by Various
“You want her to?”
“Of course.” She removed her tingling hand as they reached the top of the slope. “I don’t suppose your exwife will. Mightn’t it be a good idea if I called you Mr McAlpine while she’s around?”
“We don’t go in for such formality around here, Olivia. Clint is fine. My ex-wife has a new man in her life. With any luck at all she’ll marry him.”
“What is love?” she asked.
His expression turned bleak. “Whatever it is, Olivia, it’s in pretty short supply.”
Saturday morning Olivia was up at first light. She was nervous, although she’d had a great team to support her during the week—no lukewarm responses such as she’d been guilty of herself in the past, but enthusiastic approval. It occurred to her she had lived her life encased in her own private space. That wasn’t happening here. The team wanted in. Her “posh” accent brought forth many a chuckle from the house girls, as though she was doing a lot of it for fun.
Bessie came and went as she pleased. She was treated with great respect as befitting a tribal princess. This week she had returned from a painting trip into the desert, presenting Olivia with her first piece of what was a unique blend of aboriginal and western art. The canvas depicted a field of wildflowers, their faces with wonderful definition. Great storm clouds were massed in the background; in the foreground an aboriginal rain maker, naked except for a few strategic feathers, going about his ancient ritual, holding aloft a long stick which Bessie told her was a yamstick, always associated with magical powers.
“This is magic, Bessie.” Olivia felt moved to tears by such a splendid gift.
“Them fellas do the magic. I’ve seen ‘em make rain. The downpours make the desert bloom. All those wildflowers I paint are botanically correct.”
“I’m sure they are. Thank you so much, Bessie. I love it. I’ll take it home with me when I go. Value it always.”
“That’s if we let yah escape!” Bessie gave a big smile, showing her beautiful teeth. “Your heart has opened up, Livvy. You might not get to leave us at all.”
Again Olivia thought she was privy to a prophecy.
So many times in the past she had been challenged to show off her skills as her father’s hostess. Heaven knows she had done the rounds of all the major social events—the Balfours were invited everywhere—as well as formal and informal dinner parties. She had always felt confident of orchestrating a dinner party for anything up to forty people. She had made it her business to foresee everything her father might want and he was a very exacting man. Which people were fun, interesting, socially connected, influential, including those that were at the top of the political game.
Kath had been a tower of strength, making her famous bitter-chocolate mousse tart which Olivia had pronounced superb at their trial run. There was a time-honoured Moroccan orange tart—almost as delicious—for those who professed to have had their fill of chocolate. Honestly, could that happen? For starters she planned oysters in champagne with caramelised spring onions. For those who didn’t like oysters, there were artichoke hearts with foie gras.
Because she had spent so much time in Morocco and McAlpine knew it well, she and Kath had perfected a tagine of chicken with preserved lemon. It was to be served with piping-hot rice and garnished with tiny sprigs of watercress. She’d had lots of fun choosing the wines from an extensive cellar, of imported and domestic product. Nothing but the best!
Kath had thoroughly enjoyed being put on her mettle. The four house girls, with Bessie making up a highly vocal and sharp observer, were fascinated by the whole procedure. The house was full of the most beautiful flowers. The orchids that had been flown in from Thailand had cost an arm and a leg.
“You’ve got carte blanche!” McAlpine had assured her before he left.
“You sure know how to do things, Livvy,” Bessie gazed with pleasure around the formal dining room. “I never seen a dinner table look so beautiful. Clint’s mum and his aunty Buffy are known for their gracious tables. Just between you me and the gatepost, they’ve met their match.”
Olivia had to blush. The team were so full of unstinting praise. It would be terrible to come a cropper. Especially with the ex-Mrs McAlpine around. “I’m good at some things, Bessie,” she confided, perfecting the placement of a table setting. “Not terribly good at others.”
“Get away with yah!” said Bessie. “All you’ll ever need to be is yahself.” She rubbed her palms together as though the friction was the first move in creating a spell. “So what are you gunna wear?” she asked with interest, surveying Olivia’s ultra-slim figure. Olivia was wearing one of her silk shirts with linen trousers, her hair pulled tight off her face into a Grecian knot.
“Lord knows! I may need some advice.” Bessie had proved herself as a wonderfully artistic person. She had a great eye for colour.
“Just don’t go scraping yah hair back,” Bessie advised “Not that it ain’t nice. But for evenin’! I just love your hair. When it’s out you look like a princess in a fairy tale.”
“Except I don’t really go in for glamour, Bessie.”
“That’s because you’re always hidin’,” said Bessie. “Yah can’t stifle the person yah really are, Livvy. Not forever. I bin dreaming about yah!” Bessie’s liquid gaze was deep and mysterious. “I wanna see those dreams come true.”
Chapter Six
TRUE to his word, McAlpine was back at the homestead by 10:30 a.m. He strode along the portico feeling like a man with a renewed zest for life, entering the house in time to see the strange yet intensely familiar Ms Olivia Balfour tweaking an extravagant arrangement of flowers that wouldn’t have been out of place in the lobby of the Bangkok Oriental. True to her patrician style, she had commandeered the magnificent Chinese fish bowl that stood on its rosewood stand and filled it with every flower under the sun. He recognised masses of Oriental lilies, orchids of many varieties—flights of phalaenopsis like quivering butterflies, sprays of purple dendrobiums—Queensland’s state flower, roses, grasses, ferns, branches, lotus pods, you name it. No one had ever used the very valuable eighteenth-century fish bowl before for flower arrangements. Not even his mother. He had to say the effect was little short of sumptuous which wouldn’t have been a difficult task for a Balfour of Balfour Manor.
“How much did that little lot set me back?” He had to fight off the strong compulsion to catch her up and kiss her. Why not, considering their mind-blowing physical reaction to each other at Lubra Lakes. What had prompted him to kiss her? He had known perfectly well he was playing with fire and it didn’t exactly tally with his claim he was off women. Still he had steamed ahead. Even more of a folly was that she had never been out of his mind for the past few days. In fact, Ms Olivia Balfour had turned his ordered world upside down. It stunned him.
And yet! He had never felt so alive.
Olivia, for her part, turned her head slowly, pretending calm, when she ached with excitement. Even the sound of his voice caused her heart to go into overdrive and every cell in her body to vibrate. “I hoped you’d like it,” she said coolly, falling back on her long training. “Would you like to give the dining room and the reception rooms the once-over? My father always does.”
“By all means!” he answered crisply as he joined her. Why the hell didn’t he entwine her in his arms? She had to be nervous because she began to check her immaculate hairdo. “Let’s emulate Oscar. He recognised your value way back as a chatelaine. I’m sure he never meant to, but he treated you more like a wife than a daughter. Look after the children, run the manor and the various houses around the world, organise all the dinner parties, open the garden parties and the fetes, look after the charities, action groups, whatever!”
He had the shocking ability to hit on raw truths. Hadn’t the very same thing crossed her mind more than once, before being swiftly banished as disloyalty?
“All my life I’ve worked to be the person my father wanted me to be,” she confessed. “He always spoke of a father’s
unconditional love but we all knew certain conditions went along with that love.”
He smiled wryly. “So now you’re coming around to thinking you’ve spent your life stifling the person you really are?”
“But that’s what you want me to think, isn’t it?”
“Don’t let’s waste time, Olivia. I do.”
“Well, at Balfour Manor, chatelaine is a very prestigious position.”
“There are better ways to go,” he pointed out sardonically.
“Did your business affairs go well?” She broke the lengthening silence. Why did he make her feel so foolish?
“They did, Ms Balfour. Thank you for asking.”
He gave her that mocking smile. Such an illumination of his handsome features that could sometimes look stern. She sucked in her breath, fluttery feelings in her chest and stomach. All the time he’d been away she had caught herself up, fantasising about having sex with this man. No one could have been more surprised than herself. She’d had the odd daydream in the past. Nothing like what was happening to her now.
Pitiful, Olivia. A huge mistake.
It wasn’t smart to ignore the voice in one’s head. Generally speaking it only gave good advice. The big trouble was, her body spoke a different language. McAlpine would be an adventurous, blindingly passionate lover. Very erotic. Her scant handful of lovers had never ventured past the time-honoured—maybe outdated?—missionary position. Every instinct screamed that McAlpine would run the gamut of positions that were mutually, ravishingly arousing.
She had to shake herself out of yet another reverie.
“All most ethical,” he was saying with satisfaction. “I’m stretching my horizons, Olivia. I want you to do that too. Get into new things. As far as business goes, even in the huge global downturn, there are strategies to keep afloat.”
“Well, my father seems to think you’re someone extraordinary,” she said, allowing the note of hauteur to creep back into her voice again. The last thing she could afford was to have him know he was occupying just about all her thoughts. It wouldn’t win her any points with his ex-wife and his daughter either to appear smitten.
“Can’t leave you alone for long, can I?” His gleaming eyes were brim full of mockery.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Simple, Olivia. You’re back to the divine aloofness. And you do it superbly. So tell me, what are you wearing this evening? Your best black?”
Best black! If there was one thing she hated it was a man who could read her mind. Suddenly her best black lost its appeal. “Perhaps I’ll surprise you,” she said tartly.
“That’s great! I so look forward to seeing different aspects of your personality emerge.”
“I have you under observation as well.” She turned away to adjust a dried lily pod that looked perfectly fine the way it was. “What right do you have to be so patronising about my wardrobe?”
“Not patronising, Olivia. I want to help you. I thought we’d agreed you would look upon me as your mentor.”
“I don’t know that I agreed to that!”
“Oh, you agreed all right,” he said very drily. “So don’t let me down.”
“Perish the thought! Shall we continue on our rounds?” she asked briskly.
He gave her a droll look. “By all means, Matron.” He gestured with his hand for her to lead on.
She called on her old claim to fame. Coolness under pressure. Blonde head held high she began to stalk away from him. “Thank God I’m only here for a few months.”
“Just bear in mind others have had an epiphany in less time,” he called, admiring the swish of hips and long slender legs. Ms Olivia Balfour would be a match for any man.
McAlpine’s guests, obviously not short of a shilling, began arriving by light aircraft not all that long later. Neil and Celine Jameson, a pleasant young couple; Peter and Barbara Corbett, who greeted her in a warm friendly manner; Brendan Fraser, McAlpine’s close friend, with a knockout young redhead many years his junior, Chloe, on his arm. Olivia recalled Kath’s description of him as the “perennial bachelor.” She also recalled he was the one who had called the ex-Mrs McAlpine a she-devil. What a ghastly description! Did Marigole really deserve it? She had the weekend to find out.
Brendan was tall, rugged, with a zesty way about him that made people laugh and relax. Olivia didn’t overlook the high intelligence and the piercing shrewdness in the humorous dark eyes. She didn’t have the slightest doubt Brendan had started summing her up from the moment they had been introduced. Obviously he was very protective of his lifelong pal. Not that McAlpine needed any protection. But men stuck together. That was the way of it.
The last to arrive, predictably, as Kath had warned her in advance, were Marigole, her daughter, Georgina, and Marigole’s new man in her life, Lucas Harcourt.
Everyone and everything had fallen so neatly into place, small wonder Olivia thought something just had to go wrong. It wasn’t such a great surprise, then, when it did.
Marigole McAlpine was just about as unfriendly as one woman could get with another. After a tip-to-toe rake of Olivia’s elegant figure, she assumed the expression of a woman intent on a cold war. No question, the ex-Mrs McAlpine still had an extremely proprietary attitude towards the man she had divorced.
Oh, right! She is a she-devil.
“How do you do, Ms Balfour.” Marigole, who appeared to have a great sense of fashion, fixed Olivia with an icy stare. Not all that easy with enormous dark eyes. They dominated a milky white face of small perfect features that somehow added up to hard. She might have suspected Olivia guilty of sleeping with her betrothed instead of her ex-husband.
And you’re not sleeping with him.
More’s the pity.
“Clint said nothing about your being here.” A rebuke was implicit in her tone.
“Didn’t know I had to.” McAlpine entered the conversation, one arm wrapped around his daughter’s shoulder. He was hugging her close and she was looking up at him adoringly. Olivia had an instant picture of herself with her father at Georgina’s age. The expression was pretty much the same. “Olivia is the daughter of one of my most valued business partners,” McAlpine was saying.
“Not Oscar Balfour?” Lucas Harcourt’s thick eyebrows shot up and the bonhomie he radiated escalated an extra notch. An urbane man in his early fifties, slightly rotund, he had a lined, clever face and a full head of silver-grey hair he was lucky to hold on to considering the paucity of other physical assets.
“My father.” Olivia smiled. Lucas, although he had given her a close but discreet inspection, was very much the gentleman, with a good firm handshake—just the right measure of formality—she liked. She didn’t mind Lucas at all. Marigole at close quarters was the sort of woman she normally avoided like the plague. Yet such women men seemed to find irresistible. She had seen it time and again. Loved him. Hated her. It did happen.
“Good Lord,” said Lucas, his lined, scored face lighting up. “Now there’s a man I’d like to meet.”
“I’m sure when you’re in London it can be arranged.” Olivia gave Georgina, who had said nothing beyond a muttered “hello,” an inclusive smile. She was a beautiful child. The image of her mother. Huge dark eyes, straight dark hair tumbling like a satin bolt down her back. One could only hope she hadn’t inherited her mother’s less than sweet nature. Considering her wealthy background Georgina looked painfully awkward, a mixture of shyness, insecurity and possibly a lot of seething inner rebellion.
“Kath has lunch scheduled for one-thirty,” Olivia told them, not overly bothered by Marigole McAlpine. She had met a lot worse. The Honorable Alice Beaufort for starters, and her marginally less offensive sister, Camilla. “So if you’d like me to show you to your rooms?” Olivia threw out a graceful hand.
“Don’t bother,” Marigole retorted rudely. She turned to her ex-husband, waving one arm about as though she was fighting to find just the right words. “You didn’t say Ms Balfour is here as your assistant.”
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“Lots of things I haven’t mentioned, Marigole.” McAlpine’s answer was sardonic. “Do lighten up. Olivia is here on a study tour. She very kindly offered to act as hostess for the weekend and the various functions I have coming up. Buffy is out of action, I’m sorry to say.”
Marigole’s glossy bob swung back to Olivia, with a look that clearly said, And I hope you screw up big time!
“Extraordinary man, your father,” Lucas was remarking, rubbing his chin thoughtfully and returning to his theme. “Balfour! Now that’s a name synonymous with style and glamour.” He gave Olivia’s tall elegant figure a look of positive admiration.
“I’m assuming we’re in the same suite, Clint?” Marigole cut in, her expression reflecting a bottomless well of black thoughts.
“But of course!” McAlpine exclaimed, giving his daughter another hug. “You didn’t think I was going to move you into a hotel?”
Georgina was betrayed into a fit of giggles, quickly smothered as her mother turned a wrathful eye on her. Indeed she all but cowered against her father. Olivia felt an instinctive flare of protectiveness. So Georgina wasn’t the apple of her mother’s eye, then! How very sad! Thinking that, she held out a hand to the child, much as she had done all her life with her younger sisters. “So, Georgina!”
It was done so naturally, McAlpine thought with a rush of gratitude. Indeed beautifully. She hadn’t a thought in her head that her gesture would be refused.
“It’s down to you and me,” she was saying, smiling down at his daughter. “I thought you might like the Persian room? At least, I’m calling it the Persian room.”
“You mean the one with the dome and the doors?” Georgina looked mightily surprised.
“The very one,” Olivia confirmed. Surely Georgina hadn’t been expecting to be relegated to the old nursery. Always supposing there was one.
