‘To Africa?’
‘In a boat that screamed money.’ There was no mistaking the bitterness in his voice now. The pain. ‘To one of the poorest places on the planet. When I found out they were on their way I was appalled. I knew the risks. I had security people give them advice. I sent people out to meet them, only they were hit before they arrived.’
‘Hit?’
He shrugged. ‘What do you expect? Poverty everywhere, then along comes a boat with a swimming pool, crew in uniform, dollar signs practically painted on the sides. But they’d had good advice. If you’re robbed, once you’re boarded, just hand over everything. Isabelle’s father carried so much cash it’d make your head swim. He thought he could buy himself out of any trouble. Maybe he could, but Isabelle…she decided to defend,’ he said savagely.
Misty knew she didn’t exist for him right now. There was no disguising the loathing in his voice and it was directed only at himself. ‘I knew she owned a gun before we were married, but she told me she’d got rid of it. And I believed her. Of all the stupid…’ He shook his head as if trying to clear a nightmare but there was no way he could clear what he was going through. ‘So, as her father tried to negotiate, she came up from below deck, firing. At men who made their living from piracy. Two shots-that’s all it took. Two shots and she was dead and Bailey was close to it.’
She closed her eyes, appalled. ‘So that’s why you’re here,’ she whispered.
‘That’s why we’re here. Bailey’s spent a year in and out of hospital while I’ve researched the safest place in the world to be. I can design boats from here. Most of my designs are built internationally. I’ve hired an off-sider who can do the travelling for me. I can be a stay-at-home dad. I can keep Bailey safe.’
‘You’ll wrap him in cotton wool?’ She felt suddenly, dreadfully anxious. ‘Small risks can be exciting,’ she ventured. ‘I can make my bike stand on its front wheel. That’s meant the odd bruise and graze. There’s risks and risks.’
‘I will not take risks with my son’s life.’
The pain behind that statement… It was almost overwhelming.
What to do?
Nothing.
‘No one’s asking you to,’ she said, deciding brisk and practical was the way to go. ‘You have a house to organise, a child to care for and boats to design. Our vet, Fred, has plans for your painting, and I might even persuade you to get a dog. You can settle down and live happily ever after. But if you’d never had those adventures…’
What was she talking about? Don’t go there, she told herself, confused at where her mind was taking her. If he’d never had those adventures…like she hadn’t?
This was not about her.
She made herself step down from the veranda. This man’s life, his past, was nothing to do with her. She needed to return to the nursing home to make sure Gran was settled for the night. She needed to go home.
Home… The home she’d never left.
Nick didn’t stop her. He’d withdrawn again, into his isolation, where risks weren’t allowed. He seemed as if he was hardly seeing her. ‘Thank you for listening,’ he said formally.
‘You’re welcome,’ she said, just as formally, and she turned and left before she could ask him-totally inappropriately-to tell her about Africa.
What was he about, telling a total stranger the story of his life? It was so out of character he felt he’d shed a skin-and not in a good way. He felt stupid and naive and exposed.
He’d never done personal. Even with Isabelle… He’d hardly talked to her about his closeted childhood.
So why let it all out tonight? To his son’s schoolteacher?
Maybe it was because that was all she was, he decided. Bailey’s teacher. Someone whose focus was purely on his son. Someone prepared to listen when he needed to let it all out.
Why let it out tonight?
Justification?
He stared around at the shabby house, the empty walls, the lack of anything as basic as a storybook, and he thought that was where it had come from. A need to justify himself in the eyes of Misty Lawrence.
Why did he need to justify himself?
He didn’t want her to judge him.
That was stupid, all by itself. She was a country hick schoolteacher. Her opinion didn’t matter at all.
If it did… If it did, then it’d come under the category of taking risks, and Nicholas Holt no longer took risks.
Ever.
She went home, to her big house, where there was only herself and the sound of the sea.
Africa.
She’d just got herself a dog.
Africa.
Nick’s story should have appalled her. It did.
But Africa…
Since Gran’s stroke, she’d started keeping her scrapbooks in the kitchen where recipes were supposed to be. Dreams instead of recipes? It worked for her. She tugged the books down now and set them on the kitchen table.
She had almost half a book on Africa. Pictures of safaris. Lying at dawn in a hide, watching a pride of lions. The markets of Marrakesh.
Africa was number eight on her list.
She had a new dog. How long would Ketchup live?
She picked up a second scrapbook and it fell open at the Scottish Highlands. She’d pasted in a picture of a girl in a floaty white dress lying in a field of purple heather. Behind her was a mass of purple mountains.
She’d pasted this page when she was twelve. She’d put a bagpiper in the background, and a castle. Later, she’d moved to finer details. Somewhere she’d seen a documentary on snow buntings and they had her entranced-small birds with their snow-white chests and rippling whistle. Tiny travellers. Exquisite.
Birds who travelled where she never could. She had pictures of snow buntings now, superimposed on her castle.
She flicked on, through her childhood dreams. Another scrapbook. The Greek islands. Whitewashed houses clinging to cliff faces, sapphire seas, caiques, fishermen at dawn…
These scrapbooks represented a lifetime of dreaming. The older she was, the more organised she’d become, going through and through, figuring what she might be able to afford, what was feasible.
She’d divided the books, the cuttings, into months. She now had a list of twelve.
Exploring the north of England, the Yorkshire Dales, a train journey up through Scotland, Skara Brae, the Orkneys… Bagpipers in the mist. Snow buntings. Number ten.
Greece. Number two.
Africa.
Risks.
Bailey.
She closed the book with a snap. Nicholas was right. You didn’t take risks. You stayed safe.
She’d just agreed to keep another dog. She had no choice.
Her computer was on the bench. On impulse, she typed in Nicholas Holt, Marine Architect and waited for it to load.
And then gasped.
The man had his own Online Encyclopaedia entry. His website was amazing. There were boats and boats, each more wonderful than the last. Each designed by Nicholas Holt.
This man was seriously famous.
And seriously rich? You didn’t get to design boats like these without having money.
That a man like this could decide Banksia Bay was the right place to be…a safe place to be…
‘It makes sense,’ she told herself, and she flicked off the Internet before she could do what she wanted to do-which was to research a little more about Africa.
‘I have a dog now,’ she told herself. ‘Black runs are probably cold and wet. Doesn’t Scotland have fog and midges? Who knows what risks are out there? So gird your loins, accept that dreams belong in childhood and do what Nick Holt has done. Decide Banksia Bay is the best place in the world.’
But dreams didn’t disintegrate on demand.
Dogs don’t live for ever, she told herself. Her list money was still intact. She could hold onto her dream a while longer.
One day she’d complete her list. In her retirement?
Maybe.
Just not one day soon.
CHAPTER FOUR
KETCHUP decided to live.
At nine the next morning Misty was gazing down at the little dog with something akin to awe. He was still hooked up to drips. His back leg was splinted and bandaged. He had cuts and grazes everywhere, made more gruesome by the truly horrid-coloured antiseptic wash, but he was looking up at her with his huge black eyes and…his tail was wagging.
It had lost half its fur and it had probably been a pretty scrappy tail to start with, but it was definitely wagging. The eyes that looked at her were huge with hope, and she fell in love all over again.
‘How can he have been at the shelter for two weeks and no one claimed him?’ she demanded of Fred, and the old vet smiled, took out the drips, bundled the little dog up and handed him over.
‘Not everyone has a heart as big as yours, Misty. Not everyone accepts responsibilities like you do.’
‘What’s one more responsibility?’ she said and, yes, she felt a little bitter but, as she carried Ketchup out to her car, she wondered how she could feel bad about giving this dog a home.
There was no way she could leave Banksia Bay with Gran like she was. Ketchup would make life better-not worse.
She settled him onto the passenger seat and she talked to him the whole way home.
‘You’re going to like it with me. I have a great house. It’s old and comfy and close to the beach, where you’ll be able to run and run as soon as your leg’s better. And there’s so many interesting smells…’ Then she couldn’t stop herself adding a bit more exciting stuff because, for some reason, it was front and centre. ‘And this afternoon we have two friends coming out to visit. Bailey and Nick. Nick’s the one who saved you.’
He really had saved him. Fred had given her the facts.
‘He’s left his credit card imprint. Every cost associated with this dog, long-term, goes to Mr Holt. There’s nothing for you to take care of. Yeah, he’ll need ongoing care, but it’s sorted.’
‘He’s a real hero,’ she said, thinking of the website, of Nick’s image, and of Nicholas last night. His care of his little son. His willingness to pay for Ketchup. The fact that he was haunted by his perceived failure to protect Bailey.
He was in such pain…
Ketchup wriggled forward and put his nose on her knee. Yes, he should be in a crate in the back but she figured this guy had had enough of crates to last a lifetime.
She was still thinking of Nick.
‘He’s our hero,’ she told him. ‘He’s come to Banksia Bay to be safe, not heroic, but he’s saved you. So maybe there’s a little bit of hero left in him.’
A little bit of Adonis?
No. He was done with adventure. He was done with risk-taking.
He wanted to settle in Banksia Bay and live happily ever after.
Maybe even marry the local schoolteacher?
Where had that idea come from? A guy like that… She felt herself blush from the toes up.
But you need to settle as well, she told herself as she took her dog home. You have a great life here. A comfortable existence. All you need is a hero to settle with.
And put another rocker on the front porch so you can rock into old age together? I don’t think so.
So what is it you want? she asked herself, and she knew the answer.
Life.
‘Life’s here,’ she told herself out loud. ‘Life’s Banksia Bay and a new dog and a new pupil in my class. Woohoo.’
Ketchup pawed her knee and she felt the familiar stab of guilt.
‘Sorry,’ she told him. ‘I love it here. Of course I do. I’d never do anything to upset you or Gran or anyone else in this place. You can come home and be safe with me.’
Safe with Misty.
A flash of remembered pain shafted through her thoughts. Her grandfather’s first heart attack. Her grandmother, crippled with arthritis, terrified. Misty had been thirteen, already starting to understand how much lay on her shoulders.
And then her hippy mother had turned up, as unexpectedly and as briefly as she’d turned up less than half a dozen times in Misty’s life. Misty remembered standing beside her grandfather’s bedside, watching her grandmother’s face drawn in fear. She remembered the mother she barely recognised hugging her grandmother, then backing out, to friends who never introduced themselves, to a psychedelic combi-van waiting to take her to who knew where? To one of the places the postcards came from.
‘You’ll be fine,’ her mother had said to her grandmother, and she’d waved inappropriately gaily. ‘I’m glad I could fit this visit in. I know Dadda will be okay. He’s strong as a horse, and I know you’ll both be safe with Misty.’
‘See,’ she told the little dog. ‘My mother was right all along.’
There was no way he could miss Misty’s house. It was three miles out of town, set well back from the road. There were paddocks all round it, undulating pastures with cattle grazing peacefully in the midday sun. The sea was its glittering backdrop, and Nick, who’d been to some of the most beautiful places on the earth, felt that this was one of them.
Here was a sanctuary, he thought. A place for a man to come home to.
Misty was on the veranda, easy to spot as they pulled up. She was curled up on a vast cane rocker surrounded by faded cushions. There was a rug over her knee.
Ketchup was somewhere under that rug. As they climbed from the car, Nick could see his nose.
Once again, that pang. Of what? Want? Of the thought that here was home? This place…
This woman.
He’d bared his soul to this woman last night. It should feel bad. Somehow, though, it didn’t feel threatening.
‘I can’t get up,’ she called, her voice lilting in a way he was coming to recognize, beginning to like. ‘We’ve just gone to sleep.’
As if in denial, a tail emerged and gave a sleepy wag.
Bailey scooted up the steps to meet her, but Nick took his time, watching his son check the dog, smile at Misty, then clamber up onto the rocker to join them.
Something was happening in his chest.
This was like a scene out of Little House on the Prairie, he told himself, at the same time telling the lump in his throat to go down and stay down. The way he was feeling was kitsch. Corny.
Any minute now, Misty would invite them inside for home-baked cookies and lemonade. Or maybe she’d have a picnic to take down to the beach. She’d have prepared it lovingly beforehand, with freshly baked cakes, fragrant pies, home-made preserves. They’d be packed in a cute wicker basket with a red gingham cover…
‘It’s about time you got here,’ she called, interrupting his domestic vision. ‘I’m stuck.’
‘Stuck?’
‘I’ve been aching for lunch but Ketchup gets shivery every time I put him down. So I’m hoping I can stay here while you make me a sandwich.’ She peeped up at him-cheeky. ‘Cheese and tomato?’
‘I could do that,’ he said, waving goodbye to schmaltz and deciding cheeky was better. Much better.
‘The bread’s on the kitchen table. Cheese is in the fridge and tomatoes are out the back in the veggie garden. I like my cheese thick.’
Mama in Little House on the Prairie would never demand her man make a sandwich, Nick thought, and he grinned. Misty saw it.
‘What?’
‘I was expecting the table to be laid, Dresden china and all.’
‘I have Dresden china,’ she said, waving an airy hand. ‘It’s in the sideboard in the dining room. You’re right, Ketchup and I would like our sandwich on Dresden china.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Why would we kid about sandwiches on Dresden china?’ She was helping Bailey snuggle down beside her. ‘Important things, sandwiches. Would you like a sandwich, Bailey?’
‘We’ve had lunch,’ Bailey said shyly.
‘Since when did that make a difference?’ she asked, astonished. ‘It’s not a school day. We can eat sandwiches all afternoon if we want. Wil
l we ask your daddy to make you a sandwich as well? Is he a good cook?’
‘He cooks good spaghetti.’
‘Not sandwiches?’
‘I can make sandwiches,’ Nick said, offended.
‘Wonderful.’ She beamed. ‘Bailey, what sort of sandwich would you like?’
‘Honey.’ That was definite.
‘We have honey. Can I add that to our order?’ Misty asked and smiled happily up at Nick. ‘Please?’
So he made sandwiches in Misty’s farmhouse kitchen overlooking the sea, while Bailey and Misty chatted just outside the window.
He felt as if he’d been transported into another universe. He was making sandwiches while Bailey and Misty admired Ketchup’s progress and compared Ketchup’s bandaged leg to Bailey’s ex-bandaged arm.
‘My dad drew pictures on my plaster cast. Of boats.’
‘Ketchup’s more into bones. We’ll ask him to draw bones on Ketchup’s bandages.’
Bailey was giggling. Giggling.
This was too good to be true. His son was giggling on the veranda of a woman who was a part of his future.
His future?
Surely he meant Bailey’s future. Misty was Bailey’s teacher.
But his treacherous mind said his future.
He stabbed the butter and lifted a chunk on his knife, considering it with care. Where to take this?
This did not fit in with his plans.
He’d come to this place with a clear path in view. A steady future. Nothing to rock the boat.
Misty wouldn’t mess with that.
So maybe he could just…see. He could let his barriers down a little. He’d let them down last night and there was no issue.
There were no risks down this road.
‘Are you planning to hoist that butter on a flagpole or put it on our bread?’ Misty called through the window and he saw what he’d been doing and chuckled-and that in itself was amazing. When was the last time he’d felt like chuckling?
Misty and the Single Dad Page 5
