by Susan Napier
‘When we got a bit carried away,’ he responded rather too obligingly.
The young policeman looked from Anne’s dishevelled figure to Hunter’s tense expression and relaxed slightly. ‘Been out for the evening together, sir? Know the lady well, do you?’
Even a naïve country girl could see the trend of his questions, and Anne was instantly outraged.
‘He didn’t pick me up on the street if that’s what you’re implying!’ she snapped. ‘We live just up the road—we’ve been down to the waterfront to eat.’
‘I see.’ The young man’s smile was close enough to a smirk to be even more annoying.
‘For your information his mother happens to be baby-sitting for us,’ Anne stressed very loudly. ‘We’re two perfectly respectable citizens taking an evening stroll and minding our own, perfectly innocent business—’
Feeling Hunter start to shake beside her, Anne put a hand on his forearm, not wanting him to be arrested for assaulting an officer for the slur on her honour.
‘Now, be polite to the policeman, darling; he’s just doing the job we respectable citizens pay him for,’ Hunter said in a voice that trembled suspiciously, and she twisted to look at him, realising that it hadn’t been anger sending ripples of tension through his body.
His black eyes laughed at her furious chagrin. ‘You should be grateful he stopped to make sure you weren’t in trouble. And you must admit that what we were doing might have been perfect for us—but it wasn’t exactly innocent…’
She blushed fierily. ‘Why, you—’
‘I assure you, Officer, we have no intention of risking an indecent exposure charge.’ Hunter spoke hurriedly over her smouldering tones. ‘If you excuse us I think we’ll just toddle on home to the baby…’
‘That might be a good idea, sir. Safer for both you and your lady.’
‘Not to mention more comfortable,’ Hunter grinned, and they exchanged secret male glances before the policeman turned back to his car.
‘I can’t believe you had the gall to say that!’ muttered Anne, torn between a giggle and a glare as Hunter slid his arm through hers and hustled her up the hill in the wake of the accelerating patrol car.
‘Neither can I,’ he said wryly. ‘Put it down to shock. I’m not used to assisting the police with their enquiries.’
‘And you think I am?’
‘The police, no. The fire department? Possibly. You’re a dangerously inflammable woman.’
Her good humour was restored by the distinct note of admiration in the rueful remark. She began to laugh and hugged herself against his side, partly as a protection from the feathery rainfall and partly for the sheer pleasure of it.
A bubble of happiness caught in her throat. Tonight was a new beginning. She had discovered that Hunter possessed a kindred streak of wicked humour that might enable him to appreciate the lighter side of her reckless deception when, as she conceded must inevitably happen, she told him Katlin’s story.
‘I don’t suppose it would have done your academic reputation any good if he had hauled you in front of a judge for consorting with a prostitute,’ she teased.
‘I don’t think there’s any such crime,’ said Hunter, his arm around her supple back as they leaned into the hill. ‘It’s the soliciting part that’s illegal; the clients get off with a slap on the wrist. You’re the one who would have been up on charges.’
‘Don’t sound so smug. I would have told them you were doing the soliciting,’ Anne told him as they turned into the dim alleyway next to the warehouse and Hunter unlocked the side-door which they used when the docking bay was closed.
‘I bet you would have, too,’ he said with a mock-growl, and chased her squealing up the stairs. She whirled around to jeer triumphantly at him when she reached the top, her hair losing its final battle with the pins, flaring out around her as he caught her by the waist. She steadied herself with her hands on his shoulders, his stance on the step below allowing her to look him directly in the face. What she saw there made her even more breathless.
‘I—I wonder if your mother’s asleep?’ she stammered, glancing towards his door.
He wound his hand around a long skein of hair, tugging her face back towards him. ‘It doesn’t matter whether she is or not.’
‘Doesn’t it?’
‘No.’
She swallowed nervously at his clipped reply. He looked so…broodingly serious. She didn’t know if she was quite ready for this after all. Not yet. Not with the credibility gap yawning between his perception of what she was and what she actually was…
‘Hunter—’ She decided it might be best to approach it from an oblique angle. ‘I—it’s been a long time for me…’
He stilled. ‘How long?’
Now, tell him now!
‘A very long time…’ she forced out.
He drew the most obvious conclusion, his eyes glinting with satisfaction. ‘Before Ivan was born?’
She shook her head, smiling shakily. ‘Way before that—’
‘Good,’ he cut her off before she could formulate the rest of her confession, holding her wide-eyed gaze with dark intensity as he took the final step up and towered over her, increasing her sense of feminine vulnerability. ‘So there’s no danger of complications from former lovers…on either side, because it’s been quite a while for me too.’
His fingers slipped through the satiny strands of her hair, raking it forward over her slim shoulders, the backs of his hands skimming her breasts. ‘You have incredibly beautiful hair…’ He bent and buried his face in a handful of it.
‘Your mother said you had a fetish about it,’ whispered Anne, trying not to lose track of her good intentions.
‘Is it my imagination, or are you raising the spectre of my mother with oppressive frequency?’ He raised his head and pulled her into him for a long, fierce kiss that drove every doubt about the rightness of what they were doing from her head.
‘Getting cold feet, Anne?’ he said as he released her crushed mouth.
She shook her head dumbly and he smiled savagely.
‘You should. Nice girls aren’t supposed to go to bed on the first date.’
Anne paled and he swore, stopping her instinctive recoil towards her door with a blocking movement of his body.
‘I’m sorry. That was cruel and uncalled for. It was frustration talking. Much as I’d like to fling you on to your bed and make mad, passionate love to you all night long, knowing I can’t gives my temper a nasty edge.’
‘Why can’t you?’ asked Anne croakily, liking him even more for that instant, unqualified apology.
‘I’m not prepared.’ At her blank look he said impatiently, ‘To protect you. Since you’re still breast-feeding I presume you’re not taking an oral contraceptive?’
‘I—well, no, I’m not…’ She was slightly stunned by the practical turn of the conversation coming hard on the heels of exigent passion.
‘And since you’ve been celibate for so long I presume you don’t have any condoms lying around the flat?’
She blushed and shook her head. He smiled grimly.
‘I do, but I know my mother will have commandeered my comfortable bed, in spite of her comments about the couch, and I have no intention of providing her with more maternal ammunition by waking her up groping around in my bedside table.’
He ran his hands forcefully up and down her slender back, shuddering as he pulled her against him, letting her feel the surging strength of his arousal.
‘Around you I don’t trust myself to dabble in a little light-hearted foreplay. It’s tough enough thinking logically just holding you like this, let alone when you’re responding to me so generously. I almost had you out there against that tree and damn the consequences.’ He rested his forehead against hers and continued in a rough undertone, ‘I don’t want to settle for rushed half-measures, either. I want to be buried deep inside you when I come, so let’s wait until we can thoroughly indulge ourselves, mmm? Perhaps tomorrow, when my
interfering mother’s gone…’
When Hunter left her—with another devastating kiss after helping her transport a sleeping Ivan from his flat to hers—Anne fell into bed still shivering internally at his casually graphic description of what their love-making would be like.
The thought of Hunter buried deep inside her was both thrilling and alarming, and also infinitely desirable, but she was secretly glad that he had given her the opportunity to put off her confession.
Tonight had been for them alone. It would remain a perfect jewel in her memory, untainted by whatever strife tomorrow’s truth might bring. For this was the night that she had acknowledged to herself that she was irrevocably in love with Hunter Lewis. He might choose to call it by other names—passion, desire, mutual chemistry—but Anne knew that what she was feeling was greater than the sum of all three. And Hunter…well, at the very least he had admitted a passionate attraction that could well flourish into something deeper and more lasting if she provided the right fertile conditions.
She didn’t see Hunter the next morning but she did get a fleeting visit from his mother, who thrust a small framed painting into her hand, declaring that she had a taxi waiting to take her to the airport.
‘I was going to give it to Hunter, but I’ve decided I’d rather give it to you,’ she said ruthlessly as Anne tried to protest against a gift of such value. ‘It’s one of Hunter’s favourites because it’s this little bay up north where we used to holiday when he was a boy. He simply lived on that beach…’
‘Then you can’t just give it to me—’
‘You don’t like it?’ Skilfully pencilled eyebrows rose haughtily and Anne blurted a disclaimer.
‘Of course I do.’ It was beautiful, a delicate oil that seemed to capture the perfection of a faded, fond memory. In the distance, on the sandy curve of beach, was a small red dot, and Anne instinctively knew it was Hunter as a child, ‘father of the man’ she loved. She suddenly felt ridiculously close to that tiny dot. As if she was sharing that gritty, sandy, sunny, innocent childhood moment…
‘Good.’
‘But won’t Hunter be upset at your giving it to me?’ She didn’t want to give him more excuses than absolutely necessary to be angry at her.
‘No more than I’m upset with that depressingly ugly experiment of mine that he insists on flaunting in my face,’ said Louise drily.
‘But, well, it’s personal to your family…to Hunter…’
‘And so are you, darling.’ The haughty brow lowered to deliver a jaunty wink. ‘Consider it my contribution to your campaign to drive Hunter wonderfully crazy. Hang it on your wall where he’ll see it every time he walks in, and tell him you’ll only sell for an outrageous price—’
‘I would never sell it to him!’ Anne cried as Louise turned for the door at the sound of a distant, impatient toot from the street.
Louise grinned over her shoulder. ‘I know. But let him find out for himself that love can buy what money can’t. Give Ivan a goodbye kiss for me—and Hunter too, for that matter. He left for some meeting at a god-awful early hour and I wasn’t really compos mentis when we said our farewells…’
Anne’s second visitor of the morning was even more of a shock. She simply stared at her sister until Katlin brushed past her, looking eagerly around the flat.
‘Where is he?’
‘Who?’ For an awful moment Anne thought her family knew all about her plans to abandon herself to the ravages of a passionate affair and had sent Katlin to talk some sense into her. Then reality reasserted itself. No one in their right mind would send Katlin to advise common sense over impulse.
Katlin looked at her strangely, her smooth bell of blonde hair quivering as she shook her head. ‘Ivan, of course!’
‘Oh, Ivan…In the bedroom—I think he’s awake—’ She was talking to empty air. When Katlin emerged from the bedroom talking flat out to her son, who was regarding her with a humorous air of puzzled resignation, Anne had coffee ready, which Katlin waved away.
‘No, thanks, I’ve given up coffee. Makes me too jittery. I was drinking gallons of the stuff when the book wasn’t going well.’
The past tense sounded promising. ‘You mean it’s going well now?’
Katlin looked at her over her son’s head. Her smile was brilliant. She looked like the old, confident, exasperating Kat, supremely certain that the world revolved around her talent. ‘Fantastically!’
Then, to Anne’s bewilderment and Ivan’s dismay, Katlin burst into tears.
CHAPTER EIGHT
KATLIN’S outburst of tears was as brief as it was violent. As she mopped her eyes, and those of Ivan, who had begun to wail in sympathy, she gave her sister a watery grin.
‘Sorry. It’s just seeing Ivan again. I didn’t realise how much I’d miss him. I thought it’d be like…I could just tuck him out of sight, out of mind for a while, but in the end I couldn’t stand it so I borrowed the airfare off Don and just came. I mean, the writing’s going great but…you know, it was never Ivan that was the real problem, it was me and now I seem to have me all straightened out, well…I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t want Ivan and me to be apart any longer.’
‘You mean…you want to move in here to write the rest of the book?’ Anne asked when she got over her shock, feeling mean and petty because she wasn’t wholeheartedly glad for her sister’s sake.
‘God, no!’ Katlin shuddered. ‘This city is so claustrophobic. And I’m sure it’s healthier for Ivan to grow up in a country environment. No, I want to take him back home with me. I’ve really got myself sorted out now, Anne, truly. It’s all a matter of self-discipline, of setting realistic goals and not constantly doubting myself. I know I’m not anyone’s notion of an ideal mother-even my own—but Ivan’s part of my life now…and I can’t let him grow up thinking that I didn’t want him.’
Kat’s brown eyes softened as she kissed Ivan’s downy cheek and she laughed as he blew a raspberry in response. ‘We’re going to be OK, aren’t we, kiddo? I can’t dance like Aunty Anne, but I can tell pretty good stories. If you like the ones I make up for you, maybe I could write them down and when you’re bigger you can draw some pictures for them. Would you like that? We could call them Ivan’s Stories. Maybe they could even get published one day!’
Ivan’s fat cheeks creased and Katlin rubbed her nose against his, making him gurgle. ‘Yes, they could… Maybe one day you’ll be as famous as Christopher Robin.’ She suddenly wrinkled her nose and sniffed. ‘Or perhaps Pooh would be more appropriate—you need changing, my lad!’
Ivan’s black eyes went wide as his mother whirled him around, laughing at her feeble pun. Anne didn’t blame Ivan for being fascinated with this softer, more relaxed Katlin. More practical, too, as she asked where the nappies were kept and quickly completed the task, laughing at her own clumsiness and promising Ivan that she would improve with practice.
‘So, what are you going to do about this place?’ Anne asked shakily, trying not to sound as devastated as she felt.
‘What?’ Katlin blinked as she noticed her sister’s pale face. ‘Oh, Anne, you idiot, you’re such a worrier!’ Ivan was squeezed in between them as Katlin gave her a fierce hug. ‘Of course I’m not going to chuck you out of here. After what you did for me? For heaven’s sake, what do you think I am?’
At her sister’s rueful face she laughed. ‘No, don’t answer that—I know I’ve been bloody selfish! But nothing’s going to change for you, I promise, except you’ll have to get by on a little less because I’ll need more money for Ivan and me. In your letters you said you were earning a bit of money on the side, so you’ll be OK, won’t you?’
It was so unusual to have Katlin worrying about her that Anne smiled, mentally waving goodbye to the small savings account she had established for next year’s fees.
‘I can manage without any allowance at all if I don’t have Ivan to work around,’ she said firmly. ‘I can get a proper part-time job. But don’t you think it would be better just
to come totally clean with the foundation?’
Katlin looked horrified. She hadn’t changed that much. ‘Oh, God, no, let’s not rock the boat now, not while I’ve got this marvellous momentum going. I’ll ‘fess up later when it’s all over, and don’t worry, I promise I’ll take all the blame. If they want the grant back…well, they can have my royalties. I don’t care. At least I’ll be published. Did I tell you that the publisher loved the partial?’
‘No, that’s terrific! It must be going well,’ Anne murmured, reassured by the knowledge that it wasn’t Katlin’s ego alone talking.
‘I told you it is!’ Katlin brushed her favourite subject aside with startling impatience. ‘But, talking of rocking boats, I’m not here just to pick up Ivan…I wonder if you could do one more little favour for me? Well, no, a really big, big favour, actually. But nothing dishonest or anything this time, I promise, just a bit awkward—but only for me…’ she added hurriedly as she saw Anne’s face tighten with apprehension.
She might have known that nothing Katlin asked for would be quite that simple…
‘Look, really, Officer, I’m waiting here for a friend. I expect he’ll be along any minute!’
To be mistaken for a prostitute by the police for the second time in the space of twenty-four hours was a bit much, thought Anne several hours later as she grimly hung on to her sense of humour.
She wasn’t even dressed for the part. She had come straight from a late tutorial and her grey sweatshirt, white cotton trousers and flat black shoes were hardly provocative, but the fact that hardly an inch of flesh was on display didn’t seem to deter the men who had approached her. The innocent, fresh-scrubbed look was obviously in big demand in ports around the world!
She glared at the small, wiry man who had got her into this trouble. She had thought he was helping her but they were evidently at cross-purposes because he had looked a picture of guilt when the wharf police had approached and asked to see their identification…
