Beauty and the Wolf / Their Miracle Twins (24 page)

She hissed out a controlled breath. ‘Okay, enough with the surly hinting. If there’s something you want to say about—’

Her words were interrupted by the shrill call of his mobile
phone. He flipped it open without apology. ‘Hey.’ He took a deep breath and listened. ‘Yep. We’ll be there shortly.’ Whoever was on the other end asked a question. He lifted his eyes and looked at Bel. ‘Yes, “we”. I’ll explain when I see you. Can you check that the guest room is clear of Dad’s fishing stuff? Thanks, Mum.’ Another pause. ‘Love you.’

He muttered that last one on a half-turn away from her. So the man loved his mother. No big news there—look at the lengths he was going to protect her from further hurt. But that didn’t make him a saint. Unless the definition had changed considerably.

‘So do we have an agreement?’ His eyes were uncompromising again.

‘Agreement implies there was a negotiation. So far all you’ve done is outline all the lies I’m expected to tell.’

‘I’ve already agreed to your terms.’

‘What terms?’

‘I won’t be touching you. On pain of dismemberment.’

‘That was to get me to come here, not to lie shockingly to the people putting me up. Besides, you’ve just finished telling me how much you loathe the Rochesters. I’m not feeling at particular risk of sudden and erupting passion on your part. The no-touching rule is nowhere near a decent trade.’

‘What do you want, then?’

She considered him.

One year. That was what he was asking. Less if the court case was settled quickly or the babies didn’t take. Not a lifetime. Not forever. This was the gap year down under she’d never had. With free room and board. Far from all the friends and family who would take issue with what she’d decided to do about Gwen and Drew’s embryos. Ironically, he was offering her a haven until the damage—as her parents would undoubtedly see it—was well and truly done. When she flew home it would be with living human beings in tow, the most done of done-deals. Non-commutable.

Or she could fly home with no one if things didn’t go her way.

More alone than ever.

She had her posse of lawyers working hard for her back in the UK—there was nothing she needed to do that they couldn’t ask her via email. Her job was to get these two little beings past the first trimester successfully. And she could do that anywhere—might as well be on a commune in the Australian alps. Regardless of how many strings were attached.

She settled more comfortably in her seat. A total act. ‘As soon as I work out what I want I’ll let you know. For now, you’ll just have to owe me one.’

He laughed, but it wasn’t happy. ‘Why would I agree to something that unspecified?’

‘Because you have more to lose than me. I don’t know your family. Hurting them wouldn’t really hurt me at all.’

Brutal, but true.

He stared at her, knowing when he was snookered. ‘I can see why you and my brother got on so well.’ He leaned in closer and nailed her with steely eyes. ‘When you come calling for that favour, Belinda, make it count. It’s the only one you’re going to get.’

No doubt.
Flynn might have the same inherent personal charisma as his brother but it was nowhere like Drew’s charming, comfortable likeableness. He had this whole intense, surly, younger brother thing going on. It would be interesting to discover which of them was the black sheep. For her own sake, and the sake of the babies she hoped were taking root deep inside her, Bel really hoped it was Flynn—that
comfortable
and
likeable
were dominant Bradley traits. If she was putting herself—and her sister’s children—into the hands of people more like her own parents, then everything she’d fought for had no purpose.

The babies would have been better off going to strangers.

She sat up straight in her chair and pushed the half-drunk tea to one side. ‘Fine. I’ll play Belinda Cluney-with-a-u, frequenter
of horse races and forgetter of birth control. Long enough for us to determine whether there’s any need to continue this farce.’ Then she lowered her voice. ‘But don’t for one moment think I don’t realise that this handy string of lies you want me to spout also conveniently gets you out of confessing your ugly part in this charade. The court case, the threats, the blackmail. How wounded would your family be if I told them that?’

His stormy eyes clouded over as he pushed his chair back and stood. ‘I’m sure they’d expect nothing less of me. Don’t imagine you’ve got valuable ammunition there.’

I’m sure they’d expect nothing less.

That flash of pain suggested maybe everything wasn’t quite as happy-family as she’d imagined over at the Bradley homestead. And while she should have been worrying about what she was walking into, for no good reason it actually made her feel fractionally better to know she wasn’t the only outcast in the world.

And that she wouldn’t be the only one working hard to fit in.

Fractionally enough that when Flynn slowed to let her exit the café ahead of him she didn’t flinch at his warm hand low on her back as they stepped back out into the fresh, vital air.

I
T WAS
still awkward four hours later as the entire Bradley family sat down for their evening meal and Bel slid into the empty place next to Flynn’s grandmother, Alice. Given they were a family of five and this tree-slab table had been built for six, Bel knew exactly whose spot she was in. Sitting in what must have been Drew’s seat gave her a welcome and surprising shot of comfort. Almost as if he was behind her, hands on her shoulders, backing her up silently.

‘Well, isn’t this nice?’ Denise Bradley said on a bright smile by way of breaking the awkward silence that had descended. ‘Belinda, what time does your body think it is right now?’

She glanced at the clock over the kitchen bench and did a quick burst of mental arithmetic and answered Flynn’s mother. ‘Actually, it’s not too bad—at home it would be just before lunch. So eating now feels quite normal.’

Flynn reached over from across the long table and helped himself to a healthy serving of everything, as did everyone else, but Bel held back. It would be tempting to blame the babies for her lack of appetite, but it was more related to her level of unease at being so far from her comfort zone—and the rapidly amassing pile of manure she was feeding these people. They’d welcomed her as though she was a long-anticipated and greatly-looked-forward-to guest, not a last minute, unheralded blow-in.

Lying to their faces
in fact
was much harder than lying to them
in theory
.

‘Do you come from a large family, dear?’ This from the older woman next to her.

‘Uh … no, just me and my—’ At the last second she realised she had no idea whether she was supposed to manufacture an entire family dynamic or not. She coughed to cover the verbal stumble and took a sip of water to buy herself some thinking time. But in that stolen moment she knew that Flynn could do all he wanted to pretend his brother didn’t exist but she wasn’t about to deny her sister. ‘There’s just two of us girls and my parents.’

In truth it had often just been the two girls while their parents had either been at some social soirée or out dining with the moneyed set.

She glanced up at Flynn, at the white grip of his knuckles as he spooned a large helping of mashed potato onto his plate, and realised how unhappy he was that they’d already stumbled into such dangerous territory.

Not that he was doing anything to help matters.

‘So tell me about the name of your property, Bill,’ she said, turning quickly to Flynn’s father. ‘Does it mean something?’

‘The Bunyip is one of Australia’s most legendary mythical beasts—’ Bill Bradley started in his deep Aussie accent and she could tell immediately that he was the story-teller in the family. Out of nowhere she had an image of him with a pair of small boys on his knees, making up wild stories about Bunyips and bush rangers.

‘What a load of rot,’ Flynn’s grandfather cut in, obviously a regular occurrence judging by the way no one reacted. ‘It’s for the tourists.’

‘You’re a tourist operation?’

‘We have chalets over the far side of the ridge,’ Bill continued. ‘Trout fishing. Mountain hikes. Wildlife tours. That sort of thing.’

She lifted her eyebrows and looked sweetly at Flynn. ‘Chalets. Really?’

Oh, he was a dead man.
She was enduring the ice-breaker from hell when she could be curling up in front of a fireplace and watching a movie in peace and quiet across the ridge.

‘They’re all full this time of year,’ Flynn threw in quickly by way of covering his butt.

The whole table suddenly seemed to pick up on the tension between the two of them. She rushed in to move things on while he still did nothing to intervene. ‘Well, that explains the wonderful hospitality. Thank you, you’ve made me feel very welcome.’

‘You
are
welcome, Belinda. Just unexpected.’ Denise turned a pointed look to her son, who only dug in harder to the meal on his plate.

She jumped in again rather than have more awkwardness. ‘Please, call me Bel. Everyone does.’

‘Flynn doesn’t.’

Bel swivelled around to look at Alice, who continued, ‘He calls you Belinda.’

And in that moment Bel realised who was the true matriarch of the Bradley family because, where Flynn had only rewarded his mother’s subtle prods with silence, he immediately answered his grandmother’s, gently and respectfully. And fraudulently.

‘It’s because everyone else calls her Bel that I’ve chosen not to.’

Alice smiled. ‘I see. That’s lovely. Special.’

His lips thinned. ‘It’s not
special
, Nan. It just is.’

Alice turned to her left. ‘Do you have a nickname for Flynn, dear?’

Bel’s eyes came up in the same moment Flynn’s did.

The opportunity for revenge—albeit petty, albeit passive aggressive, albeit intensely juvenile—was way too good to pass up. She took a carefully staged sip of water and then said
brightly, ‘Well, I started out calling him the Thunder from Down Under—’ Flynn practically choked on his peas ‘—but he didn’t seem to like that. So then we worked our way through Flynn-the-Maudlin, Errol, and finally I settled on Hunky-buns.’

A stunned silence filled the room. Then, like a shared consciousness, two generations of Bradleys burst into inappropriately loud laughter. Tiny flecks of potato launched into the atmosphere from the direction of Bill Bradley and Denise slapped her husband hard on the arm with one hand while her other hand covered her mouth to prevent her from doing exactly the same thing.

It was disgusting.

It was wonderful.

Bel couldn’t remember laughter at her own dining-room table growing up. Only her sister’s barely suppressed giggles when they’d been sent to their rooms for not behaving. And if someone made any kind of mess, a maid spirited out of somewhere and cleaned it discreetly up.

She sat back in Drew’s seat and grinned at Flynn—utterly triumphant.

He was the only one at the table not smiling.

But when he spoke it was deep and measured, and still obscenely sexy. He met her eyes head-on and it caused a wave of flutters in her belly.

‘You aren’t eating, Belinda.’

Exactly as he intended, that immediately switched the focus back to her as both older women launched straight into mother-mode, plying her with spoonfuls of vegetables and slices of roast lamb and oversized chunks of home-baked bread. She protested in vain that she wasn’t hungry and, as her plate grew and she swung her eyes around the table from Alice at her right to Denise across the table, she caught the first glimpse of a smile from Flynn since they’d left England.

Tiny.

Barely deserving the name.

But most definitely there.

So that was how he wanted to play this? Fine. She let all the defiance and competitiveness she’d had nagged out of her as a child have its head. The little burst of adrenalin that came from besting someone gave her a much needed energy spike.

Game on, Hunky-buns.

‘Excuse me,’ Flynn said, pushing back his chair and standing. He’d barely lowered his fork after cleaning his plate of its contents, but he couldn’t risk Bel finishing first, possibly coming with him. He needed space and he needed it fast. ‘I’m just going to go and check on the platypus.’

He strode straight out of the kitchen with the slightest of touches for his mother as he passed.

‘Did he say platypus?’ he heard Belinda ask in her uptight British accent as he left the room.

‘It’s an animal, dear,’ his nan said. ‘Have you not heard of it?’

He crossed through the kitchen, heading for the nearest outside door.

‘I have,’ she said, ‘but I thought it was like your Bunyip—mythological.’

His traitorous family laughed and his father answered. ‘No, the platypus is very real. Although just as strange …’

He let the kitchen door slam shut behind him, locking in all the mirth and Belinda’s rounded vowels, which mocked him without even trying. She sounded just like her sister. How could none of them pick it up?

He’d expected them to cool towards her the moment she’d opened her mouth. But they were practically gushing over her. She had them totally snowed, even acting all coarse to get them more on side and laughing loudly at Pop’s lame jokes. A thousand miles from her sister’s permanent aloof smile the single time she’d visited.

When his father had sprayed the table with half-chewed food
his heart had practically shrivelled into a tight, mortified fist. Then he’d wanted to slap himself senseless for giving a toss. This was Oberon, Australia. Country home, country rules. If she didn’t like it, too bad.

Except that she wasn’t showing any signs of not liking it. On the contrary. She seemed every bit as taken with them as they were with her. And despite her obvious nerves she was sliding pretty easily into his family.

Which absolutely could not be real.

He marched resolutely down a well-worn track towards the string of trees lining a stream that branched across his parents’ lower paddock, memory guiding his way, the sliver of moon helping little.