by Robyn Donald
She challenged him with a sideways tilt of her head. ‘It has to‘ be done. Humans are social animals, and they have to learn to fit in with the group.’
‘I know. It’s an interesting problem, isn’t it? We need the close affection, the comradeship, the interaction with our fellows, yet deep in most people’s hearts there’s resentment at the ties and the responsibilities, the demands made on us by those people we love.’
‘An interesting dichotomy,’ she said, a sly note of humour colouring her tone.
He laughed, appreciating her amusement. ‘Very interesting. I’m sure that’s why the romance pedlars, those who say that one man and one woman can live happily ever after, are doomed to failure. Love begins in dependence, and it ends in resentment and the struggle to be free.’
‘That is horribly cynical!’
He cocked an eyebrow. ‘Waiting for your prince, Oriel?’
She responded to the lazy taunt in his voice with a shrug. ‘Princes and princesses have never just come along. No, I’m not waiting. I enjoy my job, I like my life. If I want to get married I suppose I will one day, but I’m not actively seeking out good husband material.’
A large black-backed gull swooped over the garden, landed on the lawn and meditatively waddled across to a patch of sunlight beside a hibiscus bush. He stretched out a wing and preened, then tucked it back in and seemed to go to sleep, hunching his head down into his shoulders.
‘Not a starry-eyed romantic?’ Blaize said smoothly.
Oriel gave him a direct look. ‘No, you’re quite safe.’
He laughed, and after a moment, slightly startled at her own temerity, she joined in.
They sat in a silent but satisfying companionship for some minutes until he said, ‘I’ll get Kathy to find your bathing-suit and we’ll go swimming. Pool or sea?’
‘The sea,’ she said instantly.
He nodded across the lawn to the stained wood summerhouse she had seen from the conservatory. ‘There’s a dressing-room there. Can you make it?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
But he came with her, just the same. Once inside she looked around at the slatted floor and the shower, the handbasin and bath. Comparatively spartan compared to the house, it was still more than most seaside beaches had. How much would it cost to keep the place running all year? As well as Kathy there was a gardener, and both would be in full-time employment to keep the house and its environs so immaculate. Yet’ it was a holiday house.
Her musings were interrupted by Kathy, carrying the bathing-suit. ‘Can I help you get into it?’ she asked, seeing that Oriel had made no effort to strip off her sundress.
Oriel smiled. ‘No, I can manage.’
‘It shouldn’t be hard. I got it with the zip down the front so it would be easy to manage.’
It was, but Oriel frowned uncomfortably as she looked at herself in the mirror. The suit was cut high in the legs, but she was used to that. It was low-necked, but she was accustomed to that too. What caught her eyes was the colour, hot pink with a black panel up the front, and in the middle of that the zip, pink again, that extended from below her navel to the neckline.
Even fully pulled up it was-provocative, she decided, frowning as she fiddled with the fastener. Slowly she eased it down a couple of inches. Like that it revealed the small swells of her breasts and became down-right challenging. Setting her lips, she hauled it up and grabbed her towel.
It took quite a bit of will-power to make her way through the door and out across the grass, and more was needed when she saw Blaize leaning against a great branch of the pohutukawa, obviously waiting for her.
He straightened as she came towards him. Unease rippled like the touch of a wet cloth across her skin, pulling it tight, standing the tiny hairs on end. Beneath that silent, enigmatic regard she’ felt acutely self-conscious, aware as never before of the tiny changes in her body that signalled, she realised with an odd sort of shame, arousal.
He said nothing, and she was too unsure of herself to be able to think of something that might defuse the unexpected, shattering tension. He was wearing dark blue racing briefs, and he was magnificent, the splendid muscles of his body sleek and taut beneath skin like bronze, oiled silk, his body hair describing a tree-of-life pattern across his chest.
As she came up to him he smiled, a tiny movement of his beautiful mouth that was totally without humour. ‘Kathy chose well. How old are you, Oriel?’
She answered curtly, wondering why telling him her age was some sort of betrayal. ‘Twenty-three.’
‘I had thought you younger.’ He held out his hand.
She didn’t want to take it-the last thing she wanted to do was touch him-but she couldn’t manage the steep, short path down to the beach alone. With immense reluctance she accepted his help, taking a short, impeded breath as his strong fingers closed warmly over hers.
He said nothing as he supported her down the bank beneath the black shade of the pohutukawa, and came out into the brilliant glare of the sun. The glittering sand scared the tender skin of her arches. She stopped.
Without a word he picked her up, the long, heavily muscled thighs flexing, the dense, fine hair on his chest and arms brushing sensually against her thin, hot skin. She held herself rigidly as he strode across the blazing beach down to the thick, cool sand left by the receding tide, and into the crisp little waves.
When the waves creamed around his lean waist he released her. Of course she had to stumble, her hands shooting out to clutch at his arms, then falling away in embarrassment. His finger came up, touched the round loop at the end of the zip.
‘I wonder,’ he said ironically, ‘if Kathy realised just how provocative that bathing-suit would be when she bought it.’
Oriel flushed. ‘No, she got it because it’s easier to put on and take off.’
‘Exactly,’ he said in a voice so dry that it took her a moment to understand.
She looked up into the polished opacity of his eyes. Colour washed across her cheekbones as his mouth pulled in at the corners. Awkwardly she turned away, her emotions rubbed raw by the tension between them, the spark of sensual fire that had its inception in the first long look they had taken at each other up in her bedroom.
Accustomed to hiding her emotions, she was sure she could cope with this new set, strange and powerful though they were. But he felt it too. That narrowed, burning gaze, the almost tangible air of intense absorption that emanated from him, meant that he too was in thrall to that most primitive of summonses.
And something else was happening to her. Although he wasn’t touching her, wasn’t even very close, her breasts seemed to expand, become heavier, and to her astonishment she felt a strange pulling sensation in the nipples.
Intuition hurtled her into the water, hiding the betrayal of her body in the cool refuge of the sea.
Because of her excellent lung capacity she came up some distance away, water dripping from her face as she pushed the heavy locks back from her eyes and drew in a deep breath as she trod water. His shout froze her; she obeyed his imperative command by coming reluctantly back in, stopping a sensible distance away, well out of reach.
Anger sculpted his features into a primitive mask. In a toneless voice he said, ‘Don’t ever do that again. You haven’t checked the bottom for rocks, you have no idea of the hazards.’
She bit her lip. Normally she would have been much more careful. ‘I keep my eyes open underwater,’ she offered as a sop.
He stared her down. ‘Don’t do it again.’
‘All right, I won’t. Are there any rocks?’
‘A clump in the centre of the bay, about two hundred metres out.’ He pointed to a dark shadow. ‘They’re about five feet under when the tide’s dead low. Stay away from them.’
Nodding, she went under again, then surfaced and began to free-style back and forth across the bay, trying to exhaust the strange energy that streamed through her body in an electric current.
She ignored Blaize. Or rather, t
hey ignored each other. As much at home in the water as she was, he swam almost out to the mouth of the bay. Once she paused and watched the strong bronzed arms cleaving the water as though he too were in flight from demons. He looked antique, from beyond time; she thought fancifully that dolphins should accompany him, nymphs and tritons beckon him through the fascinating sunlit seas of pagan Greece.
After twenty minutes she came out, and by the time he emerged she had showered and was lying on her back on a lounger, trying very hard to make some sense of what was happening to her. Although she didn’t enjoy the sensations that rioted through her at Blaize’s touch, she couldn’t discipline a certain hidden, sly pride that rejoiced because her body had the power to invoke a response from him.
This pleasure in her femininity was new to her. She had been so tall and lanky in her adolescence that she had towered over all her classmates. The few boys she had met made it more than obvious that they were not interested in someone so much taller than they. Her mother had insisted on excellent posture, for which she was now grateful, but she had grown up thinking herself lacking in any feminine attraction that might interest the opposite sex. a
But Blaize was attracted to her, she could sense it, and her body responded like a well-fed cat with a feline satisfaction in its own sensuality that was as alarming as it was exhilarating.
Which explained why she was lying out on the terrace instead of hiding in her room, and why, when she sensed his arrival, she smiled and said sleepily, ‘Thank heavens summer’s here at last. I thought we might have tropical storms until winter arrived.’
‘We still might,’ he returned somewhat grimly. ‘The long-range forecast is not hopeful. However, we’ll enjoy this while we can.’
Did his tone invest the words with a hidden meaning? Suddenly appalled at her behaviour, she refused to look at him, turning over on to her front so that he couldn’t see her face. How stupid she was to think a man like Blaize Stephenson would be interested in her! It was mortifying to realise that she was behaving like some teenager in the throes of a massive crush, cheapening herself.
But she jumped violently, her lashes flying up, when she felt his hand on her shoulder.
‘If you’re going to sit like that, you need sunscreen,’ he said, the comment like a taunt as his hand smoothed icy liquid over her skin.
Reading scorn in his expression, she returned gracelcssly, ‘I can do it.’
His nearness was suffocating. He was laughing at her, she could tell, but he handed the plastic bottle over and sat down himself, not on the chair next to her, but on her Iounger, presenting the broad expanse of his back to her. ‘Then do mine, will you?’
No doubt in his circles everyone rubbed sunscreen promiscuously all over everybody else, she thought feverishly. Of course they did; she had done it frequently herself, a simple service performed in a spirit of friendship, or common humanity, or something. Why then did she feel as though if she laid a finger on him she was going to fall off a cliff and never find her way back up again?
Because she was an idiot in the throes of her first sexual passion, and she was coping with it with all of the savoir-faire of the average fourteen-year-old, clogged with hormones and inhibitions. Scolding herself, she took a deep breath, squirted a palmful of clear liquid on to her hand and tentatively lifted it to his back.
His skin was smooth and warm and still damp from the sea, sliding easily beneath her tentative fingers, which moved over the highlighted muscles and tendons that made men so fascinatingly different from women.
Smoothing the lotion over him came disturbingly close to a caress.
Thank heavens he wasn’t able to see her face! She banished all expression from it and said in a voice that sounded astoundingly like hers, ‘There, that should do it.’
‘Thank you.’
He got up while she anointed her own shoulders and arms, then he slathered the clear liquid down the long golden length of her calves.
‘I’ll take the bandage off,’ he said, and did so, then ran his hand up to her calf and "smoothed the residue of sunscreen down over her ankle and foot.
His touch ricocheted through her body, sending secret messages singing through every nerve and cell in an arcane temptation that could destroy her if she listened to it.
‘Thank you,’ she said through stiff lips as she screwed the top back on the bottle and put it on the table.
He sat down in a chair which gave him a ‘clear view of her face. She waited warily, acutely conscious of the unrelenting impact of his scrutiny, afraid to meet it.
‘My nephew and niece arrive tomorrow,’ he said, when she was almost quivering with tension.
‘Really? I didn’t know it was tomorrow they were coming.’ Oh, brilliant, she thought with disgust.
‘They had Christmas with their father’s parents in Wellington, so I’ve no doubt they’ll arrive spoilt.’
She smiled a little wistfully. Her grandparents had died so long ago she could only just remember them. ‘That’s what grandparents are for, I believe. To spoil their grandchildren.’
‘These ones are inclined to overdo it-materially, at least,’ he said drily. ‘They tend to be a little old-fashioned in their outlook, and demand a very high standard of behaviour, rewarding the children with expensive gifts.
I suppose they want to compensate for their loss, but there must be a happy medium.’
Something in his very lack of emotion registered. Im- pulsively she leaned over and put her slim, strong hand over his. When she realised what she was doing she tried to yank it back, but his turned and caught hers in his strong clasp.
Without looking at her he said, still in that same un- naturally level voice, ‘Jim was their only child, Sue my only sister. We had no brothers. They were young and very much in love. He was a lawyer-they had everything to live for. But some criminally stupid idiot bought himself a cruiser he couldn’t control and took it out at the back of Rangitoto, drank himself into sottish irresponsibility and ran them down.’
Horrified, she whispered, ‘I’m so sorry. It’s an utterly useless thing to say, but I am.’
‘The children were on the beach,’ he went on tonelessly. ‘They saw it happen. The friends they were with said Jim and Sue yelled-then they dived, but the boat went straight over the top of them.’
She twined her hands around his, seeking to give him some comfort, something to allay the hell of emptiness she saw in the crystalline depths of his eyes. ‘Poor kids,’ she whispered. ‘Blaize, I know there doesn’t seem to be a reason for such tragedies, but...’
He lifted her hands to his mouth and kissed the tense fingers, before putting them back in her lap. He was in control, the awful darkness replaced by something she didn’t understand until he spoke, very gently.
‘It happened because a man arrogantly thought he had the right to indulge himself wherever he wanted to,’ he said. ‘Where he is now there are very few ways he can indulge himself, and when he comes out of prison there will be nothing left for him. As quickly and easily as he murdered my sister and her husband I’ve demolished the little financial empire he built, and there is no way he’ll ever be able to build it again. He’ll have difficulty finding the money to buy himself one drink.’
Revenge. Even unspoken, the word was ugly in the bright air, darkening the summer coast about them with IIS connotations. Oriel’s skin tightened, the little hairs standing on end. She had been more correct than she knew when she’d called him pagan. The impulses that had fuelled the Greek tragedies lived on in him, crying for appeasement.
At the twist of his smile her protest died on her tongue. Confronted by his implacable will, she could only shiver.
‘You don’t approve? No, of course you don’t. You were trained to be compassionate.’ He got to his feet, looking down at her shrinking length with cold, controlled lack of interest. ‘I had a different education,’ he said calmly, and left her.
Oriel was in her room getting ready for dinner, her mind never
wandering far from that lethal little scene, when the door opened and a child wandered in, a girl of about seven, well-built, with blue eyes and an aristocratic little nose above a wide, sweet mouth.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘What did you do to your foot?’
Oriel turned and smiled. ‘I stupidly stepped into a deep hole and fell very awkwardly. You must be Sarah. I’m Oriel Radford.’
‘Our plane got to Auckland early and there wasn't anyone to meet us, but Simon rang one of Uncle Blaize’s men and he came out and brought us all the way up in his car.’
‘What an adventure!’
This was clearly a new way of looking at matters. Sarah sat down on the bed and watched with interested eyes as Oriel dragged a comb through her hair, trying somewhat vainly to control the curls.
‘Uncle Blaize was cross,’ Sarah informed her, adding with relish, ‘He said someone had made a mistake and Simon said heads would roll.’
Oriel said calmly, ‘I doubt it. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes.’
‘Well, Uncle Blaize will pay back whoever was wrong,’ Sarah responded, charming Oriel with a tentative, endearingly gappy smile. ‘Can I watch you put your make-up on?’
Oriel made a face at her in the mirror. ‘I haven't got any to put on, so I’m afraid the answer has to be no.’
‘Not even some lipstick?’ True feminine horror coloured the child's expression.
Turning around, Oriel touched the pale, silky hair. ‘No, not a skerrick. You see, I was tramping when I hurt my foot, and the only make-up you need tramping is sunscreen.’
‘My mummy would take lipstick everywhere.’ There was a wobble in the child’s voice that wrung Oriel’s heart. However, it was rapidly controlled. Sarah went on, ‘Uncle Blaize said you aren’t going to be able to walk for a whole month. Will you stay here all the time?’
‘No. Why?’
‘I just wondered,’ she said vaguely, and then, ‘My gov’ness just got married.’
Realising that the child had taken one of childhood’s rapid shines to her, Oriel smiled sympathetically. ‘I have to go back home as soon as my mother comes back from her holiday in Australia.’