Beaumont Brides Collection (41 page)

‘You’re going away?’

‘Oh, yes. Unless you call me back, Broomhill has seen the last of me.’ He waited a moment. ‘Goodbye, Fizz.’

‘Goodbye, Luke.’ She was still staring at the door when Claudia, taking pity on her, put her cloak about her shoulders and took her home.

*****

‘Fizz? It’s on. We’re going to do it!’

She looked up from her desk as Claudia bounced into her office and plumped herself down on the sofa. She had moved into her father’s luxurious suite on the mezzanine floor and she was busy preparing to battle for the retention of her franchise, well aware that a rival was preparing to try and outbid her. But she sat back, ready to listen to her sister’s news. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Private Lives! Amanda for me, Sibyl for Melanie with Dad directing. I can’t believe our luck.’

Fizz sighed. ‘Oh, I’m sure you can, if you think about it. Luke is using his money to put your lives back together. Money is all he has left.’

‘Don’t be paranoid, Fizz. It’s being backed by a well known theatrical entrepreneur.’

She shrugged. ‘If you say so. But I wouldn’t have expected him to be obvious about it. He’s far too clever for that.’

‘Have you heard from him?’ Fizz shook her head. ‘Do you expect to?’

‘Not this side of a hundred years.’

‘A hundred years? Is that the time scale you laid down for forgiveness?’

‘I didn’t want him to be in any doubt.’

‘But he loves you.’ Fizz raised her brows. ‘He would have stayed if he didn’t,’ Claudia said. ‘You must know that.’

‘I know nothing of the sort.’

‘And it will break his heart not to see Melanie make her West End debut.’

‘The more so I imagine, since he’s footing the bill.’

‘It’ll be a sell out. He’ll get his investment back and a handsome profit.’

‘Then nothing much has changed, has it?’

Claudia stood up. ‘Nothing at all. You’ve wasted five years because of that bastard Patrick March and now you’re doing it all over again. This life isn’t a rehearsal, Fizz. You only get one crack at it. And it’s all your baby will have. Perhaps you should ask Melanie what that feels like.’

Fizz flushed. ‘How did you know I was pregnant?’

Claudia smiled, turning in the doorway. ‘You’re my sister. I know you. Of course, the fact that you’ve been regularly rushing out of meetings to throw up hasn’t gone unnoticed either,’ she added.

‘I haven’t!’ Fizz stared at her sister. ‘Are you telling me that everyone knows?’

‘Everyone except the father. Melanie wanted to write and tell him, but I told her it was better not to mention you at all in her letters. I thought the silence would drive him crazy and he’d come back all the quicker.’ She shrugged. ‘Of course, I didn’t know about the hundred years embargo.’

‘No one is to tell him anything,’ Fizz said.

‘Oh, I agree. That’s your job, but I wouldn’t leave it too long,’ she added, eyes full of mischief, ‘or he won’t be around to rub your back when you need him most.’

After Claudia had gone Fizz sat for a long time staring out of the window. A warm Easter had brought the crowds flocking to the sea and the pier was thronging with hoards of happy visitors.

The restaurant was busy.

The shop was selling stock as fast as it could be put on the shelves and advertisers were clamouring for air time because of the publicity about Melanie. She should have been happy. She put her hand to her waist. She was happy, she told herself. Perfectly happy.

‘Perfectly happy,’ she said, out loud, defying anyone to contradict her. No one did, because her office, like her life, had only one occupant. Claudia was right; without Luke neither her life, nor her baby’s life could ever be truly complete. If only there was some way to know how he felt about her before his guilt and her pride had got in the way.

Susie put her head around the door. ‘Are you feeling generous? I’m collecting for a wedding present for Jim and Maggie.’

Fizz reached for her bag and took out her wallet. ‘Here,’ she said, stuffing a note into the big brown envelope. ‘What are you getting them?’

‘We thought a pram.’ Susie grinned. ‘They do say it’s catching,’ she added, cheekily.

‘They do say everything comes in threes. I’d be careful if I were you,’ Fizz warned as Susie beat a hasty retreat.

Fizz pushed her wallet back in her bag. Stuffed to the seams with receipts and bills it protested and she sighed, pulling out a handful of paper to sort out, some to be passed to accounts, most to be tossed in the bin. She was sifting through them when she came across the letter that Luke had left on her doorstep weeks earlier, the night of the party at Winterbourne Manor. The night she had fled the scene of her embarrassment and he had come after her.

Creased, stained, still unopened, she laid it on the desk in front of her. She had wanted to know how he felt, really felt, before they had, so briefly, become lovers, before her father had collapsed. Could this grubby envelope possibly give her the answer?

Her heart beating too fast for comfort she pushed her thumb under the flap. The single sheet of paper didn’t say much, but the few words were enough.

“Tonight was real, Fizz. Whatever happens I want you to know that. Luke.”

Whatever happens. The words were scrawled, hurried, with nothing studied or careful in their composition. And everything about the groundwork in his plans to destroy her family had been just that. Nothing had been left to chance. He must have been so relieved when he realised she had thrown it away unopened.

She picked up the letter and laid it against her cheek, laughed a little then wiped away a tear with the back of her hand. She knew it was genuine for the simple reason that he would have taken so much more trouble if it had been his intention to deceive.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

LUKE saw the long plume of dust turning pink in the setting sun long before he could hear the complaining note of the jeep as it climbed the long slow rise to his campsite.

He stood up to poke his fire into life, throw on some more wood and set a billy to boil. Visitors were rare this far out in the bush and, even if not particularly welcome, the civilities still had to be observed.

He glared down at the trail before turning away and ducking inside his store tent to pick out a couple of extra tins for supper. There wasn’t much to choose from. He’d have to head back to civilization soon. But what then?

Melanie had a new family; her letters were full of them, at least full of Claudia and Edward, tactfully silent on the subject of Fizz. Another couple of weeks and she’d be opening in the West End of London and he wouldn’t even be there to see her.

His plans for Harries were in Phillip’s capable hands. He wasn’t needed in Broomhill.

He looked around the tent and thought briefly, painfully of Winterbourne Manor. He’d made an offer for the place, had planned to lay it in Fizz’s lap as his wedding present.

His mouth tightened. Everything he had striven for, worked so hard to achieve had been thrown away in a mindless, stupid act of revenge. He might have all the wealth he would ever need, but in his heart he was right back where he had started all those years ago when he followed Juliet to Australia after their mother had died. At least then, he’d had a goal, ambition.

What was left to him now but to make more money? A man needed more than that.

He thought of Fizz, wondered what she was doing. He half smiled. He knew. He could see her shivering in that pokey little office at the top of the pavilion, worrying away at a column of figures. She needed more than that too. Love, a family of her own.

He laughed out loud. God, what was he thinking of? Nothing to strive for when she was there, in Broomhill? Damn it, he’d go back and convince her. Lay siege to the pier, for every day of her hundred years if necessary. Refuse to take no for an answer.

He tossed up a can of beans, caught it, added a can of stew. The decision had been made and a great weight lifted from him he backed out of the tent prepared to offer his unexpected guest a proper “bush” welcome. He was half way through the flap when he saw something small and bright glinting in the sand.

He stooped to pick it up and held it up in the slanting rays of the sunlight, a small gold leaf, spinning and dancing as it hung from his fingers. The earring Fizz had lost in the study at Winterbourne.

It must have fallen out of his wallet when he had taken out Melanie’s last letter to read again, hoping as always for some hidden message between the lines. Some indication that there was hope.

And suddenly, quite suddenly, as the jeep breasted the rise, even before he turned around, he knew who it was.

He turned as the engine stilled and she was there, her eyes echoing the deepening blue of the evening sky as she regarded him gravely, quietly waiting for him to speak. His heart felt so big that it might burst to see her. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak.

‘Have you a spare bed for a weary traveller?’ she said, at last.

‘Not spare,’ he replied, hoarsely. ‘But you’re very welcome to share my sleeping bag.’

‘Am I? Truly? After all the things I said?’

He crossed the hard ground to her then, wrenched open the jeep door and took her into his arms. ‘Oh, my dear, my lovely girl. Will you let me show you just how welcome?’

She held him back a little, her manner reserved, uncertain. ‘I haven’t come alone, Luke.’ His brows drew into a sharp frown and he glanced behind her. Then he saw the unconscious protective gesture to her waist and he understood.

‘You’re pregnant?’ His joy was short-lived. ‘Sweet Jesus, you’re pregnant!’ He was so angry he could kill. ‘Just what kind of an idiot are you? Driving out here by yourself. Another day and I’d have been gone. Anything could have happened to you.’ He stared down at her. ‘To our baby.’

‘I didn’t drive all the way. I flew to the nearest sheep station,’ she said.

‘Flew! Is that a good idea?’

‘I thought so. I used a regular airplane. It had an engine and everything.’

‘Two.’ He looked distraught. ‘Please tell me it had two engines.’

‘I didn’t notice. And the station foreman loaned me the jeep, showed me the way. ‘ A smile widened her beautiful, enticing mouth. ‘I expect he’s got a pair of glasses trained on us right now and if you don’t kiss me within the next ten seconds, he’ll come roaring up here to take me back with him.’

Luke Devlin put his arms around the girl he loved and for a while was certain that he had lost. ‘Let him try,’ he said, gathering her to him. ‘Just let him try.’

‘Luke,’ she said, a long time later, as they lay under the brilliant starscape. ‘Where were you going tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘You said that you wouldn’t have been here tomorrow.’

‘Oh, tomorrow.’ She heard the laughter in his voice and dug him in the ribs with her elbow. ‘I was going home,’ he said. ‘To Broomhill. To lay siege to a particularly stubborn woman I happen to love.’

‘To lay siege?’ It was her turn to laugh. ‘How?’

He began to softly quote.
‘“Make me a willow cabin at your gate,/And call upon my soul within the house;/Write loyal cantons of contemned love,/And sing them loud even in the dead of night -”‘

‘Stop! That’s enough. My neighbours would never stand for singing, particularly in the dead of night.’

‘Then move out. Marry me and you shall live in Winterbourne Hall.’

She didn’t answer immediately. ‘You don’t have to marry me just because I’m pregnant, Luke. I didn’t come for that.’

‘Didn’t you?’ He pulled away from her, sat up, his back hunched to her. ‘Then why did you come, Fizz? To inform me of the good news and tell me how much child support you expect?’ He glared back at her, his eyes glinting dangerously in the starlight.

Fizz just grinned back. ‘If I’d just wanted money I wouldn’t have come all this way, I’d have gone to Phillip. That was what you meant, wasn’t it?’ He didn’t answer and she reached out, slid her hand over his back. ‘What I want from you, can’t be handled by an accountant.’

His expression lightened. ‘Are you telling me that you just want me for my body?’

‘You don’t think you’re getting off that lightly do you?’ She pushed herself up beside him and nuzzled his shoulder. ‘This baby is going to be a family concern and you are going to have to do your bit.’

‘Oh? And what exactly is my bit?’ he said, rolling over, pushing her back against the thick down of the sleeping bag, trapping her there.

‘Hand holding, back rubbing and the books I’ve read about natural childbirth have whole chapters on the subject of panting. I think it might be a good idea if we go to classes-’

‘We? You really mean that?’

 She took his hand, could feel it trembling as she pressed it against her waist. ‘This is our baby, Luke. A life we made together. Luke Devlin and Felicity Beaumont made into a new person, unique, special. I thought we might call her Juliet.’

‘You’re that sure it will be a girl?’

‘Positive.’ Then her lips curved into a provocative little smile. ‘Of course, if I’m wrong, we’ll just have to keep on trying.’