Gift wrapped, p.13
Gift-Wrapped, page 13
‘I certainly hope they’re going to feed you better at your father’s than they did the last time,’ her mother sighed, eyeing Anne’s too slender figure and conveniently forgetting that she’d lost all the weight after her return, not during her visit with her father. ‘I suppose this Frenchwoman cooks all sorts of cordon bleu and nouvelle cuisine meals that look wonderful but don’t give you any sustenance.’
‘I don’t think anybody considers wallaby stew to be either fancy or without sustenance, Mother,’ Anne replied. ‘Monique is a wonderful cook, and if I’m there long enough I’m hoping this time she’ll be able to teach me a few things.’
‘I would have taught you to cook, if you’d ever showed any interest,’ her mother declared with a sniff of distinct disapproval. Anne remembered a number of so-called cooking lessons during her younger days, when experimentation had been forbidden and her mother had inevitably taken over almost from the beginning to ensure that no mistakes were made. Just another example, she found herself thinking, of her mother’s wish to clip her wings and keep her under control.
She bit back a reply that would have caused more problems than solutions, and was saved by Steele’s returning at that moment with two fully sated, obviously worn-out children.
‘That’s it, I think,’ he grinned, returning them to their mother with an exaggerated air of relief. ‘Which is just as well, because I am fair ... ly ... rooted.’ And he shot Anne — the only one present who might be expected to understand the rude Australianism — a mischievous grin. ‘Well, almost, anyway,’ he added, and his grin was more than just mischievous now; it was downright wicked.
Anne shook her head in exasperation. He’d been overdoing the use of Australian slang, especially in her mother’s presence because he knew she didn’t understand the double meanings and would never deign to admit it. But this time it was, she knew, directed entirely at herself. Using the term as a euphemism for exhaustion was one thing; what he was implying now involved sexual exhaustion, and they both knew it.
‘Come on, Wombat. Let’s see if we can manage just one more decent splash before they shut this place down for the day,’ he said, rising to catch Anne’s wrist and lift her to her feet. She could have refused, but it would have had to be a verbal refusal, because his grip was like iron. And his eyes said he’d be unlikely to accept her words anyway.
Anne was far too conscious of his muscular, tanned body as he held her close against him, walking the perimeter of the huge wave pool to where the crowds were thinner and they could swim relatively undisturbed. Then he unceremoniously shoved her over the side and dived in to surface with his hands cradling her waist.
‘You want feeding up just a bit,’ he laughed, and she could only return the laugh, thinking of what her mother had said only moments earlier.
‘Christmas is barely over and you’re complaining about your present already,’ she quipped. ‘I suppose next you’ll be wanting an exchange or a refund.’ It was a light and frivolous way of not quite asking what she really wanted to ask. What did he want? What did he expect of her now, with their journey and its enforced closeness ahead of them?
Her answer was a sudden change in those dark, deep eyes, an expression that she couldn’t read, couldn’t understand. And wasn’t going to be allowed to, she realised.
‘We’ve got a long way to go before you have to worry about that,’ he said enigmatically, holding her close against him beneath the water, forcing her to feel their closeness and its effect on him. And on her! Anne couldn’t deny the sheer physical reactions he could create in her just with a touch, a smile, and unquestionably by doing this.
‘This is not the place,’ she snapped, trying in vain to free herself, to put at least some distance between them. ‘My mother’s just over there, you great fool.’
‘And wishing she was over here, instead of you,’ he replied without slackening his grip. ‘That’s half her problem, you know. She’s jealous as hell of both you and your sister.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Anne said, fighting back the warm, hollow feeling inside her. This was madness, carrying on such a conversation while knowing he could take her, here and now, that he wanted to. That she wanted him to! She leaned in against him to give herself room to move, then suddenly splashed water up into his face and thrust herself away to where she could just touch the bottom. She continued to splash him, keeping him at bay, but only just.
‘It’s hardly a cold shower,’ he laughed, returning the splashing, ‘but better than nothing, I suppose.’ Then his eyes turned serious, piercing into her own. ‘You seem to be having an awful lot of second thoughts about all this, Anne. Not planning to change your mind and stay safe in the nest after all, by any chance?’
‘I said I’d go with you and I will,’ she said, suddenly totally, completely unsure of herself. There had been, in all of this, no commitment from Steele, no declaration of love, no hint of where they would go from here. Had she even any right to expect more? she wondered. Maybe in his world there wasn’t any more.
And yet .. e was so extremely good with children. Good with everyone, come to that, but especially with children. Flummoxed for words, eager to avoid the seriousness of his probing, she quickly changed the subject to tell him so.
‘Hah! Monique’s often said we should have half a dozen,’ he said. ‘Not so likely before, but now that circumstances might be changing...’
She heard no more. The bottom dropped out of her world with just those few words, and she fled, shutting down her ears by the simple expedient of sinking into the silence of the water around her.
Now that circumstances might be changing! Now that her father was dying, now that Steele and Monique could finally get their act together without the inconvenience of a divorced husband to get in their way! Anne felt sick, felt like gulping in huge quantities of water to still the pounding noise in her head, in her entire being. She wanted to drown, to just die. But first she had to escape.
Kicking out, directionless at first, she swivelled away under the waves, her legs pumping furiously to let her slide otter-like through the crowds. When she came up for air, she didn’t bother to look around, simply gasped sufficiently to fill her distressed lungs and kept going, going.
She swam until she thought her lungs would burst, weaving between the other people, fleeing in a pattern-less route that finally allowed her to emerge from the enormous pool far from where Steele was still visible, looking round as if confused.
By the time he too emerged, Anne had herself under control, was busily drying her hair, her face concealed in the big towel, her trembling no longer obvious but her heart thumping inside her like some soundless drum.
‘You got out in a helluva hurry.’ Steele’s voice was only slightly muffled by the brisk towelling. Anne kept her face covered, managed to mutter her reply without having to look at him, without daring to.
‘Cramp,’ she lied. ‘Sudden … frightened me. Gone now.’ Gone as she wished she could be gone, but that, she realised, could not be so. She was committed to going with Steele to Australia, committed to visiting her father — more committed now than she’d been before. He would certainly need her now.
She finished towelling her hair, forced herself to meet Steele’s concerned gaze, to see past it to the devious, deceitful person he really was.
‘I ... I think I must have swallowed some water — too much,’ she stammered. ‘I have to go.’ And fled, sure-footed despite her inner turmoil, to the safety of the women’s locker-room, where she would surely have broken down but for the presence of both her mother and sister, already changing to their street clothes.
‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost, Anne,’ her mother cried, forcing Anne into a repeat of the lie, but fortunately giving her time to flee this audience, too, into the questionable sanctuary of the toilets.
They were gone when she emerged, and she was able, finally, to face the mirror, the reality, and to emerge into the real world with no sign, she thought, of the trauma she felt inside.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Steele seemed to have accepted Anne’s decision to avoid a repeat of their Christmas lovemaking, despite her occasional earlier teasing. Or perhaps just now he was simply too tired after his exhausting day with the children.
At the very least, he showed no reaction when she voiced plans to return to her mother’s house with the rest of the family after their day’s outing had ended.
Certainly, she thought, he couldn’t see inside her head, couldn’t see the real thoughts that governed her decision — and would continue not to do so throughout their journey together and beyond!
She shrugged off his apparent concern about her ‘cramps’, making light of the situation except to say that she now felt a touch queasy. A touch? Small word to describe the giant, hollow emptiness, vaster by far than the five-acre Water Park, that now comprised her insides.
Damn Steele anyway! And damn herself too, she thought, for being so stupid as to believe he could feel anything significant for her with Monique’s sultry, sophisticated beauty awaiting him. She herself had been nothing more than a convenience for him, and a means of salving his conscience while he waited to formalise his affair with her father’s wife. Pay for her to visit her dying father, so that he and Monique might feel less like vultures as they waited for him to die.
And have all his creature comforts on the way! Damn him straight to hell!
What did he expect to do with her en route to Australia? she wondered. He’d pass her off as some sort of niece, no doubt, giving hotel and restaurant staff a knowing, man-of-the-world wink that said everything and nothing at the same time. Well, let him. She would go to Australia with him, had to go with him if she wanted to go at all. Which she did! Just speaking to her father on the telephone had spurred her own conscience, freeing feelings she hadn’t known existed. He was, after all, her father! Ill, perhaps; his dying maybe more of a certainty. But this utter and faithless betrayal by his friend and his wife ... that was too much even for Anne’s simple, unsophisticated moral code.
Steele had also accepted her vague reply concerning when he would be seeing her again. Here, at least, she was on fairly safe ground; even he must accept that she needed to sell off her car, vacate her flat … but please, please, not until the last possible moment! — and arrange for storage of what she neither took with her nor got rid of entirely.
Mother, of course, would see to that problem, had even offered to keep the car if necessary. It would only be for six months at most, since that was all Anne’s tourist visa was good for. But Anne had insisted it must be sold, although not telling anyone that its meagre returns would have to be added in to the money she had to save to pay Steele back. Now, more than ever, she must repay that debt, she thought, to free herself of him forever.
The fire of her outrage at how Steele and Monique were manipulating her kept her going during the next few days, hectic days in which she advertised the car, negotiated like a bazaar merchant to rid herself of her flat on her terms and to her convenience.
She did see Steele, of course, had lunch with him one day and dinner the next. But by this time she had sorted out her head and was determined to play the game his way now — only by her own rules. The hardest part was when he changed the rules without telling her.
‘You want to make application for permanent resident status now, from here,’ he said when her passport arrived with its tourist visa all approved. ‘You can use your mother’s address and arrange for things to be forwarded if necessary.’
‘But ... I hadn’t planned to stay in Australia permanently,’ she replied without thinking. Of course she hadn’t. She was going to see her father through his health crisis, perhaps his dying, but not to stay there. Most especially not now.
Her response caused Steele to glance at her with a most peculiar expression in his eyes, but he only said, ‘You might change your mind, might at least have to stay longer than your tourist visa allows. At least this way you’ll have started the paper trail from the right end. They don’t much like permanent residence applications from tourists after they’re already in the country, even on a family reunion basis.’
Confused, but seeing some of his logic, Anne dutifully filled out the forms he provided for her. Her father might well need her for more than six months, she realised suddenly, might need her for quite some time.
Determined as she was to keep from rocking the boat, to keep their relationship at least appearing to be friendly, she found it very hard going some of the time. Steele was too perceptive, too damned perceptive, where Anne was concerned. But she was determined, and whenever he asked if she was feeling all right, or if she was suffering a change of heart, or if she was concerned about any aspect of their imminent journey, she managed to fob him off with some excuse. She was nervous, yes. Or she was having hassles with her mother over some small thing. Any excuse, she reckoned, was better than none, was better than having to tell Steele the truth: that she now knew about him and Monique, and despised both of them for it.
But it was hard, especially now that even she noticed he was, while still totally attentive, more and more accepting her own remoteness. He touched her less, kissed her less often even when the kiss was more a politeness than the raging, passionate kisses of Christmas. If she wanted him to keep his distance, he seemed to be saying, he would do so.
The worst part was that she kept forgetting herself. She was so used to being comfortable in Steele’s company, so used to his courtly manners, his decisive way of doing things and his undeniable charm that she sometimes slipped into what she now thought of as the way things were before.
He was still, he said, evaluating the gigantic West Edmonton Mall, looking at every aspect of its performance and seeking to determine if such a thing would work in Australia. Just where in Australia he never got round to telling her, but she reasoned that if such a facility could work in a city the size of Edmonton it might be just as workable in Sydney or Melbourne.
And part of this evaluation seemed to involve trying to test every restaurant, visit every single one of the advertised eight hundred shops and services. And whenever Anne could be coerced into joining him he made a point of asking her opinions, even, she thought with some surprise, of actually listening to them?
It was a never-ending production. More than two hundred fashion shops for women, something like thirty-five menswear shops, shoe shops by the dozen, eleven major department stores. And Steele obviously intended to see each and every one. Not that he made it into a marathon, or a route march. Whenever Anne was with him he seemed to approach the task with a light-hearted gaiety, a total and typically Steele form of irreverence.
‘I wonder if we started right at opening tomorrow we could manage to taste just one thing from each of the fast-food outlets?’ he said one day — remarkably, right in the midst of a truly gigantic dinner at the Cafe Orleans oyster bar.
‘How can you even think of such a thing now? There are…’ she glanced at one of the various brochures they both seemed to be consulting constantly ‘…more than fifty pure fast food outlets in this place, and that’s not counting the other twenty or so they’ve listed as “sweets and treats”. Here we are, sitting here at the end of a veritable banquet, and you want to think about junk food? You’re mad.’
‘It isn’t all junk food,’ he retorted. ‘I quite fancy some of the stuff on offer. Some of the Asian food is quite remarkable, considering it’s being dished up as fast food. About the only thing generally I’m not fussed about is the hamburgers.’
‘Says he who comes from a place where a hamburger isn’t real unless it’s got beetroot on it!’ Anne scoffed. ‘I’m not surprised; you wouldn’t know a proper hamburger if it jumped up and bit you.’
‘You’re obviously not impressed with my idea at all,’ he replied, quite unnecessarily. ‘So what do you reckon we check out all the “sweets and treats” places one by one?’
‘And you could buy extra seats on the plane, because we’d need them,’ Anne said with a shake of her head. He could be quite ridiculous sometimes. ‘I know you think I’m a bit skinny, but really...’
‘I think you’re just about exactly right,’ he put in with a hungry, speculative look that stopped just short of being a leer. ‘Not that I’ve seen enough of you lately to be sure...’
Anne ignored the suggestiveness. There was nothing else, she thought, that she could do. If she opened that subject up for discussion, it would be sure to get out of hand one way or another, and she didn’t want any more problems than she already had.
‘I have a better idea,’ she said brightly. ‘Let’s go skating. We’ve hardly even stopped to watch the activities at the Ice Palace, much less tried them out.’
‘And with damned good reason, too. My aged and brittle bones aren’t up to the risk,’ he replied. ‘Besides, ice-skating is hardly destined to become a great goer in Australia.’
‘It is so. There’s a proper skating rink in Hobart; I remember! And I’ll bet they exist in Sydney and Melbourne too. You’re just afraid I’ll show you up, that’s all.’
‘I’m not afraid of it, but it is a fair assumption you’d do exactly that,’ Steele laughed. ‘Considering I’ve never been on ice-skates in my life. You could probably skate before you could walk.’
‘Not quite. Although I did take figure-skating lessons for a while when I was younger.’ Much younger, she suddenly realised, and wondered what she was letting herself in for. Especially when Steele fairly beamed, and voiced an alternative idea.
‘Wonderful! You can get rigged out in one of those winter-weight tutu things and strut your stuff; I’ll stay here where it’s warm and just watch.’
‘Not a chance! If I go, you go. If we pick our time right, like just after hockey practice, there should be enough rugged hockey players around to help pick you up when you fall.’
