The Girl he Never Noticed (5 page)

But Mary Montrose had penned a reply on the back of it.

She hadn’t posted it yet.

Only because of looking after Scout could she not do it, Liz thought to herself, and flinched. But what to do? Scout spent two mornings a week at a daycare centre; more Liz could not afford. And those two free mornings a week would not be enough to allow Mary to take on a job she would have loved.

Liz had replaced the note on the hall table, feeling jolted and miserable, and came to work.

It was after she’d gone through the day’s schedule with her boss that he asked to see the next day’s schedule.

Liz handed the diary over.

He scanned it in silence for a minute or two, then said decisively, ‘Reschedule the lot.’ He handed the book back to her.

Liz actually felt herself go pale. ‘The lot?’

‘That’s what I said.’ He sat back in his chair.

‘But…’ Liz stopped and bit her lip. There were at least ten appointments in one form or another to be rescheduled. There were at least five major appointments amongst them, involving third, fourth and even fifth parties, so cancellation would produce a ripple effect of chaos down the line.

She swallowed. ‘All right. Uh—what will you being doing tomorrow? I mean, what would you like me to say? Mr Hillier has been called away urgently? Or…’ She paused and gazed at him.

That crooked grin chased across Cam Hillier’s lips, but he said gravely, ‘Yep. Especially said in those cool, well-bred tones. It should do the trick admirably.’

Liz frowned. ‘I don’t sound—are you saying I sound snooty?’

‘Yes, you do.’ He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Probably your private school.’

She grimaced, and after a moment deliberately changed the subject. ‘Should I know what you
are
doing tomorrow, Mr Hillier, or would you rather I remained in ignorance?’

He noted the change of subject with a twist of his lips. ‘That would be hard, because you’ll be with me. I’m going up to Yewarra and I need your help, I’ll be engaging staff.’

‘Yewarra?’ she repeated, somewhat dazedly.

‘It’s an estate I have in the Blue Mountains.’

‘The Blue…’ Liz caught herself sounding like a parrot and changed tack. ‘I mean—how long will it take?’

‘Just a day—just working hours,’ he replied smoothly, and shrugged. ‘Let’s leave here at eight a.m.—then we
will
be back in working hours. And come casual.’

‘You’re planning to drive up there?’ she queried.

‘Uh-huh. Why not?’

Liz moved uneasily. ‘I prefer not to feel as if I’m low-flying when I’m in a car.’

He grinned. ‘I promise to obey the speed limits tomorrow. Anyway, it’s a very good car and I’m a very good driver.’

Liz opened her mouth to say his modesty was amazing but she changed her mind. As she knew to her cost, you could never quite tell how Cam Hillier was going to react in a confrontation…

‘So,’ he said, lying back in his chair with his hands behind his head, ‘only three more days before Roger is restored to our midst—completely recovered from his glandular fever, so he assures me.’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly.

‘And you head off into the sunset, Liz.’

‘That too,’ she agreed.

‘But we’ve worked well together. Oh—’ he sat up and gestured widely ‘—apart from the couple of times you’ve narrowly restrained yourself from slapping my face, and the day you threatened me with worse.’ His blue eyes were alive with satanic amusement.

‘I get the feeling you’re never going to let me forget that, so it’s just as well I
am
riding off into the sunset or something like that.’

She was destined not to know what his response
would have been, because the door of his office burst open and Portia Pengelly swept in.

‘Cam, I have to speak to you—
oh
!’ Portia stopped dead, then advanced slowly and ominously with that knee-in-front-of-knee model’s walk. She wore a simple black silk shift dress splashed with vibrant colours. She had a bright watermelon cardigan draped over her shoulders, and carried a large tote in the same colour. Her famous straw-coloured locks were gorgeously dishevelled and her long legs were bare.

‘Who is
this?’
she demanded as she gazed at Liz.

Liz got up and took up the diary. ‘I work here. Uh—if that’ll be all, Mr Hillier, I’ll get back to work. Excuse me,’ she said to Portia, and left the room—but not quite quickly enough to miss Portia Pengelly uttering Cam Hillier’s Christian name in what sounded like an impassioned plea.

They set off on the dot of eight the next morning.

Liz had taken her boss’s advice to ‘come casual’ to heart. She wore a short-sleeved pale grey jumper with a black and white bow pattern on the front, and slimline jeans with a broad cuff that came, fashionably, to just above her ankles. She had a cardigan to match the jumper, a black leather bag, and pale grey leather flatties.

He also wore jeans, with a denim shirt, and he slung a leather jacket into the back of the Aston Martin.

They didn’t say much as he negotiated the traffic out of Sydney—with decorum, she noted, and relaxed somewhat—and headed west. Once they were beyond Penrith
the road started to climb—and the Blue Mountains started to live up to their name.

Liz had read somewhere that their distinctive blue haze was the result of the release of oils into the air from the forests of eucalypts that cloaked their slopes. She’d further read, though, that they were not so much mountains but the rugged ramparts, scored and slashed with gullies and ravines, of a vast plateau.

Whatever, she thought, as the powerful vehicle chewed up the kilometres effortlessly and the road got steeper, they were awe-inspiring and yet somehow secretive at the same time, cloaked in their blue haze. And indeed they had proved to be. Until 1994 they’d kept in their remote and isolated valleys the secret of the Wollemi pine—a living fossil said to date back to Gondwana and the time of the dinosaur.

It was when they’d almost reached their destination that he said out of the blue, ‘What’s your next assignment, Liz?’

She grimaced. ‘I don’t have one yet. But I’m sure something will come up,’ she added. ‘It’s just hard to predict at times.’

‘How will you manage if something doesn’t come up for some time?’

Liz moved restlessly. ‘I’ll be fine.’ She paused, then cast him a cool little look. ‘Please, I do appreciate your concern, but I think it’s best left alone. I’ll be gone in a couple of days and it’s difficult for me—for both of us, probably—to remain professional if this keeps cropping up between us.’

‘Professional?’ He drove for a mile or so. ‘That flew
out of the window, in a manner of speaking, before any of
this
“cropped up”.’

Liz frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

He took his eyes off the road to look at her just long enough for her to see the irony in his eyes. ‘Narelle was right. We’re not cut out to be only employer and employee. There is, Ms Montrose, not to put too fine a point on it, a kind of electricity between us that started to sizzle right here in this car outside my house almost two weeks ago. Or perhaps even earlier—that day in the office when you put on your magic coat and let down your hair.’

L
IZ’S MOUTH
fell open.

‘And it continued the next morning in the lift,’ he added, as he changed gear and they swept round a corner. ‘In fact it’s never gone away—despite your best efforts to kill it stone-dead.’

It struck Liz that they had driven through the pretty village of Leura with her barely noticing it, and were now on a country road. It also struck her that it was impossible to refute his claim.

She stared down at her hands. ‘Look,’ she said, barely audibly, ‘you’d be mad to want to get involved with me. And vice versa.’

Out of the corner of her eye she saw that crooked grin come and go before he said, ‘It doesn’t work that way.’

‘If we’re two sane adults, it should,’ she replied coolly. ‘You can make choices, can’t you?’

He changed gear again and slowed down. ‘On the virtually nothing we have to go on? It’d be like a stab in the dark.’ He turned the wheel and they coasted into a driveway barred by a pair of tall wrought-iron gates.

‘Is this it?’ Liz asked.

‘This is it.’ He pressed a buzzer mounted on the dashboard and the gates started to open. ‘Welcome to Yewarra, Liz.’

For a moment Liz felt like escaping—escaping his car, his estate and Cam Hillier himself. She fleetingly felt overburdened, and as if she were entering a zone she had no control over.

Moments later, however, she was enchanted as he drove slowly up the gravelled driveway.

Beneath majestic trees there were beds of white and blue agapanthus. There was flowering jasmine and honeysuckle climbing up jacarandas bursting into pale violet bloom. There were gardenias and roses. It was a glorious riot of colour and perfume.

She turned to him, her face alight with appreciation. ‘This is just—beautiful.’

He grimaced. ‘Thanks. In a way it’s a tribute to my mother. A tribute to her love of gardens and her innate sense of refined living that somehow survived the often harsh life she shared with my father.’

He pulled up beside a fountain. The house beyond it was two-storeyed and built of warm, earthy stone with a shingle roof. The windows were framed in timber and had wrought-iron security grids. The front door—a double door—was beautifully carved with a dolphin motif and had curved brass handles.

‘The house isn’t bad either,’ she commented with a wry little smile. ‘Did you build it?’

‘No. And I’ve hardly done anything to it. Well, I changed that,’ he amended, and gestured to the fountain.
‘It was this rather nauseating circle of coy naked ladies clutching plump cherubs.’

What stood there now couldn’t have been more different. A bronze dolphin leapt out of the water, cascading sparkling droplets.

Liz stared at it. ‘Do dolphins have any special significance?’

He considered. ‘It’s not inappropriate for someone whose roots go back to a seafaring life, I guess.’

Liz thought of the paintings in his office in Sydney. ‘But you’ve come a long way since then,’ she offered quietly.

‘A long way,’ he agreed. But, although he said it easily enough, she thought she detected the faintest echo of a grim undertone.

At that moment the front doors flew open and a small boy of about five stood on the doorstep, waving excitedly at the same time as he was restrained by a nanny.

Liz’s eyes widened. ‘Who…?’ she began, and bit her lip, not wanting to sound nosy.

‘That’s Archie,’ Cam Hillier said. ‘He’s my sister’s orphaned son. I’ve adopted him.’

He opened his door and got out, and Archie escaped his nanny’s restraining hand and flew over the gravel, calling, ‘Cam! Cam—am I glad to see you! Wenonah has had
six
puppies but they only want to let me keep one!’

Cam Hillier picked his nephew up and hugged him. ‘But just think,’ he said, ‘of the five other kids who’d love to have a puppy but couldn’t if you kept them all.’

Liz blinked. She’d assumed his nephew Archie would
be older. She certainly hadn’t expected to see Cameron Hillier so at home with a five-year-old…

‘I suppose that’s true,’ Archie said slowly. ‘Oh, well, maybe I won’t mind.’ He hugged Cam. ‘Are you staying?’

‘Not tonight,’ Cam said, but added as Archie’s face fell, ‘I’ll be up for the weekend.’ He put the little boy down. ‘Archie, meet Liz—she works for me.’

‘How do you do, Liz?’ Archie said with impeccable manners. ‘Would you like to see my menagerie?’

Both Cam and the nanny, still standing on the doorstep, opened their mouths to intervene, but Liz got in first. ‘How do you do, Archie? I would indeed.’

Archie slid his hand into hers. ‘It’s down this path. I’ll show you.’

‘Not too long, Archie,’ Cam said. ‘Liz and I have work to do.’

Archie’s menagerie was in a fenced-off compound not far from the house. There was netting stretched over the top, and there were shrubs growing within and without to shade it. Old hollow tree trunks lay inside. The paths were gravel. He had rabbits in hutches, and a family of guinea pigs in a marvellous cage fashioned like a castle, with climbing wheels and slides and bells. He had a white cockatoo with a sulphur crest and a limited vocabulary—‘Hello, cocky!’ and ‘Oh, golly gosh!’ He had a pond with a small waterfall and slippery stones, with greenery growing through it all and six frogs enjoying it. In another pond he had goldfish.

‘Did you do all this?’ Liz asked, rather enchanted,
surveying the menagerie and thinking how much Scout would love it.

‘No, silly. I’m only five,’ Archie replied. ‘Cam did most if it. But I helped. Here.’ He handed Liz a guinea pig. ‘That’s Golly, and this one—’ he drew another one out of the castle-like cage ‘—is Ginny. She’s his wife and they’re all the kids.’ Archie pointed into the cage.

‘I see,’ Liz replied gravely as she stroked Golly. ‘So where is Wenonah? And her puppies?’

‘Down at the stables. Wenonah can be a bit naughty about rabbits and things. She likes to chase them. But I’m going to train the puppy I get not to. Thing is—’ his brow creased ‘—I don’t know whether to get a boy or a girl.’

‘Perhaps Cam can help you there? He might have an idea on the subject.’

Archie brightened. ‘He usually does. Now, this is something special—my blue-tongue lizard!’

‘Oh, wow!’ Liz carefully put Golly back and sank down on her knees. ‘Oh, my!’

That was how Cam found them some time later, both Liz and Archie on their knees and laughing together as they tried to entice Wally the blue-tongue lizard out of his cave.

Liz looked up and got up, brushing her knees. ‘Sorry, but this is fascinating. I was just thinking how much Scout would enjoy it.’

‘Who’s Scout?’ Archie enquired. ‘Does he like animals?’

‘She
—she’s my little girl, and she adores animals at the moment.’

‘You should bring her over to play with me,’ Archie said.

‘Oh—’

Cam intervened. ‘We’ll see, Archie. Can I have Liz now?’

Archie agreed, but grudgingly.

‘You made a hit there,’ Cam commented as they walked back to the house.

‘You get into “little kid mode” if you’re around them long enough,’ Liz said humorously, and stepped through the dolphin doors—only to stop with a gasp.

The entrance hall was a gallery that led to a lounge below. It had a vast stone fireplace and some priceless-looking rugs scattered about the stone-flagged floor. It was furnished with sumptuously comfortable settees and just a few equally priceless-looking ornaments and paintings. The overall colour scheme was warm and inviting—cream and terracotta with dashes of mint-green. But it was the wall of ceiling-high windows overlooking the most stunning view that had made Liz gasp.

A valley dropped precipitously below that wall of windows and fled away into the morning sunlight in all its wild splendour.

‘It’s—amazing. Do you ever get used to it?’ she asked.

‘Not really. It changes—different lights, different times of day, different weather. Uh—the study is down those stairs.’

The study came as another surprise to Liz. It presented
quite a different view—a sunlit, peaceful view—across a formal garden to grassy paddocks with wooden fences and horses grazing, lazily switching their tails. Beyond the paddocks she could see a shingle-roofed building with two wings and a clock tower in the middle—obviously the stables.

She turned back from the windows and surveyed the study. It was wood-panelled and lined with books on two sides. On the other walls there were very similar paintings to those in his office in Sydney: horses and trawlers. Her lips twitched.

The carpet was Ming blue, and the chairs on either side of the desk were covered in navy leather.

She sat down as directed, and he took his place behind the desk.

‘I don’t know how you manage to tear yourself away from the place,’ she commented, as he poured coffee from a pewter flask. She cocked her head to one side as she accepted her cup. ‘Was the menagerie your idea?’

‘More or less.’ He stirred his coffee. ‘Archie’s always been interested in animals, so I thought instead of mice in shoeboxes we might as well do it properly.’ He looked down at his mug, ‘It has also, I think, helped him get over the loss of his mother.’

Liz hesitated, then decided not to pursue that. ‘Well, I
am
here to work, so—’ She broke off when she noticed an ironic little glint in his eye as he crossed his arms and simply watched her.

And it all came flooding back—what had been said in the car before her enchantment with his gardens and his nephew’s menagerie had claimed her.

She closed her eyes as she felt the colour that flooded her cheeks. As her lashes fluttered up, she said with effort, ‘Let’s not go there, Mr Hillier. In fact I refuse to discuss it.’

He lay back in his chair, dangling a silver pen in his long fingers. ‘Why? It
did
happen.’

‘It was an aberration,’ Liz said coolly, reverting to her Ice Queen role.

He grinned—a full version of that crooked but utterly charismatic smile this time. ‘Just a bit of naughtiness between two people for reasons unknown?’

‘Well,’ Liz said, thinking fast, ‘you
had
been stood up out of the blue. Could that have been at the back of your mind?’

‘Portia couldn’t have been further from my mind.’ He drummed his fingers on the desk and shrugged. ‘That may sound—’

‘It sounds pretty cold-blooded,’ she broke in.

He looked at her. ‘Portia thought that in exchange for her—charms—she could persuade me to back a clothing range. Swimsuits, in fact. She had her heart set on designing and no doubt modelling them,’ he said dryly. ‘When I looked into it I found it was an overcrowded market and a poor investment. Despite the fact that I’d never made any promises of any kind, she took the view that I had—uh—two-timed her.’

Liz blinked. ‘Oh?’

He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘You sound surprised.’

‘I am,’ Liz confessed.

‘You assumed it was all over another woman?’
he suggested, with a glint of wicked amusement in his eyes.

Liz bit her lip and looked annoyed, because she knew she was being mocked. All the same it
was
what she’d automatically assumed. ‘Well…yes. But did you honestly expect her still to want to go out with you?’ she added. ‘I would have thought not.’

Cam Hillier dragged his hand through his hair with a rueful look. ‘Yep—got that bit wrong,’ he confessed. ‘I thought she’d at least trust my judgement.’ He shrugged. ‘Where money’s concerned anyway.’

‘I see,’ Liz said—quite inadequately, she felt. But what else could she say?

He sat back with a faint smile. ‘And it is over between us.’

‘But only yesterday it didn’t sound as if it was over for her!’ Liz protested.

‘Look, it is now,’ he said dryly. ‘Believe me.’

Liz shivered suddenly as she watched his mouth set, and knew she couldn’t disbelieve him.

‘But don’t for one minute imagine that Portia won’t find someone else.’ He paused and looked at her penetratingly. ‘Probably a lot sooner than I will, since you’re so hell-bent on being the Ice Queen.’

Liz’s lips parted in sheer shock. ‘How did you…?’

He shrugged. ‘We’ve known each other for nearly a month now. Quite long enough for me to detect when you’re in chilly mode.’

Liz blinked helplessly several times and opened her mouth—but he spoke first. ‘Never mind, we’ll leave all that aside. How are you with horses?’

She opened her mouth again—to repeat bewilderedly
Horses?
—but just stopped herself in time. ‘I have no idea why you want to know,’ she said, ‘but I like horses. I rode as a kid. If, though, you’re going to ask me about trawlers, I’ve never been on one and have no desire to do so!’

His eyebrows shot up. ‘Why would I?’

Liz gestured to the walls. ‘They seem to go together for you. Horses and trawlers. And, probably because I don’t understand any of this, in a fog of bewilderment I thought they might come next.’

He looked quizzical. ‘No, but I suppose they
do
go together for me. I inherited a trawler fleet from my father, which eventually made the horses possible.’

Liz gazed at him. ‘Why Shakespeare, though?’

He looked surprised. ‘You noticed?’

She nodded.

‘My mother again,’ he said. ‘She was hot on Shakespeare.’

‘I see.’ Liz was silent for a moment, then, ‘Do you want to tell me why it matters whether I like horses? Come to that, why you’ve pretty thoroughly gone through my background with a toothcomb—and why I have the feeling I’m up here under false pretences?’ she added, as she was gripped by the sensation that all was not what it seemed.

‘Well, it
is
about engaging staff, Liz. I’d like to offer you the position of managing this place.’

This time Liz was struck seriously speechless.

‘It’s not a domestic position, it’s a logistic one,’ he went on. ‘I do quite a lot of entertaining up here, and we
often have house parties. I have good household staff, but I need someone to co-ordinate things both here and in the stables.’

‘How…how so?’ she asked, her voice breaking and husky with surprise. ‘I’m not that good with horses.’

‘It’s not to do with the horses
per se.
We stand three stallions, we have twenty of our own mares, and we agist outside mares in foal and with foals at foot. The paperwork to keep track of it all alone is a big job. Checking the pedigrees of prospective mares for our stallions—it goes on. I need someone who can organise all that on a computer program.’