Falling for the Rebel Heir

After a long silence, Taffy said, ‘Don’t tell me you mean Hud?’

Kendall looked her friend in the eye for the first time since she’d got home. ‘Hudson Bennington. The third, no less.’

Taffy slapped her on the arm. Then once more for good measure. ‘Get out of here.’

‘I would love to, but you won’t let me. You know him?’

‘God, yeah. I had the hugest crush on Hud Bennington when he was eighteen and I was thirteen. It was his last year of boarding school and he was here for the summer, staying with Fay while his folks scooted off to Latvia in search of leprechaun remains or something. He was my teen idol if it’s possible for a real life human to be such a thing. So what was he like? All feisty and charming? Cheeky? Pathologically flirtatious? Dry wit? Still as big and gorgeous as ever?’

‘He…he looked like he needed a shave.’ And more, Kendall thought. He looked like he needed a hug.

‘Ooh,’ Taffy said. ‘Stubble on Hud Bennington. That I just have to see. Now hurry up and get dressed and you can go right back over there and reintroduce me.’

The thought of coming face to face with all that undomesticated manhood sent a warning note through Kendall. ‘Did you not hear me?’ she said. ‘He caught me. In his pool. Without his permission. Or prior knowledge. While I was naked bar…my…swimmers.’

Which for another woman would have been a tad awkward, or for Taffy would have amounted to as good an introduction to a cute guy as she could hope for, but for Kendall that meant something wholly different.

Taffy smiled and nodded like a simpleton. But Kendall knew she was anything but simple. Tenacious, clever and stubborn was her Taffy.

‘Go over there yourself if you like,’ Kendall said. ‘I’m not going to stop you. Just don’t tell the guy you know me and you’ll be peachy.’

‘Nah,’ Taffy said, ‘that would seem too eager. Much better to casually bump into him in town. Offer him a coffee so that we can reminisce. And he can remember how I followed him around like a puppy that summer.’ Taffy dragged herself off the bed with a groan. ‘Or maybe I’ll never leave the house again and the men the world over can breathe a sigh of relief that I’m still on the market. Now, get out of here, you’re leaving a wet patch on your bed.’

Taffy left. And Kendall took herself, her bedraggled hair and her damp swimsuit out of the door and into the bathroom, where she spent the next half an hour sitting on the bottom of the shower, letting the warm water run over her clammy skin as the shakes that had threatened the moment she had been discovered finally took her over.

She ran a hand down her damaged left thigh, kneading, hoping it might ease slightly. But it worked as well as putting a Band-Aid on a broken heart.

For the regular aches and pains she felt on a daily basis seemed to have spread. Into her chest. Deep, throbbing, like a forgotten memory trying to burst through to the surface. She knew what those aches were. It was the bitter-sweet sting of unwelcome attraction. And it terrified her to the tips of her black-painted toenails.

She closed her eyes, revelled in the soothing water and tried desperately not to think too hard about how Hud Bennington’s arrival had thrown a spanner into the workings of her neat and tidy life.

An hour later, after reintroducing himself to his old bedroom—still just as he’d left it a dozen years before, with its king-sized bed, boxy teak furniture and small aeroplanes on the wallpaper—Hud stood under the wide brass showerhead in his old bathroom, amazed that the pipes still worked. Amazed and thankful. The purposely cool water sloughed away the remnant heat he’d carried with him since leaving the airport.

He closed his eyes and opened his mouth and savoured the taste of Melbourne water streaming over his face, bringing with it more memories he’d long forgotten.

Six years old and running away the first night his parents had left him here and getting lost in the pine forest before Aunt Fay found him—she and her neck-to-ankle layers of lace, lolloping dog and hurricane lamp. The hundred-year-old oak tree in the centre of town that he knew had changed every summer he visited though he couldn’t see how. The piano in the downstairs parlour with its broken e-flat.

And then suddenly, before he even felt them coming, memories of another kind swarmed over him, making the water in his mouth taste like dust. Memories of no water. For days. So thirsty he couldn’t stop shaking. And the sound of a dripping tap in a room nearby. So close. Yet achingly out of reach.

His eyes flew open. He switched off the tap, his breath loud in the huge marble shower. He leant his hand against the wall, watching the droplets slide from his skin and drip to the floor. Just as they had when his high-spirited mermaid had sprung forth from the depths of the glimmering pool.

He concentrated on brandy-coloured hair. Long pale limbs. Stormy blue-grey eyes. His breathing settled. His memories calmed. And he only had her to thank for it.

Whoever she was.

CHAPTER TWO

HUD woke early the next morning. While still fuzzy with sleep, he tugged on a pair of old jeans and a T-shirt from the minimal choices still stuffed into his rucksack and headed downstairs, through Claudel’s cold, silent rooms and outside into the post-dawn mist.

It wasn’t all that long before he found himself swinging by the pool house. He thought about poking his head inside, even though he knew that he’d find nothing there bar still water and lingering shadows. He hadn’t led a charitable enough life to deserve stumbling upon such an apparition two days running.

Instead he kept walking until he was swallowed up by the cool dauntingly tall moss-covered trees, flat beige ground covered in a layer of pine needles and shadows of the mighty forest separating Claudel’s grounds from the nearby town.

He let his fingers trail over the rough bark, the tactile discomfort grounding him while he headed he knew not where. Into blissful nothingness? Or with all too specific purpose—the knowledge that this was the last place he had seen her?

The sound of a cracking branch stilled his steps. He looked out into the tightly packed trunks and saw something shimmer and shift. Lucky for him this wasn’t bear country. Though he’d come to realise that humans could be far worse creatures to stumble upon down a dark alley.

The form stirred. Took shape. Human shape. Female shape. And there she was. As if he had conjured her out of the mist. His mermaid. The woman whose effortless allure had hovered at the edge of his dreams all night, miraculously keeping far darker dreams at bay for the first time in weeks.

As she slid into full view her dark red curls streamed over her shoulders like waves of silk. Her pale skin was luminous in the weak morning light. The fine features of her face hid nothing. Not her loveliness, or her wariness. Again he wished he had his camera, on him. His camera which he had not picked up once in two long months.

‘Well, hello there,’ he said when she was near enough for him to see the whites of her guarded eyes.

‘Hello,’ she said, offering a half smile, even though her clenched fists and ducked chin told him far more than the smile could hope to hide.

As did the black tank-top with a hot pink one beneath, the long hippy skirt and heavy black boots she’d run off in the day before. It would be close to thirty-five degrees later that day. Her feet must have felt like ovens. But he decided as soon as the thought occurred to him to keep that little titbit to himself. A wild bear she may not be, but there was an air of the intractable about her all the same.

‘I didn’t expect to see you here,’ he said.

‘I wasn’t coming to use your pool, if that’s what you mean.’

Hud laughed before he even felt it rising up his chest. It felt good. No, it felt great. Natural. Unforced. Curative. He held up both hands in surrender. ‘Ah, no. I was just making conversation. Badly, it seems.’

She flicked her hair off her face. Not out of any kind of flirtation but more like she was shooing away a bothersome fly. Either way, the shift and tumble of her hair mesmerised him. The woman wasn’t a mermaid, she was a siren. An unwilling siren, if that clenched jaw was anything to go by, but a siren all the same.

‘You come here often?’ he asked, wondering where these conversational gems were coming from.

‘More often than I should probably admit,’ she said with a shrug.

Hud didn’t realise he had a thing for shoulders until that moment. Pale, delicate, eloquent shoulders were his new favourite thing.

‘But I came out this morning in the hope I might bump into you,’ she said as she finally made prolonged eye contact with him.

Well, that was one for the books. Hud stopped his daydreaming and came to attention. ‘You could have come knocking on my front door,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve established you know where I live.’

Her eyes blazed and he bit his inner lip and told himself to cool it. The more he pushed, the more she seemed determined to pull away. But maybe it was worth it for the flare of energy in those blue-grey eyes.

‘Not my style,’ she said, the tight half smile shifting into something far more natural as it tugged at the corners of her lips. ‘I tend to make things far more difficult than all that.’

‘I’ve been there,’ he said. And he smiled back, feeling it from the inside out.

Then her smile slid away and she shook her head and, with a big deep breath, said, ‘Look, I wanted to apologise for yesterday. And all the days before that. The trespassing. The tidying. The water usage.’ She closed one eye and squinted up at him through the other, obviously mortified at having to say so.

And it was just as obvious to him that he found this woman utterly adorable. Whoever she was. Whatever she was really here to say to him. Because he knew as well as he knew his own name that she sure wasn’t here, hat in hand, just to say, I’m sorry.

‘You have nothing to apologise for,’ he said. ‘The pool house never looked so good. Ever. I should have come looking for you at the other end of this forest of ours to say thank you.’

She opened the other eye and her eyebrows disappeared under wavy wisps of dark red hair. Her voice dropped when she said, ‘It never looked that good ever? Maybe you should demand a refund from your previous pool guy.’

Hud laughed again. And his smile lingered. Grew, even. ‘You needn’t have worked nearly so hard at it.’

‘How could I not? It’s the most amazing structure I’ve ever seen. Like something out of a fairy tale.’ She let go of a sigh. A long romantic sigh that seemed to curl about them both until Hud realised the sounds of the forest had slipped completely away until all he could hear was the sound of her voice, her breathing, the swish of her voluminous skirt.

Her eyebrows settled back to a normal position, perhaps even a little furrowed as she shifted her stance as though her toes were turning numb in her shoes, and said, ‘But, even so, you were no doubt surprised to find…what you found. And I feel utterly embarrassed. About the whole thing with the pool. Tidy though it is. And for thinking you were going to rob me. And for the running away without explaining myself.’

And? Hud thought. For she wasn’t finished yet. He could almost see the wheels turning behind those smoky eyes. Right, she was thinking, he’s going to make me say this, isn’t he?

She squared her shoulders. Tossed her hair again. Looked him dead in the eye and said, ‘But, since you think I’ve done such a good job of keeping your pool house in tiptop shape, perhaps we can come to some arrangement where I can continue.’

She tried to make it seem a by the way kind of statement, but he knew from the tightness in her neck and the way she grabbed hold of clumps of her tie-dyed skirt that this was what she’d come here to say.

Hud opened his mouth to tell her she could do whatever she liked, when she held up a hand, palm forward, and he stopped before the words made it past his larynx.

‘I’m prepared to buy the chlorine, the tile cleaner, pay a portion of your water bill, get on my hands and knees and clean the grout with a toothbrush, anything. I just…’ She stopped to swallow, and for the first time he saw a flutter of vulnerability beneath the resilient exterior. ‘I just need to keep swimming in your pool. If it’s okay with you.’

She made it seem as if she needed it the same way he needed oxygen in his lungs. The same way he needed to find out how to clear his head so that he could get back to work. And the way he had come out here into the misty forest with some strange need to make sure that she was real.

‘Where on earth will you find the time to do all that?’ he asked.

‘I am a fact checker for several regional newspapers. I work freelance. My time management is my own.’

‘Sounds pretty cushy.’

‘Suits me. Not so many rave parties and shoe shops to keep a girl in trouble in Saffron, so one doesn’t need a great deal of money to have a very nice life here.’ She glanced over his shoulder to what was no doubt a gorgeous view of Claudel’s elegant gabled rooftop beyond. ‘Well, I don’t, anyway.’

He didn’t give her the satisfaction of turning. Instead he just waited for her pointed gaze to rock back to his. For suddenly he was having ideas.

Her time was her own. And he had nothing but time. Maybe this woman’s needs and his could work together. He slid his hands into his pockets. ‘So I take it you can type,’ he said.

Her hands slowly let go of the skirt fabric they’d been clinging to until the red and black cotton swished about the tops of her heavy boots. ‘Can I type?’

He nodded.

‘So fast you won’t see my fingers move for the speed. But I don’t see what that has to do with—’

‘I have a story I need to get down on paper,’ he said. ‘And I am a two-finger typist of the worst kind.’

‘You’re a writer? But I thought you were some kind of flashy documentary photographer,’ she said, then her face dropped as she realised she’d given away the fact that she’d done some asking around about him.

‘I am,’ he said, letting her off the hook. ‘But a situation has presented itself that means I need to record some of my more recent experiences.’

That much was true enough. He had been offered a book deal. A lucrative one from a big London publisher. Not that he needed the money. But if that was what it took for his boss to see he was willing and able to get back to work, to the adventures he was missing out on while real life trudged on around him, then that was what he’d do.

‘I see,’ she said, mouth turned down, bottom lip popped out, nodding. Though by the look in her wide open eyes he could tell she couldn’t see the brilliance of his plan at all. The balance. The simpatico.

‘So I have a proposal for you,’ he said.

She stopped nodding. Her eyes narrowed so far they became dark slits of mistrust. For a siren she was turning out to be some kind of hard work. Hud almost backed off. But not quite. For there was something stronger pushing between his shoulder blades again, telling him he had to go through with this. With her.

‘I dictate,’ he said. ‘You type my story. And in return…’

Her arms slid across her chest to cross, creating a shield between them. He bit back the need to laugh. The woman was so guarded she put his clandestine return to Claudel to shame.

So he added, ‘And in return you can use my pool as much as you like.’

She blinked furiously, then a fast breath dashed from her nose. ‘What’s the catch?’

‘There’s no catch. I’ll supply food. A comfy chair. I can get my hands on a new computer if you need me to. It shouldn’t take any longer than, say…two weeks.’

Which was when his crew were due back in London after a shoot in Uzbekistan. And he wanted to be on the next trip out. He needed to be. For, if he wasn’t, he feared he might never get back out there again. And out there was where he belonged.

‘Am I still in charge of its upkeep?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘No need. The whole place needs a tidy up. I’ll have to hire a gardener. A backhoe. A mini-skip. Or maybe a magic wand to put things back the way they’re meant to be.’

She nodded. ‘Excellent. Happy with that. But what about after I’ve finished taking notes for you? What kind of deal will I have to make with you then?’

Her arms tightened across her chest, pressing her breasts together until she produced some damn fine cleavage. She glared at him and he tried his hardest to keep eye contact as her hot gaze dared him to even think that she might be thinking something raunchy. But the second the thought entered his mind he could think of little else.

A half hour swim for a kiss. An hour for a roll in the grass. A whole afternoon lazing in the pool and maybe she’d agree to going through the rest of Aunt Fay’s rooms and deciding what furniture and knick-knacks to keep and which to let go. For that he’d let her have the darned pool.

‘None,’ he said. ‘No more deals. Doing this one thing for me would be a huge favour, so for that you can use the pool any time you please. For evermore. So how about we clap hands and a bargain?’ He held out his hand to seal the deal.

‘Henry V,’ she blurted, an honest-to-goodness smile creasing her lovely face. She was something when she frowned; she was something else again when she truly smiled. He decided then and there that if she agreed to his terms it would be his mission over the next two weeks to make that happen again and again.

Then her cheeks turned pink and she bit her lip and looked down at her right foot, which was kicking at a small pile of dead pine needles.

‘Henry who or what?’ Hud asked.

‘Clap hands and a bargain,’ she repeated, looking up at him from beneath her dark eyelashes. ‘That was a quote from the proposal scene of Henry V. It’ll make you laugh and cry and your heart go pitter-pat. And, if it doesn’t, well then, I fear you’re just not human.’

Hud took a moment to wet his suddenly dry throat. The woman not only had the hair of a Botticelli model, the skin of a Scandinavian princess and the ability to fill the dark nooks and crannies of his subconscious with light, but he had just accidentally stumbled upon a subject that made her eyes flash like the heralding of a summer storm.

When he said nothing she continued. ‘Shakespeare. Dead English playwright. Quite famous in his time. Funny too that the line comes from the proposal scene and you just made me a proposal. Not like it’s the same kind of proposal, of course. I’d hardly agree to marry a guy for the use of his amenities—’

‘I have heard of him,’ Hud said, cutting her off before she got herself so deep into a verbal hole that she disappeared into her shoes like the wicked witch at the end of The Wizard of Oz. ‘Though I think it’s too late to bluff my way into making you think I was quoting him on purpose. A guy I work with…used to work with, said it all the time. What’s your excuse?’

‘Double English Lit major at Uni,’ she said, back to kicking at pine needles again as she breathed through her recent verbal misstep. ‘That and a computer will get a girl a fine fact checking job with an added sideline in Shakespeare and Keats and Byron quotes on tap. I’m quite the hit at parties.’

‘I don’t doubt it for a second.’ He’d be surprised if she ever made it out of a party without half a dozen new male fans. He wondered if one of those fans had managed to pin her down. Make her his. And if he truly knew what a gem he had. ‘And might I say I’m suitably impressed. You’re the first girl who has ever picked a Shakespeare quote when I’ve given one. Not that I’d rightly know.’

She grabbed a hunk of layered skirt and gave him a little curtsy. Yeah, it would be a fine thing if some guy at a party had taken this woman off the market. For though he was most enjoying looking, he hadn’t come to Claudel to shop for that kind of…what? Tryst? Crush? Holiday romance? Stormy, once-in-a-lifetime, go-for-broke affair?

This girl was witty, cautious and beguiling. It had taken an instant for him to see she was the kind of woman a man could spend a lifetime unravelling, pleasing, knowing. But he didn’t have a lifetime. He had two weeks. Which was more than he’d given any woman in years. He’d just have to be careful to remember that.

She flattened her skirt back to a less frivolous position. ‘So who’s the guy?’ she asked.

Hud lifted his gaze from the fluttering movement of her pale hands to her magnificent eyes. He raised an eyebrow.

‘Whose quotes you steal?’ she continued. ‘The guy with whom you used to work?’

‘Ah. His name was Grant, a sound guy who works for Voyager Channel films.’

‘His name…was Grant?’ she asked, her voice suddenly softer, slower, winding itself around him like one of Aunt Fay’s warm cashmere throw rugs.

‘It still is Grant, actually. Will be for many long years, I hope. He’s fine. He’s just a million miles away and I’m here, in the middle of backwoods Victoria, only it feels like he’s gone when really that honour goes to me.’

When Hud stopped talking, his heart raced as if he’d climbed a mountain, when really all he’d done was tell this strange girl more than he’d told anyone about what he was really feeling. More than he’d told his boss. Or the doctors in London. Or the editor who’d thrown money at him to ‘tell his tale’. Or any of the friends and colleagues who’d asked how he was every time they’d picked up the phone, which was more and more rare with every passing day.

‘So do we have a deal?’ he asked, knowing the time had come to bring this little rendezvous to a close. ‘Your typing fingers for my pool?’

‘Sure,’ she said, her voice still soft, still making him feel as though she had somehow wrapped him in cotton wool.

This time she held out her hand to seal the deal. He stepped forward and took it, entering her personal space, that intangible area that contained a person’s spent energy, and touched her for the very first time.

Her hand was small. Soft. Warm. Enveloped so wholly in his, it made him feel strong. Big. Commanding. It was a feeling he didn’t realise until that moment had been lost somewhere over the past months. A feeling he wanted back. He wanted more. He needed more.

After a few seconds of simply holding hands, her stormy eyes darted to his. Blinking fast. Locking. Connecting. A current seemed to flow from her hand to his. Or maybe it was the other way around.

And in that moment he saw that she felt it too. This strange compulsion pulling them together. He saw in her eyes a deep-seated desire to hold on to him and not let go.

He understood his own reasoning completely. He was a man on the verge of drowning—in violent memories, in red tape, in commiserations where he was used to commendations. And she was a bright light. Sparky, warm, flitting just out of reach.

What a woman like her saw in a broken man in need of a shave, he had no idea. He had nothing to offer her bar his pool. He consoled himself with the knowledge that she seemed switched on. She’d figure it out soon enough.

He loosened his grip and let her go. She stretched out her fingers before clasping her hands behind her back.

‘So when do we start?’ she asked.

I’m afraid we already have, he thought. But all he said was, ‘Tomorrow’s fine with me. Unless you’re busy.’

But she merely nodded. ‘Mornings are always best for me. Projects tend to slide into my inbox around midday. So nine okay with you?’

‘Sounds as good a time as any.’

She gave him a short wave and turned away, taking all that lovely vibrant energy with her.

‘So why do you need this pool of mine so badly you’re willing to give up your precious time for me?’ he asked, not yet ready to see her go.

‘Training for the Olympics,’ she threw back.

‘Then you’d better not forget your bathers,’ he said.

She waved over her shoulder. ‘Not for all the world.’

‘Feel free to come through the front door next time.’