Six Australian Heroes

‘Now, I didn’t know Jane all that well,’ he went on. ‘We only met once, over one short weekend. But that was long enough for me to see she was one of those grandmothers that make the world a better place to live in, especially for their grandchildren. I know something about grandmothers like that. I had one myself. I know how Laura feels, and on her behalf I’d like to thank Jane, as well as all the other amazing grandmothers in this world, for their sweetly giving natures, their unconditional love and their wonderful wisdom.

‘I’m sure if Jane could speak to us today, she would tell us all gathered here in her memory not to be sad. She would want us to celebrate her life, not mourn her death. I know she was extremely proud of Laura, and all her family. Bill, Cynthia, Shane and Lisa: she loved you all dearly.

‘She was also proud of where she lived. She recently showed me the Hunter Valley Gardens, along with this very beautiful little church, saying this was where she wanted her funeral service to be held. Both Laura and I hoped that such an event would be many years in the future. But it was not to be. Let me just say that it was a privilege to know Jane. Goodbye, darling Gran. Rest in Peace.’

Ryan’s arm tightened around Laura as he led her back to her seat, sobbing now, taking a guess that she’d been sitting next to her aunt and uncle in the front pew.

‘Well said, Ryan,’ Bill complimented, his own eyes shimmering with tears. Cynthia was incapable of saying anything, a handkerchief held up to her face as she wept quietly into it.

Ryan found himself quite choked up too, feeling genuine grief—and some more remorse too, for not flying back to Australia and speaking at his own grandmother’s funeral. If only one could go back in time …

But he could still remember how alone he’d felt at the time, thinking that the one and only person in his life that he could count on was gone. Laura was probably feeling the same.

He had to make her see, however, that she could count on him, that he wasn’t the feckless fool she imagined him to be. She was still weeping quietly when they left the church. Ryan was thankful that they weren’t going on to some wretchedly dreary graveyard, Bill quickly explaining to him outside the church that his mother had requested that she be cremated privately and her ashes sprinkled on her beloved rose garden. It seemed a much better ending, in Ryan’s opinion, than being buried. But each to his own.

‘Where’s the wake being held?’ he asked Bill.

‘Back at the house. I presume Laura will be going back in your car, Ryan?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘See you back there shortly, then.’

When Ryan steered Laura over to where he’d parked his car, she didn’t argue with him, a testimony to her distressed state. But shortly after they joined the long lines of cars heading back to the house she pulled herself together and glanced over at him with a deep frown crinkling her forehead.

‘I still don’t understand how you knew about Gran’s funeral,’ she said. ‘Or even why you came.’

Ryan supposed he could make up a plausible lie—that he’d seen a funeral notice in the paper. But he didn’t want to do that. He wanted to be totally honest with Laura from now on. It was the only way she would be able to trust him.

‘Greg Harvey told me about your gran’s death this morning when he rang to offer me a new lawyer. I tried to ring you straight away but your phone’s turned off. So I rang Alison and she told me when and where the funeral was.’

‘Alison? But you don’t know her number.’

‘I made it my business to find it.’

‘But why?’ There was total confusion in her voice.

‘Because I love you, Laura,’ he said, turning to look her straight in the eye.

Laura’s mouth fell open, her eyes widening at the same time.

‘I love you and I want to marry you,’ he added, knowing that a declaration of love was not going to be enough. For how many men used false words of love to seduce women back into their beds? He had never been guilty of such tactics but he imagined other men had. Certainly dear old Mario and Brad had.

‘You want to marry me?’ she echoed, clearly in shock at his proposal.

‘Yes. And have children with you. I want it all. I’ve been thinking about it for days and that’s what I want with you, Laura. I’m hoping that’s what you want too.’

Laura could hardly believe what she was hearing, or contain the joy that washed into her until then despairing soul. For she knew instinctively that Ryan would not lie about something as serious as marriage and children. Love, yes; he might lie about that. But not the rest.

It came to her suddenly that he must know about her falling in love with him. Alison would have told him something. Dear, romantic-minded Alison who could not resist a happy ending, no matter how unlikely the couple.

‘Did Alison tell you that I loved you?’ she choked out.

‘She said she thought you did,’ he admitted. ‘But I would have come today even if she hadn’t said anything.’

Somehow, his knowing that she loved him momentarily burst her bubble of happiness. It brought doubts as well. Laura needed more understanding of his dramatic change of heart before she could blindly say yes to his amazing proposal. She needed the comfort of knowledge.

‘But you said you would never fall in love, or get married and have children,’ she pointed out.

‘That was before I met you, Laura.’

‘No, you said it after you met me. You said it more than once. You warned me.’

‘I didn’t realise then that I would fall in love with you. I didn’t know what falling in love felt like. I didn’t think I was capable of it.’

‘But why would you think that? Everyone is capable of love.’

‘I know that now. But till I met you I refused to let it into my life.’

‘You have to tell me why, Ryan. You have to make me understand.

I do love you, more than I ever thought possible. But I can’t marry you unless I know why you felt like that.’

He sighed, then nodded. ‘You’re right; I know you’re right. It’s just so damned hard to talk about it, that’s all.’

‘If you truly love me, Ryan, then you have to trust me with your past. I promise I will never tell another living soul. Not Alison. Not anyone.’

Laura could see the difficulty he was still having, opening up to her. What terrible trauma had he endured as a child, she wondered, that would make him retreat from emotion as he had? She hated to think he might have been abused in some way, but what else could it be?

‘I love you,’ she repeated. ‘I will always love you, no matter what you tell me.’

He still didn’t speak so she just sat there and said nothing further. The long line of cars was making slow progress on their way back to the house, giving him enough time to decide whether to confide in her or not.

‘My mother didn’t die of cancer,’ he said at last. ‘She was murdered.’

Laura only just managed not to gasp in shock, for it was the last thing she was expecting.

‘But not by any stranger,’ he added in a rough, emotion-charged voice. ‘By my father. Her de facto husband. The man she said she loved. The man who claimed he loved her, even as she lay battered to death at his feet.’

‘Oh, Ryan …’

‘I found her, you know, when I came home from school. Lying next to the kitchen table in a pool of blood.’

‘Oh my God …’

‘She’d cooked me a cake. It was still on the table. It was my twelfth birthday.’

Laura closed her eyes. Lord in heaven, no child should have to endure that. She’d thought she’d had it bad when her parents had been killed. But it had been an accident. They hadn’t been murdered.

‘He was sitting on the floor next to her, crying. I … I …’

When it was obvious he could not go on, Laura reached over and placed her hand gently over his, which was suddenly gripping the wheel like a drowning man holding on to a piece of flotsam. ‘You don’t have to tell me any more right now. I can see you had good reasons to reject love and marriage and fatherhood. We’ll talk about it later.’ Much later.

Ryan shook his head. ‘No, I want to tell you now. I want you to understand. It had been going on for years—the violence. The beatings. Not me, just Mum. The only times he hit me were when I tried to protect her. Even then he would just push me aside. He was insanely jealous of her. Wouldn’t let her go to work, wouldn’t let her leave the house or have any more babies. When she became pregnant once—I think I was about seven—he accused her of having an affair, then he punched her in the stomach over and over till she miscarried.’

‘Oh my God! That’s appalling, Ryan. But didn’t people know what was going on? Your neighbours? Your grandparents?’

‘Domestic violence was very common where we lived. A lot of the men were unemployed. My father did work occasionally, but he was unreliable. He was a drunk, you see. We mostly lived on welfare, in a housing-commission place which should have been condemned.

‘As for relatives, Dad refused to have anything to do with any relatives, especially Mum’s. Though I knew my Mum’s mother was alive. Mum told me her name and where she lived and said if anything ever happened to her that I was to go to my grandmother’s place. She even hid some money in a secret place which she called my escape money. Many times I thought about taking it and just going, but how could I leave her to him? I begged her to come with me but she wouldn’t. She said she loved him. I could never understand that. It made no sense to me.’

‘I don’t think she loved him at all by then, Ryan. She was simply scared to death of him. I had a battered wife as a client once. She stabbed her husband in the end.’

‘I thought about killing my father several times. I wish I had.’

‘I can imagine. So what happened to him? I presume he was arrested for murder?’

‘He pleaded guilty and got twenty years. But he was bashed to death a few months later in jail. It seems the other prisoners don’t take kindly to wife killers.’

‘I can understand that. And I can understand you now, Ryan.’ Very much so, the poor darling. It was no wonder he never wanted to talk about the past, and no wonder he’d rejected love for so long. ‘I really appreciate your confiding in me, but you know what? I think we’ve done enough talking about the past for today. I would much prefer to talk about the future.’

He glanced over at her and smiled. ‘A woman after my own heart.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, smiling back at him. ‘I am after your heart.’

‘You already have it, my love.’

Her own heart turned over. ‘I’m still coming to terms with that.’

‘You’re not the only one. When I realised I loved you, I wasn’t sure what to do because I thought you would never love me back. I mean, how could you possibly love such a selfish, self-centred, screwed-up individual like me?’

Laura groaned. ‘I hated myself afterwards for saying that, because I don’t think that at all. I think you’re a fine man, decent and kind, with a warm, loving soul. Look at the way you talked about grandmothers at the service just now. It was beautiful, the words you said.’

Ryan’s heart squeezed tight at her sweet compliments. ‘Can I take it, then, that you will marry me?’

Her eyes shone as she looked over at him. ‘Whenever and wherever you would like.’

‘How about first thing in the New Year, up here in Jane’s favourite chapel?’

Laura smiled. ‘Sounds like a good idea to me.’

EPILOGUE

‘I CHRISTEN you Marisa Jane Alison Armstrong,’ the minister said, the same minister who’d pronounced Ryan and Laura man and wife eleven months earlier in the same church.

‘She was so good,’ Alison complimented Laura when she handed the baby back after the ceremony. ‘Not a peep out of her, not even when the holy water was poured over her forehead.’

‘She loves water,’ Ryan said proudly. ‘I’ve got her booked in for swimming lessons when she turns six months.’

Alison and Laura exchanged amused glances.

‘And when is she going to start playing soccer?’ Alison’s husband asked with a twinkle in his eye.

‘Never too soon, Pete,’ Ryan replied. ‘Four or five is a good age. That way she can be a striker and not a boring old goalkeeper.’

‘A striker,’ Laura murmured, rolling her eyes and shaking her head. She still found it hard to believe just what a besotted father Ryan had become. As soon as he had found out she was pregnant, he’d turned into a real mother hen. When she’d suffered from morning sickness during her early weeks, he’d insisted she stop applying for new jobs and take it easy at home, a move which hadn’t entirely displeased her; her own priorities had changed by then. But she’d insisted she at least remain his lawyer, to keep her hand in. She loved coming to his office every Friday afternoon at three p.m., though nowadays she was dressed a little more stylishly. Sometimes they didn’t get much work done.

‘Everyone back to the house for drinks,’ Cynthia chimed in.

‘Everyone’ was not a large group, the only guests at the christening being Alison and Peter, along with Lisa and Shane, Bill and Cynthia. Their wedding had been a much larger affair with lots of Ryan’s old friends and clients attending, followed by a slap-up reception at a local five-star resort.

But they’d decided to keep the christening much more private and personal. Alison’s two children were being minded by their grandparents for a couple of days, giving Alison and Peter the opportunity for that romantic getaway that they had been meaning to have all year and not got around to. Ryan had booked them into the same five-star resort they’d spent their wedding night in—his treat, he insisted. The four of them had become close friends during the last year, with Ryan liking Peter’s easy-going nature a great deal.

‘I suggest you follow me,’ Ryan told Peter as they made their way to where their cars were parked. ‘It can be a bit tricky finding Bill and Cynthia’s place. I’ll drive slowly so you won’t have any trouble keeping up.’

Ryan still took his time loading their precious cargo into the carry-cot in the back of his new family-friendly car, a four-door Lexus which he’d bought a few months back. His willingness to trade in his much-loved BMW had displayed to Laura more than anything he said just how much it meant to him to become a father. And how serious he was taking the role.

‘They’re a nice couple,’ Ryan said when they were finally on their way. ‘But their kids can be murder. I feel sorry for their grandparents.’

‘Sibling rivalry,’ Laura said, thinking of how she’d been with Shane, who’d been a kind of sibling to her.

‘Spoilt, more like it,’ Ryan said dryly. ‘Have you seen how many toys they’ve got?’

‘I don’t think you can talk,’ Laura pointed out. ‘I can see already that you’re going to give Marisa everything her little heart desires.’

‘Oh, no I won’t. She’s going to learn the value of money. And of hard work.’

Laura groaned. ‘You’re not going to be one of those fathers, are you?’

‘And what kind is that, madam?’

‘Pushy. And bossy. And controlling.’

‘Absolutely not! I hate controlling people.’

Laura laughed, then so did Ryan. ‘You’re right. I am a bit controlling. But I can change. I’ve changed a lot already.’

‘You have indeed,’ Laura said with warmth and love in her voice.

Ryan glanced over at his beautiful wife and smiled. ‘I have one suggestion to make which might eliminate my spoiling our little princess back there.’

‘Do tell.’

‘We could have another baby.’

‘So soon?’

‘Why wait? Life is short, Laura.’

For a split second, Laura thought of her gran. And then she nodded. ‘You’re right. Another baby would be a good idea.’

‘All my ideas are good.’

‘Oh Ryan,’ she said with a soft laugh. ‘You are incorrigibly arrogant. But that’s all right. I love you just the same.’

‘That is why I love you so much, my darling.’

‘Oh?’

‘Because you love me just the same.’

The Australian’s Housekeeper Bride

About the Author

LINDSAY ARMSTRONG was born in South Africa, but now lives in Australia with her New Zealand-born husband and their five children. They have lived in nearly every state of Australia and have tried their hand at some unusual—for them—occupations, such as farming and horse-training, all grist to the mill for a writer! Lindsay started writing romances when their youngest child began school and she was left feeling at a loose end. She is still doing it and loving it.

PROLOGUE

RHIANNON FAIRFAX shared a taxi one day with a man to die for. She was twenty-two at the time.

It was during a massive Sydney thunderstorm and it was to prove a memorable ride.

They met on a rain-drenched pavement in the city. He had an umbrella, she was smothered in a bright yellow hooded plastic raincoat. He’d been there first, but when she and a taxi arrived almost simultaneously she wiped the rain out of her eyes and asked him above the din of the downpour if they could share it. Because her other options appeared to include being washed away and she was also running late.

He agreed and they went through the awkward business of getting his umbrella down and getting themselves into the taxi while the driver grumbled about them flooding the back seat.

‘Phew!’ Rhiannon pushed her hood back, uncovering a navy beret pulled down over her ears with all her hair tucked up into it. She didn’t normally wear it like that but she was cold and that was the only way she could keep it on under the hood. ‘What a day!’

Her companion regarded her quizzically. ‘At least you’re dressed for it.’

She fingered the beret and grimaced. ‘Warmth and dryness take precedence over looks at the moment. So where are you headed?’

He told her and they consulted the driver and worked out that he would be dropped off first.

Then she sat back as the taxi, its windscreen wipers working overtime, pulled out into the slick grey canyon of the street and she looked at her companion properly for the first time.

Rhiannon’s eyebrows rose slowly, almost until they were touching the beret, as she took him in. Tall, dark and handsome multiplied by a factor of ten summed it up, she decided. Thick dark hair, deep blue eyes, slightly hollow cheeks and aquiline features that gave him an aloof air, broad shoulders beneath the jacket of a superbly tailored though now damp charcoal suit.

He looked to be in his early thirties. He looked—she tried to sum it up—the embodiment of someone who wielded power in a boardroom. Yet there was a tantalising aura of a man who would be good at other things.

What things, she wondered? And how had she got that impression? From his physique, his long, strong hands, his tan?

Then she realised he was returning her gaze enigmatically.

‘Sorry,’ she murmured with a rueful little smile, ‘but you must be used to it.’

His lips twisted. ‘I could probably say the same for you, except there’s not a lot to see.’ His gaze drifted down the voluminous raincoat that fell almost to her feet.

She wasn’t sure why she felt so chatty with a perfect stranger, except for the fact that her life had taken an upward turn only about half an hour ago. ‘i suppose you’re very much spoken for?’

He settled those impressive shoulders against the seat. ‘I’m not, as it happens. I’m actually sworn off being “spoken for” at the moment and possibly the duration.’

‘Oh, dear, what a shame.’ Rhiannon eyed him concernedly. ‘If you’re serious?’

For a fleeting moment his mouth hardened then he shrugged and turned the question. ‘How about you?’

‘Actually,’ Rhiannon looked away and pleated the yellow plastic of her raincoat, unaware of the air of vulnerability that overcame her, ‘I’m pretty sure I’m sworn off men for life.’

He watched her busy fingers. ‘How come?’

‘You wouldn’t want to know.’ She made a determined effort not to go down that road again. ‘So what were we talking about before?’

He looked into her sparkling brown eyes. ‘I was trying to pay you a compliment in return for the one you paid me.’

‘Well, I don’t think I’m a ten,’ she replied, ‘but I do have some good points. My figure’s not bad, I’m actually a natural blonde under this thing,’ she pointed to her beret, ‘if you go for them—but if there’s one thing I’m sinfully proud of maybe, it’s my legs.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Why sinfully?’

‘Legs is as legs does,’ she recited and rubbed the bridge of her nose. ‘It’s your soul that counts.’

‘Let me guess, the preaching of your convent school?’ he hazarded.

Rhiannon laughed. ‘In my last year at my convent school, my Mother Superior was convinced my legs were going to lead me on a downward path. On the other hand, my next school took a different view. They were of the opinion they were a great asset.’

‘Next school?’ He frowned.

‘I had a rather extended education,’ she said quickly.

‘If I could see your legs, I might be able to—settle the dispute. That is,’ his deep blue eyes were grave but not so grave as to hide the wicked little glint in them, ‘advise you whether it’s sinful to be proud of them or not.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘if nothing else I think we should take the driver’s sensibilities into account, don’t you?’

They’d left the city and were driving down a dripping, classy, tree-lined street in Woollahra, her companion’s destination. When the driver didn’t respond, it was only because, as they realised moments later, he’d lost control of the taxi as it planed through a sea of water.

They mounted the pavement and hit a tree. They bounced off the tree and crunched through a fence behind it and came to rest precariously at the top of a rocky incline that led down to a park.

The next few minutes were chaotic. The passengers discovered themselves to be uninjured but the driver was knocked out. How long they would balance at the angle at which they were tilted was a moot point.

So they scrambled out into the rain, used a mobile phone to call for help and began to get the driver out before the car rolled down the incline.

It was no easy task. The impact had buckled the driver’s door and, had Rhiannon’s companion not been very strong but also extremely quick-thinking and resourceful, they’d have lost the driver and his taxi down the rocks.

They laid him on the grass, still out cold, on a waterproof sheet they’d found in the boot and Rhiannon ripped off her raincoat and covered him with it.

They were both, by this time, muddy, scratched, dirty and soaked.

The taxi settled then quite slowly slid down the rocks to bury its nose in the park.

‘Thank heavens we got him out!’ she breathed. ‘Are you all right? You’ve cut your hand and you’ve ruined your jacket.’

‘I’m OK. I—Ah!’ They both turned at the sound of sirens and in short order a police car and an ambulance arrived. Before long they’d been reassured that the taxi driver was not seriously injured.

By the time they’d both given their details to the police, Rhiannon to a policewoman who’d taken pity on her and invited her into the police car, Rhiannon was aware she was running very late so she explained her situation to the policewoman and asked her to call another taxi.

It came almost immediately, a miracle on a day like that, probably something to do with being summoned by the police.

She climbed out of the police car and the man she’d shared the first taxi with turned to her, having given his details to the second police officer.

‘Would you like to share it?’ she asked. ‘Unfortunately I’m running terribly late now, so—but.’ She hesitated with real anxiety written large in her eyes.