understanding. Her reputation was totally shot around Belleview. What would be the point in telling Melanie that the sight of home with its solid safe walls had flooded her eyes with tears last night, making her run off the circular driveway, across the front lawn and into the cement surrounds of the large, lily-filled pond? Or that, still terribly shaken from her ordeal, she’d left her car there and staggered inside, taken more sleeping tablets than was good for her and crashed into blessed oblivion?
‘Will you be staying for dinner tonight?’ the housekeeper asked.
‘If it’s all right with you.’ She was hoping to inveigle Nathan into going back with her to her unit tomorrow to see if Roberto and co were still there. Big brothers—even adopted ones who despised you—had to be good for something.
Melanie shrugged. ‘Whatever. I have tomorrow off, though. You’ll have to do for yourself or get Ava to cook for you.’
‘Good God, no. Auntie’s cooking is even worse than her watercolours. I’ll rustle something up myself. Where is the old dear, by the way? And everyone else, for that matter? This place is like a morgue today.’
The housekeeper looked up with those dull black eyes of hers, giving Jade a droll glance before turning away to start loading the dishwasher. The clock on the oven said two-fifty, Jade noticed. The sleeping tablets had knocked her out for nearly twelve hours.
‘Nathan’s not here, if that’s who you’ve come looking for,’ Melanie informed her. ‘He’s taken Kirsty and Gemma with him to the beach-house at Avoca for the weekend.’
‘Gemma?’ The name was vaguely familiar but she couldn’t place it. ‘Who’s Gemma?’ Jade asked, ignoring Melanie’s assumption she’d come visiting just to see Nathan.
‘Kirsty’s minder. Kirsty’s living here for a while.’
‘Oh? Why’s that? Lenore found herself a lover at last?’
Jade suspected that after twelve years married to Nathan Lenore might find it hard to replace her husband with another man. From what she’d heard—and her own limited experience with him—the man was dynamite in bed.
‘I have no idea what Lenore’s private life is like,’ Melanie said with cool rebuke in her voice. ‘She was simply fed up with Kirsty’s behaviour and thought a few weeks with her father might do her good. But with Nathan working late at Whitmore’s every day, he felt he had to hire someone to personally supervise Kirsty before and after school.’
Jade laughed. ‘I’ll bet Kirsty just loves having a minder at fourteen.’ Suddenly, the penny dropped on where she’d heard that name. ‘This Gemma person wouldn’t happen to be a lush young thing with big brown eyes, would she?’
Melanie’s eyes snapped round, confirming Jade’s intuitive guess.
‘I happened to drop by a couple of weeks back,’ Jade elaborated wryly. ‘Nathan was just getting out of his car with the aforesaid nymph sitting in the passenger seat, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Nathan was doing a good imitation of a protective father figure but he didn’t fool me for a second. I take it she’s living in?’
Melanie nodded, and so did Jade. Slowly. Cynically.
‘I’ll bet she’s not the same innocent young thing today that she was a couple of weeks ago.’
‘I wouldn’t bet too heavily on that,’ Melanie said. ‘Gemma’s a strong-minded young woman with a wealth of character.’
‘She’ll need to be,’ Jade muttered, surprised by Melanie’s defence of this Gemma. And her confidence in the girl’s will-power. Despite her deadpan exterior, Melanie was still a woman. She couldn’t be ignorant of the magnetism of Nathan’s sex appeal, even if only as an observer. The answer to the housekeeper’s high opinion of the girl had to lie in the girl herself.
‘So tell me about her,’ Jade resumed, her curiosity piqued. ‘Where did Nathan come across this gem of a Gemma?’
Melanie looked up. ‘Careful...your claws are showing.’
Jade laughed, recognising the truth of this statement. Her feelings for Nathan perhaps weren’t as vanquished as she’d thought they were.
‘OK, OK,’ she agreed. ‘I sound like a jealous cat. So where does she come from?’
‘Lightning Ridge.’
‘The opal town way out back of Bourke?’
‘That’s the one. Nathan was out there buying opals for Byron and Gemma sold him some. It seems her father had just been accidentally killed—fell down a mine shaft—and she was selling up everything to come to Sydney. Nathan made her the offer of a job if she ever needed one.’
‘Which she took him up on, of course,’ Jade said ruefully. ‘What girl wouldn’t, after meeting Nathan? Say no more, I get the picture entirely.’
The housekeeper’s sigh sounded exasperated.
‘You can sigh, Melanie, but I saw the way that girl looked at Nathan the other week. Are you telling me she’s not smitten by our resident Casanova?’
‘All I’m saying is that she’s not a pushover.’
‘Meaning I am?’
Melanie gave her a sharp look. ‘Don’t go putting words into my mouth, Jade. You know better than anyone what sort of girl you are. I wouldn’t dream of making such a judgement. I’ve only known you two years, six months of which you haven’t even been living in this house. You weren’t home much, even when you were living here.’
Jade’s laugh was wry. ‘I don’t need to live here in person for you to have found out all the dirt on me. My mother used to adore telling everyone how bad I was. And it’s all true. The climbing out of windows to meet boys in the middle of the night when I was only fifteen. Everything! I’m a bad ‘un, Melanie. No doubt about it.’
‘You and I both know you’re not nearly as bad as you pretend to be, Jade,’ Melanie astonished her by saying. ‘Your teenage rebellions were revenge on your parents for their supposed lack of love, as well as some other imagined—or even real—transgressions.’
‘My,’ Jade returned caustically, ‘What are you? The resident psychoanalyst around here?’
‘I’ve had my share of experience with analysis,’ Melanie said with not a flicker of retaliatory emotion.
Sympathy for this sad, soul-dead creature replaced Jade’s anger. She knew about Melanie’s past, how her husband and baby son had been killed in a car accident right before her eyes. It had been a horrific tragedy.
Yet while Jade could appreciate the numbing effect that would have on any wife and mother, it had been years now, for heaven’s sake. Time to live again. Either that or put yourself out of your misery and throw yourself off a cliff or something.
Jade knew she herself would never commit suicide. She refused to let life get her that down. Life was meant to be lived, and, goddammit, she was going to live hers. To hell with her father, and Nathan, and even what had happened last night. And to hell with her mother. Irene was already probably in hell, anyway!
‘Are
