Margaret Way - Secrets Of The Outback

The service droned on to the point that he actually considered getting up and stretching his legs. About time things got moving. He couldn’t bear being trussed up in this city gear. And the heat! Some guy choked up and had to be led off. Must’ve been an act. Still, this was no place for such an unChristian thought, Steve decided. He lowered his curly dark head to his hymn book, joining a choir of uniformed kids from one of the posh schools. Probably Sir Julius’s alma mater. He tried to visualize Julius Copeland as a small boy. Couldn’t. He’d always figured Sir Julius had sprung into this world fully grown—and had believed the old boy could never die. Now Sir Julius’s final destination was waiting. Steve didn’t know exactly where that would be, but he wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Sir Julius was going straight to hell.

TEN MINUTES LATER, Steve got his first good view of Lady Copeland as she made her dignified way down the aisle. No one to support her. She probably felt as though a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She didn’t look from side to side. She didn’t look at anyone. Steve had to keep reminding himself of her age. She was Travis’s mother, which had to put her well into her fifties, but behind the short black veil she wore over her face—he thought only royalty did that—she looked as youthful as her daughter-in-law.

Steve found the opportunity to study her again outside. He was tempted to go up and say hello to her. Explain he was overseer of one of the Copeland cattle stations. Of course he didn’t. He hung around watching the VIPs go, instead. Her elegant beringed hand came up to push back the short veil. Now, for the first time, Steve saw her face exposed to the brilliant sunlight.

Lord God! He gulped as a terrible malevolent humming started up in his head. The clarity of shock and the pain almost felled him. In one soul-destroying moment of revelation, Steve knew his whole life had been stolen from him. He reeled with the impact. Slammed into something hard. A stone pillar. He knew beyond any doubt that he could never be happy again.

The face of this woman, Davina Copeland, was the same magical face as his own daughter’s. The resemblance was startling. Here was the mould for the face of the child who had given him all the joy in the world. His daughter, Jewel. There was the hair, dressed differently, of course—maybe the woman’s owed a little these days to artifice—but it was the same thick, gleaming gold. There were the distinctive winged black brows, the heavily fringed blue eyes that shone like jewels.

Now all those hazy questions he’d sealed away in his mind broke out of the vault. He turned in blind anguish, his feelings of betrayal so powerful that they were beyond words. He looked for and found Travis Copeland. The destroyer was standing by himself. Without hesitation Steve moved in. He would have liked to shout “Adulterer!” but his throat closed up. Travis was sweating and shaking, just standing there staring at him. Knowing what was coming.

Before anyone could stop him, Steve Bishop, superbly fit, launched himself at the man who had dishonored his wife, ruined his life. He grabbed him powerfully by the shoulder, then—as mourners turned, both aghast and agog—punched Travis so hard in the face that he was knocked clear off his feet. Copeland’s patrician nose was most assuredly broken. Steve had felt the crunch, but without any satisfaction.

A woman in a chic black suit began to wail. Not the widow. Not the wife. Perhaps they realized this sort of display was bound to happen sooner or later. While Travis Copeland sprawled on the stone steps, his nose gushing blood, police descended on Steve Bishop. They overpowered him swiftly although he offered no resistance. He rocked back and forth on his feet, his face ashen, not a shadow of regret in his eyes. Steve Bishop was in an altered state from which he would never give himself time to recover.

It was impossible to hide things. In the end they always came out.

The present

MONDAY MORNING. Traffic was heavier than normal. Jewel swung a U-turn, not exactly sure if it was legal, and took a different route, only to find some of the lights were out on Station Road, which put her farther behind. Another couple of delays would precipitate a minor crisis. She would be late for her Monday morning “chat”—a quaint tradition—with her boss, Blair Skinner, a man she found extremely abrasive. Few in the prestigious law firm of Barton Skinner Beaumont didn’t, but they all wanted to hang on to a career. Instead they made jokes about him behind his back.

A vacant parking space in the small basement of her office building almost caught her unaware. She drove into it nearly dizzy with relief. The only real way to secure basement parking was to arrive early. Which she always did. Except today…. Someone, bless him or her, had obviously called in sick.

Jewel grabbed her handbag, so expensive she really should insure it, then locked her car by remote. She made directly for the lifts, feeling reassured, despite her workouts at the gym, that there were a few fellow workers about. Must’ve been stalled by the same set of lights. A few weeks back, another young woman who worked in the building had had a bad scare when a man approached her, pulling a gun from an inside pocket. As it later turned out after a comparatively easy citizen’s arrest—the young woman’s rescuer was a prominent footballer—the gun was a fake and the man had a long history of psychiatric problems. Still, no one needed an experience like that. There really should be security, she thought for perhaps the hundredth time, knowing full well it wasn’t going to happen.

In the handsomely appointed ladies’ rest room—thank God Barton Skinner Beaumont hadn’t gone unisex like they did on Ally McBeal—Jewel checked herself in the mirror. Skinner demanded that the three female associates of the prestigious law firm that bore his name—well, his grandfather’s—be groomed to perfection. Impeccable himself in all matters of dress, manners and taste, Skinner was very severe about it. Up until recently, Barton Skinner Beaumont hadn’t even allowed bright young women through their hallowed portals. All vacancies had been filled by bright young men. But Jewel, who held firmly to the belief that women could achieve anything, had become a prime target for Skinner’s “wit.” Not that the male associates were entirely spared. They, too, received a fair sprinkling of Skinner’s sarcastic comments without a one of them game enough to tell him to mind his own business. Extraordinarily enough, Jewel had. That was what came of being born in the bush.

Skinner wasn’t going to catch her out today, even if he tried an average of three times a week. Today she’d dressed in a brand-new suit, which had substantially set her back, fine-quality midnight-blue wool, austere but beautifully cut. Under it, to add flair, she wore a brilliant silk blouse, turquoise striped with fuchsia, matched exactly by her lipstick. Incredibly, Skinner noticed things like that. The turquoise intensified the blue of her eyes. She’d had her hair cut recently to just past chin length. It fell thick and heavy in a side-parted classic pageboy. She used to wear it much longer, the way the ex–man in her life liked it, but this was a fresh start. Why did women always cut their hair on such occasions? Perhaps she could find out with a few sessions on a psychiatrist’s couch. Not that she trusted psychiatrists. Not after the way they’d sorted out her mother’s problems—from depression to grand psychosis.

Just thinking about it was an agony, even though it had been going on for years and years. Determinedly Jewel redirected her attention to the mirror. With her suit she wore good daytime jewelry. Nothing tacky. So what if she could only afford 9-carat gold? It was tasteful, understated. Anyone might think she’d been hired as a clotheshorse instead of a pretty good corporate lawyer, she thought with a grin. No, not pretty good. She was underrating herself. She was darn good, and moving up the ladder. A welcome raise after the Stanbroke deal had allowed her to indulge her weakness for beautiful shoes—which might’ve had something to do with the fact that she’d had to go barefoot for much of her childhood.

OUTSIDE SKINNER’S DOOR, Jewel knocked, then stood back, certain Skinner would permit himself the pleasure of making her wait. She didn’t think it was worth brooding about it; it made her laugh. Finally came his peremptory “enter,” as though he could ill afford the time to see her. Jewel opened the door and walked into Skinner’s plush inner sanctum. It was furnished with an array of handsome Georgian bookcases holding weighty legal tomes, several favorite paintings by maritime artists and too few chairs, clearly signaling that anyone who wanted to visit him might have to stand up.

As expected, Skinner had his head down, perusing some file he seemed to want to keep secret; he held one arm around it, presumably to prevent Jewel from catching sight of the client’s name. Blair Skinner, in Jewel’s opinion, was the sort of man who could sour a woman on the entire male sex, but she had to concede that at forty-five he could be rated handsome by the casual observer. He oozed wealth. He loved fashion. He dressed in expensive Italian suits that she knew for a fact cost the best part of two thousand dollars; she’d checked when she’d visited an exclusive men’s store with her ex. Skinner had never been known to make a single mistake with his shirts, ties, shoes and socks. He had good regular features that were always darkly tanned, thanks to his yachting expeditions, and a fine head of hair, but the close observer would have rejected those eyes, small and set too close together. Then again, other factors weighed in. He was a brilliant lawyer with a career that went swimmingly and he was, of course, grandson of one of the firm’s founders. Nevertheless, Jewel always thought he could have posed for a shot of an upmarket Dirty Rotten Scoundrel. She never stood forlornly in Skinner’s office waiting for his attention. She amused herself with thoughts such as this.

Finally Skinner looked up, favoring her with an all-over glance that took in her appearance to the last detail. Not offensive. Not overtly sexual. Just a quick rundown of her appearance and grooming. “My, aren’t we glamorous today?” he said with a languid wave of a well-manicured hand.

“Delighted you think so, Blair.” Jewel didn’t make the mistake of taking a seat before being invited to do so. That was exactly what Skinner wanted.

Skinner leaned back in his wonderfully comfortable-looking leather. “Yes, you’ve come on well under my tutelage,” he said. “I nearly wept when I first saw you come through my door—what, all of three years ago.”

Jewel nodded, not believing he was going to bring up her outfit again—white shirt, designer jeans, navy blazer. A bit on the informal side, but classy.

He was. “I know daggy dress is all the rage in the sticks, but I was frankly horrified to see someone so scruffy standing in my office.”

As usual, he was exaggerating wildly, and on the strength of her recent achievements, Jewel tried a little taunt. “A good thing for the firm I wasn’t marched off in shame.”

“The only thing that saved you was your résumé,” he reminded her.

“And the fact that I topped my law class, along with winning the University Medal.” She would never have been so self-congratulatory with anyone else, but it was part of the routine with Skinner.

“Such revelations! And so many people to speak for you! Wonderful recommendations.” He shook his head. “Generally speaking, our young males are the outright winners.”