Love Me

Episode 3

Kelly... In another few hours she would be here, their roles in many ways

reversed.

‘I despise you, David, I hate you,’ she had hissed at him between gritted teeth

when she had first left for Europe, averting her face when he had leaned

forward to kiss her cheek.

‘I hate you...’ She had said it with almost as much passion as she had once

cried out to him that she loved him. Almost as much.. FIVE miles or so before her ultimate destination Kelly pulled the car she had

hired at the airport over to the side of the road and switched off the engine—not

because she was unsure of where she was going, not even because she wanted to

absorb the beauty of the countryside around her, magnificent though

it was as it basked warmly in the mid-afternoon sunshine, devoid of any sign of

human occupation apart from her own.

No, the reason she had stopped was that she had been tellingly aware for the

last few miles not just of the slight dampness of her hands on the steering wheel

but, even more betrayingly, of the increasing turmoil of her thoughts and the

nervous butterflies churning her stomach.

When she finally met...confronted..David, she wanted to be calm and in control

of both herself and the situation. She was not, she reminded herself sternly,

meeting him as an idealistic teenager who had fallen so disastrously and

desperately in love with him, but as a woman, a woman who had a job to do. She

would not, must not allow her own personal feelings to affect her judgement or

her professionalism.

In the eyes of other people, her job might appear to be an enviable sinecure,

travelling the world, living and breathing the air of some of its most beautiful

buildings, able to afford to commission its very best workmen, but there was far

more to it than that.

As Nichols had remarked admiringly to her the previous year, when he had

viewed the finished work on the palazzo, Kelly didn’t just possess the

most marvellous and accurate eye for correct period detail, for harmony and

colour, for the subtlety that meant she could hold in her mind’s eye the entire

finished concept of how an original period room must have looked, she also had

an extremely shrewd and practical side to her nature which ensured that with

every project she had worked on so far she had managed to bring the work to

completion on time and under budget.

This was something that didn’t just ‘happen’. It involved hours and hours

spent poring over costings and budgets, more hours and hours tramping around

warehouses, inspecting fabrics and furniture, and in many cases, because of the

age of the houses, it also meant actually finding and commissioning workmen to

make new ‘aged’ copies of the pieces she required. Europe, as she had quickly

discovered, was a treasure house for such craftsmen and so, oddly, was Australia discovered, was a treasure house for such craftsmen and so, oddly, was Australia,

but always at a price, and Kelly had surprised herself a little at her ability to

haggle and bargain for days if necessary, until she had got what she wanted and

at a price she considered to be fair.

This had, of course, led to her often having to take an extremely firm line, not

just with the craftspeople she dealt with but very often with the original owners

of their properties as well, who very often retained life tenancy in the houses and

quite naturally wanted to have their say in how they were restored and furnished.

Oh, yes, Kelly was used to dealing with sometimes difficult ex-owners, and

situations where she had to use both patience and tact to ensure that no one’s

pride was hurt.

It was a very definite skill to be able to walk the tightrope between avoiding

hurting a prior owner’s often sensitive pride and ensuring that the house was

restored as she knew Nichols would want it to be.

But this time it wasn’t just the sensitive feelings of a property’s ex-owner she

was going to need to consider. No, this time the person whose feelings, whose

emotions were going to need careful handling was herself.

Closing her eyes, she breathed deeply and calmly several times and then

opened them again, wiping her hands on a tissue and then re-starting the

Discovery’s engine.

She had hired a four-wheel drive, not just because she suspected from the

plans and other papers Nichols had given her to study that it would be useful for

travelling over the rugged terrain and the no doubt overgrown driveways that

surrounded City Hall, but also because, as she had discovered in the past, a

large sturdy off-road vehicle often provided a boon for transporting the odd

‘find’ she came across when scouting around looking for materials for the

restoration work to a property.

The statue she had found for the secluded enclosed garden of the Italian

palazzo had been one such find, bought and paid for on the spot before the

vendor could change his mind, and loaded immediately into her car.

*

Ten minutes later she was driving through the open gates to city Hall. The

twin lodges at either side of the gate, joined by a pretty spanning ‘archway’, had

both looked run-down and in need of repair.

Kelly knew from her homework that they had been constructed at the same

time as the main house—and the house, like them, had been designed by one of

the country’s foremost architects in the manner favoured by the like the country’s foremost architects in the manner favoured by the likes

of Tedy.

Theatrically, the drive to the house curved through flanking trees, several of

which were missing, spoiling its original symmetry, although those which

remained were so heavily in leaf that they still obscured all her attempts to

glimpse the house until she had driven past the final curve in the drive.

Kelly caught her breath. Used as she was to beautiful properties—after all,

Nick’s ancestral home was renowned for its elegant grace—this one, despite the

shabbiness of its fading elegance, was something very special and she could see

instantly why Nichole had fallen so immediately and completely in love with it.

Set on a small incline, so that it could overlook its surrounding gardens and

parklands, it was everything that the neoclassicist architects had decreed their

houses should be and then some more, Kelly acknowledged as she drove slowly

towards the gravelled parking area in front of the massive columned portico to

the house. Stopping the Discovery, she opened the door and started to get out.

* David had seen her drive up from an upstairs window. She was just a few seconds

short of five minutes early. Remembering a younger Kelly, and her apparent

total inability to arrive anywhere on time, he grimaced ruefully to himself before

making his way downstairs.

They met on the paved portico. David opened the massive front door just as

Kelly mounted the last step. She stopped the minute she saw him, freezing

instinctively like a gazelle scenting the presence of a leopard.

He hadn’t changed, but then why should he have? He still looked exactly the

same. Tall, broad-shouldered, with the smooth warm skin of a countryman, his

jeans clinging softly to the taut muscles of his long legs, his forearms bare and

bronzed, the soft checked shirt he was wearing exactly the same kind of shirt she

could remember seeing him wearing all the years she had been growing up. His

hair was still as thick and darkly rich as ever, his jaw just as chiselled—no signs

of soft, rich living there, despite the odd snippets of gossip she had picked up

from her mother and from Elly about the discreet parade of elegant, wealthy

women who had passed through his life David had always had a penchant for

that type, women in the main who were slightly older than himself, soignée,

knowing...all the things that an adoring, unknowing nineteen-year-old was not.

Only his eyes had changed, lelly noticed, with a sudden sharp flicker of

sensation which she immediately suppressed. Oh, they were still the same

incredible colour, somewhere between onyx and gold, still flecked with those incredible colour, somewhere between onyx and gold, still flecked with those

heart-dizzying little specks of lighter colour and still surrounded by those

unfairly long, thick dark lashes.

Yes, all that was still familiar to her, but the lazily sensual way they were

studying her, the subtle but very male message she could read in them as David’s

gaze flicked over her T-shirt-covered breasts and her slim waist in the plain blue

jeans...that was most certainly not familiar to her, at least not from David.

And it was only then, when she countered that look with an instinctive and

automatically female one of cool reproval, that Kelly realised that one of them

had closed the distance between them from its original safe several metres to a

much, much less secure three or four feet.

One of them... To her chagrin Kelly recognised that it was not only David who

had moved so much closer and that she herself was halfway towards the front

door now instead of on the perimeter of the portico... When had she moved...and

how, without knowing what she was doing...? David had always had that kind of

effect on her... Had had... All that was in the past now, she reminded herself

fiercely. And just to ensure that David knew it too she held out her hand to him

and, raising her voice slightly, smiled with cool authority as she greeted him.

David, good, I’m glad you’re here. We can get straight down to work. I’ve

studied the plans of the house, but I always find that it makes an enormous

difference to actually walk over a property, so...’

God, but she was so incredibly sexy, David acknowledged. He could feel the

heat, the reaction, the response surging through his veins. He had been prepared

to find her beautiful. She had always been that. But in the past it had been almost

a sexless, childish kind of beauty... Now her sensuality, and his own reaction to

it, hit him in the solar plexus like a blow.

As for that cool little voice of authoritative superiority, that distancing little

outstretched hand... Later David was to ask himself what on earth he had thought

he was doing and if he had gone completely mad, but at the time...

Ignoring her outstretched hand, he covered the distance between them and

before Kelly could even begin to guess what he intended doing his hands were

resting either side of her waist, his scent, his heat filling her nostrils, his body

and his mouth less than inches away from her own.

David!’

Was that really her own voice, that soft, husky, and, yes, somehow invitingly

sensual little thread of sound, gasping his name in a slow-drawn-out moan that

was more invitation than protest?

But it was too late to correct the erroneous message she knew instinctively she But it was too late to correct the erroneous message she knew instinctively she

had given; David was already acting on what he had obviously interpreted her

‘protest’ to mean, his hands lifting from her waist to her arms, her shoulders, as

he drew her closer, his mouth fastening on hers as he kissed her, not as an old

acquaintance or a friend of her brother’s, Kelly recognised, her senses reeling,

but in all the ways she had dreamed of him kissing her all those years ago, as a

man kissed a woman.

It had come as something of a shock to him later, when he met Nichole, to

recognise how much older than Kelly he actually was, but he had told himself

that if Kelly chose to have as her lover a man who was plainly so much older

than her then that was her business and no one else’s.