The Wedding Countdown. Barbara Hannay

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      Trembling with tension, she followed her mother into the dimmed interior of the house, which was shuttered from the glare of the western sun. They stepped silently through the spotless kitchen and across the carpeted lounge towards the outside deck.

      Isaac’s voice, a familiar, deep, rumbling drawl, reached her first. Her heart thudded painfully. But what surprised her as she continued her journey was the sudden fatalistic calm that settled over her, as if the churning blood in her veins was transfused with something as soothing and innocuous as warmed honey.

      It was almost as if she’d been sedated. She was able to dump her shoulder bag on the coffee table and walk towards the timber-framed doors that opened onto the deck as easily as she had when she was a thoughtless and carefree girl.

      Is this how a fly feels as it enters a spider’s web? she wondered. Perhaps people heading for the guillotine experience this strange kind of peace in their final moments.

      All it took was the sound of Isaac’s voice, and she was no longer fearful, but simply glad—overjoyed to be seeing her foster brother again.

      And then her eyes found him.

      Before she stepped out of the darkened room, she saw Isaac standing, leaning against a railing at the end of the deck. She stayed in the shadows to steady the sudden fillip in her heartbeat. Sun-dappled light filtering through overhead lattice played across his features, highlighting first the aristocratic brow and then the craggy bone structure, which looked for all the world as if it had been sculpted by a passionately impatient hand. Except for the mouth, which was moulded firmly and carefully, with lips full of sensuous promise.

      His hair was longer than she remembered. Curling and black, it skimmed his collar, so that more than ever he looked like a dark-skinned Gipsy or a pirate, wickedly adventurous, scorning convention. As he always had, Isaac carried that indefinable air of danger that should have repelled her, but had always drawn her to him—against her better judgment and to her intense regret.

      Despite the obvious quality of his clothes, Isaac wore them with elegant negligence. The untidiness was rescued by his erect and handsome figure, the breadth of his shoulders, the leanness of his hips and the length of his legs.

      It was totally unforgivable of her to immediately make comparisons, but it hit her at once that a man more different from Paul could hardly be found.

      While Paul’s face was round and placid, Isaac’s was rugged and hard. Paul’s eyes were a reflective, gentle grey. Isaac’s were black fire smouldering beneath brooding, dark brows. Just now, his eyes were shaded, but she caught the glint of heated ebony.

      Her impulse came in a heartbeat. She rushed forward, hurtling across the deck, a small missile flying into his startled arms.

      ‘Isaac!’

      After the countless hours she had idled away imagining their meeting and Isaac’s response, it was weird that now they were actually together again, her reaction was totally spontaneous, hopelessly unplanned.

      And she gave herself no time to think of an aftermath. She simply buried herself into Isaac’s chest and waited for his strong arms to close around her and to hold her tightly to him as they had so often before in happier times.

      She felt the violent tremor that shuddered through his lean body as she pressed against it. But no arms descended to enclose her as she waited there. And when she cautiously looked into his face, she caught a momentary flash of agony swiftly replaced by a shield of cold indifference.

      He stiffened, as if repelled by her advance, and the tiny, impoverished spark of faith she’d never quite extinguished through all the long years since he’d left was snuffed in an instant.

      ‘Tessa, for heaven’s sake.’ Rosalind’s choked disapproval clanged in the air behind her.

      She drew back, her hands falling lifeless to her sides. ‘Sorry,’ she said softly. ‘How…how are you, Isaac?’

      ‘I’m fighting fit,’ he replied, his eyes skittering ever so briefly over her hair, blond as ripe corn, her flushed face, simple blouse and slacks, then darting away to blink at the brick red bougainvillea, which hung from the trellis. ‘And how are you, Tessa?’

      ‘F-fine.’

      ‘Let me congratulate you.’ His eyes returned to her with lazy amusement, and he took her left hand, paying studious attention to her engagement ring. It was embarrassingly huge. An enormous emerald surrounded by brilliant diamonds. Tessa had always thought it too large and ostentatious for her fine bones, and because of her deep blue eyes, she hardly ever wore green, but Paul had been immensely proud of his selection.

      As Isaac’s dark gaze rested on the ring, her pale hand trembled visibly within the heat of his sun-tanned grasp.

      ‘A fitting rock for the Queen of Castle Hill,’ he said coldly.

      Tessa snatched her hand away as if he’d burnt her. Reality with all its glaring, hateful commonsense showed her clearly what she had always known in her heart of hearts. Of course Isaac hadn’t come back for her.

      She had heard people throw away clichéd lines about moments of truth, but she had never realised what pain these moments represented.

      If Isaac were oh so eager to see her again, he would never have stayed away so long in the first place. The accusations he’d flung at her the day he left were true. He despised her and everything she stood for. The very fact that he could come back now to watch coolly and dispassionately while she bound her heart and body to another man forever until parted by death meant that he felt no emotional ties whatsoever.

      She knew it was ridiculous, but even as she stood there, angry at his easy rejection of her and still flushed with shame over her impetuous greeting, she was unable to drag her eyes away. They travelled restlessly, hungrily over his every feature while his gaze remained politely, icily remote.

      At closer quarters, she sensed something about Isaac that was both as old and familiar as her memories of him and yet new and strange. It was as if he embodied a living contradiction. His dark, brooding eyes were shadowed by a weary sadness that suggested he’d been weighed down by too many harsh experiences. But beneath the stormy exterior there was something else, something sharp and expectant at his centre, something alert and waiting in his glittering gaze that made her think of the childish excitement of Christmas morning or the very first day of the long summer holidays.

      She was startled when her father’s voice broke into her thoughts. ‘Tessa, darling, isn’t this a wonderful surprise?’

      She forced her lips to curve into a smile as she acknowledged her father’s presence nearby in a comfortable squatter’s chair. She crossed to him and bent to kiss his cheek. Like her fiancé, Paul Hammond, John Morrow was a kind and gentle man, if a little subservient to his wife. Tessa eyed her father fondly, remembering that it was Paul’s likeness to him that had helped her decide to accept his proposal of marriage. A lifetime with someone like Dad would be very pleasant.

      She wanted to concur with her father’s pleasure in Isaac’s return, but the words wouldn’t form. Her mouth opened and then shut again. How could she possibly pretend to be pleased to see Isaac again? The wonderful surprise Dr. Morrow referred to had reverted to nightmare in the blink of a cold, indifferent eye.

      But her father didn’t seem to notice her hesitancy. СКАЧАТЬ