The Present
RETURNING FROM LUNCH — no fun at all, she loathed
hurting people — Jessica found a note from Brett De Vere,
her uncle, summoning her to a meeting in his office. It
was probably about the Siegal place, she thought,
carefully hanging up her new Gucci handbag. It had cost an
arm and a leg. She felt a tiny spasm of guilt, but she had
decided she must have it.
And why not? She was single. She had a great job, a
challenging, exciting life. Swiftly she took a hairbrush
from the bottom drawer of her desk and ran it briskly
through her long blond hair, which was naturally curly but
straightened at the moment. The action freed her a little
from thoughts of the upsetting lunch with Sean, who really
was a thoroughly nice guy, as wholesome as rolled oats.
Most girls would be over the moon having a guy like Sean
love them. The sad fact was he hadn't found a way to her
heart.
Jessica stowed her hairbrush away, then turned to stare
out the huge picture window directly behind her desk. It
offered a tranquil view of the quiet leafy street. It was
the bluest day. A day to hold in the memory. She loved the
location of their offices, the avenue of mature jacaranda
trees that in November, six months away, broke out in
blossom. At that time, the whole city of Brisbane became
tinted with an exquisite lavender-blue no sooner spent
than the great shade trees, the poincianas, turned the air
rosy. She loved life in the subtropics. Not too hot.
Perfect!
In the distance, the broad, deep river that wound through
the city's heart glittered in the afternoon sunlight.
Nature stirred her, gave her strength. Comforted, she
tried to work out what she was going to say to Brett. Her
uncle, trained as an architect from whence, becoming
bored, had branched out into interior design, had given
her the commission. She was desperate to show him she
measured up, but despite her best efforts, things weren't
going very well. She'd lavished a lot of time and effort
on her designs for the Siegals' resplendent new river-
front home. But the Siegals were proving to be rather
difficult clients. At least the wife, Chic, a fixture at
charity functions, was. Couldn't be her real name, Jessica
suspected, though she stood by Mrs. Siegal's decision to
make one up. She must have considered Chic had impact.
After all, she was only five-two standing fully erect.
But it was hell trying to deal with her. The fact that her
husband was a multimillionaire might have had something to
do with her endless waffling. De Vere's Design Studio had
a few millionaires on the books, but most of its clients
staved off mini-heart attacks by having a firm budget in
mind. Her uncle Brett was in his late forties and had
reached the point in his career when he could handpick his
clients. Such a shame, then, he'd let Chic Siegal through
the door.
About ready to join her uncle, Jessica checked herself
over in the long narrow wall mirror. The lime-green suit
and the fuchsia-pink-and-lime camisole beneath it had cost
a month's pay, but Brett was a stickler for looking good,
considering it was part of the job. He, himself, was
polished perfection. In her entire life, Jessica had never
seen her uncle slide into sloppiness. She winked at her
reflection then walked down the corridor to his office,
waggling her fingers at Becky, a senior designer, and
stopping at her door. Becky's desk was awash with swatches
of gorgeous new fabrics she was tossing around with
abandon. Turquoise, aquamarine, malachite. Jessica smiled.
Malachite sounded much better than olive. As a schoolgirl
hired for the holidays, Jessica had adored being in
Becky's office. She still did. The space was a veritable
Aladdin's cave.
Becky beamed back. "Love your suit, kid! Watcha pay for
that?"
"Not telling."
"We're friends, aren't we?" Becky, fifty for a few years
now, in her youth powerfully pretty and still hanging in
there, peered over the top of the glasses she had finally
made the decision to wear.
"Sure. I just can't get my tongue around the price tag."
"Well, you look like a million dollars." Becky gave her a
thumbs-up.
"Thanks, Beck."
Jessica resumed walking, smiling left and right at staff,
eight in all, clever, creative people very loyal to the
firm. She had joined De Vere's Design Studio soon after
completing her fine-arts degree with honors. As a result
of her degree, she'd been offered a position at the
Queensland art gallery, with good prospects for
advancement, but she'd turned it down. A decision about
which her eminent lawyer father, a pillar of society, a
man who thought he had a perfect right to speak his mind
at all times, had been most unhappy. "Working for your
uncle is a very frivolous decision, Jessica. Your mother
and I had high hopes for you, but our hopes don't seem to
mean anything to you." Her father generally spoke with all
the authority of the pope.
The fact that her stunningly handsome and gifted uncle was
gay might have had something to do with it. Brett's sexual
orientation made quite a few people in the family a tad
uncomfortable, but she had dealt with the issue by moving
out of the family home into a nice two-bedroom apartment
in a trendy inner-city neighbourhood. She was able to do
so thanks to the nest egg that Nan, her beloved maternal
grandmother — Brett's mother, Alex — had left her. Jessica
had been very close to Alex. In fact, her full name was
Jessica Alexandra Tennant. Christening her Jessica had not
been her mother's decision. She had wanted the name
Alexandra, after her own mother, for her newborn, but such
was her deference to her husband that she had given in to
Jessica after her baby's strong-minded, paternal
grandmother, a large imposing woman who wore so many
layers of clothing that one never knew exactly what sort
of body lay beneath. It was she who had descended on the
young couple like a galleon in full sail, for frequent,
unscheduled visits. Jessica's mother had once confided to
her daughter that the early days of her marriage had been
like living in a police state.
Jessica had been devastated when her beloved nan, with
never a complaint, had died of cancer when Jessica was
eighteen. She knew Brett greatly missed his mother. Nan
had offered that rare thing — unconditional love.
Jessica's formidable maternal grandfather, much like her
own father, had great difficulty accepting Uncle Brett's
homosexuality, seeing it as a blot on the family
escutcheon and a major hurdle in life. The hurdle part
Jessica was forced to concede had come into play; she had
seen it in action.
But she loved and admired her uncle, and she got on
famously with his partner of twenty years, both in
business and in life, Tim Langford. Tim was a sweet man,
exceptionally creative, with a prodigious, largely self-
taught knowledge of antiques. Tim handled the antiques-and-
decorative-objects side of the business.
Brett was working at his desk, smooth blond head bent over
an architectural drawing, but when she tapped at his door,
he looked up with his faintly twisted, rather
heartbreaking smile. Very few people saw the full picture
of Brett De Vere. "Hi! How did the lunch go?"
She took the seat opposite him. "Perfectly awful! Thanks
for asking. At least it didn't amount to a scene. Sean's a
really nice person, but I couldn't let him go on thinking
sooner or later we were bound for the altar. That wouldn't
have been fair to him. Besides, I like my independence."
"How could you fall in love with someone like that,
anyway?" Brett, who had never hit it off with Sean, asked.
"He could never make you happy. He's so damned ordinary."
"Maybe, but it took me a while to see it."
"At least you have," Brett said dryly.
"Next time I'll go for a Rhodes scholar," she joked.
"I'm not ready to settle down yet. I'm enjoying my life
just the way it is."
"Until the right guy comes along," Brett murmured, sitting
back and making a steeple of his long, elegant
fingers. "Then you'll change your mind. Have you managed
to get that truly silly woman who never shuts up on side?"
"Ever so slowly," she sighed. "The trouble with having too
much money is it opens up too many options. Mrs. Siegal
spends her time trolling through design magazines to the
point she simply can't decide whether she wants classical,
traditional grandeur, lots of drama, ultramodern or a
hybrid of the lot."
"Give her pure theatre," Brett advised. "The only trouble
with that is De Vere's puts its name to it. Maybe I should
make an attempt to help her decide?"
Jessica looked at him. Her uncle was an elegant, austerely
handsome man with fine features and an air of detachment.
Extremely intelligent, he was inclined to be sharp-
tongued, even caustic at times. His eyes were green. Like
hers. His hair ash blond, again like hers. They shared the
family face. Alex's face. Alex's coloring.
"Well?" he prompted breaking into her brief reverie.
"Why not? She fancies herself in love with you." Indeed
Brett's air of unattainability drove some women wild.
"A lot of good that will do her," he said with biting self-
mockery.
"What I don't get is they know you're not interested, yet
they fall in love with you all the same."
"A bitter pill no woman worth her salt can swallow," he
returned. "It's the Liz Taylor-Montgomery Clift syndrome.
Women always want the man they can't have."
"Is that what it is?" Jessica swiveled a quarter turn in
her black leather chair. "Be that as it may, at this point
I need help."
"Surely not the talented young woman short-listed for Best
Contemporary Residential Project!" Brett raised a brow.
"It would be quite a coup to win it."
"A coup, yes, but not beyond you. You're good, Jass," he
said, giving his professional, uncompromised opinion.
"I haven't handed over a client who hasn't been delighted
with your services. In fact, I could say with some
confidence that my mantle, when I go to the angels, will
fall on you. You're developing a following with your
watercolor renderings of our clients'favourite rooms. They
love them. Single-handedly you're reviving the old genre.
Oh, and remember it was my idea."
"Don't I always give you credit?"
"Of course you do."
It was Brett who had encouraged Jessica to turn her hobby
of painting interiors in watercolors, an art project
carried on from her student days, into a lucrative
sideline. For the past year, she'd worked very
successfully on half a dozen commissions, along with the
major commission of designing the stage sets for the Bijou
Theatre's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Maybe one day she
would follow her uncle into designing stage and movie
sets.
"Is that what you wanted to speak to me about, the
Siegals?" she asked.
"That was the second thing. First —" Brett ruffled through
his papers again, this time finding a long fax
" — what do you know about Broderick Bannerman?"
"Bannerman...Bannerman...rings a bell." Jessica sorted
through her memory bank. "Hang on. Don't tell me." She
held up a hand. "He's the cattle baron, right? Flagship
station, one of a chain, by name of something starting
with an M...M...M...Mokhani, that's it. Banner-man always
figures in the Bulletin"s Rich List."
"The very one." Brett looked at her with approval. He
leaned forward to hand over the fax, murmuring something
complimentary about her powers of recall. "And he
remembers you! He saw that interview on TV with the
ubiquitous Bruce Hilton when he so easily could have
missed it. That was just after you'd been short-listed for
your award. Apparently he was so impressed he wants you to
handle the interior design for his new temple in the
wilds —" temple' is how some magazine described it. Lord
knows what's wrong with the original homestead. I'm sure I
read somewhere it was magnificent, or at the very worst,
eminently livable."
Jessica, busy concentrating on the contents of the fax,
lifted her head in amazement. "I don't get this. With all
the established interior designers in the country, let
alone you, purely on the basis of the proverbial fifteen
minutes of fame on a talk show, he's singled out little
ol" me with scant history in the business and only twenty-
four?"
"It would appear so," Brett replied blandly. "Obviously
he's a man who can sum up someone on the spot. Remember,
you're a sophisticated twenty-four with natural gifts."
"How could he want me when he could have you?" Jessica
asked in some wonderment.