His Convenient Proposal Read online

  ‘One of your ex…one of the men in your life used to tip him five dollars to make himself scarce.’

  The colour rose from the base of her throat, he noted, and spread to the clear fresh skin of her cheeks as she said, ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Not unless Simon is given to making things up.’

  ‘Simon,’ she said bitterly, ‘is the most devastatingly honest person I know. Oh, no!’ She got even hotter. ‘Conventional art, the birds and the bees, wacky—he told you about them all?’

  ‘He ran through four of them.’

  ‘But why? How come you were discussing me like that?’

  Brett grimaced. ‘He assumed because you had a new hairstyle there was a new man in your life, and because he found me in the kitchen and because I said I’d come to see you—that I was it.’

  ‘That still doesn’t explain…’ Her eyes were wide and incredulous.

  ‘It would appear—’ Brett chose his words with care ‘—that he hasn’t entirely approved of your choice of men.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Ellie’s voice rose. ‘I chose them all because I thought they could enhance a facet of his life I was unable to but he…’ She broke off and breathed heavily. ‘He was so sickeningly polite and determinedly unimpressed it was just awful.’

  ‘Perhaps you should have chosen them for yourself?’ Brett suggested.

  ‘Well, obviously I liked them, or I thought I did, until Simon got to work on them.’

  ‘Someone with a good working knowledge of cricket might have been a better bet.’

  Ellie propped her chin in her hands. ‘What are you here for, Brett?’

  He pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her. ‘The time has come to talk of many things—wouldn’t you say, Ellie?’

  ‘“Shoes and ships and sealing wax”…do you want your house back?’

  Brett Spencer was thirty-five and six feet two. He had grey eyes, dark hair, a rather hard mouth when he wasn’t smiling and the aura of a man who knew what he wanted—and got it. The one thing he had never wanted was his best friend’s girlfriend, Ellie Madigan…

  ‘No.’ He fingered the blue shadows on his jaw. ‘Unless you have plans to marry someone and move out?’

  Ellie smiled bleakly. ‘No. I would have thought that was obvious.’

  ‘What about the new man?’

  ‘Who said there was a new—?’ She paused and her gaze refocused on the other end of the kitchen. ‘You’ve been reading the notes on the fridge!’

  He nodded wryly and looked at her neatly painted nails, a soft pretty pink. ‘Simon was certain of it.’

  Ellie muttered something beneath her breath. ‘I have no plans to marry him.’

  ‘But you’re stepping out with him?’

  ‘I…’ She reddened again, then tossed her head. ‘If you call going to lunch and…oh, damn! I nearly forgot, I’ve asked him to dinner.’

  ‘Brave of you,’ he commented, and started to laugh.

  ‘It’s not funny!’ But despite her indignation a hidden tremor ran through Ellie—Brett Spencer was devastatingly attractive when he was genuinely amused.

  ‘Storming the Bastille might be child’s play compared to running the gauntlet of Simon for any of your suitors, Ellie. But I’ll be here to lend a hand.’

  ‘You?’ Her eyes widened. ‘You intend to stay here?’

  ‘I do.’ He shrugged.

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘I’ve moved back to Australia.’

  Hazel eyes met grey ones. ‘But…?’ Ellie all but whispered and swallowed visibly.

  ‘I’m quite happy to share my house with you and Simon.’

  ‘So…’ Ellie cleared her throat. ‘So what’s the deal?’

  ‘The only deal is that we don’t have to rush in—or out—of anything at the moment.’

  Ellie absorbed this. ‘Why have you moved back to Australia? You seemed to be content to spend most of the last ten years fighting disease in Africa.’

  Brett moved his shoulders. ‘Perhaps I’m tired of Africa. Anyway, I’ve been offered a grant to set up a laboratory here to study Ross River Fever.’

  Ellie blinked. Ross River Fever, a flu-like mosquito-borne virus, took its name from the river in Townsville, North Queensland, where it had first been identified. ‘That’s…interesting,’ she said lamely.

  ‘It is to me,’ he replied gravely. ‘I don’t expect you to be jumping over the moon about it.’

  Ellie grimaced. ‘Sorry. I’m still in shock, I think. Why—didn’t it cross your mind to give me some warning of all this, Brett?’

  ‘It did but I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You’re looking well, Ellie,’ he said then.

  Don’t do it to me, Ellie prayed as his gaze swept over her. Don’t subject me to a summing up on a scale of one to ten as a woman, Brett, I know I’ve never registered on your scale either mentally or physically!

  But he did it briefly despite her prayers, and you would have had to be a block of wood not to be affected, she knew all too well. Because Brett Spencer might be a dedicated doctor with an impressive history of research into tropical diseases behind him, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t look at you in a certain way that made you go weak at the knees. That didn’t blind you to the awesome possibilities of being found attractive by this tall, sometimes arrogant but rather divinely proportioned man with his worldly grey eyes.

  In fact, she picked up a magazine and stood it on the table in front of her just in case her nipples decided to misbehave themselves, and she threatened to shoot herself if she blushed.

  ‘Thanks, I feel pretty good,’ she said brightly.

  ‘So, other than on the man front, life is treating you well?’

  A fighting little glint lit her eyes for a moment at the ‘man front’ bit but she decided to ignore it. ‘Very well! I finally got my degree in speech therapy and I work part-time at a local clinic, mainly with children. I love it.’ Genuine enthusiasm replaced the fighting glint in her eyes.

  ‘Would I be wrong in assuming Simon—he’s so like Tom, isn’t he?—is also above-average bright?’

  Ellie let the magazine fall. ‘You wouldn’t. He absorbs knowledge like blotting paper. I…it…that’s why I sometimes feel I need to broaden his scope.’

  ‘Then it’s a good thing I came home,’ Brett said lightly and stood up. ‘Would you mind if I unpacked and took a shower? I’ve been travelling for days and I need a shave.’

  ‘Not at all, if you’d just give me a few moments to clear your bedroom.’

  He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘You’ve had other men in my bedroom, Ellie?’

  ‘I have not,’ she denied hotly. ‘My market gear is in there, that’s all.’

  ‘Market gear?’

  ‘I make kites and sell them at the local markets—I have a stall one Sunday a month, remember? It was a project I started so that one day I’d be able to repay you. All the proceeds,’ she went on stiffly, ‘are in a bank account that’s become quite substantial over the years. It’s all yours.’

  ‘My dear Ellie,’ Brett Spencer said with just the right mix of quizzical affection he might have accorded a dog that had brought him a bone, ‘you didn’t have to do that. Keep it as a nest egg.’

  An hour later, Ellie closed herself into her bedroom and leant back against the door, not sure whom she was most furious with: herself, Brett Spencer or Simon.

  She’d cleared Brett’s bedroom and she’d supplied him with a pink razor when he’d discovered that he’d picked up the wrong hand luggage from the plane. She’d listened with one ear as he’d called the airline and told them what had happened, including the possibility that the person he’d sat next to on the flight from Johannesburg might have been the one to pick up the wrong bag in Sydney.

  She’d tried to contact the man she’d invited to dinner to cancel it but she hadn’t been able to reach him, so she’d got dinner under way although with def
inite trepidation, and she now had about an hour to herself.

  And as she wandered over to her bedroom window she could see Brett bowling flippers to Simon.

  Brett’s house had a lovely garden and a swimming pool. In fact it was a lovely house: brick, old, solid and mellow with bay windows and flourishing creepers on the walls, a red tiled roof. The rooms were large and high-ceilinged, some of the furnishings a little faded now, but to Ellie’s mind that only gave it the patina of a much-lived-in home. And as well as a lawn large enough to play cricket on, there was a shady paved terrace guarded by two stone lions that overlooked the pool, and suited the subtropical climate of Brisbane perfectly—she used it a lot; they often ate outside.

  Not that she was really furious with Simon, she thought ruefully as she turned away from the window. Imparting the details of her love life, such as it was, to a complete stranger was…well, just Simon, a son she adored.

  Brett Spencer was another matter. So was her reaction to him.

  Her mind slipped down the years to her earlier reactions to him…

  She’d met Tom King at university when she was eighteen and he was twenty-two, a civil engineering student, dashing and to-die-for handsome… He’d had his own apartment, a car, he’d played polo and he’d been wonderful to be with. Especially for a girl who had grown up in a repressive home life with a jealous stepmother after her own mother had died. Tom took life so differently, she’d often thought. There had been none of the undercurrents of her home life, none of the suspicions, none of the rules and regulations. It had been heady and intoxicating.

  He’d been gregarious with a large circle of friends, but the friend he’d seemed to treasure most and even look up to had been Brett Spencer, a little older and a doctor. Brett Spencer, a man who’d tended to make you stop in your tracks and think, Wow!—even when you’d been in love with another man. Nor had it been so hard to put your finger on why he’d had that effect.

  At twenty-four Brett had already had that air of knowing what he wanted and getting it; he’d been enigmatic, he’d played polo brilliantly but he’d obviously been an academic, he’d been laconic—at times he’d even been curt—but when that brilliant smile had crinkled his face and lit up his grey eyes, women had simply keeled over.

  And gradually Ellie had discovered why Tom had thought so much of Brett. Their families had been close when they’d been children, they’d been to the same schools, they’d played on the same polo team and at thirteen, when Tom’s parents had died in a ski-lift tragedy, he’d gone to live with the Spencer family.

  But she herself had never felt quite at ease with Brett Spencer. Not that he’d ever said anything, but she’d sometimes got the depressing feeling that he hadn’t taken her seriously, that he’d seen her as a passing romance for Tom, a sowing of his wild oats. To be honest, she’d sometimes wondered about this herself. She hadn’t fallen naturally into Tom’s crowd. She’d been having to put herself through university via a series of part-time jobs, she’d certainly not been as sophisticated as many of the girls in the crowd and she’d sometimes lacked confidence in herself.

  And, in hindsight, she was able to identify that her reluctance to become Tom’s lover, not that she hadn’t wanted to, had led him to pursue her all the more.

  By the time she was nineteen and had known him for six months, she’d succumbed to the pressure and surrendered her virginity to Tom King and life had been wonderful. A month later life had done an about turn and hit her hard. Tom had been killed in a freak polo accident and a few short weeks after it she’d discovered the contraception she’d used had failed and she’d been pregnant. So, where to turn? She’d had no intention of living with her stepmother’s disapproval on top of all the other things they hadn’t seen eye to eye about.

  Then fate had taken a hand. Morning sickness had kicked in with a vengeance and she’d been standing on a pavement in the middle of Brisbane, clinging onto a parking meter feeling not only sick but dizzy and as if she’d been about to faint, when Brett Spencer had walked past, recognized her and come to her assistance. And after he’d restored her, it hadn’t taken him long to prise out of her what the problem had been. His expression, when she’d told him, had said it all—a kind of weary cynicism but not a great deal of surprise that she should have got herself into this situation.

  But almost immediately, he’d got practical. He’d told her that he had settled Tom’s affairs but the hope of any assistance from his estate as the mother of Tom’s child would not be forthcoming. Tom’s lifestyle had eaten away his inheritance from his parents. In fact, all his assets had either been in hock or had had to be sold to meet his debts.

  What Brett had then proposed, however, had surprised the life out of Ellie. He’d offered her a home and financial assistance—he’d offered her and her baby security with no strings attached while she’d found her feet again. It had been something of a mystery to Ellie why, at the time, she’d found the prospect oddly chilling.

  Of course, she’d knocked the whole thing back at first for so many reasons, not least how little they’d known each other, but Brett Spencer had had other ideas. And on top of what had been turning out to be a difficult pregnancy, he’d finally worn her down. He’d even held her hand, as a doctor, when her son Simon had been born…

  Ellie came back to the present. The amazing thing, of course, was that eleven years down the track she was still here.

  For her part those eleven years had passed so fast, she sometimes had to pinch herself. But why had Brett been content to let the situation last for so long?

  She ran a bath, poured in some salts and got into it absently. How many times had she wondered this down the years?

  She squeezed the flannel over her breasts and watched the bubbles slide down her skin. Truth to tell, the only way to cope with providing Simon and herself with a stable, happy life in the circumstances had been to bury this question at the bottom of her mind.

  But she had to ask herself now why she hadn’t made a break years ago. Before they’d got too settled in Brett’s lovely old Balmoral home with its views of the Brisbane River?

  Because it had been so easy to float along with the tide, she answered herself. Brett had inherited the house from his parents. He might spend large chunks of his life away from it but he’d never planned to dispose of it so, it was there, he’d told her when he’d so efficiently reorganised her life for her, and it was silly for her not to use it. And it had also been home to Tom.

  ‘Only until I get on my feet,’ she’d warned, as if, she now marvelled, he’d suggested something faintly distasteful or illegal.

  He’d shrugged and replied, ‘Whatever.’

  So she’d moved into the house and Brett had maintained his city apartment. When Simon had been nine months old, he’d left on the first of his overseas projects and been away for a year, and from that time on his trips home had been brief and for the past five years he hadn’t come home at all.

  Her contact with him had been via his solicitor, Gemma Arden, who in time had become a friend. Brett had arranged for Ellie to have an allowance and had insisted on meeting all costs of the upkeep of the house. He’d even provided her with a small car.

  So much of this had gone against the grain with Ellie, she’d had a hard time rationalizing it. But by the time the effects of a complicated pregnancy and a protracted birth had worn off, it had all been well in place. Then, her limited prospects of taking care of herself and Simon had become apparent. She’d been forced to cut short her degree so she’d had no qualifications and, even with what part-time work she would have been able to get and a single mother’s pension, child-minding would have cut into any wages drastically.

  And although Simon was as fit and healthy as they came now, he’d not had a trouble-free run as an infant. Lactose intolerance, frequent ear infections that had eventually required grommets, and adenoid problems had plagued his early years. She’d often stopped to wonder wearily in those years how single, working mothe
rs could possibly cope.

  Some justification for the largesse Brett had showered on her had come, obviously, from the fact that Simon was his best friend’s child—perhaps even more than a best friend, almost a younger brother. The other thing, although Ellie didn’t see it as justification but it was a factor to be considered, she supposed: Brett was wealthy. There was a brewing empire in the family background and he was a shareholder.

  But even though she’d gone with the flow, so to speak, she’d tried to be as frugal as possible. She’d never exceeded her allowance, she’d insisted on it being cut when she’d started earning money, and she’d hit on the kite-making as a way of paying something of it back.

  The other thing she’d done was take extremely good care of his house. In fact she’d come to love it as if it were her own. She’d also discovered she had green fingers and his garden now looked better than it had ever done. And the house and garden had provided her with occupational therapy down the years.

  Some help had come her way from her father until he’d been transferred interstate. What had happened to his only daughter might have perplexed and disturbed him but he’d adored Simon. And he wrote to Simon regularly and every year he paid for Ellie and Simon to spend a holiday with them.

  But there was no doubt she’d needed some occupational therapy while she’d grappled with child-bearing and -rearing on top of losing Tom, and a life that had been turning out quite different from her expectations.

  Thirty now, a single mother, essentially dateless—apart from the few men she’d hoped Simon might relate to—and desperate, she thought ruefully.

  She sat up, reached for her loofah and started washing herself vigorously but it was no good. The underlying reason she was still in Brett’s home refused to be submerged beneath a lather of soap and the scrape of a loofah. It was still the perfect solution to her life, wasn’t it?

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘I DON’T get this,’ Simon said stubbornly, half an hour later. ‘Now Brett’s come home, why do you need a date with another man?’