Then he kissed her.
Emma Darcy
To Sue—for flaunting her fortieth birthday with a brilliant party where my friends Dr. Nick Smith, Dr. Geoffrey McCarthy and Dr. Harvey Adams happily informed me of the etiquette in delivering the results of a pregnancy test and insisted I acknowledge their contribution to this story.
A NANNY?
The question had niggled Beau Prescott on and off throughout the fourteen hour flight from Buenos Aires to Sydney. It had reared its tantalising head from the very first reading of his grandfather’s will, pertinently included with all the other official notices sent to him in the solicitor’s packet. Now that his journey home was almost over and he was about to get answers, it pushed once more to the forefront of his mind.
Why on earth had his grandfather employed a nanny for the last two years of his life? And why was she listed in the will as another responsibility to be inherited by Beau, along with the rest of the family retainers?
A nanny made no sense to him. There weren’t any children living in his grandfather’s household. None he knew of anyway. Certainly none had been named in the will. There seemed absolutely no point in including a nanny—whoever she was—amongst the staff who were to remain as his dependents for at least another year, if not for the rest of their lives.
It was different with the others. Beau was completely in sympathy with looking after Mrs. Featherfield who was virtually an institution as his grandfather’s housekeeper. Sedgewick, the butler, and Wallace, the chauffeur, had almost equal longevity. As for Mr. Polly, the head gardener, tipping him out of his beloved grounds was inconceivable. Each one of them deserved every consideration. But a nanny-come-lately without any children to mind?
Beau turned her name over in his mind...Margaret Stowe. Margaret sounded rather old-fashioned, spinsterish. For some reason he linked Stowe with stowaway. She could be a lame-dog nanny, fallen on hard times. His grandfather had a habit of taking in the occasional oddity, putting them on their feet again. But two years of largesse and an inclusion in the will seemed a bit much.
“We will be landing at Mascot on schedule,” the pilot announced. “The weather is fine, current temperature nineteen degrees Celsius. Forecast for today is...”
Beau looked out his window and felt his stomach curl, hit by a wave of grief he’d been holding at bay since he’d received the news of his grandfather’s death. The distinctive features of Sydney were spread out below, the predominance of red roofs, the harbour, the bridge, the opera house. This view had always meant coming home to him. But home had also meant Vivian Prescott, the man who’d taken in his orphaned eight-year-old grandson and given him the world as his playground.
Not so much of a grandfather as a grand person, Beau thought, keenly feeling the huge bite that had been taken so abruptly, so shockingly out of his life. Vivian Prescott had lived on a grand scale, had cultivated a grand approach to everything he’d done. His heart should have been grand enough to last a lot longer.
Vivian...now there was a name that would make most men cringe. The Prescott family had a history of bestowing eccentric names. Beau had often winced over his, but his grandfather...never! He’d rejoiced in having one he considered uniquely his. “It means life, my boy. And joie de vivre is what I’m about.”
He’d carried it with such panache, he’d made it perfectly acceptable, a natural extension of his highly individual personality, a positive expression of artistic flair and style, a provocative emphasis to the wickedly teasing twinkle in his ever-young eyes. It was almost impossible to believe he was actually gone and it hurt like hell not to have been there with him before he died.
A spurt of anger overlaid the grief. Damn it all! His grandfather had no business dying at eighty-six. He’d always boasted he’d live to a hundred, smoking his favourite cigars, drinking the best French champagne, a pretty woman hanging on each arm as he swanned through all the glittering charity events on his social calendar. He’d loved life too much to ever let go of it.
Beau heaved a sigh to relieve the tightness in his chest and told himself it was futile foolishness to feel cheated of more time with his grandfather. The fault was in his own complacency for letting almost three years go by without a visit home. It was all very well to excuse himself on the grounds of finding South America an explorer’s paradise. A trip home now and then wouldn’t have been a hardship. It simply had never occurred to him that the old man’s long run of good health might be failing.
There’d been no hint of it in his letters. But then there’d been no mention of a nanny, either. Beau frowned again over the vexing puzzle. If his grandfather had been sick, surely he would have hired a nurse, not a nanny. Unless...no, he couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe his grandfather had gone the least bit senile. There had to be some other answer.
The plane landed. The moment it stopped, Beau was out of his seat and opening the overhead locker for his flight bag, wanting to be off with as little delay as possible.
“May I help you, Mr. Prescott?”
It was the cute air hostess who’d been so eager and willing to look after his every need on the trip. Beau flashed her a smile. “No, I’m fine, thank you.” She was a honey but he wasn’t interested in taking up the invitation in her eyes. His mind was on serious business, no room for play.
Nevertheless, he was aware of her lustful once-over as he moved past her to the exit tunnel and felt a slight twinge of regret. He’d been womanless for a while, busy mapping out a new trek up the Amazon. Still, he’d never had a problem attracting a woman when he was ready for one. Being over six feet tall and having a body packed with muscles seemed to be a turn-on to most of them, even when he looked scruffy from being too long in uncivilised areas.
His mouth twitched as he remembered his grandfather calling it his curse. “It’s too easy for you, my boy, and if you keep taking the pickings, you’ll never know the fruits of settling down with a good woman.”
“I have no interest in settling down, Grandpa,” he’d answered.
It was still true three years later, yet his grandfather’s reply plucked at his conscience now.
“Beau, you’re thirty years old. It’s time you thought of having children. As it stands, you’re the last of our family line, and I for one, don’t like the thought of our gene pool coming to an end. It’s our only claim to immortality, having a line that goes on after we die.”
Had the old man been feeling his mortality then?
“Grandpa, there’s no time limit on a man to have children,” he’d argued. “Didn’t Charlie Chaplin have them into his nineties? I bet you could still have one yourself.”
“You need to stick around to bring them up right. Think about it, Beau. Your parents weren’t much older than you are now when their plane crashed in Antarctica. No second chances for them. If you don’t take time out from your travelling to get married and start a family, it may be too late before you know it.”
Too late...misery dragged at Beau’s heart. Too late to say goodbye to the wonderful old man who’d given him so much. Too late to say one last thank-you. Too late to even attend the funeral, held while Beau was still deep in the Amazon valley, out of range of any modern form of communication.
All he could do now was carry out his grandfather’s will as it had been set out for him, even to keeping a useless nanny in his employ for another year. And making Rosecliff—the Prescott palace—his residence for the same period of time.
Maybe the latter was his grandfather’s