Mistaken Mistress

“I can get a cab,” she offered, giving him just a glimpse of a smile so sweet it touched the heart he had hardened against her.

“I can save you the trouble. Just tell me where you live?”

“Really you don’t have to.”

He cut her short. “You’ve had a shock. Owen is my friend. He would want me to look after you.”

“But you don’t have to?”

The thing was, he did, but he denied it almost sharply. “I guess I don’t.” He took her arm quickly to cross the busy road. “Well, maybe not altogether. You’re so young.”

“You can’t be all that much older?” She picked up the conversation when they were in the car, the strange intimacy reforming.

He gave her a tight smile. “A thousand years. I’m sure of it. I’m nearly thirty-two as it happens and you’re…?”

“Twenty-four. I can’t believe my mother would have gone and left me just before my birthday.”

“It was a car accident, you said?”

She didn’t answer; simply nodded her head. She knew she would choke up if she began to explain. Her grief over her mother’s death, so recent, would never subside. She was frightened, too, to begin thinking in terms of guilt. Had it really been suicide? Was she in some way to blame? She thought she had always been there for her mother yet her mother had never confided the true circumstances of her birth. That hurt her. Or hadn’t her mother been brave enough to say? Her true parentage had been a closely guarded secret until the very end.

That fact alone presented Eden with an enormous emotional hurdle.

They said nothing more to one another until they were on the freeway.

“You must know the city well,” she ventured, deeply regretting her own lack of truth. He hadn’t asked how to get to her suburb.

“Yes I do,” he clipped off.

“Owen’s wife must be tremendously relieved,” she continued gently. “Is she flying down?”

“Of course.”

He wasn’t inclined to talk, his handsome profile remote. Eden glanced out the window. It was dusk and the glorious tropical sunset was turning the city’s glassed towers and high-rises to glittering gold. In another ten minutes night would fall, as it did in the tropics, suddenly and completely, as if someone had thrown a switch. The multi-coloured sky, now rose, gold, scarlet, indigo, lime green at the horizon, would turn to a deep velvety purple. There were people everywhere. The picturesque paddle wheeler, the Kookaburra Queen was returning from a river cruise; the City Kats busy ferrying passengers across the river to the parks where they kept their cars.

She loved her home city. It had a delightful, leisurely way of life and a wonderful climate. Owen wanted her to go to live with him in North Queensland. To think of the number of times she had visited the Great Barrier Reef and the magnificent Daintree Rain Forest and had never known her birth father, Owen, was close by. She could even have driven past his home. There were some wonderful tropical homes in the far North. Fabulous sites overlooking the spectacular beauty of turquoise sea and emerald offshore islands.

“It’s been an extraordinary day.”

“Yes.”

“Are you only going to answer me in as few words as possible?”

He responded wearily. “Eden, what is it you want me to say?”

“You can say I accept you?”

His brief laugh was grim. “The only way I could accept you is as Owen’s long-lost child.”

Her heart shook. “How do you know I’m not?”

Another lancing glance. “I know Owen, that’s why. There’s no way in this world Owen would have deserted his child, his child’s mother. I know him. No way he could have kept such a thing secret. Not from me, let alone Delma.”

“You don’t think she would take kindly to having Owen’s love child fostered on her?” she asked, her voice so poignant he wanted to stop the car to confront her.

“You’re not pregnant, are you?” God, he didn’t think he could live with that.

“I find that unforgivable.” She had never done anything illicit in her life. Owen was her father, for God’s sake. What code had Owen bound her to she couldn’t say it? Both her mother and her father were good at keeping secrets she’d found. She wasn’t going to relive history. Tomorrow when Owen was a little stronger she was going to insist he explain the exact nature of their relationship and the whole sad story behind it. There was no earthly reason to delay, not even Delma’s arrival. She was tired of this charade and intensely angry with Lang Forsyth. She didn’t enjoy how he was making her feel.

“I don’t follow you at all,” he was saying. “In fact we seem to be speaking a different language. This isn’t a good situation. You must know that. I feel I have to warn you, you’ll have a job fending Delma off. She’s a tough mature woman. She’ll fight tooth and nail for her man.” God knows she had come up with quite a strategy to land Owen in the first place, he thought. But he wasn’t about to tell the girl that. It could only amount to extra ammunition.

CHAPTER THREE

ANTAGONISM seemed to cling to them. Antagonism and a strange intimacy he tried to hold down. He wanted to be out of the car. Away from her. The scent of her. She was quite unreachable.

Sometime later he drove into her leafy street. He could see now what she meant when she said she was financially secure. The street was lined with wonderful old Queenslanders, the traditional nineteenth-century timber houses built especially for the tropics, with their wide, deep verandas shading the exterior walls and pristine white wrought-iron balustrades and detailing. The style of architecture could be seen all over the giant state of Queensland extending to his part of the world, the far North where there were fine examples. All these homes were proudly owned and maintained wherever they were, so eagerly were they sought after.

As he glanced out he could see colonial white wooden palings that linked the fences visually with the houses behind it. Masses and masses of pink, white and red oleanders ornamented the fence; towering palms defining the long drives. The street and house lights provided so much illumination he could see splashes of brilliant colour from all the tropical plants in the gardens. Gorgeous scarlets, vivid yellows, vibrant pinks.

“It’s the next one on the left,” she said quietly, breaking the silence. She pointed not to one of the beautiful big Queenslanders with their large gardens, swimming pools and tennis courts, but to a great two-story Victorian pile, set well back from the street, hiding behind high stone walls and hedges of what looked like sasanqua camellias.

It was an unexpected house for such a girl. He felt she belonged in something not so overtly ostentatious. Something very gracious. More like the houses that fanned out to either side.

“Your family live here?” he asked, peering out. It was a huge house by any standards. She could scarcely rattle around in it by herself.

“My…f-f-father.” Surprisingly she stumbled over it when usually her speech was as clear as cut glass.

“And what does your father think about what’s happening in your life? Or doesn’t he know…?” he couldn’t prevent himself from asking.

She half turned, held out her hand. “Thank you so much, Mr. Forsyth, for bringing me home.”

She had the air of a princess in her lovely blue silk dress.

He took the slender hand she extended, little currents of electricity cutting into his nerves and running up his wrist. He had a sudden powerful urge to go inside. Meet the father. He wanted to discover what all this was about. He wanted her, or her father, to reveal something about themselves. He was forced to think of the next day. Delma would be arriving. He was meeting her at the airport. Taking her first to the hotel and then straight on to the hospital. The image of the two women meeting flashed across his mind. He thought of Owen’s eyes, his face, his voice and the transparency of his emotions. Everything about him gave away his love for this girl.