The Unconventional Bride

‘You may not know this, Mel, but he’s very successful. He took advantage of Gladstone being the largest port in Queensland and the fourth largest in the country to build up a marine-engineering works and a shipping agency.’

‘Granted,’ she said slowly.

Despite only being a medium-sized town in a rural area, the port of Gladstone handled millions of tonnes of coal, bauxite, alumina and other minerals and substances. It offered a deep-water port protected by close offshore islands, it was only ten or twelve days’ distance from the Asia Pacific region and was endowed with plenty of energy resources—water, coal and natural gas.

‘But still—why Etienne?’ she asked.

Justin looked at her ironically. ‘How many other millionaires do we know, Mel? Not only that but he’s also almost part of the family.’

Mel opened her mouth to deny this but closed it immediately.

‘How bad are things, Mel?’ Justin said into the silence.

‘Not good,’ she conceded.

‘Mrs B told me he came to lunch today.’

‘Mrs B invited him to lunch—well, he did come out to see how we were going.’

‘I never could work out what you’ve got against him!’

‘You’re not a girl,’ she retorted.

‘Plenty of girls find him irresistible, so I hear—is that it?’ Justin enquired. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve always had a crush on him!’

‘I have not,’ Mel contradicted. ‘And from what I’ve heard they’re not precisely girls either.’

‘Women, then,’ Justin said, ‘or whatever the technical term is. What have you heard?’

She shrugged. ‘You know that lighthouse he’s leased and renovated? Apparently there’s been a stream of gorgeous, sophisticated, definitely women more than happy to spend time with him up there.’

‘What a glorious thought!’ Justin laid his head on the settee. ‘I’ll have to ask him how he does it.’

‘Justin,’ Mel warned.

Her brother laughed softly. ‘If you could see your face! OK. Is that why you disapprove of him?’

Mel was truly tempted to tell her brother that she had the sneaking suspicion Etienne Hurst had, out of the blue, taken an interest in her along entirely different lines from the fate of his sister’s stepchildren, but she stopped herself.

‘Uh—no. That has nothing to do with me. He…he’s urging me to sell Raspberry Hill, well, not urging exactly but he pointed out today that there may be no other way to go.’ She stopped and sighed.

‘Oh, hell.’ Justin sat up and reached for her hand. ‘I’m sorry, Mel. I knew things weren’t good but I didn’t realise it was that bad. What will we do? I can’t imagine losing this place.’ He looked around.

Not to mention each other, Mel didn’t say, but it was the core problem she always came back to.

‘I’m certainly not going to give up without a fight! The accountant will have a clearer picture in a few days—’

‘I can always leave school right now,’ Justin broke in.

‘No! I mean, no, it hasn’t come to that yet. And don’t pass any of this on to Tosh or Ewan.’

Justin cast her a speaking look. ‘What do you think I am? I know, you’re still thinking of the rum-rampage, but I’ve reformed.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of that at all, but I hope you have!’

He grinned at her, although a touch ashamedly, and presently took himself off to bed, leaving her alone with her thoughts.

She began to tidy up absently, but one thing Justin had said stuck in her mind. It was something she’d never admitted to herself in so many words but there had been a time when Etienne had occupied her dreams. At fifteen, for a while, she’d thought about him rather a lot. However, she’d been so sure she was beneath his notice, it had all died a natural death.

She stopped what she was doing with a tennis racket in one hand and a pair of roller-blades in the other—or had it? Perhaps she’d resented being completely beneath his notice and it had been a contributing factor to her so-called dislike of him?

She put the racket in a wooden locker and the roller-blades on a shelf. Not an edifying thought, she conceded. But did that explain the effect he was having on her at the moment?

She couldn’t come up with an answer so she took herself to bed, not dreaming that she would have to encounter Etienne Hurst the very next day.

It started out like any other spring day.

Cool, dry and crisp but giving promise of becoming hot and glorious. Until she noticed a plume of smoke coming from one of the ‘resting’ paddocks, and raced down to find a bush fire. She called the fire brigade immediately but the difficulty was water; no convenient mains to hook up to, only a small dam a fair way from the fire.

And she worked as frenziedly as any of the firemen to contain it. There were no casual hands working on the property that day to help so she deployed a bag and a shovel with the best of them, resisting Mrs Bedwell’s entreaties to leave it to the men, until her bag was taken out of her fingers and she was bodily removed from the area of flames.

‘Who…? What?’ she spluttered. ‘Let me go! If I lose this feed—’

‘Shut up, Mel,’ Etienne Hurst said. ‘You’ve done enough.’

‘I haven’t!’

But she was clamped into a strong pair of arms and held there until she subsided, panting, against his chest.

‘How did you know about the fire?’ she asked hoarsely.

‘Mrs Bedwell rang me. She was convinced you were killing yourself.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘You don’t look too good.’ He held her away and raised his eyebrows.

‘If you think I care how I look—’ But before she could finish tears welled in her eyes and brimmed over, making rivulets in the soot on her cheeks.

He pulled her back into his arms. ‘I think you’re extraordinarily brave. Why don’t you have a good cry?’

‘I will,’ she wept, ‘but only because I’m…I don’t know what! I never cry,’ she added in extreme frustration.

But cry she did for a couple of minutes. Then it occurred to her that she didn’t feel like crying any more; she felt, on the contrary, safe and secure and as if she could stay in Etienne Hurst’s arms for a lot longer.

She moved her cheek against his shirt and was visited by an extraordinary mental image—rather than being hot, tired and dirty, she pictured herself rising out of a woodland stream in filtered sunlight, naked and with water streaming off her body. Natural enough since she was hot, tired and dirty, she conceded, but how on earth did Etienne get into the picture?

Why was he there, waiting for her at the edge of the pool and taking the slim, satiny length of her into his arms?