by Susan Napier
Nina was distracted from trying to wrest her property from his grasp. ‘He’s used to giving orders. He skippered a fishing boat until he was in his late sixties. He’s not joking when he says he was married to the sea. I don’t think he would’ve retired yet if it wasn’t for his arthritis.’
‘I wasn’t criticising,’ Ryan said, leaping lithely onto the sand and turning to extend a hand to help Nina down the grassy bank. ‘I like the old guy. He’s a battler. I hope I’m as feisty when I’m seventy-five.’
‘He likes you, too.’ Nina ignored his polite gesture and was irritated to hear him chuckle as she ensured her jump onto the sand was just a little farther out than his.
‘And that burns you up, doesn’t it?’ he guessed. ‘I can’t help it if I’m such a nice guy—’
‘Nice?’
‘You think that’s too strong a word?’
No, too weak. Whatever words she was tempted to use to describe Ryan Flint, they weren’t pallid, wishy-washy ones like ‘nice’.
Nina shook the sand off the top of her sneakers and started to march briskly down the beach.
‘Actually, I think he’s just pleased to have a fresh audience for his tall tales,’ Ryan said as he caught up. ‘He certainly seems to have had plenty of adventures on the high seas. I suppose you’ve heard the one about the giant squid?’
Nina groaned. ‘Many times. When I was a kid, it gave me nightmares!’
‘That’s right, you used to spend summer holidays here as a child, didn’t you? Ray said your grandfather once owned the house you’re renting, but that your grandmother sold it after he died when you were—what?—about thirteen?’
Ray must have certainly been extremely forthcoming during their cosy ‘guy thing’ chats over a couple of beers on the porch each evening, Nina thought nervously.
‘Fifteen. Gran was only on a widow’s benefit and she said she’d rather have the money for Karl and me to have a good education.’ Which had made Karl’s later decision to drop out of university a rather bitter pill, although Joan Dowling had never given any sign that she regretted her sacrifice.
‘Were your parents fostering Karl before they died? Is that how he came to live with you and your grandparents?’
‘My father’s not dead—he took off just before my sister was born,’ she informed him with crisp detachment. ‘He and Mum weren’t married, so I suppose he figured he was under no obligation to stick around. Mum and Laurie were killed a year later when a gas heater exploded in our kitchen, but either my father didn’t read the papers or he was afraid he might be asked to live up to his paternal responsibilities because he never even showed up for the funeral.’ After eighteen—no, twenty years—the memory had lost most of the power to hurt.
‘You were actually there when your mother was killed?’ Ryan said, a slight hitch in his long stride.
‘It was my birthday. Mum was wrapping my present. I was in the next-door neighbours’ garden playing on their seesaw,’ Nina recited automatically, as if by rote, before switching back to her original theme. ‘Not that my grandparents would have let my father take me away from them even if he had turned up. But I was only six, and Gran didn’t want me growing up as an only child, so she and Gramps fostered Karl the following year. Gran figured that his being younger than me would mean that at least I could have the familiarity of my big-sister role back.’
‘You obviously took it seriously. Ray said you were always taking the blame for Karl’s high jinks when you were younger.’
‘Karl came from an abusive family,’ Nina protested. ‘He’s always needed a lot of love.’
‘Don’t we all,’ Ryan murmured and then laughed as, with a soft plop, Zorro sailed off the bank and landed beside them on the dry sand, legs already churning. He ran ahead, barking furiously, then circled back, nose down, following a Byzantine trail of invisible scents. ‘I thought gluttony had got the better of him back there.’
‘He probably knows about the biscuits in your pocket,’ Nina said wryly.
‘I suppose it’s okay for him to run around without a leash?’
‘Are you kidding? This is Shearwater. We don’t go for the kind of suffocating regulations that you city dwellers do. And besides, there’s no policeman on the island summer or winter, so your chances of being apprehended for some petty misdemeanour are slim to none.’
‘In other words, you make up all the rules yourselves and then decide individually whether you want to obey them or not. Sounds like anarchy to me.’
‘I suppose personal freedom would sound like anarchy to an autocrat,’ she said, stopping by the first outcropping of rocks—huge, weathered grey boulders buried halfway in the rippling sand, ancient remnants of the original cliffs.
‘You think I’m dictatorial?’
‘I think you like to believe you’re right about everything,’ she said tartly. ‘That can make a man very domineering. You can put the chair down here.’
‘Yes, ma’am, whatever you say, ma’am,’ he mocked with his obsequious haste to obey.
He unfolded the squat metal legs of the chair, the low-slung seat almost touching the sand as he wedged it firmly into place. He waited until she sat down before, to her dismay, sprawling out on the sand beside her.
‘You don’t have to stay,’ she said, twisting to get her sketchbook and pencils out of the chair pocket.
‘I know.’ He uncapped his bottle of water and took a long swallow. She couldn’t help noticing the breeze stirring the silky triangle of hair on his chest.
‘You should put your shirt back on,’ she said, balancing the unopened sketchbook on her denim-clad thighs.
He screwed the cap back on the bottle and leaned over to place it behind them in the shadow thrown by her chair. ‘I’m not cold.’ His skin still glowed from the effects of his healthy exertions.
‘You could still catch a chill. Once you stop moving, your muscles cool down very rapidly, and by the time you feel cold, it could be too late. You don’t want to pull a muscle while you’re up that ladder.’
‘Yes, Mummy,’ he jeered.
‘Don’t call me that!’ There was a sharp snap as the pencil in her hand broke.
They both looked down at the damage and Ryan was first to react. He jackknifed to face her and lifted the clenched fist bearing the broken stump, carrying it swiftly to his lips.
‘I’m sorry, Nina.’ His apology whispered across her white knuckles, creeping into her guarded heart. ‘I’m sorry…I shouldn’t have teased you like that.’
‘I—it’s only a pencil,’ she stammered, bewildered as to why she should suddenly feel like wildly weeping. And over a stupid pencil! She shook her head. ‘It must have had a flaw. I have plenty of others.’
‘Here, let me.’ He unwrapped her stiff fingers and carefully picked the broken pieces of wood and graphite from the deep impressions in her skin, rubbing out the smudges from the graphite with his thumb. ‘There…’ he said soothingly.
He kissed the long, unbroken crease of her lifeline, and for an instant time was suspended with his black head bowed before her, his thick lashes dark crescents against his cheeks, his breath cupped in the palm of her hand.
Still holding her hand, he felt in the canvas pocket for another pencil and rewrapped her fingers around it. ‘And look…I’m putting my shirt back on so I don’t catch cold.’
He wrenched the brushed-cotton checked shirt from his belt loop and pulled it roughly on but left it unbuttoned, hanging loose off his shoulders so that she was still confronted by a wide expanse of naked chest as he knelt before her.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’
His chest was rising and falling as if he had been running, and there was tension twitching at the glossy skin. The hair that was thick at the centre of his chest flared out across his pectoral muscles, thinning to a satiny smoothness around the caramel-coloured nipples. They had been blunt and flat when he drew on his shirt, but as she continued to stare at them they began
to subtly change their conformation.
He looked down at himself and then slowly back up to her flushed face with heavy-lidded intent. ‘You can touch them if you want.’
The fresh pencil fell out of her fingers as her hands curled helplessly on top of her sketchbook, and she fought the urge to do as he softly invited, the strange emotional turmoil of a few moments translating into something entirely different. Shouldn’t she be outraged by the offer?
‘Why would I want to?’
‘Curiosity.’
He picked up her quivering hands and drew them to his chest, brushing them in delicate circles over the hairy skin until her fingertips nudged his brown nipples, which stiffened visibly to her touch. He continued to tease them lightly back and forth until her trailing fingers began to move of their own volition, drawing on the taut flesh until they were both breathing fast and hard.
‘Am I allowed to be curious, too?’ he asked huskily, and her bones melted as his eyes moved down over the stretchy ribbed sweater to the sharp points that strained against the cream wool. Her breasts felt unbearably full and heavy in the lace cups of her bra and it was a relief when he reached out to touch them, slowly tracing the thrusting outline of her rigid nipples through the twin layers of fabric.
‘Just like me…’ he whispered approvingly, his fingers inscribing tight spirals around the throbbing peaks. ‘Soft, yet excitingly hard.’ He pinched gently, rolling his thumb and forefinger, and as she cried out, his open mouth came down over hers, moistly absorbing her honeyed moans, drinking in the taste of her sensual surrender.
His tongue played languidly with hers as he continued to lightly fondle her breasts, softly palming them while he concentrated on titillating the excited nipples, stoking her pleasure while not allowing it to reach a flashpoint beyond which it could flare out of his control. She leaned into him, trembling, her nails digging into his chest, and with a surge of bitter triumph he knew he could tumble her down onto the sand and mount her right there and then and she wouldn’t lift a finger to resist. With his blitzing attack he had proved that he could seduce her into doing anything with him, everything…except…
Except the one most important thing. There was one thing that could not be forced, or physically seduced, that had to come freely from the heart or be worthless. As Ryan fought to control his own recklessly surging desire, the rancorous brooding of a seventeenth-century poet-lover mocked his memory and sickened his triumph.
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her:
The devil take her!
She had to come to him in the full knowledge of what it meant or the conquest would be a Pyrrhic victory.
When Nina’s hands began sinking lower on his chest, sliding down the tense ridges of his abdomen towards the band of his jeans, Ryan sucked in a sharp breath and stayed them with a wrenching curse.
‘Ryan…?’
‘You came out here to sketch, remember?’ he said, easing himself away from her mouth with a series of biting kisses. He relaxed back on the sand, drawing up his knees to ease the pressure of his jeans on his fierce erection.
The second pencil had rolled off her sketchbook and dropped by her feet, and Nina reached shakily down for it, her mouth and breasts still hotly throbbing, mortified by her wanton behaviour and the fact that Ryan, not she, had been the one to call a halt.
Suddenly, a small shower of cold water hit her, practically hissing as it landed on her burning cheeks.
‘Zorro!’ Her voice blended with Ryan’s in a scolding chorus. The small dog finished shaking the sea water from his spiky coat and regarded them with a cocked head, tongue lolling from his open jaw.
‘And the dish ran away with the spoon,’ Ryan muttered, buttoning up his shirt
‘What?’ Nina asked as she shook off her sketchbook.
‘The little dog laughed to see such sport,’ he recited dryly.
It gave her a strange pang to hear his deep voice quoting nursery rhymes and she hurriedly transferred her attention to Zorro. It did look as if Zorro was grinning at them, she thought.
‘You little wretch!’ she threatened. ‘If my book had been open and you’d got the pages wet, you would have been in real trouble.’
Ryan sifted about in the surrounding sand and unearthed a short piece of driftwood, which he hurled down onto the wet sand, sending Zorro hurtling in pursuit to snatch it from the encroaching waves.
‘He was probably just tired of being ignored.’
Nina refused to blush. She folded over the loose leaves of her sketchbook until she reached a fresh page, which she dated along the bottom. ‘He’s used to amusing himself when he invites himself along on my sketching trips,’ she countered.
Zorro returned with his lump of wood and had it thrown for him again.
‘Then maybe he was jealous.’
She gritted her teeth and stared resolutely at the grouping of weed-covered rocks she had come to sketch.
‘He’s never been known to get bored with a game of fetch,’ she felt bound to warn him.
‘That’s okay. I’m a patient man,’ he said, which she didn’t believe for a moment.
But so it proved, and as the game continued, Nina began to relax and find her creative impulses surprisingly unhindered by the unsettling company. Zorro’s timely intervention had defused a fraught situation and his continuing antics further dissipated the tension until Nina was absently chatting as she sketched, describing in idyllic terms the childhood summers she had spent on Shearwater Island.
‘Do you think that’s why you were on the ferry that day, why you were coming here? You were pursuing those unsullied memories of golden summers, when life was safe and secure—all childish pleasures and no responsibilities?’
Nina’s pencil hatched in a patch of shade around the base of the rock. ‘I never really thought about it, but…yes, I suppose that could have been what drew me here and why I felt such a powerful urge to stay. Shearwater is magical, a perfect artist’s retreat. It’s also where I got my first set of real artists’ watercolours—Ray gave them to me the Christmas I was nine.’
‘He says you’re so ensconced here that you never leave the island.’
‘He exaggerates.’ With a few expert flicks of a craft knife, Nina trimmed her pencil and went back to work. ‘It’s not as if I’m a recluse. I’ve been over to Waiheke a few times, to the library and to buy supplies. One of the craft shops over there sells my paintings on commission, and also my note cards—I do scenic watercolour sketches on handmade paper that a neighbour over the hill makes. The cards sell really well and they’re quite fun to do because they’re so small and I can be completely spontaneous.’
She held her breath, wondering if the talk of art might trigger a shaft of remembrance, but the moment slipped past as Ryan squinted at a boat sailing in around the point. While the patchy and wildly uneven return of his memories had become a source of escalating guilt and anxiety for Nina, he seemed to have adopted an attitude of resolute acceptance, a determination to treat the whole unpredictable episode as a holiday. Perhaps, subconsciously, he was aware that he was on holiday in his real life and his biorhythms had adjusted accordingly.
‘Why do you think you came here?’ She turned the question on him, intensely bothered by the coincidence. The islands of the gulf seemed an unsophisticated holiday destination for such a wealthy, worldly, cultivated man.
‘Perhaps I was looking for something magical, too.’
‘You don’t strike me as the sort of man who believes in magic—except as a clever conjuring trick,’ she countered, her voice unknowingly reflecting his cynical tone.
‘There’s a part of all of us that wants to believe in magic,’ he said quietly. ‘The innocent child in us…’
Nina turned abruptly away and the conversation languished. Ryan took Zorro down to where the hard-packed wet sand was pricked with air bubbles, to show him that digging for live crabs was much more exciting than chasing a boring old stick. Re
turning, he lay on his back and dozed, and Nina’s pencil flew across the paper. A while later, when he stirred, she quickly turned the page and began to sketch Zorro, visible only as a pair of hind legs and perky tail protruding from the hole he was digging to China.
Ryan got up, dusting the sand from his jeans and stretching lazily. ‘I guess I’d better go back to work,’ he said, yawning. ‘See you later. By the way, Ray said to tell you someone’s given him a bundle of fresh scallops that we can have for dinner.’
He was practically drooling as he spoke, and she remembered the scallops in mornay sauce that he had ordered at the expensive restaurant to which Karl had invited what he hoped was his future bride and her brother to dine. But instead of being impressed by his generous hospitality, Ryan had provoked an argument that had ended with Karl and Katy storming out just as their main course arrived, leaving Nina to cope with an embarrassing situation and a smouldering fellow diner who had relished her discomfort and insisted on their finishing the meal.
Since he had magnanimously offered to pay the impending huge bill, for which Karl had failed to make arrangements as he had angrily swept out, Nina—with only a few dollars in her purse and no credit card—had been compelled to agree. She had been forced to spend another hour of verbal fencing that had left her feverish and flustered as Ryan’s sophisticated teasing had skilfully inflamed her emotions, ripping away the calm facade with which she had been trying to handle him.
‘Maybe you’re allergic to shellfish,’ she called after his retreating back, goaded by the memory of that sultry evening and the steamy goodnight kiss he had punished her with under the amused eyes of the restaurant doorman before handing her into the waiting taxi and tossing a fifty-dollar note through the window for what he knew was only a twenty-dollar fare. ‘You’d better not have any!’
He glanced back over his shoulder, his eyes glinting with a challenge that made her insides shiver. ‘As it happens, I’ve just remembered. I love all kinds of seafood.’
