by Robyn Donald
After dressing quietly in jeans and a sweatshirt, she and Lobo tiptoed out into a world renewed. Sunlight, thick and golden, shimmered over the bay, turning the view into a picture from a book of fables.
Normally her spirits would have soared. This morning, although she noted the beauty, she gazed at it with empty eyes until she saw the carnage caused by the storm. One of the huge lower branches on the old oak had indeed smashed its way to the ground in a wild tangle of branches, leaving a jagged stump and a great wound in the main trunk.
Her grandfather had told her about his grandfather, the man who’d built the house and settled the land and planted the oak tree in memory of his oldest child, drowned in the bay below.
Tears aching at the back of her throat, she was surveying the tangled mess of branch and leaves when Wolfe said from behind, ‘The whole tree is dangerous. It should be felled.’
She swung around, her heart somersaulting in her chest. Lobo, the traitor, merely sat and looked on, tongue lolling after an energetic tussle with a branch.
Wolfe must have already been out to the yacht, because he’d changed from the clothes she’d washed the previous night. Sunlight edged his profile, making his face into an image carved from heroic prehistory—strong and imbued with power. He wasn’t looking at the tree; he was watching her with cold speculation.
Bracing herself, Rowan said, ‘I know.’
She tried to smile as Lobo dived into the fallen greenery to emerge with a stick in his mouth, which he laid with a flourish at her feet.
Wolfe drawled, ‘Now that you know I’m not going to be manipulated through sex, how much will it take for you to tell me exactly what happened the day Tony died?’
Her astounded gaze clashed with eyes deeper and darker than the deepest reaches of the sea, eyes that made green something to drown in. ‘What?’ she asked numbly.
‘I’m talking money.’ He was the businessman, cold, lethal. ‘How much do you want to unlock those memories, Rowan?’
She had thought he couldn’t humiliate her any further. White-lipped, she asked, ‘How much are you prepared to pay?’
Lip curling, he said, ‘Enough to set you up for life. My mother is important to me,’ and named a sum that made her gasp.
Her hand stole down to Lobo’s head. Lifting her head, she fought back bitterness and an aching, hollow anguish to say curtly, ‘I don’t want your money. For the last time, I can’t tell you anything more.’ With sudden passion she demanded, ‘Will you please get out of here and never, never come back? I don’t ever want to see or hear anything about you or your family again.’
In a voice slow and lazy and silken with menace, he said, ‘Tough. I’m not going until I get what I want.’
‘So how is your huge empire functioning without you?’ she snapped back.
He smiled. ‘I’m in contact. That’s the virtue of computers and modern electronics—there is nowhere in the world anyone can hide. You’re going to talk, either to me or my mother, or you’ll find you have no future, no career and no peace ever again.’
He meant it, and he had the power to do it. Rowan said sickly, ‘So the real Wolfe Talamantes reveals himself at last.’
Lobo leapt to his feet and began to bark, stopping after the first fusillade with the air of a dog who recognises the sound coming towards him. Sure enough, Jim’s battered truck appeared around the corner of the drive, and Jim himself grinned at them all as he climbed stiffly out of it.
‘Gidday, Rowan, Wolfe.’ He stooped to pat Lobo’s eager head, and reached onto the tray for a large plastic sack. ‘Rowan, don’t you try to fell that tree by yourself. I’ll give you a hand.’
‘Thank you,’ Rowan said, so glad to see him she could have kissed his gnarled, amiable face. Jim was a darling, but the help he offered, although sincerely meant, would never eventuate.
He said, ‘Went out yesterday and got a couple of smallish kingies for you. They’ve been in the chiller, but you’d better cut ’em up as soon as you can.’
Rowan nodded and bent to pick up the sack. She was forestalled by Wolfe, who lifted it with no appreciable effort.
‘Thank you,’ she said coolly. Driven by the need to keep a distance between her and the man who had just threatened her with the ruin of her life, she asked swiftly, ‘Jim, would you like breakfast? A cup of tea?’
‘Nah, Kevin and me are off to Furniss Rock to check his craypots. Catch you later.’ He climbed into the truck, waved, and headed back down the drive.
Rowan held out her hand for the sack, saying remotely, ‘I’ll take that.’
‘It’s too heavy,’ Wolfe said, shrewd eyes surveying her with excruciating thoroughness, their faint golden spangles glittering beneath the thick lashes. ‘Rowan, just tell me,’ he said softly. ‘That’s all you have to do.’
Rowan tried to control the pulses that sped into overdrive as he smiled at her, a smile exciting enough to set any female heart careering down an unthinking and reckless road.
Before she was overwhelmed by its formidable temptation, the hard-edged, masculine magnetism of it, she counter-attacked with biting scorn. ‘Please go, Mr Talamantes. I don’t need anything at all from you—not your money or your help—’
‘I’m sure you don’t need anything,’ he interrupted, sounding bored, ‘but my parents taught me that it was polite to carry things for women—especially heavy fish. It’s a conditioned response. What do you want done with these?’
Pivoting, she strode towards the house, snapping at Lobo to heel when he took too keen an interest in the plastic sack.
‘Put them in the tub, please.’ She lifted the filleting knife from the block.
‘I’ll do it.’ Wolfe stretched out an imperative hand.
‘It’s all right. I don’t suppose you’ll have much experience—’
He said between his teeth, ‘I don’t know where you got this idea that I’m spoilt, useless and incompetent—or perhaps I do.’
‘Tony never said a derogatory word about you,’ she flashed back, pleased because she’d managed to break through his cold surface of self-command. ‘I knew he had a brother in Hong Kong, that was all.’
‘I grew up as a normal human being,’ he said with a bite in the words. ‘My father and I went fishing. I know how to fillet a fish and how to cut it into steaks.’
Wordlessly, Rowan handed over the knife and the steel. Wolfe sharpened the knife with a swift, almost ferocious dexterity, an efficient amalgam of force and skill that appealed to her at the same time as it intensified her caution into wariness. After watching him for a moment, she sharpened another knife and got to work on the second fish.
To break the taut silence, she asked, ‘Have you got something personal against that fish?’
His glance was as edged as the knife. ‘No. Whatever I do, I like to do well,’ he said pleasantly. ‘And I don’t give up until it’s finished.’
Rowan shivered. Without speaking she finished her smaller fish, took out plastic bags and began to pack the fillets for the freezer.
So he was angry? Good, so was she. Anger kept the bleak desolation at bay.
Wolfe put his knife down. ‘What do you do with the leftovers?’
She usually made stock, but she already had enough to keep her going for a while. ‘I’ll bury them.’
‘I’ll do it. Where?’
Warned by the note in his voice, she said, ‘Under the apple tree by the vegetable garden—through the gap in the guava hedge. The spade’s in the shed there. Dig the hole deep enough so that Lobo can’t get to the bottom.’
Ever hopeful, the dog frisked off beside Wolfe as Rowan began to stack the bags of fish into the freezer. When she’d finished she scrubbed her hands and went out.
Wolfe was shovelling the earth back into the hole, the smooth, rhythmic movements of his arms and shoulders personifying power and co-ordination. A safe distance away, Lobo watched, head tilted on one side.
Anguish tore through Rowan, almost bringing her to her knees.
Before she had a chance to straighten up, strong hands caught her and dragged her upright.
‘Are you all right?’ The words were a soft growl in the back of Wolfe’s throat. ‘What happened?’
‘I tripped,’ she lied. ‘It’s getting to be a habit. I’m fine.’
He released her and stood back, leaving her to deal with the after-effects of lightning, a cold and dangerous electricity rampaging through her cells.
‘Watch where you’re going,’ he said, his smile and tone blending so that the words seemed an ancient incantation, a charm to burn away inhibitions and produce instant and complete surrender.
Oh, God, she thought despairingly, clenching her teeth against the urge to fling herself back into his arms.
Making love with him had released a hidden, devouring need, a hunger that stripped away her self-esteem by revealing how shallow and feeble she really was, unable to resist a marauder who’d deliberately humiliated her.
She didn’t know—she didn’t want to know—the Rowan Corbett who could sink fathoms deep into the open carnality of sex with an aggressive, antagonistic stranger.
But then, even at their first meeting he hadn’t been a stranger to her.
‘Stop looking at me like that,’ he rasped.
Pulses jumping, her breath coming shallow and fast, she tried to drag her gaze away from his hard face. He said something she didn’t hear, and then reached for her, crushing her into his arms. But he didn’t kiss her, and she could feel the taut, lethal stillness in his big body as he fought for control.
With Wolfe’s arms around her and her cheek pressed into his throat, she began to dimly comprehend how a primitive part of the brain could neutralise logic and reason. He smelt of musk, she thought, fascinated by the shuddering beat of his heart.
Mixed in with this faint, evocative scent was the clean tang of the sea. If she licked him he’d probably taste of salt.
At this thought something inside her deliquesced, imploded. Greedily desiring a satisfaction she’d never know again, she had to stifle a crazy urge to delicately, slowly, run the tip of her tongue across the strong, warm column of his throat so that she could taste as well as inhale the other component that made up his individual scent, the indefinable essence of Wolfe Talamantes—barely noticeable and yet more potently male than the musk and the salt together.
‘Rowan.’
The contempt in his voice shocked her into awareness. Bitterly ashamed of the weakness that had kept her motionless, she wrenched herself free.
He let her go, surveying her hot face with merciless eyes. ‘However enthusiastically you fling yourself at me, I’m not going to stop asking you what happened when Tony died,’ he said with freezing clarity.
The wild colour drained from her skin as she seized on anger with an eagerness that owed everything to humiliation. ‘I never for a moment thought you would,’ she snarled.
His eyes flicked down at her breasts. She knew what he saw there—her nipples shamelessly erect against the material.
Wolfe’s smile didn’t reach the depthless eyes. ‘So it won’t work,’ he advised.
She shrugged. ‘Worth a try,’ she said laconically, ignoring the glitter in his dark eyes to say, ‘I’ve wrapped some fish for you. I assume you have a chiller on your opulent boat.’
‘All the mod cons,’ he returned coolly. ‘If that’s a heavy hint that you want to see the back of me, all you had to do was say so.’
She stiffened at the smooth challenge in his tone, but didn’t take him up on it. ‘I’m sure you have things to do, places to go.’
‘Things to do, anyway.’ He shouldered the spade and walked back to the woodshed with it. ‘I don’t plan to go anywhere in the immediate future.’
Five minutes later, fish in hand, he disappeared under the branches of the pohutukawa trees. As Lobo whined, Rowan turned away and said wretchedly, ‘We’d better have a talk about loyalty, I think. However, that can wait until I’ve done some serious, money-earning work.’
But she lingered in the shelter of the pohutukawas, waiting to see Wolfe climb onto his yacht before she turned away and went into the studio. Once before, when her world had crashed around her, she’d found comfort and a kind of redemption in work. ‘I can do it again,’ she told Lobo, who curled up and went to sleep in a patch of sun.
Except that she couldn’t settle, didn’t even turn on the wheel.
Instead, she picked up a pencil and began to doodle, realising some minutes later that she was sketching Wolfe’s face. Squinting, she tried to remember the exact proportions of eyes to nose to jaw, the way the light and shade fell across it, subtly delineating the muscles and bone structure beneath. But, although she had some small skill in drawing, she couldn’t get him right.
Eventually she sat with her eyes closed and lingered over the strong contours in her mind, deliberately imprinting them so that when she was old she’d be able to summon his face just by closing her eyes.
Her fingers flew across the paper as she committed him to it.
A short sharp bark from Lobo got her to her feet. ‘Jim—oh, no.’
It was Wolfe, in fresh clothes, and something about the way he walked, the hardness of his face, chilled her.
She met him at the workshop door. ‘What is it?’
‘My mother’s in hospital,’ he told her with icy precision. ‘They think she’s going to die, and this time, Rowan, you have no choice. Get some clothes packed and organise Lobo’s board for a couple of days. Or we can take him with us. There’s a helicopter on its way.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said with swift sympathy, and then realised what he’d said. ‘Wolfe, I can’t tell her what happened,’ she said painfully. ‘I can’t…’
For a split second she saw rage, deep and murderous, in his face. Instantly he controlled it, but not before she’d taken a shaken step backwards.
In a voice that slashed through her fragile composure he said, ‘You’re going to Auckland if I have to tie and gag you. And once there you’ll tell her what happened that day, or you can contemplate what your life will be like once I’ve finished with you. My mother is more important to me than you will ever be.’
‘You can’t kidnap me,’ she said feverishly.
‘Watch me.’ His glance was hard, sword-edged. ‘The only other choice you’ve got is to tell me exactly what happened to Tony.’
He meant it; the threat was overt, unmasked, and he looked capable of shaking the truth out of her. She could set Lobo on him—no, of course she couldn’t. She understood his pain; she’d have sacrificed Tony for her father.
Only she hadn’t been given the choice.
Wolfe’s voice softened a fraction as he added, ‘If you feel that you have to protect someone, I meant what I said before—I’m interested in the truth, not in blaming anyone.’
She looked up sharply. He met her eyes with a straight level gaze that reassured some deep-seated instinct. ‘Can I trust you?’ she asked desperately.
‘Yes.’
Simply said, but he meant that too. Cravenly Rowan realised that by telling him she’d hand the responsibility over to him. He could decide what to say to his mother.
Turning back into the workshop, she said tiredly, ‘All right, I’ll tell you.’
CHAPTER NINE
ROWAN walked across to the potting wheel. Head bent, she said, ‘When I met Tony at Cooksville I really liked him, but…’
‘But what?’ Wolfe demanded.
Rowan spread out her hands in a swift negative gesture. ‘Before long I—he became too…’
‘Too what?’ When she didn’t answer he insisted lethally, ‘Tell me, damn you.’
‘Too intense,’ she muttered, unable to think of a better word.
‘Tony? Intense?’ His voice was cold and scathing. ‘You’ll have to do better than that, Rowan. Tony was the light-hearted one, bright and happy and always entertaining. I doubt if he ever had an intense thought in his life—even after his accident he joked his wa
y through convalescence.’
‘That was how he seemed at first,’ she said wearily, looking around at her work, at the room so familiar yet now forever different because Wolfe was standing in it. ‘When I went to Auckland he changed.’
‘Changed?’
She wriggled her shoulders, trying to ease the tension knotting them. ‘He seemed to think he had rights—rights I wasn’t prepared to concede.’
‘What rights?’
‘Rights to my life! He wanted to know where I was all the time, what I was doing, who I was with. At first I was flattered, but I started to resent the way he tried to make me report to him. He wouldn’t accept that what I was doing was really important to me. He’d ring up and suggest a day out on the harbour, a trip to Queenstown, a weekend in Australia, and when I said I had to work he’d be angry and dismissive. After a couple of months it got too much, so I told him I thought it was time to cool things for a while.’
Wolfe’s mouth compressed. ‘If you were lukewarm enough to dump him because he wanted to be with you, why did you follow him to Auckland?’
‘I did not follow him to Auckland,’ she snapped, goaded into rash anger. ‘I’ve already told you this. Why don’t you believe me?’
‘Because Tony said otherwise.’
Rowan swung around and confronted him, eyes like golden fire in a white, determined face. ‘And Tony never lied?’
‘Not to me,’ he said levelly.
She closed her eyes a second, opening them to say steadily, ‘He was always very plausible, and I suppose you had a vested interest in believing him.’ She didn’t know whether Wolfe believed her or not, and as she ploughed on she told herself she didn’t care. ‘A man with your contacts could certainly verify that I’d been accepted by the School of Arts well before I met Tony.’
Judging by Wolfe’s cold green scrutiny, he didn’t believe a word of it. Well, he wanted the truth—now he was going to get it!
Recklessly she added, ‘I wanted a lot more from life than to play with a spoiled brat.’
Still in the same uncompromising tone, Wolfe said, ‘Yes, he was spoiled. But he certainly wasn’t lacking in female company—why would he fixate on you?’