An Indecent Proposal

He paused, seeming to take in the heat, sweat, dirt, backpacks, soccer ball, everything.

“I’m looking for the assistant housekeeper,” Bronwyn said.

“And here I was sure you were looking for me.”

He had a fine nose, perfect for looking down at her, Bronwyn thought.

“Let me fill in the blanks,” he added, “to save you the trouble.”

He stood over her, and Bronwyn felt the weight of the burden on her hips and shoulders and wished she could set down the huge pack, but it was too much trouble to get it back on.

“Sugar daddy is gone,” he said, “so you tracked down Patrick Stafford to see if he might step in.”

The presumption floored Bronwyn. On top of the heat, the truck ride, the mix-up over the days, this was too much. Patrick thought she hoped he would support her? How ridiculous. “Even I,” she said, “don’t have such an inflated opinion of my own charms.”

“Your arrival here on the tails of Theodoros’s untimely demise strikes me as more than coincidental.”

As it was. The job opening at Fairchild Acres had been pure serendipity, but Bronwyn had hunted job ads in the Hunter Valley in the hope of finding something. She was hanged if she’d admit so now, especially with Wesley listening.

“Do you mind?” she said, her eyes indicating that a child was present, a child who regarded Aristotle Theodoros as his father. For the first time she wondered if maybe Wesley might be better off without Patrick in his life. How insensitive could the man be, talking so casually about Ari’s “untimely demise”? “You could actually point us in the right direction. I have an appointment with Mrs. Lipton for tomorrow about a job in the kitchens. I thought it was today, and we’ve arrived too early.”

“Then, you ought to trek out to the highway and get a lift to the nearest hotel.”

After Marie’s kindness, Patrick’s callousness stung. Suddenly, Bronwyn felt close to breaking down. But she managed to repeat, “If you could let the housekeeper know I’m here or tell me where to find her.”

Patrick saw that her lips, lovely lips against that honey-colored skin he remembered so well, trembled. You ass, Patrick, he thought. There wasn’t a chance in the world that Bronwyn’s showing up here was coincidence, but she had no chance of worming her way into his good graces. So why not behave decently toward her? She was, after all, a widow accompanied by a young child, and the kid didn’t deserve to suffer for his mother’s—not to mention father’s—crimes.

The boy would be mourning the loss of his dad; that would be natural.

Turning, he nodded toward the door in the big house through which he’d just come. “Go on in. Agnes is inside, first door on the right.” Then, looking again at the kid, whose gaze had now turned cold—toward him, Patrick realized—he sighed and pulled open the screen. “Come in. We have room for you for the night.”

Bronwyn marveled that Patrick even smelled the same. It wasn’t a strong scent, and she hadn’t been terribly close to him, yet he smelled familiar, from that years-ago time when they were lovers, back when she’d been a waitress in the campus coffee shop and he one of those lucky students who didn’t have to work his way through uni.

“Agnes, this is Bron Theodoros—”

“Bronwyn Davies,” Bronwyn corrected. Bron. Many people naturally shortened her name to Bron. Ari had hated it. Like “brawn.” You’re not brawny. And Bronwyn had begun to insist upon the use of her whole name—even in the last weeks she’d retained friendship with Patrick before their horrible parting.

Patrick cast her a quick look, but didn’t argue. “Bronwyn Davies and her son…”

“Wesley,” Bronwyn supplied.

“Bronwyn has an appointment with Mrs. Lipton tomorrow, and she arrived on the wrong day. I’m sure we can put these two up for the night in the house.” He put subtle emphasis on the last three words. “Bronwyn and I are old acquaintances from uni.”

“If there’s room in the employee cottage,” Bronwyn put in, “I’m sure that will be fine.”

“Well, the available room got painted out there, and I know it’s no good tonight because of the fumes,” Agnes told her. Agnes was a fiftyish woman who wore her hair in a neat French twist. Her black-and-white uniform was spotless. Bronwyn remembered that Marie, in the kitchens, had worn a T-shirt with Fairchild Acres on it, so Bronwyn supposed that would be her uniform in the future. “We can put you up in the western corner.”

Hot, Bronwyn thought. But the house was air-conditioned, blessedly so, so even the west part would be lovely. A roof over her head would be terrific.

“Is the room ready?” Patrick asked.

“Certainly,” said Agnes, with an air of being vaguely insulted at his suggestion that it might not be.

“Then I’ll show them the way,” he said, surprising Bronwyn again. Nonetheless, she couldn’t believe that he was doing so as a gesture of hospitality. No doubt he planned to tell her again that he wasn’t going to support her. As if she would let him. She’d only wanted to give him the chance to know Wesley. But now she’d begun to wonder if that was such a good idea.

She and Wesley followed Patrick down the hall to a stairway, which, though clearly not the main set of stairs, was wide and led to an upstairs open hallway that looked down on what appeared to be a conservatory below. The upstairs hall was lined with photographs of horses, horses covered with blankets of roses, horses in the winner’s circle. Accompanying many of them was the same tall, straight-backed woman at different stages throughout her life. Bronwyn had seen her before— from a distance at one or two events she and Ari had attended—and in photographs, as well. Louisa Fairchild. Bronwyn half hoped she would never come face-to-face with the Hunter Valley matriarch. Would Louisa meet any prospective employee? Bronwyn could just imagine the reaction of this seemingly indomitable woman at the news that Aristotle Theodoros’s widow was on the premises. Did she dare ask Patrick not to mention the fact?

No. He would scorn her for asking him to help her cover up for…for what?

For having been married to a criminal.

There were two upstairs bedrooms in the south corner, and they shared a bathroom. The actual corner room with its four-poster bed was to be Bronwyn’s, and a smaller room looking out on one of the paddocks was Wesley’s.

“No soccer inside, mate,” Patrick told Wesley as he showed him into the room, which contained a silky oak double bed.

“He knows that,” Bronwyn said. She felt like a grease spot, but however miserably hot and sweaty she looked—and Bronwyn was far less sensitive to this question than any other woman she knew—Patrick shouldn’t be assuming that Wesley hadn’t been raised right.

“No doubt,” Patrick answered coolly, “but Louisa wouldn’t like it, so I thought I’d err on the side of caution.”

“In that case, thank you,” murmured Bronwyn.

“There are towels in the bathroom. If there’s anything you need, please ask Agnes. The staff eats in the dining room attached to the kitchens, and I’m sure you’ll be welcome there,” he continued. “Maybe Wesley would like to spruce himself up a bit first.”

Wesley looked baffled by the suggestion, but Bronwyn read the undercurrent in the words. Patrick wanted to speak with her alone. “Wesley,” she said, “we did have a hot sweaty trip, and I’m definitely going to take advantage of the shower. Why don’t you run yourself a bath first?”

“Okay,” said Wesley, eyeing his mother and Patrick suspiciously.

Patrick stepped out of Wesley’s room, and Bronwyn followed, closing the door behind her.

He said, “Please come and join me in my study. It’s just down the hall.”

Bronwyn knew it would be churlish to argue, so she followed him, remembering the breadth of his shoulders beneath the chambray shirt he wore, admiring his long legs in cream moleskin pants. Yes, he looked affluent and secure, yet he was also stiff, remote, serious, quite different from the Patrick she remembered from school. Of course, that Patrick hadn’t been serious enough for her. A history major who’d wanted to travel and to write. Nothing specific, of course, and no sign of a genuine enthusiasm for writing. Just impractical plans. And then he’d asked her to marry him. And that proposal had suddenly accentuated for her how immature he was, how unready for marriage. She’d broken up with him and soon met Ari. A whirlwind courtship and another proposal of marriage, this one from a more mature man.

Of course, Ari’s proposal had seemed to come from a legitimate businessman, not a mobster.

When had she begun to suspect the truth about Ari, the indecent truth that the person he seemed to be with his family was not at all the person he was in his business dealings? She shut the door on the question, a question she’d spent too much time examining over the months since Ari’s arrest.

Patrick’s study was a large, comfortable room, the furniture polished cherry, with a desktop computer which looked as though it could communicate with a space station and a separate rolltop desk complete with a banker’s lamp. Prominently displayed on the small desk was a photo of Patrick and his sister, Megan, whom Bronwyn easily recognized. She stepped over to examine the photo. Megan’s sense of style, her comfort with fashion, was apparent even in the head-and-shoulders photo, simply from her choice of earrings. But what Bronwyn remembered was the kindness of her eyes, eyes very much the shape of Patrick’s, and the mouth that had always been so quick to laugh.

But Bronwyn also remembered the slight chip she’d had on her own shoulder when she’d first gotten to know Patrick’s sister, whose childhood had been the antithesis of Bronwyn’s. Megan was the product of exclusive private girls’ schools, an affluent upbringing. Bronwyn, in contrast, had always been a survivor. “How is she?” she asked.

Patrick paused at the side bar, where several bottles sat on a silver tray. “Great. She’s met a very nice man, a detective, actually, with a fourteen-year-old daughter. A cocktail?”

Bronwyn hesitated, reluctant to accept so much as a glass of water from this man who had accused her of coming to Fairchild Acres in search of a new sugar daddy. But a drink was what she very much wanted right now. That and the shower she’d told Wesley she planned to take before dinner. “Thank you,” she said.

“Cognac?” he asked.

Bronwyn had never tasted cognac in her life until Patrick had ordered her some one evening when they were out together. It’s not exactly in my budget, she’d pointed out.

He’d said, Maybe if you get used to the finer things, they’ll find you.

That was before Aristotle Theodoros had appeared on the scene, a rival, an older man who was attractive to Bronwyn as a suitor and also filled the role of the father she’d never had—or something like that.

“Thank you,” she said again.

Two snifters. He handed Bronwyn hers, and their fingers brushed. He lifted his glass. “Around here,” he said, “we usually drink to horses. So, to Louisa’s hopeful for the Outback Classic—An Indecent Proposal.”

Bronwyn slid her eyes sideways, her mouth twisting in near amusement, and lifted her glass. “As long as you realize that I’m not here to make one.”

They both drank.

“Then why are you here?”

The question was spoken quietly, and Bronwyn found herself watching his lips, his mouth, and thinking how unchanged he was and yet how completely different. He remained a very attractive man—one who had once been madly in love with her. He had walked away without looking back after she’d told him she was marryingAri— that is, he’d left the coffee shop where she was working, hurried out into the parking lot. She’d been horribly worried then, her stomach tensing up, and had hardly been able to finish her shift. She’d been afraid Patrick would simply go out of his mind, but that wasn’t all.

Part of her had feared that she was making a terrible mistake, that she was letting go of something she’d never find again and that she was foolish to marry Ari, that she and Ari could never be together what she and Patrick might have been.

Now Patrick had asked why she’d come to Fairchild Acres. Now was the moment to tell him about Wesley.

But to do so suddenly seemed rash. Patrick was rich, powerful. She had nothing. What if he tried to take Wesley from her? It wasn’t as though the possibility hadn’t occurred to her before; but the old Patrick hadn’t been the kind of person to do that. This new Patrick? She wasn’t sure. She had no way of defending herself, and the widow of a mobster wouldn’t look so great in the courts. “I came for the job,” she said.

“Knowing I was here?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I knew you were here. But I’m here because I need the work. The government has seized Ari’s assets. I must support Wesley.”

She could tell from the look in his half-closed hazel eyes that he didn’t think her story credible.

Well, too bad. If he wanted to cherish conceited notions that she fantasized about getting back together with him, so be it.

Patrick wished he could read minds. He would gladly open Bronwyn Davies’s head and see what had really brought her to Fairchild Acres. Whatever she said—and, face it, she’d just admitted that she’d known she would find him there—he had to believe she’d come here looking for him.

“Then let’s get a few things straight,” he said.

Bronwyn buttoned her lip, knowing what was coming.

“You’re not going to get any special treatment from me. And don’t entertain dreams about you and me picking up where we left off. If you haven’t acquired any new job skills since you worked in that coffee shop, it’s time you developed some.”

Bronwyn took a drink of cognac, wanting to tell him a few home truths but knowing that doing so might influence her ability to secure the job in the kitchens.

Instead she said, “Please believe that it’s with the greatest reluctance I accepted the offer of sleeping in this house tonight, let alone enjoying this drink with you. I would be a fool if I believed any man whom I’d once rejected would come back for more.”

“Ouch,” Patrick murmured.

She shrugged. “I don’t think you’re giving me this charming lecture because you’ve forgotten I once decided to marry someone else.”

Ouch again, he thought. But Patrick knew that her ability to stick up for herself, the integrity that had never made him think everything he did was perfect, were part of what had attracted him to her in the first place. The women he’d known before Bronwyn had all been afraid of losing his favor by being less than agreeable; they’d seemed to worship him. But Patrick hadn’t wanted that. He’d wanted a partner, an equal.

And just now—well, she was probably being snotty because he was letting her know how things would be if they were both around Fairchild Acres. “Can you imagine my not being suspicious of your motives under the circumstances?”

“No,” Bronwyn replied, but she wasn’t about to relieve him of his suspicions. She decided to distract him. “What did bring you here, Patrick? As I recall, you weren’t on the best terms with your great-aunt.”

“We weren’t on any terms with her, good or bad,” he admitted. “But she invited Megan and me to Fairchild Acres, and I wanted to hear what she had to say. I have to admit, I’ve grown fond of her. And protective.”

Bronwyn managed not to say that of course Patrick would be protective of Louisa Fairchild’s money, especially if he hoped to inherit part of it.

Instead, she asked, “And what are you doing with yourself these days?” She knew the answer; the same friends who’d mentioned where he was had supplied that information.

“The stock market. Must be in the blood.”

Bronwyn well remembered when he’d seemed allergic to the possibility of doing anything so practical.

He turned from where he stood by the bar, and Bronwyn felt him assessing her. She knew he was examining her clothing, her figure, her general appearance. The thing about growing up on the streets was that she’d become used to other people being her mirror. She’d also learned to base her feelings of self-worth on things other than her physical appearance. How she treated people, her competence in life, a whole host of things were more important. But Patrick was a cipher. She couldn’t guess his reaction to anything about her. Except the suspicion that he hadn’t needed to put into words.

“Should I express condolences?” he asked.

“That’s entirely up to you. I’m a widow, and that’s considered good manners.” The callous way he’d spoken of Ari’s death—more than once—upset her, but she wanted to make as few waves as possible. She finished her cognac then and said, “In any case, I think I’ll go see if Wesley is done with his bath.”

Wesley had filled the huge claw-foot tub with as much water as he would have used at home, the home they didn’t have anymore in Sydney, the home they didn’t have anymore in Greece, the home they didn’t have anymore in Queensland, any of the homes that weren’t theirs anymore.

Why had his mother brought him here? Why couldn’t she have gotten a job in Sydney so that he could have stayed at his school?

Then he remembered the past few months, the friends who wouldn’t come over anymore because of who his father had turned out to be, the friends whose houses he couldn’t go to because his mother had found out things about their parents. All right, she’d managed to convince him that moving away from Sydney would make him happier in the long run. But it sure wasn’t happening yet. The Hunter Valley was full of rich kids, too, he knew, and he was not a rich kid any longer; his mother had made that pretty clear.

And who was that man who had finally introduced himself as Patrick, a friend of his mother’s from uni? Obviously, he didn’t want them here, but his mother must have known Patrick would be here when she decided to come to Fairchild Acres.

He had to admit there were some very nice lawns here, perfect for kicking a soccer ball, but his mum had said he couldn’t play on them till she found out if it was all right with the owner.

Yes, he was just going to be an employee’s kid, and there weren’t any other kids here that he could see. His life was horrible.

And his father was dead.

Did his mother hate his father because she’d found out he was a criminal? She’d become so brusque all of a sudden, always in a hurry, constantly issuing orders. She’d told him, I’m just concentrating on surviving, Wesley. That’s what we’ve got to think about now. Making sure we have a place to live.

His father used to be free with money, but his mum never had been. She used to get mad if she came in his room and found change on the floor. Don’t you understand how important money is, Wesley? I hope you’ll always have enough, but you need to treat it with respect.

Did they have enough money now? His father had said his mother worried too much about money; she’d always have plenty. Well, now he was worried about money.

And his father was dead.

After a brief discussion with Wesley on the necessity of conserving water, especially in the country, Bronwyn left him occupied in his temporary bedroom, reading a manga comic book he had brought with him, and headed for the bathroom herself. There, she stood under the spray of the shower, praying, begging. Begging a divinity by any name to give her the job she’d come here to obtain.

But was getting this particular job so important anymore? Patrick had been so rude, so presumptuous, that the thought of telling him that Wesley was his son held no appeal whatsoever. Bronwyn knew men, understood them. Patrick’s ego was obviously still smarting from her rejection of his proposal almost eleven years before. Bronwyn didn’t flatter herself that any attraction remained on his side, but a man like Patrick… Yes, the bitterness would remain.

How would he treat Wesley, then? It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that he would completely reject his son.

And what was all this stuff about her coming to get money from him? Did he think she was that devious? Or just insane? In any case, it offended her to be perceived as a gold digger. When had she ever not worked for a living? Even when she’d lived with Ari, she’d contributed to caring for all of his homes, working right alongside the staff whenever a dinner party or other entertainment was planned. Ari hadn’t wanted her to hold an outside job, or even to finish her degree in sports nutrition and physiology, wanting her instead to manage his homes and devote herself to Wesley. And she’d thrown herself completely into the role of mother, volunteering at Wesley’s school, going to soccer and rugby and cricket practices. Shutting off the water to soap her hair, Bronwyn wondered if being a mother counted as work to someone like Patrick Stafford.

Like Patrick?

What was Patrick actually like? He seemed so different, even dressed differently, from the way he had as a student. Now he was a stockbroker, and the wild, romantic dreamer was gone. Bronwyn knew that there was a steadiness and self-confidence to Patrick now that hadn’t been there when he’d been fantasizing different futures for himself. But there was an aloofness and distance, too. And Bronwyn was curious. Because of Wesley.

But it wasn’t because of Wesley that she noticed that Patrick was still a very attractive man, more attractive, if possible, than he had been at university.

Well, that was natural. There was probably even some biological reason for her being interested in Patrick that way, something to do with his being Wesley’s father. In any event, she wouldn’t be seeing much of Patrick, once she started work in the kitchens.

If she was hired at all.

Patrick was not sleeping. He resented that he wasn’t sleeping, that seeing Bronwyn should keep him awake. What was she up to anyway? Why had she come to Fairchild Acres, knowing he was there, to get a low-paying job in the kitchens? The answer had to be him. She denied wanting money from him, but Patrick wasn’t sure he believed that. Did she want to take up where they’d left off? Crazy. But she was here for a reason. Everything Bronwyn did was deliberate. Coincidence did not stretch far enough to explain her winding up in the same place as him.

But the question troubling him was whether the puzzle of her being here was what was really keeping him awake. Or was it just Bronwyn? She was, if anything, more beautiful than before. It was easy to believe she’d been living in luxury for the past ten years. Her honey-colored skin showed no sign of age.And that hair, the long red hair, the green eyes, whose color struck so forcefully. Lying awake in the dark, he saw not a money-grubbing widow with schemes in her heart; he saw Bronwyn. Bronwyn, Bronwyn, the only woman who’d ever broken his heart. The only woman he’d truly loved.

Chapter Three

“My only trouble with giving you this job,” said Mrs. Lipton the next day, “is that you’re overqualified. I haven’t had much luck keeping people from the city, let alone university-educated workers, here.”

“I didn’t finish,” Bronwyn said, because this was an important distinction as far as she was concerned.

“Nonetheless. Well, we’ll give it a try. We have a room in the employee bungalow for you and another for your son. Ordinarily he would have to share with the other children, but there are none living in the bungalow. Only a few of the staff actually live at Fairchild Acres. Most of them are local.”

Bronwyn nodded. “Thank you very much. I’m glad for the chance to do this job.”

The housekeeper, a middle-aged woman whose hair was neatly styled in a short cut, studied her. “Are you a horse lover?”

“Not especially,” Bronwyn admitted. Then she realized her error.

Mrs. Lipton said, “What brought you from Sydney? I would think, with your background, you could have found a better job there.”

Bronwyn was ready. She’d known this question would come up. “I wanted a change of scene for my son. I was searching for the kind of place where I wanted him to grow up and decided that the Hunter Valley looked perfect.”