Czytaj książkę: «Reunited By A Baby Bombshell»

CHAPTER ONE

WHEN THE INVITATION arrived Eva Hennessey was away in Prague, dancing the role of Odette in Swan Lake. On her return to Paris a week later, she found her mailbox crammed, mostly with an assortment of bills and dance magazines. She was riding the rickety old lift to her apartment on the fifth floor when the bright sunny Australian stamp caught her eye. Then she read the postmark. Emerald Bay.

The sharp pang in her chest made her gasp. It wasn’t homesickness. Eva’s feelings about the beach town where she’d grown up were far more complicated. These days, she rarely allowed herself to unpack the mixed bag of emotions that accompanied memories from her youth.

She always ended up thinking about Griffin Fletcher...and the other harrowing memory that would never leave her.

She’d worked hard to put that life behind her. She’d had to. Long ago.

Today, as the hum of Parisian traffic reached Eva from the street below, she let herself into the apartment that had been her home for the past ten years. Nanette, the concierge, had already turned on the heating and the apartment was welcoming and warm. Eva had loved this place from the day she’d first found it.

Decorated simply in quiet creamy tones with occasional touches of blue, the main living area was dominated by a far wall of windows that looked out over tiled rooftops, chimneys and church spires to the top of the Eiffel Tower. At night, on the hour, the Tower glittered with beautiful lights. It was a view Eva never tired of.

Stopping for a moment, she smiled to herself as she looked about the space she’d carefully assembled over the years—the beautiful cushion covers she’d picked up on various tours, the collection of blue and white pottery from all over Europe, the wide-brimmed bowl full of shells and stones she’d collected from beaches in Greece and Italy, in Spain and the UK. So many happy memories to counteract the sad ones from her past.

She set down her luggage and dumped the envelope from Australia on the coffee table along with the rest of her mail. Then she went through to the bathroom and had a long hot shower, massaging the nagging pain in her hip under the steady stream of water.

She washed her hair, dried it roughly with a towel, letting the damp dark tresses hang loose past her shoulders as she changed into a comfy pair of stretch slacks and an oversized T-shirt.

Soon she would make her supper. A simple herb omelette would suffice. But first a glass of wine, an indulgence she could allow herself now that the performance tour was behind her.

Curled on the sofa, with the wine within reach and a cushion positioned to support her painful hip, Eva retrieved the envelope from Australia and slit it open. A card depicting an iconic Queensland beach fell out.

Beneath the picture, a message—an invitation to a reunion of her classmates to celebrate twenty years since their last year of high school.

Eva felt sick as she read the details.

Where: Emerald Bay Golf Club

When: Saturday October 20th

The simple wording hit her like a punch to the chest. A thousand long-suppressed images crashed in. The beach in summer and the thrill of riding the rolling green surf. The smooth trunk of a palm tree at her back as she sat at the edge of the sand, eating salty fish and chips wrapped in paper. The smell of sunscreen and citronella.

Her thoughts flashed to hot summer days in classrooms with windows opened wide to catch a sea breeze. And then, despite her best efforts to block them, there were memories of Griffin Fletcher.

Griff, sitting at the desk just behind her in class, all shaggy-haired and wide-shouldered, catching her eye when she turned and sending her a cheeky grin.

Griff on the football field. The flash of his solid thighs as he sped past to score a try.

Griff holding her close in the dark. The surprising gentleness of his lips.

And, flashing between those sweeter memories, the fear and the crushing weight of her terrible secret. The overwhelming heartbreak and pain.

Enough.

Stop it.

Eva knew at once what her response would be. What it must be. Of course she couldn’t possibly go. With deep regret, she would be unable to accept the kind invitation. She was very grateful to be remembered by her old school friends, but her schedule was far too tight.

It wasn’t untrue. She had a new set of rehearsals for The Nutcracker lined up and she couldn’t really afford the time away. And why would she want to go back to the Bay anyway? Her mother no longer lived there. It was many years now since her mum had married and settled in Cairns in the far north of the state. As for Eva’s classmates and the rest of her memories—of necessity, she’d very deliberately left all that behind.

Instead, she’d worked as hard as possible for those twenty years, putting in endless, punishing hours to build the career of her dreams. These days, posters of Eva Hennessey, dancing as Giselle, as Cinderella or as Romeo’s Juliet, were on display in almost every theatre or train station in Europe.

After long years of hard work, this was Eva’s reward. Rave reviews claimed her as ‘technically poised and polished and lyrically perfect’. Wherever she went, audiences cheered Bravo! and gave her standing ovations. Her dressing rooms were crammed with beautiful flowers.

Eva’s world was now different in every way imaginable from the life she’d known in the sleepy seaside town of her youth. She might as well be living on a different planet. If she ever returned to Emerald Bay, she would not only awaken past hurts, she would feel like an alien.

Just the same, she felt sick to the stomach as she tucked the card back into the envelope. She told herself she was simply overtired after the gruelling weeks on tour.

In the morning she would post an ‘inability to accept’ and she would delete all thoughts of Emerald Bay.

* * *

Bees buzzed in the bottlebrush hedge. Small children laughed and squealed as they splashed at the shallow end of the elegant swimming pool, while their mothers watched, dangling their bare legs in the water as they sipped Pimm’s from long glasses. The smell of frying onions floated on the balmiest of breezes. It was a typical Sunday afternoon in suburban Brisbane.

Griff Fletcher was the host on this particular Sunday and his guests were a couple of long-time mates and their families. Griff was repaying their hospitality while his girlfriend, Amanda, was away in Sydney on business. It made sense. Amanda hadn’t known these guys for decades as he had. They weren’t really part of her scene—she was so much younger than their wives—and she didn’t ‘do’ little kids.

As Griff added steaks to the sizzling barbecue plate, the men helped themselves to fresh beers and kept him company.

‘So what do you reckon about the school reunion?’ asked Tim, who, like Griff, had moved from Emerald Bay to live and work in Queensland’s capital city. ‘Are you planning to check it out, Griff?’

Griff shrugged. He’d known that Tim and Barney were bound to talk about the reunion today, but he really wasn’t that interested. ‘I think I might give it a miss,’ he said.

Tim pulled a face, clearly disappointed. ‘But surely you must be curious about your old mates? Wouldn’t you like to catch up with the gang?’

The best Griff could manage was a crooked grin. ‘I see you two often enough.’

Barney gave an awkward smile and Tim scowled and took a long drink of his beer. Griff scowled too, as he began to flip steaks. He knew it wouldn’t be long before one of the guys had another dig at him.

Tim shook his head. ‘I know you’re a hotshot barrister, Griff, but I didn’t take you for a snob.’

Griff gave another shrug as he turned the sausages for the children. ‘I just don’t see the point in revisiting the past. You know what these reunions are like. The only people who turn up are the ones who’ve been successful, or the ones who’ve bred a swag of offspring. Then they swan around feeling smug, gossiping about the ones who stayed away.’

‘That’s a bit harsh,’ Tim said stiffly.

‘I wasn’t talking about you of course, mate.’

His mate wasn’t mollified. ‘Have you ever been to a school reunion?’

‘No, but it’s easy to—’

‘I have,’ cut in Barney. ‘My folks still live in the Bay, so I’m up there pretty regularly and I went to the ten-year reunion.’ He looked a tad defensive. ‘I enjoyed meeting up with everyone again, even after just ten years. There were some who’d really changed and others who looked exactly the same. Not that any of that mattered. We all had plenty of laughs and swapped war stories. It was interesting to hear what everyone’s doing.’

‘See!’ crowed Tim with a triumphant grin.

Griff shrugged again and used the egg flip to shift the browned onions away from the heat. Then he turned to call to the women. ‘Steaks won’t be long.’

‘Right,’ Tim’s wife, Kylie, called back. ‘We’d better get these kids dry then.’

Tim, meanwhile, moved closer to Griff. Out of the corner of his mouth, he said, ‘Eva Hennessey’s not likely to be there.’

Griff stiffened, and was immediately annoyed that the mere mention of Eva could still raise a reaction. It really shouldn’t matter if he ran into a girl he’d known a million years ago.

The reaction didn’t make sense. Sure, Eva had been his first girlfriend, but he’d eventually got over the shock of her leaving town so abruptly. It wasn’t as if he’d been planning to marry her straight out of high school and settle down in the Bay. He’d had big plans for his future.

He’d carried on with his life, with university and his subsequent career. And in the past two decades he’d had more than his fair share of relationships with glamorous, beautiful, passionate women.

He supposed it didn’t really make sense that he wanted to avoid Eva, but he’d moved on, so why ask for trouble?

‘Of course she won’t be there,’ he said, pleased that he managed to sound offhand. He added another nonchalant shrug for good measure, but he bit back the other comment that had sprung to mind—that Eva Hennessey was far too busy and world-famous to come back for such a piddling, unimportant event.

‘Well, Barney’s already put his name down, haven’t you, Barnes?’ Tim called to their mate, who was retrieving an inflatable ball that had bounced out of the pool.

Barney sent them a thumbs up.

‘And I reckon it’d be a blast for the three of us to go back to the Bay,’ Tim persisted. ‘You know, just the Three Amigos, without the women and billy-lids. Like the good old days.’

Griff was about to respond in the negative, but Tim stopped him with a raised hand.

‘Just think about it, Griff. We could stay at a pub on the beachfront, catch a few waves, even do a little snorkelling and diving on the reef.’

Well, yeah.

Griff couldn’t deny the great times he and these mates had enjoyed as teenagers, lapping up the free and easy outdoor lifestyle of a bayside country town.

Griff’s family had moved back to the city as soon as he’d finished school, and he could barely remember the last time he’d donned goggles and flippers to dive into the secret underwater world of coral and fish.

But there’d been a time when he’d lived and breathed diving...and surfing. Throughout his teenage years, he’d spent a part of every single day at the beach, in the sea. And every night, in bed, he’d listened to the sound of the surf pounding on the sand. The rhythm of the sea had been as familiar and essential to him as the beating of his heart.

By contrast, these days, the only water he saw was when he was rowing on the Brisbane River, which was usually flat and brown and still.

But the sea was different. And the Bay was special.

More to the point, these two mates were important to Griff. Amanda wasn’t especially fond of them, but she did have a tendency to be slightly snooty. She preferred mixing with Griff’s barrister colleagues and their partners, whereas Griff knew that these guys kept him grounded. Tim worked in a bank and Barney was an electrician and, between them, they provided a good balance to the eminent judges and silks who filled Griff’s working life.

He’d be crazy to let the haunting memory of one slim, dark-haired girl with astonishing aqua eyes spoil the chance to go back and recapture a little of the camaraderie and magic he’d enjoyed in his youth.

‘I’ll think about it,’ he said cautiously.

He was rewarded with a hearty and enthusiastic back-slap.

* * *

Eva stared at the doctor in dismay as two words echoed in her head like a tolling funeral bell... Hip replacement...hip replacement...

It was the worst possible news. She couldn’t take it in. She didn’t want to believe it.

A few days earlier, during a rehearsal of The Nutcracker, she’d landed awkwardly after performing a grand jeté, a demanding movement that involved propelling herself gracefully into the air and doing the splits while above the ground. Eva had performed the move thousands of times, of course, but this time, when she’d landed, the pain in her hip had been agonising.

Since then, the hip hadn’t improved. She’d stayed away from rehearsals, claiming a heavy cold, which was something she’d never done before. Normally, Eva danced through every painful mishap. She’d danced on broken toes, through colds and flu, had even performed for weeks with a torn ligament in her shoulder.

Such stoicism wasn’t unusual in ballet circles. A culture of secrecy about injury was a given. Every dancer was terrified of being branded as fragile. They all understood it was a euphemism for on the way out—the end of a career.

This time, however, Eva found it too difficult to keep hiding her pain. Even if she faked her way through class and rehearsals, by the time she got home she could barely walk. So she’d seen an osteopath. But now, to her horror, the doctor had shown her disturbing results from her MRI scan.

She’d never dreamed the damage could be so bad.

‘You’ve torn the labrum,’ the doctor told her solemnly as he pointed to the scan. ‘That’s the ring of cartilage around your left hip joint. Normally, the labrum helps with shock absorption and lubrication of the joint, but now—’ He shook his head. ‘The tear on its own wouldn’t be such a great problem, but there are other degenerative changes as well.’ He waved his hand over the scan. ‘Extensive arthritic inflammation of the whole joint.’

Arthritis? A chill washed over Eva. Wasn’t that something that happened to elderly people?

‘I strongly recommend a complete hip replacement. Otherwise—’ the doctor sighed expressively ‘—I don’t really see how you can avoid it.’

No, please no.

On a page from his writing pad, he wrote the names of two consultant orthopaedic and trauma surgeons. He handed the paper to Eva.

Sweat broke out on her skin and she swayed a little dizzily in her chair. A hip replacement was a death knell, the end of her career. The prospect filled her with such desolation that it didn’t bear imagining.

It would be the end of my life.

‘Aren’t there other things I can try?’ she asked in desperation. ‘Besides surgery?’

The doctor gave a shrug. ‘We can talk about physiotherapy and painkillers and diet. And rest,’ he added, giving her a dark look. ‘But I think you’ll find that the pain will still be too severe, certainly if you want to continue dancing. Ballet requires movements that are very unnatural.’

Eva knew this all too well, of course. She’d spent a lifetime perfecting the demanding movements most people never even tried. Pirouettes and adagios and grand allegros en pointe all made exacting demands on her limbs and joints, and she knew she was only human. She was at the wrong end of her thirties and there was a limit to what she could expect from her body. But she couldn’t give up dancing.

Not yet! She’d worked too hard, had sacrificed too much. Sure, she’d known that her career couldn’t last for ever, but she’d hoped for at least five more years.

Dancing was her life. Without it, she would drown, would completely lose her identity.

She was in no way ready for this.

The osteopath was staring at her a little impatiently now. He had no more advice to offer.

In a daze, Eva rose from her chair, thanked him and bade him goodbye. As the door to his office closed behind her, she walked through reception without seeing anyone, trying not to limp, to prove to herself that the doctor must have been wrong, but even walking was painful.

Glass doors led to a long empty corridor. What could she do now?

She tried to think clearly, but her mind kept spinning. If she gave in and had the surgery, she was sure the company wouldn’t want her back—certainly not as their prima ballerina—and she couldn’t conscience the idea of going back into the corps de ballet.

The worst of it was, this wasn’t a problem she dared discuss with her colleagues. She didn’t want anyone in the dancing world to know. The news would spread like wildfire. It would be in the press by lunchtime. By supper time, her career would be over.

As she made her way carefully down a short flight of stairs and onto the Parisian pavement outside, Eva, who had always been strong and independent, valuing her privacy, had never felt more vulnerable and alone. On the wrong side of the world.

* * *

‘Hello, this is Jane. How can I help you?’

Griff grimaced. He couldn’t believe he was tense about speaking to Jane Simpson. In their school days, Jane had been the Emerald Bay baker’s daughter. Since then she’d married a cane farmer and was now convening the class reunion.

‘Hi, there, Jane.’ He cleared his throat nervously and was immediately annoyed with himself. ‘Griff Fletcher, here. I’m ringing about the school reunion weekend.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Jane sounded excited. ‘It’s great to hear from you after all this time, Griff. I hope you’ll be able to come.’

‘Well, I’m still trying to see if I can...er...fit it into my schedule. But I was curious—how are the...er...numbers shaping up?’

‘They’re great, actually. We have about thirty-five coming so far—and that’s not counting partners. It’s really exciting,’ Jane enthused. ‘I do hope you can make it.’

‘Yeah, thanks.’

Since the barbecue with Tim and Barney, Griff had been warming to the idea of going back to the Bay. But he wanted to ask about Eva. The thought of running into her in front of everyone from their school days completely ruined the picture. There was too much unfinished business between them. There was bound to be tension. And friction. It would be unavoidable.

If Eva was going to be there—which Griff very much doubted—he would stay well clear of the place.

The simple question should have been easy to put to Jane. Griff couldn’t believe he was uptight.

It wasn’t as if he’d spent the past twenty years pining for his high school sweetheart. Many of the relationships he’d enjoyed since then had been fabulously passionate and borderline serious.

Admittedly, Griff’s relationships did have a habit of petering out. While almost all of his friends and colleagues had tied the knot and were starting families, Griff didn’t seem to have the staying power. He either tired of his girlfriends, or they got tired of waiting for him to commit to something more permanent.

At least he and Amanda were still hanging together. So far.

Now, he braced himself to get to the point of this phone call. Every day in court he faced criminals, judges and juries, and he prided himself on posing the most searching and intimate of questions. It should be a cinch to ask Jane Simpson a quick, straightforward question about Eva.

‘I don’t suppose...’ Griff began and stopped, as memories of Eva’s smile flashed before him. The view of her pale neck as she’d leaned over her books in class. The fresh taste of her kisses. Her slim, lithe body pressing temptingly close.

‘Have you heard from Eva?’ Jane asked, mercifully cutting into his thoughts.

Jane had been one of Eva’s closest friends at school, so she knew that he and Eva had once been an item.

Griff grabbed the opening now offered. ‘No, I haven’t heard from her in ages. We’re...not in contact these days. Has she been in touch with you?’

‘Yes, and I’m afraid she’s not coming,’ Jane said. ‘It’s such a pity she can’t make it.’

OK. So now he knew without having to ask. Relief and disappointment slugged Griff in equal parts.

‘I’m not at all surprised,’ he said.

‘No, I’m sure Eva’s incredibly busy with her dancing. It’s wonderful how amazingly well she’s done, though, isn’t it?’

‘Yes—amazing.’

‘Anyway, Griff, let me know if you do decide you can come. It should be a fun get-together. Do you have my email address?’

Jane dictated the address while Griff jotted it down. He would leave it a few days before he emailed her. In the meantime, he would swing by Tim’s favourite lunching hangout and let him know he was free to join him and Barney on a nostalgic trip back to their schoolboy haunts. And if he did happen to see Eva again, of course he wouldn’t lose his cool.

* * *

Eva sat beneath the red awning of a pavement café, clutching a cup of blissfully decadent hot chocolate as she watched the rainy Paris streetscape. Beyond the awning’s protection, raindrops danced in little splashes in the gutter. Across the street, the lights of another café glowed, yellow beacons of warmth in the bleak grey day.

Even in the rain Paris looked beautiful but, for the first time in ages, Eva felt like a tourist rather than a resident. She could no longer dance here and everything had changed.

She’d come to Paris to work, to further her career. Until now she’d been a professional with a full and busy life. Her days had a rhythm—limbering and stretching, promotions and interviews, rehearsals and performances.

If she lost all that, what would she do?

She hadn’t felt this low since she’d broken up with Vasily, her Russian boyfriend, who had left her for a lovely blonde dancer from the Netherlands.

Such a dreadful blow that had been.

For eight years, Eva had loved good-looking Vasily Stepanov and his sinfully magnificent body. They had danced together and lived and loved together, and she had looked on him as her partner in every sense. Her dancing had never been more assured, more sensitive. Her life had never been happier.

She’d learned to cook Vasily’s favourite Russian dishes—borsch and blini and potato salad with crunchy pickles, and she’d put up with his outbursts of temper. She’d even taken classes to learn his language, and she’d hoped they would marry, have a baby or two.

Getting over him had been the second hardest lesson of her life—after that other terrible lesson in her distant past. But now the devastating news about her hip was an even worse blow for Eva.

Sipping her rich, thick chocolat chaud, watching car tyres swish past on the shiny wet street, she found herself longing for sunshine and she remembered how easily the sun was taken for granted in Australia. A beat later, she was remembering the beach at Emerald Bay, the smooth curve of sand and the frothy blue and white surf.

And, out of nowhere, came the sudden suggestion that it made perfect sense to go back home to Australia for her surgery.

She could ask for leave from the company. Pierre was already rehearsing a new Clara for The Nutcracker, and the understudy was shaping up well. Eva was, to all intents and purposes, free. She found herself smiling at the prospect of going home.

She would make up some excuse about needing to see her mother. It wasn’t a total lie. It was years since she’d taken extended leave and it was at least two years since she’d been home, and her mum wasn’t getting any younger. If she had the surgery in an Australian city hospital, she’d have a much better chance of flying under the radar than she would here in ballet-mad Paris.

There might even be a chance—just a minuscule chance—that she could come back here to Paris as good as new. She’d been researching on the Internet and had read about a leading dancer in America who was performing again after a hip replacement. The girl was younger than Eva, but still, the story had given her hope.

And, Eva thought, as she drained the last of the creamy rich chocolate, if she was returning to Australia, she might as well go to that school reunion. She’d had an email from Jane Simpson telling her that Griff was undecided so, if she went, she was unlikely to have the ordeal of facing him.

She would love to catch up with everyone else. It felt suddenly important to her to chat with people who lived ‘normal’ lives.

Yes, she decided. She would go.

As soon as this thought was born, Eva was hit by a burst of exhilaration. This was swiftly followed by a shiver of fear when she thought about Griff, but she shook it off.

It was time to be positive and brave about her future. Perhaps it was also time to lay to rest the ghosts of her past.