A Lesson In Seduction

‘Look, here are all your tickets and documentation. All you have to do is turn up at the airport the day after tomorrow and you’ll be on your way to three weeks of carefree bliss.’

Rosalind accepted the proffered blue travel folder numbly, opening it as gingerly as if it were a potential bomb. ‘You’ve already booked for me to go?’ she said shakily, leafing through the evidence, her eyes widening at the sums involved. She didn’t know whether to feel pleased or insulted by her parents’ generosity. ‘What do you expect me to say?’

Her mother smiled warmly and jumped up to give her a hug. ‘No need for thanks, darling. We know how determined you are to stand on your own two feet, but at times like this the family should pull together...’

Rosalind struggled free of the fond maternal embrace. ‘Pull together?’ she snorted, waving the tickets under her mother’s elegant nose. ‘You’re bribing me to go thousands of miles away!’

‘We thought it would be a nice early birthday present,’ her father ventured.

‘My birthday isn’t for seven months!’ Rosalind pointed out sardonically.

‘A very early birthday present,’ Constance Marlow said, giving her husband a repressive look that told him not to deviate from the script.

She shrewdly studied her daughter’s sullen expression and abruptly changed her tactics. She threw up her hands in disgust and said crisply, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Roz. Talk about people blowing things out of proportion! Stop behaving as if you think we’re trying to sweep a blot on the family escutcheon under the carpet.’

She ignored the disrespectful snickers of her offspring at the atrociously mixed metaphor and continued with steely emphasis, ‘We’re very proud to have you as our daughter; we just don’t want to see you hurt unnecessarily. And it is so unnecessary, darling, what you’re putting yourself through. Unless you like playing the helpless martyr, of course—then I suppose there’s nothing more to be said. I might say that most children would be delighted if their parents offered to send them on an all-expenses-paid holiday...’

‘I know I would,’ said Richard with a languishing sigh.

‘I see the Met Office predicts a cold front this weekend,’ said Michael Marlow, apropos of nothing. ‘They say winter is going to arrive with a vengeance.’

‘Tioman does look wonderfully lush and Gauguin-ish,’ said Olivia traitorously, her soft, rain-washed green eyes wistful, her smile tinged with strain.

It struck Rosalind that it was her twin who looked as if she needed a holiday, and it was on the tip of her tongue to say so. She glanced at Jordan and found him watching his wife with a narrow-eyed concern that stilled the words in her throat. She felt a flutter of inexplicable panic and her fingers tightened on the tickets in her hand.

‘You know, you should make the most of your freedom while you can, Roz,’ advised Joanna, rescuing a soggy rusk from the carpet. ‘Once you have children, taking a holiday is like going on military manoeuvres.’

As if on command, Hugh’s three pre-schoolers came thundering into the room, their diminutive blonde mother breathless in their wake.

‘Oh, you are going to Tioman, then? Good on you!’ Julia panted, seeing the folder in Rosalind’s hand. ‘I told Hugh you’d do it, even if only to cock a snook at those sneaky reporters. You know, one of those gossip columnists followed us to the supermarket yesterday and tried to chat up Suzie when I left the trolley for a moment in the confectionery aisle. The idiot even offered her a lollipop.’ She ruffled the curly brown head leaning against her knee. ‘Luckily Suzie blitzed him with her favourite word.’

Suzie blinked up at Rosalind, her blue eyes huge in her doll-like face. ‘No!’ she bellowed proudly. ‘No! No! No! No!’

Julia chuckled. ‘She made such a racket that the guy had a hard time convincing everyone he wasn’t a child-molester. I bet that put a crimp in his column!’

‘He’s lucky I wasn’t there; I would have put a crimp in his face,’ growled Hugh, whose gentleness was known to be in direct proportion to his size.

Rosalind smiled weakly, stricken by the thought that her uncompromising stance might have put the trusting innocence of her nephews and nieces in jeopardy. Typically, she had been so swept up in her own problems that she had taken her family’s support for granted, without thinking how much it might cost them in terms of their own privacy.

Her certainty that she was doing the right thing by standing her ground dwindled further. Perhaps she should just abandon her principles and run for the hills...or rather the South China Sea.

It seemed such a callous thing to do while Peggy Staines still hovered between life and death in the intensive care unit at Wellington Hospital. But it wasn’t as if Rosalind could provide any positive help for her recovery. Quite the reverse—knowing that she was around might cause Peggy to have another heart attack.

A brief word of sympathy with a distracted Donald Staines in the hospital waiting room was all that Rosalind had permitted herself. He had asked what had happened but not why, and Rosalind had caught a plane back to Auckland before he or any of the other members of the Staines family had rallied sufficiently from their shock to ask for the details. Until Peggy had recovered enough to carry on a lucid conversation—if she recovered—Rosalind was bound by her conscience to remain silent.

Thank goodness the police hadn’t become involved, although Rosalind had the sinking feeling that if the publicity continued to escalate either they or someone involved in national security might feel obliged to come sniffing around with some serious questions, and then she might have no choice but to betray her conscience.

‘Well, what do you say, darling?’ her mother asked eagerly, visibly frustrated by Rosalind’s lack of enthusiasm. ‘I can’t believe you’re even hesitating...’

A disturbingly familiar tension began to crawl around the back of her skull as Rosalind looked into the expectant faces around her. A paralysing sense of her own vulnerability swept over her, but she knew she mustn’t allow it to dictate her actions. She couldn’t let the fear win.

Surprisingly it was Jordan who came to her rescue. Her brother-in-law rose to his feet, dominating the room with his muscled bulk, almost dwarfing Hugh.

‘I think we should back off and let Roz make up her own mind in her own time,’ he said with the ease of a man confident of his authority. ‘She’d probably like to go home and think things over without the rest of us breathing down her neck.’

Rosalind cast him a grateful look and he continued smoothly, strolling over to take her by the elbow, ‘Why don’t I run you back to your apartment now, Roz, so you can do just that? Here, take these with you.’ He scooped up a handful of brochures and thrust them into her free hand, and picked up her embroidered tote bag from a chair, looping it over her shoulder.

‘You can leave your own car here as a decoy,’ he said. ‘The reporters won’t bother to follow me if they see me leave alone. You can nip out over the back fence and through the neighbours’ gardens and I’ll drive around the block and pick you up in the next street.’

‘Uh, but I’m going to need my car later,’ said Rosalind, disconcerted by the unexpectedness of the offer and the firmness of the grip steering her towards the door. Although Rosalind and Jordan were cordial to each other, she had always been very careful to maintain a cool distance between them that had precluded friendship. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Olivia observing her husband’s urgency with a worried crease of suspicion on her smooth brow.

‘Richard or one of the others can drop it over to you later.’ Jordan brushed aside the feeble protest. ‘At least it’ll give you a temporary respite from all the unwelcome attention you’ve been getting.’

The idea of a few hours’ respite from the bloodhounds outside was undeniably appealing. ‘well... I suppose...OK, thanks.’ She dug her heels in and skewed round to look over her shoulder. ‘Uh, are you coming, Olivia?’

‘Olivia wants to stay and chat with Connie, don’t you, kitten?’ Jordan cut in as his wife opened her mouth. ‘We’re going back to Taupo tonight and with her exhibition coming up she might not get the chance to visit again for a while...’

There was a hasty flurry of startled goodbyes as Rosalind found herself hustled out into the hall.

‘For heaven’s sake, what’s the big rush?’ she hissed as Jordan practically pushed her out the back door. ‘Did you see Olivia’s face? She looked awfully suspicious...’

‘Maybe she thinks you’re going to try and seduce me again,’ said Jordan sardonically, blocking the doorway as she made a tentative effort to go back inside.

Rosalind, who never blushed, went hot at the reminder of one of the most mortifying encounters of her life. ‘That was all a horrible mistake and you know it,’ she gritted fiercely. ‘I didn’t know you two had even met when I pretended to be Livvy... and anyway, nothing happened—’

‘Quite. There’s zero physical attraction between us. I know it, you know it, and Olivia certainly knows it. After all, even when I thought you were her and wanted you to turn me on, you failed miserably.’

‘OK, OK, I get the picture,’ Rosalind grumbled, jerking her elbow out of his grip. ‘But I might point out the failure was completely mutual.’

He grinned, his odd-coloured eyes warming with laughter. ‘True. So now we’ve finally got that out in the open maybe we can relax around each other. Olivia is beginning to worry that we intend to keep up the pussyfooting for ever.’

Rosalind grinned back, relinquishing the last vestige of embarrassment which had constrained her natural, exuberant friendliness. ‘Well, I guess if you can accept your total lack of sex appeal, so can I,’ she teased with deliberate ambiguity.

‘Big of you,’ said Jordan, ignoring the overt provocation. ‘Do you need a boost over that wall, or can you make it yourself?’

At five feet nine Rosalind wasn’t used to men treating her as a wisp of delicate femininity and she reacted with her usual bravado to the implied challenge. Waiting in the quiet cul-de-sac on the other side of the neighbours’ property a few minutes later, she brushed off her painfully grazed palms with a rueful acknowledgement that at her age maybe she should start thinking about putting dignity before daring.

Jordan’s car turned out to be a macho four-wheel drive, scarcely less attention-grabbing than Rosalind’s beloved fluorescent green VW, but, as he had predicted, the journalists outside the Marlows’ gate had let him go unhindered when he had forced his way through the gauntlet of their questions.

‘So...what’s the real reason why you offered me a lift?’ asked Rosalind quietly as they cruised towards the city. ‘Don’t tell me it was just to clear the air between us. You could have done that any time. It’s something to do with Livvy, isn’t it? Why she was looking so...pulled back there at the house...’

She watched Jordan’s big hands tighten betrayingly on the wheel, highlighting the nicks and scars that were the legacy of his work as a sculptor.

‘She’s pregnant,’ he said baldly.

The words hit her like a sharp blow. Rosalind’s ears rang and she felt a chill across the base of her skull and tasted metal on her tongue.

‘Pregnant?’ she whispered. She felt a floating sense of utter separation. Olivia. Her sister. Her twin.. the other half of herself...was going to have a baby...contribute to the growing brood of Marlow grandchildren?