The Shock Engagement

It took a moment before he realised what she meant. He reached into his top jacket pocket and pulled out a mishmash of ideas for the evolution of his website that he had jotted down on torn off bits of newspaper and truck stop napkins on the long ride down from Alice Springs.

He put the papers in the tray and his jacket felt a good deal lighter. Huh. Well, what do ya know?

‘You will stay, won’t you?’ she asked.

He heard the hint of concern in her voice and he had no choice. He reached to gather his little Emma to him, sighing deeply as she snuggled into him, resting her head against his chest.

‘Of course I’ll stay, princess. For you, anything.’

Emma released a great breath, the warm air tickling at his skin through his cotton T-shirt. ‘I am very glad to hear that.’

But there was more he had to say, and soon, before everything settled and became too chummy. He pulled Emma away and slowly set her down on the edge of the bed. When she looked back at him with such trust he gave in to temptation and ran his hand over the back of her head, revelling in the feel of her soft hair playing against his fingertips.

‘Em,’ he said, pulling his hand away and distancing himself again, ‘keeping in mind my generosity in allowing you to put me up for the week, I have a favour to ask.’

She tilted her head and raised a pale blonde eyebrow. ‘Shoot.’

Harry began to pace. How to ask? How to begin? At the beginning seemed as good a place as any.

‘About six months ago,’ he said, ‘a gentleman sued me, for stealing the idea of Harold’s House from him.’

Emma felt her stomach drop away and her fighting instincts rose. ‘But of course you didn’t take the idea from anyone else!’ she cried. ‘I was there the day Harold’s House was born. Don’t you remember?’

‘I remember, sweetheart. But when you have the appearance of power and money you attract the attention of those who seek both. Anyway, it never went to court. He had no case. Nevertheless his stunt brought about enough publicity that I began to receive attention from one woman who believed I was wronged. She began by sending me letters via the Harold’s House email address.’

Emma reached out and grabbed his hand, stopping him pacing before he left a track in the carpet. She felt him straining against her hold, but she also felt the angry heat welling from inside him. She used her own power to tug him over to sit next to her on the bed.

‘The emails became excessive enough they were brought to my attention,’ he continued, ‘but by that time her attention had already expanded to include handwritten love letters lathered in perfume and gifts of odd souvenirs she had found in small towns as she made her way from Sydney to me. She eventually tracked me down in Alice Springs.’

He glanced over at her and she saw a flash of uncertainty. He was wondering how much to tell her. It must have been pretty bad. ‘Tell me, Harry. Please.’

He rolled his shoulders and went somewhere inside himself to draw on experiences obviously buried down deep. ‘My core creative group had come out to Alice Springs for a week to get a feel for the place, and thus for the new additions I wanted for the site. We were eating at a local pub one night and she found me sitting at a table with one of my copywriters, Rikki. This woman came straight over, grabbed Rikki by the hair, tore her from her seat and began beating her. It was so unexpected, it took us a few shocked moments before the rest of us dived in to fend her off. By that stage she had already split Rikki’s lip and broken a rib.’

‘Oh, my God! Harry!’ Emma felt a sense of cold dread gripping her spine that the woman might still be out there somewhere, thinking of Harry, watching Harry, planning to hurt Harry. Her fists clenched in her lap as she thought what she would do to the woman if she ever got her hands on her. ‘Where is this woman now?’

‘The police arrested her in Alice Springs. It turned out she was a serial stalker. She had pulled a similar stunt with some football jock in New South Wales and was wanted for kidnapping the guy’s girlfriend. Now she is behind bars and those around me are safe from her attention.’

He squeezed her hand and she knew he was making sure she realised she was safe. Emma felt a heady sense of relief. ‘And Rikki?’

‘She’s fine. All better. She’s even still working for me, believe it or not.’

There was one more thing she had to know. ‘Was she…are you and Rikki…together?’

He shook his head and her relief doubled. ‘Never. But it didn’t matter. This woman was so obsessed it didn’t matter.’

‘Harry, how can I not know this sort of stuff? You are supposed to be my best friend and yet you haven’t let me help you through any of the tough stuff.’

‘What good can it do burdening you, Em? I would rather that sweet mind of yours was filled with nice thoughts. Ignorance is bliss.’

‘Please!’ Emma scoffed. ‘I would much rather be in the know, to be able to help you and know you than to be in the dark.’

Harry’s smile was full of sadness. ‘But that’s just it, Em. I don’t bring good luck to those who care for me.’

‘That woman didn’t care for you!’

‘No, she didn’t. But others have.’

Emma knew exactly who he meant. Jamie. But that was ridiculous. He couldn’t possibly still be so defined by that experience, could he?

‘That’s half the reason I couldn’t come to your surprise party, Em. Keely had tracked me down and invited me. But when all this happened, I had to pull out. There was nothing that would have brought me back to you with that sort of danger following close behind.’

She believed him. He hadn’t come to her party in order to protect her. How ironic. It was one of the many times he had broken her heart in the name of trying to look out for her best interests.

‘So now for my favour,’ he said. ‘You must know I have been nominated for this competition, this Australia’s Best Bachelor thing.’

Emma grinned. Trust him to not even know the name of the biggest, most highly publicised event in the country.

Harry caught her grin. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I have been told on the odd occasion that I can be quite hunky when the light is right.’

Emma smiled. Harry didn’t need anything as transitory as light, nor something as subjective as a competition to make him look hunky. He made Emma’s heart race just by looking her in the eye.

‘Oh, it’s not that, Buchanan. I’m sure that under the right circumstances you can come across downright hunky to someone with the sun in their eyes. It’s just that WWW is heavily involved with that comp.’

‘I know, Em, and that’s why I am hoping that you can do something to get me out of it.’

Emma opened her mouth but no words came out. She hadn’t seen that one coming at all. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Dead serious, Em,’ he said. ‘I haven’t done an interview since this whole business played itself out, and I don’t want to start now. Especially in a forum where I am to be held up as an object of…interest to women. Harold’s House will happily thrive without any focus on me, so if there is anything you can do to get me out of this thing, cleanly and quickly, I would appreciate it.’

It seemed that Emma now had not only the future of WWW Designs weighing on her, but she was being called upon to jeopardise WWW’s involvement with Flirt magazine, the account for which nothing could go wrong. But what else could she do?

‘Of course I’ll help, Harry,’ Emma said, repeating his promise of moments before. ‘For you, anything.’

CHAPTER THREE

TAHLIA’S SUNDAY NIGHT RITUAL: MR DARCY AND A DAIQUIRI

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife? I dare Jane Austen to come over here and say that to my face,’ Tahlia said as she slammed Pride and Prejudice shut and hid it under her sofa cushion.. this time for a full ten seconds.

EMMA left Harry to unpack.

Once she heard the shower running, she changed out of her suit and into cut-off jeans. She sat on the edge of her bed, still topless apart from her bra, staring at some point on her wall as the synapses in her brain buzzed and flickered, trying to assimilate the spate of news that had come her way in the past couple of hours, and trying to conceive of some way to fix all situations for the best.

Harry wanted nothing to do with the Australia’s Hunkiest Bloke competition and for good reason. So how could she help get him out of it? The rules of the competition were pretty easygoing. The editors chose the nominees and the readers chose the winner. The guys in question didn’t have to do anything but exist. They didn’t even have to turn up to the big announcement party on Saturday night, though most of them had already RSVPd. To get her Harry out of the running would be tricky. The only prerequisites were that the guys had to be Australian, hunky and single, and Harry fit into every category perfectly.

Her mobile phone chirped in her handbag. The ring tone, Copacabana, in her opinion the most romantic song ever written, beeped merrily away until she answered it. ‘Aloha?’

‘Aloha yourself,’ Keely said from the other end.