Dreaming Of... Australia: Mr Right at the Wrong Time / Imprisoned by a Vow / The Millionaire and the Maid

Sam’s defeat was contagious. Her eyes dropped to the ground.

‘Come on. We have an hour before we’re due back. Let’s go rescue the kites and then go back to the café for that interview.’

The interview. Did either of them believe that excuse any more? But the pages of her book were already established neutral territory between them, so it was good to have it to retreat to.

Just accept the attraction …

Aimee shook her head. He was so easy to believe. He was so certain that this was a good idea. Sam had no doubt that he could put aside whatever this was simmering away between them, and maybe he could.

But could she?

CHAPTER TEN (#u3886d76e-8b0f-5bf2-896b-dffa39b2f600)

AIMEE re-read the opening to the oral history spread out on the hotel table before her and stared at the words as though they were prophecy.

She’d first met Coraline McMahon as an elderly woman from the suburbs of Melbourne, but the Cora she was meeting now was fifteen, beautiful, running barefoot and wild in her home on the Isle of Man. Cora had set her cap at tear-away Danny McMahon from a very early age—a young man idolised by the boys, dreamed of by the girls, and tsked about by their parents alike, which had only made him all the more desirable. Dark and bold and charismatic. She’d fallen hard and irrevocably for Danny, but he’d left her behind when he’d enlisted in the Second World War.

Broken-hearted. Fifteen.

Pregnant.

Within weeks a shamed Cora had been married off to Danny’s younger brother Charley: the responsible one, the tolerant one, the one willing to raise his brother’s child to avoid a family scandal.

They’d had a sound sort of marriage, living in the McMahon household while the war raged on, until the day Danny got a foot blown off and limped home to a hero’s welcome.

‘Ugh.’ Aimee dropped the sheets of her transcribed story onto the tabletop and slid down further on her chair to study the ceiling.

Every day.

Every day Cora had struggled with wanting a man she couldn’t have. Living under the same roof. Watching him making a slow life for himself. It had broken Charley’s heart, watching her try to hide it. She’d never so much as touched Danny again, but breathing the same air as him had tarnished her soul and her husband’s—even after he’d packed them all up and shipped them to Australia to escape his older brother’s influence.

Aimee’s subconscious shrieked at her to pay attention. To what, though? What was the right message to take from Cora’s cautionary tale?

Was it counsel against the pain of spending time with someone she wanted but could never have? Or a reminder of how damaging it could be to any future relationship she might form? Or was it a living warning about not seizing the moment, of settling for someone less than you wanted? Cora had lived seventy years with second-best, faithful, loyal, accepting Charley McMahon. Yet he’d married her because she was pregnant with his brother’s child. Pressured by his parents. And he’d lived his life knowing her heart truly belonged to his brother.

No matter the great affection that had eventually grown between them, each of them lived had long lives knowing that neither was the other’s first choice.

That was just … awful.

And yet their story was going in her book. Coraline McMahon had willingly given her life to the brother she didn’t love. She’d done the right thing by her family, her son, on her own merit. She hadn’t been swayed by the fact that it was the wrong thing for her. Outwardly it smacked of passivity, but there was great strength in the way she’d taken her unplanned future by the scruff and fashioned a reasonable life for herself, and that made her story perfect for Navigators.

She’d owned her choices and she lived with the consequences. For ever.

But … oh … how it had hurt her.

Aimee remembered the cloudy agony in Cora’s eyes as she’d relived the day they’d trundled away from the McMahon home with their meagre belongings stacked around them. Told her about the momentary eye-contact she’d shared with a broken and war-shocked Danny, standing respectfully to the rear of the group farewelling his brother’s family.

Bare seconds locked together. Her first and only glimpse of the saturated sorrow in his eyes. Realising he’d loved her after all.

How had she managed, never seeing him again, never speaking to him …? Aimee studied the yellowed photograph of Cora and her son aboard the ship they’d boarded for Australia. Seeing Danny every single day in the dark eyes of their son?

Was that a comfort or a kind of torture?

She squared up the bundled pages that captured Cora’s story and refastened the elastic band around them tight, sealing in all the heartbreak. The cover title was the widow’s final words to her on the last day of their interviews: This Too Shall Pass.

Except Aimee felt certain it had never passed for Coraline McMahon. She was strong and honourable, and hadn’t been afraid to reinvent herself for her son’s sake, but she’d carry the secret pain of Danny’s loss to her grave.

Aimee slid the documents back into their file and swallowed back tears. Would she have the same strength of character? Endurance? Would she grow to accept Sam’s unavailability or, like Cora, would her heart form a callus around the wound so that she could survive?

‘Phone, Aimee …’

She jumped at Sam’s voice, so close behind her, and reached for her mobile as the special ring-tone he’d recorded on her phone the day before repeated itself.

‘Phone, Aimee …’

But just as she went to accept his call she paused, glanced at Cora’s notes, and then at the hotel wall between their suites. She tuned in to the heart that hammered in Pavlovian response just to the sound of Sam’s voice. The cell-deep anticipation that excited her blood.

‘Phone, Aimee …’

And she let it go to voicemail.

She opened the door, expecting hotel staff to collect her bags, and found Sam there, instead, a deep scowl marring his handsome face and fire sparking in his eyes. Her stomach clenched.

‘Why are you leaving?’ he said.

Because it’s not healthy for me to be around you, like this. Because I need to remove myself from the temptation of touching you.

‘You don’t need me for this afternoon’s meetings so I might as well fly out today.’ Without you.

‘But what difference does one more night make?’

Her whole body stiffened up. That was not an easy question to answer. If he knew what she’d be wanting to do right through that night … What she’d wanted to do that first night, with a head full of images of him in his towel … Or last night, fuelled by sensual dream images of his strong, lithe fabric hawk kite twisting around her … How long she’d lain awake taking herself through the mental pros and cons of rolling out of bed and tiptoeing next door … How hard it had been to finally settle on not doing it …

Her arms crept around her front. ‘None, to you. But I’d like to get home now that I’m not needed. I’ve done my part for your department.’

It was more defensive than she’d meant it, but that couldn’t be helped. Being strong had to start somewhere.

He frowned. ‘You have. You’ve been amazing. I just …’

‘What, Sam?’

‘Are you leaving because of yesterday? Because of what I said on your recorder?’

There was nothing too controversial about what they’d recorded at the café. But ‘yesterday’ could only mean the kites. She tossed her hair back. ‘I’m leaving because I’m done.’ Totally. ‘And because staying has absolutely no purpose.’

His eyes smouldered the way they had at the end of their kite-flying. He was busting to say more, but even he had to see the sense in not hurting each other any further.

Aimee’s skin stretched to snapping point as they stood there, silently.