by Susan Napier
Her fingers clawed into his flanks at the drenching burst of pleasure that pulsed hotly against his fingers. ‘Oh, Ryan…’
‘Yeah, babe, I know.’ She almost sobbed as his magical touch left her, but it was only to grab her wrists and place her flat hands against the steamy wall in front of her, then he was gripping her hips again, nudging her ankles farther apart with his and lifting her to receive a powerful thrust that made her cry out as she felt him touch her womb, her back arching to ease his passage into her swollen tissues, her forehead falling forward against her hands as he withdrew and pushed in again…and again, higher and deeper and faster, one arm hooking around the front of her pelvis to steady her for his quickening thrusts, his other hand sweeping up and down the supple bow of spine to stroke the lush, round globes of her quivering bottom.
The hot water pounded down over their violently surging bodies, heightening the wild, wet thrills, and Nina gave herself up to the anarchy of pure passion. She felt Ryan’s teeth grate against her shoulder-blade, his increasingly erratic rhythm forcing her closer and closer to the wall until her swollen nipples were jarring against the cool, slippery wallboard with each dynamic thrust of his hips.
She uttered a tiny choking cry as she approached a pinnacle of sensation only to have the prize snatched from her grasp when Ryan suddenly withdrew and spun her around so that it was now her spine flat to the wall, her thighs urged up around his waist by his rough hands as he bluntly surged back into her welcoming body, grunting in triumph at the slick parting of her folds, shuddering as she instantly contracted around his pulsing hardness.
‘I love to see you watching me when you come apart. I want to watch you, too….’ Intoxicating urgency was in his voice, in his burning blue eyes as they locked with her wide-eyed gaze. Her legs tightened around his waist, freeing his hands to cup her breasts, his thumbs pushing on the stiff nipples as if he was pressing buttons he knew were wired directly to all the pleasure centres of her body.
At the same moment, his eyes still fixed on her fast-dilating pupils, he arched back slightly, allowing the full force of the hot spray to splash down on the point where their bodies joined, and Nina instantly went over the edge, convulsing violently in his arms, her keening cry of ecstatic surrender destroying his attempt to hold back long enough for her to finish, catapulting him into a vicious paroxysm of guttural pleasure that sent a ripple of aftershocks cascading through her senses.
Exhausted, they slumped against the wall, but when Nina delicately tried to disengage herself, Ryan muttered a protest, his legs buckling as he carried her down with him to the metal floor of the shower box.
‘Ryan…’ she squeaked as he laid her on her back in the shallow pool of draining water, bending her knees to fit within the box so that he could crawl between them.
‘Did you think we’d finished?’ he growled as he knelt over her, the water bouncing off his shielding back, creating a halo of fine droplets around the back of his head. The Angel of Unrelenting Pleasure, she thought deliriously. ‘No way, babe….’
She was laughing, not really believing him, and her eyes widened as he bent eagerly to his task, his mouth and hands exploring everywhere he hadn’t already touched and tasted, and very shortly he was proving himself capable all over again. More than capable, Nina thought dreamily when it was all over.
‘The water’s cold,’ she announced suddenly, even though she didn’t feel in the least bit chilled any more.
He tipped his head back up into the spray, the movement grinding his heavy, sated body delightfully against her ravished femininity.
‘So it is.’ He reached up with one hand to turn off the shower, creating another wonderful, crushing thrill in her loins. Then she realised that the water was lapping surprisingly high around her shoulders and felt an odd tugging under her left hip.
She started giggling uncontrollably and he looked down at her, enchanted by the sight of her lovely eyes filled with the familiar dancing mischief that he had feared he might never see again.
‘Either someone else is in here with us or I’m lying on the plug hole. I think I’m going to have a very large love bite on my bottom,’ she said, giggling again.
His eyes gleamed in answering appreciation. ‘This I’ve got to see,’ he murmured wickedly, hauling her up and roughly towelling them both before hustling her across the hall into his bedroom. ‘The doctor is ready for you now, my dear,’ he intoned with a leer, then tumbled her face down onto the bed.
Her irrepressible giggles were stifled in his pillow. ‘What do you think, Doctor?’ she said when he seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time to make his diagnosis.
‘Hmmm…’ She felt his finger trace a teasing circle on her flushed cheek. ‘Definitely treatable. I think Dr Flint has the perfect remedy for this, to be applied regularly and often….’ Suddenly, a warm, wet tongue was anointing the spot.
‘Ryan…’ Her feeble chuckle of protest turned huskily eager as his tongue wandered farther afield. ‘Ryan…’
They made love again, this time languorously, lingering over each soft touch and slow kiss, and when it was over they lay contentedly in each other’s arms.
‘Bring back any memories?’ he murmured, and Nina kissed the hard shoulder that pillowed her head.
‘Some…’
His lips drifted over her hair. ‘Good memories?’
‘Oh, yes…all good.’ She smiled against his skin, absently stroked the jagged scar that streaked like a lightning bolt up the side of his thigh.
‘I was in an accident,’ he said suddenly, and her fingers faltered, then moved up to rest on his unblemished chest as she shifted her head to look up at him.
‘Before I met you?’ she asked nervously. Her memories of him had not included a scar on his leg.
‘No, after.’
‘You mean after I left?’
‘No, it was while we were together.’
The careful neutrality of his voice made her afraid to delve further. She was happy and relaxed. She didn’t want anything to spoil this precious idyll. She suspected that it was only the eye of the storm, but she wanted to enjoy it while she could. ‘Well, I still think you’re sexy, battle scars and all,’ she said lightly.
‘I think you’re sexy, too.’ He stroked her stomach, looking down, his finger tracking a long, curving line towards her hip. ‘Even with your battle scars.’
She looked down at the faint tracery of thin silver lines on her belly. ‘They’re not scars,’ she automatically denied.
‘Then what are they?’ he persisted softly.
She pushed his hand away and squirmed her hips towards him so that her stomach was pressed against his, concealing the sight of the inexplicable flaws. ‘Can’t you leave a woman her vanity?’
“‘Vanity, thy name is woman!’” he quoted, not pressing the point.
‘Hamlet said “frailty”, not “vanity”,’ she corrected. ‘And I’m not frail—I’m a lusty young lass!’
She had made him laugh and the shadowed moment passed, and as the long hours of the night slipped away, they slept and woke and whispered and made love, and in the morning they breakfasted together as lovers do, and the only time they touched on anything remotely serious was when Nina said, ‘I had nothing to do with your money going missing, Ryan. There has to be some other explanation. Whatever else I may be, I know I’m not a thief!’
He merely nodded thoughtfully and changed the subject, but she didn’t allow herself to believe the matter was laid finally to rest. Ryan hadn’t become an extremely wealthy man by forgiving his debts.
Later that day when she took Ray’s lunch over to him and had to run the gauntlet of his shrewd comments and knowing chuckles, she took the opportunity to phone Karl, disappointed to discover that he was out on a sales call and not answering his cell phone. She had to content herself with leaving a stilted message on his answerphone, not sure who else might listen to the recording.
‘Karl, it’s Nina. I just wanted you to know that Ryan Fli
nt has turned up here at Puriri Bay. I—he’s staying with me—we need to talk—please call me.’
She had expected that sometime in the next few days Ray would call her over to the phone, so it was a shock to see Karl coming through the door from the deck the very next afternoon.
He was no longer the scruffy surfer he once had been. His shoulder-length blond hair was shiny clean and caught back in a trendy ponytail, his eyes clear of drugs, his shoulders square under the sharp threads, although he still sported the deeply tanned face that was the legacy of his love of the beach, along with his trademark semishaven chin.
‘Where is he?’ were the first words out of his mouth.
Her stunned greeting died on her lips. ‘He and Zorro are taking a walk on the beach,’ she said equally curtly. ‘Karl, what are you doing here?’
‘What do you think I’m doing? You wanted to talk. Here I am,’ he answered sullenly. ‘I suppose you’ve got your memory back. When did he turn up?’
‘Some things I remember…not all. Ryan arrived a week ago. He’s been helping me—’
‘I bet he has,’ he said snidely. ‘A week? Are you sleeping with him again?’ She blushed and he punched his fist into his palm. ‘God, Nina, you were happy again—you didn’t need him any more. You were doing great by yourself. You said you’d rediscovered your artistic soul! I kept him away for you, it was all for you! And now you’re just going to let him walk back into your life like nothing happened? You’ve been apart for the nine months, but now…God—now you’re cohabiting again,’ he threw at her. ‘You know what that means? It means now you’ll have to wait another two years if you want to get a divorce—’
‘A divorce!’ It hit her like a thunderclap and she staggered, reaching blindly out for a chair into which she collapsed on unsteady legs. ‘A divorce? I thought—he said we’d been living together, but…We got married?’
Karl looked equally thunderstruck by her shock. ‘Three months after you met—’
‘Ryan and I are husband and wife?’ The wall in her mind was beginning to tilt, threatening to crash down on her, pulverise her beneath its full, crushing weight, and nightmarishly Nina found herself helpless to run.
Karl erupted in a fluent streak of curses. ‘You mean you hadn’t remembered? And he hasn’t told you? Any of it?’ Her white-faced silence said it all and he swore again, but with a strong undercurrent of bewilderment thickening his angry voice. ‘What in the hell does he think he’s playing at?’ he snarled. But before she could ask him any more questions, he had spun on his heel and flung himself back out the door.
Nina was frozen to her seat. Two years. The two years that had been blocked out of her mind for so long had been the years during which she had met, loved and married Ryan Flint. She stared down at her hands…her bare hands. Something was missing. Something she had been used to seeing. Once there had been a wedding ring on that finger. Once…
Like an old woman, she got up and moved with arthritic stiffness down to the laundry where she opened the deep, ceiling-high linen closet. After dragging over a small stepladder, she went on tiptoe to the highest shelf and reached in to pull out a dusty leather satchel. It had been stuffed into her backpack when she arrived on the island. She had never opened it. She had thrust it into the back of the closet and never looked at it from that day to this, never even thought of it, blocked it out of her mind as surely as her memories. Now she took it into her bedroom and laid it on her coverlet, reaching for the dusty brass clasp with shaking fingers.
Photographs. Wedding photographs—a shaft of heat stopping memories of a simple ceremony in a beautiful little wooden church. A set of keys. Personal papers—her passport and birth certificate and…and a notarised certificate of marriage between Ryan Liam Flint and Nina Joan Dowling. And, wrapped in a handkerchief decorated with tiny teddy bears, one wedding ring, plain gold, eighteen carat, symbol of faith between a man and a woman, symbol of love and hope and shared dreams for the future….
And, finally, there was money. Bundles and bundles of money, rubber-banded together in compact stacks of large and small denominations. Untraceable used bills. Ryan’s money, his missing cash float—although to Nina’s sick shame it looked nowhere near the amount he had mentioned.
She snapped out of her dazed lethargy, batting away the questions that buzzed at her like a swarm of painfully stinging wasps. Karl—he had been so angry—where had he been going?
She ran outside to look along the beach, her stomach twisting into knots as she saw that her foster-brother had accosted Ryan and Zorro halfway down the sand and a heated debate was going on, complete with waving arms and jabbing fingers.
Suddenly, there was a violent flurry of movement, and Nina was horrified to see the two men physically slugging it out, an excited Zorro darting in and out of their feet.
Leaping off the deck, she dashed towards the beach, screaming both their names. Karl half turned to look at her, and in that unguarded instant, Ryan viciously charged him, catching him midsection with his lowered shoulder and carrying him heavily down onto the sand where they rolled over and over, grappling and punching while Zorro growled and made lightning forays to nip at their flailing legs.
‘Stop it, you two! For God’s sake, stop it!’ Nina screamed, reaching them just as Ryan gained ascendancy, straddling the younger man and swinging a heavy fist, snapping Karl’s head sideways on the sand. As he lifted his fist again, Nina caught his arm with both hands, twisting it with all her strength to wrench him away from her foster-brother. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Are you trying to kill him?’
‘No, just teach him a lesson he won’t forget,’ Ryan ground out, ripping his sleeve out of her grasp, falling back panting on the sand as he saw with bitter eyes that her horrified concern was all for his opponent.
Karl was sitting up, his hand going to a rapidly swelling mouth streaming with blood, and Nina automatically felt in her jeans pocket for the paint rag she always tucked there while she was working, making a pad out of it as she dropped to her knees.
‘You didn’t have to hit him so hard.’ She couldn’t look at Ryan—at her husband—the man she had promised to love, honour and keep and, yes—she recalled the words of the traditional ceremony with bittersweet clarity—even obey…and then had deserted, stolen from, blithely wiped his existence from her mind….
‘Get out of the way, Nina,’ Ryan threatened, rolling to his feet. ‘This is between me and him! We’re going to settle the score once and for all.’
The eye of the storm had moved relentlessly on, and now Nina was once more battered by an emotional hurricane. God, he was such a proud man. How he must have hated her for humiliating him!
‘I can’t,’ she said fiercely, still unable to look at him, concentrating on cradling Karl’s head and pressing the pad gently against his split mouth, already puffed up to twice its size. ‘Whatever’s the matter, violence isn’t the way to resolve it.’
It occurred to her that on past occasions Karl was quite capable of allowing himself to be beaten up if it meant causing more trouble for Ryan. He might think the temporary suffering worth the malicious opportunity to have Ryan charged with a serious assault. She couldn’t risk that happening, not if she wanted to salvage anything of her marriage. If the only way to protect Ryan from Karl’s malice was to protect Karl, then that was what she would do.
‘Ryan, he told me I’m your wife—what he’d done. But I won’t let you hurt him.’ She finally forced herself to look up at him, but he was already turning his back.
‘The hell with you, then. The hell with you both!’ he snarled, his words corrosive with bitterness, and she watched, shattered, as he walked away. She had expected him to stand his ground; she had never, ever expected him to simply give up. It wasn’t in his nature.
He should have been able to depend on her loyalty and instead he must think that she had given her first loyalty to Karl—would always favour the bonds of childhood over the vows of marriage. She scrambled up, int
ending to go after him, to explain—
A clumsy hand on her arm stopped her as Karl swayed to his feet, holding the pad against his mouth. ‘Wait—’
‘But I have to go to him.’ At least he was heading back to the house, she thought, watching the lean figure scale the bank with the little dog. Surely he must expect that Nina would follow—but only if she had decided that he was more important to her than the foster-brother who had betrayed them both.
‘All right.’ Karl’s hand tightened. ‘But first you have to listen to me. Please—it’s important. To me—to you…and to him.’
That stayed her. She looked at him with sad eyes that made his tanned skin pale under the reddening contusions.
‘I know…I’m despicable,’ he said jerkily. ‘He was right not to trust me. Katy and I—that would have been a bust anyway. It was like, you know, an ego trip for me. I got off on having her treat me like I was some kind of subversive hero. As much of a big shot as her brother.’ He spoke in sharp, staccato bursts, pushing the confession out. ‘But I wasn’t, and he knew that. All he had to do was goad me into overplaying my hand and he knew I’d crash and burn. I was bitter over that, and you know how good I am about carrying a grudge—I even refused to come to your wedding.
‘I was glad when you disappeared, and seeing him go crazy trying to find you—especially when he didn’t believe that I didn’t know where you were—well, that was like payback time!’ In spite of his contrition, there was a gleam of remembered spite in the brown eyes. ‘Then later, when that postcard you sent caught up with me, well, I guess I enjoyed the idea of secretly putting one over on him. And I could see you were so happy here, so I convinced myself that not saying anything was for the best…only that was self-serving, too, because of the money—’
‘Oh, God, Karl, did he tell you about that?” she choked out. ‘How I stole from him?’
‘No, you didn’t—’
‘I just found the case of money up in the cupboard.’
‘It was me. I took it. You called me to come and see you that day. Flint was in Wellington for a two-day auction and you were upset, talking about how unhappy you were and how you wanted to get away somewhere and think for a few days. I told you I was going to Sydney on a selling trip that night and you said you’d come along, so I booked an extra ticket from your bedroom phone while you threw some things in a bag.
