Читать книгу Perfect Proposals Collection - Lynne Marshall - Страница 29

JO ELECTED not to go to bed immediately.

She pulled on a cardigan and let herself out onto the veranda from her bedroom, then down a short flight of wooden steps onto the lawn. This was not the pool side of the house but the garden was well tended and there were some lovely shrubs against the veranda wall.

There was also a bench and she sat down and hugged herself. Although it was starting to warm up as spring came to Kin Can, the night air was crisp and cold, there was no cloud cover to trap the warmer air of the day or hide the stars, and there were millions of them.

Due to the lack of artificial light, this area of Queensland was renowned for its view of the night sky.

She gazed upwards for a while, admiring the heavens on one level of her mind, but mostly preoccupied with the miracle that had happened to her tonight, the release from an experience that had coloured her whole life.

It was true she’d always found being kissed distasteful for one very good reason. Between twelve and eighteen, she’d lived with three foster families. Two of them had been warm, supportive and gone out of their way to make her feel part of the family. One of them had proved to be a nightmare.

She’d been fifteen when the husband had started to pay attention to her in a secretive, nauseating way. It had started out with compliments on her figure, then he’d started to touch her, accidentally, she’d thought at first, but one day he’d cornered her and kissed her, then issued a warning to her that if she told anyone, no one would believe her, against him, anyway.

She’d packed her bags and run away to the local police station from where she’d been passed on to the Department of Family and Community Services.

At first, no one had believed her, there had even been suggestions she might have ‘led him on’, but she’d stuck to the absolute truth, her record as a ‘sensible’ girl had come to her rescue and an investigation had been mounted. Two more girls had been found, who’d lived with the same family and had had similar experiences, although they’d been too scared to come forward at the time.

She’d refused point-blank to go on to any family with a man in the house, she’d received counselling and she’d ended up with a middle-aged widow with a social services background herself, and a daughter Jo’s age who had become her best friend.

She’d overheard her counsellors agreeing once that she would most likely be able to put the whole experience behind her because she was so—thank heavens!—sensible, gutsy and independent.

They’d been wrong. They’d overlooked that she was also sensitive. It had lingered at the back of her mind ever since. Her memories had come between her and a couple of men she’d thought she might have fallen in love with.

Perhaps, even, the experience of not being believed at first had been as damaging as anything else in that her independence had become crucial to her. Never again would she rely on anyone believing her or not.

Gavin Hastings had changed all that. Somehow he’d swept it away effortlessly. Because they’d become so close and shared such heart-stopping danger? Because he had thrown himself in front of a gun aimed at her whether he liked to think of it as a calculated risk or not? Because they’d confided in each other the way they had?

Whatever, even although her heartbeat had tripped when he’d suggested she marry him, nothing had prepared her for the flood of sensuality he’d released in her tonight.

She closed her eyes. She was purged at last. She’d fallen in love and she was loving it—only thing, how was she going to cope with the fact that deeply, wildly, madly might never happen again for him when she suspected it had already happened for her? How was her sensible, gutsy, stubborn independence, but also that innate sensitivity, going to cope with that?