The Sister Swap

by Susan Napier

  She jerked to her knees, slapping his offensive hand away, glaring at him angrily, her breasts heaving against the twin embroidered dragons on their background of peacock silk as she sparked to his outrageous challenge. How could such an intelligent man be so utterly insensitive? she wondered.

  His eyes lit with a sultry triumph at her reaction and it suddenly hit her what he was doing, what he always did as a prelude to their lovemaking…

  ‘Oh, no, you’re not going to get away with it this time!’ she said, forcing herself to relax back on her heels and drop her defensive posture.

  ‘Get away with what?’ he said, still with that same, darkly mocking expression.

  ‘Tormenting me. Starting an argument. That’s what you do, isn’t it, as part of your seduction routine? You never just take me in your arms to make love. You try to tip me off balance first. You say something deliberately to annoy me, or you tease me until I lash back. Why?’

  He shrugged and stated with ungracious bluntness, ‘Adrenalin is a great aphrodisiac.’

  ‘I don’t need any aphrodisiacs around you,’ she countered steadily. ‘You must know by now you can turn me on with a look. And you certainly don’t seem to have any trouble getting aroused.’ She directed a pointed look at his lap. ‘So why does sex always have to start out as a battle, Hunter? What are you afraid of? It’s something to do with Deborah, isn’t it? About the way she died…’

  His eyes narrowed at her insistence. ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more.’

  But he did. It was burning inside him. She could see that clearly now for the first time. Good God, while she had been busy tiptoeing around the edges of his forbidden zones, had he been wanting her to force him to this point?

  ‘Well, that’s just too bad,’ she told him hotly, taking the gamble of her life. ‘You’re going to! For once I’m making the rules around here and rule number one is that if you start something you damned well finish it. How did she die, Hunter?’

  ‘What’s the matter, Anne? Do you think I killed her?’ he murmured with an embittered sarcasm.

  ‘No! But I think you think you did.’

  Her quiet words brought a violent release.

  ‘Oh, no, she definitely killed herself…while I was away overseas on a research trip. ODed on antidepressants—because there’s no danger of damaging your looks that way,’ he added with a bitterness that fended off her shocked compassion. ‘No, intellectually I know I didn’t kill her. However, I also know that our marriage was a disaster for her. But for my falling in love with her and convincing her to marry me, Deborah would be alive today, perhaps fulfilling that glorious potential of hers in the way that she was meant to…’

  ‘You can’t know that—if she had bulimia she already had latent problems—’

  ‘Yes, but I can’t deny the excellent probability that our marriage triggered them into full-blown depression. She left a note, you see, explaining why life wasn’t worth living any more. It was because she had realised that she didn’t have any life…there was only mine, slowly eating her up, growing fat and bloated off her weakness and dependence—a loathsomely vivid image for a bulimic. It was quite a brilliant little note, concise, fluid, emotionally wrenching. It’s ironic that some of her most powerful writing in years was in her suicide note…’

  He took a harsh breath. ‘She said that I had paralysed her talent with constant emotional and physical demands, because I was jealous of her talent and obsessed with dominating every sphere of her existence. The only way she felt she could reclaim total control over her destiny was by dying. Divorce obviously didn’t occur to her as a possible alternative,’ he said aridly.

  ‘She was ill, I’m not,’ said Anne, softly drawing his attention away from the painful memories. ‘You don’t have to keep warning me about your dominating temperament. I got that message right from day one and it doesn’t frighten me. I’m not a reincarnation of Deborah. I’m nothing like her.’

  ‘I know.’ He picked up a lock of her hair and let it trail down over her breast, with a faint, whimsical smile. ‘Oh, God, I know…you’re more sensual than cerebral. You make a celebration out of life…’

  ‘Nothing like her at all,’ she repeated resolutely. ‘I’m physically strong, for one thing. And I come from a big family, so I’m used to rough-and-tumble emotions and to asserting myself against bullying. Just because I love you it doesn’t mean I’ve undergone a personality transplant—’

  ‘Anne—’

  ‘I’m still me. I’m not going to fall apart if you love me back…or if you leave me.’ She looked him dead in the eye. ‘I certainly don’t have Deborah’s hang-ups about my artistic talent being smothered by yours—’

  ‘Anne—’

  ‘Because there’s nothing to smother. I don’t have any great literary aspirations—’

  His hand suddenly clamped over her mouth. ‘Enough,’ he warned.

  ‘No, not enough,’ she said in a voice muffled by the press of his warm palm. ‘I don’t want to be a writer, Hunter. I never did—’

  ‘I said enough!’ He was laughing. He took his hand away, and she was suddenly speechless at the tenderness of his expression as he clasped her wrist and drew it over his lips in a feather-light caress.

  ‘I don’t want to argue with you,’ he went on with a husky intonation that made her body react with de- licious recognition. ‘I want to take you in my arms and make long, slow, rapturous love with you…’

  He picked up and kissed her other wrist. ‘Would you like to do that with me, Anne?’ He gently touched her brow, her lips, her heart…his fingers curving delicately under her breast. She was stunned by the open adoration in his sensuous invitation. ‘I can be tender with you, darling; I can be anything you want…’ He leaned forward and kissed her parted mouth, his own warm and mellow, his tongue curling pliantly around hers, mating languidly with it until she began to tremble. ‘Give me this chance to show you how sweetly we can entwine together…’ he whispered thickly, his mouth moving on to cherish her throat, his hands flowing over her like warm honey, enticing them both with soft forays under the edges of the blue silk. ‘I can make this even more exciting for you than the other way…’ he promised bewitchingly. ‘Not as instantly electrifying perhaps, but more powerfully erotic and just as intoxicating in the end…’

  Sixteen hours after the most earth-shattering proof of that promise Anne was deep in the throes of an entirely different kind of intoxication, shaking with a delirium of outraged fury as she read the letter that she had found on her doormat when she’d arrived back from her morning lecture.

  The coward had run away!

  On paper Hunter spouted a lot of phrases about their both ‘needing this time apart to reassess their priorities’ and his not wanting to take advantage of her ‘soft heart’ and her ‘dangerous habit of self-sacrifice’. He thought that at this time in her life she should be concentrating on pursuing her own dreams instead of continually setting them aside for the sake of others, him included.

  But what it all boiled down to was that Hunter hadn’t had the guts to say goodbye to her face. He must have planned this extended research trip for weeks, probably months, and yet even on the brink of departure he had said nothing about going away. It had been his secret escape-hatch and her passionate declaration of love last night had sent him bolting smartly through it. Perhaps his reticence had been a superstitious hangover from the tragic way his marriage had ended during a similar overseas trip, but Anne was in no mood to give him the benefit of the doubt. Probably he had just wanted to avoid a scene!

  ‘I am not Deborah!’ she screamed futilely to the empty air, ripping his Dear Anne missive to shreds and then shakily trying to piece it back together a few minutes later in order to try and read between the lines. He hadn’t even bothered to write it by hand. His kiss-off letter was typewritten, like a page from one of his novels, and signed simply ‘Hunter’. Not ‘Best wishes’ or ‘Regards’ or ‘Till we meet again’. And, glaringly obviou
s, not ‘Love’…

  The most unforgivable thing of all was his destination. While Anne spent three weeks rattling around her flat in wintry August with no classes and no job because she had assumed that she and Hunter would be spending the time together, he was going to be swanning around Russia. Russia! The one country in the world that she would most love to visit! He couldn’t have calculated a greater insult to her humiliating injury.

  When she found out from one of his fellow lecturers that Hunter had two months’ leave it was the last straw, and Anne did what any heartbroken, well brought up girl did in a crisis.

  She went home to Mum.

  Fortunately she managed to hitch a ride as far as Wellington with a student relative of Rachel’s who was returning home for the holidays, a nice, gangly boy whose idea of conversation, to her relief, was singing along to heavy metal tapes played at full volume in the stereo on wheels that passed for his car.

  At Wellington Anne caught the Cook Strait Ferry and stood on the deck in the biting wind hunched into the jacket Hunter had given her, staring out at the whitecapped grey waters between the two islands of New Zealand and wondering what wonderful experiences he was having without her. And what if they weren’t so wonderful? What if he got somehow caught up in the internal politics of the former Soviet states? What if he got hurt or went missing? What if he was waylaid by a ravishingly beautiful, karate-kicking former KGB agent with big breasts and emotions of pure steel—all his unreasonable macho fantasies come true. He would probably have her tied to his bed in no time!

  At Picton her brother Don met her in the family station wagon and there was another two hours of driving before they reached the farm, where Anne was finally free to sob out her misery on her mother’s ample breast and accept a warm soothing of maternal outrage spiced with womanly understanding.

  After a week being fussed over and cossetted like an invalid, Anne was shooed off to the coast to visit Katlin and Ivan, and she found Dmitri there, finally out of his officer’s whites and temporarily employed by a local yacht charter company. After she had marvelled dutifully at Ivan’s miraculous new ability to walk, she had a quiet session with Katlin and was relieved to be told that she was on to the last chapter of her book. Then she took Ivan down to the beach to dig in the sand and catch up on her news, specifically about that lovely man next door who had turned out to be a snake in the grass. Ivan nodded sagely at this, as if he had suspected it all along, and consolingly pushed a fistful of sand into her down-turned mouth.

  Over lunch Dmitri dropped his bombshell, gravely thanking her for her vital assistance with his residency application, which seemed certain now to be approved.

  When she protested she hadn’t done anything he corrected her.

  ‘Yes, you have, for without your Professor Lewis things would be going much more slowly. He has cut through much officialdom in Russian Foreign Service by using his contacts here, and in Russia.’

  ‘Hunter did? But how? Why?’

  ‘He does it for you, perhaps? Because he knows your family means much to you. He left a message with my shipping company that he wants to help and they passed it on to me…’

  Two weeks later, back in Auckland preparing for a new term, Anne was still fuming about what she had found out. If Hunter had involved himself in Dmitri’s application, then he must have seen the form which identified the mother of Dmitri’s son as one Katlin Clare Tremaine of Golden Bay, and the biographical information that mentioned a sister named, Anne, a student, in Auckland.

  No wonder he had finally stopped nagging her about her so-called book. No wonder he had seduced her into shutting up that last night! He didn’t need her confession, he knew already. She had been dragging around that great burden of guilt for goodness’ knows how long for nothing! And all that ‘you have to pursue dreams’ stuff in the letter had obviously been his subtle and miserably apt revenge.

  But if he knew, then at least he hadn’t informed on her and Kat…yet. There had been not a peep from the grants people. Perhaps he hadn’t had time before he left. Perhaps he intended to hold the threat over her head when he returned, she thought with a frisson of excitement… to blackmail her into his bed. Or more likely, she decided glumly, to keep her out of it!

  She was thinking just such dark thoughts on the last Saturday before term, walking up an inner-city side-street from the department store where she had just landed herself a weekend job. Gusts of wind were blowing the rain across the footpath, wetting her woollen leggings, and she glanced through the glass frontage of a hotel café, envying the people tucked snugly inside, and came to a dead halt. She leaned over and pressed her face against the window-pane, ignoring the glare of the waitress inside.

  Hunter!

  The man who was supposed to be steeping himself in the mysteries of Russian politics was sitting calmly in an Auckland café laughing and sipping drinks with an elegant male companion who looked as if he had just stepped from the pages of Gentleman’s Quarterly. He was back in Auckland and hadn’t bothered to let her know!

  Anne didn’t stop to think. She slammed open the door and marched over to their table. Hunter and his guest looked up in surprise as she opened her mouth and let fly.

  During her few days at Golden Bay, Dmitri had given Anne some personal coaching in Russian conversation, recording some tapes which she had brought back with her and humorously complying with her request to teach her some pithy nautical phrases and insulting slang, some of which he had refused to give her literal translations for, claiming it was too obscene. She used them all now, with great relish, telling Hunter exactly what she thought of his worthless character and criminal antecedents and finally, wildly, accusing him of planning the whole trip to Russia for the sole purpose of punishing her for daring to get too close.

  When she paused for her first breath Hunter, who had folded his arms and bowed his arrogant head with every indication of penitent shame, raised mocking eyes and said blandly, in crisp English, ‘It’s wonderful to see you too, Anne. I’d like you to meet my very good friend of many years, Alexei Danilov. Alexei is a professor of English at Moscow University. We arrived on the same flight together this morning and I offered to help settle him into his hotel before we parted ways. It’s his first time in New Zealand and first impressions are so important, don’t you think? Alexei, this is the lady I’ve been boring you about.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Anne sank down into the empty chair that Hunter coolly thrust out with his ox-blood shoe and covered her mortified face with her hands. And she had thought she was being so clever, spitting out her temper at Hunter in a language she thought only the two of them would understand!’

  ‘Delighted to meet you, Anne,’ said the suave stranger in a voice that held a low quiver. ‘And may I say that you’re a great deal more accomplished in my language than my friend here has led me to believe.’

  ‘Unless I miss my guess, she’s been consorting with sailors…or at least, one sailor in particular,’ Hunter said slyly. ‘Dmitri is such a wonderful fund of information, isn’t he, Anne?’

  She refused to lift her face from its grateful hiding place. ‘You’re not supposed to be here—what are you doing here?’ she said into her cupped hands. ‘You’re away for another six weeks.’

  ‘I reassessed my priorities more quickly than I expected.’ His wry reply gained him the reaction he sought. She peeped hopefully at him through her fingers and he pounced. ‘Invented any good fiction lately? Anne considers herself something of a budding author, Alexei…’

  His sarcasm made her burn and Anne’s hands crashed to the table, making cutlery and crockery jump. ‘No, I don’t! You know damned well it was Katlin, not me, who won that grant. I can’t write for peanuts!’

  ‘Mmm, your skills are definitely more in the verbal line,’ agreed Hunter silkily. ‘You’re a fierce little liar when your protective instincts have been aroused.’

  She should have been furious with him but, looking into those deep black eyes, she was suddenl
y over-whelmed with love. His hair was a little longer and his skin a shade darker than when she had last seen him, but otherwise he was very much the lover of her fevered dreams.

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘About your pretending to be Katlin? For certain, only a few days before I left, when I saw Dmitri’s humanitarian grounds documentation—I used it in Moscow to circumvent the system and get certified copies of his educational and medical records from sympathetic records clerks. But I’d already had a hunch there was something strange about you and that book. You seemed far too blasé about your first novel. You just didn’t seem to have a real writer’s temperament…’

  ‘You mean selfish and cynical and sullen and suspicious and always believing the worst of people?’

  ‘You certainly thought the worst of me. Did you think I made a habit of seducing innocent virgins and then throwing them to the wolves? Damn it, Anne—you gave all your loyalty to your family, even to Dmitri who was a complete stranger—and none of it to me! You can’t blame me for storming off in a snit.’

  Anne tried not to notice Alexei’s amused interest. ‘Yes, well…you acted pretty callously sometimes. You were always pushing me away. And how could you not tell me you were going away for two months!’

  ‘I was too busy whistling in the dark. I was afraid that my judgement was becoming impaired by the intensity of my feelings—as it had been when I met Deborah—so I proved that it wasn’t by functioning in that part of my life in which you weren’t already involved as if you didn’t exist.

  ‘But you do exist, and all I proved was my folly in believing that I could control passion and love in the same way that I controlled fear and bad memories—by ignoring them.’

  ‘But in that letter—’

  ‘Oh, I believed everything that I wrote…at the time,’ he added the self-derisive qualifier. ‘Especially the bit about self-sacrifice. All those years you cared for your mother and family you dreamed those secret dreams of travel and adventure and a challenging international career. You’d earned the right to those dreams, Anne, the hard way. I had no right even to think of asking you to put them aside again, perhaps forever, in favour of my idea of paradise—a home and children, and equal partnership—the kind of ties that bind forever. I had one relationship which was destroyed by conflicting careers and broken dreams, I didn’t think I could face another…’