Island of escape (7 page)

Rather desperately she looked through the window and discovered they were over Flinders Island. A narrow jetty reached out into the water—there was a group of tiny buildings. The town of Whitemark, for sure.

All too soon they would be landing, he would be saying she was his fiancée—they'd be paired off, and it would be taken for granted he had the right to kiss her, to be alone with her. She was filled with panic. It was worse than the way she felt when that black wave of despair crashed over her head at the remembrance of Paul.

She hadn't thought of Paul even once during this flight. That was a sobering and slightly shocking realisation.

Meanwhile the man beside her felt in his pocket and without even looking at her thrust something into her hand—a small, dark red jeweller's box.

`Your engagement ring,' he said coolly. 'I bought it this morning.'

Despite herself, she opened the box, then, as the fire of emeralds caught her eye, she snapped it shut again.

`What's the matter? I assure you--they're real. I wouldn't attempt to trick you with cheap imitations, knowing your tastes. Put it on,' he concluded in the commanding tone of one who is used to being obeyed.

`You must think I'm mad—that I have no pride ! ' Ellis choked. She had a fair idea what she would be agreeing to once that ring was on her finger—what liberties he would consider himself entitled to take with her.

`I don't think you're mad at all,' he told her equably. `As for your pride—well, how shall I put it?' She saw his mouth quirk. 'You might find it's quite something to be my fiancée.'

`And I might not,' she said swiftly. 'I don't want your ring.' She thrust the box towards him, and when he ignored her she leaned forward and deliberately dropped it on the floor. He ignored that too, and glancing at the hard implacability of his profile, she knew she was mad, that she should never have trusted him-

not after the way he had behaved in the hotel bedroom. He wanted a wife—he'd decided to have her in his bed, as he put it, by trickery if he could get her no other way. But it was not going to happen. He couldn't force her to a pretence she didn't want. She wouldn't wear his ring and she would stick to a policy of distance. She'd be a very cool and remote housekeeper, and it would soon be obvious she was very far from being enamoured of Steve Gascoyne.

A few minutes later, during which time neither of them said a word, Steve gestured for her to look below. Warrianda,' he said briefly.

Ellis looked through the window. A little ahead she saw a group of buildings, a network of white tracks. One of them, thicker than the others, led to a house that stood among trees. The homestead, she supposed, and knew that in other circumstances she'd have felt a thrill of excitement. But not now. She was merely tensed up. There were mountains ahead, and to the left beyond dark scrub there was a rugged coastline, though she could see the silver curve of a beach against the sparkle of the sea. A tiny vehicle came racing across a paddock, and Steve said, 'That will be my brother Charles. He's coming out to the landing strip to pick us up. You'd better brace yourself.'

Tor what?' she retorted. 'I won't go through with this pretence you're trying to force on me. I'm the—the housekeeper, and nothing more.'

He smiled sceptically. 'If I tell Charles that, he's going to laugh in my face.'

Ellis's heart began to thump. The plane was coming down rapidly now, the ground was racing towards them, she could see the cleared strip where they were going to land, and she said no more. Steve brought the little plane down smoothly, touching down with

scarcely a bump, then taxiing gently to a standstill. The jeep hadn't yet come into sight, and Ellis turned to him and said anxiously, 'You're not being fair, you know. All I contracted to do was the cooking—the housework —that sort of thing. Now you—you

His eyebrows tilted. 'Now I want you to wear a ring?' He had retrieved the small box from the floor and now he tossed it up and caught it and put it back in his pocket. 'I haven't asked anything else of you, have I?'

`Not yet,' she thought, mistrusting the expression in those green eyes as they surveyed her. Meanwhile, the jeep had come racing along, and she said coolly, 'I warn you, Mr Gascoyne, if you say I'm your fiancée I shall call you a liar

`At least call me Steve,' he said mockingly, and she felt oddly disconcerted.

Her cheeks were flushed and her composure practically non-existent a moment later as she climbed out of the plane and found herself confronting a husky-looking young man with light brown hair and grey eyes. Steve's brother, much younger than he was, and resembling him only in that he too had a wide mouth. But his mouth was good-humoured and entirely lacked the cynical twist that was so obvious in Steve's mouth. · He smiled at Ellis and his eyes accorded her a brief and casual inspection before he stooped and peered inside the plane. As Steve came round to shake him by the hand he commented, 'I thought you were going to hunt up a housekeeper before you came back, Steve.'

Steve ignored the remark and Ellis bit her lip. She wanted to exclaim, 'I'm the housekeeper,' but she had the dreadful feeling that Steve was right—his brother would laugh. Charles Gascoyne's smile and his quick

inspection of her had said very plainly, 'So Steve has another girl'.

Steve took Ellis by the arm. 'Ellis, this is my brother, Charles. This is Ellis Lincoln, Charl
ie.
And ,don't worry about a housekeeper—Ellis says she's going to look after us. She's not anything like as useless as she looks.'

Charlie smiled-again and said 'Hi, Ellis,' but she didn't think he was impressed—not the right way, at least, because he grimaced and remarked, 'With shearing coming up, Leanne's going to be cranky. You know she can't cope with that sort of a deal.'

`I can cook for the shearers,' Ellis interjected, before Steve could speak. She was annoyed to find her voice pitched nervously high, but she was even more annoyed when both the men ignored her and proceeded to unload the cases and a few packages from the plane and transfer them to the jeep. Seething inwardly, she tagged along behind. Obviously Charlie didn't see her as the new housekeeper, and she supposed he most likely thought she was romantically interested in his brother. In fact, he'd probably think she was really eager, the way she was offering to look after the shearers. She writhed inwardly and wondered if she'd have felt any worse if Steve had said she was his fiancée. The fact that he hadn't should have given her a sense of triumph, yet it didn't. Her position was now so uncertain and vague that Charlie probably thought Steve was a bit dubious about her and had brought her to Warrianda for a—a try-out.

She felt decidedly uncomfortable as they all installed themselves in the jeep, herself between the, two brothers.

As they drove to the homestead the two men talked briefly and sombrely of the death of their aunt, and

followed that up with some discussion as to whether the recent rain would delay the shearing at Mussetts.

`I reckon Bob got enough sheep into the shed to get them dried out—they'll be right,' said Charlie, then presently asked Ellis politely, 'Do you think you're going to like Flinders, Ellis?'

Ellis didn't know how to answer. If she'd come here on a job, she might have said a polite yes, and if she'd been in love with Steve she'd have said yes, too. Actually, she found the thought of living on this island a romantic one. She had thought, when she'd written her letter to Steve Gascoyne, the simple farmer, that there she'd be able to disappear into the blue—start a new life in a place so isolated that Paul and the past would be so far far away they'd become unreal. As it was—if Steve Gascoyne was here then somehow the place wasn't isolated, it was overcrowded. And it was the situation here that was the unreal one—so unreal she simply didn't know how to cope with it.

Meanwhile she hadn't answered Charlie, and Steve said laconically, 'I think you've got Ellis stumped, Charl
ie.
After all, the girl's only just this minute set foot on the place, and it's probably not in the least like she expected. She has a bit of adjusting to do before she decides if she's going to like it or not.'

`Sorry,' Charlie said with a smile. 'Where are you from, Ellis?'

`From Melbourne,' Ellis said, and knew he must be wondering where and how she'd met his brother. But he didn't ask, he was too tactful. She was debating whether she should say she was Jan Webster's cousin when Steve asked abruptly, 'Where's Leanne?'

`Leanne? Oh, she went into Whitemark shopping,' Charlie said, sounding vaguely uncomfortable. They were driving along a white road that glistened with

quartz, and at the end of it was the thicket of trees hiding the house Ellis had seen from the air. Steve didn't pursue the subject of Leanne, but when Charlie pulled up at the gates he let him get out and open them and told him when he came back to the driver's seat, 'You can drop us off in the drive, Charl
ie.
Ellis and I will sort ourselves out.'

`Okay,' his brother agreed, and added, 'Sorry about Leanne, but you know how it is.'

`It doesn't matter,' Steve said briefly.

The house, when they reached it, was a complete surprise to Ellis The thick trees—she-oaks and tea-trees with a scattering of picturesque `blackboys' under them—ringed a wide clearing that had been made into a garden, and set in the midst of it was an unexpectedly attractive two-storied house. It was like coming on a house in the middle of a forest, Ellis thought, so hidden and secret and away from the world it seemed. It had a grey sloping roof and wide eaves, and enormous windows that from upstairs, as she discovered later, gave a view of the sea. A white quartz-gravelled drive circled a lawn and garden beds, where there were clumps of blue and white agapanthus flowers—the Star of Bethlehem—and belladonna lilies shone like pink lamps from among the trees. It was hard to realise that beyond the sheltering trees there were all those paddocks, stretching away towards wild-looking granite-topped mountains etched against a blue sky.

Charlie pulled up in the shade of a red-flowering gum, and Steve swung the door open and climbed out, followed by Ellis.

`Carry on with what you were doing, Charlie,' he said as his younger brother helped him carry their belongings and the other packages up the steps to where the front door stood open. 'I'll probably join you later.'

Ellis, waiting at the door, felt a tremor of apprehension as the vehicle completed its circuit of the drive and disappeared into the trees, leaving her very much alone with the man whose fiancée she had refused to be.

`Go on in,' he told her. 'The bedrooms are upstairs.'

Ellis hesitated, then turned quickly away from the expression she saw in his eyes and started up the stairway. It was of polished wood, uncarpeted, and the open treads made it look very elegantly light and airy. She said uneasily over her shoulder to Steve, who was following her with the bags, 'I'm sorry Leanne's not here. I—I suppose she didn't know we were coming.'

`She knew I was coming,' he said. 'But I don't warrant a welcoming party as far as Leanne's concerned. She and I have a few differences of opinion.'

`I don't wonder,' thought Ellis, and paused at the top of the stairway so that he could show her where to go.

`You'd better have the spare room,' he decided. `Leanne won't have done anything about Aunt Constance's room.' He moved across the wide hallway whose handsome polished floor was partly covered with thickly piled moss green carpet. There were dark beams in the ceiling, and Ellis commented on them out of nervousness.

`Oyster pine,' Steve told her. He pushed open a door and gestured for her to go in, then followed and deposited her two large bags on the floor. She watched him cross the room and pull back the yellow quilted bedcover. The thought came into her head quite madly that he was going to drag her over to the bed and make love to her, and she felt her heart begin to pound.

He looked up and stared at her.

`What's the matter now?'

`N-nothing,' she stammered. 'What do you mean?'

`The look on your face. You've thought of something that's got you in a panic.'

She searched wildly for an explanation, because of course he'd only been checking to see if the bed was made up. But she could think of nothing and her eyes fell before his. She moved blindly and picked up one of her suitcases. She had the awful feeling he knew exactly what she'd been thinking. He reached out and took the suitcase from her and she felt his fingers brush against hers and caught her breath. I'd—better unpack,' she said, her voice low.

`Take your time.' He deposited the bag on top of a low sturdy-looking chest that looked as if it had been carefully and lovingly made by some pioneer of long ago, then he turned and looked at her.

`I hope you're satisfied with the middle course I steered just now—the concession I made you. Or should I call it a—compromise?' he concluded, his green eyes mocking.

She felt her heart give a leap of anger. He knew very well she wasn't satisfied. She was quite positive he'd deliberately made her position a dubious one and her distrust of him deepened. She told him tartly, 'I'm not satisfied at all. Why should I be? Charlie was expecting you to bring a housekeeper, and you just ignored me when I said what I did about the shearers. You—you made me look a fake ! '