HE SAT up, shoved his hair out of his eyes and discovered he was furious. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
It was no consolation to see her eyes widen with shock. And widen further as he jumped out of bed to stand in front of her stark naked.
‘And don’t look like that either, Skye,’ he heard himself order curtly. ‘Not after last night, not to mention all the nights, mornings, afternoons and other strange times we’ve made love with extreme passion. Isn’t it time you grew up a bit? You can’t surely be so innocent as you contrive to appear!’
‘I don’t contrive to appear anything,’ she retorted with sudden spirit as she stood up herself. ‘But if you want to have any kind of a discussion with me, Nick, put some clothes on!’
He felt himself slip into another gear. ‘Why, Skye? Afraid we’ll not be able to help ourselves again?’ he mocked. ‘That is what happened last night if you remember—I hope you’re not going to pretend otherwise or wrongly apportion some kind of blame for it.’
She closed her eyes briefly and he saw her swallow. ‘No. It was all my fault. I was being morbid and stupid. But don’t you see?’ she said intensely. ‘Without poor Mrs Watson and her baby, it would never have happened.’
‘Rubbish,’ he said through his teeth. ‘It would have happened anyhow. It might have taken a bit longer before it happened, that’s all.’
‘Nick,’ she said on a breath, and he watched with a kind of grim fascination as so many expressions chased through her eyes, leading to final comprehension. ‘Did you—did you actually plan for this—for something like this…?’ She stopped and gestured towards the bed.
‘Not last night, no, I didn’t plan anything; you—’
‘I…I know, but is that why you suggested this—this trip?’
‘Only you, Skye, would have believed it couldn’t or shouldn’t have happened. I’m not a block of wood and I’m certainly not as easily manipulated as Bryce Denver. But before you brand me as the ultimate villain,’ he said roughly, ‘it’s not entirely my fault that we can’t keep our hands off each other!’
He waited as she absorbed this and knew she would blush. Which she did—another cause for grim satisfaction, he found as that pink tinge beneath her smooth skin ran all the way down her slender neck. He paused to marvel at the fact that he could still make her blush then his mouth hardened because he still couldn’t work out whether this innocence was something he loved or something that exasperated him mightily.
Skye, seeing that hardening, suddenly decided she’d had enough. She picked up her cap and bag and fled for the door.
He caught her easily enough, picked her up and carried her, kicking and struggling, back to the bed where he sat down with her in his arms. ‘Stop it,’ he said quietly. ‘You must know me well enough by now to know I’m not some kind of monster.’
Skye sat up in his lap and eyed him furiously. ‘No, I don’t! I don’t think I know you at all any more and, Nick, one of our great problems was that we didn’t know each other properly.’
‘That’s why you’re determined to run away again?’
‘Yes.’ She was clipped and severe.
He laughed softly and hugged her briefly. ‘All right. Off you go.’ He lifted her up with his hands around her waist and set her on her feet. ‘I think the first flight comes in around eleven o’clock today.’ He got up himself and headed for the shower.
Skye was sitting in an armchair when he came out.
He raised a wry eyebrow at her and started to pull on his trousers.
‘It’s all very well being superior, Nick,’ she said stiffly, ‘but this is my room and I might as well wait here.’
‘Which you’d forgotten to take into account earlier?’ he suggested with some satire.
Skye was silent as she mentally berated herself for sheer stupidity. In fact, when she’d woken and seen how deeply asleep Nick was—he could sleep like a log anywhere—her first impulse had been to just slip away.
Flights et cetera had raised their head with her as she’d showered, dressed and packed, but, perhaps most of all, leaving with no explanation. So she’d decided to wait until he woke, then try and explain things rationally to him. Only to be confronted by a Nick as she’d never seen him before, which had prompted a headlong, thoughtless flight.
He reached for his olive-green shirt then came to sit opposite her with it still in his hands. ‘When we go, we’ll go together, Skye. But you’re right—I think we might leave Lizard and Mrs Watson to rest in peace.’
She stared at him and thought involuntarily how beautiful he was. The skin of his shoulders was sleek and tanned, the sprinkling of dark hairs on his chest disappeared beneath his trousers along with a taut, hard diaphragm. The muscles in his arms were smooth and powerful and his wet hair lay flat against a well-shaped head.
All of which—and she swallowed beneath the weight of it—brought back memories of the night before.
Then it struck her that she’d never stopped to wonder whether he was handsome in a conventional sense. There was so much personality in his face together with those often expressive, sometimes enigmatic, always fascinating dark eyes, you had no need to sum him up feature by feature; the whole was simply dynamic. She had sometimes marvelled that she, Skye Belmont, could be everything to this man.
As she looked into his eyes now and found them supremely enigmatic, all the old doubts, and some new ones, came back to plague her. How to get through to him, though…?
‘I want to go home, Nick,’ she said steadily. ‘I thank you very much for all you’ve done but I’m not convinced there’s any reason for us to…try again.’
‘That’s rather remarkable—I thought we broke the scale last night?’ he drawled, and slid his arms into the olive-green cotton.
She watched him button up the shirt fixedly. Anything rather than having to encounter his eyes. ‘It probably happens to you all the time.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Well, I’m sure Wynn is capable of a bit of scale-breaking, for example.’
He smiled unexpectedly. ‘I have no idea. You’re not still worried about Wynn?’
‘I…you…no…uh…what do you mean?’ This time she looked straight into his eyes without stopping to think, her own a very puzzled blue.
‘I didn’t sleep with Wynn.’
She blinked. ‘But…I mean, you said you consoled each other!’
He shrugged and reached for his socks. ‘Emotionally but not physically. I did try to tell you this, Skye,’ he added as she looked astounded. ‘You gave me to understand you weren’t interested.’
‘But Wynn herself…’ Skye stopped.
‘Told you otherwise?’
‘No! But she might just have well have shouted it from the nearest treetop.’
‘If so, that was only her way of bolstering her ego. Or,’ he meditated, ‘perhaps you were being supersensitive?’
‘That does it!’ Skye stood up decisively. ‘I’ve had enough insults from you this morning, Nick Hunter! I’m going to breakfast.’
He slid his shoes on, raked his fingers through his hair and said sweetly, ‘Me too—I could eat a horse. Fantastic sex always did have that effect on me. Which was why you were such a delight to know, Skye.’
She wasn’t sure whether she growled audibly but she certainly felt like it.
How do you break through a brick wall? she wondered as they lingered over coffee.
It was a hot, clear day and they’d eaten their breakfast with only the most mundane conversation between them.
Then he said, ‘Would you like another swim before we take off?’
‘Take off for where?’ she asked cautiously.
‘We’re a long way from home; we’ll have to break it up a bit—Great Keppel?’
‘No, the mainland somewhere, Nick, or not at all.’
‘Mackay, Rockhampton, Gladstone?’ He eyed her wickedly. ‘Not terribly exciting, Skye.’
‘I’ve had enough excitement to last me for a while.’ Her tone was slightly bitter.
‘Skye…’ he paused and looked out over Anchor Bay ‘…I don’t think I’ve told anyone this but the prospect of stepping into my father’s shoes has never entirely appealed to me.’
She put her cup down carefully and frowned at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s talking about relinquishing the reins completely and going to live on an island. Once he gets Pippa sorted out, that is.’
‘But—you would have known this was coming, wouldn’t you?’
He gestured. ‘Some time in the future, naturally. Not as actual reality, though. And it doesn’t mean to say I relish it.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s an awful lot of responsibility.’
‘Do you mean you wouldn’t be able to go away and do your own thing?’ she asked as a little window seemed to open in her mind so that she frowned suddenly. ‘You’d be really tied down…’
He shrugged. ‘Well, put it this way, to get where he got, my father made it his whole life. To take it on to the next century could require the same dedication. I don’t know whether I—have that dedication.’
‘I’ve seen you in your office,’ she said slowly. ‘You—can look like the ultimate tycoon, you sound like one when you’re not—’ She stopped and bit her lip.
‘Making love to you?’ he murmured wickedly.
She absolutely refused to blush this time although he had, on one occasion, locked the door of his office, told Florence via the phone that he wasn’t to be disturbed under any circumstances, and done just that on the broad, comfortable settee.
To Skye’s relief, when she’d come down from the cloud nine he’d elevated her to, it had been long past five o’clock and everyone else had gone home, including Flo. Even so, she’d taken advantage of the luxurious bathroom attached to his office suite, so she could leave the building at least feeling as if she looked normal.
‘Heady days, those were,’ she commented as she sat on the veranda of Lizard Island lodge, refusing to be discomposed.
‘As you say,’ he replied a shade dryly.
‘Why are you telling me this now, Nick?’
‘I thought it might give you a new insight into me, that’s all.’
‘I don’t see how it could affect us—’
‘But you have told me that one of our big problems was how little we really knew each other,’ he countered.
She sat back, feeling confused. ‘True, but that’s all the more reason for you not to want to be pinned down by a wife. Look at it this way: if you do step into your father’s shoes, there’ll be even less time for a wife—from what you’ve told me. And if you don’t, although I can’t visualize that, Nick,’ she said honestly, ‘you’d be free to roam the world doing other things.’
He looked wry. ‘It’s quite a dilemma.’
She sat up and put her elbows on the table. ‘I wish I could help. I mean on a friendship level,’ she said with a frown. ‘Have you discussed this with your father?’
‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s always been his greatest wish that I do take over.’
She paused to think about Nick’s father. She’d liked him. He was unostentatious although a stickler for propriety and it wasn’t hard to see that he lived and breathed his minerals empire.
Perhaps, it occurred to her, and her eyes widened, Nick’s mother had pursued her own career as much as she had in a form of self-defence against a man who was rarely there, as for any other reason. Was that why his mother had worried about what she, Skye, was getting herself into? Could it be a case of like father, like son in their own different ways?
Could Nick himself have been conditioned by his parents’ marriage to expect something similar from his own wife?
‘Skye?’
She blinked and Nick came into focus again. She bit her lip and said hesitantly, ‘Maybe your father is more intuitive than you give him credit for?’
‘I doubt it if he’s considering burying himself on an island,’ he said impatiently.
‘It doesn’t sound like him, though.’ She wrinkled her brow. ‘It might be a test to see how it does appeal to you. Even on an island, in this day and age he’d be able to keep in touch.’
Nick looked at her with sudden amusement. ‘By the way, he was extremely annoyed with me for letting you slip through my fingers. I can’t help wondering—’ he frowned slightly ‘—whether the two have anything to do with each other.’
‘As in how?’
‘As in pointing out to me that it’s about time I settled down,’ he said somewhat dryly.
‘That would be the last reason you should get married for, Nick,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘Perhaps,’ he conceded, then stood up abruptly. ‘OK, let’s shake the dust of Lizard from our shoes.’
‘Where?’ she asked as they took off.
‘Brisbane,’ he replied briefly.
‘But I thought…’
‘We’ll land at Rocky to refuel. We should make Brisbane before it’s dark.’
She glanced at him. He had earphones and a mike on and there was something unusually uncompromising in the set of his mouth. ‘Nick,’ she said tentatively, ‘I feel as if I’ve let you down.’
His dark eyes were penetrating as he glanced at her briefly but he only said casually, ‘Not at all, Skye.’
‘I mean I really wish I could help, especially after the way you helped me, but getting back together could only compound the problem, don’t you think?’
‘There’s only one valid reason for us to get back together, Skye, and that would be if we found we couldn’t live apart.’
‘Well, I agree absolutely—’
He laughed softly and not entirely pleasantly. ‘I knew you’d say that.’
She flinched. He saw it and shrugged. ‘Look, don’t worry about it. There is an alternative.’
She stared at him with her lips parted as her mind raced.
‘You could connect up with a commercial flight at Hamilton Island if you preferred. You’d get to Sydney in one hop by tonight.’
It was like a blow over the region of her heart and it must have shown in her expression because he said cynically, ‘What were you expecting, Skye? That I suggested we forget about getting married and just resume intimate relations? As we did last night,’ he added pointedly.
She licked her lips and wondered desperately what she had expected. ‘No. Uh…I guess it was like having the door slammed in my face but…but then I obviously can’t help,’ she said barely audibly. Then she decided to be hanged for a sheep. ‘Nor was Hamilton Island the most tactful suggestion.’
‘Because of Wynn? And the fact that I may be tempted to break the scale with her?’ he drawled.
‘Possibly,’ she agreed tautly. ‘However, you go ahead and do what you like. I will go home in one hop!’
‘Skye—Hamilton Island happens to be handy and have a lot of flights—’
‘I’m not a fool, Nick. So does Mackay, Rockhampton, Gladstone—’
‘Yes, but they’re all further on than Hamilton and in this state of—war mightn’t it be a good idea to curtail this encounter?’ he shot back.
‘You’re the one who declared this war!’
‘No, Skye, you’re the one who invited me to sleep with her last night then got up and packed her bags this morning.’
‘Well, I’m glad I did,’ she said proudly. ‘There was always an unfinished kind of aura about our affair, Nick. Now I’ve done that, I’ve said a last goodbye. So take me to Hamilton; I really can’t wait to get home.’
He did just that.
There was not a tear in her eye as they floated over the Whitsundays in a strained silence and landed on the island. Nor when she said goodbye formally to him after he’d insisted on organizing her flight for her—fortunately she only had a twenty-minute wait. They were like two strangers, and his dark eyes were hard and cool.
He said as she was about to board the jet, ‘Take care, Skye. And don’t forget to go and see my mother.’
‘I won’t. You too. Goodbye, Nick.’ And she turned away without waiting for his reply. Nor did her composure crack, not even as she walked through the terminal at Sydney and realized she didn’t give a damn who recognized her and she’d taken no precautions against it.
Then she saw her mother coming towards her with open arms.
‘Mum!’ They hugged. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Nick rang me,’ Iris Belmont explained. ‘He said…he… Oh, Skye, my darling, don’t cry…’
‘I’m better, Mum. Promise,’ Skye said as they ate dinner in the restaurant. She’d told her mother almost everything, more than she’d ever told her before.
The restaurant was closed, actually, but it had been a busy evening and Skye had been only too happy to help out. Iris was still minus a chef.
‘But—’ her mother hesitated ‘—you don’t think he might have been right? You did seem to have an awful lot going for you.’
Skye looked at her mother affectionately. ‘I think you might have been right. There’s a lot more to Nick than appears on the surface. But one thing he’s not right about—he can’t call all the shots—when he feels like it.’
Unbeknownst to Skye, Iris decided wisely not to pursue the subject. She said instead, ‘I wish you’d told me how you felt about crowds!’
Skye grimaced. ‘So do I but I didn’t want to worry you, and I hadn’t really realized that it was growing, I guess. But that may be a thing of the past now too.’
‘You will go and see Margaret Hunter, though?’ Iris stared at her anxiously. ‘I spoke to her and she doesn’t think you should just let it lie and assume it’s all over.’
Skye sighed. ‘Perhaps another—’
‘Oh, Skye,’ her mother entreated, ‘please. I have such faith in her!’
‘Mum, it’s difficult,’ Skye protested, and was astonished to see sudden tears in her mother’s eyes.
‘The thing is,’ Iris said intensely, ‘she also knows my side of the story. We had quite a long chat.’
‘Oh—all right,’ Skye conceded. ‘I’ll give it a few days, though.’
‘You will not, Skye Belmont.’ Her mother rose and reached for the phone. ‘You’ll do it tomorrow!’
In the event, Skye was more than happy to confide in someone the next day, because she was not only furious but also not at all sure she could handle fame ever again.
She’d woken to find herself splashed all over the front page of a morning newspaper. She’d been snapped with Nick in Cairns, snapped at Lizard, snapped in the airport lounge on Hamilton Island and, most devastating of all, snapped, obviously in tears, with her mother at Sydney airport. Why was Skye crying? the caption asked. Did her reunion with Nick Hunter fall flat?
‘I can’t believe it! I hate it,’ she said passionately to Margaret Hunter in her pleasant consulting room, pointing to the paper.
‘My dear—’ Nick’s mother was small, slim and grey-haired but she had his dark eyes ‘—I know it’s awful but you have to learn to live with it.’
‘Tell me how,’ Skye pleaded desperately. ‘Nick said wanting to disguise myself was not…normal, but surely anything that avoids this has to be plain common sense!’
‘There are two separate issues here, Skye,’ Margaret said gently. ‘An invasion of your privacy which, quite justifiably, has made you hopping mad. But that’s not the same thing as a morbid fear of crowds.’
Skye subsided.
‘How…is Nick?’ Margaret asked tentatively then, as if she’d been in two minds about asking.
‘Fine—uh—’ Skye paused to study the woman who was to have been her mother-in-law and couldn’t help but observe that she was troubled. ‘Haven’t you—? You sound as if you don’t—know.’
Margaret grimaced. ‘Nick and his father had an almighty row over him breaking up with you, Skye. We haven’t seen him since.’
‘You mean no contact at all?’ Skye asked, wide-eyed.
‘Oh, I’ve spoken to him on the phone. And I gather his father has as well but—’ she sighed ‘—things are very strained. On top of it, Richard is talking about retiring—I mean really retiring—and I don’t know— I just don’t know how Nick feels about it.’
‘You poor thing,’ Skye said involuntarily. ‘You’re probably caught in the middle?’ She raised an enquiring eyebrow.
Margaret nodded ruefully. ‘Also, Pippa is coming home with a divorced French count she wants to marry who is years older than she is.’
‘Nick told me.’ Skye sat back and opened her hands in a gesture of sympathy.
‘So you and Nick are not…?’ Margaret hesitated.
‘We’re not getting back together, no. He was wonderful,’ Skye said intensely, ‘About this business, and he did suggest we try again, but only after he found out about the claustrophobia. I couldn’t—do it. It nearly killed me to know that he wasn’t even that keen on us having children the first time around, so, I think I may always love him, but…’ She stopped and sighed.
‘There’s a part of Nick you don’t think you can ever get to?’
‘Yes,’ Skye said sadly.
Margaret was silent for a good minute. Then she said slowly, ‘I’ve often wondered whether it’s a reaction in Nick to this thing that’s been hanging over his head for so long. This sort of inevitability that he was one day going to have to step into his father’s shoes.’
Skye sat transfixed.
‘Don’t get me wrong—it’s not as if he hates his father for it. In so many ways they’re two of a kind. They have that sort of business flair, that acumen and vision, and if it had been his own creation Nick may have felt just as dedicated, but…’
‘But that’s why, ultimately, he’s so averse to being tied down in any way? Because he’s always felt the weight of this?’ Skye offered.
‘Precisely.’ Margaret shrugged.
‘I’ve thought of that. He told me only yesterday that he wasn’t sure about stepping into his father’s shoes. I…well, I stopped to wonder how you had coped. Because each of them in their own way is…hard to reach, I would imagine.’
‘It came down to one simple thing in the end,’ Margaret said slowly. ‘I was more miserable away from Richard than I was with him, even fighting for recognition as his soul mate. So I stopped fighting and took another approach. I did my own thing.’
‘Have you been happy?’ Skye whispered.
‘Not all the time, no,’ Margaret conceded. ‘But, when I have, I’ve been happier than I could have been with anyone else on earth.’
Skye blinked several times. ‘I don’t know if I have the fortitude you have,’ she said huskily. ‘I just don’t know.’
‘There is another way of looking at it,’ Margaret said thoughtfully, ‘and I’m wondering whether Richard may have divined all this and that’s why he’s decided to get out now. Once he leaves it will be Nick’s creation, to take it on anyway. So instead of a weight hanging over his head he may feel liberated and, well, less prone to wanting to escape.’
‘Have you—forgive me, I don’t mean to be incredibly personal—but have you asked Mr Hunter if that’s why he wants to retire?’
‘Men,’ Margaret Hunter said with sudden bitterness, ‘can be impossible at times, Skye. Since this row between Nick and his father, every time I try to bring anything up in the context of Nick, Richard accuses me of siding with him.’
‘Oh, dear. Have I caused that much strife?’ Skye looked genuinely conscience-stricken.
Margaret laughed. ‘You’re very sweet, Skye. No—not that we don’t love you and, to be honest, thought you were very right for him, but I think this conflagration was waiting to happen anyway. Skye, should we discuss crowds now?’
Skye went to the restaurant after her time with Margaret Hunter, where her mother was waiting eagerly.
‘How did it go?’
‘She was very helpful,’ Skye said, but slowly.
‘You don’t look—’ Iris hesitated ‘—that much helped, darling.’
Skye made an effort to drag her mind from all the revelations of the morning that had nothing to do with her fear of crowds and set about trying to reassure her mother. ‘You wait and see. There’s a new me under this old exterior, Mum. I don’t suppose you’ve acquired a new chef during the course of this morning?’
‘No! I’ve interviewed three but not one of them is suitable!’
Skye hugged her. ‘Just as well you’ve got me, then, isn’t it?’
The restaurant proved to be a lifeline during the next weeks.
And during the day Skye concentrated on her book. This wasn’t as easy, though, because so much of her new material reminded her of Nick and she often found herself sitting with her chin propped on her hands, wondering what she’d turned her back on, wondering why she felt as if she’d let him down, wondering if she could be a version of his mother…
Then they met and it could hardly have been less auspicious.
‘We’ve got an absolutely full house tonight including a party of eight,’ Iris said anxiously. ‘Think you can cope? I don’t know why there’s this dearth of good chefs!’
‘Of course,’ Skye said serenely. ‘And people are probably holding onto their good staff because Christmas is not that far away—but perhaps it’s an idea to cut the menu down slightly?’
‘Good thinking,’ Iris applauded, and walked over to the menu board armed with a duster and a piece of chalk.
The evening started well but at eight o’clock Iris walked into the kitchen looking shell-shocked.
‘What?’ Skye asked as she stirred a béchamel sauce and grilled an eye fillet at the same time.
‘You’re not going to believe this but Nick and Pippa are amongst the party of eight!’
Skye froze then continued what she was doing automatically. ‘So?’
‘He said…he said he didn’t know which restaurant had been booked until he arrived. Neither did Pippa; someone else made the booking and gave them a lift.’
‘Mum, there’s nothing we can do about it.’
‘No, no, of course not. But I didn’t tell him you were right here in the kitchen when he asked after you. I just said you were fine as if you were somewhere else.’
‘Then all I’ve got to do is stay out of sight. Here.’ Skye handed her mother two plates. ‘Look, don’t worry about it. It makes no difference whether I’m here or not or whether he knows or not.’
‘He’s with that woman, though,’ Iris said tragically. ‘The one you told me about—didn’t you say her name was Mortimer? That’s the name the booking was made in, only I just didn’t connect the two!’
Skye set her teeth and could have killed herself for the way her hackles rose automatically. But she said calmly, ‘It still doesn’t matter, Mum. Let’s just—carry on. They’re getting cold, by the way.’
Iris looked down at the plates in her hands as if she’d never seen them before then dashed out.
Things went smoothly until about ten-thirty—as smoothly as could be expected of a kitchen with a full restaurant to feed. Then they took a turn for the unexpected.
A Frenchman invaded the kitchen as Skye was taking a breather, having dished up the last dessert. Invaded it, what was more, saying, ‘I have to meet the chef! I have to toast him, buy him a drink and possibly lure him to France to cook for me. Oui! Don’t say—’ he looked around ‘—you are he, mademoiselle?’
‘I am he, monsieur, but—’ Skye got no further as she was picked up and carried out of the kitchen, to be set down triumphantly before the party of eight!
‘It’s a she, not a he, Pippa!’ the Frenchman marvelled. ‘You wouldn’t credit it, would you?’
There was a sudden deathly silence until Pippa said on a sigh, ‘Oh, yes, I would. So that’s why the food was so marvellous—Skye, I’m sorry but we didn’t know we were coming here or that you were here.’
‘Although we should have guessed,’ Nick said quietly, and he stood up.
‘What’s this? Give the girl a drink.’ The Frenchman put a glass of champagne into Skye’s hands and pulled up a chair for her. ‘You know my fiancée, Pippa? How fortuitous. She may be able to persuade you to come to France. I assure you our kitchen is of the most modern, the servants’ quarters are—’
It was Wynn who broke in. ‘Jean-Claude,’ she said lightly, ‘you’re putting your foot in your mouth, chéri. This is just about the most famous chef in Australia—not that she looks it right at the moment.’ And she let her dark eyes drift down from Skye’s chef’s hat, the red bandanna tied at her throat to her stained apron over a white shirt and trousers and white gum boots.
Wynn herself was extremely stylish in a caramel silk knit dress that exposed a lot of smooth, tanned skin, and her hair was straight and smooth and flowed like a dark river down her back.
Skye pulled her apron off then her hat, clamped her hand around her glass of champagne and sat down.
‘Jean-Claude, if I may call you that,’ she said to Pippa’s fiancé, ‘you’re very sweet and it was a natural mistake. I’m only glad that you enjoyed my cooking. Oh, may I introduce my mother? I’m sure she’d enjoy a glass too.’ She beckoned to Iris, standing transfixed behind the till.
‘I really didn’t know we were coming here,’ Nick said quietly to her a bit later when everyone was talking to everyone else. ‘Or that you’d be cooking. I thought you’d given it up.’
‘I’m helping out. Mum is still short-handed. But it doesn’t matter, Nick. Please don’t avoid the place on my account.’ She managed to look comically rueful. ‘Restaurants can live or die on such little things. So, Hamilton Island lived up to all expectations, I gather?’
He studied her for a long moment—the flush in her cheeks, her damp curls, the steely little glint in her blue eyes. ‘Do you really care one way or the other, Skye?’
Her gaze didn’t waver for a long moment then she grimaced. ‘You’re a little hard to work out sometimes, Nick, I guess, but then you always were! I hope Wynn knows what she’s in for.’ She drained her glass and set it down gently.
Whereupon he turned to Wynn and drawled, ‘I guess we should get this party on the road, my sweet.’