The Marriage Gamble Read online

  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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  EASIER said than done. He could get to Abbott Road, no problem, but how to get in to the clinic? He could phone the clinic’s office manager—which would arouse immediate suspicion in that woman’s breast. She’d assume she was in trouble—people always did—and insist on accompanying him, which would spoil what he was beginning to think of as a sentimental journey.

  Who else would have keys? No doubt the medical staff, but he didn’t know any of them personally. Chris Welsh, who’d started with him at Abbott Road, now appointed all the doctors, and Jill Claybourne, who’d been their nurse-receptionist in those early days, was in charge of the nursing staff.

  Calling either of them would raise more questions than he wished to answer. Both knew he was thinking of selling the place, and both had argued against it—though they’d both done well out of Trent Clinics and should understand by now there was no place for sentiment in business decisions.

  Security people must have keys. They were on call twenty-four hours a day to answer the alarms. Mike had to check the discreet sign on the outside of the kitchen window to recall the name of the firm who did all his security, then, once connected, go through the third-degree, trying to prove he was who he said he was.

  ‘Look,’ he said, when the argument had raised his temper to near-explosion point, ‘get your boss, or whoever has authority to hand over keys, down to your office. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes with enough ID to satisfy a police investigation, and I’ll want to collect that key, or I’ll tear up the contract I have with your firm.’

  He got the key, but the victory brought him little joy. The head of the
security firm had asked if Karen had had her baby yet, and Mike, unwilling to admit he knew no Karen, pregnant or otherwise, had mumbled something he’d hoped was noncommittal and changed the subject. It had simply been a reminder of how out of touch he’d become.

  School was more interesting for his daughter than spending a day with her dad, he didn’t know the names of his employees and firms whose existence depended on their contracts with him had never realised he existed, content to do business with whoever headed their particular branch of his organisation.

  He drove to the city, parked his car and walked down the pedestrian mall in the centre of the city. When he’d first opened the clinic, it had been a busy thoroughfare, but it was now blocked off to all but emergency vehicles. Trees and shade-cloth sails provided shelter, while seats offered resting places for weary feet. Being Sunday, it was near deserted, the tables and chairs from the sidewalk cafés stacked away.

  There was the old pharmacy where Lauren had worked when he’d first met her. She’d been as excited as he had over the clinic in the beginning—or had she always seen it as a means to an end?

  The pharmacy had been renovated, with pinkish coloured tiles covering the old brick façade, making it look modern and inviting.

  Making the doorway to the clinic seem dim and dark in comparison.

  He moved on and stood in front of the small entrance where steps led down to the basement he’d turned into an inner-city clinic thirteen years ago. Of course, as the clinic was closed, most of the lights were off. That would explain why it looked so dark and uninviting. The dim light above the stairs was probably a safety precaution.

  Mike walked past the entrance and frowned. He’d eventually bought the building that housed the clinic but surely there’d always been a snack bar in the ground floor shop. When had it closed? And who’d approved the lease to what called itself an adult bookshop, but from the window display sold far more than books? Right next to a medical clinic children could be attending!