by Susan Napier
‘How very convenient,’ she muttered suspiciously as he strolled away, his hips rolling in a masculine swagger that was as arrogant as it was sexy, an impossibly well-behaved Zorro meekly coming to heel at a single command.
That brooding suspicion was still with her hours later as she packed up her sketchbook and retraced her steps, carefully avoiding looking up at Ray’s house as she skulked along below the bank of puriri trees until she was parallel with her door, then scuttled across her lawn.
It was a suspicion that had been hovering in the back recesses of her mind, but one she had been loath to drag out into the light of day for fear of the consequences if it were true.
It nagged at her as she rattled about her studio, assembling the completed set of watercolours that George was due to collect the next day, then eventually drove her down to Ryan’s room where her hand hovered sweatily on the doorknob.
What she was about to do was an unforgivable invasion of privacy, but she had a right to do this, she told herself. She had a right to protect herself.
His bag was still sitting under the bed and Nina was startled at its weight as she slid it out. She had thought Ryan would have preferred to put his clothes in the drawers or wardrobe rather than leave them zipped in his bag, and in any case, surely his clothes alone wouldn’t be very heavy.
The first thing she saw when she pulled down the zip was a cell phone, not the slim accessory that Dave Freeman had carried, but the solid, seriously expensive, cutting-edge communications device that accepted faxes and e-mails and probably satellite communications, as well.
Nina picked it up. Perhaps he hadn’t considered it worth mentioning because it had been rendered useless by the rain, she thought hopefully, removing it from its leather case, but when she pushed the power button, it sprang to life and she saw from the digital display that its long-life battery was fully charged.
It felt cool and heavy in her hand, but the shape and weight of it also felt queasily familiar. She had held this phone before…used it herself. She didn’t need an instruction booklet to tell her how to work its complex commands.
A veil billowed in her memory and she quickly twitched it back into place, drawing out the credit-card holder from her pocket and punching in the toll-free number on the back of one of the credit cards.
‘Hello, I’m calling on behalf of my—my boss who’s lost his platinum card while on holiday. I’d like to make sure you cancel it, please,’ she said croakily, reeling off Ryan’s name and the string of numbers embossed on the hologrammed silver surface.
She heard the sound of a computer being keyed and then the disembodied toll of doom. ‘Mr Flint rang and personally cancelled that card himself two days ago. According to his instructions, we’re withholding the issue of a new one until he gets back from his trip.’
‘Oh, I see. Sorry, I must have misunderstood,’ Nina managed to say before she hung up.
He had cancelled his missing credit cards two days ago.
With no more thoughts of discretion or hiding the evidence of her search, she ripped back into the bag, but the only other thing inside was a heavy rectangle wrapped like contraband inside the doubled-up black sweater he had worn when he arrived. What had he been so anxious to prevent from being casually discovered?
Snagging her fingernails on the fine wool in her hurry, Nina sat on the bed and impatiently wrenched the item free.
A hardback book?
He had been hiding an interest in reading?
A thin, grey-haired man in a tweed suit gazed up at her with an enigmatic smile from the water-stained back dust jacket. A bookmark sprouted from roughly the halfway point, and as she gingerly turned it over, she could see that edges of the pages were rippled where dampness had seeped into the body of the book.
The title took up the whole front cover.
Mind and Memory: Case Studies of Amnesia. A string of medical qualifications followed the author’s name.
Ryan had been come to Shearwater Island carrying a book all about memory loss?
She was so stunned that the full implication didn’t hit her until several heartbeats later.
Oh, God…!
‘Have you seen enough? Or do you want to strip-search me, too?’
Nina’s head jerked up and she stared blindly at the man standing grimly in the doorway. How long had he been watching her paw through his things?
She jumped to her feet clutching the book and grabbed the cell phone from the bed with some wild idea of confiscating everything that he could possibly use as a threat. He was obviously expecting some form of answer, but Nina was incapable of giving it to him. She headed towards the door, but instead of pausing for the confrontation he had invited, she shouldered past him with a sudden burst of superhuman strength that sent him staggering into the sharp edge of the wooden moulding.
‘Nina, wait…’
Cursing, he raced after her down the hall, bursting into the living room and hurdling over the couch to bar her way to the sliding door with his outflung arms.
‘Nina, don’t think you’re going to run away from th—’
‘You bastard!’ she screamed at him. She hadn’t been running away; she had been seeking a space large enough to encompass her towering rage. She threw the phone directly at his head, all the strength of her shoulder behind her deadly accurate aim, but he ducked and it crashed against the frame of the window, sending a shiver through the toughened glass.
‘For God’s sake, Nina—that could have killed me!’
‘I wish it had, you lying, slimy creep!’ She followed it up with the heavy book, this time aiming for a bigger target, and it hit him square in the centre of his chest. A cough of pain wheezed out of his lungs as he doubled over, rubbing his heart. ‘No wonder you had a “textbook” presentation of amnesia!’
‘God, Nina—’
He could beg for mercy until hell froze over and she wouldn’t listen. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your memory—there never has been. It was all a set-up! You were stringing me along. You knew exactly who you were all the time!’
‘That’s not entirely true,’ he defended himself through another harsh cough. ‘I was dazed at first. I wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t—’
‘Don’t lie!’ she shrieked. ‘I can prove it. I had the credit cards you supposedly didn’t even know you owned—the cards you rang up and cancelled because you thought they were lost! Well, here they are back again. Take them—I never wanted them. They’re as worthless as you are!’ She tore them out of the holder and threw them at him one by one, followed by the stack of business cards that struck him on the cheek and scattered like confetti over the floor.
He rubbed his cheek, ice filming his eyes as he looked at the scattered cards at his feet. ‘You had these?’ he grated harshly. ‘You’ve had them all along?’
She would have liked to torment him by saying yes, but she wasn’t going to give him an excuse to accuse her of trying to steal them. ‘No, I found them down the back of the couch the morning Ray got home, and when I looked at them…I phoned your office and then I knew…I remembered.’
He went white.
‘You’ve got your memory back,’ he said, his voice boiling with black bitterness. ‘You bitch! You knew two days ago and you didn’t tell me? Who’s been stringing who along…babe?’
His insolent sneer fueled her blazing temper. ‘Why should I have told you? I don’t owe you anything. And, unlike you, my amnesia is not a sick joke I play on people for my own sadistic ends. I haven’t got my memory back, only the small chunk of it that confirms what a twenty-four-carat-gold bastard you are.’
Ryan snapped to rigid attention, his eyes narrowing to splinters of blue ice as she continued to blaze away at him with bullets of contempt.
‘What I remember is a couple of months I rather would forget, a couple of months of you making my brother’s life a misery—’ Her breath caught on a humiliating sob.
‘That’s it?’ He snapped out the hoarse qu
estion as he started prowling towards her. ‘That’s all…a couple of months nearly three years ago? You don’t remember any more than that?’
Her fists bunched helplessly at her sides. ‘That’s all I need to remember as far as you’re concerned—’
‘Oh, no, it isn’t,’ he cut her off savagely, moving in closer, his eyes locked on her furious face. ‘Oh, no…I haven’t finally tracked you down to be fobbed off like that.’
Tracked her down?
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
His voice was low, purposefully intent. ‘I’m talking about you and me, babe.’
Her breath dug a hollow in her chest. ‘There is no “you and me”,’ she denied in a thin, high voice.
‘How do you know?’ he said cruelly. ‘You’re hiding out here on your magical little island, hiding from all the things you don’t want to remember, things that I don’t have any choice but to live with.’
Nina felt a tremor of deep foreboding. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I can’t—’
‘Not yet. But you will by the time I’ve finished with you,’ he said brutally. ‘I’m not leaving until I get what I want.’
‘And what’s that, for God’s sake?’ she cried wildly.
His expression was dark and saturnine, his smile a caricature of tenderness. ‘How about the two years you and I spent together? How about the money you stole when you walked out on me without so much as a goodbye kiss?’
‘What money? Are you insane?’ A sick thrill whipped through her veins. ‘Two years? Are you suggesting that you and I—that I—that we were…That you and I had some sort of affair?’ she choked, putting a hand up to her swirling head.
‘You lived in my house and slept in my bed. It was more than just an affair.’
‘No, I don’t believe you…’ As the velvety blackness closed comfortingly in, she felt his strong arms closing around her gracefully collapsing body.
‘Swoon all you like, my faithless darling. I’ll still be here when you wake up. This time, there’s going to be no easy escape….’
CHAPTER SEVEN
NINA opened the door of her flat, her body tightening at the sight of Ryan Flint on the doorstep, looking wildly out of place in the shabby hall in his silk suit and cashmere coat. She hadn’t seen him since the fight outside the courthouse the previous week. She had thought she might never see him again.
‘You shouldn’t have come here…’ Her husky voice faltered at the smouldering impatience in the pale blue eyes.
‘May I come in?’
She fell back and he stepped over the threshold, slanting himself sideways as he moved past her in the confined space of the narrow entranceway, his long coat brushing against the neat blouse and slender navy skirt she had worn to work.
‘If this is about Karl—’
He stopped her with a single look, shouldering out of his coat and throwing it over the back of a chair. The tiny flat, which had seemed so achingly empty and depressingly sad since Gran had died, was suddenly throbbing with vibrant, restless life. Except for Karl, she had never had a man here. Looking after Gran had been emotionally draining as well as physically taking up all her spare time and energy.
He didn’t even look around the tiny flat as he took off his jacket and loosened his silk tie, his eyes moving over her flushed face and primly attired figure, lingering on the crisply concealing blouse and the lush curve of her hips encased in the tight skirt that ended halfway up her thighs. His nostrils flared as he eased his collar open and saw her gaze follow the movement, her lips parting at the glimpse of the bronzed hollow of his throat.
‘Do you have anything to drink?’
His blunt demand cloaked the crackling sexual tension with a thin veneer of sociability. Nina’s fingers tracked the side seams of her skirt, smoothing it over her hips in an unconsciously seductive gesture.
‘I—I might have some Scotch…’ She knew she did. Towards the end, the smooth liquor was the one small pleasure that Gran had still been able to enjoy, with the added bonus that it helped dull the pain the drugs no longer seemed to ease.
Ryan followed her into the cramped galley kitchen while she fumbled the glasses out of the cupboard, moving up to catch the whisky bottle when it threatened to slip through her trembling hands, then taking over the pouring of two stiff drinks.
‘I—I’m sorry, I’m not sure I’ve got anything to mix with it,’ she said vaguely, finding it difficult to think while he was so close, his lean body angled towards hers, crowding her with intense awareness of his masculinity, the musky scent of him even more potent than the heady aroma of the Scotch.
‘That’s all right, I’m not thirsty anyway,’ he said roughly, shoving the glasses away and spinning her into his arms.
His mouth crashed heavily down on hers, smothering her whimper of relief as the momentum of his body crushed her back against the kitchen wall. Nina’s head angled beneath his as she frantically tried to deepen his savage kisses, her hands tearing at the buttons of his pale grey shirt, pulling it open so that she could lace her fingers through the hair on his chest.
She felt him shudder as she scraped her nails across his skin, his strong hands sliding up the outside of her thighs, working her skirt up around her waist, pushing her panty hose and fragile lace panties out of the way so that he could reach her molten core. His fingers slid against her slippery heat, his knees pushing in between hers to wedge her legs farther apart while he prepared her for his urgent possession—’
‘No!’
Nina’s eyes flew open, her panting cry dying on her lips as she found herself lying on the couch in the house at Puriri Bay, staring up into Ryan’s waiting gaze. The press of his hip as he sat alongside her was all too familiar.
‘No…’ she protested weakly, caught between two equally unacceptable realities.
‘Yes…I’m still here,’ he confirmed remorselessly. ‘I told you I wasn’t going anywhere. I’m part of your magical world now.’ He stroked her hair back from her hot forehead in a gesture of mingled triumph and reassurance. ‘You were only out for a few seconds.’
A few seconds! Nina shuddered. Her mind was playing tricks on her. She didn’t know what to believe any more. Only she knew—in her heart she knew—that that frenzied coupling against the wall of her flat had been no erotic fantasy. No fantasy she had invented had ever been that vividly explicit!
‘You said you tracked me down,’ she said in a feathery whisper. ‘Why? How?’
His hand returned to the back of the couch, bracing his leaning body across her.
‘Since you haven’t entered any database or made any official applications or opened any bank or utility accounts since you got here, it wasn’t easy. It was pure chance. The daughter of a friend bought a watercolour of yours on a trip to Waiheke. Your style might have matured almost out of recognition, but your signature is still that distinctive N. So I made a few discreet inquiries about the artist—’
‘What do you know about my style?’ she broke in jerkily, thinking of that intimidating gallery where paintings sold for thousands of dollars rather than the mere couple of hundred that she commanded for some of her larger works.
‘I had a studio built for you at my house.’ His mouth twisted. ‘It was one of the major inducements for you to come and live with me—that you could spend your free hours in the studio, painting.’
The wall in her mind shivered on its rock-solid foundations. ‘You’re lying,’ she said, desperately grasping at straws. ‘Even if we had been lovers, I wouldn’t have moved in with you—I couldn’t have done that to Karl.’
‘Neither of us had a lot of choice in the matter,’ he said wryly. ‘Our body chemistry was too strong. We were like two halves of a biological equation. Karl had nothing to do with what happened between us.’
‘How can you say that? He was the reason we met. You were the one who got him arrested—’
‘He got himself arrested,’ Ryan corrected harshly.
‘Karl was in trouble before I ever came along, and you know it. He would have dragged Katy down with him, too. He got in too deep with the wrong people and ended up having to pay the price for it. He was damned lucky he didn’t have to do any jail time.’
Nina felt a tremor of relief as he looked grimly down on her.
‘Karl might have preferred to blame me, and yes, it suited me to let him think I had that kind of muscle, but I make it a point never to involve the police in my personal conflicts. I much prefer to deal with my enemies in my own time on my own terms.’ His faintly cruel smile sealed the sincerity of his words.
Nina shivered. Was she his enemy now?
‘If it were true…about you and me, Karl would have told me…’ Her voice petered out as she pressed her hands against her face. ‘He did tell me. I couldn’t have been living with you. He told me that after Gran died, I travelled around…backpacking, never staying in one place long enough to settle down.’
‘He lied. You never went anywhere. You were with me.’ Ryan’s implacable certainty hammered the words into her skull. ‘Karl still hates my guts for seeing through his charming facade, for opening up Katy’s eyes to his real character, and yes, for opening yours, too. When we became lovers, it was obvious you were choosing me over him, and that ate at him. We were happy and he only had himself to blame for his misfortune—that was reason enough for the selfish bastard to resent our relationship.
‘He was one of the first people I got in touch with when you disappeared.’ He drove his point home with painful precision. ‘He visited you on the day you left and claimed you were talking about taking off to Australia to “find yourself”. He told me to leave you alone, that you didn’t need me any more. He’s known all this time what happened to you, where you were, that you’d lost your memory—and yet he never bothered to tell either one of us about the other. Ask yourself why that is, Nina, why.’
‘Why should I believe anything you say?’ Nina swung her legs off the couch and stood up. ‘You know I can’t remember. For all I know, you could be making all this up.’
