by Robyn Donald
‘No, thank you.’ He sounded contemptuous. ‘What’s your problem?’
‘You know what it is. Why did you put seven hundred dollars into my account?’
‘Don’t be obtuse. My steer broke through your electric fence and trashed at least some of your tunnel-house. I pay my debts.’
The colour drained from her face. His eyes darkened and he swore beneath his breath. ‘Damn it, Natalia, I didn’t mean that you don’t!’
‘Then what did you mean?’
‘As you pointed out, I owed you for the damage and for the loss of quite a few plants.’
‘Seven hundred dollars’ worth?’
He didn’t move, but she sensed a discomfort in him, a moment of hesitation. Whipping up her anger, she said, ‘I may be poor, but I don’t sponge off my neighbours.’
‘Natalia.’ He said her name as though it was something precious to him. ‘You’re shivering,’ he said curtly. ‘It’s bloody cold in here—don’t tell me you have no heating!’
It wasn’t the cold making her shiver; tormented by a wild hunger made more potent by her emotion, she stood with green eyes glittering, her mouth a straight, tight line.
‘Use some of the money to get a heater,’ he snarled.
‘Are you trying to buy me?’
‘Why would I be so stupid? You want me every bit as much as I want you!’ Clay’s iron restraint was splintering, its cracks revealing a white-hot anger to match hers. ‘You know what you’re doing, don’t you? You’re using every excuse you can to push me away.’
He reached her in one stride and lifted her hands, his own making steel bracelets around her wrists. When Natalia shuddered he dropped them and picked her up as easily as if she’d been half her size. ‘I won’t let you starve yourself and go cold out of misplaced pride,’ he said savagely, eyes hard and uncompromising, his mouth a straight line. ‘If it means so much to you, give me back the extra money after you’ve taken out the amount that covers the damage my steer did. And make sure you count the previous times it got into your tunnel-house.’
His arms tightened around her, holding her against his charged body. He was so hot, she thought feverishly, and she leaned into that heat, warming herself at it like a child bewitched by the dangerous beauty of a bonfire. It was all she could do to say, ‘I’m not starving myself.’
‘You haven’t had anything to eat, have you? There are no cooking smells.’
‘I’ve been digging.’
‘Come out to dinner with me.’ His voice was deep, almost husky, all anger gone.
A moment ago she’d been so furious she could barely speak. Now it had seeped away, leaving her raw and vulnerable. All she wanted to do was lie there in his strong arms and abandon herself to the language of her senses, to glory in the power and heat of his big body, to watch the movement of his mouth as he spoke, to let the scent that was a mixture of soap and subliminal male pheromones work their magic on her.
‘Natalia?’ He set her on her feet, lifting her chin so that he could see into her dazed eyes.
Almost lost to prudence, she welcomed the excuse. ‘I can’t—I have to be here at nine o’clock.’
‘Why?’
She was in deep trouble, because the swift question didn’t do any more than burnish her caution. ‘I need to check the peppers.’
‘Then have dinner with me at Pukekahu,’ he said urgently. ‘I can’t leave you like this.’
For a shocked moment she was tempted. But she pulled away from the haven of his arms, saying stupidly, ‘I’d rather keep this businesslike—’
‘How can you?’ he asked, smiling the lopsided smile that twisted her heart. ‘We saw each other and wanted each other—it happened in the first minute. Business has got nothing to do with it, and you know it.’
‘Are you married?’ she asked abruptly, watching him with suspicious eyes.
He laughed, but his eyes were level. ‘No. No marriage, no engagement, no relationship.’
‘Then I’ll come out to dinner,’ she said.
‘If you need to be back by nine I can organise that. Do you like spicy food?’
‘Very much.’
‘Then we’ll go to The Indies. It does Indonesian food very well.’
Who else had he taken there? Shaking her head, she looked down at her jeans. ‘I haven’t got—’
‘Wear the clothes you had on when you came up to the homestead—the shirt that’s the same colour as your eyes.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘While you’re changing I’ll book a table and tell them we need to be in and out in two hours.’
It wasn’t until she’d got to her room and pulled off her jeans and sweatshirt that she worked out his tactics. Just take things for granted and dimwits like Natalia Gerner would meekly go along with him.
But a febrile anticipation built inside her, burning away the cautious prompting of common sense. What harm could going out to dinner with him do?
It could break her heart, that was what it could do, because she suspected she was heading down a long and lonely path—a path towards love for a man who hadn’t said anything about love, a man who made no bones about wanting a mistress.
So what? she thought defiantly. You got over the last dented heart soon enough. Do it often enough and you’ll get used to it.
And anyway, could love grow from this powerful, violent physical response? How would she know the difference? After all, she’d wanted Dean too—although not like this.
But even as she got into her clothes she knew there was no comparison between Dean Jamieson’s facile charm—based on sexual promise and superficial courtesy and a fundamental disrespect for women—and Clay, as protective as he was dominant, who seemed to understand both her inconvenient sense of responsibility and her desire for freedom.
CHAPTER SIX
WHEN she walked back into the sitting room and saw him waiting, her pulses gave a sudden, almost deafening thump. He’d been examining her sketches and he turned as she came in and watched her come towards him. A cotton shirt in a shade of copper lit his eyes to molten ore, and his mouth was curled in a smile that both beckoned and taunted.
‘You look like something wild and woodstruck,’ he said, scanning her with deliberate enjoyment. ‘Beautiful and pagan and free.’
It threw her; he had no right to unseat her with a sly, practised compliment. Coolly she returned, ‘You look splendid too. Did you get a table at The Indies?’
‘Yes, and told them we were in a hurry. Why do you have to be back by nine?’
‘I have to check the hydroponics system,’ she said. She said it casually, as though this was an entirely normal thing for her to do.
She should have known better. ‘No doubt because as well as trashing your plants and eating the capsicums, the steer damaged it,’ he said curtly. When she hesitated, he went on without finesse, ‘Make sure you take the cost of the replacement out of the money I deposited.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said sweetly.
He grinned at her barely hidden challenge, then frowned. ‘Will you be warm enough like that?’
‘I believe the restaurant has excellent heating.’ She wasn’t going to tell him she had nothing suitable to wear over her pretty green shirt.
‘You have a real talent for ink and watercolour,’ he said, nodding at the wall of sketches. ‘Do you do any now?’
Natalia shook her head abruptly, her face still and proud. If he showed any sort of pity at all he could eat dinner by himself.
He didn’t, although his eyes narrowed. ‘Liz said you once had plans to be a botanist.’
Mentally adding a caustic page to the letter to Liz that lay half finished in her bedroom, Natalia said, ‘When I was at high school. And even then I think it was only because I wanted to draw plants.’
‘And now?’
She shrugged. ‘One day, when I have more time, I’ll probably take it up again.’
Dark lashes hid his thoughts, but to her relief he said no more about the sketches; as they drove t
o the restaurant she realised with surprise that she was glad he’d seen them. Now he knew there was something she could do well.
On the outskirts of Bowden, The Indies was new, stylish and expensive; it attracted guests from the coast as well as people in the immediate district. Natalia had never been there before. It seemed to her that every eye was on them as they were shown to their table, one set a little aside, about halfway between a huge black grand piano and the flickering flames of the fire. In spite of her prickly mood she couldn’t squelch a lowering, embarrassing pleasure that she was with Clay Beauchamp.
Keeping her eyes fixed on the menu, she determinedly discussed the food until the waitress took their order.
After choosing a bottle of white wine, Clay said without preamble, ‘I thought the easiest way to deal with the situation was simply to deposit money in your account.’ He gave her a sardonic look. ‘I assumed you’d use only what was necessary, itemise the accounts to the last cent, and take great pleasure in flinging any change back in my face.’
Natalia stopped herself from wetting suddenly dry lips. Was she being foolishly antagonistic? ‘I—thank you for trusting me with—with the money. It’s just that you overwhelm me.’ Her voice sounded creaky so she swallowed. ‘I’m sorry if I seemed ungrateful.’
‘Gratitude is not what I want from you,’ he returned negligently, the thin straight scar on his face lit for a second by the leaping light of the fire. ‘Your father’s shame is not yours, Natalia. Plenty of people endure hard times—it’s nothing to be embarrassed about.’
Stung pride burned up through her skin. ‘Even you?’ she asked, trying to sound casual.
His eyes were hooded. ‘Yes.’ The answer was crisp and inflexible. ‘After I left school I put every cent I could scrape up into investments in the rural sector, and because I needed to know what I was doing, I spent a lot of time working on farms.’
Natalia could imagine him harnessing his will to his ambition, using every ounce of determination and patience and endurance to build his empire. ‘It must have been hard going,’ she said quietly.
To build as much as he had, so swiftly, needed more than sheer hard work; Clay’s empire was based on flair and nerve and a nose for a bargain, as well as an almost intuitive understanding of trends and opportunities.
‘I enjoyed it,’ he said simply. ‘I took courses at various polytechs for the financial side of things, and I wheeled and dealed and lived on a surge of adrenaline for years. Like you, I had things to prove.’
What things?
Before she could ask the unwise question forming on her tongue he went on, ‘Tell me why your parents decided to move here when neither of them knew anything about earning a living off the land.’
She shrugged. ‘As you said, my father had a dream,’ she told him, not trying to hide the irony in her words. ‘He believed that living in cities was bad for humanity; he hoped that technology would enable us all to live in small communities in the country. He was convinced that when we did crime would dwindle and the world would be a much better place. So he went looking for Xanadu.’
‘Did your mother agree with him?’
‘She came with him; I suppose she did.’ Although she’d found life in Bowden boring, she’d loved her husband.
‘What made him think he could earn a living off ten hectares?’
‘You can earn a living off ten hectares.’
‘If you’ve got the capital to set up a proper system,’ Clay said mercilessly.
Got it in one. Her father had always been so certain that every new project would make their fortune, remaining filled with optimism even though each venture had failed to live up to his rosy expectations.
Natalia didn’t say anything, but she didn’t need to. Clay would read her unspoken words with unerring comprehension. In a way it was a relief when he leaned back into the dining chair, one tanned hand resting with casual strength on the white tablecloth, and said, ‘So you grow capsicums and fatten cattle. Do you rear them from calves?’
‘The next lot arrive in July.’
His dark, straight brows drew together. ‘How many?’
‘Ten.’
‘That’s a real tie,’ he said thoughtfully, the tawny gaze scrutinising her face until she felt stripped, so exposed she couldn’t hide a vagrant thought.
The waitress came with bowls of hot, spicy soup. Thank heavens, Natalia thought edgily as the first fragrant mouthful slid down her throat.
‘How long will it take you to pay off this mortgage?’ Clay asked.
Natalia gave him an aloof look. ‘I’m working on it,’ she returned.
Watching her with half-closed eyes, he said, ‘All to show the world that you aren’t like your father. Looked at pragmatically it’s a foolish burden to shoulder, but it was wholly admirable of you to take it on.’
A swift, hot shiver scudded down her spine. Crisply, and possibly unwisely, she said, ‘I didn’t want anyone to suffer for his faults—and his bad luck.’
‘Anyone but you,’ he said quietly.
Natalia’s shoulders lifted in a shrug. She’d worn her grandmother’s gold chain as a necklace beneath the green shirt, and the warm links moved against suddenly sensitised skin. ‘Wouldn’t you do the same thing if it had been your father?’
His hard, handsome face remote, he leaned back, slightly shifting the glass of wine so that the flames in the fireplace turned the liquid to golden-green elixir.
‘I never knew my birth father,’ he said.
‘Then your adoptive father?’
The wine glass tilted. ‘If he’d had debts, yes, I’d have paid them,’ he said indifferently, ‘even though we didn’t like each other.’
Awkwardly Natalia said, ‘I’m sorry.’
His abrupt nod acknowledged her sympathy. ‘To get back to Xanadu, in a couple of years land prices will start to rise again.’
‘Believe me, I’ll sell you the place as soon as it’s worth enough money to repay the debt.’
‘And in the meantime you’ll slog your heart out. And if you do sell, you’ll end up with nothing.’
Trust him to home in on her other great worry. ‘I don’t work any harder than lots of people,’ she said calmly. ‘And most people start their life with no money.’
‘Most people start when they leave school,’ Clay said tersely, ‘and acquire a few more qualifications than knowing how to grow capsicums and raise stock. Why couldn’t your father have fallen in love with a more conventional block? Most of Xanadu is bush and gullies.’
‘He wasn’t looking for an investment property like Pukekahu.’ What else could she say? The difference between her father and Clay was that Ryan Gerner had bought land because he’d fallen in love with it, whereas Clay chose his for cold, hard profit.
Yet, although Clay’s iron integrity might break bones, he’d never allow an overwhelming optimism to cheat his friends of their savings.
‘Pukekahu will be self-sufficient in less than two years, whereas anyone with an atom of common sense would have realised that without large injections of capital Xanadu would never be able to support itself—unless you found gold on it, and as far as I know that’s not likely to happen.’
‘Not in Northland,’ she said, the words acrid on her tongue.
‘So, what are your plans?’
‘I’ll manage,’ she said with a proud lift of her chin, rejecting any pity.
His mouth tightened. ‘How?’
‘I’ll manage,’ Natalia repeated, converting her stubborn expression into a smile for the waitress who brought their main courses—fish cooked in coconut cream with lemon-grass and chilli for Natalia, spicy beef for Clay.
When they were once again alone he said, ‘In other words you haven’t the faintest idea what you’ll do. Your parents should be shot for leaving you in this situation.’
‘They didn’t do it deliberately,’ she flashed back, her appetite suddenly deserting her.
‘They didn’t die deliberately,’ h
e said with curt disregard for her feelings, ‘but they sure as hell didn’t make any provision for your future. They didn’t even see that you had some sort of training so you could earn a decent living.’
‘And yours did?’ Natalia said shortly.
Clay’s tawny gaze darkened into something compelling and stark. After a taut moment Natalia glanced down at the plate of food in front of her and picked up her knife and fork.
When he spoke his voice was detached, yet she heard a gritty note beneath each word, as though he had to force it out. ‘God alone knows who my birth father was. My birth mother was killed in a car accident just after my sixth birthday, leaving me without any relatives. I was made a state ward, and about a year later I was adopted. I adored my adoptive mother, but her husband didn’t think much of me—he had a great belief in the purity of blood. He also had a son by a previous marriage, and I soon understood that no matter what I did I’d never measure up to him in our father’s eyes.’ He didn’t sound scornful, but he didn’t need to. It was obvious what he thought of his adoptive father.
Natalia’s breath hissed through her lips. She couldn’t bear the thought of him as a small, bewildered child. ‘What did he want—Superboy?’
Broad shoulders lifted in a shrug. ‘He probably could have coped with a pretty little girl. What he got was a savage. Olivia loved me and civilised me, and we managed to rub along reasonably well while she was alive. He wanted her, and if keeping her happy meant putting up with the kid she’d wanted them to adopt, well, he was prepared to do it. Things disintegrated fast after she died.’
‘How old were you?’ Natalia asked, her heart wrung.
‘Sixteen.’ Evenly he finished, ‘I left home within six months.’
Natalia said fiercely, ‘I’m so glad you’ve succeeded—it’s by far the best revenge! He didn’t deserve you for a son.’
He gave her an oblique glance. ‘My birth mother wasn’t a shining light of virtue, either. I don’t remember much about her, but she used to hit me, and locked me up sometimes when she went out. Olivia was my real mother, and it was her legacy that started me off.’