Margaret Way - Mistaken Mistress

“Yes I do,” he clipped off.

“Owen’s wife must be tremendously relieved,” she continued gently. “Is she flying down?”

“Of course.”

He wasn’t inclined to talk, his handsome profile remote. Eden glanced out the window. It was dusk and the glorious tropical sunset was turning the city’s glassed towers and high-rises to glittering gold. In another ten minutes night would fall, as it did in the tropics, suddenly and completely, as if someone had thrown a switch. The multi-coloured sky, now rose, gold, scarlet, indigo, lime green at the horizon, would turn to a deep velvety purple. There were people everywhere. The picturesque paddle wheeler, the Kookaburra Queen was returning from a river cruise; the City Kats busy ferrying passengers across the river to the parks where they kept their cars.

She loved her home city. It had a delightful, leisurely way of life and a wonderful climate. Owen wanted her to go to live with him in North Queensland. To think of the number of times she had visited the Great Barrier Reef and the magnificent Daintree Rain Forest and had never known her birth father, Owen, was close by. She could even have driven past his home. There were some wonderful tropical homes in the far North. Fabulous sites overlooking the spectacular beauty of turquoise sea and emerald offshore islands.

“It’s been an extraordinary day.”

“Yes.”

“Are you only going to answer me in as few words as possible?”

He responded wearily. “Eden, what is it you want me to say?”

“You can say I accept you?”

His brief laugh was grim. “The only way I could accept you is as Owen’s long-lost child.”

Her heart shook. “How do you know I’m not?”

Another lancing glance. “I know Owen, that’s why. There’s no way in this world Owen would have deserted his child, his child’s mother. I know him. No way he could have kept such a thing secret. Not from me, let alone Delma.”

“You don’t think she would take kindly to having Owen’s love child fostered on her?” she asked, her voice so poignant he wanted to stop the car to confront her.

“You’re not pregnant, are you?” God, he didn’t think he could live with that.

“I find that unforgivable.” She had never done anything illicit in her life. Owen was her father, for God’s sake. What code had Owen bound her to she couldn’t say it? Both her mother and her father were good at keeping secrets she’d found. She wasn’t going to relive history. Tomorrow when Owen was a little stronger she was going to insist he explain the exact nature of their relationship and the whole sad story behind it. There was no earthly reason to delay, not even Delma’s arrival. She was tired of this charade and intensely angry with Lang Forsyth. She didn’t enjoy how he was making her feel.

“I don’t follow you at all,” he was saying. “In fact we seem to be speaking a different language. This isn’t a good situation. You must know that. I feel I have to warn you, you’ll have a job fending Delma off. She’s a tough mature woman. She’ll fight tooth and nail for her man.” God knows she had come up with quite a strategy to land Owen in the first place, he thought. But he wasn’t about to tell the girl that. It could only amount to extra ammunition.

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