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 father 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.