The Australian Tycoon's Proposal. Margaret Way

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СКАЧАТЬ free to do anything you want.” To calm herself Bronte moved closer to a magnificent stand of ancient ferns found only in the rain forest. Some of them had grown into trees with huge crowns standing twenty feet or more over her head.

      “I won’t do anything that upsets you.” Gilly followed Bronte up.

      “We don’t really know this man, Gilly,” Bronte pointed out as gently as she could when she wanted to yell: exactly who is he? “He said he has a law degree. I don’t know from where but it should be fairly easy to find out. Another odd thing, he said he knew of Nat’s family. He said I wouldn’t want to move in with them. He spoke like he actually knew them.”

      Gilly’s expression turned thoughtful. She tucked a snow-white lock back into the loose coils. “Funny, he never said anything to me.”

      “Yet you told him all about me?” Bronte tried not to sound upset. She knew how proud Gilly was of her.

      “Lovie, you can’t turn around anywhere in the house without seeing a photo of you. You were on the television until that rotten Saunders struck back. Damned if I’m famous compared to you. Steven was interested. He thinks you’re very beautiful and a great actress.”

      Bronte laughed that one to scorn. “I’m not a great actress. Great actresses are born, like my mother. I’ve got a little talent that’s all and I’m photogenic. I’m not a great anything!”

      Gilly pulled her over and hugged her. “You’re too modest, that’s your trouble. Give yourself a chance. You won’t be twenty-three until the end of December. I thought your parents might have named you Noelle but Miranda had a thing about the Brontë novel Wuthering Heights.”

      “I know. She’s often said it’s her favourite book though I’ve never seen her read anything else. Vogue, Harpers & Queens, Tatler, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, that’s about it.”

      “She wouldn’t have time to read,” Gilly said dryly. “That megalomaniac she married demands all her attention. But getting back to Steven!”

      “How long have you actually known him, Gilly?” Bronte asked in a worried voice.

      “I dunno.” Gilly broke off a dead frond. “It seems like forever. He’s been up here quite a while but I didn’t run into him until around June. It was after you left anyway. I’d taken a trip into town to do my shopping and Steven was walking out of the mall the same time as me. He asked if he could push my trolley.”

      “Oh, right!” Bronte said with extreme sarcasm. “That’s one way to start up a conversation. He probably knew who you were.”

      Gilly threw back her head and laughed, a sound that put a dozen brilliantly plumaged lorikeets to flight. “Hell, girl, who am I? Steven sure wasn’t after a fling. I mightn’t look it but I am an old lady. I have to keep reminding myself from time to time. Steven is a gentleman. He unloaded the trolley and put it all in the back of the ute for me. I said I had someone to unload it at the other end, the someone being me, but I didn’t let on to him about that.”

      “So how did he get to visit?” Bronte had a sinking feeling.

      Gilly eye-rolled her. “I seized my opportunity next time I saw him in town. I said if he was anywhere near Oriole Plantation sometime he might like to pop in.”

      Bronte looked at her with eyes like saucers. “Gilly, do you realize how dangerous that was?”

      “Don’t be ridiculous, girl. You of all people should know I can protect myself. Besides, eyes are the windows of the soul. That young man’s eyes are as clear as crystal. If I could go back forty years my ambition might be to marry him,” Gilly laughed, heading off towards the lagoon where thick banks of the Green Goddess lily and tall reeds grew around the boggy perimeter.

      “I suppose it’s possible to become hooked in one’s seventies,” Bronte mused.

      “Shows what you’d know,” Gilly said. “Seventy-year-olds are as enthusiastic about sex as seventeen-year-olds. The right man can melt a woman of any age like a marshmallow.”

      “Good grief!” For some reason Bronte felt herself go hot. She bent in agitation selecting a river pebble and sending it skipping across the smooth sheet of water.

      “I’m fooling, sweetheart!” Gilly guffawed. “I’m just trying to get something straight. I trust Steven Randolph like I trust you.”

      That hurt. “You still haven’t told me what he wants you to do?”

      Gilly bent, picking her own pebble. She threw it with gusto and it went further than Bronte’s. “If you can wait until tomorrow—I’ve asked Steven to dinner—he can tell you himself. He can explain it all so much better than I can. He knows his way around all the legalities and things like that. He’s right on side with the council and he does things properly, anyone in the town will tell you that. Wait until tomorrow night.”

      Morning. The first rays of the sun filtered through the billowy lemon folds of the mosquito netting that cocooned the huge Balinese bed. A warm golden beam lay across Bronte’s dreaming figure, but it was the outpouring of bird song that woke her. She turned her dark head on the pillow. The pillow slips and the sheets had been scented with Gilly’s aromatic little sachets. It was a floral-woody smell, that was the closest she could come. Gilly never would reveal her secrets though she’d promised Bronte she’d left her her books of recipes in her will.

      It was impossible to sleep with that powerful orchestra tuning up. There were all sorts of voices, violins, violas, cellos, flutes, oboes, trumpets, the occasional horn, even a bassoon. Whistles from those who couldn’t properly sing. A loud resounding choo from the whip birds. Miaows from the Catbirds. Beautiful singing from the robins.

      Lovely! Bronte turned on her back, staring up at the sixteen-foot-high ceiling with its elegant plaster work and mouldings that badly needed restoring. She stretched her arms above her head, luxuriating in the morning and the brilliant performance. It was the first morning in fact she’d woken up not thinking of the terrible fiasco of her abandoned wedding. She fully appreciated now her involvement with Nathan had been engineered by her mother with the full support of her manipulative husband. Both understood the advantages of the match, social and financial. To them! Nat never had been interested in her really. Certainly not in her mind. He’d been far more interested in her body and the fact she could, when she put her mind to it, look as stunning as Miranda.

      For so many years of her life Bronte had looked to her mother for some signs of love, of support, but mothering for Miranda was a closed book. All Miranda’s energies in life were directed towards pleasing her horrible husband and maintaining the ravishing looks that were the envy of her socialite friends. Looking back Bronte realized Miranda had been trying to marry her off from probably age eighteen. A girlfriend told her it was because her mother didn’t want Bronte around as competition. Gilly had brought her up to scorn vanity so Bronte never thought of herself in that way.

      Her own mother jealous? Yet Miranda’s critical comments and hard stares whenever Bronte was dressed up to go out could have been interpreted as a kind of jealousy?

      It didn’t matter any more. She couldn’t go home. She couldn’t even rent an apartment in Sydney. Like Carl Brandt owned her mother, Miranda thought she owned her daughter. And then there was poor Max, her half brother. She wondered if it would be possible to get Max up to Oriole for the Christmas vacation. He would love it! It wasn’t as though he had doting parents who required his presence СКАЧАТЬ