An Indecent Proposal. Margot Early

move off. She wouldn’t be interested in the things he was.

      But she said, “Do you like horses, Wesley?”

      “I haven’t been around them much. My dad—” Abruptly he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to talk about his father. But that seemed so silly. Wesley knew that his father hadn’t drugged any horses himself. He knew this because he read the papers, though his mother had tried to keep them out of sight. He used to find and take them from the garage and take them to his room.

      “Yes?” Louisa Fairchild arched her eyebrows.

      “He knew about horses,” Wesley decided to say.

      “Where is your father?”

      “He died.”

      The look of sympathy the old lady gave him made Wesley feel warm inside, and suddenly he felt tears come to his eyes. He turned away so that she wouldn’t see.

      “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Perhaps you’d like to learn about horses, too. You can remember your father that way, by doing something which interested him.You can be like him. Our loved ones, after they die, live on in us.”

      You can be like him.

      Wesley wasn’t sure he wanted to be like his father. Once, he would have said that, yes, he wanted to be just like him. But everything had gotten confused when his father went to jail. It didn’t seem okay to want to be like him, because he had stolen people’s money, basically, or cheated them out of it. Just regular people, too, not especially bad people. Just…anyone.

      His mother had said once, “He was weak, Wesley.”

      Weak? Or bad? He’d asked his mother, and she’d said, “The hell of it is, I don’t know and I can’t tell you. Only your father could answer that question.”

      But, in any case, the old lady was being nice, and maybe she was one of those lonely old people his mother sometimes talked about, people with no one left who loved them.

      So he said, “I’d like to learn about horses.”

      “I’ve just got to lose some weight,” said Helena, one of the prep cooks, as she chopped carrots by the sink where Bronwyn was washing dishes.

      Helena was more than heavy, Bronwyn could see, with almost three chins. Pity stirred in her heart, along with an old urge—it felt very old, pre-Ari—to do something to help. It was, in fact, the desire to help obese people that had led Bronwyn to study sports nutrition and physiology at university. She had done this because her own mother had been obese. Not back when they’d been homeless and living on the streets. Later, when, because of Bronwyn’s first job, they were finally safe. Suddenly, her mother had experienced a weight gain of almost a hundred pounds, then diabetes and health struggles and sudden death.

      Bronwyn had vowed to always stay in good shape herself. But she’d really wanted to do something for other people like her mother.

      “I wasn’t always like this,” Helena volunteered. “I used to be closer to your size.”

      Bronwyn eyed the diet soft drink at Helena’s elbow and said, “You might try drinking some juice instead of those.”

      “But the calories!”

      “The thing is, if you eat something with nutritional content you’ll probably be less hungry. In fact,” she added, “studies have linked diet soft drinks with weight gain. They seem to make people crave more calories.”

      “You think? I sure wish I could lose weight. But every time I diet, I just end up putting it right back on.”

      “For me, anyhow,” Bronwyn said, “nutritious food makes me feel better than things that are bad for me. So I’d rather have fresh fruit or vegetables or whole grains than things that have a lot of nonfood junk in them.”

      “You might be right about that.”

      “She’s right!” chimed in Howard, the sous-chef. “You eat too many crackers, Helena.”

      “But they’re low fat!”

      “And there’s nothing in them,” he told her. “No nutritional value.”

      “I bet you work out, too,” Helena said to Bronwyn.

      “Not now. Back when I was married—” Bronwyn stopped abruptly.

      “Wesley told me your husband died,” said a woman’s voice beside her.

      Bronwyn started, but it was just Marie, sticking her hands beneath the tap to wash them.

      “Oh, you poor thing,” said Helena. “How did that happen?”

      Omitting to tell her employer that she was Ari Theodoros’s widow was one thing. But she didn’t want to lie to coworkers, to people Bronwyn hoped would become her friends. After all, both Marie and Helena lived in the employee cottage where Wesley and Bronwyn would be staying. So Bronwyn said quietly, “He was murdered.”

      “Oh, God. I’m so sorry I asked you about it!” Helena exclaimed. “How terrible for you. But you don’t have to talk about it anymore.”

      They were probably curious—Australia had few murders—but no one asked more.

      Howard changed the subject. “You know, I think we should have an exercise class here, for employees. Do some yoga or something.”

      Howard was American. Besides working in the kitchen he was apprenticing to a local farrier. Louisa had a large kitchen staff for the size of her business, but Helena had explained that she did a fair amount of entertaining.

      Marie asked, “Where could we have a yoga class, and when?”

      “Before work in the morning or after we finish up at night,” Howard suggested. “I bet Louisa would find some place for us.”

      “Yeah, you ask her,” François, the chef, suggested, with the air of baiting him.

      “All right, I will.”

      “But who’s qualified to teach something like that?” Helena asked.

      Bronwyn hesitated. Her leisure activities, while married to Ari, had been Iyengar yoga and running, things she’d done at university as part of her own physical fitness regimen. She’d also played on several teams at university and had volunteered coaching a girls’ hockey team. She certainly had a strong sports background, and the course of study she’d pursued at school made her better qualified than most.

      “I suppose I could,” she said.

      “I think Louisa has been surprised by what a fine horsewoman Megan is,” Dylan Hastings told Patrick as the two men sat on Louisa’s veranda late that afternoon.