‘Not to his face,’ Bella had had to confess. ‘I haven’t got the nerve, but it would seem silly to call him Mr Dawson in his own home, wouldn’t it?’
‘I’d check first,’ Kate had advised. ‘And possibly not while you’re making him do something as embarrassing as line dancing.’
The cringe factor was still there. With a sigh, Bella forced herself to focus.
‘Put your arms out so that your fingers are in the bubbles,’ she told Lady Dorothy. ‘Then we’ll see how we go with your exercises.’
‘Do you think I should take my necklace off, dear? I’m a bit worried about what the chemicals might do to the stones. I’m sure I can smell chlorine.’
‘I don’t think it will hurt your necklace.’
‘I’d rather not risk it. Could you do the clasp for me, please, Bella?’
‘Sure.’ Bella unclipped the string of polished garnets that was one of Lady Dorothy’s favourites. So much so that her new employer was planning to measure the success of her progress by when she would be able to wear the matching ring again.
And Bella had every intention of helping her to do just that. That was what she was here for and it would be best if she stopped thinking about Oliver Dawson at all.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy. Even knowing that she had infuriated him didn’t seem to be enough to quell the temptation to go there again. Maybe it enhanced it, even.
It was a personality flaw, wasn’t it? To be scared of something but drawn to the danger of it?
Exactly the kind of situation that had got Bella into trouble all her life. Doing something when she knew she shouldn’t because she just had to find out what would happen if she did.
Honestly, she should have grown out of it by now because she’d had plenty of examples when the thing that had happened had been bad. Like all the toys she had broken as a child because she’d just had to bend them in an impossible direction or see if they could survive being dropped out of a window or something. In the end, her father had been so angry her pocket money had been stopped until she learned better sense.
And what about when she’d broken her arm falling out of that tree when she’d gone out on a branch that obviously didn’t have the strength to support her?
Or the time she’d nearly drowned and the lifeguards had had to rescue her from the hole in the surf with its lethal swirl of competing currents?
That had been at Piha.
Now, there was a distraction. The upcoming wedding that was to happen at Piha beach.
Bella helped Lady Dorothy flex and straighten her fingers in the hot current of moving water. ‘That’s fantastic,’ she encouraged Lady Dorothy. ‘Look, they’re much straighter than they were yesterday. Can you do your wrist exercises too?’
The movements were almost routine now. Lady Dorothy had been right. They were learning together and Bella knew she was already far more qualified than she had been when she had been trying to help look after her nana.
Which was such a shame because if Nana were here now, she would be so excited about Kate’s wedding, which was only a few weeks away now.
Bella was excited.
So was Connor.
Even Lady Dorothy kept asking about how the plans for the beach wedding were going.
The only person who didn’t seem over the moon about it, Bella had decided last night, was Kate.
Which was odd. Disturbing, even. Connor hadn’t seemed to notice anything amiss but, in some ways, he didn’t know Kate as well as Bella did, did he?
She’d known her aunt since she’d been a small girl and Kate had been a troubled teen who had come from an appallingly abusive background. Her father had been a violent bastard and her mother had failed to protect Kate other than by sending her away to live with her much older brother’s family. And then her father had murdered her mother and been sent to prison for it!
Not that Bella had known that until recently, but she had known that Kate had secrets. She’d always known that some things were tucked away and hidden so well that sometimes Bella was the only one who could see that locked door in Kate’s eyes. She’d seen the bone-deep sadness that could only be the aftermath of something really bad happening.
And she thought she’d seen it again last night for the first time in many years.
Maybe she was wrong. Bella hoped she was wrong, but it needed thinking about, didn’t it?
And worrying about her aunt was probably the only sure-fire way she could distract herself completely from thinking about Oliver. If shades of the past were haunting Kate again it couldn’t have anything to do with her father because he was gone. Locked away so securely he would never see freedom again for as long as he lived.
