The Sister Swap

by Susan Napier

  ‘No doubt I’ll manage to choke it down.’

  She felt a very strong desire to empty the sauce over his supercilious head. The amount of best-quality beef mince that she had used in the sauce would have lasted her three meals.

  ‘Oh, please, don’t suffer on my account,’ she snapped.

  ‘I won’t,’ he assured her smoothly, and there was a small silence.

  She sighed. It would appear that she was going to have to grovel after all, since her bribery had patently failed to charm. She caught her plait over her shoulder and began fiddling with the end as the silence lengthened.

  ‘By the way, while you’re here…’

  ‘Yes?’ She brightened, her eyes shifting from gloomy hazel to hopeful blue at his apparent tentativeness. Perhaps he wanted to ask a small favour of her, thereby enabling her casually to suggest a trade!

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to use my telephone?’

  ‘Telephone?’ she echoed blankly, hoping her shock would be mistaken for polite surprise.

  ‘That is why you’re here, isn’t it?’ His voice was a strange mixture of gravel and silk.

  ‘Whatever makes you say that?’ she said bravely.

  ‘The way you keep sneaking glances at it. The phone box down the street has been vandalised, I noticed yesterday. And now here you are, oozing charm to a surly brute—’

  ‘I never called you a brute!’ she protested weakly. ‘A brute is unreasoning and unintelligent—’

  ‘You must think me both if you expected to fool me so easily, after making such a point of avoiding me like the plague since you moved in—’

  ‘Since you’ve so kindly and unexpectedly offered, I may as well take advantage of your good temper,’ interrupted Anne loftily. She marched over to the wall and lifted up the receiver. ‘You know, you’re a very mistrustful man,’ she said as she dialled the number. ‘If you remember it was your not so subtle suggestion that we avoid each other.’

  ‘I didn’t expect you to take me quite so literally.’

  ‘No, you expected me to fling myself at you—’

  ‘Or to start knocking at my door every five minutes, sweetly offering me home-cooked meals and asking to use the phone,’ he interposed pointedly.

  She glared at him and turned her back as the telephone was answered.

  ‘Rachel?’ Conscious of her audience, she hurried to make her call as short as possible. ‘My morning tutorial has been cancelled for tomorrow so I’m not going to be coming in. Do you want to drop by here after your lecture so we can go over that Russian test, or do you want to leave it until the weekend?’

  She turned again as Hunter brushed past her to move about the kitchen. As she listened to Rachel run through her crammed weekend social schedule she watched him out of the corner of her eye, noting how thoroughly comfortable he was in his surroundings. She saw him take a pot from a drawer beneath the ceramic cook-top and empty the contents of her square plastic container into it. Instead of scraping it with a spoon as she would have done, he hooked a bottle of red wine out of the rack built into the wall above her head and deftly opened it, rinsing the remains of the sauce out of the corners of the container with a hefty slug.

  She forced her attention back to the voice in her ear. ‘Uh…no, thanks…really, I just have too much work to do…I’ve got a few assignments going already…and a lot of writing to do,’ she added hurriedly for the benefit of the man untangling what looked like freshly made fettucine on the marble bench-top. ‘Oh, sure, maybe another time…’ Much as she liked Rachel, the night-clubbing social life that her friend enjoyed was not for her. Unlike Rachel, Anne couldn’t afford to fail any of her papers so most of her spare time had to be dedicated to studying, or earning some extra income. ‘OK. I’ll see you Sunday evening, then. Bye!’

  She hung up. ‘Thanks.’

  He didn’t turn around, concentrating on coiling up the ribbons of pasta. ‘I know I should say, Any time, but we both know that would be a polite lie.’

  ‘This was sort of an emergency,’ she explained.

  ‘So I heard. I get the feeling that there are going to be a lot of sort-of-an-emergencies in your life, so perhaps we’d better define a set time convenient to both of us that you can use the telephone.’

  Anne opened her mouth to refuse haughtily, and realised that pride was getting in the way of good sense. ‘Well…’

  He made it easy for her. ‘How about not before six or after seven?’

  She was usually up well before six at home but her metabolism was already adjusting to lazy city ways. ‘Uh, I think that might be a bit early…’

  He turned his head, his look wry. ‘I meant in the evenings, Anne. I like a lie-in in the mornings myself.’

  She could imagine it. That big, bronze body sprawled across white sheets. Since he didn’t have any bodily imperfections to hide he probably slept in the raw…and within touching distance of Anne if there hadn’t been a wall between them. She knew his bed was hard up against the same wall as hers because sometimes, when she woke up at night, she could hear the protest of his bedsprings as he turned over.

  ‘Anne?’

  ‘Mmm? Oh, sure. But I don’t expect it will be very often. I’m sure they’ll fix the phone down the road soon.’

  ‘When they do, make sure you make your calls during daylight hours. It’s not a good idea for a lone female to stand in a lighted phone booth by herself at night, even in this part of town.’

  Anne’s feminist instincts bristled. ‘I can look after myself, thank you.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like it. You’re fairly small—’

  She knew he wasn’t complimenting her on her slenderness. ‘I’m compact,’ she corrected him. ‘I keep very fit, as you must know from all the thumping you do on my wall. And I have four brothers back at home!’ She announced the fact as if it explained everything.

  Evidently it didn’t to him—a dead give-away that he was an only child. ‘They’re not going to do you much good there,’ he scoffed.

  ‘I didn’t mean I need them to defend me. I meant that growing up with them taught me how to fight dirty. I broke Rex’s arm once, and he’s taller than you!’

  She hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her skirt in a boastful stance that threw out her chest.

  ‘What did you do, batter him to the ground with your br-braids?’

  She eyed him suspiciously but he didn’t react. Perhaps she had misjudged that small stammer.

  ‘Actually I fell on him,’ she admitted reluctantly. ‘Out of a tree. He was trying to shake me down, so I came down. Knocked him flat. He was sixteen at the time and he howled like a baby.’ The smile she gave him was redolent of bloodthirsty pleasure.

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Thirteen…’

  She bit her lip. She had forgotten that, as Katlin, she was supposed to be the eldest. Thank goodness she hadn’t given the childhood encounter any time reference. Hunter had no way of knowing how old the real winner of the Markham Grant was but she shouldn’t have taken the risk. Anne knew that she didn’t look her own twenty-three years, let alone Katlin’s twenty-eight.

  She bent over and peered into the pot he had set on the cook-top, giving her sauce an brisk stir with the wooden spoon he had left resting across the top.

  ‘Wouldn’t this have been quicker in the microwave?’ she offered helpfully.

  ‘Quicker but not better,’ he said, accepting the change of subject as he filled a large pot with cold water and set it on another ring, flicking one of the dials inset into the bench on to high. ‘A long, slow blending of flavours always results in a better dish than a brief jostle of molecules. I want to give the wine time to mature the flavour.’

  ‘I suppose you think that only culinary philistines use microwaves,’ she sighed. Naturally someone like Hunter Lewis wouldn’t have to take the reduced power costs of using a microwave into his equation!

  ‘Not at all. They have their uses. I take it you like pasta?’

&n
bsp; She looked at him, in his casually elegant clothes, in his casually elegant kitchen. ‘It’s cheap, tasty and nutritious… What’s not to like?’

  He rinsed his hands in the sink and turned to rest a solid hip against the marble counter as he dried his hands on a linen tea-towel and studied her mobile expression.

  ‘Do you resent me for what I have, Anne?’ he drawled with uncanny perception. ‘Is that where all this subtle hostility of yours is aimed? I assure you, most of what I have I’ve worked hard to earn for myself.’

  ‘I work hard too,’ she shot back.

  ‘Oh? When?’

  ‘What do you mean, when?’ Did he think she was a scrounger because she was supposedly living on a grant?

  ‘When do you write?’

  Anne nibbled her full lower lip. ‘I’m writing all the time,’ she said defensively.

  ‘I don’t doubt it. Russian, Japanese and anthropology, isn’t it?’ Anne’s heart sank as she realised he must have looked her up in the university files. It might have been idle curiosity on his part, but what if he de- cided to dig further?

  ‘I’m not talking about compiling course assignments,’ he continued in a tone of voice which she thought he probably used on recalcitrant students—crisp and lightly sarcastic. ‘I’m talking about writing. That is why you’re here, isn’t it—to finish a first novel for publication? If you’re taking on a heavy study-load, when are you going to find the necessary writing time for yourself? And don’t tell me you can fit it in here and there…creative writing involves a sustained, concentrated effort—’

  ‘I write best at night,’ protested Anne, hating him for trapping her into another lie.

  ‘All the more reason to take it easy during the day,’ Hunter pointed out, his shrewd, black-eyed gaze steady as he returned to the main attack. ‘Exactly when at night? I stay up pretty late myself and I haven’t heard your typewriter pounding away very often.’

  ‘I like to revise my work by hand,’ she said quickly. If he could hear her typewriter from her living-room, then the walls were even thinner than she had realised.

  ‘You must be doing an awful lot of editing compared to the amount you’re writing,’ he commented thoughtfully.

  ‘Uh, well, I haven’t really settled to a routine yet…’

  ‘After several weeks? In my experience writers usually have to have their regular creative fix or go crazy. Have you set yourself goals? Or are you suffering from writer’s block?’

  ‘I guess, in a way,’ Anne said wryly. ‘I’m just going through a period of adjustment—’

  ‘Then probably the worst thing you could do is to stop, or load yourself up with other distractions!’

  She might have known that his sympathy would be backed with infuriating logic. ‘Thank you for your advice but I’m sure everything will sort itself out,’ she said firmly, hoping that Katlin was justifying her confidence by writing her head off in her isolated little eyrie at Golden Bay.

  ‘Translated: you’re going to ignore the problem and hope it goes away of its own accord.’ His disapproval was obvious. Anne didn’t doubt that any difficulties he encountered he met head-up and head-on.

  ‘One of my problems, anyway,’ Anne said meaning-fully. ‘I suppose it’s an occupational hazard of being a professor—this constant urge to lecture people. I thought politics, not literature, was your particular field of expertise.’

  ‘The whole essence of politics is human behaviour—the complex of relationships that people form to empower their beliefs and invest themselves with authority over others. In its adjectival sense it was very politic of you to evade my original question…Do you resent me for what I have?’

  ‘Not for what you have but for what you are,’ Anne said flatly, glad to get off the subject of her non-existent novel.

  ‘And what am I?’

  ‘Don’t tempt me,’ she threatened.

  His heavy lids drooped lazily. ‘Oh, come on. You’ve been perfectly free with your insulting opinions of me so far. Why stop now?’

  Is that what he thought? Not so devastatingly perceptive after all, thought Anne impishly. ‘You’re intelligent, strong, utterly independent and self-confident to the point of arrogance,’ she frankly listed the personal assets she found so irritating.

  He stared at her for a moment, his eyes narrowing with a faintly arrested intensity as he realised that she was perfectly serious. Then the square mouth tilted slowly in amusement. ‘You forgot handsome.’

  ‘That’s because you’re not,’ she snapped.

  ‘Then why did you look me over in my towel as if I were a Cosmopolitan centrefold?’

  She could hardly deny it but she refused to blush at the remembered image of his semi-nudity, lifting her chin and answering baldly. ‘Because you looked like one. You have a big, sexy body. That doesn’t make you handsome. And it doesn’t help that you frown too much. You’ll probably have train-tracks across your forehead by the time you’re forty,’ she took pleasure in telling him.

  ‘But I’ll still have my big, sexy body,’ he reminded her slyly. ‘I’d rather have that than a pretty face.’

  ‘Is that why you’re not married?’ she said, wilfully misunderstanding in order not to be in agreement with him. ‘Do you live alone because you don’t want a feminine face around, distracting you from your loving self-absorption?’

  ‘Are you accusing me of being an onanist, Anne?’ he asked blandly.

  ‘I might…if I knew what it meant,’ she confessed warily.

  ‘Someone who actively enjoys sexual self-sufficiency,’ he said obliquely, so that it was a moment before she fully comprehended his meaning.

  ‘Oh. Oh!’ She blushed vividly under his glittering black gaze and he laughed. His laugh, like his voice, was unexpectedly mellow for a man of his temperament and toughness. He was, she was beginning to realise to her dismay, a very much more attractive man than she had at first suspected.

  ‘So you were wrong about my being utterly independent,’ he pointed out, turning his attention back to the bench. ‘There are certain things that I still have to depend on others to provide for me. And I was married…once. How much fettucine would you like?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ she murmured, still trying to conquer her embarrassment, and her curiosity over that casual mention of his marriage. And his phrasing was intriguing—’still have to depend’—as if the most intimate form of human interaction was something he looked upon as a tiresome, practical physical necessity rather than a deeply desirable, emotionally fulfilling experience.

  ‘I can hardly eat all this myself.’

  ‘Are you asking me to have dinner with you?’ she asked, startled by the notion.

  ‘That’s what you expected me to do, isn’t it?’ he asked drily. ‘When I discovered there was more than enough here for two…’

  ‘No, it’s not what I expected!’ she erupted, annoyed at the implication. ‘I just thought your appetite would match your size, that’s all. I certainly don’t need to resort to underhanded tactics to get dinner dates—’

  ‘Do I take it you’re refusing my kind invitation?’ he murmured, looking undismayed by her rejection and confirming her belief that he had been merely goading her.

  In the brief silence in which she searched for a sufficiently crushing reply there came a sudden, high-pitched and very distinctive sound from the other side of the apartment. Hunter’s black head snapped around to focus on the noise and Anne tensed, coughing loudly and making a great show of looking at her watch.

  ‘Gosh, look at the time! Well, thanks for the phone; I really must rush—I’ve got my own dinner on…’ She started backing towards the door, still making distracting rumbling sounds in her throat. Hunter rotated slowly back to face her.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘What?’

  He tipped his head back and, as if on cue, the sound came again and this time no amount of coughing was going to disguise that it was coming from her flat on the other side of the wal
l.

  ‘Maybe I left my radio on,’ Anne improvised hopefully, and stitched on a brilliant smile just as the sound intensified into an angry wail. Oh, no, not now, Ivan. Please, of all times, not now…Anne began to pray silently as she progressed blindly in what she hoped was the right direction, trying to keep a nonchalant expression on her face.

  ‘That’s not music. Not even what you claim passes for music.’ Hunter prowled around the counter towards her, his black eyes brooding with a growing suspicion as she skittered backwards. ‘It sounds much more like a—’

  ‘Cat! Yes, you’re right, it’s probably a cat.’ She tried to force the words into his grim mouth. ‘There are quite a few strays yowling around the warehouse, I notice,’ she gabbled as she scrabbled behind her for the doorhandle, aware of the wail starting to subside into a series of hiccuping sobs that were all too human. ‘The men must feed them their lunch scraps. They can get up the fire-escape, you know—the cats, that is, not the men. I left the window open…Maybe one got in and got trapped. Oh, look, your pasta water’s boiling. You stay and cook your meal. I’ll just—’

  Her words were cut off as thoroughly as her escape as Hunter’s big frame blocked the doorway.

  ‘If that’s a cat then I’m a monkey’s uncle,’ he grated, pushing past her and heading towards her unlocked door.

  Ten seconds later he was looming accusingly over Anne as she scooped a red-cheeked Ivan up from the cot and cradled him protectively to her breast.

  ‘Yes, it’s a baby! And no, he’s not visiting. His name is Ivan Tremaine and he lives here with me. Stop glaring at us like that—you’re frightening him!’

  This despite the fact that as soon as Ivan had spotted the loud stranger he had halted in mid-cry and was now squinting at this new visual toy with every appearance of glee, the tear-stains on his feverish cheeks rapidly drying.

  Anne felt like bursting into tears herself as she faced Hunter’s searing disapproval, but she sensed it would gain her little sympathy. He had the fierce look of a man who wasn’t going to budge without some very good answers.

  She’d better think of some—fast!