Relief flooded Maisie and her face lit up with genuine enthusiasm. ‘Absolutely marvellous. I didn’t actually swim with the whales-’
‘Why not? Oh,’ he added as Maisie looked down at her stomach, ‘of course. Well, at least you’re acquiring some wisdom along those lines.’
‘Yes and thanks so much for organising it-it was still wonderful! But,’ she paused, ‘I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.’
‘Change of plans,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you have a quick shower? Are you particularly starving?’
‘No, I had a big lunch on the boat so I can wait for dinner, but-’
‘I’ll wait outside,’ he interrupted.
Maisie showered and changed into khaki shorts and a loose primrose blouse. She tied her hair back and slid her sandals on.
Rafe got up as she let herself out onto the veranda. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he murmured.
She looked surprised then shrugged and fell into step beside him.
They walked to the main entrance, a set of gates with a fence climbing the hillside on one side and a rock wall groyne extending into the sea on the other. At the end of the groyne was a little thatched hut with wooden seats.
As they approached the gates, a man got out of a car parked on the other side and opened the gate-and Maisie suddenly stopped dead.
Rafe stopped, too, and watched her intently as all colour left her face and her mouth worked. Then she blinked and closed her eyes experimentally and, as her lashes fluttered up, she said in a trembling voice, ‘R-rafe? I mean…’
‘No,’ the man beside her side said on a harsh breath. ‘It’s my cousin, Tim Dixon.’ He took hold. ‘Maisie, here’s what I suggest. That you and Tim discuss things in the hut. I’ll leave you alone. But I’ve booked the Tree House for dinner and you and I can-talk.’
He turned on his heel and walked away.
Some time later Maisie stood on the beach on her own, staring blindly out to sea but with the sensation that the scales had fallen from her eyes.
Tim Dixon did bear quite a resemblance to his cousin and he’d admitted to impersonating Rafe. As he’d done so, she’d glimpsed a biting hostility towards Rafe.
But why? she’d asked.
He’d shrugged and told her that Rafe had a lot more than he deserved, a lot that was rightly his, Tim Dixon’s.
He wouldn’t bore her with too many details, he’d gone on to say but, he’d added with a charming smile, the irony of the fact she was one girl who apparently had never heard of Rafe Sanderson hadn’t failed to strike him.
Maisie had been struck dumb.
Then he’d sobered and told her some of his background. He’d also said he had nothing to offer her, he was on his uppers with a string of debts around his neck, that was why he was in Tonga working as a diving instructor, but he would acknowledge he was the baby’s father.
Throughout it all, along with his golden good looks-his hair was bleached fairer by the sun and was now longer, and a pair of board shorts and a T-shirt showed off his tan as well as his physique-she’d got bewildering flashes of the man who had swept her off her feet.
But as he spoke, even sometimes with the wry humour, the charm and the whimsy she’d loved, the knowledge had grown in her heart that Tim Dixon was like a rogue leopard, beautiful, mesmerising, but a loner with only his best interests at heart.
She hadn’t said much at all.
She hadn’t given him a piece of her mind or called him any of the hard names he deserved.
She’d agreed that there was no point in pursuing a paternity suit, but at that point he’d really stunned her when he told her Rafe would make some settlement on her anyway.
But you hate him, she’d cried then.
He’d agreed coolly.
That was when she’d stumbled to her feet and walked away from him.
But he’d had the nerve to call out, ‘So it’s settled, Maisie?’
‘Yes. Just go away!’
That was why she stood on the beach for so long with her sandals in her hand, viewing everything that had happened to her through new eyes.
Then she turned to go back to the room, but one of the waitresses called out to her as she passed the dining room, to tell her Rafe was waiting for her in the Tree House and she was just about to serve the first course.
It was a still, perfect night and the candle flames in the thatched Tree House hardly wavered as the water lapped softly on the beach below.
Rafe had changed into jeans and a blue shirt and he rose as she appeared. After taking one look at her face, he poured her a glass of wine.
‘No,’ she murmured.
‘Yes.’ He put the glass in her hand. ‘One glass is not going to hurt you. I’m sorry I did it that way but I wanted you to be sure I wasn’t covering anything up.’
‘I don’t think however you did it would have made any difference.’ She sniffed and licked some salty tears from her lips. Then she looked across at him bravely. ‘How did you work it out?’
He looked away briefly. ‘Right from the start Tim was at the back of my mind. We have been mistaken for each other occasionally. He does bear me a grudge.’
‘But you didn’t tell me-’
‘Maisie,’ he interrupted, ‘I didn’t know for sure it was Tim, but if it was, I had no way of knowing you weren’t in cahoots with him.’
She digested this with widening eyes, but in light of the revelations she’d so recently been party to, she had to concede he had a point.
‘How did you get him to agree to acknowledge the baby?’
‘Don’t ask.’ He rubbed his jaw. ‘So?’
‘He said-’ She stopped as she heard the waitress climbing the stairs. The first course she brought was asparagus soup.
‘He said?’ Rafe prompted as she left them alone.
‘He said that he had good cause to bear you a grudge. That you’d inherited what he should have and he’d had to grow up in your shadow and he’d had to-grin and bear it.’
Rafe picked up his spoon. ‘It had nothing to do with me. Tim’s father was my mother’s brother. In the natural course of events he would have inherited the Dixon empire. But he fell out with his father, my grandfather-he was caught red-handed siphoning off profits, and worse-and disinherited. Most if it went to my mother as the oldest child, and all the others were girls. Eat something, Maisie.’
She crumbled the roll on her plate and tasted the asparagus soup; it was delicious but she had no appetite, although she forced herself to take a few spoonfuls.
‘Then,’ Rafe went on, ‘Tim’s father, my uncle, died in a parachuting accident when Tim was about six. My mother took pity on Tim, and his mother, and she brought them into the family; my grandfather had died by then. She paid for Tim’s schooling and university and she set up a trust fund for him and his mother. And he and I did spend a lot of time together at Karoo as we grew up.’
‘Did you realise how much he resented you?’ Maisie asked.
Rafe looked out over the darkened water for a long time. ‘He kept it to himself until my mother died. We were in our mid-twenties. Then he dropped a bombshell-that he intended to sue me for what he claimed was his rightful inheritance.’
Maisie put her spoon down and pushed her soup away and took a sip of wine.
‘It was settled out of court,’ Rafe went on. ‘Not that we felt he had any leg to stand on, particularly since it was my father and a lot of Sanderson money that had saved the Dixon empire from collapse because of drought and low wool prices by then-something Tim wasn’t aware of.’
