by Susan Napier
She ate her solitary breakfast and cleared away the dishes, then flitted around the living room tidying up, pausing frequently to glance out the window.
As she straightened the cover on the couch, she remembered Zorro making a nuisance of himself last night, snuffling and pawing at the fabric tucked deep into the crease where the padded back met the sagging seat. At the time, she had suspected him of having buried one of his bones down there, but a cursory inspection had produced nothing except fluff. Rather an embarrassing quantity of fluff! She couldn’t remember the last time she had thoroughly vacuumed the couch, and now, looking closely at the floral pattern, she could see faint streaks of dried mud on the bottom of the throw where Ryan’s feet had lain that first night. Maybe it was time to put the whole thing in the washing machine.
The thick woven cotton was quite tightly wedged into the crease and Nina had to tug hard to get the crumpled folds to emerge, staggering back as the cover finally sprang free, bringing with it a small, dark object that bounced onto the floor.
When she picked it up, she discovered she was looking at a polished black leather card case with a tiny gold catch. She popped it open. Tucked behind a leather strip in the lid was a platinum credit card bearing the name of Ryan Flint…no, not one, but two platinum credit cards, two bank smart cards and an unmarked magnetic swipe card that was obviously some kind of security key.
Nina’s gaze fell to the bottom of the case, and she lifted out one of the thick, pale cream cards embossed with stark black lettering.
Ryan Flint
Pacific Rim Galleries
Honolulu, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland
Nina’s eyes widened, her body going rigid, her hand clenching around the card, the sharp corners digging into her damp palm. Sweat bloomed across her body and she suddenly found her breathing locked into a frightening rhythm of shallow, uneven gasps, acid searing the back of her tongue. She slumped down on the couch, fighting for oxygen, retaining just enough presence of mind to push her head down between her denim-clad knees.
Ryan Flint.
Pacific Rim Galleries.
Blackness hazed the edge of her vision and she fought to push the encroaching nightmare back. The blood pounded in her skull and gradually the suffocating tightness in her chest eased enough for her to suck in a deep, reviving breath. Blindly, she pushed the little leather case back where she had found it, forcing it deep out of sight, and blundered for the door.
She ran across the springy grass between the two houses, stumbling as she mounted Ray’s uneven wooden steps, her head bobbing unevenly on her shoulders as she looked around for the old man, unable to make herself call out. Her throat felt swollen, grated raw, and she had no saliva to help her swallow. There was a pain in her hand and she looked down, surprised to see her fist still tightly clenched. It took a monumental effort to force her fingers to unfold and she stared at the mangled card in the centre of her palm.
The peeling front door stood open as it usually did when Ray was home and Nina walked inside on stiff legs, not stopping until she had reached the kitchen and the battered grey telephone fixed to the wall next to a corkboard smothered in children’s crayoned drawings and letters.
As if she were standing outside herself, Nina watched her hand reach out and unhook the receiver. Smoothing out the card on the chipped Formica bench with her other hand, she stared at it with glassy green eyes.
Ryan Flint. Pacific Rim Galleries.
She began to punch in the telephone number, not even registering the fact that the number she was dialling was several digits different from that printed on the corner of the card.
‘Good morning. Pacific Rim Galleries. Ryan Flint’s office. May I help you?’
The professional trill sent a shudder down Nina’s spine and she swayed, almost dropping the receiver.
‘No…that is, I…’ Nina struggled to overcome the numbing of her tongue.
‘I’m sorry. This is Mr Flint’s private line. Did you want the main gallery?’
Nina moistened her bloodless lips. ‘I—could I speak to Ryan, please,’ she said in a dry husk completely unlike her usual cool, clear tone.
‘I’m afraid Mr Flint isn’t here at the moment. Can I put you through to his personal assistant?’
‘Uh…no. When will he be back?’
‘Not for at least two weeks, I’m afraid. Mr Flint is on holiday.’
‘Oh…well, perhaps I’ll call him at home, then.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t give you that number. It’s unlisted—’
‘I know.’
The bright professional voice became a little more friendly and confiding. ‘I’m afraid you won’t get hold of him at home for the next couple of weeks, either. I understand he was going away and didn’t want to be disturbed. He did say he would check messages on his mobile, although currently it appears to be switched off.’
More likely buried in mud at the bottom of a ditch, Nina thought with a mirthless smile.
‘In case you don’t get in touch with him, would you like me to tell him you called? If you’d just give me your name—’
Nina quietly hung up. And then she began to shake. Wrapping her arms around her waist, she leaned her shuddering body against the bench for support as the memory of the two months immediately following her grandmother’s death suddenly emerged from the blank wall in her mind, crystallising into images so bright and sharp that she found it hard to believe that she hadn’t been able to summon them before.
But then, she hadn’t summoned them this time, either. They had ambushed her when she least expected it, hitting her with the force of an avalanche and sweeping away all the smug certainties that she had nurtured in the past nine months. Memories that she had thought were lost forever, severed from her experience and locked away in an inaccessible part of her brain, had found an escape portal.
Ryan Flint.
…The starkly beautiful gallery in a renovated church a short stroll from Auckland’s Albert Park, where Nina used to lunch alfresco when she was working in the city. The gallery she used to visit and in which she innocently fantasised her paintings might one day hang!
…The elegant city restaurant where there had been such a ghastly scene.
…The fateful party in the elegant Parnell house where Ryan had shredded her pride and she had slapped his arrogant face.
What miserable freak of fate had brought Ryan Flint back into her unknowing orbit? Ryan Flint, the former professional gambler who—according to Karl—had won a rundown Sydney art gallery in a high-rolling poker game when he was twenty-six and parlayed it into a string of prestigious galleries that had made him into a multimillionaire and serious art collector in his own right.
The bastard!
The rage erupted in her veins.
No wonder she had found his presence obscurely threatening! No wonder she had instinctively erected such strong mental barriers against him.
She remembered the shock she had felt when she first touched him out in the storm. Although she had shrugged it off at the time, it had obviously been a shock of physical recognition; only her mind had refused to acknowledge what her senses were telling her.
Of course she knew who he was. He was the unprincipled swine who had nearly ruined Karl’s life!
The stormy emotions that Nina had felt at the time came back in a devastating rush.
She hadn’t taken off on her travels straight after her grandmother’s funeral as she had hazily assumed. She had decided to stay on in Auckland until the lease on the flat had officially run out, working out her notice at the commercial art firm and saving every cent she could for her planned trip. For the first time in three years, Nina had been able to look towards a cloudless future.
Then Karl had entangled her in his disastrous romance. A few days after her grandmother’s funeral, he had introduced her to Ryan Flint in the hope that she would influence him to look favourably on Karl’s desire to marry his sister.
Karl had been dating
Katy Flint for several months—secretly, because wealthy Big Brother didn’t approve of his pretty nineteen-year-old sister hanging around with a long-haired, chain-smoking, antiauthoritarian drop-out who spent most of his time surfing and the rest of it living suspiciously well on unspecified odd jobs that he picked up from amongst his dubious set of friends.
Nina, who had never felt comfortable with her foster-brother’s previous free-and-easy attitude to drugs and selfish avoidance of any sort of responsibility, had been in secret sympathy with Big Brother’s protective instincts…until she had actually met him!
Sparks had flown immediately, Ryan tarring her with the same brush as her brother and Nina loyally refusing to admit that she, too, doubted Karl’s suitability for marriage—especially to a gentle-natured girl like Katy.
Karl had revelled in the role of star-crossed lover, but only because his youthful arrogance could not conceive of his beloved actually choosing her brother over him. In any event, he had grossly underestimated Ryan’s ruthless determination to smash up the relationship. It had all ended very messily, with Karl arrested on a cannabis charge and Katy dumping him when he tried to blame her brother for setting him up.
Nina’s last memory of Ryan was the triumphant smile on his face as he had taken a furious punch on the jaw from Karl outside the courthouse, while at his side, Katy had screamed at her erstwhile lover to stop.
It came as no surprise to realise that Karl might have had his own reasons for so philosophically accepting Nina’s loss of memory for a period that might well have included a stint in prison for him.
Was that why he had taken so long to respond to the first postcard she had sent him a couple of months after her arrival on Shearwater? He had said it was because he was travelling so much in his new job, but perhaps it was because he was ashamed of what had happened and welcomed the chance of a clean slate. Certainly, he was much less reckless and more disciplined than the hot-headed twenty-year-old she had remembered him to be.
The sound of voices and footsteps on the creaking planks of the front veranda had Nina straightening up, snatching the creased business card off the counter and stuffing it into the pocket of her jeans.
She hastened back to the front door, stepping out into a patch of sunlight that momentarily dazzled her vision.
‘Hi, Ray, I…’
She stopped, raising her hand to shade her eyes as she saw the dark outline of his much taller companion. Her pupils contracted to pinpoints as she took in the pleasant expression on the lean, smiling face.
‘I guess today I’m allowed to greet you with a “good morning”,’ Ryan said as Zorro trotted forward to sniff at her laces.
Nina’s head whirled. She had no idea how to react. Should she just blurt out that she had finally recognised who he was?
‘You came racing over here for nothing,’ Ray cackled. ‘Ryan’s already beaten you to it!’
‘What?’ Nina’s gaze zigzagged violently between the two men. Had Ryan now remembered the rest? So far, all he had managed to dredge up were fragments of his childhood.
‘Saw him walking along the beach with Zorro, so I called him in. He told me all about your rescue effort,’ Ray expanded, shuffling over to the bench seat against the blistered weatherboards and lowering himself stiffly onto it with an audible creak of his arthritic bones. He sighed with relief, his knobbly hand resting the smooth kauri walking-stick against his spindly knee.
‘Cooked up some bacon and eggs for me, too, while we had our chat. Almost as good as yours! I was glad to hear you had a bit of company—I worried about you in that big blow. Thought I might come back to find you picking through a pile of matchwood, the way they were talking about it on the TV!’
‘It wasn’t that bad here…’ Nina began, instinctively playing down her fear.
‘Bad enough, according to the fishermen I met on the wharf,’ Ray muttered gruffly, a scowl crossing his whiskery, weather-beaten face. ‘And I can see it around here. Some of my roofing iron around back is flapping loose and I’ve sprung a few weatherboards. No use thinking I’ll ever get round to fixing it, not with these hands the way they are.’ He held up the gnarled fingers, distorted by the disease in his joints. An ex-fisherman, he had spent most of his working life in the open, and now he chafed at the fact that his hardy, work-toughened body was letting him down. ‘I’ve been thinking it’s about time this place had a general spruce-up anyway….’
‘Perhaps you’d better see if you can get Bill Sawyer to come and take a look—’
‘And get charged an arm and a leg for knocking in a few nails? No thanks!’ Ray was generous in many respects, but he hated spending an unnecessary dollar. ‘Not when I have Ryan here offering to do it for nothing but a shared crust and a roof over his head.’
‘Ryan!’ Nina’s chin jerked around. Sitting on the wide veranda rail, his arms propped on the cracked wood on either side of his hips, he looked amused at her stunned reaction. In the pale ivory trousers and indigo cashmere sweater, which were among the clothes he’d had to wash from his bag, he was infuriatingly attractive, and his cocky grin seemed to imply he knew it.
‘Yep. He’s gonna be my handyman for the next few days,’ Ray said. ‘So you’ll have your temporary tenant for a bit longer. Naturally, I’ll adjust your rent since he’s gonna need meals—’
‘Handyman! But—you can’t do that! He can’t stay here,’ Nina squawked. ‘He has to get back!’
‘To what?’ Ryan slammed the ball back into her court with effortless ease. ‘Freeman was right. Without any outside pressure, my memory’s coming back…just a bit more slowly than he predicted. I don’t want to mess with the process. Maybe I was travelling light for a reason—the same reason I was only carrying a few dollars. Maybe I’m in some sort of trouble. I don’t want to go back to a life I don’t remember. I’d be too vulnerable. Surely you can identify with that.’
Nina’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly.
‘He’s got you there, girl,’ Ray said slyly.
It was on the tip of her tongue to say that a man with two platinum credit cards would never be as vulnerable as a roving artist with scarcely an asset to her name. But something held her back.
‘For goodness’ sake, it’s ridiculous!’ she said hotly. ‘What makes you think he’ll be any good at doing repairs? I doubt if he even knows which end of a hammer is which.’
Ryan’s head tilted, his hair gleaming blue-black in the sun. ‘What makes you say that?’
She spun around and grabbed up his hands, turning them over to display the palms. ‘Well, look! You’re obviously not used to manual labour. No-one who works with tools has hands this soft,’ she jeered, drawing her fingers across his smooth skin. ‘And your fingernails have been manicured.’
He looked down at her, standing between his splayed knees, a willing captive to her strong artist’s grip. ‘I thought women liked a man to have nice hands,’ he murmured smokily. ‘You have such silken skin yourselves it seems a shame to risk damaging it with rough handling.’
Nina snatched her fingers away. It had been a big mistake to touch him. He might have lost his memory, but he hadn’t lost his instinctive ability to flirt or the basic sensuality of his nature.
Even when they had been snapping and snarling at each other over their respective siblings, Ryan had somehow managed to inject an element of sexual provocation into their encounters. To her horror, Nina had started to feel a kick of guilty excitement every time she saw him and had secretly thrilled to the smouldering blue fire that had flared in his eyes whenever she scored a point in one of their close verbal jousts.
Unlike her, Ryan had not attempted to hide the fact that he was aroused by her spirited opposition to his entrenched ideas. His girlfriend of the time had been a gorgeous, slinky blond creature who Nina had cattily decided looked as if she had never opposed an idea from a man in her life!
‘Maybe you’re a hairdresser. They always have soft, pampered hands,’ she suggested evilly.
‘I must admit, doing this does feel familiar,’ he mused, openly goading. ‘Perhaps if you let me wash it for you tonight, it might give me a better clue.’
Since Nina always washed her hair in the shower, the suggestion made her flinch. She hurriedly stepped back out of reach, an irresistible vision arising in her mind of Ryan standing behind her under the flow of water, slowly massaging her soapy scalp.
Her lashes flicked up and she was mortified to find him studying her hot cheeks with knowing eyes. ‘Inspiring thoughts?’ he asked blandly.
She remembered how clever he was with words. His technique for vanquishing Karl had included treating the younger man with an unpredictable mixture of polite condescension and thinly veiled contempt, deliberately goading him into outbursts of temper that only succeeded in making him sound like a petulant boy.
‘I don’t need a qualified master builder to do the job,’ Ray was saying testily. ‘I’m only a fisherman and I still managed to build most of this place myself. Acourse, it took a good few years….’
‘That’s not really the point,’ she told him, attempting to outstare her tormentor as she directed another question at him. ‘What if someone’s already worried about you? What about your family?’ she challenged.
His parents had lived somewhere in Europe, but what about Katy? Had she graduated with her commerce degree and gone on to postgraduate study at Harvard as Ryan had originally planned?
‘What if you’re married?’ she added, watching with grim satisfaction as his face become carved out of stone.
Three years ago, he had been a confirmed bachelor. The slinky blonde had been only one of a parade of women through his life. Katy had confided that she had never known her brother to fall in love.
‘Women are always claiming to be in love with him. They all make it too easy for him,’ she had complained to Nina, trying to explain why Ryan was incapable of understanding the very special love that she and Karl shared. ‘He’s such a cynic I don’t think he’ll ever get married except for practical reasons—like, you know, buffing up his family image.’