But he’d lost it now, and it hit him like a sledgehammer.
He stood up and held out his hand. ‘Come with me,’ he repeated, and she got up and put her hand in his and followed him to the cabin.
‘When will you go?’
He turned his head and met her eyes, his own shadowed.
‘I don’t know. When Dad and Liz get back?’
‘Right.’
So that gave her two more weeks with him, then—two more weeks of loving and aching and crying in secret, trying to be brave and all the time wanting to beg and plead with him to stay.
No. She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t beg, or plead, or grovel. And she couldn’t go, so that was the end of it. She’d just be there for him, for the time he had, and take what she was offered and be grateful that she’d met him and that they’d had this short while together, like an oasis in the desert of her life.
‘We’d better make the best of it, then,’ she said lightly and, reaching out, she took his face in her hands and rained kisses over his eyes, his lips, the taut planes of his jaw. The stubble grazed her lips and made them tingle, ultra-sensitive now so that she was completely aware of the texture and taste of his skin, memorising it inch by inch as she moved slowly, thoroughly, over the whole of his body.
Finally he arched up, a deep groan torn from him, and rolling her over, claimed her with a single powerful thrust that took her straight over the edge. Then he cried out, the words distorted, so that she couldn’t be sure if he’d really said them.
But it had sounded like, ‘I love you.’
They had a few bittersweet days after that.
He finished painting the cabin, but she didn’t do any more work for her exhibition. She would have all the time in the world to paint when he was gone and, for now, she just wanted to be with him. So she scraped and filled and painted, and then held the ladder, heart in her mouth, while he did the barge boards all the way up on the gable ends of the house, and when Charlie came home from school he’d take him down to the jetty and sit with him, dangling a line in the water and waiting for the little shore crabs to take the bacon rind.
They had competitions, and he didn’t let Charlie win. Well, not obviously, and not always, by any means, and she loved him all the more for that.
Then they’d go back to the house and sometimes she would cook, and sometimes he would, knocking up some amazing little number with flair and lightning speed, and Charlie thought he was amazing.
Clever boy, to have worked that one out.
She was worried about him, though. He was getting too close to David, and she knew it was going to hurt him, so they talked about David going back.
‘Why does he have to go?’ Charlie asked one evening as she tucked him up in bed. ‘Can’t he live here with us?’
She shook her head, groping for words. ‘He lives in Australia,’ she told him. ‘It’s on the other side of the world.’
‘I know that,’ he said with all the scorn of the very young and naïve. ‘But why?’
‘Because it’s where his hotels are,’ she explained for the umpteenth time.
‘Can’t he have hotels here?’
‘Not like the ones he’s got there,’ she said, seeing again in her mind the soft focus brochure of the rainforest retreat, the trees wreathed in mist, the clear turquoise water, the walls open to the elements. ‘We don’t have the right weather, and we aren’t on the Great Barrier Reef.’
‘But it’s lovely here. You always tell me it’s lovely. People want to come here—they stay with us and they say it’s great. He could buy the pub.’
‘Except it’s not for sale, and it’s really not the same.’
He twisted round on to his back and stared up at her earnestly. ‘I know! We could go! We could go and see him.’
‘Maybe,’ she said, and Charlie rolled his eyes.
‘You always say that when you mean no.’
‘Perhaps one day,’ she said, but she felt a flicker of hope and crushed it ruthlessly. No. They wouldn’t be going. It was crazy to even think about it. Or to think about seeing him when he came back to visit his father and sister.
Her heart thumped, and she wondered if they’d have to move, to go right away so she wouldn’t be torn in two every time he came over and stirred things up.
‘Anyway, what about Grannie and Grandpa?’ she asked. ‘They’d miss you.’
‘They could come too.’
‘I think they’re a bit old. It’s a very long way.’
‘They only have to sit in a plane. They sit all day anyway. What’s the difference?’
A child’s logic. If only it were that straightforward.
‘It isn’t quite the same and, apart from anything else, it’s expensive.’
His little face fell. ‘Oh. That means we can’t go, either, not even maybe. We never do things if they’re expensive.’
She hugged him gently. ‘It’s not just the money, Charlie. It’s all our friends and family, your cousins, your grandparents—’
‘Just a holiday,’ he said plaintively, but there was no point. A holiday would just bring it all back, make it hurt again, dredge up all the agony of losing David all over again.
And he hadn’t even left yet…
‘Is he settled?’
She sighed and nodded. ‘Yes. Finally.’
‘What’s up?’ he asked softly, reaching out and snagging her hand, tugging her over to his side. He was sitting outside on the veranda with his feet up on the rail, and she leant against him, her arms wrapped round his head, and he turned his face into the softness of her breasts, inhaling the warm, musky scent of her perfume, and felt a sharp stab of desire.
‘He wants to come and visit you,’ she said, and he could hear her voice was clogged with tears.
Oh, damn.
He dropped his feet to the floor and pulled her on to his lap, and she leant against his chest and propped her head against his and sighed a little unevenly. ‘I wish…’
‘I know.’
They didn’t talk any more. There was nothing to say they hadn’t said a hundred times, so he just held her, and when the sun had sunk below the horizon and the sky had turned to flame and purple and then to black, he lifted her in his arms and carried her to the cabin and made love to her with a desperation he couldn’t quite conceal…
His phone rang, the ring-tone harsh and incongruous in the aftermath of their lovemaking, and he groaned and reached out, m
eaning to turn it off.
But it was Cal, and he understood time zones. He wouldn’t be ringing for nothing, David knew, and he twisted round, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and pressing the button.
‘Cal, hi. What’s up?’
‘We’ve lost your manager. His mother’s dying. I’m up here at the moment, but we’ve got a crisis down in Port Douglas and I need to get back there. I hate to do this to you, but I know the wedding’s over and I can’t be in two places at once. I was just wondering if I could talk you into cutting it short.’
He felt the sands of time running away under his feet, and closed his eyes. ‘Can’t you get a temp in to help you out and move your manager up there for a week or so?’
‘Done that. It’s not working. He can’t take the dive boat out and we’re having difficulty filling that with anyone I’d trust.’
David swore under his breath, and Molly’s hand settled gently on his shoulder.
‘Go,’ she said softly. ‘It’s time. He needs you.’
You need me, he wanted to yell. And I need you. To hell with the business.
But he didn’t. He said, ‘OK, mate, don’t worry, I’m on my way. I’ll see you soonest. I’ll give you a call when I land.’
And he cut the connection, threw the phone down and shifted so he could see her face.
‘Come with me,’ he said roughly, hearing the tremor in his voice and hating it. ‘Just to see.’
‘There’s no point,’ she said sadly. ‘It’s over, David. It’s been wonderful, but it’s over, and it’s time to let it go.’
She turned away from him, reaching for her clothes and pulling them on, and he watched her as she covered the body which had brought him so much joy in the last two weeks—the body he’d never see again.
He swallowed hard and looked away, reaching for his crutches and heading for the bathroom.
The Single Mom and the Tycoon Page 13
