The Collector's Edition Volume 1 (55 page)

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Authors: Emma Darcy

BOOK: The Collector's Edition Volume 1
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“The artist’s style. It’s a Philip Barker.”
She supposed art collecting had familiarised him with many well-known names. Then another thought struck her. “You’ve been here before.”
“Yes,” he admitted, meeting the accusation in her eyes without any apparent concern.
“But that wasn’t the right time to pay us a visit,” she mocked.
“I imagined you married. With children.”
“Easy enough to call and find out.”
“No. It wasn’t easy, Beth. I don’t expect you to understand, but there was a barrier I couldn’t cross. I would never have crossed it but for you coming to me... and breaking it down.”
He sounded sincere. He looked sincere. Beth refused to believe it. Her silence scorned his convenient, self-made barrier.
He leaned back in his chair, regarding her thoughtfully. Beth sensed his mind wandering down various tracks, searching for the most effective way to reach out to her. It was rather ironic, considering how desperately she’d tried to do the same with him only two nights ago.
“When I first saw you in the gallery,” he said slowly, startling her by coming in on the same time frame as her own thoughts, “I couldn’t take my eyes off you. You made me think of spring. You looked so fresh and appealing. It warmed something in me. I wanted to know you. I asked Claud who you were.”
“Claud?” It came out harshly, like a squawk. The quiet intensity of Jim Neilson’s words had somehow seized her by the throat.
“The owner of the gallery. He was surprised. He thought I knew.” A wry smile curled his lips. “After all, you’d given my name to the attendant at the door, in lieu of a formal invitation.”
A flush seared her cheeks. He’d known she’d lied to get in, using his name as a passport. Known before he’d approached her. Which put a different complexion on his subsequent actions. “What did you think?” she blurted.
He shrugged. “Some women will do anything to get to a man they fancy. It’s happened to me a few times.” He grimaced with distaste. “Usually I cut them dead.”
The heat grew painful. “Why not me?”
“I was angry. It spoiled the image I’d been building in my mind. Spoiled the feeling. I wanted to punish you for looking so attractive and being so deceptive.”
“I see,” she muttered, her whole body clenching at the realisation of what had been simmering underneath his surface that night.
“And the worst of it was, no matter what I told myself, the attraction was still there. And I gave in to it, even as I fought it.”
Hating her, hating himself. No wonder it had been impossible to crack those barriers. The seething sense of barely repressed violence came back to her. That was what had ignited the same feelings in her, the fierce passion she had never experienced before. Hating him, hating herself. Yet unable to let go.
The wine waiter returned with the chilled chardonnay. It was a welcome diversion. While Jim Neilson tasted and approved the wine, Beth managed to regain her composure and her wits. There was no denying a strong attraction between them. That didn’t excuse Jim Neilson’s way of pursuing it after he knew who she was, especially using the old family farm as a lever to get what he wanted from her. She
could
let go now. She was determined never to see him again after tonight.
Having poured the wine into their glasses and placed the bottle in a nearby ice bucket, the waiter left. Beth took a small sip of the cool liquid. Her throat was very dry.
“Why didn’t you tell me who you were, Beth? Right there in the gallery when I asked you.”
“I only came to see you,” she answered in defence. “I used your name because I didn’t know how else to get in. I just wanted to see what you were like now.”
“But when I came to you...”
“You didn’t recognise me,” she accused hotly, uncaring how unreasonable that might be. Somehow he should have known—if there’d been anything of Jamie left in him.
“Maybe I did, Beth, on some subconscious level,” he said softly, his eyes piercing hers with such deep intensity, she felt them boring into her soul. “Maybe that was the attraction I felt, beyond any ordinary common sense. Telling me you were uniquely special in some very meaningful way.”
“Stop it!” she returned, angry that he was tugging at her so powerfully. “You’re just trying to seduce me with lies now.”
“Am I? How else can I explain what I did when I’ve never done anything like it before?”
“Why not put it down to good, old-fashioned lust?”
“Because it was more than that. And you know it, Both.”
“That’s all I felt coming from you, Jim Neilson, and God knows I wanted more,” she retorted fiercely, hating the confusion he stirred in her, rejecting it in favour of what she knew with certainty.
He leaned forward, eyes blazing with passion, voice throbbing with conviction. “You would have had more. Much more. If you’d only told me who you were right then and there.”
She recoiled from him, bristling with pride. Her hands clenched in her lap, fists wanting to pummel him for his rotten, insidious lies. “You didn’t want to know me. I would only have been a reminder of the valley you’d left behind. The life you hated.”
“Then why am I here, Beth? Why have I just tied myself to the valley again?”
“You told me why.” She hurled the words at him. “So you can keep laying me until the fire’s burned out.”
“I wanted more of you, damn it!” He leaned forward, his eyes stabbing hers with a ferocity of soul that was prepared to smash anything in his path. “The fact that I didn’t care what it cost me—and I’m talking more than money here—should give you some idea of how deeply you’d got to me. And if you think I’d pay that much for sex—however great—you’re crazy.”
He jabbed a finger at her. “It was you... you who limited us to a sexual connection. And that was so explosive there had to be more behind it. But you gave me nothing else to work with. Not a damned thing about where you were coming from.”
His mouth thinned. He made a slashing gesture. “I worked with what you gave me. What you led me to believe. And if you’re honest with yourself, Beth Delaney, you’ll damned well admit it instead of sitting on some high moral stand, pretending you didn’t ride with me down the road we took. For whatever reason you did it, you came with me every step of the way.”
His eyes dared her to deny it.
She couldn’t.
“So I called it wrong,” he went on. “Big crime. Never mind how much you’d misled me with your actions. Now you consider it another crime that I came and found out what your life has been like since you left the valley. The truth of the matter is you could have told me on Friday night what your father told me today. And it would have saved all this—” his mouth twisted in savage feeling “—this hell.”
“And you could have come to Melbourne and found out for yourself years ago. Years ago, Jim Neilson,” she repeated with the fury of her pentup passion.
All his justifications were fair enough, she had to concede, looking from his point of view. But she had a point of view, too! He’d betrayed her faith in something so rare—soul mates, always and forever... she’d been so certain of it. A child’s certainty, she corrected with bitter cynicism.
He closed his eyes, shook his head as though deeply pained by her reminder of a truth he didn’t want to look at. He dragged in a deep breath, opened his eyes and settled in his chair as he slowly exhaled. His face was set in lines of hard pride. He gave her a look of dark derision.
“I came. I came when I was eighteen. I saw you step out of your home with a fold-up pram and a baby in your arms.”
Kevin.
Except he hadn’t known about Kevin.
Nor about her mother dying.
“And I said to myself, Jamie, my boy, she didn’t wait for you. You’ve been living in a dream. So I went back to Sydney and pursued a different dream.”
Those few blunt facts, tossed at her in an offhand drawl, completely shattered her case against him. Beth sat in stunned silence, trying to absorb the shock, the awful realisation of his disappointment and disillusionment, however falsely based it was.
He had come, as he said he would, as she had believed he would. Not for one moment did she think this was a lie. It rang true. The bond they had shared, so deep, so special. They’d sworn that time and distance would not diminish it. And he thought she had betrayed it, giving herself to another in an intimacy that should have been unthinkable in the span of time before he came. When he was eighteen.
She
had
been waiting for him, waiting for many more years before hope and faith were whittled away. If only he’d come up to her, spoken to her...
“If you want to blame me for that, go ahead,” he invited sardonically, as though tuned straight into her mind. “I know now I was wrong in what I thought. But nothing either you or I can say will change the past, Beth. Or change the years that have passed since then, what we made of them, what they made of us.”
She couldn’t speak, too shattered by the turn of fate that had killed off Jamie and created Jim Neilson. Mourning was not going to restore what had been irretrievably lost. And he was right about the effect of the long passage of years, far more years than they had spent together. They were no longer the children whose trust in each other had been absolute.
Blame was a pointless word. They had both reacted to unfulfilled dreams. Did he bear any more guilt than she in the way they had made their decisions?
“All we have is now, Beth,” he said quietly. “And what we make of
now
will be the test of what we really feel about each other.”
The waiter arrived with their entrees. Beth stared at her mud crab pasta. She knew she had to pick up a fork and start eating it. It would be a dreadful waste if she didn’t. It looked superb. It smelled as inviting as it looked.
Yet her hands did not cooperate with what her senses were signalling. Her mind was jammed, twirling around the reality that had to be faced. Jamie
had
come. And gone. The sense of betrayal went both ways. They were both wrong. Which left her with
now
.
Did she want to lose what might be with Jim Neilson, given a fair chance?
I
HAVE to deal with now.
Beth clutched that concept with painful intensity.
She picked up her fork.
Now
was the food in front of her.
Now
was Jim Neilson sitting across the table from her, a man who’d travelled alone to his mountain top, a man who’d left the ideals of his youth behind.
He picked up his fork. Her gaze was drawn to his long, lean fingers. They’d touched her with lust, not love. Did he have the capacity to love or was it gone? Did it matter now? Did anything matter now?
Deeply depressed, her heart aching for what had been lost, Beth speared a small envelope of pasta and lifted it to her mouth. Concentrate on taste, she told herself. Yes... There was the delicate flavour of mud crab. The butter and chive sauce was just right with it. The chef certainly knew how to produce a culinary masterpiece. This dish would surely satisfy any gourmet.
“Good?”
She looked up to see dark eyes sharply scanning hers, wanting, appealing for a response. To more than a question about her entree, Beth thought.
“Yes. Very good,” she answered, warily choosing superficial politeness. “Yours?”
“A tantalising taste. It has a sweet and dry finish. Like to try some?”
He pushed his plate of ravioli closer to her, inviting her to share his experience. She hesitated. It was a friendly thing to do. Like smoking a peace pipe. Did she have any reason to hold onto her hostility towards him? She felt confused, stressed by emotions she hadn’t sorted out yet.
He gave her a whimsical smile. “You always shared your school lunches with me. Can’t I return the favour?”
For one sharp moment, she saw him on his first day at school, hauled there by Mrs. Hutchens against old Jorgen’s will. When lunchtime came he’d sat alone on the big stump in the playground, a misfit amongst children who were used to the routine of school life. He had nothing to eat. He never did have anything to eat for lunch.
She’d braved the teasing she knew would follow and sat on the stump with him, asking him if he’d finish her lunch for her. Her mother was trying to fatten her up, but it was simply too much to eat, and if she took it home she’d get into trouble. Even then he’d been proud, not liking to take charity from anyone. But he’d succumbed to her five-year-old, little-girl guile and helped her out of a scolding from her mother.
Seven and five. They were now thirty and twenty-eight. Innocence gone. Trust gone. Faith gone. But it would be churlish not to accept the return of a favour.
She took a piece of his ravioli.
“Would you like some of mine?” she offered impulsively. “It’s superb.”
“Thanks, I will.”
His smile grew warmer, a glow of pleasure in his eyes. It jiggled her heart, lifting it, making it pump faster. Her taste buds were suddenly more acute. She ate with relish, mentally shying away from examining what was happening to her or fighting against it. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew it was impossible to return to the past. But it had been good in those days. No harm in remembering, was there?
Or was Jim Neilson manipulating those memories? If she separated him from Jamie—and she had to—what did she know about him? Hard, cynical, incisive, ruthless. A lone wolf. Sexy. Knowingly sexy. Aware and confident of his power to attract, both physically and in the challenge innate in the position he had attained. Alpha male on top of the mountain.
She was not immune to him.
He could hurt her. Badly.
She wanted Jamie back. He knew it and could use it to manoeuvre her into giving him what he wanted. The question was... what was the
much more
he wanted?
Could she meet it? Or would they both end up dissatisfied?
They emptied their plates, and the waiter took them away. They sipped the wine, content to let the issues between them rest for a while.
“You were never too thin, Beth.”
She lifted her gaze and found the same old memories swimming in his eyes.
“You were always perfect to me,” he added, his mouth soft and sensual in warm reminiscence.
She remembered how he had kissed her on the creek bank, the tantalising caress of his lips on hers, drawing her into that manic explosion of passion. How long could that be sustained? Would it be different now they knew more about each other?
“You’ve grown into a very beautiful woman.”
Well, he’d certainly seen all of her. Felt all of her. And there was more than warmth in his eyes now. Heat, desire, simmering, arousing feelings she had great difficulty in suppressing. He was an exciting lover. Or rather a superb sexual athlete. With a body that incited lust.
Why give it up without trying for more? He wanted it. She wanted it, too, if she was honest with herself. But other things were more important. He might think her beautiful, but she certainly wasn’t perfect. If she had to accept him as the person he was now, he had to accept the present-day Beth.
“I’ve recently broken up with a man I might have married,” she blurted.
Desire was cooled with weighing speculation. It made her wonder if the recounting of a previous lover made her less desirable. But he had to have realised she was not inexperienced.
“Why didn’t you marry him?”
It was a reasonable question. “Because...”
Because he wasn’t you
. She frowned over the automatic response. The dream had not been rooted out. Its tentacles still clung to her heart.
“I haven’t married either, Beth,” he said quietly, not waiting for her reply. “I’ve had a number of relationships, but none of them measured up to what I wanted. What I’d once known.”
“You said it was gone,” she answered, letting him know any game-playing on that issue was in very bad taste.
His eyes locked onto hers, deeply challenging. “Has it?”
I don’t know
. She rushed into speech to cover the misery of not being sure of where she was going now. “I met Gerald at university. He’s a lecturer. I was a mature-age student and he took an interest in me. It was good for a while.”
“You enjoyed academia?”
“It was a larger world than I’d had up to that point. The people I met seemed to know a lot.”
“Seemed?”
“It all came out of books. The
right books
.”
He looked amused. “Are there wrong books?”
She grimaced. “Gerald referred to what I wrote as ‘Beth’s little children’s books.’”
“Condescending. And probably jealous of your success. Did he have ambitions to get published himself?”
“He’d had some poems published. They were...very literary. Not easy to understand.” She shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know why I’m talking about him. You can’t want to know.”
“You’re wondering if I’d respect what you do...or belittle it.”
She stared at him. Could he read her better than she did herself? In a way he was right. How would Jim Neilson behave towards her work?
“You’ve always been a giver, Beth,” he went on, his voice softening to an intimate caress. “You gave to me from the first day we met. You gave to your family to hold it together when your father could not afford other help. You would have given him his farm. You’re constantly giving to all the children who are entertained by your stories. I value that in you far too much to ever slight any part of it.”
Strange. She’d never thought of herself in those terms. She liked to make people happy. It gave her pleasure. She wasn’t as unselfish as Jamie...Jim made her out to be. Maybe this was a ruse to soften her up for a seduction scene. She looked hard at him, trying to probe what was really in his heart.
He grimaced. “You must be thinking I’m a taker. I certainly took all I could get from you when I was a boy. And this past weekend, I took even more from you, justifying it with a lot of false assumptions. When your father laid out the reality of your life this afternoon—” his eyes begged her forgiveness “—it was all so true of the Beth you’d been to me, I was ashamed of ever having imagined anything else.”
She had played her part in giving him a false impression, Beth thought guiltily, allowing him—a supposed stranger—to pick her up and carry her off.
The tantalising question was, how much of Jim Neilson was still true to the Jamie he’d been to her? Pride, she thought. Not showing his hurts. Determinedly rising above them. He’d always shrugged off old Jorgen’s beatings, giving other excuses for his bruises, but she had known. Known he had suffered for sneaking off to be with her.
“I realise now you had it a lot harder than I did,” he murmured.
“No,” she swiftly corrected. The stark loneliness in the painting hanging in his penthouse living room was imprinted on her mind. The Brett Whitely one, too, the scream of the soul. “I always had the love of my family around me.”
A wry look. “Much better than material possessions.”
Jamie had loved being with her family. Did he still hanker for that warmth? “You did wonderfully well for yourself. Got what you aimed for,” she surmised. It was certainly no mean feat, coming from nothing. “You have every reason to be proud of your successes. And take satisfaction from them.”
“I won’t pretend I don’t. I like the rewards for what I’ve put in. But...”
He leaned forward and reached across the table, taking the hand she’d rested near her glass of wine, enveloping it with pressing warmth, his flesh making hers tingle. Her pulse took a mega-leap. Her eyes flew to his, afraid of what advantage he meant to pursue, feeling more vulnerable to him now than ever before.
“Let me give, Beth,” he pleaded with urgent intensity. “I want to give your father the farm. I want to give you whatever you’d like. Whatever would make you happy.” He suddenly grinned. “Remember how much we wanted to see a circus? I still haven’t been to one. Have you?”
She laughed out of sheer nervousness.
“Oh, I know that’s trivial,” he rushed on, his expression changing with bewildering speed, sobering to deep seriousness. “I know there are things I can’t make up for. No one can.” His fingers fondled caringly. “Like Kevin. I’m sorry he died, Beth. Bringing him up as you did, like a child of your own, it must have hurt so badly, losing him like that.”
Tears welled into her eyes. “I gave him the bike for Christmas,” she blurted, drawn by his sympathetic understanding to unburden her private grief. “I made him wait until he was ten. I thought he’d be sensible enough to ride it safely by then.”
“It wasn’t your fault. It was just an accident.”
“I know. Dad blames the city. Sorry, I...”
She snatched her hand out of his and grabbed her handbag, quickly fumbling through it for a tissue. Her mascara would start running any second if she didn’t mop up the damage and get herself under control. She was an emotional mess, being tugged in all directions, too many what ifs crowding in on her.
It was a relief when Jim Neilson drew his hand back to his glass. His physical effect on her was in no way abated. If anything, the connection to Jamie had increased it. She was hopelessly quivery inside. She barely managed to paste some composure on her face as she put the tissue away and set her bag beside her chair.
Fortunately she was given a breather with the arrival of their main course. The filleting of the barramundi was done right at their table, the waiter demonstrating admirable skill in deftly removing the fish from its bones. It was a welcome distraction for Beth. She didn’t have to look at Jim Neilson for quite some time.
Once the waiter had departed, they started eating without resuming any conversation. Beth was gradually able to relax and enjoy her crisp duck with the lemon peppercorn sauce. The chef had definitely excelled himself.
“I’m glad I didn’t spoil your appetite.”
The rueful remark elicited a wry response. “That would have been a shame. This is heavenly food.”
“Good to know I got something right.”
He had achieved more than Beth could ever have anticipated, eroding her prejudice against him on so many levels she was in danger of forgetting all the negatives she had stacked up to protect herself from succumbing to the attraction that ran so strongly between them. In a way, they had been answered or explained. She found herself excusing his actions. And his non-actions. For the most part.
“Your father said Chris has joined the navy.”
Of course he’d remember the brother closest to her in age. Chris had often tagged along with her and Jamie on their adventures. “Yes. He’s sailing the Pacific at the moment.”
“His uncle’s influence?”
He obviously hadn’t forgotten about her mother’s brother fixing up a job for her father on the docks. And a low-rental house for them. It was why they had moved to Melbourne. Uncle Ray had been a merchant seaman, but Beth felt Chris had made up his own mind about his career choice.
“I think it was more to ease the financial situation at home,” she answered. “Chris could continue an education in the navy. They paid for it.”

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