He was also rather surprised, when she let fall an idle remark on the subject, to find that she knew her way around the stock market.
‘I’m not just a pretty face, Mr McKinnon,’ she assured him with mock gravity, then went on quite seriously to tell him about the portfolio of shares she was building on her own.
‘So it’s not only property you dabble—correct that—you’re interested in?’ he said.
She directed a cool little glance at him and told him exactly how much she’d earned in commission over the past twelve months. ‘I do seem to have a flair for it,’ she said with simple honesty.
‘You do.’ He frowned. ‘You also seem to know your way around these rather well.’ He gestured to the house and boat blueprints he’d shown her.
She told him about the courses she’d done at university.
‘All of which,’ he said, and smiled suddenly, ‘leaves me with egg on my face, I guess.’
Maggie gazed at him, then she said, ‘I told you it was a good idea to get to know me better.’
He laughed. ‘You were right.’
She thought, after this conversation, that there was a subtle shift in their relationship, as if the playing field had been levelled a little between them, intellectually.
She caught him watching her thoughtfully sometimes, then he invited her to participate when he checked the stock market and some of their discussions on all sorts of things—life, politics, religion— became quite deep.
‘Where did you learn to cook like this?’ she asked once, halfway through an absolutely delicious seafood crêpe they were having for lunch.
‘I grew up in a household where food was important.’
‘Your adoptive family?’ she queried.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you… have you… do you know anything about your own family?’ she asked tentatively.
‘No.’ He helped himself to salad and held the salad servers poised above the bowl for a moment. ‘I decided—’ he lowered the servers gently ‘—to take the road they took.’
‘Which was?’ she queried, feeling a little chilled, but not sure why.
‘If I wasn’t good enough for them, the same applied in reverse.’
He said it quite casually, but she thought she detected a glint of steel in his eyes.
‘But,’ she heard herself object even although she had the feeling she was trampling on dangerous ground, ‘there could have been any number of reasons… I mean, maybe your mother had to give you up, for example. I don’t think it was as easy to be a single parent thirty-two years ago as it is now. I don’t think it’s easy now, come to that, but there is a lot more support and social security available.’
He sat back with his food untouched and something about him reminded her of the man she’d first met at a jazz concert on a marina boardwalk, very sure of himself, controlled and contained and—as he’d proved then—lethal.
‘What would you know about it, Maggie?’
‘I—well, nothing, I guess. Look, I’m sorry.’ She took a sip of her wine in a bid to hide her discomfort, her discomfort on two fronts. The feeling she’d rushed in where angels feared to tread and her concern for him, she realized with a little rush of amazement. ‘I shouldn’t pry.’ She half smiled. ‘Or give gratuitous advice. But—’
‘Listen—’ he ruffled his hair and pulled his plate towards him ‘—it’s all water under the bridge. It was water under the bridge when I was far too young to understand anything other than the presence of a loving family in my life even if they weren’t my own. And that’s all that counts really.’
The smile he cast her as he cut into his crêpe was completely serene, and she would have believed him if she hadn’t seen that steely, scary glint in his eyes.
He was also quite a handyman, she discovered, and that he set himself an improvement project every time he visited Cape Gloucester.
His current project fitted in with one of Maggie’s enthusiasms—gardening. His garden was quite wild and in need of taming, he said. There wasn’t much more he could do for it since water was a problem. There was only tank water or extremely salty bore water.