Alison Kelly - Man About The House

1 did warn you.’

His teasing didn’t draw more than another small smile, but its briefness didn’t dull its impact. Brett scrambled to keep the conversation going. ‘You like Thai food?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never had it. I had Italian once.’

‘Once?’

‘My family didn’t eat fancy stuff.’

‘Well, then, I guess I’ll have to introduce you to a wider culinary range while you’re here.’

‘Oh, no! Really. I wouldn’t feel right letting you fix meals for me.’

‘Why not? You have to eat, and it’s no fun just cooking for myself.’

For several seconds she seemed nonplussed by his logic, then produced another of those killer smiles. ‘All right, but only if we take turns. You cook one meal, I’ll cook the next’

‘Fair enough.’

Their gazes met and held, and Brett had a difficult time convincing his libido that he really wasn’t interested in any woman right now—much less the young girl across the table. Even if she was the most incredibly beautiful female he’d ever seen. Yet the hypnotic effect of those turquoise eyes made it impossible for him to look away, and they suffused his body with an inner warmth that was as tranquil as it was disturbing.

It wasn’t until she lowered her lashes and rose from her chair that Brett was capable of blinking and breathing again.

‘Would you like tea or coffee?’ she asked.

Caught up in trying to unravel his bemused thoughts, he had to rerun her words twice before they made sense. ‘Whatever you’re having is fine.’

‘I only drink tea,’ she told him. ‘But I don’t mind making you coffee if that’s what you want.’ The curve of her mouth was almost as bewitching as those of the body she leaned gracefully against the counter, and the item which sprang to the top of his immediate ‘want list’ wasn’t anything as innocuous as either beverage. He managed to bite back the admission. ‘Thanks, but tea’s okay with me.’

‘How do you have it?’

Brett found himself actually having to think before making what should have been an automatic response. ‘White. No sugar.’

‘Darjeeling, Earl Grey or Irish Breakfast?’

It was then his trouble alarm started clanging!

The truth was he had no damn interest in what sort of tea he drank and way too much in the woman making it; all of it sexual.

The problem was he wasn’t supposed to be in the market for sex. Even more disturbing than discovering he was, was finding himself window shopping in an area outside his habitual interest zone.

Which, of course, was Meaghan’s fault! he thought testily. She was the one who’d placed him in Joanna Ford’s proximity. It was bad enough she’d exposed him to the ethereal raven-haired witch currently holding up boxes of tea like a quiz show hostess, but if his sister hadn’t erected neon ‘keep off the grass’ signs around Joanna, he probably wouldn’t have given the girl a second glance. After all, as attractive and sexy as she was, it didn’t alter the fact she was only eight years older than his niece and twelve years younger than him.

What was more, he decided, she was only proving a distraction because he was allowing her to be one. Determined to correct that situation right now, he responded to her repeated query about the tea with an uninterested, ‘Surprise me,’ then stoically refocused his attention on finishing his breakfast. His only reaction to the steaming mug which moments later was placed near his right hand was a headbent murmur of, ‘Thanks.’

Ruing the absence of a newspaper to bury his head in, Brett continued to eat and to drink his tea without once letting his gaze shift beyond the centre of the table. With the passing of each loud, silence-breaking tick of the wall clock he congratulated himself on having triumphed over the temptation to look at his breakfast companion. See? It wasn’t hard. He could be as indifferent to Joanna Ford and her seemingly mystical intrigue as he could the salt and pepper shaker her long, elegant fingers were idly tracing with slow, sensuous strokes.

‘Brett...’

The husky utterance of his name was his undoing, immediately snapping his gaze up to hers.

‘I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t drink last night,’ she told him. ‘But I think you’re right about me having a hangover.’

A curt nod would have communicated his lack of interest in further discussion on the subject, but instead Brett heard himself say, ‘A contradictory comment, but I take it as meaning you think it’s possible you were slipped a mickey.’

Her brow wrinkled. ‘Slipped a mickey?’ The confused shake she gave her head set her dark hair glittering in the sunlight. ‘What does that mean?’

Aw, hell! There ought to be laws against women this unworldly being allowed within a thousand-kilometre radius of a major city. Especially one with a male population. Deciding the sooner Joanna had her beautiful but innocent eyes opened and developed a cynical edge the safer every red-blooded man she was likely to encounter would be, he went on to explain what a Mickey Finn was, concluding with, ‘Some idiot with a juvenile sense of humour probably spiked the punch.’

‘But mostly I drank cola.’

‘Out of a can or bottle?’

She stiffened in her chair and glared at him. ‘Look, I mightn’t be all that terribly chic and sophisticated...’ hearing anger in her voice startled him ‘...but I do know it’s good manners to use a glass!’

Prudence had him swallowing the smile trying to force itself from his lips. ‘While that social nicety has its place, Joanna, sometimes good manners have to take second place to good sense.

‘So.’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you exactly what my father told Meaghan and me when we were sixteen and just starting to hit the party circuit. One: never accept a drink from anyone at a party unless the bottle cap or ring tab is still sealed. Two: never leave a drink somewhere and then go back and drink it later. And three: avoid punchbowls at all costs.

‘As Dad used to say, “The most innocuous thing someone will spike a drink with is alcohol, which can leave you sick as a dog. Other things can leave you dead.’”

‘You mean some people might put drugs in someone else’s drink?’

‘No... Some people do.’

At her look of alarm, he hastened to reassure her. ‘Relax, Joanna; you might’ve been plastered last night, but you didn’t appear doped.’ But then, because she still looked so shocked, concern caused him to add, ‘Well, at least I didn’t think you did. You don’t think you were, do you?’

‘How would I know?’ she demanded. ‘Until this morning I didn’t know I was drunk.’

‘Good point!’ He laughed. ‘Well, you’ll know next time.’

‘There’s not going to be a next time,’ she told him. ‘If I ever have to feel this ill again I want it to be because I’m dead.’

The droll retort indicated Joanna had a sense of humour, which wasn’t good. Because after three years of Toni’s pouts and petulance, a woman with a sense of humour was all too appealing, especially when she came gift-wrapped with sexy curves and wide-eyed innocence that practically begged to be educated.

Once again enmeshed with his own worrying thoughts, it took him several seconds to notice Joanna had already cleared the dirty dishes and was running water into the sink.

‘Don’t bother washing them,’ he told her. ‘Just rinse them and shove them in the dishwasher.’

‘I don’t mind doing them. I enjoy standing here and looking out at the beach.’

‘Yeah? Gee, Meaghan and I always thought it was more fun being on the beach, which is why Mum got the dishwasher in the first place.’

‘True.’ She sent him another of her breath-defying grins. ‘But, since I never saw a beach until I was sixteen, I don’t consider having to look at one from this distance any real hardship.’

Brett knew his curiosity showed, but rather than voice it he merely crossed to the kitchen linen cupboard and, pulling out a dishtowel, joined her at the sink.

‘It’s so incredibly beautiful. It must have been wonderful growing up here?’

Though she phrased the words as a question, her attention was fixed firmly on the other side of the ceiling reaching window, and her enraptured expression as she surveyed the surrounding cliffs, crags, sand and surf suggested she’d merely been uttering her thoughts aloud. Clearly she was in awe of all that lay between them and the horizon.

It was, be supposed, only natural that growing up here had bred a familiarity which to a degree had immunised him against the natural beauty the scene presented, but for some reason Joanna’s reaction to it urged him to look back and try to see it through less jaded eyes. When he did it was as if each new wave that rolled in and collapsed on the beach carried a precious but too long ignored memory of the past.

His father teaching him and Meaghan to swim. The Christmas he’d been given his first surfboard and had been practically tied to a chair to get him to stay out of the water long enough to eat dinner with the multitude of relatives who’d turned up for a hot turkey dinner. He remembered how they’d all been politely appalled when his ‘radical’ father had served up salad and exotic seafood instead. James McAlpine, whose motto had been ‘Tradition is for the gutless and uninspired’, had been highly amused by the predictable reaction, yet he’d still produced an alternative menu of baked vegetables, roast turkey and pork with all the traditional trimmings.

Growing up. Brett had at times been embarrassed by the fact his parents had rejected most of the middle class values embraced by his peers’ families and teachers, who’d viewed his upbringing as being at best unconventional—especially after his mother was arrested at an anti-nuclear rally. Yet now, from the distance of maturity, he could appreciate that James and Kathleen McAlpine had provided their children with a loving and secure environment that went far beyond their material comforts and liberal views on discipline. They’d taught love and tolerance by example, and yet while firmly adhering to their own beliefs had never tried to force feed them to their children.

Yeah, he thought, gazing out at the beach but seeing much more. It had been wonderful growing up here.

As his eyes drifted to the outcrop of rocks at the northern end of the beach yet another time-locked image floated through his mind. One that not only made him smile, but kindled a desire to snatch a piece of the past. But this time, unlike this morning, when he’d dug out his old wetsuit and board, he felt like sharing it

‘Joanna,’ he said, ‘have you got some ratty old jeans and a pair of runners?’

CHAPTER FOUR

THE mid-morning July air was cool but not cold as they picked their way over moss-covered rocks still damp from the earlier tide.

‘Okay, now I know why you wanted me in old clothes and sneakers,’ Joanna said. ‘But where exactly are we going?’

Brett waited until she’d sussed out the width of the rock pool which separated them and then agilely leapt over it before pointing to the wall of rock rising on his right. ‘In there.’

‘We’re going to climb the cliff?’ Her tone questioned his sanity.

‘Nope.’ He pulled at a weedy overhanging scrub growing from wide ancient cracks in the upper rockface to reveal a metre-wide cavity at its base. ‘We’re going to crawl into it.’

Shooting him a sceptical look, she crouched to inspect the cave entrance, then frowned over her shoulder at him. ‘It’s pitch-black. We can’t go in there.’