The Present

RETURNING FROM LUNCH — no fun at all, she loathed

hurting people — Jessica found a note from Brett De Vere, her uncle, summoning her to a meeting in his office. It was probably about the Siegal place, she thought, carefully hanging up her new Gucci handbag. It had cost an arm and a leg. She felt a tiny spasm of guilt, but she had decided she must have it.

And why not? She was single. She had a great job, a challenging, exciting life. Swiftly she took a hairbrush from the bottom drawer of her desk and ran it briskly through her long blond hair, which was naturally curly but straightened at the moment. The action freed her a little from thoughts of the upsetting lunch with Sean, who really was a thoroughly nice guy, as wholesome as rolled oats. Most girls would be over the moon having a guy like Sean love them. The sad fact was he hadn't found a way to her heart.

Jessica stowed her hairbrush away, then turned to stare out the huge picture window directly behind her desk. It offered a tranquil view of the quiet leafy street. It was the bluest day. A day to hold in the memory. She loved the location of their offices, the avenue of mature jacaranda trees that in November, six months away, broke out in blossom. At that time, the whole city of Brisbane became tinted with an exquisite lavender-blue no sooner spent than the great shade trees, the poincianas, turned the air rosy. She loved life in the subtropics. Not too hot. Perfect!

In the distance, the broad, deep river that wound through the city's heart glittered in the afternoon sunlight. Nature stirred her, gave her strength. Comforted, she tried to work out what she was going to say to Brett. Her uncle, trained as an architect from whence, becoming bored, had branched out into interior design, had given her the commission. She was desperate to show him she measured up, but despite her best efforts, things weren't going very well. She'd lavished a lot of time and effort on her designs for the Siegals' resplendent new river- front home. But the Siegals were proving to be rather difficult clients. At least the wife, Chic, a fixture at charity functions, was. Couldn't be her real name, Jessica suspected, though she stood by Mrs. Siegal's decision to make one up. She must have considered Chic had impact. After all, she was only five-two standing fully erect.

But it was hell trying to deal with her. The fact that her husband was a multimillionaire might have had something to do with her endless waffling. De Vere's Design Studio had a few millionaires on the books, but most of its clients staved off mini-heart attacks by having a firm budget in mind. Her uncle Brett was in his late forties and had reached the point in his career when he could handpick his clients. Such a shame, then, he'd let Chic Siegal through the door.

About ready to join her uncle, Jessica checked herself over in the long narrow wall mirror. The lime-green suit and the fuchsia-pink-and-lime camisole beneath it had cost a month's pay, but Brett was a stickler for looking good, considering it was part of the job. He, himself, was polished perfection. In her entire life, Jessica had never seen her uncle slide into sloppiness. She winked at her reflection then walked down the corridor to his office, waggling her fingers at Becky, a senior designer, and stopping at her door. Becky's desk was awash with swatches of gorgeous new fabrics she was tossing around with abandon. Turquoise, aquamarine, malachite. Jessica smiled. Malachite sounded much better than olive. As a schoolgirl hired for the holidays, Jessica had adored being in Becky's office. She still did. The space was a veritable Aladdin's cave.

Becky beamed back. "Love your suit, kid! Watcha pay for that?"

"Not telling."

"We're friends, aren't we?" Becky, fifty for a few years now, in her youth powerfully pretty and still hanging in there, peered over the top of the glasses she had finally made the decision to wear.

"Sure. I just can't get my tongue around the price tag."

"Well, you look like a million dollars." Becky gave her a thumbs-up.

"Thanks, Beck."

Jessica resumed walking, smiling left and right at staff, eight in all, clever, creative people very loyal to the firm. She had joined De Vere's Design Studio soon after completing her fine-arts degree with honors. As a result of her degree, she'd been offered a position at the Queensland art gallery, with good prospects for advancement, but she'd turned it down. A decision about which her eminent lawyer father, a pillar of society, a man who thought he had a perfect right to speak his mind at all times, had been most unhappy. "Working for your uncle is a very frivolous decision, Jessica. Your mother and I had high hopes for you, but our hopes don't seem to mean anything to you." Her father generally spoke with all the authority of the pope.

The fact that her stunningly handsome and gifted uncle was gay might have had something to do with it. Brett's sexual orientation made quite a few people in the family a tad uncomfortable, but she had dealt with the issue by moving out of the family home into a nice two-bedroom apartment in a trendy inner-city neighbourhood. She was able to do so thanks to the nest egg that Nan, her beloved maternal grandmother — Brett's mother, Alex — had left her. Jessica had been very close to Alex. In fact, her full name was Jessica Alexandra Tennant. Christening her Jessica had not been her mother's decision. She had wanted the name Alexandra, after her own mother, for her newborn, but such was her deference to her husband that she had given in to Jessica after her baby's strong-minded, paternal grandmother, a large imposing woman who wore so many layers of clothing that one never knew exactly what sort of body lay beneath. It was she who had descended on the young couple like a galleon in full sail, for frequent, unscheduled visits. Jessica's mother had once confided to her daughter that the early days of her marriage had been like living in a police state.

Jessica had been devastated when her beloved nan, with never a complaint, had died of cancer when Jessica was eighteen. She knew Brett greatly missed his mother. Nan had offered that rare thing — unconditional love. Jessica's formidable maternal grandfather, much like her own father, had great difficulty accepting Uncle Brett's homosexuality, seeing it as a blot on the family escutcheon and a major hurdle in life. The hurdle part Jessica was forced to concede had come into play; she had seen it in action.

But she loved and admired her uncle, and she got on famously with his partner of twenty years, both in business and in life, Tim Langford. Tim was a sweet man, exceptionally creative, with a prodigious, largely self- taught knowledge of antiques. Tim handled the antiques-and- decorative-objects side of the business.

Brett was working at his desk, smooth blond head bent over an architectural drawing, but when she tapped at his door, he looked up with his faintly twisted, rather heartbreaking smile. Very few people saw the full picture of Brett De Vere. "Hi! How did the lunch go?"

She took the seat opposite him. "Perfectly awful! Thanks for asking. At least it didn't amount to a scene. Sean's a really nice person, but I couldn't let him go on thinking sooner or later we were bound for the altar. That wouldn't have been fair to him. Besides, I like my independence."

"How could you fall in love with someone like that, anyway?" Brett, who had never hit it off with Sean, asked.

"He could never make you happy. He's so damned ordinary."

"Maybe, but it took me a while to see it."

"At least you have," Brett said dryly.

"Next time I'll go for a Rhodes scholar," she joked.

"I'm not ready to settle down yet. I'm enjoying my life just the way it is."

"Until the right guy comes along," Brett murmured, sitting back and making a steeple of his long, elegant fingers. "Then you'll change your mind. Have you managed to get that truly silly woman who never shuts up on side?"

"Ever so slowly," she sighed. "The trouble with having too much money is it opens up too many options. Mrs. Siegal spends her time trolling through design magazines to the point she simply can't decide whether she wants classical, traditional grandeur, lots of drama, ultramodern or a hybrid of the lot."

"Give her pure theatre," Brett advised. "The only trouble with that is De Vere's puts its name to it. Maybe I should make an attempt to help her decide?"

Jessica looked at him. Her uncle was an elegant, austerely handsome man with fine features and an air of detachment. Extremely intelligent, he was inclined to be sharp- tongued, even caustic at times. His eyes were green. Like hers. His hair ash blond, again like hers. They shared the family face. Alex's face. Alex's coloring.

"Well?" he prompted breaking into her brief reverie.

"Why not? She fancies herself in love with you." Indeed Brett's air of unattainability drove some women wild.

"A lot of good that will do her," he said with biting self- mockery.

"What I don't get is they know you're not interested, yet they fall in love with you all the same."

"A bitter pill no woman worth her salt can swallow," he returned. "It's the Liz Taylor-Montgomery Clift syndrome. Women always want the man they can't have."

"Is that what it is?" Jessica swiveled a quarter turn in her black leather chair. "Be that as it may, at this point I need help."

"Surely not the talented young woman short-listed for Best Contemporary Residential Project!" Brett raised a brow.

"It would be quite a coup to win it."

"A coup, yes, but not beyond you. You're good, Jass," he said, giving his professional, uncompromised opinion.

"I haven't handed over a client who hasn't been delighted with your services. In fact, I could say with some confidence that my mantle, when I go to the angels, will fall on you. You're developing a following with your watercolor renderings of our clients'favourite rooms. They love them. Single-handedly you're reviving the old genre. Oh, and remember it was my idea."

"Don't I always give you credit?"

"Of course you do."

It was Brett who had encouraged Jessica to turn her hobby of painting interiors in watercolors, an art project carried on from her student days, into a lucrative sideline. For the past year, she'd worked very successfully on half a dozen commissions, along with the major commission of designing the stage sets for the Bijou Theatre's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Maybe one day she would follow her uncle into designing stage and movie sets.

"Is that what you wanted to speak to me about, the Siegals?" she asked.

"That was the second thing. First —" Brett ruffled through his papers again, this time finding a long fax

" — what do you know about Broderick Bannerman?"

"Bannerman...Bannerman...rings a bell." Jessica sorted through her memory bank. "Hang on. Don't tell me." She held up a hand. "He's the cattle baron, right? Flagship station, one of a chain, by name of something starting with an M...M...M...Mokhani, that's it. Banner-man always figures in the Bulletin"s Rich List."

"The very one." Brett looked at her with approval. He leaned forward to hand over the fax, murmuring something complimentary about her powers of recall. "And he remembers you! He saw that interview on TV with the ubiquitous Bruce Hilton when he so easily could have missed it. That was just after you'd been short-listed for your award. Apparently he was so impressed he wants you to handle the interior design for his new temple in the wilds —" temple' is how some magazine described it. Lord knows what's wrong with the original homestead. I'm sure I read somewhere it was magnificent, or at the very worst, eminently livable."

Jessica, busy concentrating on the contents of the fax, lifted her head in amazement. "I don't get this. With all the established interior designers in the country, let alone you, purely on the basis of the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame on a talk show, he's singled out little ol" me with scant history in the business and only twenty- four?"

"It would appear so," Brett replied blandly. "Obviously he's a man who can sum up someone on the spot. Remember, you're a sophisticated twenty-four with natural gifts."

"How could he want me when he could have you?" Jessica asked in some wonderment.