By Request Collection 1. Jackie Braun

was silent a moment, then said, ‘Okay. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t hear the rumours.’ Her voice was as soft as the evening air.

      ‘Why would you?’

      ‘To spare you pain … or embarrassment maybe?’

      He shook his head. Not pain, not any more. He’d taught himself not to react every time he thought of Janine. Not embarrassment because he didn’t give a rat’s ass what others thought they knew. ‘Don’t spare my feelings, Lissa. Either you believe the gossip-mongers or you don’t.’ Watching her, he reached for the wine bottle, raised it to his lips but didn’t drink.

      ‘I didn’t really know you back then. You weren’t real. You were more a. fantasy.’ She looked down at her hands, then back at him. ‘But I’m beginning to know the man you are now. You’re kind and generous, you’re a good listener, you care about others—’

      ‘But you don’t know whether to believe the rumours or not.’

      She lifted her glass, sipped from it, set it down again. ‘Of course I don’t believe them.’

      Was she telling the truth about how she felt? Or was it a carefully disguised attempt? He realised that what she thought mattered to him a great deal more than he’d have liked.

      ‘You can’t decide,’ he said, watching her. ‘You want to believe they’re lies but deep down inside you, there’s always been that doubt. Who is Blake Everett? Not the man you wanted to see, but the real man? Could he make a girl pregnant then walk away? Could he walk away from his own child?’

      ‘Stop it, Blake.’

      ‘And now we’ve had sex, you think a bit further. and you wonder, what if, just once, your pills don’t work? You ask yourself, ‘Would he walk away from me? Would he leave me to raise our child alone?’’

      She shook her head, closed her eyes. ‘Stop.’

      ‘Maybe I could walk away. Maybe my upbringing convinced me that alone was best, that responsibility didn’t matter.’ He turned the bottle in his hands, studying the distorted image of the burning candle through the glass. Everyone had their own way of looking at things.

      ‘Or perhaps back then, I simply made the problem go away. Don’t tell me that never crossed your mind.’ He looked into her eyes, read the answer.

      ‘Blake, please, I know you better now.’

      He picked up her glass, downed the rest of her wine in one long swallow and said, ‘Let me tell you about Janine.’

       CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      Y‘OU don’t have to. I know you’d never do what they say you did.’

      He challenged her clear-eyed gaze. ‘Maybe I want to set the record straight.’ For you at least. He cared more than he wanted to what Lissa believed and what she thought about him.

      He looked up, away from the warm distraction before him, to the cold blue emotionless stars. ‘I met Janine at the beach. She asked me about life-saving. Said she was interested in joining. She lived in a small apartment on the edge of town and was studying law and pulling late-night shifts at a nearby club to pay her fees.

      ‘Her body was every teenage guy’s fantasy but she didn’t even seem to be aware of it. She had a freshness about her and a keen mind and I found the combination irresistible.

      ‘We started dating. I saw her every day for lunch and in the evening before she had to go to work. We were together for two months. The houseboat didn’t feel right so I told her I intended getting us a bigger place and supporting her so she didn’t have to work nights. I’d already bought and sold my first property and was making a reasonable income at the dive shop.

      ‘But before we’d met I’d arranged to sail from Perth to Port Lincoln. I wanted to test my sea legs and the Great Australian Bight has some of the world’s roughest seas. Throw in some scuba diving and I was supposed to be gone five weeks. She cried all over me the day before I left and told me how much she loved me and how she couldn’t bear to be without me. I cut my journey short by ten days for her.

      ‘Then a week later she told me she was pregnant and that we needed to get married fast. I hadn’t known who her parents were until then. She’d kept very quiet about her privileged upbringing.’

      Lissa frowned, doing the calculations. ‘How pregnant?’

      Exactly. ‘She didn’t say and it didn’t occur to me to ask. She said it didn’t matter since we loved each other and I’d forget the navy now we had a baby on the way.’ He blew out a breath. The old pain still had the ability to crush. ‘You know, she nearly had me. Then I saw her due date on a report she’d carelessly left inside a pregnancy advice book on her bedside table. There was no way I could have been the father.’

      He’d been devastated. He’d let himself be drawn into love only to be betrayed again. It had been the last time.

      He jerked himself out of the memory. ‘So I did some quick investigating. Turned out her night shifts hadn’t been of the waitressing kind. I went to Sydney and joined the navy a week later.’

      ‘How could someone do that?’ Lissa’s voice seemed to come from a long way away.

      ‘Quite easily, it would seem.’

      ‘Blake, I’m …’ Lissa swallowed. He wouldn’t want her pity. ‘That must have been tough.’ She reached out and covered his hand with hers on the table and felt him flinch.

      Before she could think of how to tell him she understood his anguish, she stopped. Because she didn’t understand. She had no idea how he felt. Whether he’d have given up his navy dreams to be a father. To make a home with her and the baby.

      He pulled his hand away, flexed it at his side and rose abruptly. ‘I’m going for a run.’

      Lissa’s heart ached on his behalf. She’d tried reaching out and he’d rejected that, so she just said, ‘Take care,’ as he stalked away.

      There was a coolness in the air and it wasn’t just the evening’s breeze from the river. Janine’s deception had broken something inside Blake and talking about it tonight had scraped at the old wounds. She knew he needed that alone time.

      She cleared the dishes, hoping Blake would come back soon and she could see how he was. When he didn’t, she went to the room where she’d set up her artwork. She pushed the window wide to let in the evening.

      Ears strained, she listened for the sound of Blake’s footsteps on the pavement. She could hear nature’s soft night music, the distant sounds of a party in progress. The frangipani’s scent from outside mingled with the tang of turpentine and charcoal.

      With a sigh, she tucked her legs beneath her on the tarpaulin she’d set on top of the carpet, letting her gaze meander through the window to the river with the spill of moonlight shimmering like pearl beads on black velvet.

      The moonlit scene reminded her that she loved working with black and white. She opened her sketch pad. If only problems were as clear-cut. She selected a black pencil with a blunt smudged tip and drifted it at random over the blank page.

      She wasn’t aware of time or her cramped fingers or the moon’s slow arc across the sky. Nothing took her attention from her work. Until she felt the hairs on her neck rise.

      For a few seconds she froze, remembering how Todd used to creep up on her, finding it funny to see her jump.

      She looked over her shoulder. And her heart started beating again. Blake.

      ‘I startled you.’

      ‘Only a bit. I’m all right.’

      He watched her a moment without speaking.

      ‘You