Cursing beneath his breath, he thumped the side of the small weatherboard building. Damned if he’d leave without letting her know he’d been here. Jane had been avoiding him for days. The blank stare she’d given him in the car park outside the police station was the sum total of their interaction since he’d come back.
He strode back to his truck, reached into the glove box, pulled out a pen, and ripped a sheet from his diary. Scribbling a note, he anchored the piece of paper on the doormat of the front door with a rock he found in the garden.
It was hardly satisfactory, but it conveyed his message. He was finished with playing games. He’d waited seven years.
As far as he was concerned that was seven years too long.
JANE EDGED THE car into her garage. It was dark, the night moonless and overcast as she slung the strap of her handbag over her shoulder and hauled her bags of groceries out of the boot. Juggling the bags, she locked the car and the garage door, then trudged the short distance to the house and set the groceries down on the path while she went to let Jess off the leash.
Jess strained at the collar, tail wagging as Jane struggled to unclip the leash. A wet tongue swiped across her face, then the clip came free, and Jess bounded off into the night, doing her customary tour of the grounds as Jane collected the groceries and mounted the steps to the verandah. As she set the groceries down, the pale luminescence of a piece of white paper caught her eye. She retrieved the note, and set the rock that had anchored it to the doormat to one side, unlocked the door, and flicked on the hall and porch lights.
The note was brief and to the point.
“Call me, Michael.”
Raw heat flashed through her, making her belly clench and her knees turn to jelly. The moment Michael’s gaze had locked on hers outside the police station replayed itself in her mind, and abruptly she was spun back almost seven years when she’d opened the door, and found him on her doorstep dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, his hair damp as if he’d not long stepped from the shower. His wife had left just days before, and she had also been on her own because Patrick had been in hospital for an operation.
He hadn’t asked to come in, and she hadn’t offered any hospitality. The lack of manners on her part had been unspeakably rude for a small country community, but erecting some kind of barrier had been necessary, because the moment she looked into his dark gaze the reason he affected her so badly was suddenly clear, and the revelation shook her to the core.
His dark gaze pinned her. “The reason Clare left is that she knows I’m in love with you.”
The words dropped into a pool of silence and for a moment she wondered if she’d misheard, or even worse, if her guilty mind had somehow supplied the words she wanted to hear.
She’d felt dazed, at once present and peculiarly removed from the scene taking place, as if there were two Janes—one who dealt in the solid currency of reality, and one who floated in a fantasy world.
He was in love with her.
Her heart slammed in her chest, and not for the first time, she wondered what it would be like to stretch out in bed with him, to have that sensual male mouth on hers: to have him naked on top of her.
It should have shocked her that she was even considering what it might be like to make love with her next-door neighbour, but instead, all she could think of was that on top of everything else that was going wrong in her life, she shouldn’t have to want Rider.
Rider must have read something in her expression, because instead of backing off, he stepped into her, his hands curved around her waist—the contact electrifying. “Damn,” he murmured. “I didn’t mean to upset you, and I wasn’t going to do this.”
His head dipped and his mouth captured hers. Jane’s heart slammed in her chest and for a moment she was frozen, then, somewhere in the murky depths of her mind, sharp need welled out of the confusion that always gripped her whenever she thought about Michael Rider and the hazy notion of pushing free dissolved. If the kiss had been practiced or slick, maybe she could have resisted, but it was so hungry it made her toes curl.
His tongue stroked along hers and a low moan welled up from deep in her belly, and she closed off the guilt, wound her arms around his neck, and kissed him back.
His hands closed on her bottom and she found herself lifted, until the hard ridge of his sex settled against the sensitive flesh between her legs. He pressed more firmly against her, and the tension coiled almost unbearably tight.
She broke the kiss. “If you keep doing that—”
“You’ll come.” His gaze locked with hers, dark and fierce. “God, don’t say it—”
One hand closed on her hair, pulling her head back, the movement fierce as his mouth sank on hers. His tongue was hot and wet and salty in her mouth, and her whole being tensed as he walked her back a half step until she was pinned against the doorjamb, his muscled body tight against hers. Her breasts felt swollen and constricted, her skin so sensitive that every touch made her shiver and jerk, the hot ache between her legs so acute it bordered on pain.
She felt the hard, male shape of him straining for entrance despite the constricted layers of clothing, felt the shudder that swept him as he moved against her, and the gloomy afternoon dissolved in a raw flash of heat.
The buzz of the phone, the click of her answering machine engaging, registered, and abruptly, she recoiled.
Patrick. She’d forgotten about Patrick.
She’d forgotten she was married.
All Rider had had to do was kiss her and she’d practically forgotten her own name.
She shook her head, her throat tight. She still felt drawn, magnetized. She wanted to bury her face against the warm skin of his throat, breathe in his scent, open her mouth against his skin and taste him, and for a moment she teetered on the brink, shoved off balance by needs that were so alien and powerful she could barely breathe, let alone think.
She wanted Rider. It wasn’t rational, and it wasn’t right.
His dark gaze caught hers. His mouth dipped again, barely touching hers, and her body reacted, her hips sliding against his, and for a split second, she didn’t care, she just wanted.
He lifted his head and pressed her face into his shoulder, and for endless seconds she clung to him, memorizing his scent, soaking in his warmth.
His breath stirred in her hair. “I’ve got to go.”
“I know.”
He eased back. “It’s okay. Like I said, I didn’t mean to”—his thumb swept across her lips—“do this, but I’m glad I did, because I’m going away and I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“Or if I’ll be back” hung in the air, and as it turned out, that time he almost hadn’t come back.
Jane didn’t see him for more than eighteen months. Eventually, she’d heard secondhand in town that he’d been wounded on some overseas operation. The next time she’d been in Winslow, she’d gone to the library and searched back in the newspaper files, and finally found a small mention of the incident, where “a soldier” had been knifed and evacuated to a military hospital in Germany, his condition serious.
Worry had eaten at her, and her weight had plummeted, until she’d taken herself in hand and forced herself to eat. One day, months later, she’d turned around in the supermarket and seen him, larger than life and drop-dead gorgeous, loading groceries into a trolley. She couldn’t remember what she’d gone to the supermarket to buy, she’d simply turned on her heel, walked back to her car, and driven home. She’d gotten through the rest of the day, she’d managed to function, but that moment in the supermarket had stunned her.
She’d had visions of him in intensive care, close to death. She’d even worried that he had died, and she simply hadn’t heard. In the supermarket, he hadn’t looked as if he’d suffered anything as traumatic as a life-threatening wound. If anything, he’d seemed even bigger, more muscular—more of everything.
Jane stared at the note in her hand, brought back to the soft scent of the night air, the whine of mosquitoes
on the prowl. “What did you want to tell him?” she muttered to herself. “That you were head over heels in love with a man you barely knew?”
Because the fact was, falling in lust with a man had never happened to her before. She wasn’t promiscuous, and she hadn’t had that many relationships. Sexually, she’d always been as dead as a doornail unless she was emotionally involved. Crazy as it seemed, somehow she had become emotionally involved with Michael Rider; she had fallen in love.
Jess lolloped inside, her claws clicking on the hall floor. Automatically, Jane picked up her groceries, readjusted the strap of her purse on her shoulder, closed the door, and locked it. She was tired and she was hungry, and her feet were aching. She’d spent hours driving around Winslow, tramping the streets trying to buy a security alarm—without any luck. Apparently, they’d sold out within a day of the news breaking about the home invasion in Tayler’s Creek. Security firms and appliance stores had more alarm systems on order, but it would take a couple of days for them to be shipped, and then there was a waiting list. If Jane wanted an alarm, she would have to stand in line like everyone else.
After stowing the groceries, she walked slowly upstairs, flicking light switches as she went, the note crumpled in her hand. When she got to her room, she stowed her bag and dropped the note on her dressing table, and walked over to the dormer window and looked in the direction of the Rider place. The faint glimmer of lights shone through the trees.
Her gaze shifted, caught by her own reflection in the glass, and for the first time in months she took the time to examine herself. She was medium height and slim, her breasts a respectable size and shape, her hips narrow enough that she had difficulty buying pants that fit and often had to shop for teenagers’ sizes. She’d lost weight—enough that most of her clothes were loose on her now—but with Patrick dwindling away, her appetite had faded and she hadn’t wanted to eat.
Her hair was long, and dark enough to be mistaken for black, her eyes a light amber and faintly slanted, and her skin was tanned a honey colour from spending so much time outside.
She lifted a hand to her lips. She hadn’t worn lipstick in—She tried to think, and couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn so much as a clear gloss, let alone makeup.
She was still attractive, despite the passage of years, and now she was fiercely glad she was pretty, glad that even if she felt old inside, the outer packaging looked young.
Her waist was small, her hip bones jutting faintly, her stomach flat. Her hand came to rest on the strip of tanned skin left bare where her tank top had separated from the waistband of her shorts, and the heat of her palm against her skin sent a small shiver through her. The weight loss had made her more sensitive, as if the gradual paring away of her normal subcutaneous layer had left all of her nerve endings exposed and unprotected.
Abruptly, she wondered what it would be like for her belly to swell with a child.
A part of her longed fiercely for the physical changes that pregnancy forced on the female body. For more years than she cared to count, she’d wanted her belly to balloon and her breasts to grow heavy with milk. She’d wanted a baby to hold in her arms, to suckle at her breasts, and she wanted to be tired because her life was filled with kids, and not just emptiness.
She’d ached with wanting a baby, and still did, but as the years had passed and all of her energy had been focused on Patrick, the sharp, panicked feeling that her childbearing years were slipping away had dulled into acceptance.
Maybe Patrick’s death had sharpened her need to have a baby, or maybe it was simply that her biological clock was ticking loudly because she was over thirty—but she didn’t just want children in the misty, uncertain future, she wanted to be pregnant now. Too much time had slid by while her body had simply marked time. She wanted to know there was a baby growing inside her.
She was young enough to remarry, young enough to start a family if she wanted, but her mind flinched from the process of getting pregnant. After years of having a separate room from Patrick, the thought of sleeping with a man, the shattering vulnerability of making love, quite frankly scared the living daylights out of her.
She picked up the crumpled note, smoothed it out, and looked at the firm, slanted writing.
Call me.
Just like that.
If she called Rider, within five minutes she would be flat on her back and penetrated.
A raw flash of heat went through her, starting a dull throbbing between her thighs.
Michael was big, taller than Patrick had been—six foot two, at least—heavier and more muscular, and intensely male. Sex with him would be hot and vital, and there was no question in her mind that he would make her pregnant. The thought of having him on top of her, sliding inside her and climaxing, sent another raw shudder through her and her breasts tightened, the nipples erect and almost painfully sensitive.
When she was ready for that—if she was ever ready—she would call him, and it registered that, regardless of Rider’s availability, and frightened out of her skin of the process or not, she was mentally preparing herself to have sex with Michael Rider.
Chapter 5
AT FIVE IN the morning, Jane woke from a fitful sleep, drenched with perspiration, the tank top and panties she’d worn to bed clinging uncomfortably to her skin. Untangling the single sheet that was wound around her legs, she pushed the damp cotton aside, paced to her window, and pushed it wide. Sometime in the night a fitful wind had got up, but the heavy mantle of cloud remained, blanking out the moon and stars, so that darkness pressed in—thick and absolute. The faint tang of ozone filled her nostrils, along with the rich scent of rain and the pervasive sweetness of the jasmine and honeysuckle that persisted in her garden despite her attempts to weed them out.
Smothering a yawn, she showered, washed her hair, and changed into fresh clothes, then walked out to the sheds and began battening down for the storm.
Despite the canopy of cloud and the steady breeze, the heat was oppressive, and by lunchtime, coated in dust and grime from wrestling farm equipment into sheds, and jittery from expecting at any moment to hear Michael’s truck coming up her drive, she was ready for a break. Changing into her swimsuit, she called Jess and walked along the worn track to the creek that flowed through the wild reverted country at the rear of her property. Here, the land was twisted and strange, filled with a jumble of large boulders and creepy caves, but the river was deep enough to swim in, and surrounded by ferns and nikau palms, with the added bonus of a small waterfall plunging off a limestone shelf.
As she swam, she gradually became aware that aside from the deliciously cool sound of water flowing, the bush had grown silent, as if the approaching storm had cloaked everything in a blanket of humidity, muffling sound. Tension skimmed the length of her spine as she climbed a small sloping rock face, retrieved her towel, and knotted it around her waist. Just minutes ago, Jess had been lying in the shade, happily panting; now she was nowhere to be seen.
Jane swiveled around, searching the thick bush edge, which was choked with trailing vines of supplejack and thick, spiky coprosmas. Her instinct was to call out to Jess. The little dog was more than likely exploring, but Jane didn’t like the thought that she might have gotten stuck down a hole, or lost in one of the limestone caves. Here, the country was as unpredictable as it was strange, and every now and then, when a piece of limestone eroded enough, a hole simply opened up in the ground.
Oddly loath to break the silence, Jane held her hands to her mouth and called. A rustling on the other side of the bank drew her gaze. She called again. When there was no response, she reluctantly dropped the towel and climbed back down the rock face and slid into the water. A few strokes took her across to the other side of the river. Grasping moss-covered rock, she hauled herself up the bank to the spot she’d seen the thick clump of ferns move. She parted the coarse leaves, half expecting to find an opening to one of the limestone caves. There was an opening, but it was little more than a shallow concavity i
n the rock.
There was no sign of Jess, but the ground was trampled as if someone had hunkered down there, the vantage point high enough that whoever it was had been able to watch her swim.
Her gaze probed the bush edge, all the fine hairs at her nape lifting as she backed away from the trampled ground, clambered down to the river, and swam across to the other side. The little hidey-hole could have been made by kids coming here to swim and build huts, but the property was isolated. Apart from the Jackson family, who lived a couple of miles away, there were no children who were likely to come and spend time here.
Snagging her towel, she cinched it around her waist and headed back to the house, calling Jess as she went.
It wasn’t inconceivable that a feral goat or pig had taken up residence on her land, although that scenario wasn’t likely, because with the threat of tuberculosis from wild animals, most of the surrounding farmers were hot on animal control.
Maybe she was overreacting, but, whatever—or whoever—had been hunkered down there in the ferns above the swimming hole, she wasn’t taking any chances.
TUCKER’S OFFICE WAS small, cluttered, and smotheringly hot, despite the fact that he had a window open to catch the breeze.
Jane sat down in the chair adjacent to his desk and set her purse on the floor. “There was someone watching me swim.”
Tucker’s face was weary. “Join the club. Martha Holbrook said someone was watching her take a bath last night, and Anna Wheeler claims she saw a face at her window while she got undressed, but her husband said it was probably the next-door neighbour’s cat trying to get in the window. You sure it wasn’t kids?”
“I don’t know who, or what, it was. It could have been kids, I just…”
“Have a feeling. I know.” He rubbed a hand over his balding head. “The whole town’s having ‘feelings.’ I’ll send Zane out to look around. Is your house secure and alarmed?”
“It’s secure, but not alarmed. I tried to buy an alarm in Winslow yesterday. They were sold out.”
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