A Case For Trust (3 page)

‘Not on your bloody life. You're not driving my car with a bellyful of champagne.'

‘I've had
one
glass—'

Enough was enough. Ignoring the bickering brothers, Pippa turned and strode as fast as she could along the road that ran beside the cliff, slowed just a little by her sharp-pointed heels sinking into the sun-warmed bitumen. When she got to the bench seat up ahead, she would swap her stilettoes for the flats in her briefcase.

She'd made fair progress towards her objective when she heard the low, pulsing thrum of the car engine behind her; she determinedly ignored it until it pulled ahead of her, stopped, and the passenger door was flung open.

‘Get in.'

For a second she seriously considered disobeying the command. Considered running full pelt down the hill. Considered hurling herself over the cliff into the Pacific Ocean below. Anything but getting into a confined space to spend one more minute with Matt Mason.

She got in, and let the slamming door speak for her. The car didn't move.

‘Fasten your seatbelt.'

‘Oh, for god's sake, we're only going a few hundred metres!' But she buckled her seatbelt, and stared fixedly out the window at the rolling, crashing waves that threw themselves relentlessly across the expanse of golden sand below the headland. Less than a minute later the car was slowing near the lay by.

‘Which is yours?'

Pippa gestured to the battered utility truck parked at the end of the row.

‘The ute? You drive a
ute
?'

‘Thanks for the lift.' Pippa had the door open and her legs out before Matt had fully stopped the car. Reaching down for her briefcase, her wrist was clamped in a grip which, try desperately as she might, she couldn't wrench off.

‘I told you before, we're not done.'

‘
What? What
do you want? Would you say whatever you think you have to say and
let me go
?' Pippa's panic was only partially allayed by the knowledge Justin had seen them drive off together. Common sense told her she would come to no harm at Matt Mason's hands. Common sense had nothing to do with the instinctual fear that gripped her gut, even less to do with her reflexive flinching from the masculine anger that reminded her of other bruising hands. The grip lessened slightly; enough that she could feel the blood throbbing in her wrist, not enough that she could move to the safety of the air outside the car.

‘Look at me.
Look
at me. Right. You will give me your word you will not see my brother again. You will not contact him again. You will not seek him out. You will
leave
.
Him. Alone
.'

Fury with herself and her weak response, as much as with the man's unspeakable arrogance, made Pippa unwise. Suddenly she was thirteen again, tempting the bullying devil with stupid, rebellious bravado. ‘Or what? What will you do? Hit me?'

Matt recoiled with a physical repulsion as obvious as her own. ‘Hit you? I'm not going to hit you. What do you think I am? I'm not going to
hit
you. I'm going to ruin you. You and your little smokescreen of a wedding business. You might have thought you had your own Mason wedding all sewn up, but I promise you this: if you ever go near my brother again, by the time I'm done with you you'll wish you'd never met him. Justin's going to marry Lucy. She's exactly what he needs, despite what you've persuaded him. There's no place for the scheming, grasping likes of you in the Mason family!'

Shock held Pippa captive in the car. Finished with his speech, Matt had let go her wrist and she rubbed it absently with her other hand, trying to make sense of her scattered thoughts, trying to sort out the maze of ridiculous, nonsensical notions he had put to her. His anger seemed to have spent itself with his speech—or perhaps it was that, having delivered his instructions, he had nothing but certainty they would be followed to the letter. He was looking at her expectantly, and Pippa deliberately slowed her breathing. Her hair, annoyingly, kept falling across her face, and she pushed it behind her ear again, wondering at the anger that fleetingly returned to his eyes as she did so; at some point in the last half hour—was that really all the time that had passed?—her carefully upswept knot had collapsed into a tangled mess. When she was confident of her composure again, she looked him steadily in the eye.

‘It really doesn't matter to me what you think of me, or my business. I'm not interested in your accusations or your threats. I repeat, I will not discuss my clients, including Justin, with you. All I will say is this: you have not the first idea what you're talking about. And the last place—the very
last
place—I would ever wish to find myself is involved with the arrogant, overbearing, philandering Mason family. Thank you for the lift. Goodnight.'

This time he let her go, and Pippa wobbled her way in her tottering heels across the gravelled surface of the car park to her ute, unconsciously holding her breath as she hoisted herself into its cabin, locked the doors and gunned the ignition. Behind her, Matt Mason reversed his car—a low-slung black Audi convertible, she now noticed; typical—and accelerated smoothly back up the hill. She watched until its tail-lights disappeared around the curve of the mountain before she remembered to breathe again. It took several minutes for her hands to stop shaking before she felt steady enough to start the long drive north to Brisbane.

Chapter 2

Easily the best thing about a summer Sunday afternoon in Brisbane was the oppressive, sticky heat. Pippa didn't mind the humidity everyone else seemed to complain about. She worked steadily in her backyard, clearing the last overgrown plot of weeds (at some point it had held nasturtiums and melon vines), loosening the heavy clay soil, shovelling through some rich, crumbly compost and sand, planting and staking the delicately leafed native grevilleas in a configuration she knew would bring more butterflies and birds by spring.

It had taken twelve months, but the gardens surrounding her shabby timber cottage were finally looking the way she'd envisaged them when she first moved in the previous summer. The house itself needed work, she knew, but for Pippa, the gardens would always come first

As a very young child, frightened by the yelling that repeatedly drove her out of her family's home, she had found silence and peace, butterflies and beetles, and an imaginary world of fairies and pixies under the sheltering branches of backyard shrubs. Through her pre-teen years she had retreated to the security of the garden with its mysterious patterns and predictable seasons, until she realised her mother was safer when Pippa was in sight.

And when her mother had finally taken herself out of her husband's shadow, out of Pippa's limited protection, out of the reach of them both, the sixteen-year-old Pippa returned to her gardens, rediscovering quiet joy and fulfilment in turning the jungle of weeds into a showpiece. She escaped there from her father's rages, from his destruction of her study projects, from his theft of her savings, from his raised voice and clenched fist, until he drank himself to death when she was nineteen. By that time, she was two years into a psychology degree. She'd stuck it out another year, merely to get the piece of paper that justified the time and money she'd invested, but the misery of the cases she was studying had seen her copying her father's destructive drinking habit.

She was smart enough, had enough self-awareness, to recognise it. Abandoning alcohol and psychology together, she turned back to her beloved gardens, fast-tracked a vocational landscaping design qualification, and for ten years now had been creating beautiful gardens for others. It was backbreaking work, and didn't pay that well—it had taken all this time for her to build enough capital that she could leave the rented home and memories of her parents, put a deposit on her own, terror-free house, and set up her dream landscape design business. She'd worked so hard to prove herself with other people's gardens, her own had taken a backseat in recent months. But now it was done, and the gently terraced garden beds were thriving where once there'd been nothing but a steep slope of weeds.

She stretched her achy lower back and gazed with satisfaction at the ominous, queerly purple sky. To the west, over the tri-masted peak of Mt Coot-tha with its television towers, bulging, billowing clouds, heavy with rain, promised to dump their bounty. The breeze had picked up considerably in the last quarter-hour, and she heard low rumbles of thunder, still a good way off, but heading her way at speed. With a very little luck, the rain would dump first, soaking the saplings in their new plot, and she could relax on the back verandah with a good glass of merlot to watch nature's fireworks extend the twilight.

As if she'd called them to her, the first plump drops of rain soothed her sun-flushed shoulders as she gathered up her garden tools and stashed them in the tray of her ute, ready for work the next morning. She had accepted a new landscaping commission at a kindergarten in the wealthy rural community of Brookfield, and her head was full of ideas for the flowerbeds, the vegetable plots and the miniature maze she had designed and which had been so well received by the parents' committee overseeing her project. A mini-dozer was due on site around seven the following morning. As the heavens opened and drenched her where she stood, she ruefully hoped her wish for a good summer soaking tonight wouldn't leave her bogged in mud tomorrow!

But the rain was easing off as suddenly as it had started, the pounding on the corrugated iron roof of her garage settling into a comforting rhythmic patter. She would just check the saplings had survived their first rain before taking herself inside for—

‘Didn't you hear me knocking?'

The abrupt irritation in the question was as disconcerting as the shock of hearing Matt Mason's voice so close behind her shoulder, and Pippa responded just as irritably, vigorously rubbing the elbow she'd banged painfully on the tray of her ute.

‘I didn't hear you knock. I didn't see you arrive. What are you doing here? How did you get my address?'

‘Phone directory.'

‘I'm not
in
the phone directory.'

He waved a vague hand towards the ute, the name of her landscaping business half-camouflaged by mud spatters. ‘Lloyd's Landscapes. You're in the phone directory.'

‘My mobile number is. My address isn't. How did you find me?'

‘You didn't answer your mobile.'

‘
How did you find me?
'

He looked at her coolly, and for the first time, Pippa became aware of the state of her appearance: her hair in dark, dripping rats' tails plastered to her skull, her threadbare gardening shirt equally drenched, smeared with mud, and clinging far too revealingly to nipples chilled and pert. Self-conscious under that disapproving gaze, she pushed a hand through the strands that clung to her forehead and didn't realise she left a smudge of rust-coloured clay in its wake. His eyes followed the movement before dropping back to her petite, rebellious figure.

‘If I hadn't seen you get into that ute last night in your silk suit and pretty shoes, I'm damned sure I wouldn't recognise you as the same woman. I assume from all the dirt you're wearing you do more than just drive the truck?'

‘You bet I do, Mister.' She crossed tanned, wiry arms across her misbehaving breasts, blocking his view and creating a barrier she hoped he'd find intimidating. He didn't look intimidated. ‘How did you get my home address, and why are you here?'

‘I did an ASIC search.'

His shrug was casual, his eyes wary. Pippa regarded him narrowly. It probably wasn't illegal; as a commercial lawyer, she figured he had access to the securities commission database, and she had nothing, anyway, to hide. But it did speak to some determined sleuthing. On a Sunday. Curiouser and curiouser. ‘And you are here because …?'

His momentary wariness disappeared behind a blazing determination. ‘I'm not convinced you were listening last night. It occurred to me afterwards, you didn't actually agree to stay away from my brother. I want your promise.'

‘In writing?' Pippa asked sweetly.

‘In blood, if necessary.'

‘Good heavens, don't be so melodramatic!' Pippa's forced laugh covered her nervousness. The ridiculous things that came out of this man's mouth.

‘I'm not being melodramatic. You will stay away from my brother, from my family. You don't even understand what you've done, splitting up Justin and Lucy, but as I told you last night, there's no place for you in our lives. I want your promise you won't see Justin again.'

‘I have no intention—'

‘Your
promise
, Ms Lloyd.'

Attack was the best form of defence. She'd learned that early. But as he towered over her with his condescending demands and his cynical black eyebrows, Pippa struggled to find the will or the words to fight back. Why did he seem to despise her so? What had she done to attract this aggression? She'd turned the question over and over in her mind the night before on the drive home, had eventually made herself dismiss thoughts of Matt Mason so she could try to get some sleep, but his absurd accusations about a relationship between her and his brother, his threats to ruin her, clamoured again in her head and crowded out rational thought. If he wouldn't listen to her, they would continue to go around in circles over this stupid misunderstanding—it
had
to be a misunderstanding—

A flash of lightning and a loud crack of thunder brought Pippa back to the moment. The storm was very close.

‘Mr Mason. I don't know why you think I'm having an affair with your brother, I've only ever …' His forbidding frown had her hurrying on, ‘… but yes, I promise. My business with Justin is finished, I have no plans to see him again, and I will not contact him. Now, I suggest you get back in your car before the storm hits—'