He looked at his watch then took in her appearance. All the dust and grease had disappeared. Her hair, released from the scarf, rippled and glinted like new pennies in a well-brushed loose cascade to her shoulders and her skin was smooth and fresh.
‘I was prepared for at least half an hour, so you did well.’ He reached for his beer but for some reason their gazes locked.
Something trickled along Mel’s nerve-endings as she couldn’t look away, a strange little frisson that made her feel excited but also vulnerable and somehow at the mercy of this man.
Then he cut the eye contact but not before Mel remembered the look she’d intercepted from him three weeks earlier. A look that, in the most surprising circumstances, had held her trapped at the sheer unexpectedness of it. It came back to her now, and left her posing a question to herself.
For the first time since she’d known him, was Etienne Hurst looking at her as a woman rather than a troublesome tomboy who’d always made it clear she didn’t like him? But, perhaps more pertinently, was she responding in kind to it?
‘How are the boys?’
She blinked and tried to deal with the change of subject smoothly as she thought of her three brothers, Justin, Ewan and Tosh, aged fifteen, twelve and ten respectively. ‘As well as can be expected. Still lost and bewildered. Tosh was having nightmares so I got him a puppy.’ She grimaced.
Tosh, short for Thomas, which Ewan hadn’t been able to pronounce so the baby name of Tosh had stuck, had been allowed to choose his puppy. The result was a three-month-old tan and white Jack Russell he’d named Batman, who was almost as mischievous and trouble-prone as his new owner. Although, since Batman had been allowed to sleep on Tosh’s bed, the nightmares had stopped.
‘Talking of Batman,’ Mel added as Mrs Bedwell came on the veranda pushing a trolley, ‘where is the little monster?’
Mrs Bedwell laid before them a minor feast. Cold chicken and ham, a green salad, her home-grown and cooked beetroot, new potatoes in their jackets sprinkled with parsley and drizzled with garlic butter and warm crusty rolls. ‘That dratted dog,’ she intoned, ‘is asleep, thank the lord!’
‘What’s he done this morning?’ Mel asked with resignation.
‘You wouldn’t want to know! There.’ Mrs Bedwell stood back. ‘Enjoy your lunch!’
The smile of thanks Etienne Hurst bestowed on her was dazzling and she retreated indoors in some disarray, causing Mel to think darkly that she resented being included in the universal effect on women this man had, however, well, slightly intoxicating it was.
‘So you’re not working today, Etienne?’ she queried as they started their lunch.
‘I am. I’m just taking a few hours off to make sure you’re coping, Mel.’
She broke open a roll and buttered it. ‘It’s going to be a bit of a battle, obviously, but—’
‘It’s going to be an uphill battle, Mel,’ he broke in, ‘let’s not beat about the bush. All your profits are going to go in repaying the mortgage on Raspberry Hill.’
She looked up, deep concern in her blue eyes. ‘Surely not. I mean, I can’t believe Dad would have let it get to this stage.’
‘Mel, as I probably don’t need to tell you, seasonal irregularities have made pineapples a dicey crop at the moment. Raspberry Hill would not have been the only property affected—it’s why more and more people have diversified. So it wasn’t so much that your father “let it get to this stage”. If anything the weather has been the problem or at least a significant part of it.’
She said nothing.
He put his knife and fork down. ‘But things having happened the way they have may mean that you have to face the fact that you won’t be able to save Raspberry Hill.’
Mel said huskily, ‘I can’t believe that. We all love it so much, the boys as much as I do.’
‘They…they’re young, Mel,’ he said.
‘Young enough to get over it? I don’t know. It’s also a unifying factor in our lives and our heritage.’ She stared at her plate with deep distress then pushed it impatiently away half-finished. ‘I will not,’ the distress was suddenly replaced with determination, ‘give up, Etienne. Whatever it takes to save Raspberry Hill I will do.’
‘Such as?’
The question came with businesslike precision.
‘I may have to subdivide it. That’s one thing I’ve been thinking of,’ she said slowly.
‘It’s a possibility,’ he agreed. ‘But then you face the prospect of a smaller holding being unviable.’
Mel swallowed hard. ‘Maybe a guest farm? I think there’s a market for real country experience holidays.’
Something in his dark gaze softened but he didn’t respond.
‘What’s so silly about that?’ she asked tartly.
‘It’s not that it’s silly but you’d need capital to start it off.’
‘A lot of misguided capital has been spent on this house,’ she said.
‘I take your point,’ he replied evenly, ‘but it may not be that easy to realise. There’s also the problem of who is going to stand in loco parentis of three young boys.’
Mel was crumbling what was left of her roll into tiny pieces as she struggled with perhaps the greatest of her problems, when a ball of white and tan fur erupted onto the veranda and Batman leapt onto her lap. He licked her face profusely, knocked her side-plate off the table then leapt down to do an ecstatic jig along the floorboards.
Mrs Bedwell arrived hot on his heels and scooped him up in her arms. ‘You little wretch! As if I haven’t got enough to do without babysitting you—why on earth didn’t that plate break?’
Etienne got up. ‘Here, I’ll take him. Whoa!’ he said as the dog was put in his arms. ‘No licking, mate!’ He sat down with him and Batman subsided with an ecstatic expression as he was scratched behind his ears.
‘You like dogs?’ Mel asked, still blinking at the whirlwind events that had just overtaken her.
‘Sure. I even had one of these as a kid. He was also as mad as a hatter but very loyal.’
She frowned. ‘I can’t picture that.’
‘Me or the dog?’
‘Uh—you.’
‘You assumed I came into the world all grown up?’
‘Truth to tell, since you had a French mother and both have—had—French names,’ she amended, ‘I’ve always associated you with an exotic background rather than a kid with a dog. I know Margot was born in Vanuatu.’
‘She was but I was born right here in Gladstone, and other than for the name,’ he looked humorous for a moment, ‘I escaped a lot of the exotic influence our French mother exerted on Margot. Our father was a fair-dinkum Aussie.’
‘You certainly sound like one. While she was certainly the essence of chic,’ Mel murmured and frowned again. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, you didn’t seem to be very close. Although, of course, I could be quite wrong—but we didn’t see much of you at Raspberry Hill at all.’
He stared into a space for a moment, then down at the contented dog in his arms. ‘No, we weren’t that close. She was ten years older, which is quite a gap, but I guess the other reason is that my business has really expanded in the last five or six years so I’ve had my nose to the grindstone a lot.’
‘Hurst