The growl had become more a grumble by the end of this declaration, but even grumbled it was so startling Alana found her lips opening and closing but no sound coming out. Then one bit of it struck home.
‘Rat’s-tails? Let me tell you, buster, if you’d been pushing this furniture around your hair might not look its best either.’
He looked up, his blue eyes awash with confusion.
‘Is that all you have to say? I tell you I’m attracted to you and you want to make an issue of hair?’
I don’t want to make an issue of hair, I’m just so damn confused it was the easiest bit to handle, Alana thought, but she wasn’t going to share the confusion with Rory. Best to stick to practicalities.
‘You can’t be attracted to me,’ she said bluntly, though her heart was telling her of course he could—wasn’t she attracted to him right back? ‘Daisy said so, and that’s that.’
She turned away, surreptitiously tucking a couple of rat’s-tails of hair behind her ear while dragging the vacuum cleaner back towards the hall closet. She couldn’t remember if she’d done all the corners of the room but, if she hadn’t, what the hell.
‘Daisy said so?’ His disbelief was even more forceful than his words. ‘What do you mean, Daisy said so?’
After shoving the cleaner away, Alana slammed the door and, reluctant to get too close to him again, stepped cautiously into the bit of hall that opened into the living room.
‘She said it would be terrible for Jason because he sees me as a friend and he’d view any relationship between us as all kinds of betrayal—me liking you better than him, you liking me better than him, you stealing his friend, me stealing his uncle. I think there might have been even more horrible complications but it was all so traumatically believable I stopped listening.’
Rory tried hard to make sense of what he was hearing, but his mind had sloped off down another track. Realising Alana wasn’t going to come closer so they could have a proper discussion about this lightning-bolt revelation, he rose to his feet and stepped towards her.
‘And just why were you and Daisy discussing a relationship between you and me? Why should it even have been mooted, given the time the body-builder guy spent in your flat last night?’
She’d watched his approach with the wariness of a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car, but now he could see her expression change, through startled to seriously wary, then, with pinkness rushing to her cheeks, to furiously angry.
‘The amount of time the who spent in my flat? And what business of yours, pray tell, are my visitors? Do you get off on imagining wild couplings among the various tenants of the building? Do you time everyone’s visitors or just mine?’
Desperate to redeem the situation, Rory stumbled into a disjointed apology, blaming tiredness, confusion, too many visitors himself, and finally admitting it was none of his business.
‘But you and Daisy discussing a relationship between us is,’ he added, retreating to firmer ground as he remembered where the argument had started.
‘Daisy and I weren’t discussing a relationship between you and me,’ Alana said, her pale eyes looking up into his with a mix of defiance and sadness he found both disconcerting and incomprehensible. Why should anger give way to sadness? Especially as she must be lying.
‘We were talking about Jason. Daisy used the “you and me” situation as an example of the kind of circumstance that could upset a kid with a shaky emotional balance.’
‘“Shaky emotional balance”? Did she use those words? Is that what she thinks? Goddammit, why doesn’t the woman insist she see him regularly if she thinks he’s that bad, instead of leaving it up to him to decide if he wants to talk?’
Well, at least that’s got him off the subject of the ‘you and me’ thing, Alana thought, but now she had Daisy in trouble.
Friendship decreed she should at least try to retrieve the situation.
‘She didn’t say he had a shaky emotional balance, just that, given the changes in his life recently, things could be shaky somewhere inside him. She’s given him the option to talk to her any time and, in fact, it was only because I suggested maybe I could tell him that talking to her would be good that she got fired up and told me my role in his life was as a friend, not a counsellor.’
‘Or a love interest of his uncle?’ Rory murmured, though there was no humour in his voice and his lips were grim.
Yet he was so close all she could feel was the attraction she always felt, only now it was exaggerated a thousandfold.
‘The love-interest thing was an example. Truly.’ Heaven knew how she managed to get the words out when her chest was so tight with tension it was aching. ‘I mean, why would we be talking about something going on between you and me when nothing does, or has, or—?’
‘Hasn’t it?’ he said, the words almost inaudible so she had to lean closer to hear them. ‘Is what I feel all one-sided?’
He hooked his finger behind the top button of her shirt and pulled her upper body forward, closing the eighteen-inch gap between them.
‘Tell me it’s one-sided, Alana.’
The words were whispered so close to her lips there was no way she could have answered, even if he hadn’t cut off that option with a kiss that burned through all her barriers, seared its way across her senses, then set her skin on fire. Desire, so akin to pain she gasped, ricocheted through her body, while Rory, perhaps encouraged by the gasp, drew her closer, his hands moulding her body against his, fitting the two of them together until it seemed they were one entity.
Voices, seemingly a long way off, finally penetrated her consciousness and, panicking, she pushed herself away.
‘J-Jason’s back!’ she managed to stutter, then she turned and fled towards the bathroom.
Where no amount of cold water splashed across her face cooled the heat still ravaging her body. Though it did provide her with more rat’s-tails than she’d had previously.
The murmur of conversation easily penetrated the closed door and, knowing she couldn’t stay shut in the bathroom for ever, she wiped her face, pushed the rat’s-tails back again, put her hand on the doorknob and prepared herself to bravely sally forth.
Well, as bravely as she could with a squeamish stomach, unreliable legs and her heart banging so loudly in her chest she suspected both her visitors would hear it.
Though maybe Rory had gone.
Wouldn’t that be good?
‘You’re back quickly,’ she said as she emerged from the bathroom. She heard the squeak in her voice and decided she’d missed ‘bright and welcoming’ by about a mile and hit ‘slightly demented’ instead.
Jason was shuffling into the spare bedroom with a long sports bag in one hand and a guitar in the other.
She hadn’t known about the guitar.
But before she could mention it—maybe question his practice times—she realised he was only the leader of a procession of people, all carrying what presumably were more possessions.
Drusilla came first, with a box of tapes, CDs and computer disks, while behind her was another woman—another beautiful brunette, of course—carrying a small computer with a collection of cords trailing behind it like misplaced entrails.
Rosemary?
‘Alana, this is an old friend of mine, Rosemary Jenkins. Rosemary, this is our neighbour, Alana Wright.’
Rory, bringing up the rear with yet another box which one of the women must have been carrying earlier, performed the faultless introduction, but what he made of the quizzical look Rosemary sent him when he mentioned ‘old friend’ or the dirty look Alana delivered, just seeing him returning to her flat, she couldn’t tell. The man’s face was an unreadable mask.
‘I’m actually also his solicitor, and Jason’s as well,’ Rosemary said, returning to the hall after dumping her load and putting out her hand towards Alana. ‘Though as I was telling Rory, I can’t act for him in the custody case because it’s a different field of law and I’d also be considered too close—conflict of i
nterests and all that, you know.’
She was charming, chattering on in a light, inconsequential voice, telling Alana things she didn’t really need to know—and probably shouldn’t know, given that solicitors had as strict rules of confidentiality as the medical profession.
Drusilla and Rory both departed, presumably to get Jason’s clothes as surely everything else he owned was already here, but Rosemary hovered, checking out the animal cages, talking to the parrot, possibly waiting for an opportunity to say more, because when Alana headed for the kitchen to get a drink of water—which might or might not help the residual heat from the kiss—she continued talking.
‘When Alison was ill, I backed away from Rory, not because I didn’t love him—Lord, we’d been going out practically all our adult lives—but because he needed all his energy for Alison and Jason. Then, of course, I had to give the law firm in Sydney notice before I could leave, but with the custody hearing coming up—Rory’s case is more likely to be successful if he’s married or about to be married—I thought I’d better get myself up here.’
Far too much information! Alana thought as she battled to keep up with the verbal flood. And why? What made this woman think any of this could be of the slightest interest to me?
Except it was—especially the bit about the custody case, and Rory standing a better chance of winning it if he was married.
Very carefully, Alana set her water glass down on the kitchen bench, then she said, ‘I’d better see if Jason needs anything.’ She walked past where Rosemary was still peering at the parrot, through the living room, down the hall and, after a perfunctory tap on the open door, into her spare bedroom.
‘Do you really need all this gear for a temporary visit?’ she asked Jason, smiling at him at the same time so he didn’t feel he wasn’t wanted.
He grinned at her and shoved his empty sports bag under the bed.
‘Scared I’ll stay for ever?’ he teased, and she shook her head.
‘It’s because of school,’ he continued. ‘I’ll have to do my homework so I need my computer, and I can’t do homework without music so I needed the CDs, and Rory’s already told me he’ll personally rip off my ears if I play it too loud and disturb you.’
‘And the guitar?’ Alana asked, and saw the now familiar tightness come over Jason’s face.
She’d said the wrong thing.
‘I won’t be loud,’ he said. ‘I just like to strum it sometimes.’
Alana glanced at the instrument, propped carefully in one corner of the room. It wasn’t new, or flashy in the way teenagers’ guitars often were. Had it been his mother’s?
‘That’s fine with me,’ she said, speaking quietly so she didn’t seem to be making an issue of it. ‘I love the sound of a guitar.’
She backed out the door.
‘I want you to make yourself at home. What do you like to drink and snack on when you’re studying? I know Rory said you’d eat upstairs but you don’t want to be dashing up there when you feel like a snack. And breakfast. If you just have cereal and toast, you might as well have that here as well. What cereal do you like?’
Jason didn’t answer, simply looked at her, while the tightness disappeared and a look Alana couldn’t analyse took its place.
‘You’re being very kind to me, although you hardly know me,’ he said.
Had the look been suspicion?
Slapping down the thought, she smiled in what she hoped was a very reassuring manner and, mindful that she was cutting off for ever any hope of a relationship with Rory, she said, ‘But we’re friends, aren’t we? Friends help each other out. And I don’t think friendship depends on how long you know a person but more on how you click.’
She grinned at him, then added, ‘And how clean you leave the bathroom! Just remember we’ll be sharing, so mop up any mess before you walk out the door.’
These firm words seemed to restore Jason’s equilibrium and, confident now their friendship was also balanced again, she walked away to get a notebook, then returned to ask what food he wanted kept in stock.
‘Rory will pay,’ he told her. ‘But I’m not dependent on him. He’s my trustee, and can dole out money to pay for what I need.’
He was speaking with his usual candour, but Alana was still surprised when he continued, in the same matter-of-fact way, ‘I’m quite rich. That’s why my father suddenly wants me to live with him. Rory’s rich, too, so at least I know he doesn’t want me for my money. His parents—Mum’s parents, too—left a lot of money to Mum and Rory. I think that’s why Drusilla and Rosemary both want to marry him.’
‘But he didn’t just get rich when your mother died,’ Alana said, because the flaw in the story was too big to ignore. ‘So why didn’t they want to marry him earlier? I mean, I don’t know how old he is, but he’s no spring chicken.’
‘Who’s no spring chicken?’
The man would walk in, right on cue. Suspecting, in his current confiding mood, that Jason might actually answer, she threw him a warning glare.
Did it help?
Not a bit of it!
‘You,’ Jason was saying cheerfully, while Alana could just as cheerfully have wrung his neck. ‘I was telling Alana we’ve both got money—’ great, now if ever anything did happen between us, not that it could, but if it did, he’d think I was after him for the money ‘—and that’s why the Drac—sorry, Drusilla—and Rosemary are both after you, and why my father is after me.’
‘It must be nice to be so sought after,’ Alana murmured, sidling out of the room so Rory could get in to put down the pile of clothes he was carrying.
‘Your money is in trust for you until you’re twenty-five,’ Alana heard Rory say to Jason as she walked away. ‘And if I hear any more discussion of it, or people being after other people for money, I’ll cut your allowance back so far you’ll need a magnifying glass to read your bank balance.’
He sounded stern, but the scuffling noise that followed suggested they were following up the lecture with a little wrestling—male bonding stuff, Alana guessed.
And she still didn’t know what cereal to buy or what snacks to get in for her young guest.
Snacks reminded her of the guinea-pig babies, who must now be teenagers in guinea-pig years as they were always hungry. She cut up an apple and was poking slices through the bars of their cage when heavy footsteps told her the wrestling was done—and Rory was approaching.
Or maybe he was just leaving.
She kept her back to the room so he’d know there was no need to socialise, but the man had less awareness of atmosphere than his nephew. And, knowing he’d stopped, common decency decreed she should turn to face him.
‘Well?’
He scratched at his head, and she could have sworn she heard a muttered oath, not quite caught in time.
‘You’re very good to have him. Please, don’t let him make a nuisance of himself. Send him up for meals and, though I know you hate the thought of repayment, just as a gesture—to ease my conscience a minute fraction—could you see your way clear to having dinner with us tonight? I realise you probably have better things to do, and I have to tell you it’s likely to be a bit of a circus.’
‘With three women at your table?’ He looked so uncomfortable Alana couldn’t resist teasing him. ‘I’d say it would be a full-blown circus performance!’
‘There’s no way three could be worse than two,’ he told her, both voice and lips adding grim constraint to the words. ‘So would you come? I do a mean lamb curry. Unless, of course, you’ve got a date with the chap you were with last night. Or someone else. Another engagement.’
He floundered on, but Alana was wondering what ulterior motive he might have for inviting her and what excuse she might make to herself, should she accept.
‘You haven’t answered.’
Grim had given way to grumpy.
‘I haven’t decided.’ Alana found herself smiling. ‘To be perfectly honest, I can think of better ways of spending Saturday evening
than with two women who are fighting over a man. Drilling a hole through my left eye comes to mind. Or having my toes cut off with a bolt-cutter. Or—’
‘OK, I get the picture!’ Rory said. ‘You don’t need to rub it in.’
Then he paused, and a very small smile shifted the contours of his face. Shifted something inside her as well. Seeing those lips move brought to mind—far too vividly—the feel of them.
And the effect of their power on various parts of her body…
‘But wouldn’t you come anyway? Believe me, I’d be very grateful—undying gratitude. It’s just until I work out what to do with them both. I mean, Rosemary’s come up here, thinking I needed help. I can hardly kick her out into the street…’
I think you’d find she could fend for herself, Alana wanted to say, but didn’t.
‘While Drusilla is Jason’s aunt.’
But wants the uncle, not the boy. Once again Alana didn’t voice her thoughts.
She wasn’t sure she wanted his undying gratitude either, so was still hesitating when Jason bounced out of the spare bedroom.
‘I’ve written a list for you, but you’re not to pay for any of it. Rory will pay, won’t you, Rory? And did he ask you about coming to dinner? Please, please, please come, Alana. At least if you’re there the other two can’t keep sniping at Rory about how a single man can’t bring up a child. As if I’m a child anyway. And they talk as if I’m not sitting there right with them.’
His smile, so like his uncle’s, curled charmingly across his lips.
The Doctor's Destiny Page 13
