A Kiss To Remember Read online

  Angie was touched by his sympathy, and had to battle not to break into further sobs. Eventually, and reluctantly, she extricated herself from the comfort of his embrace.

  ‘You...you’ll really drive me all the way up there, Lance?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you have to go back to Melbourne today?’

  ‘I should, but I’m not going to. How could I possibly leave you at a time like this? You need me, Angie.’

  Her eyes filled again. ‘Yes... yes, I do. Lance, I—’

  ‘No,’ he cut in abruptly. ‘Don’t say any more. This isn’t the right time. You’re all emotional at the moment, and what you feel might not be real. Now, pop up and have a shower, love, and I’ll order us some breakfast. I dare say you’ll want to drop in at your flat on the way through to pick up some clothes, so shake a leg. Time might be of the essence.’

  Lance’s last remark sent Angle’s mind flying back to her mother, lying ill and possibly dying in hospital. The thought that she might never see her mother alive again sent her hurrying out of bed and into the bathroom.

  Less than an hour later, she was letting herself into her flat. As she walked into the living room the clock on the wall said twenty-five past six.

  ‘Is that you, Angie?’ Vanessa called from the bedroom.

  ‘Yes. It’s only me.’

  Vanessa appeared, bleary-eyed and nightie-clad. ‘I... I hope you’re not mad at me,’ she said worriedly. ‘I wasn’t going to tell that pompous brother of yours where you were, but when he told me about your mother I just had to.’

  ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘Where’s Lance?’

  ‘He’s waiting for me in the car. He’s going to drive me up home.’

  ‘I suppose this isn’t the right time to ask you how it went with you two?’

  ‘No,’ Angie returned stiffly. ‘It isn’t.’

  Vanessa nodded. ‘Is there anything I can get you? A cup of coffee or anything?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘I hope your mum pulls through,’ she said, hovering while Angie stripped off and pulled on some white shorts and a black and white striped top.

  ‘I hope so too,’ she said, slipping her feet into a pair of black sandals.

  ‘She always sounds so nice on the phone.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘My mum’s a right bitch, and I still love her.’

  Angie’s chin started to wobble.

  Vanessa came forward and put her arms around her. ‘It’s all right, sweetheart. Cry. You don’t have to be brave around me.’

  Angie cried.

  Ten minutes later, she was back in Lance’s car and they were speeding north.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘What exactly do you do, Lance?’

  His blue eyes whipped round at her question. They’d been travelling in virtual silence for nearly an hour, the only sound in the car some faint music from the radio.

  ‘You don’t have to talk for the sake of talking,’ he said, returning his eyes to the road ahead.

  ‘I realise that. I want to know. Bud told me once you worked in the export division of Sterling Industries. But what exactly does that entail?’

  He slid her a sharp glance. ‘Then you don’t know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘I moved on from that position twelve months ago. I now run Sterling Industries. I’m the managing director.’

  Angie blinked her astonishment. ‘No. I didn’t know. I... I naturally thought your father occupied that position.’

  ‘He did. Theoretically. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been a hands-on CEO for many years, and Sterling Industries was beginning to suffer. His choosing to live in Sydney wasn’t conducive to good management, considering all the companies’ head offices are in Melbourne. But that was my mother’s doing. She refused to live in Melbourne, and what she wanted, she got. By the time I took over, Dad’s neglect plus the recent recession had put some areas of the business into deep trouble. I’ve been lucky enough to turn things around and we’re now in a position to take advantage of the growing economy.’

  Angie was both surprised and impressed. ‘So how did you come to take over, Lance? Did you talk your dad into taking early retirement?’

  ‘No. He died.’

  Angie sucked in a shocked breath.

  ‘It was in all the papers,’ he added. ‘The business section, that is.’

  ‘I don’t read the business section very often,’ she murmured.

  ‘I had no idea you didn’t know. Bud knew, because he rang me at the time. I presumed he must have told you.’

  ‘No. He didn’t. He never mentioned it. Oh, God, I... I’m so sorry, Lance. You must have thought me very rude for not contacting you, or sending a card or something. How did your dad die? Had he been ill?’ She recalled a tall, handsome man at Lance’s wedding who’d not looked a day over fifty, although he had probably been older.

  ‘Yes. Very ill. He had cancer of the pancreas and liver. There was nothing the doctors could do. He died less than three months after the original diagnosis.’

  ‘How awful for you all. Your poor mother must have been devastated.’

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ came his caustic reply. ‘So devastated that she had to take herself off around the world to recover—her trip starting the day after the funeral. Last month she became Mrs Jonathon Winthrop the third. Fortunately, for me, Mr Winthrop lives in Texas, and can’t travel due to some rare blood disease he has. I would say the next time I see my darling mama will be at my new step-papa’s funeral. Though maybe not,’ he added with savage sarcasm. ‘If I’m a minute or two late I’ll probably miss her. She’ll have moved on by then.’

  Angie was about to defend his mother with some soothing platitude but decided not to. She hadn’t liked the woman—had despised her, in fact—and didn’t blame Lance one iota for feeling the way he did. She’d been a cold and unloving mother, and, it seemed, a miserable wife—a beautiful but cold bitch, whose priorities in life were money and social status.

  ‘I see,’ was all she said, which brought another sharp look.

  ‘Yes, you would,’ Lance said, admiration in his voice. ‘Any other woman would have made some inanely sympathetic remark and not meant a single word of it. But not you, Angie. You’re your mother’s daughter. Straight down the line. You’ve no idea how much I appreciate that. A man would always know where he stood with you. There’d be no deceptions. No lies. No bull.’

  She felt warmed by his compliments, yet perturbed at the same time. What she wanted was the same from Lance. No deceptions. No lies. No bull. Ever!

  ‘Then tell me what you do, Lance,’ she insisted. ‘Give me a run-down of a typical day in the life of Lance Sterling. Or, better still, a typical week.’

  He slid a wry smile her way. ‘Ah, that sounds like Angie Brown, psychologist and counsellor, taking over. This is the way you people get to know your patients, isn’t it? By getting them to tell you about themselves. Maybe we should pull over and I could lie down in the back seat and pretend it’s a couch.’

  ‘And maybe you should just keep driving and answer my questions.’

  He sighed. ‘You might not like the answers.’

  ‘I’ll risk it.’

  She didn’t like the answers at all. She was appalled by them. Lance’s normal daily schedule was horrendous. He worked eighteen-hour days during the week, with little time for anything else. Then, at the weekend, he seemed to be still working, even when he was playing golf or going to dinner or the theatre. They were business rather than social engagements. She began to appreciate where his marriage might have gone wrong. And said so.

  ‘Ah, but you forget,’ he argued back. ‘For the first three years of my marriage I didn’t hold this gruelling position. I had plenty of time for my marriage, and my wife. For the first two years whenever I went overseas Helen went with me.’

  Angie ignored the stab of jealousy this evoked to concentrate on the facts Lance was relaying.

  ‘By the time my fath
er died, my marriage was already on the rocks. Helen was refusing to accompany me just about everywhere. She’d started refusing to sleep with me. She lived her own life and went her own way.’

  ‘I must be honest, Lance,’ Angie said painfully. ‘Your present lifestyle is not conducive to a happy family life, even if your wife loved you.’

  ‘Is this still Angie the counsellor speaking? Or Angie the woman considering my proposal of marriage?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘So you see no hope for us, if I continue as managing director of Sterling Industries?’

  ‘I... I won’t marry that man,’ she stated bravely. And meant it.

  Lance must have heard the conviction in her voice, for he swore under his breath. ‘Would you become that man’s mistress?’ he asked brusquely, slanting her a narrow-eyed look.

  Angie had never felt so dismayed in all her life. Or more disappointed. She should have known that this would be Lance’s next move. His aim, after all, was not so much to install her as his loving wife, but as a permanent bed-partner.

  ‘Well?’ he persisted harshly. ‘Would you?’

  Angie gulped. ‘Yes, I probably would,’ she confessed with a bitter honesty. But she refused to meet his eyes. She felt too ashamed.

  For being a man’s mistress was based on lust, not love. It wasn’t a real relationship. Lance was offering her sex, and nothing more. Love didn’t come into it.

  Yet it was love which would propel her into such a role. A love which refused to die. A love which could make her untrue to herself, and the values she had been brought up with.

  The most awful silence descended on the car.

  Angie kept her head turned away from him and the miles flew past. They stopped only once, and briefly. Lance drove on and on—not speeding, but pushing the car to the limit all the time. The countryside grew browner, and Angie saw first-hand the drought that her father had been complaining about all year.

  A good farmer, Morris Brown had made enough money to send both his children to university in Sydney, but while he could protect his crops from disease there was little he could do about the lack of rain. Luckily the Brown farm was bounded on one side by a river, but even that was down to a trickle in parts.

  Not that her father would be worrying about drought at this moment, Angie conceded unhappily. His mind would be on other worries. As were her own.

  ‘Am I to take you home?’ Lance asked at last as they came into the main street of Wilga, which was fairly deserted at noon on a hot December Sunday. ‘Or do you want to go straight to the hospital?’

  ‘To the hospital. There might not be anyone at home.’

  ‘Which way, then?’

  Angie gave him directions and soon he was parking his car in the hospital car park. The heat blasted Angie as she opened the door, a testimony to the car’s excellent air-conditioning. Thankfully, the hospital was air-conditioned as well.

  It was a fairly modern building, extensions and renovations having been made only two years ago— not so much because the town of Wilga was growing, but because the hospital had to service a large area. Recent government cutbacks had forced several smaller hospitals and clinics in adjoining towns to close, which meant that patients were sent to the Wilga hospital from up to a hundred miles away.

  ‘There’s Bud’s car,’ Angie pointed out on their way through the car park. ‘Oh, and there’s Dad’s utility!’ She wasn’t sure if this was good news or bad. Were they all at the hospital because her mother was still deathly ill? Or because she was better and they could talk to her? Either way, it did seem likely that Nora was still alive. Angie desperately hoped so.

  Lance placed a supportive hand on her shoulder as they pushed through the heavy glass doors which led into Reception. ‘She’s a fighter, your mum,’ he said soothingly. ‘She’ll be all right.’

  But Angie was worried. Even if her mother pulled through this attack, she could see further health problems down the road. The doctor had told her mother years ago to lose weight because of her high blood pressure, but Nora hadn’t seemed able to give up the rich foods she loved. Angie had no doubt that this had been a contributory factor in her mother’s coronary. She also doubted whether Nora would take a blind bit of notice if told to go on a special low-fat diet.

  Her voice was shaking when she asked the woman behind the reception desk about her mother. ‘Mrs Nora Brown,’ Angie repeated. ‘She...she had a heart attack. I’m her daughter. From Sydney.’

  The woman’s smile brought some welcome reassurance. ‘Oh, yes. I had your brother and father in here not long ago. Mrs Brown’s been moved from Intensive Care to a general ward so I think you can take that as good news. She’s in Ward C, room ten. You take the lifts over there to level three, turn right and follow the signs.’

  Angie almost burst into tears with relief. Somehow, she held on, but her ‘thank you’ was choked out, and she was blinking madly as she hurried over to the lifts.

  Room ten in Ward C was a private room, though small. When Angie went in, her mother appeared to be asleep, lying grey-faced in the white hospital bed. Angie’s father was sitting by her side, holding her hand. Bud was standing at the small window, looking out at the limp trees beyond. Both men’s eyes snapped up to hers as she entered, her father’s brightening, Bud’s still full of reproach.

  ‘Angie’s here,’ Morris Brown whispered excitedly to his wife, and her eyes shot open.

  ‘Angie,’ her mother rasped, in a voice so hoarse and shaky that Angie almost broke down. When her mother held out her hands to her, she succumbed to those long-threatening tears and threw herself into her mother’s arms.

  ‘There, there, Angie, love,’ her mother crooned, stroking her daughter’s hair. ‘I’m all right. It’d take more than a silly old heart flutter to kill me.’

  ‘Heart flutter, my foot,’ her husband rebuked, but gently. ‘You’d have been as dead as a doornail if I hadn’t got you in here as quick as I did.’

  ‘What an exaggerator your father is, Angie,’ Nora said, lifting her daughter’s tear-stained face up and wiping away the wetness with the bedsheet. ‘All I had was a little clot stuck in the wrong place for a little while. The doc says the ECG shows no lasting damage.’

  ‘The doc also said that if she doesn’t take herself in hand where her diet is concerned she might not be so lucky the next time.’

  ‘Diet, diet, diet,’ Nora sighed. ‘That’s all I’ve been hearing about ever since I woke up. I think diet is the most offensive four-letter word ever invented.’

  ‘“Dead” is worse,’ Bud grumbled. ‘For pity’s sake, Mum, you have to do what the doctor said. Diet does not mean starve. It means eating different things, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, piffle!’ she scorned.

  ‘So that’s where she got that word from,’ Lance muttered, from where he was standing just inside the room.

  Nora Brown’s eyes turned to him for the first time. ‘Well, Lord be praised, if I didn’t know better I’d think that was Lance Sterling over there! Angie, tell me I’m not seeing things.’

  Angie sat up straight and threw a wry smile over her shoulder at Lance. ‘I wish I could, Mum, but I’m afraid you’re quite right. It is Lance. He turned up at Bud’s birthday party on Friday night, like the proverbial bad penny, and was still in Sydney when the news about you came through. He was kind enough to drive me up here.’

  Angie watched the wheels in her mother’s intuitive head start going round, but she was darned if she was going to explain how Lance had come to be on the spot in the early hours of this morning.

  ‘Well, well,’ was all her mother said, but it spoke volumes to anyone who knew her. She stared at Lance, then at a suddenly blushing Angie, then back at Lance again. ‘That was extraordinarily kind of you, Lance. Now, come over here, you handsome hunk, and give your second-best girlfriend a hug.’

  Lance laughed, then did just that. ‘Hello, Mrs Brown,’ he greeted her warmly. ‘Glad to see you haven’t changed.’


  ‘Can’t say the same for you, my lad. You look mighty peaky. What you need is a good night’s sleep and some fresh country air. Why don’t you stay up here at the farm with Dad for a while?’

  ‘I’d love to, Mrs Brown, but I have urgent business back in Melbourne to attend to tomorrow, which really can’t wait. I’ll have to drive back to Sydney first thing tomorrow morning, then take a plane.’

  Angie contemplated telling her parents about the death of Lance’s father, then decided it was hardly the time or the place.

  ‘Pity,’ Nora said. ‘You young people don’t know how short life is. Don’t waste the one you have doing things that don’t make you happy. And don’t keep putting off doing the things you know you should have done years ago.’

  Angie might have imagined it, but she thought her mother was directing a definite message at Lance with those last words.

  ‘Scares like the one I’ve just had rather make one reassess life,’ she went on. ‘Dad and I have decided to go on that holiday we’ve been putting off for years—haven’t we, Dad?’

  ‘We certainly have, Mother. Hang the expense. And the overdraft.’

  A hatchet-faced nurse with a bosom like the bridge on a battleship bustled in at that moment and ordered all visitors out, putting paid to any more conversation about holidays or wasted lives.

  ‘Doctor says Mrs Brown is to rest,’ Sister Sour-puss stated firmly when Angie’s dad objected. ‘And that includes you, Mr Brown. You need some rest as well.’

  ‘The chooks and dogs need feeding anyway,’ Nora reminded him. ‘I’ll see you tonight, perhaps?’ she said, looking at Sour-puss for permission.

  That gesture alone showed just how much this attack had dented Nora’s confidence. She normally never looked for permission to do anything from anyone. Still, old Sour-puss would have a deflating effect on just about anyone, Angie thought.