Desire And Deception

‘OK, OK,’ she agreed. ‘I sound like a jealous cat. So where does she come from?’

‘Lightning Ridge.’

‘The opal town way out back of Bourke?’

‘That’s the one. Nathan was out there buying opals for Byron and Gemma sold him some. It seems her father had just been accidentally killed—fell down a mine shaft—and she was selling up everything to come to Sydney. Nathan made her the offer of a job if she ever needed one.’

‘Which she took him up on, of course,’ Jade said ruefully. ‘What girl wouldn’t, after meeting Nathan? Say no more, I get the picture entirely.’

The housekeeper’s sigh sounded exasperated.

‘You can sigh, Melanie, but I saw the way that girl looked at Nathan the other week. Are you telling me she’s not smitten by our resident Casanova?’

‘All I’m saying is that she’s not a pushover.’

‘Meaning I am?’

Melanie gave her a sharp look. ‘Don’t go putting words into my mouth, Jade. You know better than anyone what sort of girl you are. I wouldn’t dream of making such a judgement. I’ve only known you two years, six months of which you haven’t even been living in this house. You weren’t home much, even when you were living here.’

Jade’s laugh was wry. ‘I don’t need to live here in person for you to have found out all the dirt on me. My mother used to adore telling everyone how bad I was. And it’s all true. The climbing out of windows to meet boys in the middle of the night when I was only fifteen. Everything! I’m a bad ‘un, Melanie. No doubt about it.’

‘You and I both know you’re not nearly as bad as you pretend to be, Jade,’ Melanie astonished her by saying. ‘Your teenage rebellions were revenge on your parents for their supposed lack of love, as well as some other imagined—or even real—transgressions.’

‘My,’ Jade returned caustically, ‘What are you? The resident psychoanalyst around here?’

‘I’ve had my share of experience with analysis,’ Melanie said with not a flicker of retaliatory emotion.

Sympathy for this sad, soul-dead creature replaced Jade’s anger. She knew about Melanie’s past, how her husband and baby son had been killed in a car accident right before her eyes. It had been a horrific tragedy.

Yet while Jade could appreciate the numbing effect that would have on any wife and mother, it had been years now, for heaven’s sake. Time to live again. Either that or put yourself out of your misery and throw yourself off a cliff or something.

Jade knew she herself would never commit suicide. She refused to let life get her that down. Life was meant to be lived, and, goddammit, she was going to live hers. To hell with her father, and Nathan, and even what had happened last night. And to hell with her mother. Irene was already probably in hell, anyway!

‘Are you all right, Jade?’ Melanie asked.

‘Yes, of course.’ She blinked rapidly, then tossed her head in memory of when her hair had recently been long and brown. After Nathan’s rejection she had gone out and had most of her hair cut off, the remainder dyed whipped-cream blonde, shaved at the sides and spiked on top. Oddly, the outrageous style and colour suited her. Men now pursued her even more than they had before. ‘I’m fine,’ she lied blithely.

‘You don’t look fine. You look terrible.’

‘Oh, that’s just because of the sleeping tablets I took last night. They always leave me dopey the next day.’

‘You shouldn’t be taking sleeping tablets,’ Melanie reproached seriously. ‘You shouldn’t even have them in your possession. They’re like having a loaded gun around. People say they never mean to shoot anyone but if they didn’t own a gun they couldn’t. Same thing with sleeping tablets.’

Jade stared at the housekeeper, and wondered if she had once overdosed on sleeping tablets. Unexpectedly, Jade felt the urge to try to make friends with this woman whom she’d always pitied but never really liked. Now, she wanted to extend the hand of friendship, to see if she could help her in some way. But what to say, how to start? They were hardly of the same generation. Melanie had to be over thirty. If not, she sure looked it!

‘Let’s not talk of nasties,’ Jade started up in her best breezy voice. ‘How’s things going with Auntie Ava? I presume she’s up in that studio of hers, fantasising about Prince Charming sweeping into her life on a white charger. Has she finished any of those infernal paintings of hers, yet?’

‘I would have thought your first concern would be your father, Jade, not your aunt.’

‘I said no nasties, remember. Hopefully, Pops will stay put in that hospital a while longer. I can just about tolerate visiting him there. It’s rather amusing seeing him trussed up in that pristine white bed with his leg in a sling. Of course, I haven’t seen him for over a fortnight. We had the most frightful row over my appearance and that was that. What’s he done? Has he been a bad boy? Banged up his leg again trying to seduce one of the nurses? He certainly wouldn’t have tried it on the matron. What a tartar that woman is!’

Melanie smiled at Jade’s ravings, shocking Jade. Why, the woman was quite striking when she smiled, with dazzling white teeth and eyes like glittering jet jewels. Not only striking, but sensual. The mock scenario of Byron trying to seduce the nurses seemed to have tickled the housekeeper’s fancy, lending a decidedly sexy flavour to her smile.

Now Jade was floored. Melanie... Sexy? The idea was preposterous. And yet...

Jade looked at the housekeeper, really looked at her, mentally stripping away that shapeless black dress, trying to see the real woman behind the sexless façde. Her slender shoulders were broad, her breasts full, her waist and hips trim. And when she bent down over the dishwasher, her buttocks showed shapely and firm through the black gabardine. Her knees—what Jade could see of them—were very nice indeed. As were her ankles. Those ghastly thick beige stockings distracted from, but not entirely hid, the slender coltish lines of the legs inside them.

Jade tried to imagine what Melanie would look like in a slinky black dress, scarlet gloss on that sultry mouth of hers and sexy earrings swinging around that long white neck she had. Everyone’s eyes round Belleview would fall right out of their sockets, her father included. He wouldn’t recognise his prim and proper housekeeper.

A sudden memory stabbed at Jade’s heart before the corner of her mouth lifted in a cynical smirk. It was just as well, perhaps, that Melanie was as she was, considering what had happened between the last housekeeper and the master of Belleview. Catching her father with that woman in his arms had come as a dreadful shock to Jade. Her god of a father, high on his pedestal—or was it podium?—always preaching about character and control and moral standards. Her father, having an affair with his housekeeper while his manic depressive wife was safely installed in a sanatorium somewhere.

He’d tried to explain everything away, saying he hadn’t actually slept with the woman, saying he’d kissed her in a moment of weakness. Jade had not accused. She’d simply stood there, not listening, refusing to understand, unable to forgive, regardless of the circumstances. She couldn’t abide parents who had the policy of ‘don’t do as I do, do as I say.’

She’d been just twenty at the time. Her father had dismissed the unfortunate woman—another injustice, she believed—and hired Melanie. But Jade had never looked at her father in the same way again. Neither had she taken a blind bit of notice of anything he tried to tell her. She went her own way, did her own thing. She had her own code of right and wrong, and had never hurt anyone as she was sure he had. He, and Nathan. They were the hurters, the despoilers.

Jade frowned as her mind shifted uncomfortably to her mother.

No, she decided abruptly. I will not make excuses. For either of them. For any of them!

An alien tap-tapping sound click-clacked somewhere in the house. Not recognising it, Jade swivelled on the kitchen stool she was perched up on, only to see her father making his way across the family-room, a walking cane in his right hand.

Their eyes met simultaneously through the open doorway, Jade’s widening as Byron’s narrowed. He looked hopping mad.

‘You didn’t give me a chance to tell you,’ Melanie said quietly from the other side of the breakfast bar. ‘Your father came home from the hospital yesterday.’

CHAPTER TWO

‘YOU’VE changed your mind, it seems, about darkening this doorstep again,’ Byron barked at his daughter.

‘And hi to you, Pops,’ Jade said with a flipness she fell into when at her most stressed. What on earth was her father doing home from hospital? A fortnight ago they’d said his leg wasn’t mending properly and he’d be stuck in there for another month at least. She should have known he’d prove them wrong. ‘You thinking of auditioning for the part of Long John Silver?’ she quipped airily, waving at the walking cane.

Byron hobbled into the kitchen, still scowling at his daughter. ‘One day you’ll use that sassy mouth of yours on the wrong person. I hope I’m around to see it. Melanie, I’m expecting a visitor shortly. A Mr Armstrong. Show him into my study when he arrives, will you? And we’ll be wanting coffee. Or tea, if he prefers. Ask him.’

‘Certainly, Bryon. Will this Mr Armstrong be staying to dinner?’

‘Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll have to let you know.’

‘And who is Mr Armstrong?’ Jade asked, the name not at all familiar.

Byron’s hard blue eyes swung back to his daughter. ‘No one you know.’ He looked her up and down, his upper lip curling with disgust at her appearance. ‘Good God, girl, don’t you ever wear a bra?’ And, spinning round on his good leg, he limped off.

She pulled a face at his disappearing back. She did wear a bra...once every hundred years or so.

Admittedly, the ribbed pink vest-top she was wearing moulded her well-rounded breasts like a second skin, her nipples outlined and emphasised. But she hadn’t brought any clothes with her and all that was in her wardrobe were things she hadn’t worn for years, most of which were a little tight on her. She’d gone through a semi-anorexic stage back in her teens, till the loss of half her boobs had brought her up with a jolt. Horrified, she’d quickly eaten up till she was back to her shapely self, substituting the dieting with aerobics and weight-training. Her figure had steadily gone from gaunt to good to great. She was quite proud of it and had no intention of hiding her hard-earned shape under dowdy matronly clothes. Lord, she was only twenty-two, not fifty-two!

Sliding from the kitchen stool, however, reminded her that the jeans she had on were close to obscene, they were so tight. Maybe she should hunt out something of Auntie Ava’s to put on. The old dear was always buying things in sales that were several sizes too small.

Jade was on the way through the family-room, heading in the direction of the front hall when the doorbell rang. ‘I’ll get it, Melanie,’ she shouted back over her shoulder. ‘It’s sure to be the mysterious Mr Armstrong.’