Dreaming Of... Australia: Mr Right at the Wrong Time / Imprisoned by a Vow / The Millionaire and the Maid

Aimee surged to her feet and slapped her fists on the table, leaning across it. ‘Not for me. If I let you in then you will be in. Do you understand me? Is that a complication you want?’

Sam stared at the dignity and passion in her eyes. He almost chased the conversation to its natural conclusion, followed the white rabbit deep down into the hole, because for one blazing second—yes—he did want that complication. Very much. But Aimee was right: getting closer to her emotionally wasn’t going to do either of them any favours. He should be admiring the strength of her character, or cursing the lack of his own, but all he could think about was that this amazing human being was apparently off-limits to him.

And, God help him, he wanted to be in.

‘So that’s how this has to be? A careful distance between us?’ he said.

‘Don’t you think that’s wise?’ Aimee slumped back onto her side of the bench and into the shaft of dappled light streaming down through the tangle of flowers overhead. It made her mop of blonde hair shimmer like a halo, like some angelic being. But all that did was make him feel more like playing the devil.

‘No. Not if it means I can’t get to know you.’ She flinched, and he regretted causing it, but Aimee was fast becoming one of the important people in his life and her opting out was not on the cards. ‘I like you, Aimee. I like how you think so differently to me in many ways but on the essential things we’re in tune. I don’t like being told that I can’t be friends with you just because of Melissa.’

But he didn’t like that he’d referred to the woman he’d married as ‘just’, either. And he really didn’t like the resentment that had started oozing through the moment Melissa had become an obstacle between him and getting to know Aimee better. He frowned internally. He’d been working so hard on managing that ugly, unreasonable side of himself, but apparently it was alive and well.

Aimee lifted one prosaic brow and the corners of her mouth tightened. ‘It’s not actually your call, Sam, whether I’m friends with you or not, or what kind of a friend I am. If that’s what you’re expecting, then …’

She leaned down for her own shopping bags and her reach had a tremor in it. Ugh, idiot! She was breaking away from under the controlling thumb of her family and here he was going all caveman on her. He rushed in to undo his damage.

‘I respect you, Aimee.’ That stilled her fingers just as they started to pull on the handles of her bags. ‘And that goes for whatever decision you choose to make about this. About us.’

She straightened up and brought her green eyes back to his, and he hated the caution he saw there. Partly because he’d caused it, and partly because he knew she was never going to tell him who’d put it there in the first place. One of a thousand things he’d never get to know about Aimee Leigh if she got her way.

He folded his arms in front of him on the table and leaned towards her. ‘Keeping our friendship shallow feels like a crime against nature. But I’m not about to force the issue. I know you well enough to know that you’ll walk if I do. Like it or not, you’re a part of my life now, Aimee, so I don’t want you to do that.’ He wasn’t about to look too closely at why. Not today at least. He smiled and hoped it seemed genuine. ‘So, even though I don’t agree with you, I’ll take whatever you’ll give me.’

Her eyes darkened and dropped briefly, but when they rose they were flat. ‘I like and respect you, too, Sam. But you have a wife. She’s where your emotional investment should be.’

She was right. Of course she was. And Lord knew if ever a marriage needed emotional investment it was his and Mel’s.

But he still hated it.

He shook off the growling doubts in his stomach, stood when he should have been reassuring her, and waved a hand towards the bright fabric sticking out of his bag. ‘Come on. How long has it been since you flew a kite?’

Kites were superficial. Harmless and pretty. She couldn’t be suspicious of a bit of recreational fun, right?

But her eyes could.

‘I’ve never flown one. I think my mother was afraid of friction burns on my hands.’

A long-dormant part of him deep inside roused, lifted its slumberous head. Aimee had been so protected from life … The things she must not know … The things that he could teach her …

If she was his to teach.

But all he said was, ‘Come on. Time to add a new life-skill to your repertoire.’

Sam’s heart was simultaneously warmed and saddened by the enjoyment Aimee got from her lesson. His urge to protect her clashed headlong with his anger at the selfishness of her parents—raising her in an over-cautious bubble and robbing her of simple childhood joys.

Like flying a kite.

She set off again, in a long-limbed gallop across the open parkland, with the fuchsia fabric eel trailing behind her, lifting higher, flirting with the current. This time it caught and held, and she jogged to a halt and looked back at him across the foreshore, with triumph in her whole body as it climbed.

‘It’s up!’ she cried in astonishment, bouncing on the spot, returning her eyes to the feminine kite wavering and folding in the air high above her.

‘She’s like an alien,’ Sam muttered as he jogged across to her, his own yellow and black kite in his hands. A big-brained alien who existed on learning new things.

‘If she starts to drop,’ he called out, ‘pull on the line. If she veers left, you pull right …’

In under a minute Sam was by her side, staring up into the electric blue above the park, his hawk kite dominating the sky, expertly keeping his strings from tangling in Aimee’s.

‘You’re good!’ She laughed as her eel tumbled momentarily.

Sam reached one hand over on top of hers and showed her how to moderate its altitude. Her hands were warm and soft and fitted perfectly in his. He had to force himself to let go. ‘I flew kites as a kid. It’s like riding a bike. You never really forget.’

‘I never learned that, either.’ She squealed as the eel cut to the left sharply, but she’d already started correcting it.

‘You have good instincts.’ He smiled.

‘I’m not exactly tearing up the sky.’ She laughed. ‘I’m too scared to move out of my safe little orbit.’

‘You just need the right motivation. Watch out.’ A flick of his wrist turned the sharp-winged hawk back towards the eel and he cut it back and forth on her tail like a predator toying with its prey. Its two long ribbons streamed like twin vapour-trails behind.

‘Quit it!’ Aimee grumbled, laughing.

‘Make me.’

She kicked into top gear then, weaving her kite ahead of his, trying to anticipate whatever stunt he’d pull next, her frown pronounced as she concentrated on besting him. She wasn’t bad, but half an hour’s experience was never going to beat a lifetime love of the skies, and he had plenty of easy time to glance back at what the eel’s pilot was doing.

A light sheen of sweat glistened on Aimee’s golden forehead and determination blazed in her heaven-lifted gaze. His eyes dropped to her full mouth. Lingered.

‘Does biting your lip help?’ he teased.

The guilty lip sprang free and she smiled, broad and brilliant, but didn’t take her eyes off his hawk. ‘Yes. It improves my aerodynamics.’

Immediately his mind was filled with thoughts and images that she’d have been horrified to know he harboured. He shook them loose and disguised them with a laugh. ‘Interesting technique.’

Above, Sam wound his hawk in tight circles around the eel, trapping it in the spiral of the twin-tails, but she broke free and let herself soar high above him, before circling back around and down to meet him from the side. He dodged away and twisted back, to race the eel through the sky.

The two of them moved in parallel, tightly synchronised, and Sam’s glance ping-ponged down to see what Aimee’s hands were going to do next before shooting back up to watch his hawk respond.

Where she ducked, he dived. When she turned he was right there with her, mirroring her every move.

Her radiant gaze grew large as the beauty and sensuality of the airshow overtook her. Her lips fell open and she sighed. He felt it in his gut more than heard it. Sam took his chance, tightening his strings and bringing the headstrong hawk back under tight control, curling close around the eel but never quite tangling with it. The two kites danced in dreamy synchronicity across the blue canvas sky.

Wild, open, limitless. A place where anything, any future, was possible. His breath grew short.

For one brief moment he raced the hawk ahead of her, hovered in space as her eel caught up, and then twisted in freefall to touch it in a slow-motion aerial kiss before falling away in a showy controlled dive.

Beside him, Aimee gasped.

He steered the hawk back into an ascent and his focus flicked to her, met her gaze head-on. Wide-eyed. Flushed.

Utterly dismayed.

He fumbled his climb, and the strings were yanked meanly from Aimee’s hands as the two kites tangled, tipped, and plummeted in a twisted mess to the hard ground in the distance, their sensual skirmish terminally interrupted.

I’ll take whatever you’ll give me.

That was what he’d said back at the little cafeteria, and he’d meant it to be kind. Some sort of compromise between what he wanted—to really get to know her—and what she needed—to keep a safe emotional gulf between them. But all it did was hurt and mirror her own patheticism back to her. Not even a real word—but it summed her situation up perfectly so she was going with it. She was taking whatever he would give her.

How had she found herself in this situation—again? She marched resolutely back towards the car, her chest balled tight around her anger and pain.

Anger at herself.

Pain because he’d never be able to touch her for real.

What was she prepared to give him? Everything. But she wanted everything in return. Not a friend. Not a shopping buddy. She wanted someone she could curl up with at night, see the wonders of the world with, and whose brain she could mine for useless information. She wanted someone to admire and appreciate and get jealous over. She wanted someone to wander the markets with or sail a boat or fly a kite. Or cheer for at an awards ceremony. All perfectly legitimately.

She wanted someone like Sam. She deserved someone like Sam. And it was a bit of a first in her life to be thinking that way. But all those things were way, way more than he was free to give.

And so Sam playing kissing-kites had done nothing but mess with her head and cut her deep down inside where she never let anyone go.

‘Aimee … Stop.’

‘Someone will steal your kites,’ she threw back over her stiff shoulder, picking up pace as the park got smaller behind them.

‘They’ll have to untangle them first.’

Her smile stretched her skin tight. Even his sharp wit got up her nose. Why couldn’t he be an egotist? Or as thick as two planks? Was he not even the slightest bit muddled by what had just happened back in the skies? By that little aerial seduction?

Did he not even have the decency to be vaguely rattled?

‘Aimee. Please.’

Her feet slowed. Shuffled. Stopped. But she didn’t turn around. Either he’d see how mad she was or he’d see the confusion in her eyes, and she didn’t want either. She clenched her fists. ‘I’ve got somewhere to be, Sam. I’m not at your disposal all day.’

‘You’re angry with me.’

Her eyes drifted shut and she turned slowly, marshalling her expression. ‘I’m not angry with you. I’m just angry at …’ The universe. The timing. ‘… this whole situation.’

‘It was nothing. It wasn’t supposed to be anything.’

That meant he knew it was something. Her mouth dried up.

He lifted his hands either side of him. ‘I just wanted you to have the chance to fly a kite.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you never have. That seems wrong.’

‘Why is it your job to fix the ills of my past?’

He frowned. ‘Because …’ But his words evaporated and his shoulders sagged. ‘I don’t know, Aimee. I just wanted to see your face the first time you got the kite up. I wanted to give you that.’

She stared at him. It was a nice thing to do, and it was just kites. But then it wasn’t. ‘So what was with the kite foreplay?’

It was a risk. She watched his face closely for signs of total bemusement, for a hint that this was all in her head and totally one-sided and she’d just made a complete fool of herself. Or for the defensiveness of a man caught out.

She got neither.

‘I don’t know,’ he murmured, frowning and stepping closer. ‘It just happened. And it was kind of …’ She tipped her head as he grasped for the right words. ‘Beautiful. Organic. It didn’t feel wrong.’

It had been beautiful and it had started so naturally, but it was wrong. It had felt too good so it had to be wrong. She shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her sweatshirt and took a deep, slow breath. ‘This is how we’re always going to go, Sam. Even something ordinary like flying a kite becomes—’ loaded ‘—unordinary.’

He ruffled long fingers through his hair and stared at her. ‘So maybe that’s just us? Why don’t we just … allow for it?’

Allow for it? ‘How?’

He stopped in front of her, looking down with deep, calm eyes. ‘It is what it is, Aimee. Neither one of us is going to act on it, so do we really need to stress about it? We could just accept that there’s an … attraction … between us, and then just move past it.’

Her lips twisted along with the torsion in her gut. ‘You make it sound so simple.’

‘I’m sure we’re not the first two people who have accidental chemistry.’

Except it wasn’t just chemistry for her. Her mind was involved. Her heart. And that made it very complicated.

‘What just happened with the kites …’ he started. ‘I feel comfortable around you, Aimee. Relaxed. It just happened. I’ll be on my guard from now on so that it doesn’t happen again.’

Her chest hurt. ‘What kind of friendship is that going to make? If we’re both constantly guarding our words and actions?’ Our hearts.

His broad shoulders lifted and fell, but she couldn’t tell if it was a shrug or a sigh. ‘Our kind.’

Sam’s defeat was contagious. Her eyes dropped to the ground.

‘Come on. We have an hour before we’re due back. Let’s go rescue the kites and then go back to the café for that interview.’

The interview. Did either of them believe that excuse any more? But the pages of her book were already established neutral territory between them, so it was good to have it to retreat to.

Just accept the attraction …

Aimee shook her head. He was so easy to believe. He was so certain that this was a good idea. Sam had no doubt that he could put aside whatever this was simmering away between them, and maybe he could.

But could she?

CHAPTER TEN

AIMEE re-read the opening to the oral history spread out on the hotel table before her and stared at the words as though they were prophecy.

She’d first met Coraline McMahon as an elderly woman from the suburbs of Melbourne, but the Cora she was meeting now was fifteen, beautiful, running barefoot and wild in her home on the Isle of Man. Cora had set her cap at tear-away Danny McMahon from a very early age—a young man idolised by the boys, dreamed of by the girls, and tsked about by their parents alike, which had only made him all the more desirable. Dark and bold and charismatic. She’d fallen hard and irrevocably for Danny, but he’d left her behind when he’d enlisted in the Second World War.

Broken-hearted. Fifteen.

Pregnant.

Within weeks a shamed Cora had been married off to Danny’s younger brother Charley: the responsible one, the tolerant one, the one willing to raise his brother’s child to avoid a family scandal.

They’d had a sound sort of marriage, living in the McMahon household while the war raged on, until the day Danny got a foot blown off and limped home to a hero’s welcome.

‘Ugh.’ Aimee dropped the sheets of her transcribed story onto the tabletop and slid down further on her chair to study the ceiling.

Every day.

Every day Cora had struggled with wanting a man she couldn’t have. Living under the same roof. Watching him making a slow life for himself. It had broken Charley’s heart, watching her try to hide it. She’d never so much as touched Danny again, but breathing the same air as him had tarnished her soul and her husband’s—even after he’d packed them all up and shipped them to Australia to escape his older brother’s influence.

Aimee’s subconscious shrieked at her to pay attention. To what, though? What was the right message to take from Cora’s cautionary tale?

Was it counsel against the pain of spending time with someone she wanted but could never have? Or a reminder of how damaging it could be to any future relationship she might form? Or was it a living warning about not seizing the moment, of settling for someone less than you wanted? Cora had lived seventy years with second-best, faithful, loyal, accepting Charley McMahon. Yet he’d married her because she was pregnant with his brother’s child. Pressured by his parents. And he’d lived his life knowing her heart truly belonged to his brother.

No matter the great affection that had eventually grown between them, each of them lived had long lives knowing that neither was the other’s first choice.

That was just … awful.

And yet their story was going in her book. Coraline McMahon had willingly given her life to the brother she didn’t love. She’d done the right thing by her family, her son, on her own merit. She hadn’t been swayed by the fact that it was the wrong thing for her. Outwardly it smacked of passivity, but there was great strength in the way she’d taken her unplanned future by the scruff and fashioned a reasonable life for herself, and that made her story perfect for Navigators.

She’d owned her choices and she lived with the consequences. For ever.

But … oh … how it had hurt her.

Aimee remembered the cloudy agony in Cora’s eyes as she’d relived the day they’d trundled away from the McMahon home with their meagre belongings stacked around them. Told her about the momentary eye-contact she’d shared with a broken and war-shocked Danny, standing respectfully to the rear of the group farewelling his brother’s family.

Bare seconds locked together. Her first and only glimpse of the saturated sorrow in his eyes. Realising he’d loved her after all.

How had she managed, never seeing him again, never speaking to him …? Aimee studied the yellowed photograph of Cora and her son aboard the ship they’d boarded for Australia. Seeing Danny every single day in the dark eyes of their son?

Was that a comfort or a kind of torture?

She squared up the bundled pages that captured Cora’s story and refastened the elastic band around them tight, sealing in all the heartbreak. The cover title was the widow’s final words to her on the last day of their interviews: This Too Shall Pass.

Except Aimee felt certain it had never passed for Coraline McMahon. She was strong and honourable, and hadn’t been afraid to reinvent herself for her son’s sake, but she’d carry the secret pain of Danny’s loss to her grave.

Aimee slid the documents back into their file and swallowed back tears. Would she have the same strength of character? Endurance? Would she grow to accept Sam’s unavailability or, like Cora, would her heart form a callus around the wound so that she could survive?

‘Phone, Aimee …’

She jumped at Sam’s voice, so close behind her, and reached for her mobile as the special ring-tone he’d recorded on her phone the day before repeated itself.

‘Phone, Aimee …’

But just as she went to accept his call she paused, glanced at Cora’s notes, and then at the hotel wall between their suites. She tuned in to the heart that hammered in Pavlovian response just to the sound of Sam’s voice. The cell-deep anticipation that excited her blood.

‘Phone, Aimee …’

And she let it go to voicemail.

She opened the door, expecting hotel staff to collect her bags, and found Sam there, instead, a deep scowl marring his handsome face and fire sparking in his eyes. Her stomach clenched.

‘Why are you leaving?’ he said.

Because it’s not healthy for me to be around you, like this. Because I need to remove myself from the temptation of touching you.

‘You don’t need me for this afternoon’s meetings so I might as well fly out today.’ Without you.

‘But what difference does one more night make?’

Her whole body stiffened up. That was not an easy question to answer. If he knew what she’d be wanting to do right through that night … What she’d wanted to do that first night, with a head full of images of him in his towel … Or last night, fuelled by sensual dream images of his strong, lithe fabric hawk kite twisting around her … How long she’d lain awake taking herself through the mental pros and cons of rolling out of bed and tiptoeing next door … How hard it had been to finally settle on not doing it …

Her arms crept around her front. ‘None, to you. But I’d like to get home now that I’m not needed. I’ve done my part for your department.’

It was more defensive than she’d meant it, but that couldn’t be helped. Being strong had to start somewhere.

He frowned. ‘You have. You’ve been amazing. I just …’

‘What, Sam?’

‘Are you leaving because of yesterday? Because of what I said on your recorder?’

There was nothing too controversial about what they’d recorded at the café. But ‘yesterday’ could only mean the kites. She tossed her hair back. ‘I’m leaving because I’m done.’ Totally. ‘And because staying has absolutely no purpose.’

His eyes smouldered the way they had at the end of their kite-flying. He was busting to say more, but even he had to see the sense in not hurting each other any further.

Aimee’s skin stretched to snapping point as they stood there, silently.

‘So … good luck this afternoon.’ She stood back to close her door.

‘I’ll call you. When I get back to Hobart.’

Her heart squeezed. ‘Why?’

His scowl bisected his handsome face. ‘Your book. Don’t we need to finish the interview?’

The book. The last remaining thread between them. A totally fake thread.

She pressed her fingernails into her palms. ‘I think I got everything I needed yesterday.’

‘I’ll call you. To be sure.’

She’d seen him angry, amused, confused, delighted. But she’d never seen Sam so … adrift. Cutting him completely free just wasn’t something she could do at this very second. She needed more strength for that.

She sighed. ‘Okay.’

No one said she had to answer his call.

The banks of the Derwent were busy as always—even for a week day. Small watercraft under billowing sails glided along its gleaming surface, and presumptuous ducks busied themselves nearby, waiting for any scraps that might tumble from Aimee’s lunch. Parallel pairs of prams pushed by athletic mums dominated the shared pathway and cyclists had to rumble onto the grass to go around them.

Aimee sat on her comfortable bench, tucked back into a recess in the thick foliage edging the pathway, munching absently on her chicken sandwich, her eyes very much lost amongst the boats out on the channel. Glorious golden rays of sun sprinkled down, warming all they touched.

Was there anything more restorative? A productive morning in Hobart’s research library, a simple lunch by the Derwent and a silent mind. A rare treat after the emotion of the past few days.

Aimee sighed and sipped her apple juice.

A clutch of power-walking nannas passed her, chatting across each other like the ducks grumbling around her feet, and she followed them with her eyes as she ate. She missed Danielle. Not that they’d ever been power-walking-type friends, but she missed having someone to chat to, to share work with, since her friend had gone on a month’s leave back to New Zealand.