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,’ Matt Sheffield said wearily.
‘You mean Mrs Pride?’
‘No, the other one. In the revolting floral dress. Flora something or other. But they both descended on me like a plague of locusts. Thank God you came to the rescue. I wouldn’t have thought to suggest a trip to the gents.’
‘That’s what I’m paid to do. Not that you really needed rescuing. You always handle women very well.’
Matt Sheffield’s laughter was dry. ‘Only some, Bill, only some. I suppose you heard I’ve been partnered with Miss Clare Pride for the evening, daughter no doubt of the aforementioned Mrs Pride. God, what a ghastly woman!’
‘Come now, Matt, Mrs Pride wasn’t too bad. Try to look on the bright side. Perhaps Miss Pride will be as well endowed as her mother.’
Clare blushed all over. Whether from anger or a sharp feeling of inadequacy, she didn’t know. She was too enraged to think clearly!
‘The way my luck is going lately,’ the guest-ofhonour continued, ‘she’ll be a flat-chested spinster whose only vice is butterfly collecting.’
Their mutual laughter sealed their fate. Or it did in Clare’s eyes. Just you wait, Mr Sheffield, she plagiarised. Just you wait…
Clare stayed where she was hidden for a couple of minutes, and when she emerged her smiling face hid an iron-willed determination to see that man in hell.
The guest-of-honour was by now standing behind his chair at the main table, with the man called Bill two chairs down on his left, Flora between them. Clare thought she was mentally prepared to meet her foe, but as she crossed the stage he swung round and fixed the most incredible blue eyes on her. She found herself speechless and staring, almost as hard as she was being stared at. With one shattered glance she took in the splendid cut of his tall figure, the well-shaped mouth, the manly chin with its tiny cleft, the strong nose, the sweep of dark brown hair. But always, in the centre of her stunned appraisal, those gorgeous blue eyes.
She must have shaken his hand, said something in greeting. She couldn’t remember. It was just as well she noticed the raised-eyebrow glance he flicked Bill’s way and the slight smugness that crossed the other man’s face. So, the exchange seemed to say. This is a turn-up for the books. Not so bad after all.
At least that was what Clare imagined they were thinking, and it was enough to snap her out of her fatuous reaction to the man.
God! How could I? she castigated herself inwardly. So the man has incredible eyes. You already knew that, you idiot!
Unbeknown to her, a look of sheer disgust slid into her own expressive grey eyes, freezing Matt Sheffield on the spot. He frowned, but was immediately distracted by Clare’s parents joining them.
‘Matt, did you meet Jim Pride?’ Flora gushed. ‘He’s Agnes’ husband and father of our lovely Clare here. Jim is our local bank manager. Fancies himself a farmer on the weekend,