‘Hey, wait a bit,’ he cautioned. ‘That wasn’t a game and it wasn’t a toy.’
‘Well, you found it amusing enough when you were doing it. I find it more amusing now.’
‘That was very serious business,’ he insisted.
‘Getting your photo taken,’ she mocked. ‘Ringing all the bells. Driving that poor man to distraction.’
It didn’t get the kind of response Sasha had grown used to from him. The eyes that bored into hers had no twinkle. His face suddenly looked older; grave, hard, bitten with a determination to survive any odds.
‘If that poor man hadn’t said what he did to me, I wouldn’t have gone to the US to develop my system. If I hadn’t gone to the US, I wouldn’t have kept custody of Matt. If I hadn’t been contracted to prove my system at the exhibition, I wouldn’t have had to come back to Australia. Because I came back into the country, and got found out, I’ve got a custody case to fight...’ for the first time he sounded and looked like a man under great stress and strain ‘...and the inevitable consequences.’
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ The impulse to give whatever sympathetic comfort she could was instinctive.
Nathan Parnell looked at her, a fierce blaze of emotion making his eyes even more vividly blue. There was no surface amiability or pleasantness now. Sasha wondered if she could ever know the inner core of this man, if any one person could ever really understand another.
‘I’ve run out of time,’ he grated. ‘I need a wife.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
SASHA felt her heart being squeezed. The force of his emotion was frightening and hurtful in its striking power. Sasha had never experienced anything like it. The urge to take it upon herself to solve his problems was compelling.
It took all her concentrated willpower to resist it, to turn her head away, keep walking. She was acutely conscious of him walking beside her, carrying Bonnie, a man who loved his son as she loved her daughter.
She didn’t need to ask why a wife was so necessary to him. He had said enough for her to put two and two together. It was clearly related to keeping custody of his child. She felt sorry for him, deeply sorry that he was faced with the possibility of being parted from Matt. His love for the little boy had tugged at Sasha’s heart from the moment of meeting in the park.
Nathan Parnell touched her in a way no man, or any human, had ever touched her, but she couldn’t be his wife. Not as a convenience. His need to be married had nothing to do with her, not as the person she was. Sexual attraction was no basis for marriage. Neither was compassion. Sasha wanted to be loved, to be the only woman her husband would ever want beside him because no other woman would ever mean as much.
Tears pricked at her eyes. It wasn’t fair that she should feel so drawn to a man who only wanted to marry her to secure his son from his ex-wife. And what about Matt’s mother? Nathan had taken their son out of the country to keep custody, possibly bypassing the law, taking it into his own hands to do what he considered right. Maybe the woman had been grieving for her child. Sasha had only heard Nathan’s view of his first marriage. How could she judge what was right and wrong?
They reached the car. Sasha remembered what she had thought about Nathan parking in a place reserved for VIPs. She hadn’t known he was entitled to do so. It reinforced how little she knew about his life, what drove him to be the man he was. In the same way, he knew next to nothing about her. The idea of a marriage between them was dangerous. She had to stop thinking about it.
It was worse when they got in the car. Sasha was even more aware of him and it wasn’t simply physical awareness. She felt pain and purpose pulsing in the silence. She desperately searched her mind for a way to break away from it, to separate herself from his need.
‘So, you’re now in the security business,’ she said. His job was the only diversion she could come up with.
‘More or less,’ he answered, his tone uninterested, his thoughts clearly focused elsewhere.
‘Would you mind explaining to me how your computer game works?’ Sasha persisted.
There was little enthusiasm in his voice at first. Sasha suspected it was only good manners prompting his replies, but he gradually warmed to the subject under her skilful questioning.
She found out that touching the objects under protection did not set off the alarms. The public were deceived about this so they didn’t put their fingerprints on things. The system worked on the principle of what Nathan called a violation of space.
Apparently this was very important to Nathan. He expounded on the theme on their way back to Mosman. The violation of space was measured or triggered—Sasha wasn’t quite sure which—by comparing digitalised information from different sources—whatever that meant.
The whole concept sounded ingeniously clever. Any kind of normal movement close to the protected objects was discounted. It was the opposite of a video security system that sought to capture every piece of information, over ninety-nine per cent of which was wasted. This system excluded irrelevant information, only reacting to a very specific computation.
It was all a bit too technical for Sasha to fully comprehend but she listened intently because Nathan was clearly proud of his work, and from the sound of it he had every right to be.
They were close to home when Nathan turned the car off the main route. ‘We’re back earlier than I expected,’ he said, ‘so I’ll pick Matt up and save Marion the trouble of doing it later on.’
They stopped at a pre-school kindergarten centre. Nathan was able to park right outside the gate. ‘This can take up to ten minutes or so, Sasha,’ he warned. ‘Do you want to come with me?’
‘I’ll wait here if you don’t mind.’ She needed the relief from keeping up a friendly interest and trying to ignore what was none of her business.
He had no sooner left her than Bonnie awoke. The motion of a car always put her to sleep, but once it stopped there were invariably cries of protest. Sasha decided a little distraction was in order. The kindergarten playground was swarming with small children taking part in one activity or another. Sasha lifted Bonnie out of the car and strolled over to the wire fence, knowing her baby daughter would soon be fascinated by the novelty of watching other children at play.
‘Bonnie!’ An excited cry pealed across the playground. A group of boys broke apart as one of them raced towards the fence. ‘Bonnie, it’s me, Matt!’