An Indecent Proposal. Margot Early

caught, and she stumbled on the walk. Graceful, Bronwyn.

      She would have known him anywhere, and already her eyes were seeking out that cleft chin, the jaw and delicate yet prominent bones she remembered in his face. His medium brown hair was a little too long, parted on the side, and still had a tendency to dash across his hazel eyes.

      The eyes Wesley had inherited.

      Patrick Stafford stopped in his tracks. He paused, gave her one derisive look, and said, “Why doesn’t this surprise me?”

      Chapter Two

      Patrick Stafford wasn’t surprised to see her? Well, Bronwyn wasn’t surprised to see him, either. After all, wasn’t seeing him part of her purpose in coming to Fairchild Acres? Hadn’t she subtly quizzed college friends about the old crowd until they’d gotten around to Patrick, until finally she’d learned where he was? He was Wesley’s father, and both father and son deserved the chance to meet, to get to know each other.

      But now, face-to-face with Patrick, Bronwyn remembered how angry and hurt he’d been when she’d refused his proposal. We were so young, she thought. She definitely intended to let him know that Wesley was his son, but not in front of Wesley.

      He paused, seeming to take in the heat, sweat, dirt, backpacks, soccer ball, everything.

      “I’m looking for the assistant housekeeper,” Bronwyn said.

      “And here I was sure you were looking for me.”

      He had a fine nose, perfect for looking down at her, Bronwyn thought.

      “Let me fill in the blanks,” he added, “to save you the trouble.”

      He stood over her, and Bronwyn felt the weight of the burden on her hips and shoulders and wished she could set down the huge pack, but it was too much trouble to get it back on.

      “Sugar daddy is gone,” he said, “so you tracked down Patrick Stafford to see if he might step in.”

      The presumption floored Bronwyn. On top of the heat, the truck ride, the mix-up over the days, this was too much. Patrick thought she hoped he would support her? How ridiculous. “Even I,” she said, “don’t have such an inflated opinion of my own charms.”

      “Your arrival here on the tails of Theodoros’s untimely demise strikes me as more than coincidental.”

      As it was. The job opening at Fairchild Acres had been pure serendipity, but Bronwyn had hunted job ads in the Hunter Valley in the hope of finding something. She was hanged if she’d admit so now, especially with Wesley listening.

      “Do you mind?” she said, her eyes indicating that a child was present, a child who regarded Aristotle Theodoros as his father. For the first time she wondered if maybe Wesley might be better off without Patrick in his life. How insensitive could the man be, talking so casually about Ari’s “untimely demise”? “You could actually point us in the right direction. I have an appointment with Mrs. Lipton for tomorrow about a job in the kitchens. I thought it was today, and we’ve arrived too early.”

      “Then, you ought to trek out to the highway and get a lift to the nearest hotel.”

      After Marie’s kindness, Patrick’s callousness stung. Suddenly, Bronwyn felt close to breaking down. But she managed to repeat, “If you could let the housekeeper know I’m here or tell me where to find her.”

      Patrick saw that her lips, lovely lips against that honey-colored skin he remembered so well, trembled. You ass, Patrick, he thought. There wasn’t a chance in the world that Bronwyn’s showing up here was coincidence, but she had no chance of worming her way into his good graces. So why not behave decently toward her? She was, after all, a widow accompanied by a young child, and the kid didn’t deserve to suffer for his mother’s—not to mention father’s—crimes.

      The boy would be mourning the loss of his dad; that would be natural.

      Turning, he nodded toward the door in the big house through which he’d just come. “Go on in. Agnes is inside, first door on the right.” Then, looking again at the kid, whose gaze had now turned cold—toward him, Patrick realized—he sighed and pulled open the screen. “Come in. We have room for you for the night.”

      Bronwyn marveled that Patrick even smelled the same. It wasn’t a strong scent, and she hadn’t been terribly close to him, yet he smelled familiar, from that years-ago time when they were lovers, back when she’d been a waitress in the campus coffee shop and he one of those lucky students who didn’t have to work his way through uni.

      “Agnes, this is Bron Theodoros—”

      “Bronwyn Davies,” Bronwyn corrected. Bron. Many people naturally shortened her name to Bron. Ari had hated it. Like “brawn.” You’re not brawny. And Bronwyn had begun to insist upon the use of her whole name—even in the last weeks she’d retained friendship with Patrick before their horrible parting.

      Patrick cast her a quick look, but didn’t argue. “Bronwyn Davies and her son…”

      “Wesley,” Bronwyn supplied.

      “Bronwyn has an appointment with Mrs. Lipton tomorrow, and she arrived on the wrong day. I’m sure we can put these two up for the night in the house.” He put subtle emphasis on the last three words. “Bronwyn and I are old acquaintances from uni.”

      “If there’s room in the employee cottage,” Bronwyn put in, “I’m sure that will be fine.”

      “Well, the available room got painted out there, and I know it’s no good tonight because of the fumes,” Agnes told her. Agnes was a fiftyish woman who wore her hair in a neat French twist. Her black-and-white uniform was spotless. Bronwyn remembered that Marie, in the kitchens, had worn a T-shirt with Fairchild Acres on it, so Bronwyn supposed that would be her uniform in the future. “We can put you up in the western corner.”

      Hot, Bronwyn thought. But the house was air-conditioned, blessedly so, so even the west part would be lovely. A roof over her head would be terrific.

      “Is the room ready?” Patrick asked.

      “Certainly,” said Agnes, with an air of being vaguely insulted at his suggestion that it might not be.

      “Then I’ll show them the way,” he said, surprising Bronwyn again. Nonetheless, she couldn’t believe that he was doing so as a gesture of hospitality. No doubt he planned to tell her again that he wasn’t going to support her. As if she would let him. She’d only wanted to give him the chance to know Wesley. But now she’d begun to wonder if that was such a good idea.

      She and Wesley followed Patrick down the hall to a stairway, which, though clearly not the main set of stairs, was wide and led to an upstairs open hallway that looked down on what appeared to be a conservatory below. The upstairs hall was lined with photographs of horses, horses covered with blankets of roses, horses in the winner’s circle. Accompanying many of them was the same tall, straight-backed woman at different stages throughout her life. Bronwyn had seen her before— from a distance at one or two events she and Ari had attended—and in photographs, as well. Louisa Fairchild. Bronwyn half hoped she would never come face-to-face with the Hunter Valley matriarch. Would Louisa meet any prospective employee? Bronwyn could just imagine the reaction of this seemingly indomitable woman at the news that Aristotle Theodoros’s widow was on the premises. Did she dare ask Patrick not to mention the fact?

      No. He would scorn her for asking him to help her cover up for…for what?

      For having been married to a criminal.

      There were two upstairs bedrooms in the south corner, and they shared a bathroom. The actual corner room with its four-poster bed was to be Bronwyn’s, and a smaller room looking out on one of the paddocks was Wesley’s.

      “No soccer inside, mate,” Patrick told Wesley as he showed him into the room, which contained a silky oak double bed.

      “He knows that,” Bronwyn said. She