A Kiss to Seal the Deal (7 page)

The two lines that creased his forehead told her he'd said more than he meant to. She nodded. ‘I can see that. He had a very forceful way about him. Particularly after he… Well, at the end there. When he thought he was out of time.'

Grant's forehead creased further. ‘What do you mean?'

Kate rushed in to fix her insensitive gaffe. ‘I'm sorry. I just meant that he must have felt the pressure following his diagnosis. The urgency to get things in order.'

Grant's face bleached in a heartbeat. His body froze.

Kate's stomach squeezed into a tiny fist.
Oh please, Leo… Please have told your son…

His already deep voice was pure gravel. ‘What diagnosis?'

Kate's eyes fell shut. ‘Grant, I'm so sorry. I had no idea you—'

‘Kate!' The bark drew stares from the other diners. ‘What diagnosis?'

Empathy bubbled up urgently. Memories of that awful discussion in her principal's office bled through her. Memories of Mrs Martin's pale face. Her shaking fingers, having to break a child's heart with unspeakable news.

She groaned. ‘Grant…'

‘Tell me, Kate.'

‘Lung cancer.' The words rushed out of her. ‘Terminal.' She took a deep breath. ‘You didn't know?'

Grant's chest rose and fell roughly and his gaze dropped to the table.

Damn you, Leo…
To tell a stranger and not his son…

She reached across the table and slid her fingers around Grant's icy ones. His Adam's apple worked furiously up and down as he struggled to compose himself. Her focus flicked nervously around the dining room and caught the cheerful waitress as she smiled her way towards them with two steaming meals balanced carefully on her forearm. Kate's eyes flew wide and she shook her head subtly.

Effortlessly, the waitress spotted it, interpreted the tension at the table, turned on the balls of her feet and whipped the meals back into the kitchen. Kate had a horrible feeling they wouldn't be eaten tonight—at least, not by them. She slid
Grant's untouched beer towards him. Then she just waited, her fingers still wrapped tightly around his. He clutched them back, holding on tight.

Holding himself together.

‘Are you ok, Grant?'

When he finally lifted his shaking head, his colour was back but his eyes had faded. ‘I didn't know, Kate. I'm sorry that you had to…' His words ran out.

Tears prickled embarrassingly behind her eyes. She shook her head, unable to speak.

He seemed to realise where his fingers were and he gently extracted them, sliding them into his lap, dragging the napkin with them to disguise their trembling. Distancing himself.

Kate cleared her throat. ‘He told me last August—in case anything happened to him. Because I was on the farm so often.' It sounded exactly as lame as it was.

He told me. But not you.

‘Something did happen to him. But you weren't there.'

Kate's eyes dropped, her guilt surging back. ‘No. I was on a conference. It was terrible timing.'

His frown was tortured and angry at the same time. ‘You weren't his nurse. He wasn't your responsibility.'

‘He was my friend.' Grant's loud snort drew more eyes. ‘You doubt me, but you weren't there.'

His eyes blazed. ‘I had a life to lead.'

She gentled her tone and didn't bite. The man was suffering enough right now. ‘I meant you weren't there to judge the friendship. But clearly you two weren't—' she changed direction at the last second ‘—in touch, so he told…a friend. I imagine Mayor Sefton knows, too.'

Grant's nostrils flared wildly and his eyes darkened. ‘If he does, he'll have some explaining to do.'

Kate frowned. This was more than just a horrible surprise. Grant was really struggling. What did he think his father had died of? ‘Let me take you home, Grant.'

His distracted eyes scanned the dining room. ‘Our meals…'

‘I'll make you something at home.'

She stood and held out a hand to him; it hovered, ignored, in space and Kate fought the flush that rose as she let her fingers drop back to her side. The gesture had been automatic, but now, more than ever, was the last time a man like Grant McMurtrie would accept a gesture like that from her. Yet his world had just imploded so very publically and he was desperately trying to pull himself together.

She softened her voice. ‘Come on.'

He stood unsteadily on his feet and dropped a handful of notes—way too much for what they'd ordered—on the table. Kate smiled an apology to the waitress through the servery window and led Grant out into the cool night.

At the car she stopped him. ‘Keys.'

‘I'll drive.'

‘You'll drive us into a ditch. I have a research study to finish and I imagine you have—' she suddenly faltered ‘—someone to get safely home to when this is all over.'

He tossed her his keys with an accuracy that suggested he was quickly recovering his wits. ‘No someone. No family. Not now.'

Lord, did she sound that morose when speaking of her long-dead family?

‘Well, aren't we just a pair of poster children for “misery loves company”?' she offered lightly. It seemed to work; his face defrosted a hint more. She pulled open her door. ‘In the car, McMurtrie.'

Grant desperately needed a few minutes in the darkness to gather his composure. He slid into his passenger seat and sank into the familiar, comfortable leather, breathing deeply.

Cancer. Lung cancer.

A whole bunch of things flashed through his mind and suddenly made sense: Alan's awkwardness when Grant had
mentioned the stink of tobacco in his father's house. The freaky, hippy health-concoction in his beer fridge. The fact he'd more or less got his affairs in order before…

Grant took a deep breath.

He'd even waited until Kate was away before taking his life. He glanced at the face, so serious with concentration, watching the road ahead. Had Leo not wanted such a gentle woman to find him? To discover the horror? He was willing to bet big bucks that his father wouldn't have expected his only son to find him, either, in a million years. Grant had a sinking suspicion he'd been counting on his old mate Alan Sefton to do the honours.

Cancer.

It had had nothing to do with Kate's project or the land grab. Something very close to relief rushed through him, stumbling and falling over the latent grief still clogging his arteries. He should have been here. He should have made more than one call a year. He should never have let so many years go by. And neither should his father.

I see Leo staring back at me.
Were they truly that similar? Would he end up grumpy and alone and sick enough to end it all? There wasn't much else stopping him, just his work. Just the same rigid discipline about his job that his father had had. That Kate had.

He cleared his throat and turned to the woman whose hands gripped the steering wheel brutally. She knew, first hand, how he was feeling yet she hadn't taken advantage of his weakness. She'd just been there for him. Is that the kind of quality his father had seen in his young friend's character?

He cleared his throat. ‘Kate, thank you.'

Her eyes flicked to his, wide and anxious. ‘How are you?'

He nodded slowly. ‘I'll survive.' She wanted to ask something. He could see it in the way her teeth worried her lips. ‘Go ahead, Kate. Ask.'

The words practically exploded from her. ‘Did it not say on the certificate—the cause of death? Or did you not see it?'

His chest tightened up. Could he tell her? She and Leo had been friends. ‘I saw it,' he answered carefully.

‘Yet tonight was still a surprise?'

Anxiety ravaged her sweet face. Knowing would only hurt her, and lying couldn't hurt Leo. Or him; not any more. Yet he couldn't let her go on feeling bad for letting the truth slip, either. He reached over and slid a hand onto her cool arm.

‘I'm glad you told me. Imagine if you hadn't…'

Her brows dropped and she thought about that. ‘I just…I would have approached it so much more carefully if I'd known. Obviously,' she finished flatly and shook her head.

‘It hasn't been the best night for you—assaulted by the local fishing mafia, accosted by me and now digging your way out of the deepest of social
faux pas
.'

Kate's laugh shriveled. ‘Oh no; that's pretty typical of a Dickson night out. It's why I prefer to stay in.'

‘Well, looks like you've got your wish.'

She hit the indicator and turned off the highway into Tulloquay's long access-road.

‘It feels weird, coming here at night.'

But also strangely right. Grant had the sudden flash of them driving home from a night out at the community centre, grey and old, chatting about town affairs, about their grandchildren. Their hands old and weathered, tightly entwined. Just like his father must have always wished for with the wife he had lost so young.

And then to lose a son, too…

They didn't speak until Kate pulled up in front of the house. She killed the ignition and then turned to peer at him from the half-shadows. ‘What did he die of, Grant?'

Damn her intuition and her curiosity. ‘Kate…'

‘I've been thinking about it all the way home. I assumed it was the cancer—but there should have been hospitals, a decline.
His lungs weren't really any worse when I saw him the week before.' Beautiful brown eyes appealed to him. ‘Please, Grant. I know you must not want to talk about it but the question is going to eat at me.'

He studied her hard. No matter what he said, she was going to sit on her guilt for not being here. That Leo had died alone. The same guilt he was nursing. ‘It was the cancer, Kate.'

Tears filled doe eyes. ‘You're lying—which means it was worse. Was it his heart? Did something happen to him? Was he hurt?'

Her anxiety was only going to increase if he didn't put an end to this. He tightened his lips and swore inwardly. ‘Did Leo ever lose stock?'

Thrown off-balance momentarily, she blinked back at him. ‘Sure. Sometimes. He hated finding them out in the paddock, suffering. He hated shooting them, too, but he did what he had to do.'

‘He never could abide anything suffering. Any
one.
'

Kate frowned and waited for him to continue, but in his steady, loaded silence her beautiful face blanched and the liquid wash of her eyes spilled over as she pieced together Leo's puzzle.

‘He did what he felt he had to do, Kate.'

She fought so hard to keep from losing it in front of him, almost visibly willing those tears back under the privacy of her eyelids. But she couldn't sustain it; they leaked, unauthorised, down her face. Grant cursed and reached out to gently curl his hand around the back of her neck. She let herself fall into the support of his shoulder. Immediately his nostrils filled with the scent of clean, unadorned woman. Even going into town, Kate hadn't broken the no-perfume rule. Her hands slipped up to control her descent, one curling around his bicep and the other bracing on his chest. They burned through his wool-blend sweater and branded his skin, setting off a chain reaction of tingles.

But his hormones weren't his priority right now.

He threaded his fingers through the thickness of her hair and pressed her against his shoulder, murmuring comforting sounds. She wasn't a sobber, but her silent tears were almost worse. They matched her perfectly—stoic and dignified.

‘I should be comforting, you,' she mumbled between tight shudders.

‘It is comforting, knowing he had a friend who would cry like this for him. Honour him.'

She sniffed. ‘I hate that he felt he had to do it, but I understand why.' Grant stroked her hair. ‘Maybe it was the last thing he could control—how he left us?'

Us.
That sounded way too good on Kate's tear-puffed lips. His eyes lingered on them—fuller and redder than usual—even in the half-darkness.

The tears surged back. ‘He was so difficult,' she squeezed out. ‘But so lovely.'

‘I know,' he murmured against her hair.

Except he didn't. ‘Lovely' was not a word he ever would have associated with his father.

‘It's like losing Dad all over again,' she croaked.

Nothing she said could have cut him more deeply. Here was a woman who would give anything to have her father back, to have a farm to call her own, to have sheep and alpacas and…bloody seals. And he'd thrown it all away decades before, as though it had no value.

To him, it hadn't.

‘I was born into the wrong family,' he murmured, not really expecting her to hear. She curled her fingers tighter in his sweater and it was strangely reassuring. ‘I bet you would have traded with me in a heartbeat.'

She nodded silently against his chest. His next words crawled out of his deepest subconscious. ‘I might have stayed if you'd been here.' Tear-streaked eyes raised to his, but she didn't speak. She just studied him in that all-seeing way of hers. His
explanation was more for his own benefit than hers. She wasn't asking anything of him, not tonight. ‘Having someone who I could connect with—identify with—it would have helped.'

‘Helped how?' It was more hiccup than anything else.

‘Made me feel less alien.'

Her sympathetic hand slid up to his shoulder. ‘You didn't feel like you belonged here?'

Not until this month.
‘Never.'

Kate sighed, long and deep. ‘So sad. We've both lost so much of our lives.'

Somewhere deep in his brain he knew what she meant—that they'd both suffered loss. But the words echoed around the car, blew a trail through her loose hair, mingled with the wholesome scent of Kate, and all he could think about was not wasting one second more…

His left hand cupped the back of her head more comfortably and his right pressed against her cheek and tipped her face up towards his. He knew then that he'd been thinking about this for days—specifically
not
thinking about this for days. About how she would feel. How she would taste.