Sweet as Honey (The Seven Sisters) (19 page)

“Anyway,” she continued, “As I said, it’s
not really about the kiss, or even about Cathryn at all really. I don’t believe
you love her. It’s more about what she said. I suppose all she did was confirm
the worry that’s been circling in my head for a while.”

“What worry?”

“That I’m not enough for you,” she said,
glad when he didn’t brush her words away with platitudes.

Instead, he said, “What do you mean, not
enough?”

She turned against the tree to face him.
His eyes, usually the same colour as his cornflower blue shirt, had darkened to
navy in the fading light.

She didn’t know where this was heading, or
even what was going to come out of her mouth. But suddenly it felt important to
get to the bottom of things. It was as if they’d spent the past six months
growing flowers in a beautiful garden, but finally they were going to dig down
into the soil and discover the whole secret world that lived beneath the
surface.

Dex watched as Honey paused to gather her
thoughts. Without his jacket, the cool evening air caused goose bumps to rise
on his flesh beneath his shirt and the rough rock behind him dug painfully into
his back. But he didn’t care. He would have sat there for a thousand years if
it meant he had a chance of getting Honey back.

He’d never felt anything like the relief
that had flooded him when he’d found her sitting there. Surprisingly, Cam had
not been worried to find she’d escaped out of the bathroom window. He’d just
sighed and said, “She’ll come back, when she’s ready.” When Dex had protested,
Cam had reminded him, “She’s twenty-five, not fifteen. She’s a grown woman, and
if she doesn’t want to talk to anyone, that’s her right. She knows where we
are, when she’s ready to talk.”

But Dex couldn’t bear the thought of her
sitting in the dark on her own somewhere, trying to deal with God knew what
horrors Cathryn had thrown at her. He would have combed the bush all night to
find her.

She unscrewed the bottle top and took
another tiny sip of the whiskey, following it with the delicate wince that
amused him every time before passing him the bottle. He took a mouthful,
reminding himself that if he carried on like this he wouldn’t be able to drive
home, and passed it back to her. She screwed the top on carefully. The
moonlight that coated the bush around them, turning it into real silver fern,
painted her nose and the apples of her cheeks with pure silvery-white. She
looked like a Greek statue, ethereal and sad, and it made him catch his breath.

“Marriage is for an awfully long time,” she
said finally. “I mean, I know you can get divorced if it doesn’t work out, but
it doesn’t seem great to go into it thinking like that. ‘Till death parts us,’
is what we’ll have to say, and it seems to me you have to be pretty certain of
each other to make that commitment.”

“I’m certain,” he said, but she waved the
words away.

“You proposed to me very soon after we’d
met. And I said yes. And since then the outcome hasn’t been in question. But I
don’t think either of us has really sat down and thought about what it means,
and if we’re right for each other.”

“I’m certain,” he said again, meaning it.

She gave him an exasperated look. “I’m
serious, Dex. I’m not looking for false flattery or glibness here. This isn’t
Regency England—it’s not an arranged marriage. A little compatibility is sought
for before couples get together now. And we didn’t know a thing about each
other at the beginning. We made the decision based on a kind of desperation, a
hope that things couldn’t possibly be as bad as they had been for both of us in
the past. For me, certainly, I saw you—a policeman with a strong sense of
justice—as a kind of hero. I put you on a pedestal—I know that.”

“I like being someone’s hero,” he said.

Her lips curved wryly. “And you saw me as
some sort of innocent angel who’d wash away your sins. Don’t deny it, Dex—I
know it’s true.”

“I’m not denying it. It is true. And I
still believe it.”

“I’m not an angel—nowhere near it.”
Frustration furrowed her brow. “I’m very much an ordinary mortal with tons of
foibles and weaknesses.”

“I guess that makes two of us then.”

“Dex… Do you see what I’m saying? Being
with me doesn’t make you into a different person, any more than being with you
makes me different. Our past doesn’t dissolve when we’re together—we just paper
over the cracks.”

“You’re wrong,” he said simply. “I
am
a different person when I’m with you. And I like who I am when we’re together.
It’s not a case of forgetting the past or trying to change. It’s that you bring
out the best in me.”

“I’m not perfect.”

“I think you are.”

“Dex! I slapped Cathryn, for God’s sake.”

That made him raise his eyebrows and stare
at her. She gave an involuntary giggle at the look on his face.

“Honeysuckle Summers, I don’t believe it.”

“Don’t make me laugh. I’m not ready to
laugh yet.”

“Why did you slap her? Other than the
obvious—because she was there.”

“She provoked me.”

“I’m sure she did. Still, I find it
difficult to believe she riled you up that much.” He frowned. He’d never seen
Honey irritated, let alone angry. She was always so calm and unflappable, so
patient and kind. Cathryn must have really upset her to drive her to semi-violence.
“What the hell did she say?”

Honey met his gaze, then dropped hers to
examine her hands. “She talked about your sex life.”

Fuck.
“Like
what?”

She looked up. The humour had faded from
her eyes, and now they looked black in the moonlight. “You really want to
know?”

“I want to know exactly what it was that
upset you so much.”

“She told me how many different positions
you had sex in. How you liked playing with sex toys. That she enjoyed going
down on you.”

“Oh jeez.”

“And she told me to buy some lube,
because—and I think her exact words were—‘He likes to fuck a girl hard every
which way, including—” She blinked. “That’s where I slapped her, because I
couldn’t bear to hear...” She looked down at her hands again.

Hatred welled inside him for the spiteful woman
who’d tried to wound the gentle girl sitting next to him, just to punish him
because he didn’t love her anymore.

Honey unscrewed the bottle again, took a mouthful,
winced and passed it to him. She glanced up at him briefly, and for the first
time tears glistened in her eyes.

He took a long swig of the whiskey,
swallowed, coughed, wiped the top and passed it back to her. Then he thought
carefully.

There was no point in saying anything more
about what Cathryn had told her. Talking any further about his sex life with
his ex couldn’t possibly be constructive. And Honey didn’t want platitudes or
flowery declarations of love. She didn’t want him to lie and deny everything,
nor sweet it under the carpet and pretend it hadn’t happened.

So what should he say? The only thing left
was the truth.

He leaned his head back on the rock and
looked up, through the leafy canopy to the glittering stars above their heads.
“When I became a police office, I tried to put my miscreant youth behind me and
move on, but—as you said—our past doesn’t disappear overnight. I always felt
the old me lay beneath the surface. My father and brothers repeatedly told me
that you can’t change who you are, and every time that I slipped up— saw my old
mates, got drunk, smoked weed—I felt that was the real me, and I was just
fooling myself. Cathryn was a part of that—a woman that I felt I…deserved, I
suppose. She appealed to the young man who thought himself a degenerate. There
was nothing loving or beautiful about our relationship. It was harsh and
physical, because that’s all that young man knew.”

He sighed. “I don’t know how to describe my
upbringing to you, Honey. At the time I didn’t know any different, but watching
the relationship you girls have with Cam, and especially seeing how he and Koru
interact, makes me realise how twisted and dark my relationship with my father
and brothers was, and of course that spilled over into my social life. Issues
were always solved physically, never by talking. It was very much survival of
the fittest. Our home was dark, filthy and unhappy. I was often hungry, my
clothes were never clean, I always had bruises, and I was frightened of my own
shadow half the time, until I grew tall and strong enough to defend myself.”

He looked across at her. She sat quietly,
listening, picking at the label on the bottle. Was he making things worse?
Making it all about him? It didn’t matter—it was too late to go back now. “Your
home is so beautiful. Everywhere you look there’s beauty—not just in you girls,
but in everything around you. Beautiful clothes, colourful furnishings.
Handmade cushions and throws, Lily’s paintings on the wall. Even the wonderful
cooking you all do. Do you know that you always smell sweet? Just like your
name?”

She smiled shyly and shook her head.

“Well, you do. I noticed that the first
time we went out. Everyone I’d ever known in my youth smelled of alcohol,
smoke, weed or B.O. But you girls all smell of flowers and perfume and cakes.
Even Koru smells of cookies, along with his aftershave. Light surrounds you
all, but especially you, Honey.”

He caught her gaze and held it. “You know
why I think I kissed Cathryn? Because I wanted to see if she still had any
power over me. It’s not an excuse and I’m ashamed of it, but seeing her there
standing outside the school, I didn’t feel pleasure or excitement, just dread.
And she gave me a similar talk to what she gave you, about sex and how good it
had been, and part of me remembered how she’d had this hold over me, and I
suppose I wanted to see if any of that still remained. So when she kissed me,
for a brief second I didn’t pull away. But I didn’t feel happy or turned on. I
felt disgusted and dirty, and terribly, terribly unhappy that I’d done
something that might have hurt you. It lasted seconds and I walked off and left
her there, which made me feel a bit guilty at first, but now, knowing what she
said to you, I wish I’d driven her to Cape Reinga and let her walk home.”

Honey swallowed and finally dropped her
gaze.

“I’m not trying to make excuses,” he
whispered. “Or to say what I did was justified. Or to say that there’s an evil
demon inside of me and it’s all his fault—although that’s what it feels like
sometimes. All I can say is that I regret what I did deeply, and I hate her for
coming to see you and for making you feel bad. But I don’t want to think about
her. I love you, Honey Summers, and I want to marry you and carry on loving you
every day for the rest of your life. I know you’re not perfect, any more than I
am. But you’re sweet, gentle, kind and loving. You’d be a wonderful mother to
my children, and if you became my wife, I’d want to grab a loudspeaker and
shout it to the world.”

She started to cry, and he gave into his
urge to take her in his arms. She curled up against him, pulling his jacket
close around her, and sobbed into his shirt, and he let her, holding her
securely, kissing the top of her head and murmuring soft words of comfort until
she finally quieted.

“Can I take you home now?” he asked her.

She nodded, wiping her face on his sleeve,
so he stood and pulled her up with him, kept a tight arm around her and started
to lead her back to the house.

Once they’d cleared the bush and started up
the paddocks to
Stormwind
, she began to lean more heavily on him, and
when he looked down he saw she was nearly asleep. The emotion had worn her out,
and the whiskey was finally taking its toll.

Bending and slipping an arm under her legs,
he lifted her into his arms and carried her the short distance to the house.

As he neared the large glass sliding doors
at the back, they slid open and Cam and Koru came out, concern on their faces.

“She’s okay,” Dex said. “Just tired. Shall
I take her to her room?”

Cam nodded, and Dex carried her through the
living room, noting that all the girls save Daisy were there, watching him
cautiously as he passed by. He didn’t say anything but took her through to the
west wing of the house, hearing Cam behind him talking to the girls.

He walked along the corridor to her room,
pushed open the door and carried her to the bed. The moonlight streamed through
the curtains and fell across the cover in a sheet of silver.

He bent and pulled back the duvet and laid
her carefully on the mattress, removing his jacket from her shoulders, and
covered her over. Then he kissed her cheek.

She opened her eyes. “Don’t go.”

He studied her for a moment. “You want me
to sleep next door?” Daisy’s room lay empty unless she came back for a visit.

“Here,” Honey said.

For the first time that evening, emotion
overwhelmed Dex and he had to swallow down the lump in his throat. He nodded
and toed off his shoes, took off his tie and hung the jacket over the chair in
front of the dressing table. Then he climbed onto the bed—on top of the
duvet—and lay next to her. He lifted his arm and she curled up beside him, and
he laid his arm around her and pulled her tightly to him.