setting the table, and peace reigned, if only momentarily, in the Halliday kitchen.
Pop was explaining to Mac the project Nikki would be doing when school resumed, and why she needed a spear.
‘I’ve made so much stuff for so many kids over the years,’ he added. ‘Izzy, was it you who was the robot? That was probably my most ingenious design, although I did go through a lot of aluminium foil.’
Any minute now he was going to dig out the old photos and she’d be squirming with embarrassment all night!
‘Okay, dinner is ready.’
Hallie saved the day this time. She set the roasted leg of lamb on the table and handed Pop the carving knife and fork, Lila brought over dishes filled with crisply roasted potatoes and sticky baked pumpkin, while Izzy did her bit, taking the jugs of gravy from the warming drawer in the big oven and setting them on the table.
‘Right!’ Hallie said. ‘Guest of honour—that’s you, Mac—at the head of the table. Izzy, you’ll be working with him so you might as well get to know a bit about him. You sit on one side and Lila on the other, and no descriptions of operations of any sort, please, Lila. Pop, you sit next to Lila, and then Nikki, and on the other side Marty and Cindy, and I’ll sit at the end because—’
‘Because you have to get up and down to get things,’ the family chorused, and Izzy began to relax.
This was home, this was family, this was where she was safe, so who cared if her body found Mac whoever he was—did he have a last name?—attractive? Of course she’d felt attraction before—although not for quite a while, now she thought about it.
‘Are you going to sit?’
Heat crept up her neck and with her hair piled haphazardly on top of her head, the wretched man would see it! How was she to know he’d hold her chair for her?
She thumped down in the seat, too quickly for him to guide it into place, pulled it in herself and turned to offer a brusque thank you. She met the blue of his eyes and felt herself drowning.
This wasn’t attraction, this was madness.
‘So, why Wetherby?’
Lila saved her again, asking the question that had been in Izzy’s mind, only hers had been phrased more as ‘Why the hell Wetherby?’.
Now he was smiling at Lila—well, what man didn’t smile at Lila?—and the kind of dark voice she remembered from the beach was explaining in short, fairly innocuous sound bites: army doctor, Middle East on and off over the last few years—
‘—so when I decided to get out of the service I looked for somewhere green, and close to the surf, yet small enough to be peaceful.’
‘Well, it’s certainly that—I’m guessing a month here and you’ll be bored to tears,’ Cindy told him.
‘Hey, Cindy, this is my home!’ Marty protested.
‘And this is only the second time you’ve been here, Cindy, and then only for a night,’ Nikki pointed out.
‘Are all small-town people as defensive as Wetherbyans?’ Mac murmured to Izzy, who felt the heat of his body radiating towards her and the breath of his words brush against her skin so all she could do was look blankly at him.
‘Of course,’ Lila said briskly, and although she’d once again saved the day, she was also studying Izzy closely. Probably trying to work out what was happening.
As if I know, Izzy thought desperately, passing the potatoes to their guest, while Lila piled slices of meat from the platter Pop had filled onto Mac’s plate.
Mac took the offerings of vegetables as they arrived and passed them on, poured gravy on his meat, and when his hostess picked up her knife and fork, he began to eat.
He tried to make sense of this family—anything to forget the woman by his side and the effect she was having on him. But how big, blond, blue-eyed Marty could be related to the beautiful Lila, let alone the petite redhead by his side, was beyond him.
‘We’re foster kids.’
He wasn’t sure whether he was more surprised by Izzy speaking to him or the fact that she’d read his thoughts.
‘All of you?’
‘Oh, yes, and there’s heaps more of us. It was a nunnery, you see, and Pop bought it for a song when he and Hallie married, and they intended filling it with their own kids, but that didn’t happen so they went out and found the strays that careless parents leave behind, or kids whose parents died, in Lila’s case. And they gave us all unquestioning love, and stability, and the confidence to be anything we wanted to be. But more than that, they gave us the security of a home, a family.’
‘It’s true,’ Lila said, nodding from his other side.
‘And it’s been the best thing that happened in all of our lives,’ Marty put in, although Hallie was telling them to hush, it was nothing anyone else wouldn’t have done.
But for some reason Mac’s thoughts had stopped earlier in the conversation so although he’d heard the rest, and been impressed, the question that came out was, ‘A nunnery?’
How could these beautiful women be living in a nunnery? Except it wasn’t a nunnery, of course it wasn’t, it was just that his brain wasn’t working too well. There was nothing immodest about the sprite’s clothing, but from where he was sitting he could see the tops of the soft roundness of her breasts, and blood that should have been feeding his brain was elsewhere.
‘It was cheap,’ the man they all called Pop offered. ‘And not that hard to knock two or three of the little cells together into decent-sized bedrooms.’
‘You’re a carpenter? Builder?’
Pop smiled and shook his head.
‘Truckie—mainly long haul. I’ve taught all the kids to drive trucks.’
‘I’m learning now,’ Nikki announced, adding, rather to Mac’s relief, ‘Though only in the paddocks behind the house at the moment.’
The talk turned to the animals kept in the paddocks—did Mac ride? That was Nikki. Hallie mentioned the vegetable garden—‘Feel free to help yourself to any vegetable...we always have far too many!’—and with the simple, delicious meal, and the general chat, Mac found himself relaxing in the midst of this strange family.
‘You’ve family yourself, Mac?’ Pop asked.
‘Parents, of course,’ he said. ‘Though I don’t see much of them. The army, you know—you never know from one day to the next where you’ll be.’
He didn’t add that their regular divorces and remarriages had dulled any filial emotion he’d ever felt for them.
‘Married?’
This time the question came from the beautiful Lila and he didn’t miss the wink she sent to Izzy.
Best to get that sorted once and for all, and quickly.
‘Was once,’ he replied, forcing himself to speak normally, although what felt like a very unsubtle third degree had his temper rising.
‘And once was more than enough,’ he added, to underline the point.
He glanced at Izzy, who was blushing furiously, and realised the questions weren’t so much for him but to tease her.
Marty put a stop to it.
‘Enough!’ he said, directing the word at Lila. ‘Pop asked a normal, everyday question, but all you’re doing, Lila, is teasing Izzy.’
He turned to Mac.
‘Izzy had an unfortunate experience with a doctor we had here a few years ago and it’s become a bit of a family joke.’
The shrill tone of a mobile phone broke up the conversation,