Dog Handling Part 16

"Who does this place belong to?" Liv repeated, mesmerised by the overwhelming beauty of it all.

"It's a secret. But it's perfect because we can just walk down the hill to Robert's Restaurant and then scramble back up in no fit state later." Ben pointed out of the windows to a small cl.u.s.ter of buildings a couple of vineyards away.

"So it's Amelia's place then?" Liv a.s.sumed, getting the impression that Ben had stumbled drunk back up the hill on many an occasion and that the only family in Australia rich enough to be able to neglect such a stunning house and even leave the back door open all summer must be the Frasers.

"Actually, it's not. Belongs to a mate," Ben said vaguely as he scanned the wine rack and pulled out a bottle, dusted down the label, and smiled like the cat who ate the canary.

"Anyone I know?" Liv asked, sitting at the head of the table and gazing down over the valley.

"Can't say. I was only allowed to bring you here on condition that I didn't tell." Ben winked and took an opener to the bottle. "Needless to say, the guy owes me a favour."

"Who is it, Ben?" Liv stopped sniffing the gorgeously musky quinces and sat up.

"I'm never going to tell you, so stop asking." Ben sloshed the wine into first Liv's goblet, then his own. "To you and I renewing our acquaintance," Ben diverted the conversation, and Liv made a mental note to bring it up again later when he was better oiled.

"Perhaps." Liv took a sip and narrowed her eyes as she took in just how glorious he was. Well, in another life, perhaps.

Later, after they'd explored and dumped their luggage in their respective and very separate bedrooms, they decided to rinse away the dust and grime of the journey with a swim in the green pool.

"It looks like a biology experiment. Are you sure it's safe?" Liv asked as she dipped her toe in the water.

"Perfectly." Ben ran along the marble side of the pool and jumped high, his knees clutched to his chest, and landed with a fearsome thud at the other side of the pool.

"Is it cold?" she dithered, looking suspiciously at the insect corpses that drifted across the surface.

"Oh, just get in." Ben emerged from the deep end and sc.r.a.ped back his hair.

Liv pulled off her bathrobe and dived headlong into the unknown. "Gross." She came up for air and imagined herself with spiders' legs in her hair and dragonfly wings in her mouth.

"That's what I love about you, Liv Elliot. You're such a girl." Ben emerged from somewhere beneath her and secured her to the side of the pool with his arms. "Truly a different species."

Liv brushed her hair from her face and blinked at him. "Oh, it's that madonna-wh.o.r.e syndrome again-you boys love that-pure, virginal Amelia at home and then rough, loose Liv to play away with." Liv half smiled but wasn't joking.

"You've got this whole thing so wrong." Ben fixed his eyes on her. "When I'm with Amelia I can't think of anything except you. Sure she's beautiful, can be funny, always knows what to say-"

"If you've come here to tell me you're in love with your fabulous girlfriend don't bother. It's a given." Liv slipped under his arms and clambered onto the side of the pool, where she sat with her feet in the water and the sun magnified through the gla.s.s windows warming the tiny droplets of water on her back.

Ben eased himself onto the poolside and lay on the marble next to her. "She's also selfish and vain and wouldn't give a d.a.m.n if I were to disappear tomorrow as long as she had someone to carry her shopping bags and be arm candy for the photographers. When I first met her I thought she was lively and fantastic. But I was caught up in the whole trip, Liv-her looks, charm-it can feel like the most interesting place in the world. But really when you scratch the surface it's unattractive and superficial. I'm not in love with her." Ben covered his face with his arm to block out the sun.

"The only thing worse than a cheat is a cheat who slags off his girlfriend to other women."

"I know. And if I were cheating on Amelia then I wouldn't be saying this."

"Oh, so doing some girl in her bathroom and then taking her away for a weekend is the dictionary definition of fidelity, is it?"

"I was going to leave Amelia anyway. But meeting up with you again just confirmed that."

Liv must have unconsciously rolled her eyes at this f.e.c.kless male bulls.h.i.+t, because he sat up and caught her arm.

"I know it's none of my business, but I saw you leave the pub the other night with Will. Are you seeing him? Is that the problem?"

"Do you really think that's any of your business? And did it occur to you that even if I weren't seeing Will I wouldn't want someone who's already walked all over me?" Liv couldn't believe his audacity. She shook his arm loose.

"It's just that I don't know Will very well, but he does have a reputation for being a bit of a s.h.i.+t and no matter what happens between you and me I don't want to see you get hurt."

"You what?"

"Above all, I really care about you, Liv."

"Listen, Ben, we had s.e.x," Liv helpfully pointed out just in case it had slipped his mind. "But you forfeited your right to even have me acknowledge your existence when you led me on by saying you wanted to take me to lunch and then never called. Until you saw me with Will. Now just because you're perverse enough to only be interested in what you suddenly can't have does not mean that I am at your beck and call any longer. So get over it. I'm not such a girl that I don't understand the meaning of casual s.e.x. Can I just suggest that in the future you don't make promises to women that you can't keep?" Liv splurted.

"You can't even begin to know how far from the truth you are," Ben tried to interject.

"Oh, I think I'm depressingly close to the truth. Don't pretend that this isn't a pattern with you, Ben."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about Laura, my neighbour, for starters. Even if, as you claim, you wanted me all along, isn't this a remarkably similar pattern to the one you established when you broke her heart less than six months ago?"

Ben looked shocked.

"Ha, got you with your hand in the cookie jar!" Liv wanted to yell triumphantly. Instead she pulled on a bathrobe, because she did feel slightly ridiculous trying to be intimidating while her b.o.o.bs jiggled around. She lacked a certain gravity in more ways than one.

"So?"

He looked at her, sitting there with her hair dripping water down her alabaster shoulders, her wet eyelashes. "Have you spoken to Charlie about this?"

"Why Charlie?" Liv asked.

"I met Laura through Charlie. She was going out with this great girl and they seemed really happy. We all used to hang out a lot-Laura's a great cook and we had picnics and barbies the whole time. Anyway, I'm a guy and you know I'm not really into all that psychology stuff, but I think that what pretty much happened was that Laura became fixated on me. Some s.e.xuality blip. Not sure if she was gay or not. Called me a lot, kept turning up at the museum when I was working" (Liv couldn't imagine what kind of freak would do something like that!), "and then turned quite nasty on Amelia. It was rough. She split up with her girlfriend and Millie had to have a restraining order taken out on her."

"You're joking." Liv didn't know whether to believe him or not. I mean, Laura wasn't exactly a poster child for mental health, but she wasn't such a loop, surely? Wouldn't Charlie have told Liv and Alex? But then perhaps he was just being gracious and giving Laura a second chance by not telling Liv all about her. Still, maybe she would have turned dangerous.

"Was she violent or anything?" Liv asked tentatively.

"No, just pain in the backside really. She made a few threats, but nothing too serious. More than anything, it was stressful and rough on Millie. But then she met this girl Jo-Jo who's a social worker and they really hit it off. She promised to get help and I thought things had got better. She hasn't called me for months."

"And she probably was better until I came along and started talking about you and getting phone calls."

"You talked about me?" Ben interrupted Liv, and brushed the water from her cheeks.

"Only libellous, malicious stuff. Nothing nice." She half smiled and then bit the inside of her mouth to bring herself back from la-la land. "Right. Well, just because we've dismissed the Laura situation as a misunderstanding I can't think of a single excuse for what you did to me."

"I was trying to protect you."

"What from? Being happy and having self-esteem?"

"From Amelia."

"G.o.d, I think you're the freak. Are you telling me that every woman you know has some subclinical behavioural disorder? What? Did Amelia have a fixation on me? Should I take out a restraining order, too? Come on, Ben; you're really stretching it now."

"What did I do that was so bad?"

"Ben, you used me. I know it sounds c.r.a.p and old-fas.h.i.+oned, but there's no getting around it. You behaved like a w.a.n.ker. What has Amelia got to do with that?" Liv clung on the cliff face of logic with her fingernails even though she loved the way the sun was making her feel as it streamed through the sunroof. Even though she was being very distracted by the way Ben was stroking the back of his neck anxiously. "I'll do that," she wanted to offer. Shut up, Liv, she told herself.

"I can't tell you."

"Oh, you are so full of it."

"No, really. You just have to trust me on this one."

"Ha. I see. Trust you. No way."

"Okay, well, you asked."

"Shoot."

"She knows about us. Not about the boat, but she saw us at Mardi Gras. She followed us."

"Holy s.h.i.+t." Liv was no longer cool and sussed. She was flipping out.

"Shhh. It's fine; I've got it all under control."

"What? The fact that your girlfriend hates my guts and probably wants me dead?"

"I don't give a flying f.u.c.k about Amelia." He was no longer soft at all. In fact, he was angry. What was that primal turn-on thing about anger? It was sick, but somewhere very s.e.xy. As long as Liv wasn't on the receiving end. "But I don't like being blackmailed."

"What do you mean, blackmailed?" Liv felt as though she were watching a particularly juicy episode of Eastenders. This was more drama than the omnibus edition.

"She said that if I saw you again she'd pull out of helping you and Alex with the business," Ben said gravely. "So I didn't call you again. You've no idea how hard it was, but I couldn't risk her finding out, Liv. She stuck to me like a limpet that entire weekend. G.o.d, I could have throttled her."

"And whenever we had a meeting she'd just talk about how many times you and she had done it last night. It was a bit gross." Liv thought back, not quite sure how this whole picture fitted together yet. So Ben wasn't in love with Amelia, but she was planning to ruin Liv's business if he ever saw her again. "But we're here. What if she finds out?" Liv shrieked.

"She's away at a spa like I said. There's no way she'll know about this. The guy whose house it is will keep it superquiet, I promise. Anyway, the thing is that I overheard Alex at the pub that night of the rugby talking about how well you guys were doing on the stall. She said that business was great and I realised that Amelia had probably overegged her own importance in your success. Ego gone mad. Also, I figured that just so long as she'd done the publicity photos and the party was all done with then you could do without her. I was going to end it with her after your launch."

"But-"

"It's over between us no matter whether you want to be with me or not, Liv. I know you're seeing Will and I don't want to pressure you and I know that business is important to you, but . . . I'm willing to wait."

"Will?" Liv could barely contain her disgust. She wanted to tell Ben all about dog handling. About how she'd thought that he wasn't interested and that's why she'd spent the last few weeks scheming to make him want her. But how on earth could she? For heaven's sake-oh, by the way, I was training you, bringing you to heel, making you sit up and beg. Holding onto your ball, as it were. She was mortified she'd ever been so dreadful. But then she remembered that she had been pretty fragile what with Tim and then Will and then Ben dumping on her from a great height, so let herself off just a bit.

"Ben, if I hadn't been so hard to get, if I'd been available to you from the very first night on the beach, would you have wanted me?" She held her breath and hoped that he'd say something that vindicated her like, "Never. You know us men: We never want to belong to any club that would have us as a member." Something along those lines.

"You have no idea how much. You were just like this amazing breath of fresh air with your naturalness and innocence and the fact that you had no idea how to work it. All the women I've met for years have been operators. They're like steel. They manipulate and control and it's all some huge game. It sounds pretty mad, but you had a purity about you, Liv."

"Ben, I think that . . ." Liv was about to try to make some sense of what she'd been doing these past few weeks. The manipulative, controlling, steely games she'd been playing. Oh, whoops.

"I'm sorry I put you through h.e.l.l," he said, and kissed her.

Liv closed her eyes and lay back on the moss-coated tiles and decided that confessions could wait. This, on the other hand, couldn't.

And so events sort of took on a shape of their own. Liv quashed her dog-handling revelation as irrelevant now that the whole game was over, and they just sank into the spirit of their dirty weekend. They'd put any talk of the future to one side as it was so stressful. The Amelia hurdle to leap, the party to get through, Tim arriving in Sydney next week. All just too much. Instead they retreated into a world of wine and Cole Porter and doing silly dances in the garden in the moonlight and talking about the bullfights they wanted to hold hands through, the days they'd spend just chilling out and watching MTV on Ben's bed, the afternoons when they'd just lie on the beach back in Sydney getting burned, and the archaeological digs they'd go on with Liv warming baked beans up on a calor gas stove, killing the odd snake, and guarding the tent while Ben unearthed unimaginable treasure.

Their hands shook as they raised gla.s.s after gla.s.s of red and white and Chardonnay and a little drop of Penfold's Grange to their lips in yet another winery, under the eye of yet another vintner who watched the happy couple enviously and thought that maybe it was time to make a lover of the pretty Norwegian grape picker who was staying in the attic bedroom for the summer. His wife was too busy chatting up the estate manager to notice anyway. And as they took long walks in the late afternoon through the vineyards, they'd laugh and chase each other onto private land with the air of naughtiness usually only managed between George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's when they emerged bright-eyed from their shoplifting spree.

In fact, by Sunday evening, as the sun dipped behind the horizon on yet another perfect, still evening and they toasted more bliss and s.e.x with yet another bottle of s.h.i.+raz, Liv felt as though her life had been a seamless journey from the Provencal marketplace to Australia. She could barely remember a time in between. Somewhere she was terrified to be this happy-she tried to tell herself that anything she gained on this trip, be it a man or a business empire, was a bonus, but she mustn't treat this adventure as her everyday life. She mattered; finding out what she thought and felt and cared about and hated mattered. Wasn't she slightly missing the point if she didn't do what she wanted to do for once in her life rather than what was right or expected or made someone else happy? Yes, she should definitely go for it.

After the s.h.i.+raz, Liv kissed Ben on the forehead and went to get dressed for their Last Supper. Or what she privately hoped would be their first of a million suppers. She showered for an age and pulled on an emerald-green silk slip dress. Though it was a bit on the long side because it was Alex's, it still looked ethereal and lovely. And the wine had made her cheeks flush pink, giving her a Snow White look against her clean, s.h.i.+ning black hair. She wondered if she felt beautiful enough to tell him about the silly, pointless, irrelevant little game she'd been playing. She'd tell him honestly that it was because she felt used and broken and fragile and she realised now how childish it had been, but she was sorry and hoped that he could understand. He'd made such a big deal about her honesty, her integrity, that she felt she had to live up to his expectations and come clean. Then they'd have a wonderful basis for a new relations.h.i.+p. Liv was beginning to feel ready to trust someone again. There was little for it now except to remember to put some perfume on and hope for the best.

As she walked out onto the balcony into the dusk Ben whistled slowly. "It just doesn't get any better," he said, and pulled her onto his lap.

"Wait and see," Liv teased as she allowed his hands to ease down the straps of her dress and he rubbed his cheek against her shoulder.

"You are so fantastic."

"You're all right, too."

"Liv, you have to say that we can give this a go. That as soon as I've told Amelia it's over then we can be together. You have to."

Ben was so close, she could feel his eyelashes grazing her cheek. She should tell him now. Just say it. He'd understand completely why she'd done what she'd done. Then she thought maybe better after a gla.s.s of wine or two. Oil the wheels first.

"The table's for seven-thirty. We'll discuss it later, okay?" Liv took his hands and pulled him reluctantly to his feet. They set off hand in hand down the valley, through the rows of vines, dusting their feet with red sand. Robert's Restaurant was just at the foot of their hill, and they entered through the rose-covered oak door just slightly breathless from the walk.

The restaurant was full of very quiet couples. They were all so sophisticated that Liv felt she'd come in her mother's nightie and high heels. Everyone was tete-a-tete, doubtless discussing the vintage of the merlot in hushed tones and agreeing that this year's grape may be pungent, but it lacked a certain je ne sais quoi.

"Doesn't it remind you of the school in Little House on the Prairie?" Ben whispered in Liv's ear as they were shown across the low-beamed dining room to their table. This of course was all the excuse they needed to break into ludicrous American accents and find themselves hysterically funny. They devoured their warm bread rolls and then asked for more as they suddenly realised that they hadn't eaten since breakfast. The waitress gave them a sympathetic look as though she were feeding the needy.

"Do you think we'll still behave like five-year-olds when we're seventy?" Liv asked, giving her first hint that she was prepared to talk about anything beyond tomorrow. Which, one gla.s.s of champagne down, was the first step to giving up her armoury of toughness and mantle of noncommitment.

"Seventy?" Ben asked, casting his imagination across the decades. "No, when we're seventy we'll be wandering around a farm in Devon sc.r.a.ping our gum boots on our grandchildren and kicking geese."

"Devon? G.o.d, I can't imagine a time without suns.h.i.+ne," said Liv. "Couldn't we stay here and have sandy children and mangoes for breakfast forever?"

"Sorry, you're barking up the wrong bloke. I've always wanted to live in England. Well, Russia, actually, but England's got all the miserable weather you can buy. I want a windswept, chilly old age with bleak skies and a library full of books. The sun's no good when you've got the body of a California prune and can't get your kit off without scaring off the local wildlife," Ben remarked as he offered her a bite of his asparagus.

"If you promise that I can have a blackberry bush and pond and you'll bring me duck eggs for breakfast you might have yourself a deal," Liv said as she imagined her grown-up self picking daffodils and packing the children off to school with perfect triangles of marmite sandwiches. But now obviously wasn't going to be the time to be grown-up because, as Liv tried to cut her way through her prosciutto to offer him a taste, her hand slipped and sent her winegla.s.s tumbling, which set off a full-blown chain reaction incorporating the water jug and ending with the candelabra. In Ben's lap.

"That's not a good look." Liv tried not to laugh as the waitress wafted the smell of burning away with a large napkin and offered to douse Ben's trousers with a soda siphon.

"Thanks, I'll be fine." He was an adult for a second before the pair of them exploded into howls the second the waitress's back was turned.

"It all just happened in slow motion," Liv said by way of apology.

"Yeah, well, like I said, you set me on fire."

"I was wondering how long it'd take you before you came out with some atrocious line, Barry Manilow." Liv smiled as the waitress hastily took their credit cards before she got tangled up in a tidal wave or a.s.sa.s.sination plot or some other disaster that might befall the ill-fated Liv and Ben.

Despite narrowly averted injury, this had been the most fun evening Liv had had in a very very long time. She wasn't really a druggy clubby girl. She wasn't an athletic, hearty, surfing type, either. She was much more mellowing-out-with-the-man-I-love. It suddenly occurred to her that it wasn't just a coincidence that she'd been in a relations.h.i.+p with Tim for five years. Being part of a couple suited her in the way getting p.i.s.sed and staying up till five o'clock and crawling to brunch in combats with a hangover suited other girls. It would be unnatural to pretend otherwise. Liv decided that now was the moment to come clean. Then she'd be able to agree to what he wanted. What she wanted more than anything. They could at least give the relations.h.i.+p a try.