Маргарет Уэй – Olivia's Awakening (страница 2)

“Sooner or later, Olivia, we have to pay for our sins. When it comes down to it we’re no different from anyone else.”

What nonsense! Of course they were different. They lived in a stately home for one thing. The family was mentioned in Debrett’s and Who’s Who. To top it off their father was a billionaire. This time they were all paying, from her illustrious father down, when it was she and Bella who had finally toppled the grand Balfour edifice. How shocking was that?

Was it any wonder their father had reinstituted the Balfour Family Rules, a code of conduct that had been passed down from generation to generation within the Balfour family? All eight of Oscar’s daughters through their father’s three marriages, and both their mother’s and their father’s misalliances—had accepted his decision to send them away from the scene of the family humiliation.

“You need to face your limitations, my daughters, and hopefully find your strengths,” he had exhorted with as much gravitas as a hanging judge.

They could have refused. She had certainly considered it. But they didn’t.

“A point very much in your favour,” Oscar Balfour conceded.

Bella had been handed rule one. Dignity.

She had been given her own rule. Rule eight. Humility.

When their father had first handed her rule eight, she had looked back at him in blank astonishment.

“Humility, Daddy? What can you mean?” She felt enormously hurt.

He had taken up valuable time to explain.

Now in a moment of self-clarity she saw she just might have a need to develop that overrated virtue. She knew what people thought of her: aloof, cool to the point of glacial, supremely self-confident, self-assured, really a snob and a bit of a prude, the least approachable of the Balfour girls. Not true. At least, not entirely. The cool bit was in order. She was a private person. Indeed she had a passion for privacy. But at the heart of it she couldn’t do without her defence mechanisms any more than Bella, both of them cruelly robbed of a mother and a mother’s love and guidance when they had barely mastered the trick of abseiling down their cots.

“Doesn’t anyone realise what losing a mother does to a child? The effects are felt forever.”

“God, tell me something I don’t know!” Bella, clad in a gorgeous imperial-yellow silk kimono decorated with richly embroidered chrysanthemums and mystical birds, had cried. In many ways Bella was a bit of a drama queen.

So in the end she and Bella, who really didn’t have a personality disorder as she had so wrongly accused her, accepted their banishments.

“Both of us have to master the rule, Olivia.” Bella, for once, showed meekness.

It was certainly their father’s directive. A cue for obedience if ever there was one. “It will get you safely through life so you never again bring shame on the family name.” He had spoken as if he was throwing them all a lifeline. For herself, she had to confess she ever so slightly resented the fact he had omitted to mention his own part in the debacle. It was his “girls” who had to take the direct hit.

“We have to work out our punishment,” Bella had said, apparently not feeling the same degree of betrayal. “Take it on the chin.”

“Punishment? I prefer to look on it as a challenge.”

A challenge—far, far away from their comfort zone.

“Good grief, Daddy, not Australia!” She had a vision of that very large island continent not all that far off the South Pole. Surely they had sent convicts there?

“Australia, it is!” Her father had fixed her with the piercing Balfour eyes. “You’re to work in whatever capacity is required of you, Olivia. At least you have the Balfour good business head on your shoulders.”

She should have reminded him that had already been established. But to be obliged to work for a man she had only met briefly and had cause to intensely dislike? Could she even do it, much as she was made of stern stuff?

Clint McAlpine, Australian cattle baron, had been the only person in her life outside Bella who had had the temerity to tell her to her face—she had only been showing him her normal demeanour at the time—that she badly needed taking down a peg.

“Come down from your high ivory tower, ice princess,” he’d advised, a satirical twist to his handsome mouth. “Mix with mere mortals. I promise it will do you a power of good.”

She winced at the memory! Just because he was a billionaire like their father didn’t give him the right to tick her off. Maybe for that very reason his image, incredibly vivid, had stuck in her head. It had never diminished. Something she didn’t understand.

There was some distant family connection on her father’s side; that’s how they had met up. Functions, a family wedding. The McAlpines often visited London on business or pleasure or a mix of both. A few years back, her father had bought a large block of shares in the McAlpine Pastoral Company which must have prompted his decision to send her into the McAlpine stronghold. Evidently her father trusted McAlpine as he had trusted McAlpine’s late father, a man of good British stock. He must have been a much nicer man altogether. So now, a scant two days after the Balfour disaster she was on the threshold of taking up her challenge.

At the end of the earth.

Australia.

CHAPTER ONE

Darwin, capital of the Northern Territory, gateway to Australia

NEVER a good traveller—her privileged lifestyle had ensured a great deal of international jet-setting—Olivia had come to the conclusion this had to be the epic journey of all time. First there was the flight from London to Singapore. Horrendous! Well over fourteen hours of claustrophobia. She had tried, largely in vain, to gather her resources with a one-night stopover at Raffles. Lovely hotel with a unique charm. She fully intended to revisit it at some future date, but for now on to Darwin, the tropical capital of the Northern Territory of Australia, yet another four and more hours away.

She couldn’t read. She couldn’t sleep. All she could do was dwell on her disastrous fall from grace. She knew she had no alternative but to fight back. And not take an age about it either. She and her siblings were due back in London five months hence to celebrate their father’s birthday on October 2. Nothing for it but to pull up her socks! Re-establish her aristocratic credentials.

Could be hard going in Australia.

Looking wanly out the aircraft porthole she could see the glitter of the Timor Sea. It was a genuine turquoise. That aroused her interest sufficiently to make her sit up and take notice. They continued their descent, and Darwin City’s skyline rose up.

Skyline! Good grief!

She craned her neck nearer the porthole. After London, New York and the great cities of Europe, all of which she had visited, it looked more like something out of a Somerset Maugham novel—a tropical outpost, as it were. It was bound to be sweltering. She knew the heat of the Caribbean where her father owned a beautiful private island, but she had a premonition the heat of Darwin was going to be something else again. And she the one who had often been described as the “quintessential English rose"! Anyone who knew the slightest thing about gardening would know roses hated extreme heat.

Yet her father had sent her here and she had obeyed his decision. But then hadn’t she obeyed him all of her life? Struggling to always be what he wanted, while Bella was out enjoying herself, men falling around her like ninepins.

“Only flings, sweetie! Something to get me through a desperately dull life.”

She had thanked Bella for sharing that with her. Far from being the quintessential English rose she was starting to think of herself as the quintessential old maid who, far from bedding lovers, burnt gallons of midnight oil reading profound and often obscure literature. She even dressed like a woman ten years her senior. Or so Bella said. How had that developed? Her father’s fault for expecting way too much of her, especially from an early age. Bella’s taunt aside, she thought she always looked impeccably groomed—that was her duty—but she saw now with her perfect up-do, her whole style could be too much on the conservative side for a woman of twenty-eight.

Twenty-eight! My God, when was she going to start the breeding process? Time was running out. Bella had had dozens of affairs and countless proposals. She’d had exactly two. Both perfect disasters. Geoffrey, then Justin. They had only wanted her because she was her father’s daughter. Bella’s men wanted just Bella. Wasn’t that a bit of a sore point? But could she blame them? Bella was everything she was not: sexy, exciting, daring, adventurous, not afraid to show lots of creamy cleavage, whereas she was as modest as a novice nun. She could see herself now as being as dull as ditch water. That image bruised her ego. Or what was left of it.

What would she make of Australia? The Northern Territory she understood was pretty much one sprawling wilderness area. She hadn’t wanted Australia. Too hot and primitive. But in the end she had accepted the commitment. She was a Balfour, British to the bone.