‘So you feel the same?’
‘About the kids, maybe, yes,’ she snapped. ‘They’re fantastic. ‘You’re really lucky.’
‘Lucky…’
‘Only you don’t see that. You’re too busy trying to be self-contained.’
‘I only know that the kids think you’re wonderful.’
‘So you want me to stay so you can take even more of a back seat. I don’t think so.’
‘It’s not just the kids.’
She held her breath.
‘Look, Shanni, I…’
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t know.’ He dug his hands deep in his pockets and swore. ‘You cook a mean chocolate cookie.’
‘I do, don’t I?’ She paused, and then softened. Anger was getting her nowhere. He couldn’t see what was in front of his eyes-that she was falling hopelessly in love with him, and every minute spent with him was making her more miserable. For he didn’t have a clue how to reciprocate such love.
‘Pierce, I’m an art curator,’ she said gently. ‘I’m not a housekeeper. I used you as an emergency stop-gap, and now the emergency is over.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes, for I’ve pulled myself together.’ She gave another sniff as if to prove it. ‘So I’m off back to my world, leaving you to get on with yours.’
‘I still don’t want you to tell Ruby.’
Great. Back onto neutral ground. Well, it was okay with her-if that was all there was.
‘You can’t stop me,’ she said flatly. ‘I won’t be a party to hurting my Aunty Ruby. You’ve hurt her by not telling her about the kids. She knows I’ve been with you, and I’ll be grilled. I won’t lie.’
‘Just don’t go near her.’
‘My lovely Aunty Ruby? Avoid her? Like you have for the last year? I love my Aunt Ruby, and you have rocks in your head for suggesting such a thing.’
‘She’ll give me a really hard time.’ He looked so hangdog that suddenly, despite her heartbreak, she chuckled.
‘She will, too,’ she said. ‘I remember when I was twelve I stayed with her. She was having a time out from fostering-there’d been a couple of heartbreaks and she needed time. So my family sent me to keep her company. You remember that white poodle she had?’
‘Miffanwy.’
‘That’s the one. It spent its days preening itself in front of the front-room mirror.’
‘So…’
‘So I wanted to have a go at dying my hair, but I wasn’t game. So I tried it out first on Miffanwy.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘Flaming scarlet, the packet said, though fire-engine red might be a better description. Anyway Miffanwy darn near had kittens and hid under the bed for days. And I laughed, and Ruby took a mop to me.’
‘A mop?’
‘She was mopping the kitchen floor when Miffanwy came flying out of the bathroom-bright red-and hid behind her legs. I was giggling and she raised her mop. Well, I went flying out of the house and she chased me and chased me. She was a little tub on legs, without a snowball’s chance in a bushfire of catching me. Finally I legged it up a huge eucalyptus in the back yard. Then I was dumb enough to jeer, “You can’t catch me.”
‘And so…?’ he said, and he was smiling. She loved his smile, she thought. She just loved it.
‘And so she simply smiled, put her mop back over her shoulder and marched away. “You’ll be home for dinner,” she said as she left, and I still remember the sinking feeling I had in my stomach as she walked inside.’
‘But she wouldn’t have hit you.’
‘No. Oh, I might have got a faceful of soggy mop and that’d be it. Instead of which, I had to spend three hours every morning for the rest of my holidays scrubbing out kennels at the local dog shelter.’
He grinned. ‘Good old Ruby.’
‘The punishment fits the crime.’
‘It always did.’
‘Shanni, stay.’
It slammed back at her. He was still smiling, that wobbly, endearing smile that had her heart turning somersaults. But she wasn’t going to be drawn in. She wasn’t.
She forced herself to deliberately look behind her. Queen Victoria in widow’s weeds looked sternly down upon them. Victoria, who’d fallen so deeply in love that she’d spent almost half of her life in mourning.
And here was Pierce. A man she could fall for, just like that.
A man she had fallen for.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Because?’
‘Because you don’t understand.’
‘Because of the kiss?’ he demanded.
‘Kisses. If you like.’
He stared at her, baffled. ‘Hell, Shanni, no I don’t understand.’
‘Neither do I,’ she said sadly. ‘I only know I don’t have a choice. I’ll go down to the beach and say goodbye, and then I’m leaving. Please, Pierce, don’t stop me. I just have to…go.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JULES’S floor was really hard. They padded it with cushions, even going out to the shop to buy more, but as a luxury hotel it lacked a certain something.
‘It’s only until my parents are within phone range,’ Shanni reassured her shocked friend. ‘They keep going off to digs in the middle of nowhere.’
‘Then let me lend you some money.’
‘No,’ she said, horrified. Pierce had offered her a loan, too. He’d tried to give her far more than her few days’ work were worth, but she’d refused to take it. She had enough to feed her for a few more days yet. She’d visited the employment agency-‘We don’t get a lot of call for art curators, dear, but if you’d consider waitressing…there’s two positions coming up early next week.’
So she lay among Jules’s cushions, waiting for the waitressing jobs to happen, or for her parents to come down from their mountains, and she tried really hard not to think of how wonderful a time Pierce and the kids would be having at the castle.
She failed.
‘You look like you’ve been hit by a bus,’ Jules said as she flitted in to change on the fourth day Shanni was there. Jules used her apartment as a base for a frantic work and social life. She’d invited Shanni to join her but a round of drinks was higher than Shanni’s budget-and how could she drink when she had a broken heart?
‘I have a broken heart,’ she told Jules.
‘Mike was a fink,’ Jules said. ‘Get over it.’
It wasn’t Mike, but she didn’t tell Jules that. More questions would ensue-questions she couldn’t answer.
On the fifth afternoon at Jules’s the doorbell sounded. She was in the middle of watching a particularly gripping episode of
She was in her pyjamas.
She nearly didn’t answer the door, but then got conscientious. Jules’s boyfriend was a romantic who solved arguments with flowers. And they argued often. There were roses in various stages of decomposition all round the apartment. It’d be a delivery person, and surely the least she could do for her friend was accept deliveries.
She stalked over to the door, trying not to think dark thoughts about best friends with a surfeit of roses. She
