The Marriage Gamble
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Meredith Webber
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CHAPTER ONE
MICHAEL TRENT stood in front of the painting, which three eminent artists and critics had adjudged the best in the exhibition, and frowned. He hadn’t yet seen the bill for the air fares and accommodation for these same judges, but he guessed it would be hefty, though not as hefty as the acquisition prize of twenty thousand dollars Trent Medical Clinics, as sponsors of the art award, had offered.
‘A cross-section of a wart, with a phloxine-tartrazine stain, seen through a pathologist’s electron microscope.’
He was startled by the voice at his elbow, but amused enough by the description to smile.
‘I’ll admit to not spending a lot of time studying cross-sections of warts,’ he said to the diminutive brunette who’d materialised beside him to offer her opinion of the striated lines of colour, broken by spotty blobs of darker paint, ‘but I had been thinking about slides and smears and images from my early student days.’
He paused, unconsciously assimilating twin arcs of dark eyebrows, eyes so brown they were almost black, a neat nose and sweetly curving lips—glossed but not coloured—before he added, ‘Is it as bad as I think it is?’
His fellow viewer tipped her head to one side as if to better consider the painting. She had dark hair, pulled loosely back and held with a clasp, and the movement brought an attractive sheen to it.
‘I suppose the actual composition isn’t too bad—I mean, it’s got a kind of balanced look with those amoeba-like things on one side and the striated muscle fibres on the other. And the main colour combinations of pink and purple, while not what I’d choose for home decorating, aren’t as gloomy as the all black and grey masterpiece that won the highly commended award. It looks like diseased lung tissue.’
Her opinion of the highly commended so matched his own that he was about to introduce himself and ask her which of the exhibits she did like when Jaclyn tapped his shoulder.
‘Darling, you simply must meet Beau Delpratt. He’s so delighted with the win he’s offered to do a complementary painting to hang opposite this one.’
‘Complimentary as in free?’ Michael asked, and Jaclyn gave a trill of laughter.
‘Oh, darling, as if you could expect Delpratt to give his talent away.’
Jaclyn’s hand slipped to his forearm and she applied a slight pressure which, while unspoken, definitely meant, Come with me now.
Prepared to follow—after all, he’d known talking to the artist would be part of his duties for the evening—he was momentarily distracted by the word ‘Talent?’ murmured in a huskily mocking voice behind him.
He turned back but the brunette was still studying the painting, so motionless he thought he must have imagined hearing the word. As he threaded his way through the crowd of expensively dressed men and women, responding to greetings and praise with a nod or murmured ‘thank you’, he wondered who she was and whether, in a crush like this, he might happen to meet up with her again.
‘Great start!’ Jacinta muttered to herself. Coming to the art show opening had seemed such a good way to meet the big boss, Michael Trent. Then she’d seen the painting to which he was giving the major prize and had blurted out the first thing that had come into her head.
Or maybe it had been the shock of seeing the man himself. In the flesh. For the first time.
Hunky men had been so thin on the ground in her vicinity in recent years she’d begun to think they only existed between the covers of expensive magazines.
To be honest, healthy men of any type had been thin on the ground, which probably explained the tingly feeling his voice had generated in her stomach. She’d always been a sucker for deep gravelly voices.
So she’d shot off her mouth about the prize-winning painting!
Though he hadn’t seemed put out by her remark, rather the opposite, in fact, which had encouraged her to make an even more derogatory remark about the second place-getter.
Then the willowy blonde had appeared and effortlessly removed him from in front of the painting, and Jacinta was left staring blankly at the pink and purple swirls, which failed to provide any inspiration for her next move.
Following him through the crowd and appearing at his side a second time wouldn’t offer the element of surprise she’d hoped might lead to a conversation that ranged beyond the artwork on the walls. But trying to get an appointment with him at his office hadn’t worked and neither had phoning him at home. The man was surrounded by more minders than Michael Jackson!
No! It had to be tonight. Somehow she had to get close to him again.
‘Drink, madam?’
A waiter pressed a tray towards her, using his free hand to indicate the different drinks on offer.
‘Champagne, dry white wine, Chardonnay.’
‘Not right now,’ Jacinta told him, as the germ of an idea sprouted in her mind.
The drink waiters wore black trousers and charcoal grey shirts—no doubt to differentiate them from the dinner-suited male guests. But the women serving finger food were in black—long skirts, and roll-neck, long-sleeved, skivvy tops. Not so different to Jacinta’s dress with its high neck and long sleeves.
She made her purposefully towards the kitchen area, where the caterers were refilling platters to pass around again. Given his opinion of Beau Delpratt’s winning entry, Michael Trent might welcome a diversion. And as he chose between dainty little omelette rolls filled with sour cream and smoked salmon or herbed pikelets topped with horseradish cream and tiny prawns, she could introduce herself and tell him she had to speak to him about Abbott Road. Quickly explain she’d been unable to get an appointment any other way.
Should be a cinch!
So, why, as she made her way towards him, was her stomach churning like a washing machine?
No, washing machines sloshed while her stomach’s behaviour was more a grumble of uneasiness. What else might churn?
Seeking a suitable metaphor took her closer to where Michael Trent’s height made him easily identifiable, but the knot of people around him added to the anxiety that had replaced the tingle in Jacinta’s midsection.
‘Ah, more food,’ someone on the outskirts of the knot cried, and half a dozen hands reached out to scoop the small delicacies off the plate.
‘There’s plenty coming,’ Jacinta assured them, while inwardly fuming at the gluttony which was rapidly diminishing her excuse to get close to Dr Trent. ‘These were for the officials,’ she tried, wanting to slap their hands away, but one man was passing pikelets to all his friends, and before the words were out, all she had left on the platter were a few sprigs of parsley and a tired lettuce leaf.
‘It’s a wonder they didn’t eat those as well,’ she muttered to herself as she pushed her way back to the kitchen to refill the tray and start again. ‘And the platter, the pigs!’
‘What’s this, Jazzy? You moonlighting as a waitress? Surely those days are over for you.’
Adam Lockyer accosted her before she was halfway back to her destination.
‘Ah, but you’re working for Mike now, I hear. Is this his way of making staff feel part of the empire? Expecting them to help out at functions?’
Adam was smiling jovially down at her, while his blue eyes flicked an admiring glance up and down her person. He really was the world’s worst flirt!
Her mind was trying to devise a new strategy so she wasn’t paying a hundred per cent attention to Adam’s light-hearted prattle, but the name Mike was recurring with regularity and finally registered in her frustrated brain.
‘Mike? You call Michael Trent Mike? You know him?’
Adam looked a little put out, no doubt by Jacinta’s incredulity.
‘Why shouldn’t I know him? We’re both doctors after all. In fact, we trained together, down in Sydney. Knew him from playing rugby before that. He was a state player and could have gone on to play for Australia. Don’t know why he dropped out.’
Jacinta could have told him. She’d studied every bit of information she could find on Michael Trent, but she guessed Adam wasn’t particularly interested in knowing anyway, and right now he could be put to better use.
‘I’ll just return this tray, then you can introduce me to him,’ she told Adam, taking hold of his arm so he couldn’t escape her. ‘Make it casual. Let him think we’re together, and you’re greeting him as an old friend and introducing the woman you’re with.’
Adam gazed down at her with such perplexity she suspected the task would be beyond him. How the man had ever made it through medical school…
‘It’s not hard,’ she assured him, then a sudden doubt assailed her. ‘You haven’t already said hello to him, have you? Or introduced him to your date?’
‘I don’t have a date,’ Adam said, beaming now she’d asked him something simple enough for him to answer. ‘I always come to these things alone. Never fail to meet someone who wants to go on afterwards.’
He smiled hopefully at her.
‘I don’t suppose you’d—’
Jacinta shook her head.
‘We tried it years ago, Adam,’ she reminded him. ‘After Becky and Paul’s wedding. One date, and we both realised we were only ever going to be friends.’
‘Most women would have been thrilled to spend the day in the champagne tent at a big race meeting,’ he grumbled, while Jacinta deposited the tray on the serving bench, then took her friend by the arm and steered him back towards their destination.
‘I’m not most women,’ she reminded him. ‘Now, have you got it right? We breeze up to him, you do the “old mate” thing and introduce me. Then, if you wouldn’t mind distracting anyone who’s hanging around him—you could tell that story about the Irish basketballer—I can have a quick word with Michael.’
‘But you work for him—you could have a quick word anytime.’
Jacinta sighed. Of all the allies she could have chosen, she’d been stuck with Adam, to whom the world was black and white and whose interests—outside paediatrics, at which he was very good—were limited to women, racehorses and sporting stars.
‘I work in the Abbott Road clinic which is light years away from the rarefied air of his Forest Glen home. And he’s so hemmed in by staff it’s impossible to get a memo through to him.’
Or if he does get it, he ignores it, she added darkly, but only in her head.
‘So you want to talk to him about something?’ Adam said, far too loudly given they’d now reached the outskirts of the crowd around one of the city’s wealthiest men.
Uttering a silent prayer for patience, Jacinta smiled and nodded, then, as Adam’s broad shoulders forced a wedge through the cluster, she clutched at the bottom of his jacket and followed in his wake.
‘Mike, old man! Long time no see!’
I could have taken a bet he’d say that, Jacinta thought, but Adam had got her to where she wanted to be so she could hardly criticise his conversational gambits.
‘How’s everything going? I heard you’d opened another clinic. That’s five or six, is it?’
Michael Trent greeted Adam with a smile and hearty handshake, asked how the ankle-biter business was going and generally seemed pleased to see his old rugby friend.
‘Oh, almost forgot!’ Adam said, when he and Michael had relived several ancient games and played ‘do you remember’ about their university lecturers. ‘Got someone I want you to meet. Very special little woman, this one.’
He hauled Jacinta forward before she had time to kick him, hard, in the shins. Little woman indeed!
‘Jacinta Ford. Michael Trent.’
‘Ah, the wart!’ Michael Trent said, holding out his hand towards Jacinta. ‘Jacinta—that’s a pretty name.’
‘But too much of a mouthful,’ Adam put in. ‘Just call her Jazzy!’
Jacinta, who’d spent three months of her hospital training working under Adam and trying to convince him she hated her childhood nickname, sent Michael Trent a look that dared him to try it.
‘I prefer Jacinta,’ she said in her coolest voice, then remembered her ulterior motive in meeting the man and smiled to make up for the coolness.
Mike accepted the small hand she offered and murmured a polite greeting, while random thoughts flashed through his head. How delicate, almost fragile, her hand felt in his much larger one, how her smile lit up her face, how strange he’d met up with her again without having to go seek her.
Ah, but she was with Adam Lockyer, the man voted most likely to succeed—with women—way back when they’d gone through medical school together.
The killjoy in him squelched the pleasure.
He was consoling himself with the thought that personally he preferred blondes to brunettes, and that small women always made him feel overly large and clumsy, when he realised she was talking to him.
Urgently.
‘So, you see, if I could just set up a time to talk to you,’ she was saying, when Jaclyn, with perfect timing, once again grasped his arm. ‘I know we could work something out.’
Brown eyes, luminously large in her small face, gazed beguilingly up into his, while a quite becoming flush lit the clear skin.
‘Darling, they’re ready for the presentation,’ Jaclyn was saying in his ear, while her hand was exerting a similar pressure on his arm. ‘We really must go.’
She smiled apologetically at Adam—women always smiled at Adam—but ignored his companion, and it was partly out of embarrassment at Jaclyn’s behaviour that Mike gave in.
‘No problem,’ he assured Jacinta-not-Jazzy. ‘Phone my secretary and set it up.’
He turned to follow his arm, which Jaclyn was tugging through the crowd, but his way was blocked by the small woman who’d stepped abruptly into his path. The beguiling brown eyes were now shooting sparks of anger and the becoming flush in her cheeks had turned to red flags of rage.
‘I have phoned your secretary seventeen times, I have spoken to every underling and yes-man in your employ. I have sent you written memos, emails and faxes, all requesting an appointment and all answered by faceless minions who assure me you understand my concerns and are taking them into consideration.’
She stamped her foot at that stage, but missed the floor and got his toe—the one with the ingrown toenail he kept meaning to have fixed.
‘Shit!’
The word reverberated through the room, causing beautifully clad women and elegantly suited men to turn towards him. Not that he cared. He was hopping up and down, clutching at his foot, wanting only to take off his shoe and sit for a while until the agony subsided.
The cause of his problems, meanwhile, gave him a stricken look then, perhaps realising his pain went beyond a simple toe-stamp, dropped down, wresting his injured foot from his hands and balancing it on her knee while she carefully undid the laces of his shoes.
‘Leave it alone!’ He managed to put enough menace into the whispered order for her to stop, which was just as well because if she’d removed the shoe and hurt the toe in doing it, he’d probably have strangled her.
She looked up enquiringly at him, her fingers still hovering over the laces.
Pretending a calmness he was far from feeling, he added, with less menace but sufficient warning to make his message clear, ‘It’s only throbbing. It’ll get better soon. If you take the shoe off, it will hurt more putting it back on.’
She stopped trying to remove the shoe but retained her grasp on his foot, moving it enough to disturb his precarious balance.
‘Just name a time,’ she said, and as most of the crowd had either moved off towards the centre of the gallery for the presentation or had shifted away from him in case he crashed down on them, only he heard the veiled threat in her low-pitched voice or saw the determination in the dark eyes.
If she lifted his foot he would crash to the ground, but if she pressed on his toe…
‘Tonight.’ Fear of more pain lent desperation to his voice. ‘I won’t be needed once the prizes are handed out. I’ll ask Don Jacobs, the gallery owner, if we can use his office. It’s towards the back, you can’t miss it.’ He glanced at his watch, worked out how long it would take to get from the gallery to the Hilton where he was due to deliver an after-dinner speech at ten then added, ‘I can give you ten minutes. Just wait by the door.’
She looked so angry he thought for a moment she was going to lift his foot and tip him off balance anyway, but in the end she let go, satisfying herself with a final glare in his direction.
Ten minutes is better than nothing, Jacinta told herself. In ten minutes, surely you can convince him to come down to Abbott Road and see conditions for himself. After all, he must have some feeling for the place—it was where he started out, the foundation of his empire.
She thanked Adam for helping her to her feet, thanked him again for the introduction, then reminded him the official presentation would signal the beginning of the end of the art show opening and he’d better start circulating if he wanted to find someone who’d go on to dinner or a nightclub with him after it.
‘But I thought you might change your mind,’ he protested. ‘It’s an age since we caught up with each other.’
Jacinta smiled at him.
‘We can do that in ten seconds. I’m still working with people from low socio-economic backgrounds and you’re still overcharging wealthy anxious parents who want to be sure they have the healthiest and most intelligent children in the universe.’
‘I also do public hospital rounds,’ he reminded her, sounding so aggrieved she reached up to kiss him on the cheek.
‘I know you do, and all your patients, as well as all their parents, love you dearly. Now, go and find yourself a nice woman to take out to dinner.’
She turned him around and pushed him gently in the direction of the bulk of the gathering, then made her way towards the back of the long gallery, where she found a small, glassed-in office.
After a month of frustration, she’d finally made contact with Michael Trent.
So why didn’t she feel more satisfaction?
Because he was six feet tall, far too handsome for his own good and his voice had made her stomach tingle.
This is business, she reminded herself when her mind showed interest in following up the tingling phenomenon.
Business!
Though her toes were curling a bit as well. Could the champagne be responsible? She’d had a quick glass for Dutch courage before approaching him by the painting.
She shifted from one foot to the other and peered through the glass into the gallery owner’s office. A small but exquisite painting, a seaside scene with sun shining on blue water, hung on the wall behind the gallery owner’s desk, and Jacinta, gratefully distracted by its beauty, was studying it when a voice—the voice—accosted her.
‘So, Jacinta Ford, come on in and tell me why you’ve been so desperate to get in touch with me.’
Michael Trent unlocked the door, then stood back to let her enter the office first. Walking past him made her feel even shorter than usual, and she wondered if he’d done it deliberately.
The thought stiffened her determination, though the sharp tang of aftershave she’d caught as she’d passed him lingered in some olfactory memory box, taunting her efforts.
He walked—well, limped—past her and, as if by right, dropped into the chair behind the desk. Now he latched his hands behind his head and stretched back, tilting the chair so it balanced on the two back legs. The ultimate corporate mogul!
‘I should tell you from the outset that my charity dollars are committed for the year, I’ll only do one art prize and that’s in conjunction with this gallery and, no, I have no need of an advertising agency, a publicist, a fashion guru or an image consultant.’
She had no doubt he was trying to intimidate her but she was more confused than intimidated, and no matter how often she repeated his statement in her head, she still couldn’t make sense of it. Hopefully, she didn’t look as bemused as she felt.
‘Why would you imagine I thought you needed an image consultant?’ she managed, latching onto the last of his job descriptions while studying the image in question. His dinner suit had obviously been made for him, fitting his tall, broad-shouldered figure to perfection, and with his black, silver-flecked hair, craggy features and arresting eyes, he was already a photographer’s dream.
Especially a female photographer…
‘An image consultant?’ She repeated the words, shaking her head in disbelief.
He shrugged off her astonishment.
‘People representing such agencies have all, at some time or another, used elaborate ploys to gain an interview with me. I feel it’s only fair to warn them at the outset that I’m not interested.’ He checked his watch. ‘You’ve seven minutes left.’
‘Seven minutes is more than enough,’ she snapped, infuriated by his disdainful attitude. Not to mention the conceit of the man! ‘In fact, seven seconds would probably do to get the main point across. Your clinic at Abbott Road is a disgrace. It’s dank and dirty and dreary and probably makes patients unfortunate enough to end up there even sicker and more depressed than they were when they came in. Now, I’m perfectly willing to do what I can to improve the place, but I need your permission. Yes or no?’
She was a little virago! He’d once looked up the meaning of the word after reading a book published by the Virago company. This turbulent, scolding woman seemed to fit the description admirably. But finding a word that fitted her didn’t help him understand what she was going on about. Abbott Road being a disgrace?
‘In what way?’ he asked, conscious of the fact he’d have to leave very shortly.
‘Well, paint, for one thing,’ she replied, which threw him into even worse confusion.
‘Paint? I run a medical clinic, not art classes.’
‘The paint on the walls!’
Ah!
‘The paint’s peeling? Is that the problem?’
‘Didn’t you listen to anything I said?’ she raged, and Mike suspected if she’d been two feet taller and a man she’d have socked him on the jaw. ‘The whole place is a disgrace. Come down from your ivory tower and check it out some time. See what your “business manager” thinks is suitable for Abbott Road. Take a look at the place, sit in the waiting room, flick through a grime-encrusted magazine. That is, of course, if your busy social life allows you an hour now and then to venture into the real world.’
She must be a patient down there, Mike realised. No wonder she hadn’t been able to get in touch with him. Patients saw the practising doctors at all his clinics—or spoke to his secretaries. It must be what, three years, since he’d done any hands-on doctoring, and then it had only been a week to fulfil an obligation to a friend. But she didn’t need to know that, and appeasing her should be easy. After all, as a patient the most she’d be there was for fifteen minutes at a time. He could send Barry, his business manager, or maybe Christine, Barry’s assistant, to check the place out and she’d never know he hadn’t been in person.
‘I hadn’t realised things were so bad,’ he said in his best conciliatory tone. ‘I’ll get down there this week.’
‘Good,’ the woman said, and he was congratulating himself on getting out of the situation so lightly when she added, ‘And make sure you have more than seven minutes. An hour would barely scratch the surface.’
Mike collected Jaclyn and drove to the Hilton, delivered his speech to two hundred selected guests, mingled for an hour to be polite then dropped Jaclyn at her luxury unit in the city, refusing her invitation to stay by pleading tiredness.
But as he drove along the river towards his home in an upmarket riverside suburb, he remembered the brunette’s face, not so much the neat features, dark eyes, soft lips and the perfect arches of her eyebrows, but the fire and passion that had lit it from within.
Bloody exhausting all that fire and passion, he reminded himself. Thank heavens as we get older common sense and sound business principles supersede it.
But the mention of Abbott Road had brought back memories of when he’d had the fire and passion—when he’d thrown all his energies into setting up that first inner-city medical clinic.
He turned away from the river, feeling the engine shift to a lower gear as he drove up the steep hill towards his house. High on an escarpment overlooking the river, and beyond it the city lights, it was not only in a prime position but was one of a handful of heritage-listed houses in the area—the ultimate status symbol.
But tonight his feeling of satisfaction in his hard-won achievements was lacking, and the light on in the library of his house suggested things weren’t going to get any better.
‘That you, Mike?’
His father had greeted him the same way all his life, and Mike was often tempted to ask whom he thought it might be.
‘You’re up late, Dad,’ he said, crossing the hall and entering the library, then bending to drop a kiss on his father’s greying hair. In just this way, his father, so manly a man, had kissed him goodbye every day of his childhood. Who was it had said the child was father of the man?
‘I keep having to take sidetracks with these old Greek chaps,’ Ted Trent told him. ‘I’m reading Aristotle and he mentions Socrates and I have to find that fellow to see what he has to say for himself.’
He waved his hands towards the wall of bookshelves where a small fork-lift had been adapted so he could roll his wheel-chair onto a platform and raise himself up to find a particular book, or range along the shelves in search of it.
‘Very time-consuming,’ Mike agreed, marvelling, as he always did, that this working-class man who’d had little education could read and understand the writings of the world’s great philosophers.
And get such pleasure from his pursuit of knowledge and understanding!
‘Libby phoned to say she won’t be coming tomorrow. Something on at school. She had her usual grumble about the teachers but sounded really bright.’
Disappointment warred with relief. He loved his daughter dearly, but at twelve the simple pleasures they’d once shared—going on picnics in the mountains, a day at the beach—had become ‘so boring, Dad’ that he’d begun to dread her visits as much as he anticipated them. Especially since she’d started bringing a clutch of friends with her, and the house had seemed overrun by very skimpily clad young females.
‘Well, now we won’t have a houseful of twelve-year-olds giggling around the place, do you want to do something special? We could take the boat down the bay.’
‘Sorry, son! Jack and I are off to the Darling Downs. It’s one of those old codgers’ trips and we heard a couple of new widows are going along. The bus’ll pick us up at seven. I’d left you a note as I didn’t think I’d see you.’
Which means he thought I’d spend the night with Jaclyn. Mike was irritated by the assumption. He hadn’t yet reached that stage of a relationship with her and, though he was tempted and knew she was willing, he was finding himself more and more reluctant to get too involved.
Having a twelve-year-old daughter was part of it. In the past, Libby had accepted any woman who’d happened to come on picnics with them as Dad’s friend. But there’d been a very knowing glint in her eye when she’d first met Jaclyn a couple of weeks ago. Knowing enough to make Mike draw back from committing himself any further.
For the moment!
‘Now, seeing you are here, tell me about the show.’
Mike settled into one of the comfortable leather armchairs, propped the foot with the still aching toe on a footstool and resigned himself to the task. His father might have a better social life than he did these days, but it didn’t stop the old man wanting to know all the details of Mike’s day—a habit that had started when Mike had been a kid at school. Then he’d sat at the kitchen table, watching his father cook their evening meal, and had enjoyed sharing the small disappointments or triumphs of the day.
At thirty-eight, there were nights when he’d rather have gone straight to bed!
Mike woke in the morning, after an unsettled night’s sleep, to an empty house and the prospect of a full day where he’d set aside all work plans and now had nothing to do.
He rolled over in bed and lifted the phone. The unsettled night had got him thinking about his relationship with Jaclyn. Maybe it was time to take it further. He’d phone her, see if she’d like to join him for breakfast at one of the riverside restaurants. Who knew what would follow?
Then a glance at the clock told him that ten past seven was too early to be phoning anyone. It must have been the bus departing with his father and Jack that had woken him. He’d go back to sleep.
At seven-thirty, frustrated by being unable to sleep late when given the chance, he climbed out of bed, winced as his sore toe hit the floor, showered, dressed in ‘round the house’ type clothes, then made himself a cup of coffee while he considered what to do.
All day.
He needed some exercise but his toe was still throbbing, so that was out.
There was always work. He could go to the office. The medical web-site he’d been setting up had taken all of his time lately, but Sid Chase had brought in the architectural drawings for the new clinic and he had to look at them some time. And Paul, his accountant, was a workaholic. He’d phone him up, suggest a working lunch to discuss financing the project. Paul was all for him divesting some of his less viable properties rather than borrowing for this.
Abbott Road!
He remembered the dark-haired woman and smiled to himself. ‘Give yourself more than an hour!’ she’d told him, with enough scorn to shrivel a lesser man.
Well, he had more than hour. He had an entire day. He’d go back to where it all began—take a look at Abbott Road.
