Reluctant Date (18 page)

“And when you got here you introduced him to Beth,” the
words were out before Claire could stop herself. She winced and hoped he
wouldn’t realize that she already knew about his own relationship with Beth.

“No, not right away.
 
To start with he wouldn’t meet anyone.
 
He begged me not to tell anyone he was back in Dolphin Key, especially
our parents. He just sort of huddled in a chair on my porch and stared out into
the bay. And he couldn’t get warm. I used to pile covers on him and leave hot
soup and coffee in a couple of flasks when I went to work.
 
Then, when I returned home, I would try to
feed him something nourishing.
 
Really he
needed Mum but he was adamant about not telling anyone he was home. In the end
I insisted I tell Beth because she was my girlfriend then, and she was getting
fed up with the fact that I kept going home early every evening without
inviting her along.”

His reference to Beth was so casual that for a moment Claire
could almost believe that losing her to Carl meant nothing to him.
 
He soon disabused her of the thought,
however.

“In the end she insisted on visiting of course. She was all
set to give him a piece of her mind for being so difficult.
 
She said I had done enough for him and it was
about time he took some responsibility for himself.
 
That was before she met him though. When she
actually saw him…well even I could see I was going to be fighting a lost cause
if I tried to come between them.
 
As far
as Beth was concerned, I no longer existed!”

Claire heard the wry humor in his voice and identified with
the pain he was trying to hide.
 
She had
been like that when she had been thrown over for someone else all those years
ago.
 
She had joked about it and
pretended it didn’t matter in the daytime, and then had cried herself to sleep
at night.

“Meeting her was his turning point though,” Daniel
continued.
 
“She gave him back his love
of life, and soon he was strong enough to walk into town.
 
Then Beth told him it was time he visited our
parents.”

“They must have been pleased to have him back in one piece,
surely.”

“My mother was.
 
I’ll
never forget the expression on her face the day I told her he had come home.”

“But your father wouldn’t forgive him?”

“You’ve got it in one!
 
If he wouldn’t forgive him when he first left, then he certainly wasn’t
about to forgive a son who he regarded a drunken, dope-addled hippy, a son who
had come home with his tail between his legs. That was
his
interpretation, of course, and it was very far from the truth.

“I tried to explain it wasn’t like that at all.
 
That Carl had been ill not drunk, and that he
was recovering fast. Then I suggested we offer him a job in the family business
to help him get back on his feet.”

“And it didn’t go down well!”

“It certainly did not.
 
For a moment I thought he was going to throw me out of the house too.”

He turned and looked at her. “So now you have it, the entire
unedifying Marchant family saga. Nowadays there are a few upsides of course,
such as Carl and Beth getting married and starting a family, and the fact that
Carl now runs his own successful print business, but Dad still won’t talk to
him.”

“And your poor mother is in the middle of it all,” Claire’s
heart went out to Mrs Marchant. No wonder the poor woman looked so strained and
sad when she had a son she wasn’t allowed to mention, let alone see, and a
husband who demanded she look after him every hour of the day and night.

“Mmm.
 
Well she’s sort
of found a way around that.
 
She calls
into the print shop for coffee whenever she manages to get into town. And
occasionally I shut myself into the study with Dad for what he thinks is a
business meeting, and try hard to make it last long enough for her to have
lunch with Carl and Beth as well.”
 

* * *

Suddenly Daniel was bored with his family history. It was
something he didn’t like to dwell on, and he had only told Claire because she
needed to know.
 
If she hadn’t taken to
visiting his parents and reading to his father then it would have been a very
long time before she found out the truth about the Marchant family. He stood
up.

“I’ll make some more coffee and then we’ll talk about
something far more interesting, your week for example.”

He didn’t wait for her answer and Claire frowned as she
watched him retreat into the house carrying their empty mugs. Life in Dolphin
Key wasn’t as uncomplicated and serene as it appeared to be after all.
Underneath its smiling face were the dark undercurrents of family feuds and
broken relationships.
 
She thought of her
own parents with a sudden surge of affection because she knew it would never
ever occur to either of them to stop her doing something she loved.
 
Nor would they ever disown her, or refuse to
speak to her, whatever she did.

For the first time in her life she stopped dwelling on the
difficulties of her unorthodox childhood and began to appreciate what they
had
given her instead. Their loving but
hands-off parenting had given her the freedom to develop her own interests
without any pressure. Unlike Carl, who had had his music taken away, she had
been able to pursue her own obsession with photography with their blessing. Nor
had they ever tried to make her into someone that she wasn’t.
 
Instead they had merely insisted she stay
with them and learn to adjust when their lives changed, rather than shut
herself away in the boarding school she had once hankered for. And despite her
hang ups, and however difficult she had found it at the time, she had to admit
that all the travelling and the new experiences had left her with an inner
confidence in her own abilities and a knowledge that she was totally her own
person.

She accepted a second mug of coffee with a murmur of thanks,
wondering, as she did so, how badly the story Daniel had told her had affected
him. She wanted to ask him but she didn’t dare.
 
He had already opened a small portion of his heart, and from the
troubled expression on his face that was more than enough for one night.

“My week was good,” she told him. She was rewarded by a
broad smile, and soon they were talking about some of the ideas she and Scott
had come up with during the past few days.
 
As they talked Daniel’s face gradually relaxed, and he laughed aloud as
she recounted her latest success.

“You mean you have actually persuaded Scott to pose for our
leaflets as some sort of poster boy!”

“There was no persuasion! She and Beth blackmailed me into
it!” Scott’s voice, coming out of the surrounding darkness, made them both
jump. He joined them on the dock.

“I was driving past when I noticed the lights were on in the
house so I knew you were back Dan. I guess it’s kind of late for a work update
but knowing how you don’t sleep when you’ve been travelling, I thought I’d stop
by anyway. Tell me if I’m intruding.”

“You’re not,” Claire and Daniel protested in unison,
shifting away from one another as they did so.

“We’ve been talking work, ” Daniel explained. Then he
grinned.
 
“As you heard, we were just
about to discuss your new role as in-house model!”

Scott, who had noticed their involuntary movement away from
each other and heard the unnecessary emphasis in their voices when they told
him he wasn’t intruding, inwardly cursed himself for stopping by at all.
 
There was something going on here, so why
weren’t they owning up to it?
 
What was
the matter with them? He gave an imperceptible shrug. Best play the game.

“As I said, it was blackmail,” he said with a false frown.
“Both of them told me I owed it to the company, that if I didn’t do it then any
shortfall in our visitor numbers would be all my fault.”

“He means female visitor numbers,” Claire told Daniel with a
grin.
 
“He’s just too modest to say it!”

Daniel chuckled.
 
“I’m
impressed.
 
In less than a month you’ve
managed to turn my ultra macho Operations Manager into a piece of female eye
candy!”

“She has not!” Scott growled.
 
“One day is all I’m giving her.
 
One day to take all the photos she
wants.
 
After that nobody is allowed to
mention it ever again.”

Claire and Daniel roared with laughter at his furious scowl,
a scowl that grew blacker as Claire spelled out the sort of shots she intended
to take, the poses he would have to hold.
 

“You owe me,” he told her when she finished. “You owe me big
time Claire Harris and don’t think I won’t collect!”

Then, unable to keep up a pretense of fury any longer, he
joined in with the laughter. And after that the three of them moved indoors
where they stayed until late talking about work and the plans they all had for
the future of the company. When Scott eventually stood up to leave, thinking
that perhaps it was time he left them alone, Claire stood up too.

“Will you give me a lift home?” she asked him.

“Of course,” he hid his surprise as he glanced at Daniel,
but his friend’s face was expressionless as he gathered up the coffee mugs and
walked towards the kitchen.

Chapter Sixteen

Scott’s photo shoot was the source of a great deal of
amusement in Dolphin Key.
 
Word got
around and soon he had an audience of fishermen, shopkeepers and bemused
tourists while Claire took photo after photo of him supposedly clearing
undergrowth, building a boardwalk, and setting off for the islands in his
dinghy. She even took one where he was explaining the finer details of the
local flora to Beth who, determined to enjoy her own brief publicity, produced
a suitably enraptured expression as if she was hanging onto his every word.
They were all good macho shots that showed off Scott’s physical attributes to
perfection while also illustrating the work he was involved in. Once she was
satisfied with them, she insisted on taking some softer ones too; Scott talking
to a group of small children at the local school; a close up of him holding a
newly hatched bird that had fallen from its nest and which he was rearing; and
finally, at the end of the day, a picture of him sitting on the beach watching
a flock of birds fly across the sunset.

“Those last ones are for the ‘ah’ factor,” she told him with
a grin as she packed away her camera.
 
“A
girl likes nothing better than to see a macho man reduced to gooeyness!”

Then she ran away shrieking as he chased her across the
sand.
 
“Mind my camera Scott,” she
pleaded when he caught up with her.

He smiled wickedly as he very deliberately removed it from
her grasp and put it on the boardwalk while still keeping one arm tightly
around her. Then he picked her up, covered the area between the boardwalk and
the sea at a run, and dumped her into the sun-warmed water of the bay. She came
up spluttering and then, not to be outdone, she started splashing him.

He retreated up the beach.
 
“Mind the camera,” he mimicked, and then he doubled over with laughter
as she lost her footing and was submerged for a second time. When she
resurfaced she was covered in seaweed.

“You asked for it,” he told her as he helped her out of the
water and picked some of the longer strands out of her hair.

“I guess so,” she looked suitably contrite as she pushed her
wet hair out of her eyes. Then she dumped a fistful of wet sand down the front
of his T-shirt. With a roar of surprise he tried to grab her again but this
time she eluded him and ran up the beach to retrieve her camera.
 
When she straightened up she had a sudden
sense of déjà vu because a very tall man was standing in front of her.

“Daniel,” she exclaimed, wishing her heart wouldn’t do that
double beat thing every time he appeared. “I thought you were in Miami today.”

“I was.
 
I’m back,” he
told her. “I guess Scott didn’t enjoy his modeling debut then.”

Ineffectually trying to wring some of the water out of her
T-shirt, she shook her head. “You could say that!”

Scott came padding up the beach to join them, a huge grin on
his face. “She deserved everything she got.
 
She has done nothing but needle me all day.
 
Professional photographer indeed!”

“I so have not,” Claire protested. “I did everything I could
to make it easy for you.”

Scott knew she had but as a matter of principle he kept on
bickering with her as the three of them walked back to the entrance of her
apartment block. Daniel, however, didn’t say very much at all.
 
He was too busy trying to forget what he had
seen as he walked down onto the beach in search of Claire, because the sight of
Scott picking strands of seaweed out of her hair with one hand while he pulled
her up out of the water with the other had been almost more than he could bear.

It was only when she said goodbye and turned towards her
apartment that he finally found his voice.
 
“I came to ask if you would like to come to the State Reserve with me
tomorrow.
 
I’ve got a meeting out there
and if you come with me it will give you a chance to get to know some of the
rangers.
 
It will be an opportunity for
you to see a different type of local habitat as well.”