Читать книгу Summer Beach Reads - Natalie Anderson - Страница 28

‘PLEASE be a stripper.’

His voice was thick and groggy, as though she’d just roused him from sleep. Maybe she had. It was a gently warm and breezeless day and Hayden Tennant looked as if he’d been lying in that longish grass at the base of the slope behind his cottage for quite some time.

Shirley found some air and forced it past a larynx choked with nerves. This suddenly seemed like a spectacularly bad idea.

‘Were you expecting one?’ she breathed.

He scrutinised her from behind expensive sunglasses. ‘No. But I’ve learned never to question the benevolence of the universe.’

Still so fast with a comeback. The man in front of her might have matured in ways she hadn’t anticipated but he was still Hayden inside.

Somewhere.

She straightened and worked hard not to pluck at her black dress. It was the tamest thing in her wardrobe. ‘I’m not a stripper.’

His head flopped back down onto the earth and his eyes closed again. ‘That’s disappointing.’

Discharged.

She stood her ground and channelled her inner Shiloh. She wouldn’t let his obvious dismissal rile her. Silent minutes ticked by. His long body sprawled comfortably where he lay. She took the opportunity to look him over. Still lean, still all legs. A tiny, tidy strip of facial hair above his lip and on his chin. Barely there but properly manicured. It only half-covered the scar she knew marred his upper lip.

The biggest difference was his hair. Shorter now than when he’d been at uni and a darker blond. It looked as if someone who knew what they were doing had cut it originally, but she guessed they hadn’t had a chance to provide any maintenance recently.

She pressed her lips together and glared pointlessly at him as the silence continued. Had he gone back to sleep?

‘I can do this all day,’ he murmured, eyes still closed. ‘I have nowhere to be.’

She spread her weight more evenly on her knee-high boots and appreciated every extra inch they gave her. ‘Me, too.’

He lifted his head again and opened his eyes a crack.

‘If you’re not here to give me a lap dance, what do you want?’

Charming. ‘To ask you some questions.’

He went dangerously still. Even the grass seemed to stop its swaying. ‘Are you a journalist?’

‘Not really.’

‘It’s a yes/no question.’

‘I write for an online blog.’ Understatement. ‘But I’m not here in that capacity.’

He pulled himself up and braced against one strong arm in the turf. Did that mean she had his attention?

‘How did you find me?’

‘Molon Labe.’

He frowned and lifted his sunglasses to get a better look at her. His eyes were exactly as blue and exactly as intense as she remembered. She sneaked in a quick extra breath.

‘My office wouldn’t have given you this address.’

No. Not even face to face.

‘I researched it.’ Code for I stalked your offices.

It had taken a few visits to the coffee shop over the road to spot what messenger company they used most regularly. A man at the head of a corporation he didn’t visit had to get documents delivered to wherever he was, right? For signatures at least. Sadly for them, if Hayden ever found out, the courier company had been only too obliging when a woman purporting to be from Molon Labe had called to verify the most recent details of one of their most common delivery addresses.

His eyes narrowed. ‘But you’re not here in a journalistic capacity?’

‘I’m not a journalist.’

‘Or a stripper, apparently.’ He glanced over her from foot to head. ‘Though that seems wasted.’

She forced herself not to react. She’d chosen this particular outfit carefully—knee-high boots, black scoop-neck dress cinched at the waist and falling to her knees—but she’d been going more for I am woman and less for I am pole dancer.

‘You used to say sarcasm was the lowest form of wit,’ she murmured.

One eye narrowed, but he gave no other sign of being surprised that she already knew him. ‘Actually, someone else did. I just borrowed it. I’ve come to be quite fond of sarcasm in the years since …?’ He left it open for her to finish the sentence.

He didn’t recognise her.

Not entirely surprising, given how different she must have looked when he last saw her. Fourteen, stick-insect-thin, mousy, uninspired hair. A kid. She hadn’t discovered fashion—and her particular brand of fashion—until she was sixteen and her curves had busted out.

‘You knew my mother,’ she offered carefully.

The eyes narrowed again and he pushed himself to his feet. Now it was his turn to tower over her. It gave him a great view down her scoop neck and he took full advantage. His eyes eventually came back to hers.

‘I may have been an early starter but I think it’s a stretch to suggest I could be your father, don’t you?’

Hilarious.

‘Carol-Anne Marr,’ she persisted, the name itself an accusation.

Was it wrong that she took pleasure from the flash of pain he wasn’t quite fast enough to disguise? That she grasped so gratefully at any hint of a sign that he hadn’t forgotten her mother the moment she was in the ground. That he wasn’t quite as faithless as she feared.

‘Shirley?’ he whispered.

And it had to be wrong how deeply satisfied she felt that he even knew her name. Hayden Tennant wasn’t a god; if he ever had been he was well and truly fallen now. But still her skin tingled.

She lifted her chin. ‘Shiloh.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘Shiloh?’

‘It’s what I go by now.’

The blue in his eyes greyed over with disdain. ‘I’m not calling you Shiloh. What’s wrong with Shirley—not hip enough for you?’

It killed her that he was still astute enough to immediately put himself in the vicinity of the secret truth. And that she was still foolish enough to admire that. ‘I preferred something that was more … me.’

‘Shirley means “bright meadow”.’

Exactly. And she, with her raven hair and kohl-smudged eyes, was neither bright nor meadowlike. ‘Shiloh means “gift”. Why can’t it be a gift to myself?’

‘Because your mother already gifted you a name. Changing it dishonours her.’

Tendrils of unexpected hurt twisted in her gut and rolled into a tight, cold ball and pushed up through her ribcage. But she swallowed it back and chose her words super-carefully. ‘You’re criticising me for not honouring her?’

Surprise and something else flooded his expression. Was that regret? Guilt? Confusion? None of those things looked right on a face normally filled with arrogant confidence. But it didn’t stay long; he replaced it with a careless disinterest. ‘Something you want to say, Shirley?’

Suddenly presented with the perfect opportunity to close that chapter on her life, she found herself speechless. She glared at him instead.

He shook his head. ‘For someone who doesn’t know me, you don’t like me very much.’

‘I know you. Very well.’

He narrowed one eye. ‘We’ve never met.’

Actually they had, but clearly it wasn’t memorable. Plus, she’d participated secretly in every gathering her mother had hosted in their home. Saturday extra credit for enthusiastic students. Hayden Tennant had been at every one.

‘I know you through my mother.’

His lush lips tightened. She’d always wondered if her own fixation with Lord Byron had something to do with the fact that in her mind he shared Hayden’s features. Full lips, broad forehead, intense eyes under a serious brow … Byron may have preceded him in history but Hayden came first in her history.

‘If you’re suggesting your mother didn’t like me I’m going to have to respectfully disagree.’

‘She adored you.’ So did her daughter, but that’s beside the point. She took a deep breath. ‘That makes what you’ve done doubly awful.’

His brows drew down. ‘What I’ve done?’

‘Or what you haven’t done.’ She stared, waiting for the penny-drop that never came. For such a bright man, he’d become very obtuse. ‘Does remembermrsmarr.com ring any bells?’

His face hardened. ‘The list.’

‘The list.’

‘You’re 172.16.254.1’

‘What?’

‘Your IP address. I get statistics from that website. I wondered who was visiting it so often.’

‘I …’ How had this suddenly become about her? And why was he monitoring visitation on a website he’d lost interest in almost immediately after he had set it up? It didn’t fit with the man she visualised who had forgotten the list by the time the funeral bill came in.

‘I visit often,’ she said.

‘I know. At least three times a week. What are you waiting for?’

She sucked in a huge breath and ignored the flick of his eyes down to her rising cleavage. ‘I’m waiting for you to tick something.’

An eternity passed as he stared at her, the sharp curiosity he’d always had for everything in life dulling down to a careful nothing. ‘Is that why you’re here? To find out why I haven’t ticked some box?’

Pressing her lips together flared her nostrils. ‘Not just some box. Her box. My mother’s dying wishes. The things you were supposed to finish for her.’

His eyes dropped away for a moment and when they lifted again they were softer. Kinder. So much worse. ‘Shirley, look—’

‘Shiloh.’

‘Shirley. There’s a whole bunch of reasons I haven’t been able to progress your mother’s list.’

‘“Progress” suggests you’ve actually started.’ Okay, now she was being as rude as he’d been on her arrival. Her high moral ground was crumbling. She lifted her chin. ‘I came because I wanted to know what happened. You were so gutted at the funeral, how could you have followed through on none of them?’

He shrugged. ‘Real life got in the way.’

Funny. Losing your mother at fourteen had felt pretty real to her. ‘For ten years?’

His eyes darkened. ‘I don’t owe you any explanation, Shirley.’

‘You owe her. And I’m here in her place.’

‘The teacher I knew never would have asked anyone to justify themselves.’

He pushed past her and headed for his house. She turned her head back over her shoulder. ‘Was she so easily forgotten, Hayden?’

Behind her, his crunching footfalls on the path paused. His voice, when it came, was frosty. ‘Go home, Shirley. Take your high expectations and your bruised feelings and your do-me boots and get back in your car. There’s nothing for you here.’

She stood on the spot until she heard the front door to his little cottage slam shut. Disappointment washed through her. Then she spun and marched up the path towards her car, dress swishing.

But as she got to the place where the path forked, her steps faltered.

Go home was not an answer. And she’d come for answers. She owed it to her mother to at least try to find out what had happened. To put this particular demon to rest. She stared at the path. Right led to the street and her beaten-up old car. Left led to the front door of Hayden’s secluded cottage.

Where she and her opinions weren’t welcome.

Then again, she’d made rather a life speciality out of unpopular opinions. Why stop now?

She turned left.

Hayden marched past his living room, heading for the kitchen and the hot pot of coffee that substituted for alcohol these days. But, as he did so, he caught sight of a pale figure, upright and prim on his lounge-room sofa. Like a ghost from his past.

He backed up three steps and lifted a brow at Shirley through the doorway.

‘Come in.’

Her boots were one thing when she was standing, but seated and carefully centred, and with her hands and dress demurely folded over the top of them, they stole focus, big time. Almost as if the more modest she tried to be, the dirtier those boots got. He wrestled with his gaze to prevent it following his filthy mind. This was Carol-Anne’s kid.

Though there was nothing kid-like about her now.

‘The door was unlocked.’

‘Obviously.’

She pressed her hands closer together in her lap. ‘And I wasn’t finished.’

‘Obviously.’

Less was definitely more with this one. The women he was used to being with either didn’t understand half of what he said or they were smart enough not to try to keep up. It had been a long time since he’d got as good as he’d given. One part of him hankered for a bit of intellectual sparring. Another part of him wanted to run a mile.

‘I think you should finish the list,’ she said in a clear, brave voice.

Little faker.

‘Start the list, technically.’

‘Right.’ She seemed nonplussed that he’d made a joke about it. Was she expecting him to go on the attack? Where was the fun in that when he could toy with her longer by staying cool?

Now that he looked at her, he could see the resemblance to Carol under all her make-up. Mrs Marr to everyone else, but he’d presumed to call her Carol the first time he’d sat in her class and she’d smiled every time and never corrected him.

It was Shirley’s irises that were like her mother’s—the palest khaki. He’d have assumed contact lenses if not for the fact that he’d seen them before on a woman too sensible and too smart to be sucked in by the trappings of vanity. Shirley reminded him of one of those Russian dolls-inside-a-doll things. She had large black pupils surrounded by extraordinary grey-green irises, within the clearest white eyeballs he’d ever seen, and the whole thing fringed by smudges of catwalk charcoal around her lashes. Her eyes were set off by ivory skin and the whole picture was framed by a tumble of black locks piled on top. Probably kept in place by some kind of hidden engineering, but it looked effortless enough to make him want to thrust his hands into it and send it tumbling down.

Just to throw her off her game.

Just to see how it felt sliding through his fingers.

Instead, he played the bastard. The last time he’d seen her she’d been standing small and alone at her mother’s funeral, all bones and unrealised potential. Now she was … He dropped his gaze to the curve of her neck. It was only slightly less gratuitous than staring at her cleavage.

Another thing he hadn’t touched in years. Curves.

‘Looks like you’ve been on good pasture.’

The only sign of that particular missile hitting its target was the barest of flinches in her otherwise steady gaze. She swallowed carefully before speaking and sat up taller, expression composed. ‘You really work hard at being unpleasant, don’t you?’

A fighter. Good for her.

He shrugged. ‘I am unpleasant.’

‘Alcohol does that.’

His whole body froze. A dirty fighter, then. But his past wasn’t all that hard to expose with a few hours and an Internet connection. ‘I don’t drink any more.’

‘Probably just as well. Imagine how unbearable you’d be if you did.’

He fixed his eyes on her wide, clear ones, forcing his mind not to find this verbal swordplay stimulating. ‘What do you want, Shirley?’

‘I want to ask you about my mother.’

‘No, you don’t. You want to ask me about the list.’

‘Yes.’ She stared, serene and composed. The calmness under pressure reminded him a lot of her mother.

‘How did you even know it existed?’

Her steady eyes flicked for just a moment. ‘I heard you, at the wake. Talking about it.’

He’d not let himself think about that day in a long, long time. ‘Why didn’t you add your name?’

She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t invited.’ Her eyes dropped. ‘And I didn’t even know she had a bucket list until that day.’

Did that hurt her? That her mother had shared it with strangers but not her? A long dormant part of him lifted its drowsy head. Empathy. ‘You were young. We were her peers.’

She snorted. ‘You were her students.’

The old criticism still found a target. Even after all this time. ‘You weren’t there, Shirley. We were more like friends.’ He had hungered for intellectual stimulation he just hadn’t found in students his own age and her mother had filled it.

‘I was there. You just didn’t know it.’

He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I used to hide under the stairs when you would all come over for your extra credit Saturdays. Listen in. Learn.’

What? ‘You were, what, fourteen?’

‘Actually, I was eleven when you first started coming. I was fourteen when you stopped.’

‘Most eleven-year-olds don’t have a fascination with philosophy.’

She licked her lips, but otherwise her face remained carefully neutral. Except for the tiny flush that spiked high in her cheeks. And he knew she was lying about something.

‘Ask me what you really want to know.’ And then go. His tolerance for company was usually only as long as it took to get laid.

She leaned forward. ‘Why didn’t you even start the list?’

Oh … so many reasons. None of them good and none of them public. ‘How many have you done?’ he asked instead.

‘Six.’

Huh. That was a pretty good rate, given she had been a teenager for the first half of that decade. The old guilt nipped. ‘Which ones?’

‘Ballooning, horse-riding in the Snowy Mountains, marathon—’

He gave her curves a quick once-over. ‘You ran a marathon?’ She ignored him. With good reason.

‘—abseiling, and climbing the Harbour Bridge.’

The easy end of the list. ‘That’s only five.’

‘Tomorrow I swim with the dolphins.’

Tomorrow. The day after today. Something about the immediacy of that made him nervous. ‘Won’t you eviscerate if you go in the sun, or something?’

She glared at him. ‘I’m pale, I’m not a vampire. Stop hedging. Why haven’t you done a single one?’

She was going to keep on asking until he told her. And she wasn’t going to like the answer. ‘I’ve been too busy besmirching my soul.’

She frowned. ‘Meaning?’

‘Making lots of money.’

‘That should make it easier to do the things on the list, not harder.’

‘Success doesn’t make itself. You have to work hard. Put in the hours.’ So many hours …

Her lips thinned. ‘I’m well aware of that. But this list was your idea. To remind you of the importance of feeding your soul.’ His own words sounded pretentious on her dark-red lips. ‘To honour my mother’s memory.’

The distress she was trying to hide under her anti-tan crept out in the slightest of wobbles.

There it was again. The weird pang of empathy. ‘They’re meaningless, Shirley. The things. They won’t bring her back.’

‘They keep her alive. In here.’ Pressing her long, elegant fingers to her sternum only highlighted the way her dress struggled to contain her chest. And the way her chest struggled to contain her anger.

‘That’s important for you; you’re her daughter—’

‘You were her friend.’

His gut screwed down into a hard fist. He pushed to his feet. Forced lightness to his voice. ‘What are you, the Ghost of Christmas Past? Life goes on.’

Those eyes that had seemed big outside were enormous in here, under the fluorescent glow of her sorrow. The silence was breached only by the sound of her strained breathing.

‘What happened to you, Hayden?’ she whispered.

He flinched. ‘Nothing.’

‘I believed you, back then. When you sat at my mother’s funeral looking so torn up and pledged to honour her memory.’

She stared at him. Hard. As if she could see right through him. And for one crazy moment he wished that were true. That someone could drag it all out into the open to air. Instead of festering. But the rotting had started long before he’d begun to go to her house on Saturdays.

He clenched his fists behind his back. ‘That makes two of us.’

‘It’s not too late to start.’

He needed to be moving. ‘Oh, I think the time for me to make good on that particular promise is long past,’ he said, turning and walking out of the room.

She caught up with him in the kitchen, grabbed his arm and then dropped it just as quickly. Did she feel the same jolt he had?

Her steady words gave nothing away. ‘Come to the dolphins with me tomorrow.’

‘No.’

She curled the fingers she’d touched him with down by her side. ‘Why not? Scared?’

He turned and gave her his most withering stare. ‘Please.’

‘Then come.’

‘Not interested.’

The smile she threw him was tight, but not unattractive. ‘I’ll drive.’

He glanced down at her boots. ‘You’re just as likely to get your heel speared in the accelerator and drive us into—’

At the very last moment, his brain caught up with his mouth. She didn’t need a reminder of how her mother had died.

Silence weighed heavily.

She finally broke it. ‘I’ll pick you up at dawn.’

‘I won’t be here,’ he lied. As if he had anywhere else to be.

‘I’ll come anyway.’ She turned for the door.

He shouted after her. ‘Shirley—’

‘Shiloh.’

‘—why are you doing this?’

She paused, but didn’t turn back. He had no trouble hearing her, thanks to the hallway’s tall ceiling. ‘Because it’s something I can do.’

‘She won’t know,’ he murmured.

Her shoulders rose and fell. Just once.

‘No. But I will.’ She started down the hall again. ‘And so will you.’