The Sister Swap

by Susan Napier

  ‘No!’ Remembering the packet of disposable nappies resting just below the serrated rim of paper, Anne jerked the bag sideways, out of his reach, and the carton of eggs which was lying on top of the nappies tilted and slid off the slippery surface of plastic wrapping, the lid flying open and three of the eggs catapulting through the air to smash against Hunter’s chest.

  ‘Oh, no!’

  They both watched the broken yolks bleed into the slimy whites and drip down Hunter’s tie. It was silk, by the look of it, pale blue with no pattern to hide the critical damage. His shirt had been cream.

  ‘Why am I not surprised?’ he rasped wearily.

  ‘Well, I guess that’s the price you pay for helping the environment,’ Anne said weakly, raising her eyes to meet his smouldering gaze. ‘The supermarket uses recycled paper bags rather than plastic—kinder to the environment but not as rainproof!’

  ‘Which environment? It’s obviously not mine,’ he bit out. ‘That makes it four shirts, I believe.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said hurriedly, envisaging her budget for the whole term going into his wardrobe. ‘That one will be right as rain if it’s washed straight away. It’s only egg!’

  ‘And the tie?’

  ‘I suppose I could pay to have it dry-cleaned,’ she said with a sigh, hoping he would gallantly refuse.

  ‘I’d like it back by Friday.’

  She scowled at his black head as he bent down to pick up the fallen groceries. ‘If you’ll open your door I’ll put these in your kitchen.’

  He wanted to go into her flat? Her eyes widened in dismay. ‘No! I mean, you just collect the things up. I’ll nip in and get a carton to put them in.’

  She didn’t given him a chance to reply. She delivered his orders and turned tail, dropping several more packets in her wake as she scrambled up the last few stairs and jiggled her key in the lock. She shut and bolted the door behind her before dumping her burden on the kitchen counter. The nappy pack was virtually the only thing that hadn’t fallen out.

  She grabbed one of the empty boxes left over from her move, making a quick, soothing sound to Ivan as she shot by him, and went through the same routine with the front door in reverse, making sure it was securely fastened before she joined Hunter Lewis on his haunches beside the neat stack of her goods.

  ‘If you give me your shirt I’ll wash it for you and get it back to you tomorrow,’ she offered awkwardly.

  ‘Thank you, but my wardrobe is depleted enough already. I’ll wash it myself by hand,’ he said, his hand pointedly brushing aside the thick braid that was leaking rainwater on to the contents of the open carton.

  ‘Suit yourself!’ Anne snapped, flicking the wet braid over her back.

  ‘I usually do.’

  ‘Why am I not surprised?’ she murmured, parodying his ironic first comment.

  He didn’t answer, studying the side of a box of baby-rice with raised eyebrows. Uh-oh.

  ‘I happen to like it, OK?’ Anne snatched it out of his hand and stuffed it into the carton. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’

  ‘No. But I think you might. You must be even younger than you look,’ he said drily.

  ‘Just because I’m not impossibly cynical and trying to make everyone around me miserable, it doesn’t mean I’m a babe in arms!’ she said hotly.

  ‘So I see,’ he murmured, eyeing the formerly demure white shirt that was plastered by rain to her generous breasts. ‘Is that little homily supposed to be a jab at me?’

  ‘If the shoe fits!’

  ‘For a promising writer you have a very hackneyed turn of phrase.’

  ‘That’s because I save all the good stuff for my books,’ she told him tartly.

  ‘The good stuff?’ he echoed, his hard mouth kinking in mocking amusement. ‘Inelegant but succinct.’

  ‘Thank you for that critique, Professor,’ Anne said sarcastically as she straightened, grateful to have the heavy carton to hug to her chest. The way he had looked at her breasts had made her tingle uncomfortably.

  ‘Let me carry that for you.’

  ‘Thank you, but I’m quite capable,’ she said, starting up the few remaining steps.

  ‘At least give me your key so that you don’t have to put that down to open your door.’

  ‘I can manage,’ she told him, stopping at the top and waiting for him to move on.

  He studied her stubborn expression. A muscle moved in his bluntly square jaw as he said through his teeth, ‘You really are the most incredibly…irritating woman…’

  At least she had finally graduated to adulthood in his eyes! She grinned.

  ‘Oh, I can be a lot more irritating than this,’ she told him cheerfully. ‘See you later, Professor!’

  ‘Not if I see you first,’ he delighted her by growling with childish petulance as he stumped off in the direction of his own door. ‘And stop calling me Professor.’

  ‘Why? Does it make you feel your age?’ She wasn’t going to let him have the last word.

  ‘I’m only thirty-seven,’ he shot back, ramming his key into the deadlock that adorned the battered entrance to his flat.

  ‘Really?’ she said wickedly, squinting at him along the length of the hall. ‘You look much older. Maybe it’s just because you’re so surly—’

  ‘I am not surly!’

  He was yelling. Anne beamed at him. ‘Don’t burst a boiler, Prof. I’m sure you’re utterly charming when you’re with people of your own generation…’

  She was giggling as she bolted him out. It was rather risky of her to taunt him but she just couldn’t seem to help it. Something about him just seemed to beg her for a provoking response. She had never known a man whose emotions simmered so close to the surface. Her father and brothers were real men of the land who had an earthy sense of humour and were stoically good-natured. Anne could tease and provoke them and they would only laugh and brush her off like a pesky fly.

  Hunter Lewis was definitely outside her experience and, as Anne wistfully informed Ivan over his puréed vegetables, experience was one of the things she had come to Auckland to obtain!

  CHAPTER THREE

  ANNE took a big breath before knocking on the door, her nervousness making her fist land a little harder than she had intended. She took another deep, unsteady breath as the door began to open and then nearly fell over at the sight of Hunter Lewis in a towel.

  Much as she hated to admit it, he was very impressive, the bulky, well-defined muscles flowing over his shoulders into a deep chest, the sculpted power of which was evident even through the masking of dense, dark hair. He was certainly every inch a man, she thought as her eyes helplessly traced the inverted triangle of hair that tapered from a broad hand span between his masculine nipples to an enticing narrow line that dipped beneath the white towel insecurely hitched around lean hips. His belly was as taut and tanned as the rest of him and his long legs were strong and sinewy, smothered with the same silky-rough black hair that covered his chest. Patches of water glistened on his bare skin and glinted in his body hair, as if he had been interrupted in the process of drying himself.

  ‘Seen enough?’

  She wondered wickedly what he would do if she said no. Hurriedly she tore her gaze away from the taut pull of towelling across his flanks and summoned all her meagre acting powers. She edged closer.

  ‘Uh, I made some pasta sauce and I thought you might like some…as a kind of thank-you—for helping me with my shopping the other day. And I have your tie here too, all cleaned and pressed.’ He had said he had wanted it by Friday and she hoped she would get Brownie points for delivering it a day early although his expression wasn’t encouraging.

  She gave him a coolly restrained smile that she hoped was unthreatening and lifted the covered plastic con- tainer in one hand, offering his tie with the other. She had no intention of telling him that she had carefully washed and pressed it herself in clear defiance of its bossy care-tag. At the moment a dry-cleaning bill was effectively as far beyo
nd her budget as a new silk tie would have been, so she’d figured she had nothing to lose.

  He reached for the tie but made no attempt to accept the pasta sauce, and she took advantage of his sudden need to anchor his slipping towel and ducked under his arm to saunter into his flat.

  ‘Come in, why don’t you?’ he murmured ironically, turning to follow her.

  ‘Thanks, I will…just for a moment,’ she said cheerfully, as if he had uttered a gushing welcome and she was merely being polite.

  The physical layout of his loft, she discovered to her intense interest, was virtually a mirror-image of her own, but there any resemblance ended. Here lived sinful luxury instead of artful practicality.

  There was oatmeal carpet underfoot, so thick and soft that her sandalled feet sank down into it, and the walls were colour-washed a pale terracotta, dappled with either sponge or brush to produce a stippled effect that provided an interesting background for the gilt-framed paintings which lined the walls. Floor-to-ceiling wooden bookcases surrounded the familiar high, arched windows at one end and at the other was a huge, ornately goldframed mirror that took up almost the whole of the wall that backed on to her flat, effectively doubling the apparent length of the room, the reflection of the sky making it seem lighter and airier even now, with rain pouring down outside and dusk approaching. The dancer in Anne coveted that mirror immediately, while the lazy hedonist in her lusted after the butter-soft apricot leather of the squatly over-sized couch and chairs.

  His kitchen was larger than hers, cleverly designed to encompass the leading edge of culinary technology, and as she put the plastic tub down on the marble bench Anne had the uneasy feeling that her economical but tasty recipe for pasta sauce might be somewhat out of its element. Rather as she was in her swirling home-made skirt and loose peasant blouse. Then her glance fell on the reason for her generosity and damped down her qualms.

  ‘All you have to do is heat this for…’ As she turned back from her spying mission she discovered that her instructions were being delivered to empty air. Hunter Lewis had disappeared with the same uncanny quietness with which he was prone to appear. She looked at the telephone on the kitchen wall and wondered if she dared take advantage of his absence, but decided that it would be unwise to antagonise him further than she already had. It was a major achievement just to have got inside his flat.

  She moved to take a closer look at some of his paintings. Originals, of course—prints were probably beneath his dignity, she thought wryly—but his selection was an eclectic mix which suggested that they were chosen with the heart and eye rather than the dictates of an investment portfolio.

  ‘Don’t you like it?’

  She jumped as Hunter materialised in the doorway beside the painting which she was studying with a frown. His bedroom, she surmised, and realised with a small hitch of her breathing that his cotton crew-necked shirt and unbleached linen trousers didn’t quite blot out the mental image of him in a towel.

  She looked at the painting again. ‘No,’ she said bluntly, before she remembered that she was supposed to be buttering him up and began hurriedly back-tracking. ‘Th-that is, I don’t really know much about art so I really can’t—’

  ‘I didn’t ask for artistic criticism. I asked whether you liked it.’

  ‘Does it matter?’ she hedged, wondering belatedly whether he might have painted it himself. She tried to squint at the signature without being too obvious.

  ‘No, it isn’t mine. I have no skill with a paintbrush whatsoever. So you’re not going to be insulting my talent by telling me you don’t like my taste in art…nor, I hope, my intelligence with polite lies,’ he added silkily as she nibbled at her lower lip.

  ‘All right, I loathe it,’ she was neatly trapped into admitting sullenly. ‘I can’t make head or tail of it and I don’t like the colours. Satisfied?’ Her eyebrows almost flew off her face as she regarded him haughtily.

  ‘Completely. Actually, it was painted by my mother.’

  Anne closed her eyes. When she opened them again gold flecks were smouldering in the blue irises at the discovery that he was laughing at her. ‘My commiserations to your father,’ she said insultingly.

  ‘My parents were divorced when I was still at primary school. My father’s dead now, but he shared your dislike of my mother’s art.’

  Anne gave up and allowed the vivid blush of remorse that had been lurking under her temper to swallow her up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. Why did her good intentions towards this man always go up in smoke? ‘I’m sure your mother is a very good artist—’

  ‘The international art world seems to think so,’ Hunter interrupted blandly. ‘She’s very well-known. In fact, I had to pay several thousand dollars for that painting that you find so unlikeable.’

  Anne was instantly outraged on his behalf. ‘She made you pay for one of her paintings? Her own son?’

  ‘Only indirectly. I bought it retail from a gallery. My mother often gives me a painting for my birthday or for Christmas. But when I asked for this particular one she refused—sold it outright to the gallery instead…’

  ‘Why?’

  Anne knew all about artistic temperament. It was prone to flights of illogic that could verge on the ridiculous —which she and Ivan could thank for their current sojourn in the city. In Katlin’s view the artistic ends justified the means. It was left to Anne to endure the pangs of conscience suffered by less talented mortals.

  She had smothered her deepest doubts about what they were doing by insisting on an absolute minimum of outright lying, enrolling at the university under her own name and simply saying, ‘Call me Anne,’ whenever someone addressed her as Katlin. It usually worked—they accepted the correction politely, without question… except for this man, of course.

  But it was tough. Not least because she still worried about whether she was doing the right thing for Katlin and Ivan in the long term.

  Anne herself could never envisage a situation where she would put her career ahead of the needs of her own baby, but neither could she condemn Katlin for being different. Her pregnancy had been a very difficult one and mother and child had almost died during Ivan’s premature birth.

  Afterwards, when Katlin had taken the baby back to the tiny, isolated cabin on the coast that she called home, she had found to her horror that the words that had once flowed so easily from her pen had completely dried up. With another’s needs taking precedence over her own she could no longer achieve the necessary physical and mental peace that she required for her writing. She had stubbornly resisted Anne’s pleas to contact the baby’s father.

  Anne, who had stayed with her sister to help her through the first month of solo parenthood, had been alarmed on later visits by her sister’s deepening list-lessness. She had been thrilled when the recipient of this year’s Markham Grant had been finally announced, thinking that it might be just what Katlin needed to bounce her out of her slough of despond.

  It had, but not in the way that Anne had fondly en-visaged. She had been a great deal less thrilled with her sister’s brilliant solution to the problem of her ongoing writer’s block but, after discreetly consulting Katlin’s doctor about his concerns for his patient’s mental and physical health, she had reluctantly allowed herself to be persuaded.

  Hunter was regarding her morose expression thoughtfully. ‘My mother doesn’t like this painting either. She regards it as a depressing aberration in her abstract style.’

  Anne perked up at the realisation that her faux pas hadn’t been quite so bad after all. ‘Then why did you buy it?’

  His square-cut mouth pulled into a mocking curve. ‘To annoy her. She lives in a rarefied environment of more or less undiluted praise these days. She sometimes needs reminding that she’s as human as the rest of us.’

  ‘A very expensive way to make your point,’ said Anne disapprovingly, thinking that Hunter Lewis evidently didn’t have to struggle along on a mere lecturer’s income, to be able to indulge
such an expensive whim. ‘And not very filial either.’

  ‘Do I take it you believe that family loyalty should override other ethical considerations…like personal integrity or honesty, or expecting people to accept responsibility for their own actions?’

  Anne’s eyes skated away from his. He was speaking idly and at random, she reminded herself. ‘Blood is thicker than water,’ she muttered uneasily.

  ‘Ah, yes, I forgot you have a cliché for every occasion. So you believe that the rights of the individual are paramount over the rights of the state?’

  ‘I didn’t come here for a political discussion,’ she said gruffly, feeling guiltier than ever before.

  ‘No, that’s right.’ He strolled over to the kitchen and lifted the lid off her pasta sauce, giving her a cynical smile as he bent to inhale the smell of the contents. ‘You came to deliver the poor bachelor a wholesome, home-cooked meal—purely out of the goodness of your heart…A bit heavy-handed with the dried basil, weren’t you?’

  ‘I’ll have you know I only use fresh herbs when I cook and there’s exactly the right amount of basil in there,’ Anne said, infuriated by his casual criticism. ‘I’ve made that sauce hundreds of times and no one’s ever com-plained before…’

  ‘Perhaps country palates aren’t as discriminating as city-bred ones—’

  Anne said a rude word, then blushed when his eyebrows rose.

  ‘What makes you such an expert anyway?’ she said defensively.

  ‘I was taught classic cuisine by an Italian chef.’

  Anne resisted the urge to snatch back her modest offering. ‘You took a cooking course?’

  ‘Not as such. Maria gave me lessons purely out of the goodness of her heart.’

  Irony threaded the innocent statement and the wicked glint of anticipation in his black eyes warned Anne not to make the obvious mistake of enquiring further into Maria’s identity. She had a feeling that he would enjoy embarrassing her by telling her that it was not only as a chef that the woman had excelled.

  ‘Naturally you don’t have to eat it if it’s not up to your impeccable standard,’ she said stiffly.