Marriage & the Mermaid (Hapless Heroes) (5 page)

She was injured. It was the perfect reason to stop picturing her wrapped around him slippery and naked, and once he’d allowed himself a calming breath he felt marginally stronger. She held out an arm and he steeled himself for more close contact, this time easing her into the tub. She settled into the water and lay back to look at him, pensively. “You do not touch me unless I ask you to.”

Baz wanted to say,
and you have no idea how much effort that requires,
but instead he said, “I’m a gentleman,” wondering if he was. It certainly sounded good.

“Then a gentleman would never hurt a woman,” she replied, with an odd testing tone in her voice that set his radar off.

“God no!” he replied instinctively, but part of his brain was wondering why she was asking that. The police were coming. Was she setting him up for some sort of sexual harassment accusation? His father was rich. Maybe she thought they’d settle out of court. It happened to people. She could be —

Baz cut himself off in mid–thought.

The girl had almost drowned. Another man had died trying to save her. Add to which, she couldn’t have known it would be someone wealthy like Baz who would come to the beach to rescue her. She wasn’t a criminal mastermind. She was just a beautiful girl on the run with a lump on the back of her head who was clearly exhausted by her ordeal.

Well, not too exhausted to masturbate and ask for sex.

Jesus, Wilson. Get up and go!

Baz turned off the taps and said, “I’ll leave you to it then,” and forced himself to stand.

She looked up at him with a confused frown. “I do not understand how my sisters have been successful when I cannot. But perhaps when I am clean you may find me more attractive. Then you may want to make a baby with me.”

Baz suddenly felt like the worst sort of bastard on the planet. “No, it’s… you’re beautiful,” he told her.
It’s not you, it’s me.
But he couldn’t bring himself to say that out loud, so he added, “I do want babies but … you’re a stranger and —”

“I didn’t realize that familiarity was required. I am only here for a handful of days.”

She definitely came from somewhere far away.

“It’s not… required for sex,” he said, then weathered a blush that made his ears hot. “But making babies is serious. You don’t do that with a total stranger. Well I don’t.”

“Then if I hadn’t told you about the baby you would have made sex with me?”

Baz stared at her unblinking eyes and was completely unable to say
I’m not like that,
because maybe he was. Certainly the drugged version of Baz had thought about it. If she’d just opened her legs and kept her mouth shut they might well be…

Seconds ticked over silently incriminating him. Finally he swallowed down a lump of guilt and he said, “I’m just going to get you some clothes and a drink of water,” then he backed out of the bathroom and shut the door.

Fuck.

He looked down at his hand on the doorknob and it was still trembling. Strangely, this time it calmed him down. It was just the drugs. He wasn’t himself. She’d told him the effect would wear off, and he could only hope it did before the police arrived, or he was in serious trouble.

But first he had to get her ready, so he let himself out of the guest suite and went to check on his father, padding down the hallway to his father’s room which, predictably, was empty, then on around past the front door and down the other side of the U–shaped hallway looking in each room until he got to the library where Ted was snoring in a leather recliner. So far so good. Baz left his father to sleep while he set off down the hallway to retrieve a pair of drawstring shorts and a tee he’d shrunk in the wash and put in the bag by the poolside cabana for the cleaning lady to take to the charity shop.

He passed through the kitchen and out the back door, crossing the veranda and loping down the steps into the back garden he’d run through earlier with Matt. But instead of turning sharp left, through the hedge border and into the garage complex, Baz took the path straight ahead through the roses as if he was heading for the stairs down to the beach. Just short of them he turned right and passed through the other hedge border into the pool area. Afternoon sunlight that was warming Baz’s bare shoulders glistened off the chlorinated water and the terracotta tiles surrounding the pool were swept clean, which meant Carlos had been busy.

Beyond the poolside cabana, another hedge hid the fragrant herb garden, situated behind the old weatherboard servant’s quarters which had been deserted when Baz had been a child. He’d thought the old dormitory creepy then. Now it reminded him of the boarding school he’d been sent to when he was eight. Unhappy memories there.

Baz went around the back of the cabana and pulled the canvas drawstring bag up from the storage box under the eaves and ratted through it until he had the shrunken clothes. In the distance he could hear Carlos mowing, probably the orchard behind the garages, but as Baz stood and gazed down at the marigolds, sweet basil and cherry tomatoes growing over the tops of each other in the herb garden, their scent took him out of the present and cast him back in time, to a world of long hot afternoons, homemade pineapple cordial, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and sleepy kittens curled up under cane chairs. Baz breathed it in, closing his eyes to remember what it had felt like with his head in her lap while she’d read to him, as if they were the only two people in the world.

Safe.

That’s what it had felt like. Safe and loved. Such distant memories.

Sweet, achingly distant memories, with nothing since then that compared.

Baz sighed, trying hard not to feel sorry for himself as he retraced his steps but talking about babies earlier had made him feel sad, as if he’d never have a family of his own. When he reached the kitchen he went to the designer–white ‘heritage’ sink to pour a large glass a water for the girl. The gold tap felt incongruous under his hand, and the nostalgic part of him longed for the kitchen of his childhood with it’s chrome–and–copper sixties plumbing and linoleum floor, but the interior designers his father had employed had gone to pains to replicate the original 1820’s style. So the timber flooring had been uncovered and polished, and the burnt–orange laminex bench tops had been replaced with oiled oak slabs. Everywhere you looked was timber, exactly as it would have been in the original, only now it disguised the most up–to–date plumbing and electricals available.

The kitchen, of course, was only the tip of the iceberg. A cable TV dish hidden between two chimneys on the roof and a concealed widescreen projector in the disused gentlemen’s smoking room had turned it into a home theatre. The governess’s quarters and adjoining schoolroom had become the guest suite where his naked stranger now bathed, and the nursery where Baz had spent the first eight years of his life was now two bedrooms with an ensuite between them.

It was in those two separate rooms, one blue and one pink, that he and Beth had spent their wedding night. Apart. He should have guessed that Beth’s relief to be ‘alone at last after such a hectic day’ wouldn’t bode well for their marriage. But no, ever the optimist.

Baz sighed for the second time in ten minutes, and turned off the tap before glancing at the old wrought iron clock on the paneled timber wall.

Three fifteen.

Shit! Only forty–five minutes until the police arrived. He snatched up the water and the clothes, detoured past his own bedroom to throw a tee shirt over his own bare chest. Then he headed back down the hallway to the guest suite. Only, when he arrived there he found the door open. Baz blinked in shock, then he walked inside and looked through the rooms methodically: sitting room on the right, bathroom straight ahead, bedroom on the left, but from the moment he’d stepped into the suite he’d known she wasn’t there.

You dreamt her.

Chapter Five

E
lizabeth, are you finished in the bathroom?”

“Not yet, Aunty Glenda,” Betty called back, giving her blonde bob one last swipe over with the hair straightener before struggling to get the plug out of the ancient wall socket. Unfortunately the more she pulled, the more the plastic wall mounting lifted off the flaking fibro wall. If she wasn’t careful she’d rip it right out. “Won’t be long,” she called, then more softly to herself, “Crappy dump.”

Not that she was ungrateful for the digs. It had been kind of her aunt to put her up on such short notice, but Betty knew she deserved better. Much better. And because you couldn’t rely on men for anything, it was clearly up to her to raise the deposit for her dream home. One wallet at a time.

Finally she had the straightener out, then swept a last glance around the tiny room with its mismatched porcelain: blue bath, pink toilet, yellow stained wall tiles. She wanted to make sure she hadn’t left anything out of the toiletries bag under her arm because you never knew when you’d have to bolt. When she was sure she had everything she reached for the doorknob.

“That’s a good girl,” Aunty Glenda said as Betty exited the bathroom. The old duck was pulling her chenille dressing gown over her ample bosom. “Pop the kettle on, will you?”

“Sure,” Betty said, trying not to be grossed out by the fact that her aunt and uncle had probably been doing
it
while Betty had been in the shower, and that’s why the old bird was in such a hurry for the loo. For some reason she always raced to the toilet after their bed stopped creaking. Some old–lady bladder thing.

Betty waited until she was into her own bedroom to shudder as she put her hair straightener and toiletries bag in the suitcase under her single bed. Then she went to the dresser to retrieve her watch, being careful to restraighten the pineapple pattern doilies her Aunt had been so proud of. Betty knew she’d be in trouble if she wrecked anything.

The toilet flushed and Betty scampered to beat her aunt out into the kitchen so the kettle would be on before the old bird got there. This might be a creaky lopsided house but it was free digs and free food. Betty wasn’t stupid enough to spoil that deal by being lazy.

As she got the cups and saucers down she said, “Do you want me to set up the teapot?”

“Thanks for offering, luv,” Glenda replied, shuffling in behind her in her matching chenille scuffs. “But you know I like to do it my way.”

“No worries,” Betty replied. “I’ll put the biscuits out.” A chair scraped behind Betty and she knew that must be her Uncle Jim, coming for his afternoon tea. Betty was sure that one day — when she was much older — she might think it was a wonderful thing that old people still had sex, especially in the afternoon. But at seventeen, it was squeamish–making, especially when she hadn’t heard the tap in the bathroom running, which meant her uncle hadn’t bothered to wash his hands before he’d come to eat.

“I hear there’s a pick–pocket doing the rounds,” Jim said, index finger digging through the hair coming out of his ears, searching for wax. His loud voice, as usually, got on Betty’s nerves. “You be careful out there job hunting, Elizabeth,” he told her. “Keep your wallet in the bottom of your handbag under your lipsticks and such. That’s what it says to do in the paper.”

Betty put the tin of her aunt’s home made jam drops onto the table. “Goodness,” she said, conjuring a frown. “I thought country towns were safer than the big smoke.”

Glenda, who stood at the sink rinsing the teapot, snorted, and Jim shook his head. “Not any more, luv,” he said. “The badduns are spreading, like a damned disease. Like those God damned cane toads!” he added, raising his voice even further.

Betty flinched at the volume but Glenda didn’t react. Maybe they were both going deaf. “I’ll be careful,” she promised, and opened the tin, putting a selection of strawberry and apricot jam drops onto a plate. “Anzacs?” she asked, and at a nod from Jim she retrieved that tin and loaded the other side of the biscuit plate with the coconut–oat biscuits that reminded her of her grandmother.

She loved that about Glenda and Jim’s. It was like stepping back in time, reliving happy moments of her past with her wider family. Unfortunately her near–kin had all been flakes but she’d survived that, and if nothing else, it had taught her to be a chameleon. To her Aunt and Uncle, she was Elizabeth, their favorite niece, kind, helpful, eager to please. To the man whose pocket she was going to lighten this evening, she would be … Rose — yes, that was a pretty name for a fantasy woman. She hadn’t been Rose before. That would be fun. A sweet demure Rose with batting eyelashes and a shy smile that promised a whole lot more than he was ever going to see.

“Now remember I work on Friday,” Glenda told her, putting the teapot down on the table, then covering it with a knitted tea cosy. “I’m off to the Wilson’s to clean. Huge mansion they’ve got. Takes all day. So you’ll be making Jim’s lunch for him and cups of tea. You know he can’t boil water.” She shot her husband a sly glance. “Lucky he’s got other talents.” They laughed then and Betty put her biscuit down, appetite gone.

“So the Wilson’s are rich?” she asked, to steer the conversation back onto a more profitable — not to mention more comfortable — subject.

“Loaded,” Jim said. “The Wilson family opened up this area a hundred and fifty years ago, sugar cane, cotton and pineapples. Brought darkie laborers down from the islands and built
Saltwood,
a big sandstone mansion on a cliff–top out of town. The family’s lived there ever since. Old man Wilson’s alone now –”

“His son visits,” Glenda interrupted around a mouthful of jam drop. “He’s there now.”

Jim leant across and tapped a nicotine stained fingernail onto the table in front of Betty. “The prince of Wales was a guest at
Saltwood
around nineteen hundred. They had a special bathing room built just for his visit, with a big claw foot tub. I can’t remember what they use that room for now. Petal?” he turned to Glenda.

“Torn down, I think,” Glenda said. “The boy, Balthazar used it as a cubby when he was tiny, you know, before…”

“Right,” Jim said and held out his cup for some tea. The conversation faltered while Glenda poured them all a cup and Betty stirred sugar in absently. Thinking. “I’ll be happy to stay home and look after Uncle Jim while you’re working, Aunty Glenda,” she said. “And for a special treat, why don’t I make dinner the night before, so you’re well rested on Friday?”