Beguiled and Bedazzled Page 2

  ‘I really would prefer to bring it to you,’ she said. ‘And soon. If there’s any chance you might take on this commission, I would have to insist on completion by—’

  ‘I’ve already said that I don’t do commissions,’ he cut in. ‘I have quite enough work to keep me busy until I’m ready to retire, which I hope I won’t ever do. I also,’ he added, with what Colleen heard as a sneer, ‘do not work to deadlines. Except my own, of course. There is only one person in my young life who insists upon anything with me, Ms Ferrar, and that is me.’

  Colleen took a slow, deep breath, fighting for control. Then she forced her voice into submission and said calmly, ‘I really do not see, Mr Burns, how it could hurt you to at least look at this wood, at least look at what I have in mind. You might even actually decide you want to do the sculpture I’m after; I expect it would be very, very challenging.

  ‘And,’ she added after a significant pause, ‘there’s always the question of money. I am quite prepared to pay very well for this, knowing that you are probably the only person who could do what I would like and do it properly.’

  ‘That,’ he said, with what could only have been another sneer, ‘goes without saying. The question is not whether I could do it properly; it is whether I would do it at all. And money doesn’t come into it.’

  Even internationally renowned craftsmen have to eat,’ Colleen reminded him. ‘Won’t you reconsider and at least look at the project?’

  ‘I eat quite well, as a general rule. Well enough that I’m able to pick and choose the work I take on. And just for the record,’ he added, ‘I like to think of myself as an artist.’

  ‘Well, I think you’re being extremely short-sighted about all this,’ she replied. ‘Only a fool would stand there dithering when opportunity knocks. For all you know this could be the most important project you’ve ever taken on, and you won’t even look at it!’

  ‘Dear Ms Ferrar,’ he said then, in the most condescending of tones, ‘we don’t have a project; you have two pieces of Huon pine and I have work to do. My work. If you want me to look at your wood, just give me your address and I’ll get there sooner or later and look at it. Otherwise...’

  ‘But when? When? Yes, I want you to see this wood, but I also want you to at least consider the sculpture I had hoped you might do for me. And the timing is relevant; my father’s seventy-fifth birthday is coming up and this is supposed to be his present and—’

  ‘When?’

  His voice sliced into her ramblings like a razor, effectively cutting short the torrent of frustration that she was beginning to put into words.

  ‘When what?’

  ‘When is your father’s birthday?’ he said, speaking slowly, patiently, as if he were speaking to a child. ‘The birthday you want this to be a present for ... remember?’

  She told him, then waited through an aeon of silence before he replied.

  ‘That’s five months away. Did you expect this ... commission to take that long?’

  ‘No, but, as you said yourself, you are an artist,’ Colleen said. ‘And I might be naive but it did seem to mc that the more time you had in hand the better.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Does that mean you’ll reconsider?’ she asked after yet another lengthy silence.

  ‘It means ... hmm, that’s all,’ he replied gruffly.

  Another long pause. Colleen wasn’t quite so intimidated this time by the ploy; if Devon Burns wanted to maintain his position as a man not to be pushed it was fine with her, although it would have been nice, she thought, to know what he was thinking. It seemed too ludicrously simple, somehow, to have changed his mind just by admitting that she had allowed plenty of time for him to do the commission, but—

  ‘Right,’ he said suddenly. ‘Got a pencil handy?’ And without waiting for a reply he began dictating a lengthy ream of directions, starting from the pub at Bracknell.

  ~~~

  ‘I’m not so sure you ought to have done that, old son,’ Burns said to himself after he’d hung up the phone. ‘That is one very persuasive woman you’re going to be dealing with, and if her sense of humour is any indication she might prove even more persuasive in the flesh.’

  He reached down idly to scratch at the ruff of the large, reddish-gold dog at his feet, and received a whuffle of acknowledgement for his effort.

  ‘What do you reckon, my lad?’ he asked the dog. ‘Did I do the right thing — or have I let myself get led astray by the promise of all that lovely Huon pine? Presuming it is Huon pine, of course. I don’t know how she’d recognise it in the first place, much less where she could get her hands on such quantities. Worth a look, though.’

  Which, he knew, it definitely was. Good quality Huon pine, especially in large chunks as described by this Colleen Ferrar, was never easy to come by, although he had quite good sources and generally preferred other, far more visually striking wood for most of his work. Like the black-heart sassafras in which he was currently seeking the essence of a siren, a sea-nymph temptress from various mythologies who lured sailors to their fates. She was there, in the wood; he knew it, could almost see her face, had already found her hair in a swirl of the grain.

  ‘But, we don’t do commissions, do we, old son?’ he asked the red dog. ‘We don’t, and we’re not going to start now.’

  Once and only once in his long career had he ever taken on the specific task of creating somebody else’s vision from a piece of wood, and although the success he’d achieved was beyond question the ramifications had turned him off ever doing it again.

  Burns’ strong fingers clenched in the dog’s ruff just at the thought of Lucinda, who had modelled for the sculpture. Lucinda: frighteningly beautiful, and even more frightening in the madness that twisted her personality. Lucinda, his distant cousin’s wife.

  She’d wanted far more from Burns than his artistry, and had been denied as gently as he had been able to manage — which hadn’t been gentle enough! And when that very artistry had found her true nature in the wood, revealed it through his then unconscious talent for bringing out such qualities from rare Tasmanian timbers, she had turned upon him with a vengeance born of a quite unstable mind.

  ‘Seven years ago,’ he muttered to himself. ‘And only now resolved … at least as much as it ever can be, for what that’s worth.’

  He went to his studio and sat in silent contemplation of the barely started siren, the siren whose face was yet hidden to him, unrevealed in the fine grain of the black-heart sassafras. He would see it, eventually. He knew that. Even knew that it would be a face of great beauty. But now...

  No,’ he said, and went outside to work on something else.

  All this answering-machine nonsense with Colleen Ferrar had him fascinated, and he was honest enough to admit that as he roamed his wood-yard in search of something to occupy the time while he waited for her.

  Quite an incredible sense of humour … quirky — perhaps too quirky, he thought. Then he laughed ... at himself! She had only been responding to his own approach to modern technology. He could accept the advantages of having an answering machine but something in him still didn’t like it. Too impersonal, too remote ... until he’d personalised the thing in an irreverent bid to make it at least partly human.

  ‘She picked up on it just right,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Or else she’s a born salesman.. .saleswoman — which is always possible, I suppose. And there’s something familiar about that name, too. Ferrar...’

  He searched his memory without success but knew it would come to him in time. Her name wasn’t going to be the issue when she arrived, and neither, really, would be her sense of humour.

  ‘No commissions,’ he told the red dog at his side. ‘You just keep reminding me of that, young Rooster. We don’t do commissions!’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘Damn, damn, damn...’ Colleen muttered the words in a refrain as she pottered along the road out of Liffey, heading west — more or less — in a frustrating attempt to follow
Devon Burns’ directions. The road itself was no problem, but she was flustered by the speed of events, and his precise mileage directions only complicated things.

  ‘You should be able to make it in less than an hour,’ he’d said, then had sternly trampled on her protestations that she couldn’t just drop everything and make the journey from Launceston right that very minute.

  ‘Of course you can. You just fling those enormous bits of wood into your car, you get into the car with them and you drive to Carrick, then down to Bracknell, and then you follow my instructions very carefully and you’ll be here in less than an hour. What could be simpler?’

  What, indeed? ‘We’ll just ignore the lunch I have to cancel, and the two appointments this afternoon, and the fact that I’m busy at my work too,’ Colleen had muttered — to herself, since Bums had hung up without another word.

  She concentrated now on the tripmeter, wondering if it was calibrated the same as Burns’, or if, indeed, she had been deliberately sent on a wild-goose chase.

  Certainly there was no sign of any form of habitation ... and then there was!

  But it wasn’t much of a sign, merely a rutted, apparently little used track that looked far too difficult for her low-slung sports car. There was no mailbox, no sign-post, no gate, no power lines; the track just seemed to twist upwards from the main road and disappear.

  Colleen halted in the road, looked at the track for some time, then decided that she simply had to be wrong, somehow. Still with half an eye on the tripmeter, she drove on for another half-kilometre, then that far again before she found a paddock gateway where she could turn around.

  Even more sure now that she had been deliberately led astray, she turned into the narrow track and halted, then got out and began to walk, muttering curses against Devon Burns as she did so. And to her astonishment, once she had crested the little rise about fifty metres along, the track improved as if by magic to become a proper, small graded road. And from this vantage point she could see just the tip of a roof protruding from a grove of trees where the road led.

  She returned to the car and drove up the track. The sports car bucked and churned its way over the first bit, then settled comfortably on the delightful drive to the house, which was quite a surprise in itself. It seemed more to have grown on its site than to have been built; the overall effect was of a structure as natural as the bushland around it.

  Colleen halted the sports car in front of the house, and turned off the engine to hear, from somewhere at the rear of the building, the sound of some small motor screaming in terror or agony. She stepped out and began making her way round the side of the house, only to halt and then quickly backtrack as she came face to face with a large, reddish-coloured dog whose amber eyes gleamed with malice.

  The animal didn’t bark, didn’t even growl. But by the time she had reached the car it was so close that she couldn’t even think of getting inside; there wasn’t the time or the space. Colleen backed up tighter and tighter against the car, the dog still holding her gaze with those fearsome, evil eyes as it calmly sat down almost on her toes. And grinned.

  A gigantic red tongue drooled across ivory fangs; Colleen could imagine the saliva also dripping on her pale blue silk skirt and ridiculously expensive court shoes, but didn’t dare look down to investigate. Then the creature took her right wrist between those fangs and, for the first time, uttered a sound!

  It wasn’t a growl exactly. More like a moan that rumbled from somewhere deep in the animal’s chest, hardly louder than the roaring of her own heart, which threatened to leap from her throat in absolute terror. Then she realised that the dog wasn’t trying to bite her, although that in itself was little consolation.

  Again it uttered its quaint moan / groan / yodel, this time tugging gently as it stood and started to try and move — with Colleen in tow — around the side of the house where she had originally started to go.

  Colleen resisted; the dog stopped, sounded its cry again, then started off with increased determination and a slightly firmer grip — not enough to hurt her, much less puncture the skin, but a grip she dared not even try to break.

  ‘Oh, all right. If you insist,’ she found herself saying. And was rewarded by a shortened version of the yodel as the beast stretched its long legs; Colleen almost had to trot to keep up. They rounded the corner, moved along the side of the building, then round another corner. And now, slavering jaws or no, Colleen determined to stop before the monster dragged her right to the feet of the most impressive hunk of manhood she had ever seen.

  Devon Burns! It had to be, of course. But the man was so in keeping with that growly, gravelly voice on the telephone that without the dog to hold her Colleen might have had trouble keeping her balance. The dog solved that problem by halting when she did, then sat on her feet without so much as slackening its grip on her wrist.

  The man was balanced on a step-stool, only half-turned towards her, his eyes disguised by safety goggles but with the rest of his face clearly revealed. It seemed to be all planes and angles: a jutting jaw, unshavenly dark, a wide, mobile mouth, a nose so strong that to call it a beak seemed almost an understatement, and hair much darker than her own, at least as unruly, and, like the rest of him, strewn with wood chips from the work he’d been doing.

  Those shavings were also sprinkled through the coarse mat of chest hair that led from massive shoulders to an improbably tiny waist, but didn’t cling to the faded jeans or rugged work boots. As they reached up the man’s arms and upper body were corded with muscle — not the bulky muscle of a weightlifter, but the smooth, pliant, whipcord muscles of a natural athlete.

  As she watched, transfixed by the unexpected attractiveness of the man she’d come to see, Burns switched off the electrical implement with which he’d been assaulting a massive tree trunk twice his own height and, after holding it well away from his body until it had quit spinning, dropped lightly down from the step-stool and shook the shavings from his hair in a practised motion. Only then, apparently, did he realise Colleen’s presence.

  It seemed to her to happen in slow motion as he reached up to push the safety goggles away to reveal eyes of the same deep amber as the dog’s — eyes that swept up and down and sideways, taking in every inch of her, assessing, evaluating, noting proportion, line, the curve of a hip, the bulge of a breast, the tilt of a chin. They were an artist’s eyes, she thought — or a pirate’s.

  The scrutiny went on and on, Burns apparently oblivious to how uncomfortable Colleen felt at being held there by this gigantic hound while its master assessed her for possible blemishes or … or whatever. And when he finally did speak it wasn’t to her but to the damned dog!

  ‘You are a proper twit, Rooster,’ he said with a weary shake of his head, dislodging more wood chips as he did so. Then a broad grin revealed even white teeth as he dropped into a slight crouch and continued speaking to the dog as if Colleen were no more than a duck it had retrieved.

  ‘Well, don’t just sit there, you bloody great mongrel,’ he said. ‘Come on ... fetch it here properly.’

  That curious growling yodel was almost ear-piercing this time as the great dog lumbered to his feet, dragging the astonished Colleen over to his master, then sitting once again, squarely in front of Burns, and stretching out his muzzle with Colleen’s wrist still firmly gripped.

  ‘Leave,’ said Burns, reaching down to take her hand as it was promptly released into his own. ‘Now go and lie down, you great fool, and pray this woman still has a sense of humour.’

  The dog yodelled happily and turned away, but Devon Burns stayed in that semi-crouch, turning Colleen’s wrist in his strong fingers, inspecting it in the same way he had inspected the rest of her earlier. Only, now his fingers touched her with equal intensity, and Colleen couldn’t ignore the effect. Legs made wobbly on the amazing performance of the dog now threatened to betray her entirely.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he murmured, and to her amazement dropped his head to bestow kisses first on her wrist, then
the back of her hand and finally, in classic gallantry, upon her fingers. Kisses, she thought, so soft as to be unbelievable — except that she actually saw them happen.

  If I were the swooning type I’d be done for, she thought, but any risk of that disappeared as Devon Burns came to his feet, still holding her fingers, and looked down into her eyes, with his own eyes like amber beacons of mirth.

  ‘Not a mark,’ he said with a broad, almost mocking grin. ‘That dog really has a wonderful mouth, for a Chesapeake. I just hope it stays that soft when he grows up.’

  ‘When he grows up?’ Colleen knew that she was squeaking but couldn’t help it. Just the thought of that beast being even bigger was enough to drive from her brain the words she had been going to say. At least for the moment.

  ‘He won’t get much bigger but he’s only a baby, really,’ was the curious reply. ‘Another year to go, I reckon, before he’ll be fully mature.’

  Which was just enough to give Colleen’s temper a chance to come into its own.

  ‘Well, when he is, I hope he develops a mouth like a dingo trap — and takes you in it, for breakfast, lunch and tea!’ she snapped, yanking her fingers from Devon Burns’ light grip and stepping back from him. ‘It’s no more than you deserve, wishing a stupid name like that on a poor, helpless dog!’

  She had quite forgotten her own fear at first sight of the huge dog, much less her embarrassment at being delivered to hand like a wounded duck. Colleen was aware only of this strangely compelling man, whose eyes and touch held only warnings for her — warnings she would ignore at her peril.

  ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were just a touch cranky, Ms Ferrar. What ever happened to that wondrous sense of humour you possessed?’

  ‘It got lost in the shuffle when that damned hound started dragging me round the yard,’ Colleen retorted. ‘Especially when all you could be worried about was his so-called soft mouth. What about my soft body, for instance?’