by Susan Napier
His hand on her arm steadied her swaying body, turning her to face him. ‘Why don’t you call Karl, then?’ he challenged. ‘Tell him that I’m here on the island and see what happens.’
Her upturned face paled, her green eyes glowing at him with bewildered mistrust. His rigid face softened, his hand relaxing on her arm, stroking down to cup her elbow and coaxing her gently forward until their bodies were almost touching.
‘Or, better still, why don’t you come back home with me now and find out for yourself?’ he murmured. ‘See if being back in familiar surroundings makes a difference to what you can remember. That book you threw at me—you should read it, Nina. It can help you understand what’s happening to you. It says that physical cues can be a powerful source of spontaneous recall. Cues from your senses—familiar sights, sounds, tastes, sensations…’
Like the sensational impact of his lovemaking! Nina began to shake her head, but he continued inexorably.
‘Seeing your studio, your clothes, your personal things, how we lived…that could help make it real to you.’
‘No, I’m not going anywhere with you!’ she said, her thoughts in a hopeless tangle of panic. ‘If it’s true and I left you…I—I ran away, I must have had a good reason—’
‘Why don’t you come back with me and together we can discover what that is?’
His voice was soft, sombre, infinitely seductive. It promised safety, yet Nina sensed an unspeakable danger in his deliberate gentling.
‘If we were so happy, why would I have left?’ she demanded shrilly. ‘Was it another woman? Did I catch you sleeping with someone else?’
His gentleness dropped away into the well of his frustration. ‘Aren’t you going to ask if I was beating you, too?’
She realised it had never even occurred to her as a possibility. He was undoubtedly tough, even ruthless in the pursuit of his goals, but on some instinctive level she didn’t believe he was abusive. Only too sexy for his own good…
‘You’re avoiding the question,’ she snapped, relieved to be able to turn the tables, albeit only briefly.
‘I was faithful to you every minute we were together—just as I’ve been uncomfortably celibate for the past nine months,’ he snapped back.
Her cheeks stung. ‘Celibate?’ Somehow she had difficulty associating Ryan Flint with the word.
His eyes gleamed wolfishly. ‘Can’t you tell? I’m aching for a woman, Nina. The only drawback is the woman I’m aching for is trying to pretend she doesn’t want to know me.’
She took a deep, shaky breath and walked away to pick up the fallen book and thrust it out at him. ‘I want you to leave.’
He seemed genuinely sympathetic. ‘I know you do. But I can’t, Nina. I never walk out on unfinished business.’
She threw the book down on the couch. ‘If you’re talking about this money you’re claiming I took—’
He named a sum of cold, hard cash that took her breath away. ‘It disappeared from the safe in our bedroom the same day you did your daylight flit, and since you were the only other person to have the combination—’
‘Why do you assume it wasn’t simply a burglary?’ she flung at him.
‘A burglar would have cleared out the safe. There were a lot of other valuable things in there, but all that went missing was the cash and your passport and personal papers.’
She realised that he had trapped her into arguing as if she believed his tale about their being live-in companions.
‘I didn’t have any of those things when I arrived here. You are delusional.’ She paced the room, waving her hands. ‘Look around you. Does it look as if I’m rolling in stolen money? What I have, I earned.’ And she was fiercely proud of the way she had done it!
He shrugged. ‘Maybe you went straight to the casino and gambled it all away. You might have thought that was rough justice, considering the way I originally made my money.’
‘I don’t gamble.’
‘The whole of life is a gamble.’
She didn’t like the idea of being at the mercy of the random rules of chance. ‘What did the police say when you reported it? Are they looking for me, too?’
‘I told you, I don’t like the police poking into my private affairs. You could call it a legacy from my childhood.’
‘Your childhood?’ She found herself teetering on the brink of understanding.
‘My parents are a very charming pair of con artists,’ he admitted, nudging her over the edge. She already knew this, she thought as she listened to him. ‘They dragged Katy and me all over the world in pursuit of their grand scams, even using us to help reel in the suckers when we got old enough to tell a convincing lie. I struck out on my own as soon as I could, but that left Katy to their tender mercies.
‘When they finally settled in Australia after a big score, she and I thought she would have her chance at a decent education and a stable life, but Max and Irene found respectability boring. So they pulled up stakes and went back to their swindles, but this time Katy was old enough to kick up a fuss and I was able to persuade them to leave her with me.’
I have a duty to stand between my sister and harm, she remembered him telling her in the exhausted aftermath of the encounter in the kitchen of her flat. I haven’t always been there for her when she needed me. I owe it to her to be there for her now. I always protect my own.
His expression became sardonic. ‘One thing my parents taught me that I did consider good advice—make sure you always have a cash float stashed away for emergencies, preferably in untraceable, small used bills.’
‘So you have no record of ever having had the money and never told the police it was missing,’ Nina guessed shrewdly. ‘In other words, you have no proof of anything you say!’
‘I have all the proof I need in here.’ He pointed to his temple.
‘So you’re out for revenge. Is that what all this is about?’ Nina demanded, hands on hips. In a twisted kind of way, it would be a relief!
The man wanted his money back. He would soon have to accept that she didn’t have it. She had never been materialistic. Clothes, jewellery, possessions—they had never been more important to her than people.
‘Not revenge. Satisfaction.’
‘What’s the difference?’ she challenged unwisely.
He smiled. ‘Come here and I’ll show you,’ he purred.
She bridled at the sudden change in his demeanour. ‘If I walked out on you, how can you still want anything to do with me? Have you no pride?’ she ripped at him.
‘Oh, you’ve already stripped me of that, Nina, so what do I have to lose? But if you assume I’m going to grovel to get you back in my bed, you have another think coming. You’re the one who’ll be doing the begging.’
Her eyes blazed with a fury that made him laugh, enraging her even more. ‘The hell I am! What’s the matter, can’t your ego accept that you’re obviously completely forgettable in bed?’
‘Liar,’ he goaded. ‘I slept with you for two years. I know your body as well as you do. I know all the nuances of its language. You can close your mind to our relationship, but your body definitely remembers how good we were together. You’re as hot for me right now as I am for you. Arguments always did spice up our sex life.’
She spluttered, her hand itching to slap his face as she had once before. ‘Get out!’
‘No way. I’m bonding to you like superglue from now on, sweetheart. The only way you’ll get rid of me is to stick a knife in my chest.’
She went white, then red. ‘Don’t tempt me!’ she choked.
‘Oh, I intend to tempt you every which way,’ he said, then turned towards the kitchen. ‘Starting with your taste-buds.’
Another lightning switch of moods to set her off balance.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, following him suspiciously, still spoiling for a fight.
‘Making dinner,’ he said, rattling through the cupboards and getting out a shallow pan and three beautiful, oval pottery ramekins from
the set of crockery Nina had got for giving painting lessons to the potter’s ten-year-old daughter. ‘Ray gave me the scallops and a bottle of white wine he brought back from his daughter’s.’
He fetched them from the fridge, where he must have detoured before continuing along to his room to catch her red-handed in her search, and began assembling his other ingredients. He drew a broad chef’s knife out of the knife block on the bench and extended it to her, handle first.
‘Care to do some chopping?’ His eyes were gleaming as brightly as the wicked, shiny blade. He wasn’t kidding about temptation!
She was baffled by his good humour. ‘I don’t want you in my kitchen,’ she said truculently. That he liked to cook was already evident from the amount of time he had spent there during his visit. If he had got his way, he would have cooked for them every night.
He found her sullenness amusing. ‘You’d rather have me in your bedroom, I know, but I did tell you that you’d have to beg me first.’ He swung around to the bench and began to rinse the scallops, expertly separating the coral from the beard.
‘I usually just crumb and fry them when they’re this fresh,’ she criticised.
‘Then it will be a special treat for you to have them done differently for a change,’ he said, deftly cutting a lemon and squeezing out the juice. ‘We all have to adapt to changes in our lives, Nina. As difficult as it may be to accept sometimes, change is good. Birth, life and death is a natural progression—’
‘I thought you were supposed to be cooking, not offering a lesson in pop psychology,’ she said sharply.
‘I can do both,’ he said modestly. ‘And since you seem to have avoided anyone with the medical expertise to help you assess your amnesia, I’ve elected myself the self-educated expert. Ray said you’ve never even consulted an M.D.’
‘I didn’t need to. I was fit and healthy and perfectly normal in every other way—’
‘You mean you didn’t want anyone to deny you your regression to childhood.’
‘How can I have matured as an artist if I’ve been regressing to childhood?’ she snapped.
The smooth rhythm of the knife paused. ‘Because you put all your passion into your paintings and none into your life.’
‘That’s not true!’
He shook the knife at her. ‘Be honest. You feel more emotionally stirred up at this moment, more alive, yelling at me, than you’ve felt since you arrived here.’
‘I am not yelling!’
‘Zorro thinks you are.’
Nina looked at the dog lying guard in front of the fridge, his nose on the cold floor, his ears folded closed.
Traitor!
‘What are you making anyway?’ she asked with exaggerated softness.
‘Coquilles Saint-Jacques—’
‘That’s just a fancy name for scallops,’ she scoffed.
‘—à la Flint. My variation provides an exquisite touch of something unique in the sauce.’ He tipped her a sly, sexy wink. ‘You’ll recall I’m very good at exquisite variations, Nina. I have great endurance and I always like to be inventive.’
She glowered at him, folding her arms over her tautening breasts. ‘Really? Well, I have better things to do than stand around watching you play chef.’
As an exit line, it was a dismayingly limp white flag, and she fled to her studio to simmer and stew over the coruscating riposte she should have uttered.
In order to take her mind off the emotional turmoil generated by the stunning revelations from her past, she buried herself in the pleasantly mindless task of stretching the paper that she would be using the next day, and when she finally heard a deep voice calling, she reluctantly emerged to find a mouth-watering aroma permeating the kitchen and Ryan removing the bubbling ramekins from under the oven grill and setting them on the hob.
He had showered and changed out of his work clothes into his black trousers and white linen shirt, and Nina immediately wished she had done a bit more than merely wash her hands and brush her hair and swap her ribbed sweater for a loose blouse.
‘I’ve set the table, but if you wouldn’t mind pouring the rest of the wine, I’ll just carry this one over to Ray—’
Nina snatched up an oven mitt and tea-towel and reached for the third ramekin before he could pick it up. ‘I’ll take it!’
‘If you’re thinking of running to Ray with a sob-story of what a brute I am, hoping that he’ll kick me out and tell me never to darken his door again, forget it. He already knows our history together. I told him who I was the first time we met.’
Fortunately, Nina hadn’t picked up the scalding dish. ‘What do you mean, you told him who you were?’
He shrugged. ‘Basically, I told him that I didn’t have amnesia, that I was here in order to get the love of my life back. He was the one who came up with the idea of having me work on his house, to give me an excuse to hang around you.’
‘You devil!’ As a pre-emptive strike, it was masterful. Ray, for all his pride in his crusty bachelor status, was a romantic at heart.
The love of his life. How beautifully lyrical Ryan made it sound, but in all his earlier talk of passion and desire and body chemistry and biological equations, he had never even hinted that his heart was involved. He had never tried to flatter her into believing that he had been in love with her. Why? Because he obviously knew it wouldn’t have been convincing. He might persuade an old man who had never met him before that he was an old-fashioned, swashbuckling romantic hero, but Nina was made of sterner stuff.
He grinned. ‘It always pays to stack the odds. I think you’ll find Ray’s on my side in this one.’
When she marched across to deliver the steaming dish, she discovered he was right.
Ray looked at her from under lowered bushy eyebrows when she stiffly expressed her hurt for his part in the deception.
‘It’s past time,’ he said gruffly. ‘Ryan’s right—you can’t keep hiding things from yourself, pretending that a part of you doesn’t exist. The past has come right back to meet you, girl. You have to deal with it before you can properly get on with the rest of your life. And if this lad is the one to help you do that, well, good on him.’
Nina couldn’t find it in her heart to be really angry with the old man when it was clear that he was stubbornly convinced that he had her best interests at heart.
‘You certainly did a good snow job on him,’ Nina began when she slammed back into the house a few minutes later. ‘What’re you going to do with that?’
Ryan was spooning a portion of scallops and a smothering of sauce onto a plastic plate. ‘It’s for Zorro.’
‘You can’t give him all that,’ she protested as he set it down on the floor. ‘It’s got wine and cheese in it. It’ll be far too rich for his stomach!’
They both watched as the scallops disappeared in a twinkling of an eye, following by a noisy sucking of sauce and a credible attempt to eat the plate.
‘You can be the one to get up in the night when he’s whimpering with a stomach-ache,’ she said sourly.
There was a split second of silence, a mutual holding of breath, then life moved on again, and Nina decided she had imagined the splinter of pain that had entered her heart before the echo of her words died away.
Much as she would have liked to turn her nose up at Ryan’s meal, it turned out to be delicious, and the glass of wine she had fully intended to spurn was the perfect accompaniment. She limited herself to one confidence-inspiriting glass, however, since she badly needed to keep her head.
With darkness pressing in on the windows around them, the low, pendant light centred over the table and the glowing fire in the grate were the only illuminations, creating a bubble of intimacy that made Nina vibrantly aware of the man across the table, acutely conscious of the spell he was weaving as he set out to be a relaxed and entertaining companion, talking art until she warmed to the lively discussion and making her laugh when she should have been guarded and wary.
He watched her greedily eat
every bite of his meal with no sign of gloating. ‘Actually, I thought I might become a chef once,’ he confided, pouring himself the rest of the wine. ‘As a teenager, I worked in the kitchen of a hotel-casino. Only that’s when I discovered I had more of a flair for the front of the house than the rear,’ he said wryly. ‘I learnt to deal cards and never looked back.’
‘Easy money?’ she gibed.
He considered the question seriously. ‘No, I wouldn’t say it was easy. It takes intense concentration, skill, practice, persistence and, of course, a certain amount of luck to beat the house odds. I always knew that it wasn’t something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was looking for a stake I could use to enter the next phase of my life. It was serendipity that the stake turned out to be the next phase. Among the dubious benefits of being the son of a con man was that I was exposed to lots of fine art in public and private collections while we were racketing around Europe pretending to be rich.’
‘And now you don’t have to pretend any more. You’re a rich and influential art collector yourself.’
He looked at her across the top of his glass, his eyes as smoky as his voice. ‘I’d give it all away in a heartbeat for one more night with you, darling.’
Nina nearly spilled the remainder of her wine. God, for an instant her mind had slipped a cog and she thought he actually meant it!
‘Overextravagant compliments don’t impress me,’ she said repressively.
“‘Was ever woman in this humour woo’d? Was ever woman in this humour won?”’ he murmured, leaning his chin on his hand.
‘Not when she remembers what the next line is,’ she sparked back. “‘I’ll have her; but I will not keep her long.’”
He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Caught out! I should have expected it, knowing how much you like Shakespeare. It’s one of the things we have in common.’
‘Then you’d do better to avoid any more lines from King Richard III,’ she told him, feeling a warmth in her belly that had nothing to do with the food and wine. So it hadn’t been just an irresistible physical attraction of opposites! ‘Unless you really want me to think of you as a villain.’