Wed in the outback volum.., p.2
Wed In the Outback, Volume 1, page 2
“Rose, Eve, and Matilda, you still have the trusts your mother left for you,” said Harrington, dropping to sit on the arm of Matilda’s couch.
Her eyes moved to him, the easier target. He looked tired. As if the past few weeks, leading up to this day, this bombshell, must have been hard on him too.
“They exist outside of the scope of the conditions. So don’t fret on that. But the land itself, the Garrison Downs station and all of its holdings, will belong to the Garrison family unless you, Rose, Evelyn, Matilda, and Anastasia, are all married within the next twelve months.”
This was real. Really real. Meaning they had to get on the same page, and fast.
Which was where Matilda usually came into her own. As the youngest, it had fallen to her to find some creative way to lighten the mood. But all she could think was that she had information that might bring a modicum of relief.
“Rose?”
“Hang on. Evie, did you know? Is this why—”
“I have to go,” said Eve, looking as pale as the white walls surrounding her. Before the TV turned to black.
“Ah, Rose—”
Rose threw out her arms and stormed toward the office door. “I can’t—I don’t have time for this. I have a station to run.” At the door she stopped, turned, pointed at Ana and barked, “Stay!” And then she was gone.
Matilda knew Rose didn’t mean to sound so autocratic, that she was used to having to deal with brash young station hands testing her authority on the daily, but the situation meant everyone was tense.
Including Matilda, who swallowed the words she’d been readying to spill, a secret she herself had been keeping for several years, with a discomfiting level of relief.
From somewhere inside the house they all heard Rose holler, “Lindy! Can you see that the yellow guest suite is made up for Anastasia please. She’ll be staying with us for a bit.”
She would? Matilda thought. Then, Yes, she would.
For Anastasia was clearly as crushed by the whole situation as the rest of them. And she was here, on her own.
This was their father’s fault. Every last drop.
He’d left them, not only when Rose, Eve, and she were so young, to have an affair with some other woman, but he’d left them again, with this ‘condition’ hanging over them like an anvil about to drop on their heads.
He’d left them with nowhere to put their shock, their anger, their hurt. No one to ask why.
As rage, and fear, and panic rose inside of her, Matilda too would have loved to have flicked a switch and shut it off. Or walked out of that now claustrophobic damn room, and outside, where she might scream at the wide blue winter sky.
But the clock had already started ticking.
One year.
One year to wed or lose the land that had been their lifeblood, their safe space, their connector since birth.
Rose, for whom Garrison Downs was the love of her life.
Eve, who was not exactly known for toeing the family line.
And Ana...
From the corner of her eye, Matilda glanced at the girl, only to see that she was shaking like a leaf, her bright blue eyes glassy, as Harrington gently tried to talk her out of leaving.
Dad, Matilda thought, a ball of fury clenching in her belly. How could you? Why would you? Did Mum know? Oh, poor Mum. How dare you do that to her? How dare you do this to us?
Then again, she thought, her thumb once again playing with the ring on her right hand, when it came to family secrets, who was she to protest?
Matilda closed her eyes. Trying to find a kernel of anything in her life that she could trust anymore.
Rose. Eve. That she could trust. Her sisters.
Matilda turned to face Ana. For she was in this now too.
Fortifying herself with a big breath, Matilda offered up a smile. Gave her a nod. Letting her know it would all be okay.
Matilda would make sure of it.
And the clock was ticking.
CHAPTER ONE
Chaleur,
one month later...
MATILDA WAVED TO the taxi driver.
“Bonne chance!” he called, waving back happily as he drove away. His grin was no doubt due to the generous tip she’d added on top of the fee for the trip from Nice Côte d’Azur Airport to Côte de Lapis, a coastal town in the picturesque principality of Chaleur.
Or it could be the fact she was no longer in the car, talking his ear off.
“What’s in Côte de Lapis?” he had asked as he’d angled his way out of the airport queue. “We have lovely beaches here in France.”
“I’m not after a beach,” Matilda had said. “I’m looking for a man.”
“We have those in France too,” said the driver, eyebrows waggling at her in the rearview mirror.
“A specific man,” she’d said, smiling. Then frowning. Because it wasn’t a laughing matter at all. In fact, in the space of a couple of months, life for the Waverly sisters had become a big old mess.
Rose was still deeply mourning their dad—his physical loss and the loss of the man they’d thought him to be—while also frantically trying to fill his shoes.
Eve, still resolutely sticking it out in London, was proving even more bull-headed than usual—flat out denying the condition of bequeathment in their father’s will was valid. While acting as if Ana didn’t exist at all.
As for Ana, in the short time they’d had together before she’d gone home to her family, it had been clear how overwhelmed she was feeling. Navigating a life with sisters she’d never known, all of whom looked at her and saw their father’s betrayal, was hard enough without the pressure of the will.
Then, there was Harrington, the lawyer, still insisting the will was as their father must have wanted.
Add the need to keep the will condition under wraps, so that the vultures didn’t start circling, and to keep Ana’s existence private for as long as possible, and it was near impossible to call on outside help with any assurance it wouldn’t blow up in their faces.
Meaning, as far as Matilda saw it, it was up to her to figure out a plan.
“Ahh,” the taxi driver had said, “is this a dating app scenario? Or you are a woman scorned?” He sounded intrigued more than accusatory.
“No! No, nothing like that. It’s a man I...I knew some time ago. A man I very much need to track down again.”
Though after two solid weeks of searching, she was fast losing hope of finding Henry at all.
Henry. Her not so little secret that had finally come home to roost.
She’d been nineteen when they’d met, having skipped off overseas midterm in the final year of her history degree in search of an infamous, missing, handwritten love letter her favourite professor had been wanting to authenticate for years. Keen to follow in his footsteps and become a renowned graphologist and authenticator of celebrated letters herself, she’d flown to Vienna with the intention of making his dream come true.
But the truth of it was she’d been looking for an excuse to do something wild and wondrous for years, having been told tale after tale of exotic adventure by her well-travelled mother in lieu of bedtime stories since she was a little girl.
What she hadn’t counted on was meeting a boy. A boy named Henry.
When she’d caught his eye across that crowded bar in Vienna, phew, that had been a moment. The way his thick dark hair swept across his forehead, somehow immaculate and unkempt all at once. The pale hazel of his bedroom eyes. The most perfectly carved lips. Pale skin that flushed pink in the cold. Then there were squiggly horizontal lines furrowed permanently into his brow, making him appear deeply thoughtful, über-masculine, and tragically Byronic all at once.
Like lines of verse, Matilda used to think.
The kind he was always reading her from that beaten up, blue, leather-bound book of letters and poetry she had bought him from a second-hand bookstore in Paris.
All of it had been made even more enticing by the fact he was one of a crew of bright young things who knew nothing about one another bar their names.
That had been the deal. Something she’d discovered when Andre, Henry’s cousin, had swooped on her at the bar in Vienna after having seen the way she and Henry had been swooning over one another, laying out “The Rules”.
They were a wandering band of merry travellers having what he called a Summer of Freedom.
Their intent: suck the marrow out of life before responsibility and consequence sucked the life out of them.
Their terms: names only, no talk of home or family. No selfies or group photos.
Anyone found to breach the rules was out. Cut off. Left behind.
From the outside it had had all the hallmarks of a cult, but she’d known their ilk in boarding school. Bored, cloistered rich kids desperate to break free.
Besides, she’d helped her dad break horses and birth calves, told off grizzled stockmen for swearing in front of her gran. She could take any one of them without breaking a sweat.
Yes, she probably ought to have thought through the logistics, and the why, but it had been so thrilling, and a million miles from where she’d grown up. She had, with intent, put herself in adventure’s path and adventure had found her. And the lure of anonymity, of adventure, had been too strong.
As had the lure of Henry. Enough that one night, off the coast of Gibraltar, by the power vested in the yacht ‘captain’ who’d sailed them there, she had vowed to love him through all her forevers.
A whirlwind wedding, a fairy-tale romance—it had mirrored the way her parents had met so beautifully it had felt meant to be.
Only later that same week, as if her karma had swung so far past the edges of exhilaration her life had overcorrected, she’d learned that her mother was dying.
By the time she’d made it home, it had been too late. The household in disarray, her father crushed, Rose a shadow of herself, there had been no time to tell them her ‘good news’. It had felt cruel to have been that happy at the same time her mother had been so unwell.
There was the fact that Henry hadn’t followed, hadn’t even been in touch, even after she’d broken the rules and left a note telling him how. With no way to contact him, no information bar his name, she’d never seen him again.
After such severe romantic whiplash, she’d hunkered in, put her head down, burned through her studies, put all her love into the family she had left, and lived as if none of it had been real.
Until George damn Harrington had read out the conditions of her father’s damn will.
The taxi driver had sighed, a gloriously Gallic sound. “I know that look in your eyes all too well. This man, he is the one that got away.”
“Mmm...” she’d said, noncommittally, while shifting uncomfortably on the car seat. “The thing is, I’ve been looking for a couple of weeks now. Hitting places we’d been together. But staff have moved on, places have closed down. The trail is getting cooler and I’m running out of options.”
“Can you not call him? Knock on his door?”
“All I have is his name. It was a thing.”
The driver had cocked his head, as if he had misjudged and ought not to be encouraging her on what seemed a fool’s mission. But whatever he saw in her face, her ragged last vestiges of hope, had him shaking his head in a fatherly manner and saying, “Have you tried stalking him? On the...comment dit-on? On the socials?”
She had. With no luck.
“Mmm,” the driver had said, “let me think on it.”
Leaving Matilda to slump back in her seat and worry that, while thinking his name still brought on warm swoopy feelings inside her, echoes of the way he’d made her feel all those years before, he might not remember her at all.
What if he was some weirdo who collected wives then let them go with nary a word? What if he wasn’t a weirdo, but had changed? Irrevocably? What if he wasn’t exactly as she remembered him? What if he was?
What if he was with someone? What if he had married again, and she was about to open a massive can of worms?
What if she never found him at all? Or never found proof that they’d said I do? Did that mean the condition would be impossible to fulfil right from the start, and it was all her fault?
“What is his name?” the driver had piped up. “This man of yours?”
“Henry,” she’d said, a hopeful lilt at the edge of the word. “Henry Gallo.”
The driver had looked front, his expression thoughtful. Then he said, “I thought it rang a bell, but I have nothing.”
Now, standing on the beach path, one hand waving as the taxi driver edged his way through the lethargic traffic, the other resting on the handle of her small suitcase, Matilda took a deep affirming breath and checked out Côte de Lapis.
Bougainvillea cascaded down the pastel-stuccoed facades of centuries-old buildings tucked up together on the other side of the curving coastal road. Tables and chairs, and pots of brightly coloured flowers took up every spare inch of footpath, with café after café taking advantage of the view of striped umbrellas lining the craggy beach behind her, and beyond that the glinting Mediterranean.
It was exquisite. And dripping with history. But no matter the urge to soak herself in it till her fingertips turned pruney, she wasn’t there to sightsee.
She was there to find Henry.
To convince him to stay married to her for one more year, on paper at least, in order to fulfil the provisions of her father’s will, after which they could shake hands and move on with their lives.
And then—if they couldn’t find some other way out—her sisters might magically meet wonderful men to love and marry and it would all work out. It had to. The alternative was unthinkable.
As if on cue, her phone rang.
“Rose!” she answered. “Everything okay?”
“Just checking in,” said Rose, her voice overloud as if she was outside. “Still in Paris?”
“Nope. I just arrived in Chaleur.”
“Oh.” Then, “And where is that exactly?”
“Tiny principality in a crook of the south of France.” Matilda laughed. “Let me guess... If it doesn’t import Waverly beef, it might as well not exist?”
“True that.”
“Now, Tilly, remember,” said Rose, her tone dropping into serious big sister mode, “while you will undoubtedly become best friends with every person you happen upon, use discretion. If news gets out—about the will, or Ana—”
“So the T-shirt I had made, the one that says Marry Me or I Lose the Farm, you want me to take it off?”
“I’d appreciate it,” Rose deadpanned. Then, “Now go poke an old building, look at mouldy statues, sniff a tulip. Whatever people do over there.”
“All those things,” Matilda assured her. “Now you remember, Boss, since I’m not there to remind you every minute of every day, you could run that place with one hand tied behind your back, and you’d still do so with grace and aplomb.”
A pause. “I’m currently knee-deep in bore water and smell like cow dung.”
“And yet, I bet,” said Matilda, “glorious with it.”
With that, the sisters hung up.
Reinvigorated in her quest, Matilda tipped up onto her toes and peered over the top of the traffic, checking the faded names on the café awnings. Searching for one name in particular.
Though they’d not visited Chaleur, Andre, Henry’s cousin, had mentioned a café in Côte de Lapis more than once. Either his family owned it, or they had the best coffee in Europe. She couldn’t quite remember, but there was some connection.
There. Beneath the yellow and white awning, café tables, small dogs loosely tied up to wrought iron chair legs, friends meeting, cheeks bussing, a cacophony of style and colour and life, just as Andre had described it. Café du Couronne.
Her stomach swooped again, for it was a real place, and still standing. Or maybe that was hunger. Now she thought about it, she was starving.
She looked both ways, found a path through the slow-moving cars ignoring the lane markings entirely, and made her way to the other side of the road.
Where she would find a waiter, say, “Hey! I’m looking for an old friend. Henry Gallo? Wondering if you might know him.”
But first, coffee.
* * *
Henri rested his elbow on the rim of the convertible car window and listened with half an ear as the news journalist on the car radio showed mild hope over the improved state of the economy, then moved on to the lack of royal family attendance at the Summer Festival celebrations.
When there was no hint of a clandestine meeting between the Sovereign Prince of Chaleur and a handpicked gathering of sympathetic members of both sides of parliament, the subject of which would have generations of royal ancestors turning in their graves, Henri switched the radio to silent.
His gaze skimmed over the traffic ahead. Cars had slowed to a crawl or a stop both ways, as drivers and passengers alike gawked at the view.
Boris and Lars, the security detail in the car behind, would not be impressed with the crowd or the delay. But impressing them was not on his top ten list of things he had to do that day.
Finding himself with a rare moment of nothing to do, Henri tipped back his head and breathed in the sea air. Côte de Lapis in summertime with its quaintly colourful architecture, plethora of shops and cafés, creamy sands dotted with striped umbrellas, and water the colour of sapphires, was a local jewel.
In fact... Henri sat taller, looking over the top of the cars to the string of cafés across the road.
And there, beneath the yellow and white awning, was Andre’s old place. Café du Couronne. The Crown Café. Not the most subtle man on the planet, his cousin. Why he’d given the place up, Henri could not remember.
Though it was around that summer. The Summer of Freedom, as Andre had labelled it, once again lacking finesse. It had been a hell of a time, either way. The only time in Henri’s life he’d been able to relax, dispute, go anywhere, make questionable choices, make love, and just disappear, all without needing to consider anyone but himself.
