In the Australian's Bed: The Passion Price / The Australian's Convenient Bride / The Australian's Marriage Demand. Miranda Lee
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pew for more than twenty minutes, max.” She laughed, not a good idea since they’d just entered the vaulted interior of the cathedral, right at the moment when the organ stopped. Her laughter echoed up into the cavernous and unfortunately silent ceiling. Several heads whipped round to glare.
‘Sorry,’ Jake apologised to them. ‘I can’t take her anywhere.’
‘Stop it,’ Angelina hissed. ‘Just shut up and watch.’
He shut up. But not for long.
‘Hard to see much from this far back. Want to get closer?’
‘No! I can’t trust you to behave.’
‘True. I’ve always been a bad boy in churches. Can’t stand all the hush-hush nonsense. Makes me want to break out.’
‘If you embarrass me,’ she whispered, ‘I won’t go to your place with you afterwards at all. I’ll make you drive me straight home to the Hunter Valley.’
‘Don’t think so,’ he returned just as softly. ‘You left that pretty handbag behind, remember? We’ll have to go collect it. Although, perhaps not. You could always collect it next weekend.’
Angelique frowned. She’d been trying not to think about tomorrow, let alone next weekend. ‘I…I have to have lunch with Alex next weekend.’
‘You don’t have to do anything of the kind. Call him. Tell him it’s over by phone.’
‘No.’
‘I knew you’d say that,’ he muttered. ‘OK, go to lunch with him if you have to. But that’s just on the Saturday during the day. As soon as you’re finished with him…permanently this time…I will expect you at my place. Shall we say four? Five?’
‘Make it six.’ The swimming carnival wouldn’t finish till five.
‘That’s one hell of a long lunch. I sure hope it’s going to be somewhere public. All right, all right, so I’m acting like a jealous fool. Six, it is. I’ll book us a table for dinner at eight. You can stay over till Sunday night, can’t you?’
Angelina swallowed. She really shouldn’t let this fiasco continue. It wasn’t right. She should tell him the truth.
But she just couldn’t.
‘All right,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Now hush up.’
He hushed up, but a small boy several rows up from them didn’t. He started whinging and whining about wanting to go outside. Several warnings from both his parents to be quiet and to sit still had no effect. Finally, the father lost his patience, swooped the child up in his arms and headed with swift strides back down the aisle, past Angelina and Jake.
Angelina smiled a wry smile. She remembered full well the trials and tribulations of taking a small boy to church.
Jake’s suddenly leaping to his feet startled her. ‘Be back in a minute,’ he said. ‘Got to check on something.’ And he was off, bolting down the aisle after the man and child.
Angelina jumped up as well, and hurried after the three of them, catching up with Jake on the cathedral steps. He was standing there, staring, an odd confusion in his eyes.
Her hand on his tensely held arm was gentle. ‘You see?’ she said quietly as her gaze followed Jake’s to where the father was happily lighting up a cigarette whilst he watched his son enjoying himself immensely jumping up and down the steps. ‘No need to worry.’
‘I thought…’
‘Yes, I know what you thought,’ she said softly.
She actually felt the shudder run all through Jake.
‘Can we get away from here?’ he said, glancing around at all the onlookers who were gathering to see the bride emerge.
‘All right.’ She tucked her arm through his and they just walked in silence for a while, finding their way across the road and back into the park at the next intersection.
‘Is that what your father did to you, Jake?’ she asked gently at last. ‘Hit you?’
‘No, not my father. I never knew my father. He did a flit before I was born. It was my mother who did the honours. Man, she had a punch on her, that woman. Not a day went by that she didn’t lay into me for some reason. Just about anything would set her off, especially when she’d been drinking. Sometimes it was just the way I looked at her. I can still remember how scared I was to go home after school, right from the time I was in kindergarten. Although weekends were the worst. No school to escape to those days.’
Angelina was both horrified and saddened by his story. What kind of a mother would do that to her son? ‘But didn’t the teachers notice?’ she asked. ‘I mean…there must have been bruises.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m a boy. Boys get bruises all the time. If they did notice, they just looked the other way. Teachers weren’t always as conscientious in reporting such matters back then as they are now.’
‘But what about you grandparents? Your aunts and uncles? Neighbours? Wasn’t there anyone who cared?’
‘Not that I knew of. Mum was estranged from her family. And the neighbours we had were just as bad. It was not a salubrious street.’
‘So what happened in the end? Did you run away?’
‘I put up with it as long as I could. By the time I was in high school, I didn’t go home much so I didn’t get hit as often. I spent more and more time on the streets after school. Got into a gang. God knows how I didn’t get arrested for shoplifting. I thought I was smart but I was just lucky. Anyway, one day when I was around fifteen, I came home late and Mum started swinging at me with this frying pan. Great heavy thing it was. Collected me a beauty. I’m not sure what happened next but it was Mum who ended up on the floor. Made me feel sick afterwards, I can tell you. But then…aggression breeds aggression. That was when I walked out and never went back.’
‘But where did you live?’
‘On the streets, of course.’
‘But…’
‘Look, I survived, OK, thanks to Edward and Dorothy. Let’s not get into this. It’s all dead and gone, even the lady herself. I looked her up last year when Edward died and found out she’d passed away years ago. Hepatitis. I didn’t grieve, but I needed to know what had happened to her. Closure, I guess.’
Closure? The man who’d started shaking at the sight of a father showing even a small amount of impatience with his son was a long way from closure. Angelina was so glad that she had never used corporal punishment on her son. She’d never allowed her father to hit Alex either, no matter what.
Poor Jake. All of a sudden, she wanted to hold him and love him, to make up to him for everything he’d suffered as a child.
‘Let’s go home, Jake,’ she suggested softly.
He stopped walking to throw her a speculative glance. ‘Home, as in your home or my home?’
‘Your home.’
‘Now you’re talking.’
But she didn’t do much talking on the way home. She kept thinking of everything Jake had suffered as a child.
It explained why he didn’t want to have children himself. Clearly, he was afraid he’d be a bad father, that the cycle of physical abuse would continue. Angelina didn’t believe that it would for a moment. Not with Jake.
Still, it was what Jake thought that counted.
It was going to come as a terrible shock when she told him about Alex. Perhaps it was as well, Angelina realised, that their son was a teenager and not a baby.
‘You’ve gone rather quiet,’ Jake said as he unlocked his front door and ushered her inside. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘Wrong?