Nor had her mother failed to notice her abstraction.
‘Darling…’ Belle regarded her seriously once ‘… did Jack McKinnon get you in just a little bit? Is that why you’re so quiet sometimes?’
Maggie chose her words with care. ‘If you have to get locked in a shed with a guy, he was all right.’
She got up abruptly, her coffee untasted. No good sitting around moping, she decided. Action was called for. She’d go for an invigorating swim.
The water was glorious. She swam out, caught a wave and surfed in expertly and she laughed at the sheer bliss of it as she lay on the sand with the water ebbing over her. That was when it came to her. If the mountain wouldn’t come to her, she would go to it.
She packed her bags that morning and drove home.
Two days later, two very low-key days in case anyone was snooping about looking for her, she’d exhausted every avenue she could think of to get in touch with Jack McKinnon to no avail.
Either she was on a hit list of people to be kept away from him or he had the most zealous staff who kept everyone away from him. She couldn’t even reach Maisie—no one seemed to have heard of a Maisie.
She’d even sat outside the headquarters of the McKinnon Corporation’s head offices in her own car, not her firm’s car, hiding behind dark glasses and a floppy linen hat, but she’d sighted neither the man himself nor his Range Rover.
She lay in bed that night, wide awake and with very mixed feelings as she listened to the mournful cries of the curlews on the golf course.
What had seemed so clear and simple to her in the surf at Mooloolaba was now assuming different proportions.
The polite spiels she got from a secretary saying he was currently unavailable, but she’d be happy to take a message although she had no idea if, or when, Mr McKinnon would return it, were an embarrassment to her. Sitting outside his headquarters was the same—both were entirely out of character and she was finding it hard to live with the almost constant churning of her stomach and nervous tension involved.
Was she doing the right thing? It was all very well to tell herself that she didn’t deserve to be brushed off like this, but if Jack McKinnon didn’t want to be tracked down, should she respect his wishes?
Why, though? she asked herself passionately. Why was she such a persona non grata for him? Had she completely misread their, if nothing else, spirit of camaraderie in those last hours in the shed?
I guess, she thought forlornly, I really want an explanation from him, but that could be as embarrassing, if not to say as demoralizing, as what I’m going through now.
She turned over and punched her pillow, but still sleep didn’t come. She got up and made herself a cup of tea. As she drank it and dawn started to rim the horizon it came to her that she would let it all drop. For one thing, she had no idea how to proceed now. For another, she wasn’t feeling completely happy with herself.
She stared at the rim of light on the horizon and blinked away a sudden tear but when she went back to bed she slept until nine o’clock in the morning.
And it was a relief, although a sad one, the next morning, to have made the decision to stop her search.
Then her aunt Elena came to call, as she did fairly regularly. Maggie invited her in and since it was that time of day asked her to stay to lunch—Elena was always good company.
She prepared open smoked salmon sandwiches drizzled with lemon juice and dusted with cracked pepper and she opened a bottle of chilled chardonnay to add to her lunch.
‘How nice!’ Elena approved.
‘Let’s sit outside,’ Maggie suggested.
When they were comfortably installed on her terrace with a sail umbrella protecting them from the sun, they chatted about this and that until Elena said out of the blue, ‘Your mother mentioned a while back that you’d met Jack McKinnon.’
Maggie went still and swallowed. ‘What did she say?’
‘That he was rather rude to you, so I’m thinking of taking him off my list of eligible bachelors.’
Maggie relaxed. Not that she had any qualms about Elena broadcasting the shed debacle, but she couldn’t help feeling that the fewer people to know about it, the better. ‘Oh, you don’t have to do that on my behalf,’ she said.