They personified love, not lust. Without her mother’s ready support, Nicole knew she could not have managed the period of Zoe’s illness nearly as well. Then for Harry to have been hit by cancer…Nicole could not begrudge the extreme lengths her mother had gone to in search of a cure. It had been done out of love. And it had to be very hard to lose two husbands. Losing out on Quin’s love had devastated her five years ago.
We three are the survivors, Nicole thought, three generations of the one small family.
In the past few weeks her mother had pulled herself together and was back managing the dance school. The grey had been dyed out of her short curly brown hair and her trim dancer’s body and still pretty face belied her fifty-five years. Occasionally Nicole glimpsed a haunted look in the generally warm hazel eyes, but at least the depression that had followed Harry’s death had lifted.
As for Zoe, she was always a delight—a wonderfully healthy delight—and to Nicole’s mind, the most beautiful little girl in the world with her large smoky grey eyes and the amazingly thick, glossy, black hair which Zoe wanted to grow long so it could be braided. Nicole was smiling over this ambitious aim as she walked over to the three-seater sofa facing the television screen.
“You missed it, Mummy,” Zoe informed her, heaving a disappointed sigh.
“I’m sorry, darling. I was busy on the ’phone and couldn’t cut off the person calling me.” She sat down beside her daughter, smiling encouragingly. “Tell me what you saw.”
Her little face lit up with awe. “It was a butterfly farm.”
“An enclosure, like an aviary,” Nanna supplied.
“And there were lots and lots of big pretty flowers for the butterflies to land on.”
“Tropical flowers,” Nanna chimed in. “Most of them hibiscus.”
“It was near the rainforest at Kranda. Could we go there, Mummy?”
“Kuranda,” Nanna corrected. “Up above Cairns in Far North Queensland.”
Nicole shook her head. “That’s too far away, Zoe. It was lucky you saw it on TV.”
Zoe heaved a sigh but didn’t argue. She knew only too well that some things could be done and some things couldn’t. “They were all blue, the butterflies. The man called them—” she frowned, trying to recall the word “—Issies.”
“Ulysses,” Nicole recollected with painful irony. The glass one Quin had bought was still prominently displayed in his bedroom—a tormenting reminder of what he didn’t know, what he wouldn’t want to know.
Zoe cocked her head appealingly. “If we can’t go and see them, could you make one for my tree, Mummy? We haven’t got a blue one. Not all blue like the Ulysses.”
Nicole inwardly winced, knowing it would be forever connected to her nights with Quin. “Butterflies mark special occasions, Zoe. You’ll have to wait for one,” she said, hoping her daughter might forget about the blue Ulysses. “Now I must go finish drying my hair before I tuck you into bed for the night. Okay?”
“Okay, Mummy.”
Nicole caught a frown from her mother, worry in the hazel eyes. “Are you…going out?” she asked warily.
“No. I just want to finish doing my hair or it will end up frizzy,” Nicole rattled off carelessly, hoping to dismiss anything her mother had overheard from the kitchen doorway.
However, after she’d put Zoe to bed and read her a story, she found her mother pacing around the living room in an agitated state, the television switched off. “What’s wrong, Mum? You’re missing your favourite crime show.”
“I don’t like this, Nicole,” was shot back at her. “On the ’phone to that man, you sounded so bitter…vengeful.” She wrung her hands. “It’s wrong, wrong. I shouldn’t have let you do this.”
“You didn’t let me, Mum. I did it on my own. My choice,” Nicole insisted quietly.
“It’s not good for you.”
“Oh, I don’t know. In a weird kind of way it is.”
“How?”
Nicole managed a wry smile. “I doubt there’s a man alive who’s as good as Quin in bed. It’s not exactly a hardship to spend twenty-six nights with him.”
“Do you still love him?”
“No.”
“I don’t believe you can have really good sex without loving your partner,” her mother argued heatedly.
Nicole tried to shrug off the point. “Well, Quin and I still have a strong physical connection. It’s okay, Mum. Don’t worry about it.”
“No, it’s more than that. You’re getting hurt by him again. I heard it in your voice. You can’t change people, Nicole. They are what they are. And paying them back for not living up to what you want of them…”
“It’s not about what I want,” Nicole cut in fiercely. “Quin and I have a deal. A deal is a deal. No changes. That was all I was insisting upon, Mum. Now please…leave it alone. I do not wish to spend any more of my time on Quin than what he’s paid for.”
But, of course she did. He was on her mind more often than not. Her mother respected her wishes enough to drop the subject for the time being but her silence didn’t stop Nicole from thinking about him, nor brooding over what her mother had said.
When they both retired for the night, Nicole lay awake and very acutely alone in her own bed, hashing over what she did feel about Quin Sola. The bottom line was she did wish he would change and her bitterness stemmed from having her wishes thwarted. Her mother was right. Being vengeful did not bring about some magical transformation. On the other hand, it did satisfy a dark sense of justice to belittle his role in her life, as he had belittled hers when she’d desperately needed something else from him.
There was no good answer to any of this, she finally decided, and set her mind to counting sheep in the hope it would send her to sleep. It must have succeeded because she was jerked awake by the loud and persistent ringing of the doorbell.
She looked at her bedside clock: 23:17. Was the house on fire or something? She sniffed but didn’t smell any smoke. Nevertheless, there had to be an emergency to account for such determination to arouse the people in the house. She tumbled out of bed and met her mother in the hall heading for the front door. She stopped as she heard Zoe calling out, alarmed by the bell which was still being rung aggressively.
Not for one second did it occur to Nicole that Quin Sola might be at the door, that a determination not to forfeit one night with her had caused him to cut his business meeting short, catch a plane from Melbourne to Sydney and come to this house in Burwood to collect her before midnight!