Archer did have a marvellous bedside manner!
Clare dragged in then expelled a shuddering sigh. She should not have agreed to this. No matter what. She had very bad vibes about it.
‘Clare! Yoo-hoo, Clare!’
Clare looked down into the body of the hall to see Flora waving at her from near the back doors. With a resigned sigh she made her way over, trying not to cringe over the dress Flora was wearing—a loud floral which looked hideous on her plump figure. The poor sweet darling was also all pink and flustered as she kept checking arrivals out the back.
‘Oh, my, don’t you look simply stunning!’ Flora praised between anxious peers. ‘I…er…hope you didn’t mind about my putting you on the main table after all, dear. I was speaking to your father in town this morning and he said you must have misunderstood what I wanted because he was sure you wouldn’t mind at all. I…er…hope he was right.’
Clare smiled. ‘He was perfectly right. I just thought maybe you could find someone better suited than me, that’s all.’
‘Oh, goodness me, no. I told Jim that there wasn’t a brighter or prettier girl in town than you and if anyone could charm our guest it would be our own darling lady chemist.’ Flora suddenly squealed and grabbed Clare’s wrist. ‘Oh, look. There’s his car! Isn’t this thrilling?’
Clare pulled out of the other woman’s grasp, alarmed to find that her heart was galloping. She also found herself joining Flora in the avid peering through the doorway.
A shiny black car was rolling into the kerb. When it stopped, a man in a black dinner suit slid out from behind the wheel. A tall man. A nice-looking man. He wasn’t, Clare recognised with sick relief, the man himself.
‘That would be Mr Marshall. He’s our guest’s manager. Oh, there’s Dr Archer, getting out now. Aren’t you coming down to meet him?’
Clare swallowed, finding her eyes riveted on the opening passenger door. ‘No,’ she croaked.
‘Well, I certainly am.’ Flora surged down the steps towards the welcoming committee.
The passenger door was wide open now and a sleek dark head appeared, connected to a black dinner suit. Clare did not wait to see any more. Totally unnerved, she turned and fled back into the hall.
CHAPTER TWO
CLARE shut the door of the back-stage powder-room and leant heavily against it. Literally shaking, she tried to calm her thumping heart and failed miserably.
Finally she managed to still the ragged, painful breathing that her mad flight had caused. Levering herself away from the door, she walked over to the seat that ran along one wall of the small rest-room.
Thank the lord, she thought as she sank down, that no one had seen her hurtling down the hall and stumbling up the stage steps. She would be eternally grateful for a country town’s obsession with the rich and famous, grateful that all eyes had been fixed elsewhere.
Clare closed her eyes and leant back against the wall. Just a few minutes, she told herself. A few minutes so that she would feel collected enough to return to the hall and take her place at the main table.
What on earth had caused her to panic like that? So she found the man attractive? So what? She had found any number of men attractive over the years. She’d even been attracted to a couple of local men since coming home. Unbeknown to her mother, she’d gone out with them too, thinking that in Bangaratta she might find a man of principle she could fall in love with and possibly marry.
But in truth, Clare had found the local men so boring, their personalities so flat and dull, that she now lived a lonely life rather than keep seeking an elusive dream. 19
Clare stood up and walked slowly towards the mirror that hung above the washbasins. Her eyes travelled slowly over her hair, her dolled-up face, her glamorous gown. When she went to push back a stray hair she was dismayed to see her hands were trembling. With a groan she leant against the bench and stared into the basin. When she glanced up again she was hotly aware of the over-bright eyes, the still racing heart.
Face it, she warned herself in a harsh whisper. The man excites you. The man himself…not the character on television. Why else have you avidly read everything printed about him? Those articles were about Matt Sheffield, not Dr Adrian Archer.
That’s why you refused to come tonight in the first place: because, underneath, you knew he was too much like David for your peace of mind. Both exceptionally handsome men. Both brilliant actors. Both, amazingly, the only sons in wealthy Sydney families, each even more amazingly headed by a politician patriarch. The similarities were quite striking.
OK, so David had given up acting shortly after leaving university to pursue a career in a law firm, presumably with his eye on politics. But lawyers and politicians were consummate actors anyway, Clare reasoned cynically.
Given his similar background, it was hard to see Matt Sheffield turning out any differently from the smoothly polished, superbly arrogant and insidiously charming type David had been. But beneath the surface appeal would lie a soul so shallow and insincere, so utterly, utterly selfish, that such a man should wear a brand across his forehead declaring to the world at large—and women in particular—that they were poison.
Oh, yes, Clare knew exactly what to expect tonight. Yet even so, the prospect of being in Matt Sheffield’s company had stirred her as no man had since David.
Fortunately, being forewarned was forearmed. With her past bitter experience to the forefront of her mind, Clare felt reasonably confident she could sustain a coolly polite faade all night, no matter how attractive she found the man, or how much he flirted with her. Any direct defensive rudeness was out of the question, of course. Flora and Bangaratta were counting on her.
Steeling herself, Clare left the rest-room. She had just walked past the gents’ room and her foot was on the first of the three steps that led back up into the right wing of the stage when a man’s exasperated voice pulled her up short. ‘Good God, Bill, this place is a lot more backwoods than I expected.’
‘You’re not wrong there. Did you get a load of the decorations? Bloody balloons, no less! Why on earth you accepted this invite, I have no idea. The appearance fee won’t even cover expenses. As for publicity…you don’t need that any more.’
‘Certainly not of the nature I’ve been getting. But I agree, this doesn’t seem to have been one of my better decisions. Talk about the back of Bourke!’
Clare cringed inside. She knew instinctively whom that superbly cultured voice belonged to. She’d heard it often enough on the TV. Normally, she liked its deep rich tones, especially when it was soothing an accident victim, or a woman in painful childbirth. But overhearing it utter words flavoured with sarcasm and contempt reminded her of that other highly educated voice from the past, brutally putting her down because she was country born and bred. The memory brought a rush of rage that overpowered her resolve to remain cool and she hurried forward to confront this pair who dared speak disparagingly of her home town.
The two men were standing between the two sets of heavy stage curtains, their backs towards her, but their broad-shouldered, dauntingly male figures made Clare hesitate. When they resumed speaking, she found herself retreating behind a backdrop.
‘I’m certainly not looking forward to a whole evening of that woman’s inane chatter,’
