by Susan Napier
‘You could be married,’ she repeated vengefully.
A dark shadow moved behind the pale eyes. ‘So could you,’ he quietly pointed out.
‘Me?’
‘Who’s to say that in those two years you say that you can’t remember, that you didn’t get married?’
She was furious at him for turning the tables, nauseated by the suggestion. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I didn’t. Karl would have told me!’ she snapped. ‘I’m hardly likely to have got married without letting my brother know—’
‘Foster-brother—’
‘Whatever!’ She shrugged angrily. ‘Even if it happened while I was in the middle of the Aussie outback, I would have at least sent him a postcard about it.’ Karl had vaguely mentioned getting a few postcards from her while she was away, but he wasn’t one for filing his correspondence and she had never bothered to ask him where they had come from or what they said. If it had been important, he would have told her. ‘Besides, I wasn’t wearing a wedding ring when I arrived.’
Ryan raised his splayed hands. ‘Neither was I.’
‘Some men don’t!’
He smiled cynically. ‘Some women don’t, either.’
He’d know all about that! she thought snidely. Katy had said that not all the women who threw themselves at his head were single, although the ones he deigned to catch were invariably unattached.
‘If I were married, I’d wear a ring,’ she announced definitively, hands on her hips.
He stood up, towering over her, adopting an identical stance. ‘So would I.’
Stalemate! He wasn’t going to be pressured, or persuaded by appeals to his nonexistent conscience, into leaving Shearwater Island until he was good and ready to go.
For God’s sake, why couldn’t he see there was nothing for him here? And now she was in the invidious position of holding the key to his identity when the last thing she wanted to do was help him. Why should she humiliate herself by revealing the circumstances of their brief acquaintanceship? She had every right to despise him. What he had done to Karl was unforgivable!
‘Look at you two!’ Ray chuckled, his white hair fluffed up into a halo by the breeze. ‘You look as if you’re about to put up your dukes! I would’ve thought you’d have been dead keen on the idea, Nina. You’ve been after me for months to get some maintenance done—those warped front steps of mine, for instance. And after Ryan’s finished here, maybe I can get him to give your roof a bit of a going-over. I noticed there’s a patch or two of rust starting to show up….’
This sounded as if it was turning into a long-term position, Nina thought, aghast. ‘I don’t think you should risk using someone who doesn’t know exactly what they’re doing up there,’ she muttered. ‘He’ll probably fall off and break his neck!’
‘Is that concern for me, or wishful thinking?’ Ryan asked sardonically. ‘Ray’s shown me what needs doing and I’m willing to have a go. You’ve told me that a lot of people around here work a barter system—that’s what I’m doing. It seems a fair exchange of favours to me. Or do you think that I’m going to exploit the trust of a helpless old man for some nefarious purpose of my own?’
‘Hey, less of the “helpless” there, Sonny Jim!’ Ray barked, rapping his stick on the hollow boards, demonstrating that his hearing was still as sharp as his comprehension. ‘I may look like a decrepit old wreck, but I’m not ready for Davy Jones’s locker yet. And as for you, Nina, stop fussing—I know what I’m doing!’
How could he? Nina brooded, when he didn’t know the kind of man he was dealing with—a man who would do anything to get his own way. She should tell him, warn him, whatever the embarrassing consequences to herself.
‘Any man with a bit of muscle can do basic carpentry,’ Ray continued, obviously nettled at her interference. Since his arthritis had worsened over the winter, he had become ever more protective of his salty male pride. ‘It only needs one of us to know what we’re doing. I’ll supervise. All Ryan here has to do is to use his common sense—of which he seems to have plenty—and follow my instructions. I’m the expert of the outfit. He’s just the brawn, working for his keep.’
Ryan Flint—a brawny labourer working for his keep? Taking his orders from an irascible old codger who had nothing else to do but drive him crazy with his ‘expert’ supervision? Nina was startled by a new perspective on the situation, a bubble of malicious laughter rising hysterically in her throat.
How priceless! Oh, what a delicious irony it would be—Mr Arrogant Multimillionaire reduced to the level of a medieval serf, serving his lord with his sweated labour. The man who had wanted Karl sent to prison for daring to fall in love with his sister, trapped in the prison of his own making and cheerfully volunteering to do his sentence in hard labour!
Why not let him get on with it?
The sinful thought quickly blossomed into wicked fruit. A feeling of power swept over her, smothering her weak stirrings of conscience.
He was worried that he was broke and in trouble—why should she disabuse him? Why should she make anything easy for him? She was under no obligation to tell him what she knew. If she did and he left, she would never get another chance to make him pay. As a form of revenge it couldn’t have been more perfect if she had planned it herself. And empowered by her knowledge, she would be in total control.
Oh, he’d eventually remember and then there would be trouble, but he would never be able to prove anything, and it would be worth it for the sheer pleasure of seeing him toiling like a common slave for a few days. She hoped he found it a humbling experience.
She tossed her head and gave him a haughty look. ‘And if you get your memory back before the job’s finished, what then? You just swan off and leave Ray in the lurch?’
Ryan’s mouth thinned at the deliberate goad. ‘Whatever happens, I’ll finish what I start,’ he said with a steely determination that satisfied her he was well and truly set up.
‘Well, I suppose if you’re going to be hanging around, you may as well make yourself useful,’ she conceded grudgingly, turning away to hide her smirk. ‘I’ll leave you two to get on with it. You won’t want to waste any time.’
She had to wipe the secret smile off her face a few seconds later, when Ryan joined her walking across the grass, leaving Zorro to the promise of the scrapings from the bacon pan.
‘I need to change into something a bit more hard-wearing and practical if I’m going to be clambering over roofs,’ he explained as Nina cast him a suspicious glance.
‘You haven’t got anything more hard-wearing,’ she pointed out, having seen his washing drying by the fire.
‘I know. I thought…well, I know Karl’s clothes fit me, and you say he has plenty of others….’
He trailed off and Nina gave him a careless shrug of acquiescence. Poetic justice indeed. Talk about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes!
‘You changed your mind all of a sudden back there,’ he said as they stepped over the low, straggly hedge between the two properties. ‘One moment you’re all fired up for me to leave and the next you’re challenging me to stay.’
Ah…now they were getting to the real reason why he had been so quick to follow her.
‘A woman’s prerogative,’ she murmured, tilting her face to enjoy the stroke of the sun on her skin and inhale the sharp tang of salt on the biting air.
His eyes followed the unconsciously sensual movement. ‘You suddenly decided that I wasn’t going to be a danger to myself and others?’ he speculated. ‘You decided I was worthy of your trust after all?’
‘Not you…’ She reacted crushingly to the hint of masculine satisfaction in his tone. ‘…Ray. I trust his opinion. I simply decided to give you the benefit of the doubt.’ She turned her head, her green eyes cutting up at him. ‘That’s what every person deserves, don’t you think…the chance to prove themselves?’
They had come to a halt by the open sliding door and Ryan rubbed his knuckles thoughtfully along his lower cheek—the same c
heek, she was uneasily aware, that she had slapped on the night he had made the insulting suggestion that they work out their mutual differences in bed.
‘Are you saying that’s why you suddenly needed me to stay?’ he asked quietly. ‘You want me here purely as a matter of principle?’
Talk of principles, and the thread of disbelief in his voice made her flare defensively. ‘I don’t need you—I never even said I wanted you to stay! I’m willing to put up with you if I have to, that’s all!’
His eyes were as hazy as a sea mist, moving in, enveloping her, reducing her visibility to a bare few centimetres.
‘Oh, I think there’s more to it than that, Nina.’ He transferred his knuckles to her own satiny cheek, measuring the heat streaking beneath the skin. ‘Much, much more…’
The trailing tip of his thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, which parted in alarm.
‘Don’t!’ Her startled breath stirred the fine hairs on the back of his hand.
‘Don’t what?’
When had he moved so close? Why wasn’t she pushing him away? What was it that rooted her to the spot and left her with only flimsy words with which to defend herself. She was supposed to be the one in control!
‘Don’t touch me!’
‘Why not?’ His voice dropped to a bittersweet tenderness, a mere scrape along her nerves. ‘What are you so afraid of? What will happen if I do?’
She blinked in terror, breaking the hypnotic spell. ‘Nothing!’ She stiffened her sagging spine. ‘Nothing will happen!’
Because she wouldn’t let it!
‘All right.’ To her ineffable relief, his hand dropped away. ‘I won’t—’ he turned into the house ‘—for now.’ He gave her a smouldering smile over his shoulder. ‘But we both know that I don’t have to touch you for you to be touched by me, don’t we…Nina, darling?’
And he strolled into the house, whistling…for all the world as if he were the one relishing revenge!
CHAPTER SIX
‘I THINK you missed one!’ Nina called out, lazily pointing up to the spot where a sun-blistered piece of weatherboard had sprung out from behind the trim at the top corner of the house.
Ryan, who had just set one foot on the grass after backing all the way down the tall extension ladder carrying his box of nails and a chisel and hammer, looked up, then down over his shoulder at Nina, standing next to Ray on his sandy front lawn, a folding canvas beach chair tucked under her arm, a plate of biscuits in her hand.
‘Couldn’t you have told me that while I was still up there?’ he grunted.
‘I didn’t see it until just now,’ Nina said innocently.
She watched him toil back up to the roof line, the faded denim of his dusty jeans straining at the seams as he braced rigid knees against the wooden rails of the ladder and hammered the board back into place. It was a sunny afternoon and he had taken off his shirt, his long, rangy back gleaming with a light coating of sweat, the lean muscles rippling as he worked.
‘The boy makes a pretty picture, doesn’t he?’ Ray commented, shifting the splinter of wood he had been chewing to the side of his mouth. ‘Thinking of painting him?’
Nina whipped her head around, scowling when she saw his lively expression. She handed him the biscuits she had baked for his afternoon tea. ‘He’s not a boy, and you know I don’t do portraits.’
‘I thought you might be making an exception in his case…seeing as how much you seem to like watching him work,’ he said slyly.
‘He’s so out of place he’s rather difficult to ignore,’ Nina defended herself.
‘I thought he was fitting in quite well. He’s certainly not a whiner. Does everything I ask and more. Got a good eye for detail. Doesn’t even seem to get his back up when you come over to carp and criticise.’
‘He doesn’t belong here. I don’t understand why you think he’s so great,’ she countered. She didn’t like the fact that Ray and Ryan had established such a good rapport in such a short time. In little more than two days they seemed to have become as thick as thieves. It undermined her satisfaction in her petty revenge, which she had already discovered was rebounding on her in other unpleasant ways.
‘It’s a guy thing.’ Nina’s eyebrows whipped up incredulously and the old man chuckled. ‘I picked that up from my granddaughter.’ His faded grey eyes sobered. ‘But, then, why shouldn’t I like him, Nina? I’ve listened to him talk and my instincts tell me he’s a good lad. What have you really got against him?’
She transferred her hold on the chair, hugging it to her chest like a shield. ‘What’s he been saying to you?’ she demanded sharply.
‘Probably nothing he wouldn’t say to you…if you were interested enough to ask the right questions.’
Alarm flashed in Nina’s eyes and her mouth pulled into a stubborn line. ‘I just don’t trust him, that’s all.’
Ray chewed thoughtfully on his makeshift toothpick as he turned to watch Ryan start down the ladder again.
‘Maybe it’s not him you don’t trust,’ he said. ‘Maybe your prejudices don’t quite jell with what your own instincts are telling you. I wonder why you’re so anxious to dislike him?’
And with a tug on the battered canvas hat covered with fishhooks that he wore summer and winter, he stumped back over the grass, pausing for a word with Ryan before climbing the warped steps that were the next thing on his amateur workman’s agenda and settling into his rocking chair on the porch, the plate of biscuits on his lap. Zorro, with his unerring instinct for a free feed, immediately rose from his lazy sprawl at the base of the ladder and skittered up to investigate the oaty aroma.
Ryan scooped up a plastic bottle of water from the ground and strolled across the grass to Nina, wiping his shiny forehead with the back of his arm, revealing the black tuft of hair in his damp armpit.
‘What do you think?’ he said, flicking his head towards the house.
Impressive, was Nina’s impulsive response, but she kept her mouth sealed and quickly shifted her eyes from his chest to his workmanship. ‘I still think you’re a hairdresser.’
He grinned appreciatively at the put-down and crammed a biscuit into his mouth.
‘Those weren’t supposed to be for you,’ she complained.
‘Then why did you bake so many?’
‘Anzac biscuits are Ray’s favourite,’ she said evasively.
‘Mine now, too.’ He took another one from his pocket and crunched into it with relish. ‘I think Ray gets the better end of the deal he has with you—you’re a good cook.’
She refused to be warmed by the praise. ‘I like baking. I find it soothing.’
‘Did you feel in need of a double batch of soothing this morning?’
He couldn’t have known about her restless night…the haunted images of him that had pursued her even into sleep. She had spent far too much time over the past few days watching him, thinking about him, hugging her secret knowledge to herself and subtly tormenting him with his ignorance. That had meant seeking out his company instead of avoiding it, and too late she was realising that in doing so she was opening herself up to examination.
Her thoughts and feelings and past experiences were just as frequently the subject of the conversation as his, and since she was ostensibly eager to help him regain his memory, she could hardly object when he peppered her with questions about her amnesia in an effort to understand his own.
‘I told you, I always bake extra Anzacs!’ Fortunately, her words had the ring of truth.
A wink of light caught her eye—a bead of sweat rolling down his muscled shoulder. She stared at it in unwilling fascination as it hovered on the outer ridge of his collarbone.
‘It’s surprisingly hot work up there,’ he said, following her gaze. He lifted the crumpled tail of the long-sleeved shirt he had tucked through his belt loop and slowly blotted at his upper chest and throat. ‘I bet it gets scorching here in the summer. That metal roof traps a lot of heat, even in winter. I nearly fried like an egg scrambli
ng around on it. I managed to peg everything back down, though, so Ray shouldn’t have any leaks.’
It struck her that he was looking far too exhilarated for a slave-labourer. ‘You’re enjoying this!’ she said accusingly.
He lowered the shirt from his face, his eyes blue with reflected sky. ‘So are you,’ he accused softly back. ‘Or you were. Does it spoil your fun to find that I don’t mind a bit of good, honest sweat? I wonder what it is you think you’re trying to punish me for?’
‘I had nothing to do with this. It was all your idea,’ she reminded him hotly, all the while conscious of his credit-card holder burning a hole in her jeans pocket. ‘I’m just an innocent bystander.’
His eyes responded with a brief blaze of white heat. ‘Innocent? I don’t think so. You’re not a bystander, either. You’re in this up to your sweet little neck whether you realise it or not.’
His cryptic words made her stiffen, and his hostility vanished as if he had flicked an internal switch.
‘Where are you off to anyway?’ He nodded at the chair, bulging with items that had been stuffed into the built-in pocket on the canvas back.
She was so grateful for the change of subject she answered frankly. ‘Just down to the end of the beach. I want to do some sketches of the rocks.’
‘Let me carry that for you.’ Before she could refuse, he had plucked it out of her hands.
‘I wasn’t asking for company.’
She had couched her refusal too politely. ‘I’m not company,’ he said easily, heading towards the puriri trees that lined the bank. ‘I’m the hired help.’
‘And you already have a job to do,’ she pointed out, hurrying after him to try to snag a chair leg.
‘Ray told me to take a break.’ He twisted his head to wave at the old man up on the porch, who flapped a gnarled hand in response. ‘I think he was trying to figure out how to take a nap without missing anything. He certainly likes to be in charge!’