The Wedding Countdown. Barbara Hannay
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‘I don’t think you should drive for the rest of the week,’ Rosalind said as she put her key to the lock of her smart, navy blue sedan. ‘We can’t have you fainting at the wheel.’
Tessa paused in the process of arranging her wedding dress on the back seat. ‘I was nowhere near to fainting, Mum. Don’t exaggerate. Now that I’m over the shock, I’ll be fine. I—I’ve got Paul.’ She slid into the passenger’s seat next to her mother.
Rosalind paused before firing the ignition. ‘Yes, you do have Paul, darling. Don’t forget that. He’s a dear man, and just right for you.’ She steered the car into the late afternoon traffic.
A dear man, thought Tessa.
It was such an appropriate way to describe steady, dependable Paul. A dear man. A good man. No one had ever been tempted to describe Isaac that way. Sexy, sensuous, brooding, exciting, enticing, dangerous—the words that sprang to Tessa’s mind to define Isaac flowed with alarming ease. And as she thought about him, a strange yearning, a shocking, unchecked wildness percolated fiercely along her veins. Hateful! She must always remember the truth about him, she reminded herself swiftly.
But she couldn’t help asking, ‘Where has Isaac been?’
Rosalind took a corner at a quite reckless speed. Then she replied, almost guiltily, ‘To be honest, I’ve hardly spoken to him this afternoon. He did say something about mining over in Western Australia. Started out prospecting with some old fellow and worked his way up in the mining industry, I think. I believe he’s been quite successful. But it’s your father’s afternoon off, and he just greeted Isaac with open arms like the returned prodigal son, opened his last bottle of his favourite vintage claret, and they’ve been chatting for hours. I’m afraid I was too distressed to just sit and listen to them. I have so much still to do, of course, and—well, you know how close they always were.’
The car pulled up with a slight screech as they encountered a line of traffic at an intersection.
Her father had always loved Isaac, Tessa reflected. Bringing the street kid home one night when he found him sick and shivering on the steps of his general practice surgery had been quite out of character for Dr. Morrow, but something in Isaac’s intelligent, haunted face had touched the good man’s heart long before the boy stole Tessa’s. Isaac had lived with them for seven wonderful years after the official fostering papers had been signed.
And he’d been gone for nine after that fateful day.
Tessa quickly clamped down hard on her distracting thoughts and forced her mind to return to the safety of practical wedding plans. ‘I can’t wait to see the marquee when it’s all decorated. Have the bud lights arrived?’
‘Gardeners and Greene delivered all our orders this morning,’ Rosalind replied.
‘Great!’ It was so easy to sound reassuringly interested in other things, but the attempts to keep her thoughts from straying to Isaac were unsuccessful. How could she bear to see him again now? Another alarming thought jumped into her head. ‘Mum, Isaac’s not going to stay for the—for my wedding, is he?’
The car was climbing through the streets of Yarrawonga, which, clinging to the edge of Castle Hill with stunning sea views, was Townsville’s most prestigious suburb. They edged up the last steep incline to the Morrows’ house.
‘I have a strange feeling that might be why he came home,’ said Rosalind, her voice brittle with tension. ‘Of course, he claims he’s here on business with some big Asian mining company. But it is a strange coincidence, isn’t it?’
Tessa’s eyes stung with sudden hot tears. It was indeed very strange. And to have Isaac come back now, to have him present, actually watching her marriage to Paul Hammond, was worse than her most distressing nightmare. After all the long nights she’d lain in bed wondering about him, one minute crying for fear he was hurt or dead, and then wishing he was the next! How many times had her mind elaborated wildly on a bizarre range of horrific accidents?
Then eventually, after too long, she’d been numb enough to be able to force him to the back of her mind. And she had thrown herself into teaching her preschoolers with a passion that had delighted everyone and had brought her a measure of satisfaction. Her life, even if it felt continually at the low water mark, had resumed.
An off-the-road utility truck, black, new and very expensive looking, swathed in red dust, was parked in front of the Morrow house. It had to be Isaac’s. The shock wave that jolted through Tessa hurt to her very fingertips.
She couldn’t go inside, she decided. If seeing his car made her feel like this, how could she possibly face the man?
A blue heeler cattle dog sat in the back of the truck, keen eyes alert, ears pricked and tail wagging.
‘Of course I’ve insisted the dog stays in the truck,’ Rosalind muttered as she swung her car through the gates and swept up the steep drive beside the house. ‘It would make a terrible mess of the garden.’
‘Won’t he—it—get hot?’ asked Tessa lamely, wondering how any part of her mind could still function when she felt so dazed with dread.
‘Isaac’s brought a covered cage for him, and knowing him, he’ll take him for walks all over the hill. He’ll be all right. July is our coolest month, after all,’ replied Rosalind firmly as she wrenched on the handbrake and opened her door.
This was it.
Tessa tried to tell herself it was simply a matter of opening the car door, walking into her home and saying good afternoon to an old family friend. She would have preferred to walk into a creek full of man-eating crocodiles or into a dentist’s surgery to have all her teeth drilled.
Trembling with tension, she followed her mother into the dimmed interior of the house, which was shuttered from the glare of the western sun. They stepped silently through the spotless kitchen and across the carpeted lounge towards the outside deck.
Isaac’s voice, a familiar, deep, rumbling drawl, reached her first. Her heart thudded painfully. But what surprised her as she continued her journey was the sudden fatalistic calm that settled over her, as if the churning blood in her veins was transfused with something as soothing and innocuous as warmed honey.
It was almost as if she’d been sedated. She was able to dump her shoulder bag on the coffee table and walk towards the timber-framed doors that opened onto the deck as easily as she had when she was a thoughtless and carefree girl.
Is this how a fly feels as it enters a spider’s web? she wondered. Perhaps people heading for the guillotine experience this strange kind of peace in their final moments.
All it took was the sound of Isaac’s voice, and she was no longer fearful, but simply glad—overjoyed to be seeing her foster brother again.
And then her eyes found him.
Before she stepped out of the darkened room, she saw Isaac standing, leaning against a railing at the end of the deck. She stayed in the shadows to steady the sudden fillip in her heartbeat. Sun-dappled light filtering through overhead lattice played across his features, highlighting first the aristocratic brow and then the craggy bone structure, which looked for all the world as if it had been sculpted by a passionately impatient hand. Except for the mouth, which was moulded firmly and carefully, with lips full of sensuous promise.
His hair was longer than she remembered. Curling and black, it skimmed his collar, so that more than ever he looked like a dark-skinned Gipsy or a pirate, wickedly adventurous, scorning convention. As he always had, Isaac carried that indefinable air of danger that should have repelled her, but had always drawn her to him—against her better judgment and to her intense regret.
Despite the obvious quality of his clothes, Isaac wore them with elegant negligence. The untidiness was rescued by his erect and handsome figure, the breadth of his shoulders, the leanness of his hips and the length of his legs.
It was totally unforgivable of her to immediately make comparisons, but it hit her at once that a man