HE’D COME TO Fort Neptune to say goodbye to his great-aunt. Instead, he was watching her pack away a comprehensive breakfast and listening to her nudge him in the direction of romance.
‘She’s lovely. I’ve thought she was lovely ever since she was a wee girl. Her grandpa used to pop her on the back of the ponies in her pink tulle and she was so cute …’
‘I’m not in the market for a woman in pink tulle,’ he growled and she grimaced.
‘You’d prefer black corporate? Honestly, Mathew, that last woman you brought down here …’
‘Angela was caught up in a meeting and didn’t have time to change before leaving. She changed as soon as she got here.’
‘Into black and white corporate lounge wear. And she refused to go for a walk on the beach. Mathew, just because you lost your parents and sister, it doesn’t mean you can’t fall in love. Properly, I mean.’
‘There’s the pot calling the kettle black,’ he growled. ‘Your Raymond never came back from the war and you dated again how many times? And that guy who calls every morning and you refuse to see him … Duncan. He’s a widower, he’s your age, he has dogs who look exactly the same as Halibut …’
‘They are not the same. They’re stupid.’
‘They look the same.’
‘They come from the same breeder,’ she said stiffly. ‘Those dogs of Allie’s came from him, too. Allie got the smart ones. I got Halibut and he was the best. Duncan got what was left over.’
‘You’re changing the subject.’
‘You’re changing the subject,’ she retorted. ‘We were talking about your love life.’
He sighed. ‘Okay. We’re two of a kind,’ he said grimly. ‘We both know where love left us, so maybe we should leave it at that. But are you coming to watch today?’ But he thought … they’d never had a conversation like this. About love?
When he’d mentioned Duncan, Margot had looked troubled. Why? Had he touched a nerve?
A love life? Margot?
‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘My knees are still wobbly.’
‘Because you’ve hardly eaten for months.’
‘My decision not to keep on living is sensible,’ she said with dignity, and he grimaced.
‘It’s dumb. There are always surprises round the corner.’
‘Like you’d notice them. Corporate …’
‘I am,’ he said in a goaded voice, ‘spending most of my day today with pink sparkles.’
‘So you are,’ she said, cheering up, and in silent agreement both of them put the moment of uncharacteristic questioning aside. ‘For two weeks. I hope I’ll be fit to come tomorrow and if I can I’ll come every day until the end.’
The end …
The words hung and emotion slammed back into the room again.
The end of the circus?
‘You won’t go back to dying at the end of the circus, will you?’ he demanded.
‘You won’t go back to corporate?’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘It is fair,’ she retorted. ‘What’s the alternative? Look at you, a banker all your life and nothing else, and will you look at an alternative? Why not get serious about some pink sparkles? It could just change your life.’
‘Like you’re changing your life?’
‘That’s not fair, and you know it.’ Then she hesitated. ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘Just because I make mistakes, it doesn’t mean you need to join me.’
‘Margot …’
‘Shoo,’ she said. ‘Go. I’ve made my mistakes. You go right ahead and make yours.’
He needed to go to the circus, get into those books and make sure the structure was ready for handover, but the conversation with Margot had unsettled him. Instead, he decided on a morning walk and the walk turned into a run. He had energy to burn.
He had emotion to burn.
Margot was matchmaking. It needed only that. He’d spent half the night awake, trying to figure out how he was feeling, he was no closer now, and Margot’s words had driven his questions deeper.
Allie.
Why had he kissed her? There’d been no reason at all for him to take her face between his hands, tilt her lips to his and kiss her—and Mathew Bond didn’t do things without a reason.
Nor did he get involved.
Thirty years ago, aged six, Mathew had been a kid in a nice, standard nuclear family. He had a mum and a dad and a big sister, Elizabeth—Lizzy—who bossed him and played with him and made all right with his world. Sure, his father was a busy banker and his mum was corporate as well, but he and Lizzy felt secure and beloved.
That all changed one horrendous night when a truck driver went to sleep at the wheel. Mathew was somehow thrown out into the darkness. The others … Who knew? No one talked of it.
He’d woken in hospital, with his Great-Aunt Margot holding him.
‘ Mum? Dad? Lizzy?’
He remembered Margot’s tweed coat against his cheek and somehow even at six, he hadn’t needed her to tell him.
After that, his grandfather had simply taken him over. Mathew was, after all, the heir to Bond’s. From the warmth, laughter, the rough and tumble of family life, he’d been propelled into his grandfather’s austere existence, and he’d been stranded there for life.
He learned pretty fast to be self-contained. He had two weeks every summer with Margot, but even then he learned to stay detached. He needed to, because when the holidays ended he woke up once again in his great, barren bedroom in his grandfather’s mausoleum of a house. He’d learned some pain was unbearable, and he’d learned the way to avoid it was to hold himself in.
His aunt Margot cried at the end of each summer holiday but he didn’t. He didn’t do emotion.
And now … He’d come down here trying to figure how to keep himself contained while Margot died. Instead, Margot was dithering over whether to die or not, his self-containment was teetering and a girl/woman in pink sequins was messing with his self-containment even more.
So why had he kissed her?
Lunacy.
Margot was right, he conceded, in her criticism of the women he dated. Inevitably they were corporate colleagues who used him as an accessory, the same way he used them. Sometimes it was handy to have a woman on his arm, and sometimes he enjoyed a woman’s company, but not to the point of emotional entanglement.
And not with a woman who wore her heart on her pink spangled sleeve.
It was Margot causing this confusion, he decided. His distress for his great-aunt had clouded his otherwise cool judgement. Well, that distress could be put aside. For the time being Margot had decided to live.
Because of Allie?
Because she had renewed interest, he told himself. So … He simply had to find her more