Mango Kisses (16 page)

What would Miles do with all this? He didn’t have either the skills or, probably, the inclination to run an enterprise of this complexity. He’d have to turn it over to a business manager, or he might start selling things off for a quick money fix.

Tiffany sighed. Whatever he decided it was none of her business, unfortunately. But the challenge of handling such a prosperous set-up was tremendously exciting and the work could be streamlined to yield even more profits.

Apart from the information about Nancy, the notebook had yielded nothing more than out-of-date addresses and business information. Grant didn’t have personal friends. But she’d also found letters. Personal ones. Nancy had written to him and Grant had kept everything by the look of the postmarks and the size of the bundles — eight of them, fat and untidy, each secured by a thick rubber band. She’d written for years.

Tiffany hadn’t brought herself to pry before now and the bundles stayed in the box where she’d discovered them. They tempted her though, every time she removed more documents.

She stared at the innocuous looking bundles.

Why had Nancy written to the man who deserted her and their baby? Why had he kept all the letters? What did she say to him? Had he replied?

Miles should open them but he’d continually professed disinterest to the point of anger. She was charged with sorting out Miles’s inheritance not his personal life, but the letters could contain information she needed to know. The boxes were empty of their other secrets.

She set the bundles out on the table beside the orderly folders of her completed work. Firming her mouth she selected a letter at random, dated twenty-one years ago. A standard envelope, a butterfly on the stamp, neat handwritten address. He’d been living in a flat in Brisbane.

She looked at the addresses on some of the other envelopes. The earliest ones were at a different street address and the latest went to the hotel. Nancy clearly knew where Grant was, right from the time he’d left her. He was hardly a callous, deserting spouse.

Heart thumping, expecting to be accosted at any moment by a furious Miles, Tiffany slid the letter out.

Dear Grant,

Here’s a photo of Miles with his friend, Peter. They went to a movie together on his birthday and then we all went to a pizza place for dinner. He liked the magazine subscription. That was a good idea, thank you for setting it up.

All the best,

Nancy.

The photo showed Miles, a lanky teenager with tousled hair and a broad grin, squinting slightly against the bright sunlight. Beside him stood freckle-faced Peter, smiling and doing the two fingers in a vee joke behind Miles’s head. Tiffany smiled.

But Miles. What a gorgeous boy he’d been. The sort of boy she’d lusted after as a teenager herself. A Sam Black. He was as sporty then as he was now. Both boys wore cricket whites and in the background was an oval.
Did he have girlfriends, teenage Miles?

The phone rang. Tiffany folded the letter and photo quickly back into the envelope and answered the call she was expecting from a real estate agent in Burleigh Heads. Ten minutes later, business completed, she glanced at the clock on the wall in the kitchen. After 12. Marianne would be waiting for her to go to Kandala for lunch.

Tiffany stacked the files and stowed everything neatly away in one of the storage boxes. She left the piles of letters in full view on the table. They were important, Miles should read them, but would he? He might dump them straight in the bin. She stood undecided, staring at them, wondering.

The front door opened and closed with a bang, startling her. Miles was home. Tiffany snatched up her bag and sunhat from the chair.

‘Still here,’ he said. Accusing? Or was it simply he didn’t care.

‘Just leaving.’

Tiffany jammed the hat on her head. She couldn’t look at him because when she did she saw the carefree teenager with the lazy grin and the sporty body. Now he was a man with all the knowledge of a man and the confidence of a man whose virility made her weak with longing. The attraction she felt was growing right out of control and out of all proportion to what he felt, or didn’t feel, for her.

‘How’s it going?’ he asked. He tossed his keys on the table and they landed with a clunk. ‘The work, I mean.’

‘I’ll have a report for you tomorrow or maybe Saturday,’ she said. The letters glared at her. Had he noticed them? ‘It’ll only be a preliminary one. There’s lots more to do.’

‘You’re not working on Saturday are you?’ He strode past her to the kitchen, flung the fridge open and grabbed a plastic jug of chilled water. ‘Like a drink?’

‘No thank you.’

Tiffany turned away. Marianne had been out when Tiffany returned to the motel after her dinner with Jim and Sharon.
Still at the pub.
She’d considered going to find her there but decided against it in the interest of a clear head in the morning. She had to work.

‘Marianne and I had dinner together,’ said Miles. ‘She’s good company.’

Tiffany nodded stiffly. Her back was to him still, fortunately, or he would have seen the dismay that must show on her face. She certainly felt it inside. Miles came up behind her and put his glass of water on the table next to the letters.

‘We were both at a loose end,’ he said. ‘Seeing you had a date. Again.’

Tiffany spun around. That was too much.

‘I had dinner with Jim and Sharon. While you two were having a good time together and enjoying each other’s company half the night...’ The horrible thought struck her that it may not have been half the night, it could have been all the night. ‘While you were doing whatever it was you were doing, I was giving them financial advice. I came here on holiday and I’ve done almost nothing but work since I arrived. At least Jim and Sharon cook me wonderful dinners and give me fruit and yoghurt and say thank you.’

She screeched to a halt, breathing heavily and with her hands planted defiantly on her hips. Just like her mother, she realised. Except Mum never raised her voice to a seagull squawk. And Mum didn’t have an underlying note of self-pity.

Miles’s expression grew fierce. ‘I asked you to dinner and you refused because I was your client!’ He waved an arm about in exasperation, and it slapped down hard against his thigh. ‘What am I supposed to do? You have one rule for me and one rule for them. And I
have
said thank you.’ He frowned. ‘Haven’t I?’

She couldn’t remember whether he’d thanked her or not but that was totally irrelevant. What
was
relevant she wasn’t quite sure, but ‘rational’, like Elvis, had long since left the building.

‘They’re not my clients. They’re friends,’ she yelled in her now seagull scaring voice.

‘Can’t I be your friend?’ He glared at her so ferociously she retreated a step and her bottom hit the table. The glass of water slopped and formed a small puddle on the polished surface, but neither she nor Miles moved to mop it up.

‘If you like,’ she said through gritted teeth, the only way she could exert control over her voice.

‘I do like,’ he said, quieter now. His fierce expression softened and he gave a brisk nod. ‘Friends.’

The door bell sounded, startling them both. Tiffany said, ‘I’d better go.’

‘Just wait a minute while I see who this is. Don’t go yet, please?’ He hurried towards the door, throwing her a last beseeching glance over his shoulder.

Tiffany went to the kitchen for something to wipe up the water before it marked the table. Her hand was shaking when she picked up a cloth and she observed the phenomenon in surprise.

‘Hi Miles.’ Marianne. Perfect timing as usual. ‘Is Tiffany still here? We’ve a lunch date.’

‘Hello, yes she is. Come in.’ Miles didn’t sound terribly enthusiastic either.

‘She’s a workaholic, that girl.’

Their voices moved closer. Tiffany came out of the kitchen wielding the cloth and walked purposefully to the table.

‘Hello. I’m just about to leave.’ She dabbed at the spillage but Miles grabbed the red and white dishrag.

Marianne meanwhile had charged across to the wall of windows.

‘What a fabulous view. Miles this is abso-bloody-lutely fantastic.’ She spun around. ‘No wonder you love coming to work here, beats the hell out of your Sydney office, Tiff.’

Tiffany summoned a smile and nodded. ‘Shall we go?’

‘We’ll see you tonight, Miles. He’s on our trivia team,’ Marianne informed Tiffany. ‘And another couple of blokes I met. Brent and his mate Chris. They’re at the campground.’

‘Surfers,’ said Miles to Tiffany and smiled a smile that was almost a grimace. What a night of fun lay ahead of them.

Marianne started towards the door. Miles was standing very close all of a sudden. ‘Promise you’ll come,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t want to tackle a trivia night by myself.’

Tiffany’s lips curved into a grin all by themselves. Her knees had turned to spaghetti. His eyes were turning her brain to pulp. Trivia night would be heaps of fun.

‘Marianne’s determined to win that slab of beer,’ she blurted.

‘Well, we’ll do our best. Thanks for working so hard, Tiffany...’ he said leaning forward, so the words fell gently into her ear. ‘...on your holiday.’

She couldn’t look at him anymore or she’d do something that would shock even Marianne. She drew a deep breath. Then another.
Control.

‘You might like to have a look at these.’ Tiffany touched her fingers lightly on the letters. ‘They’re important, Miles. Don’t throw them away.’

His brow furrowed momentarily. He looked at the letters. When he saw the handwriting, recognition and shock hit his face in quick succession. The voice that had whispered so intimately a moment ago was almost unrecognisable when he asked, ‘Have you read them?’

‘Only one. I needed to see if they had any information relevant to what I was doing.’

‘Who are they from?’ asked Marianne. She stood in the hall with her hand on the latch while her perceptive brown eyes flicked from Tiffany to Miles.

Neither answered her.

‘Do they?’ Miles demanded.

‘Read them, Miles,’ Tiffany said quietly. ‘All of them.’

His mouth opened and closed. He held her gaze and when she didn’t look away he said, ‘I don’t think I want to.’

‘I think you should. I think you need to. Let’s go Marianne.’ Tiffany strode to the door and Marianne snatched it open.

‘See you tonight, Miles,’ she called but received no reply.

‘Who wrote the letters?’ Marianne asked as soon as they were out of earshot and crunching over sandy gravel towards her convertible. ‘What’s the big secret?’

The car alarm whooped once as she pressed the remote.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Tiffany.

She climbed in and slammed the door. Should she confide in Marianne or not? She’d have to tell her something because Marianne was nothing if not persistent. Telling her about the letters wouldn’t really be breaking client confidentiality because it wasn’t related to her work on Miles’s finances.

‘He’ll be able to trade that old bomb in when he claims his loot,’ Marianne said as she reversed the BMW out of Miles’s driveway, barely missing his white station wagon. She changed gears and they shot out onto the main road. ‘What sort of car do you think he’ll get? He looks like a Porsche man to me. He’s very good looking — imagine what he’ll be like with a bit of money spent on him. We should take him shopping in Sydney.’

Tiffany said, ‘I don’t think he’s into that sort of thing. He didn’t even want the inheritance in the first place.’

‘So he
is
coming into big money,’ stated Marianne with satisfaction.

Tiffany nodded unable to deny that fact outright. ‘But don’t say anything, Marianne. Promise me. Don’t go blabbing tonight about how lucky he is or anything. Promise.’

Marianne looked sideways at her briefly before saying, ‘I can keep my mouth shut, you know.’

Tiffany stared at the road ahead as it wound between tall gums in dappled sunlight. The wind whipped at their hair tugging Marianne’s curls free from its combs and pins and pulling Tiffany’s neat bob into disarray.

‘What about the letters?’ said Marianne a few moments later. ‘Or are they off limits as well.’ It was hard to tell from the set of her mouth whether she was upset or not. Her eyes were hidden behind slimline dark glasses.

‘Miles told me his father deserted his mother when he was a baby and he never heard from him again.’

‘Bastard!’

‘That’s what I thought and also what Miles thought. Has thought all his life. So when he inherited everything his father owned he wasn’t very pleased about it. He didn’t even know the man was still alive, until he died.

I’ve been going through his papers. Apart from the business stuff there were bundles of letters, going back thirty years or more, and they were all from Miles’s mother.’

‘Did you read them?’

‘Only one and only to see if they might be relevant to what I was working on.’

Marianne was silent as she digested this information. ‘How would you feel,’ she said eventually, ‘If you discovered your mother had lied to you all your life?’

‘And not only that, you’d probably never find out why. She died last year.’

‘What did she tell him was the reason his father left?’

‘He didn’t say, but he’s very bitter.’

‘Poor guy. No wonder he looked like someone had given him a dead fish for Christmas,’ said Marianne. ‘But at least his dad came good in the end and left him a bundle.’

‘I don’t think he takes that as much consolation,’ said Tiffany.

‘I would,’ squawked Marianne and laughed. ‘By the way, I saw Kevin this morning and we had a little chat.’

‘About Fleur?’ asked Tiffany

‘Yes, we’re going out with her on Friday night to some club in Coffs Harbour. You should ask Miles to come. It might cheer him up.’