An Indecent Proposal

The boy would be mourning the loss of his dad; that would be natural.

Turning, he nodded toward the door in the big house through which he’d just come. “Go on in. Agnes is inside, first door on the right.” Then, looking again at the kid, whose gaze had now turned cold—toward him, Patrick realized—he sighed and pulled open the screen. “Come in. We have room for you for the night.”

Bronwyn marveled that Patrick even smelled the same. It wasn’t a strong scent, and she hadn’t been terribly close to him, yet he smelled familiar, from that years-ago time when they were lovers, back when she’d been a waitress in the campus coffee shop and he one of those lucky students who didn’t have to work his way through uni.

“Agnes, this is Bron Theodoros—”

“Bronwyn Davies,” Bronwyn corrected. Bron. Many people naturally shortened her name to Bron. Ari had hated it. Like “brawn.” You’re not brawny. And Bronwyn had begun to insist upon the use of her whole name—even in the last weeks she’d retained friendship with Patrick before their horrible parting.

Patrick cast her a quick look, but didn’t argue. “Bronwyn Davies and her son…”

“Wesley,” Bronwyn supplied.

“Bronwyn has an appointment with Mrs. Lipton tomorrow, and she arrived on the wrong day. I’m sure we can put these two up for the night in the house.” He put subtle emphasis on the last three words. “Bronwyn and I are old acquaintances from uni.”

“If there’s room in the employee cottage,” Bronwyn put in, “I’m sure that will be fine.”

“Well, the available room got painted out there, and I know it’s no good tonight because of the fumes,” Agnes told her. Agnes was a fiftyish woman who wore her hair in a neat French twist. Her black-and-white uniform was spotless. Bronwyn remembered that Marie, in the kitchens, had worn a T-shirt with Fairchild Acres on it, so Bronwyn supposed that would be her uniform in the future. “We can put you up in the western corner.”

Hot, Bronwyn thought. But the house was air-conditioned, blessedly so, so even the west part would be lovely. A roof over her head would be terrific.

“Is the room ready?” Patrick asked.

“Certainly,” said Agnes, with an air of being vaguely insulted at his suggestion that it might not be.

“Then I’ll show them the way,” he said, surprising Bronwyn again. Nonetheless, she couldn’t believe that he was doing so as a gesture of hospitality. No doubt he planned to tell her again that he wasn’t going to support her. As if she would let him. She’d only wanted to give him the chance to know Wesley. But now she’d begun to wonder if that was such a good idea.

She and Wesley followed Patrick down the hall to a stairway, which, though clearly not the main set of stairs, was wide and led to an upstairs open hallway that looked down on what appeared to be a conservatory below. The upstairs hall was lined with photographs of horses, horses covered with blankets of roses, horses in the winner’s circle. Accompanying many of them was the same tall, straight-backed woman at different stages throughout her life. Bronwyn had seen her before— from a distance at one or two events she and Ari had attended—and in photographs, as well. Louisa Fairchild. Bronwyn half hoped she would never come face-to-face with the Hunter Valley matriarch. Would Louisa meet any prospective employee? Bronwyn could just imagine the reaction of this seemingly indomitable woman at the news that Aristotle Theodoros’s widow was on the premises. Did she dare ask Patrick not to mention the fact?

No. He would scorn her for asking him to help her cover up for…for what?

For having been married to a criminal.

There were two upstairs bedrooms in the south corner, and they shared a bathroom. The actual corner room with its four-poster bed was to be Bronwyn’s, and a smaller room looking out on one of the paddocks was Wesley’s.

“No soccer inside, mate,” Patrick told Wesley as he showed him into the room, which contained a silky oak double bed.

“He knows that,” Bronwyn said. She felt like a grease spot, but however miserably hot and sweaty she looked—and Bronwyn was far less sensitive to this question than any other woman she knew—Patrick shouldn’t be assuming that Wesley hadn’t been raised right.

“No doubt,” Patrick answered coolly, “but Louisa wouldn’t like it, so I thought I’d err on the side of caution.”

“In that case, thank you,” murmured Bronwyn.

“There are towels in the bathroom. If there’s anything you need, please ask Agnes. The staff eats in the dining room attached to the kitchens, and I’m sure you’ll be welcome there,” he continued. “Maybe Wesley would like to spruce himself up a bit first.”

Wesley looked baffled by the suggestion, but Bronwyn read the undercurrent in the words. Patrick wanted to speak with her alone. “Wesley,” she said, “we did have a hot sweaty trip, and I’m definitely going to take advantage of the shower. Why don’t you run yourself a bath first?”

“Okay,” said Wesley, eyeing his mother and Patrick suspiciously.

Patrick stepped out of Wesley’s room, and Bronwyn followed, closing the door behind her.

He said, “Please come and join me in my study. It’s just down the hall.”

Bronwyn knew it would be churlish to argue, so she followed him, remembering the breadth of his shoulders beneath the chambray shirt he wore, admiring his long legs in cream moleskin pants. Yes, he looked affluent and secure, yet he was also stiff, remote, serious, quite different from the Patrick she remembered from school. Of course, that Patrick hadn’t been serious enough for her. A history major who’d wanted to travel and to write. Nothing specific, of course, and no sign of a genuine enthusiasm for writing. Just impractical plans. And then he’d asked her to marry him. And that proposal had suddenly accentuated for her how immature he was, how unready for marriage. She’d broken up with him and soon met Ari. A whirlwind courtship and another proposal of marriage, this one from a more mature man.

Of course, Ari’s proposal had seemed to come from a legitimate businessman, not a mobster.

When had she begun to suspect the truth about Ari, the indecent truth that the person he seemed to be with his family was not at all the person he was in his business dealings? She shut the door on the question, a question she’d spent too much time examining over the months since Ari’s arrest.

Patrick’s study was a large, comfortable room, the furniture polished cherry, with a desktop computer which looked as though it could communicate with a space station and a separate rolltop desk complete with a banker’s lamp. Prominently displayed on the small desk was a photo of Patrick and his sister, Megan, whom Bronwyn easily recognized. She stepped over to examine the photo. Megan’s sense of style, her comfort with fashion, was apparent even in the head-and-shoulders photo, simply from her choice of earrings. But what Bronwyn remembered was the kindness of her eyes, eyes very much the shape of Patrick’s, and the mouth that had always been so quick to laugh.

But Bronwyn also remembered the slight chip she’d had on her own shoulder when she’d first gotten to know Patrick’s sister, whose childhood had been the antithesis of Bronwyn’s. Megan was the product of exclusive private girls’ schools, an affluent upbringing. Bronwyn, in contrast, had always been a survivor. “How is she?” she asked.

Patrick paused at the side bar, where several bottles sat on a silver tray. “Great. She’s met a very nice man, a detective, actually, with a fourteen-year-old daughter. A cocktail?”

Bronwyn hesitated, reluctant to accept so much as a glass of water from this man who had accused her of coming to Fairchild Acres in search of a new sugar daddy. But a drink was what she very much wanted right now. That and the shower she’d told Wesley she planned to take before dinner. “Thank you,” she said.

“Cognac?” he asked.

Bronwyn had never tasted cognac in her life until Patrick had ordered her some one evening when they were out together. It’s not exactly in my budget, she’d pointed out.

He’d said, Maybe if you get used to the finer things, they’ll find you.

That was before Aristotle Theodoros had appeared on the scene, a rival, an older man who was attractive to Bronwyn as a suitor and also filled the role of the father she’d never had—or something like that.

“Thank you,” she said again.

Two snifters. He handed Bronwyn hers, and their fingers brushed. He lifted his glass. “Around here,” he said, “we usually drink to horses. So, to Louisa’s hopeful for the Outback Classic—An Indecent Proposal.”

Bronwyn slid her eyes sideways, her mouth twisting in near amusement, and lifted her glass. “As long as you realize that I’m not here to make one.”

They both drank.

“Then why are you here?”

The question was spoken quietly, and Bronwyn found herself watching his lips, his mouth, and thinking how unchanged he was and yet how completely different. He remained a very attractive man—one who had once been madly in love with her. He had walked away without looking back after she’d told him she was marryingAri— that is, he’d left the coffee shop where she was working, hurried out into the parking lot. She’d been horribly worried then, her stomach tensing up, and had hardly been able to finish her shift. She’d been afraid Patrick would simply go out of his mind, but that wasn’t all.

Part of her had feared that she was making a terrible mistake, that she was letting go of something she’d never find again and that she was foolish to marry Ari, that she and Ari could never be together what she and Patrick might have been.

Now Patrick had asked why she’d come to Fairchild Acres. Now was the moment to tell him about Wesley.

But to do so suddenly seemed rash. Patrick was rich, powerful. She had nothing. What if he tried to take Wesley from her? It wasn’t as though the possibility hadn’t occurred to her before; but the old Patrick hadn’t been the kind of person to do that. This new Patrick? She wasn’t sure. She had no way of defending herself, and the widow of a mobster wouldn’t look so great in the courts. “I came for the job,” she said.

“Knowing I was here?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I knew you were here. But I’m here because I need the work. The government has seized Ari’s assets. I must support Wesley.”

She could tell from the look in his half-closed hazel eyes that he didn’t think her story credible.