Mistess of the Groom

by Susan Napier

  Ava, who had inherited the run-down property only a few weeks previously on the death of a curmudgeonly great-aunt, had told Jane that she could have the place as long as she needed it. She had warned her that a real­ estate agent had told them they wouldn't be able to rent the house out anyway, until it was cleaned up and re­paired, so that the living might be rough, but Jane had grabbed at the chance to do something useful in her self­-imposed exile, offering to earn her keep by giving the place a thorough clean-out and making a list of the main­tenance work that was beyond the capabilities of her limited handyman skills.

  Not that she needed to earn her keep, for Ava had insisted that she and her husband already owed Jane more than they could ever repay. She had been under­standably shocked by Jane's telephone call begging for help in finding an inexpensive place to hide, for she had had no idea that her friend's recent business problems had become so extreme, nor that they were directly re­lated to Ryan Blair.

  Ava and Conrad Martin had moved to Wellington shortly after their wedding, and their decision to settle a comfortable few hundred kilometres away from Ava's interfering parents had enabled Jane to make light of the catastrophic impact that Ryan's return to Auckland had had on her life. She had seen no point in upsetting Ava when there was nothing that she could do to help.

  Conrad, who was a mechanic looking to own his own workshop, was too proud-or too wise-to accept finan­cial assistance from his in-laws, so the couple, already with two young children to support, were in no position to rush to Jane's aid either physically or financially. And, anyway, Jane had promised herself three years ago that she would never raise the spectre of the past as a test of their continuing friendship.

  Making that phone call was the hardest thing that she had ever done, but fortunately, and somewhat unexpect­edly, Ava had risen magnificently to the occasion. She had instantly acceded to Jane's strained plea that she ask no questions, even though she had obviously been bursting with curiosity-so Jane didn't have to tell any awkward lies. To admit that she had become enmeshed in Ryan's vengeful toils was one thing; to confess that she had also slept with Ava's former fiancé was quite another!

  Even more fortunately, it turned out that Ava's great-­aunt Gertrude had harboured a distrust of authority, and had held gloomy opinions about the fate of civilisation that had turned her into something of a survivalist. Every bit of storage space in her house had been crammed with hoarded groceries and bulk supplies and there was a huge rambling vegetable patch which, along with the hens and fruit trees, supplied most of Jane's dietary re­quirements.

  All she required to complete her self-sufficiency was a cow, thought Jane with a wry grin as she poured some of the hot water from the kettle over the dishes in a plastic bowl and the rest into a teapot. Milk and butter were the only staples she had to buy.

  Of course there were drawbacks to the simple life, especially to someone who had to cope with the incon­veniences one-handed. Thankfully Ava had arranged for a relative of Conrad's to give Jane and her cartons and plastic bags of possessions a lift out to Piha in his van, but once there she was effectively stranded by her need to eke out her funds for an indefinite period.

  There was an infrequent bus service to Auckland, but so far she hadn't had to use it, and although the house was wired for electricity there was no phone, and Jane was minimising power bills by using the tilly lamps and candles that Great-Aunt Gertrude had stored in generous quantities.

  She had also turned off the hot-water cylinder, heating washing-up water on the wood stove in which she burned the rubbish she was gradually cleaning out of the crammed rooms and blessing the balmy summer as she took refreshingly cold showers. All Piha residences relied on tank water, so she was also careful to econ­omise on her water usage, recycling washing water on the vegetable patch and placing a brick in the toilet cis­tern.

  At least she had one source of help to hand. Her pres­ent reading material was a number of battered 'do-it­-yourself' books and old-fashioned housewifely tomes that she had found in a dusty carton under one of the sagging beds.

  Hence her fledgling bread-making skills. Jane glanced at the clock on the kitchen mantelpiece and decided it was time to see if she had yet conquered the problem of iron crusts. She opened the oven door and used a quilted oven-cloth to lift out the heavy loaf tin she had put in to bake while she went for her usual morning walk along the beach. Setting it carefully down on the work-scarred table, she pressed her finger into the raised crust, smiling at its springiness. Not perfect, but since she had been at Piha Jane had stopped trying to live up to impossible standards. She had even discovered that failing could be fun if you were willing to laugh at your mistakes instead of punishing yourself for them.

  'So this is your "better offer"!'

  Jane whirled, burnping the table with her hip, knock­ing the bread flying. Instinctively she reached out with her good hand to catch the tin before it hit the floor and spilled its contents, gaping at the man who filled the narrow doorway. Her confusion was such that it was several moments before she responded to the pain receptors screaming for attention. She yelped and threw the loaf back down on the table, gazing down at her seared palm in macabre fascination as a blister began to bubble up from the abused flesh.

  'What have you done?' Ryan was by her side, his hand clamping on her wrist as he spun her over to the sink and turned on the cold tap, holding her hand steady under the gentle stream of water as he pushed in the plug.

  He made her stand there with her hand in the sinkful of water while he fetched the cellphone from his car and made a call to Dr Frey.

  'Yes. Yes, she does, doesn't she? No, no skin bro­ken-blisters, though, on her palm and the pads of her fingers. Yes. Fine-I can do that. Yes, yes I will. Thanks Graham-just add it to my bill.'

  As he flipped his portable phone closed and tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans Jane, still leaning over the sink, said weakly, 'You didn't have to do that.'

  He should have looked less intimidating in casual clothes than he did in a suit, but somehow they just made him look tougher.

  'You should know by now that I never do anything because I have to,' he told her. 'How's it feeling?'

  She grimaced. 'Not too bad.' It was only a half-lie, the cold water was having an anaesthetic effect on the fierce stinging. 'What did he say?'

  'That there might be some psychological reason you're so accident-prone around me.'

  Jane swung to face him, sending splashes across the white polo shirt he wore under an unzipped navy cotton jacket. 'I am not! It was your fault. You shouldn't have crept up on me!'

  'That's right, blame someone else for the trouble you're in.' He dunked her hand back in the water. 'You need to keep it there for at least ten minutes to draw the heat out of the skin and ease the pain. Where's your first-aid kit?'

  'I-I suppose there must be one around here some­where,' she said vaguely, fighting to think of something other than the solid warmth of his body as it had pressed against her spine. Why did he have to arrive when she was in shorts and a T-shirt with her hair scraped into a childish pony-tail?

  'You mean you don't know?' Ryan's gaze swept dis­approvingly around the cluttered kitchen, noting the holes in the discoloured linoleum floor and the crack in the window. His mouth thinned. 'I've got one in the boot of the car. And here-sit down before you fall down!'

  He pushed one of the stout kitchen chairs up against the back of her knees and waited until she had slumped down on it before he slammed out of the door.

  Jane's eyes began to sting in sympathy with the raw, stinging redness of her right hand. She had learned the value of a good cry since she had been down at Piha. There had been no need to keep a stiff upper lip when there had been no one around to jeer at her tears, so she had shamelessly indulged herself. In just two weeks she had cried out years of repressed emotion. The sense of release had been enormous and now she was finding it difficult to stuff all those wayward feelings back into the tight little box o
f self-control where they had always belonged.

  She was shivering when Ryan got back, and without a word he disappeared into the back rooms. He was gone for a few minutes and she could hear him poking around the chaos before he returned with a blanket which he tucked around her shoulders and over her bare knees. He made her try and take her hand out of the water several times before she could do so without an increase in pain. Then he sat her at the table and carefully dried off the affected area with sterile swabs and applied a large, dry non-stick dressing which he covered with a thick pad of cotton wool before bandaging it firmly.

  'You should have been a doctor,' she joked into the thick silence as her slender hand was turned into an un­wieldy fin. This was the second time he had handled her wounded person with a gentleness that belied his intimi­dating size and ruthless demeanour. In spite of the vio­lence Ryan had brought into her life it wasn't difficult to visualise him in the role of healer.

  He flashed her an unsmiling look. 'I wanted to be, but we couldn't have afforded what it would have cost to send me to med school. I went into the building sector because I needed to get a full paying job to help Mum out. She tried to be tough but she had health problems, and working at more than one job became too much for her. I didn't do a formal apprenticeship because the wages were too low, but I learnt enough about all aspects of the building business to know a good deal when I saw one.'

  'Oh.' So, he had become a successful, self-made ty­coon, but it was because of her father that he hadn't been able to pursue his original dream. That made two of them.

  'I wanted to become a dress designer,' she blurted out, and immediately felt stupid. There was no comparison between being thwarted of entering a noble profession and one based on the frivolities of fashion.

  To her surprise he didn't scoff. He glanced at her freshly scrubbed face, her plainness emphasised by the pale mouth and dragged back hair, the frowning expres­sion. 'So why didn't you?'

  She shrugged and looked away from the fingers se­curing the bandage, ignoring a faint ringing in her ears. She had excelled at design classes at high school but had dropped them because of her father's scorn of 'soft' sub­jects. Her artistic imagination had been stifled by years of trying to live up to what was expected of her, rather than asking herself what she wanted. But here at Piha the old, creative impulses had begun to stir again.

  'Because you didn't have the guts to go against your father's wishes in case he disinherited you?' Ryan sup­plied when she didn't answer.

  He was still kneeling by the chair, in the perfect po­sition to see the flaring temper in her blue eyes before she abruptly doused it. 'Yes, I suppose that was it,' she said, her voice tight with the effort of not defending herself.

  'Or was he withholding something else you wanted even more?' he asked softly, refusing to allow her to close herself off from him. 'Like love... Was Jane Sherwood a poor little rich girl desperately trying to earn Daddy's love...?' His jeering grin burrowed under her control. 'Or should I say a poor big rich girl...?'

  'Oh, shut up!' she snarled, embarrassed at the pathetic picture of herself he had sketched. That might have been her at sixteen, but at twenty-six she had a lot more con­fidence in herself.

  'Whatever else I might have wanted to do, I was damned good at managing Sherwood's. It would have been a good career for me if you hadn't come along and bulldozed it!'

  He got up. 'That's better. You were looking a little pale and shocky there for a moment. We'd better get some fluids into you.'

  Jane watched him pour the tea, moving about the kitchen as if it was his own, and suddenly remembered what she would have preferred to forget.

  'How did you find me?'

  He spooned several sugars into her cup, ignoring her protest that she didn't like sweetened tea.

  'You made a toll call from the hotel room just after I left. It conveniently appeared on the printout that accom­panied the receipt they posted me-time, duration and the number that you called. Certainly it proved more informative than that polite little note you sent to my office thanking me for my generosity but saying you preferred to accept another offer.'

  Jane put a bandaged hand over her mouth. She had forgotten about payment for the long-distance call. 'Oh, God-you phoned the number-'

  'I find it astonishing that you've remained such good friends with the woman you humiliated and lied to at the altar, but then, as Ava said herself, she has a very forgiving nature. A pity she didn't exhibit that forgiving side of herself where I was concerned...'

  He set the tea before her and poured a sugarless cup for himself as he sat down opposite. 'She said you were more like sisters than friends, and sisters stick together even through the bad times-that once she knew the truth she accepted that you believed you were protecting her. Quite from what, she didn't explain, but then she wasn't very coherent...'

  Jane's hand fell to the base of her throat in a classic gesture of shocked dismay. Poor Ava, she must have nearly had heart failure when she picked up the phone! And no wonder, if Ryan had wrapped his questions in those dark tones of silken suspicion.

  'What did you say to her?' she asked hoarsely.

  'You hadn't told her very much in that one phone call, had you, Jane?' he said with an infuriatingly unrevealing smile. 'Rather ironic, isn't it? First you lie to her about us being lovers when we're not, and then you lie to her by not telling her we're lovers when we are. Who were you supposed to be protecting this time?'

  'She wouldn't have just told you where I was-' choked Jane, fighting a sense of betrayal. She had im­pressed on Ava that no one was to know her where­abouts, just in case Ryan had been lying about calling off the dogs. Maybe she should have told her friend more, but she hadn't really expected Ryan to personally hunt her down, not after she had scrawled that brief mes­sage to him on hotel notepaper, posting it on her way back to her flat in a taxi for which he himself had pre­paid.

  'Not during our first conversation, no. But I can be irritatingly persistent, and extremely persuasive...'

  Jane had a sudden mental image of some of the more erotic methods of persuasion he had used on her in that hotel room and scowled.

  'Fortunately you don't have a phone down here,' he added purringly. 'Otherwise I'm sure she'd have rung to warn you she'd let the cat out of the bag.'

  More likely it had been scared out! 'If you bullied or threatened her--' she began shakily.

  'What?' Ryan put his cup down, leaning his forearms on the table. 'What will you do about it if I did? What can you do?'

  Exactly nothing and they both knew it. 'I'd think of something,' she said darkly.

  'You could' try,' he said amicably. 'But you needn't worry. Ava's a lot less fragile than she used to be. As it happened we ended up having a full and frank dis­cussion that proved enlightening on both sides...’

  Jane's heartbeat accelerated. 'How full and frank? Did she tell you about Conrad?'

  She knew immediately that she had made a mistake.

  His eyes narrowed. 'How frank do you think she should have been? And what about Conrad?'

  'I mean ... that it was-well, it was sort of Conrad's idea to let me have a go at doing this place up for them to sell while I was here,' she improvised hurriedly.

  It had been foolish to think that after all this time Ava might have felt impelled into a spur-of-the-moment con­fession that she and Conrad had fallen in love during the last few months of her engagement to Ryan. That was why Ava had pleaded so hard for Jane's help the day before the wedding.

  Ava and Conrad, her parents' former chauffeur, had finally stopped fighting their feelings and admitted their love for each other. If Jane hadn't found a way to stop the wedding then Conrad would have stepped in and done so, but, having met the quiet, lanky young man with his shy smile, gentle way of talking and fear that he wasn't good enough for the girl he loved, Jane had known that Ava was right when she'd sobbed that her parents and Ryan would make mincemeat out of him.

  Jane would have
had to be iron-hearted to resist the appeal of the star-crossed lovers, though if truth be told, she had also been angry with them for the hurt they were about to inflict in grabbing at their own happiness at the expense of others', a resentment that had been inextri­cably mixed up with her angry defiance of her own emo­tions.

  'Oh, really?'

  She realised that while she had been brooding Ryan had been feeding his suspicion by watching the rapidly changing expressions on her face.

  'Why did you come?' she asked abruptly.

  He raised an eyebrow. 'Maybe to find out what you did with my ten grand-the cheque hasn't been cashed yet.'

  Trust him to have found out!

  'Only because I haven't been able to get to a bank,' lied Jane, her blue eyes stormy. 'I told you you weren't going to get it back. As you were so kind to point out at the time, I earned every cent of that money.'

  She had intended to hold a ceremonial burning, but somehow she hadn't been able to bring herself to destroy what was the only physical evidence of their explosive night of passion. The cheque lay carefully folded in her otherwise almost empty wallet, a tribute to the triumph of pride over practicality. It also served as a concrete reminder of the futility of the treacherous, happy-ever­-after fantasies that lurked deep in her soul.

  'So you did,' he admitted blandly. 'I just thought you might have since misplaced it, that's all.'

  He knew she had no intention of cashing it!

  Immediately Jane decided to do so at the first opportu­nity. But she wouldn't do anything selfishly sensible with it, like reduce some of her debts. No, she would take his damned money and secretly donate the whole lot to a charity devoted to fighting the oppression of women! Let him stew over what she had done with it!

  'Because if you have I could always write you an­other.'

  Realising that he was winding her up, Jane turned her attention belatedly to her cooling tea, only to discover that she had trouble picking it up. The taped fingers of her left hand hurt when she tried to lift the cup by the handle, and if she cradled it in both hands her burned right palm was seared by the heated china in spite of the thick cotton wool padding. With some juggling she man­aged to balance the bottom of the cup in her left palm, keeping it straight with the guidance of her bandaged hand while she lifted it to her mouth.