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‘Ianthe Brown. For a while she turned up on all the covers of the women’s magazines. She lost her job after she got bitten, of course.’ He shrugged. ‘The girl they got to replace her looks just as good in a bikini, but she’s not as good in her job. You could tell Ianthe Brown really liked what she was doing.’
Alex nodded, and Mark said, ‘By the way, I didn’t mean to hurt her wrist. She almost fell into the water and then she just lost it—started to shake and went as white as a sheet. Scared the hell out of me, so I hauled her out a bit too roughly. But I didn’t mean to hurt her,’ he repeated bluntly.
‘She’s probably nervous in the water,’ Alex said. ‘After an attack like that, anyone would be.’
‘Well, yeah, she might be, although we don’t have any sharks in the lakes.’
Alex laughed. ‘It’s not quite so easy as that,’ he said drily. ‘All right, on your way.’
‘What time do you want dinner?’
‘Eight.’ He was already looking at the first paper, and barely heard the door close behind the other man.
An hour later he lifted his head and got up, walking out onto the deck. The lake danced before him, ripely blue as the sheen on a kingfisher’s wings, and he summoned the face of the woman.
Intriguing, he thought.
But he’d known women who were more than intriguing, who exuded sexual promise with every smile, every movement of their bodies. This one wasn’t like that. Oh, she had a good figure and skin, and her golden eyes were miraculous, but she limped badly, and although she had regular, neat features she wasn’t beautiful in the modern sense.
He frowned. At first those hot amber eyes had glittered with anger, the long dark lashes almost hiding the wariness. And that hair! Hair to tangle around a man’s heart, he thought sardonically, knowing his was safe. This was a more primitive reaction; he wanted to see her hair spread out on his pillow, that delicately sensuous mouth blurred by his kisses, those eyes heavy and slumbrous with passion.
When their eyes had met, his stomach had contracted as though he’d been punched in the solar plexus. A savage, unmanageable physical desire had bypassed defences set up and reinforced since early adolescence.
Using the cold, analytical brain that served him so well, he recalled her face, her defiant stance, the square chin, the gentle, womanly curves—and watched his hands clench in front of him as his body responded helplessly.
What quality in her summoned such a response? She’d had no tricks, no artifice. The soft mouth had been naked of lipstick, and the glinting eyes hadn’t been emphasised by mascara and eyeshadow. Yet beneath her delicate, slightly old-fashioned prettiness he’d sensed a smouldering intensity, a primitive carnal power that threatened while it beckoned.
What had those amazing eyes seen when she’d looked at him the first time?
Grimacing, he forced his hands to relax. She’d seen what he saw in the mirror every morning—the face that proclaimed his pedigree and announced his heritage, features that could be traced back a thousand years.
Those great eyes had viewed him with nothing but suspicion, he thought, trying to find something amusing in that, a thread of irony that would quench the fever curling through his loins.
Her cool composure had challenged the primitive, fundamental male in him, as had her burning, golden eyes and her pale skin and that hair. And, he thought ironically, the body beneath those appalling clothes. Oh, yes, he’d responded fiercely to the slim legs and the sleek, lithe curves of breast and hip, the oddly fragile line of her throat and the thin wrists and ankles.
Different, but just as fierce, had been his reaction to that abomination of a scar, to her limp, to the pain in her eyes and the pallor of her face when her leg hurt. That unwilling, highly suspect need to protect her shocked him.
He was a man of strong passions and even stronger control. Celibacy was no stranger to him. And he was, he admitted, cynical about women, and regrettably bored with professional beauties.
Yet when he’d opened the door and seen her staring out of the window, her long legs and neat little backside revealed by her shorts, somewhere at a deep, cellular level he’d responded with a white-hot leap of recognition.
Damned inconvenient, he thought caustically, walking back into the room to straighten the pile of papers beside the laptop computer. He might crave the physical release of sex, but now, of all times, he needed to keep his mind clear.
For a moment he summoned the face and gorgeously voluptuous body of a woman who would have been furious to hear herself described as a call girl, but who would, he knew, be on the next flight if he asked her. His mouth tightened. He had no illusions; apart from his power and his money, Isabel wanted him because he had never succumbed to her lush expertise. He’d never used women, and his irritating desire for the interesting intruder wasn’t going to drive him in that direction.
There were other, far more important things to think about. That was why he’d come to New Zealand—to think. The decision he had to make would affect not only his life, but those of millions.
And for the only time since he’d grown up he couldn’t weigh the facts and measure the results of any given decision. His self-contained mind—razor-sharp and cold-blooded he’d been called often enough to make the terms clichés—didn’t even want to face the prospect.
The finely etched features of Ianthe Brown coalesced in the recesses of his brain. The contrast between her elaborate first name and her prosaic surname amused him. Ianthe meant violet flower, although the first Ianthe, his classical education reminded him, had been a Greek nymph, the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys.
All suspiciously appropriate.
Those delicately etched features were the sort adored by the camera. He caught himself wondering if the camera also revealed that latent wildness in her. Had she ever indulged it? Or was she a passionate puritan, afraid to give rein to her emotions?
Frowning, he looked out of the window and across the impossibly blue water of the lake. Once Mark had told him who she was it had been easy to find out more about her. The investigator in Auckland had worked fast and the pages had come through on the fax a few minutes ago.
Nothing, however, about her personal life. Apparently when featured by the women’s magazines she’d spoken only about her work, which had seemed to consist of swimming decoratively with whales and dolphins.
And sharks. No doubt the tense line of her succulent mouth and the frequent opacity of her eyes were other, more subtle results of that attack.
Once again gripped by a ferocious instinct to protect her, he pressed the buzzer beside the desk, then put the detective’s findings into a drawer.
When Mark appeared he said, ‘You’re going into Dargaville tomorrow morning, aren’t you? Go to the video shop and get me any that have Ianthe Brown in them.’
When he was alone again he picked up the papers on his desk and began to read, banishing memories of a passionately sculpted mouth, and hair the mixed colours of gold and new-minted copper, and skin translucent and delicate as silk.
And huge golden eyes that reflected the sheen of firelight and hinted at passions he’d never waken.
CHAPTER TWO
AFTER a restless, dream-hounded night, Ianthe drank two cups of tea and forced herself to eat a slice of toast before driving down to the nearest town, the sleepy little port of Dargaville on the wide reaches of the Northern Wairoa River.
When she’d stocked up on the groceries that weren’t available in the small shop at the motor camp, she bought a couple of magazines and tried hard to resist several new paperbacks. Succumbing, she appeased her conscience by buying another four from the reject rack at the library.
About halfway home she saw a Range Rover pushed sideways into the ditch. A familiar figure stood beside it, surveying the damage.
She almost put her foot down and accelerated past Mark the frogmarcher, but in some odd way his behaviour had formed a tenuous bond between them, so she drew in behind and got out. ‘Hello,’ she said coolly. ‘Are you all right?’
Mark stood unsmiling. ‘I’m fine.’
Wondering why she’d bothered, Ianthe persevered, ‘Do you want me to call in at the Kaihu garage for you?’
‘Everything’s under control,’ he told her, ‘but you could do me a favour—I’ve got frozen goods, and although they’re well-wrapped they aren’t going to last. Would you drop them off at the house?’
He must have decided she was relatively harmless. Fighting down an odd sense of darkening destiny, Ianthe said crisply, ‘Yes, I’ll do that. Will you need a ride back after the Rover’s been towed to the garage?’
‘No.’
‘All right,’ she said, still feeling that she was burning unknown bridges behind her. ‘Hand over the frozen stuff and I’ll deliver it.’
Five minutes later she was on her way, with a large plastic bag in the boot of her car and a frown pulling at the smooth skin above her brows. If she’d had any common sense at all she’d have driven on past, but she was too imbued with the New Zealand instinct to help.
And now she had to beard the lion in his den—no, the hawk in his nest.
Perhaps hawks had eyries, like eagles, she thought with a faint smile, flicking down the visor as the sun shimmered like a mirage on the tarseal in front of her. A hawk in a summer sky, proud and fierce and lethal…
And handsome. That disturbing familiarity tugging at her mind was probably instinctive female homage to an ideal of masculine beauty. The arrangement of his features pleased some integral pattern set up by the human brain so she recognised him as good-looking.
Logical, when you thought it through.
A too-fast swerve around the next corner banished the enigma of her unwilling host of the previous day. From then on she concentrated, driving past the other three lakes and the locked gate that separated the reserve from the fourth lake in its nest of pines, along a road with farms on one side and the sombre green of the plantation on the other, until she made a right-angle turn over a cattlestop onto a very ordinary drive. It didn’t look as though a man of mystery lived at the end of it.
As she drew up under that splendid porte-cochère every cell in Ianthe’s body thrummed with a hidden excitement, heating her skin and sharpening her senses.
She got out and rang the doorbell to the accompaniment of the busy, high-pitched chattering of a fantail fluttering amongst the gold-spotted aurelia leaves. Instead of the rich golden brown of the common variety, this one was sooty, with a breast of dark chocolate, the comical white brow and collar missing. Ianthe wasn’t a bird person, but she knew enough about the small, cheerful birds to be aware that black fantails were unusual in the North Island.
Its complete lack of fear and its sombre colouring shouldn’t have lifted the hair on the back of her neck. Although she was aware of the bird’s Maori reputation as a harbinger of death, she was a scientist, for heaven’s sake. Yet, as she stood before the big wooden door, the fantail seemed like a magic messenger, the emissary from another world who summons the hero to a quest.
How’s that for logical, professional thinking? she mocked. Darwin would be proud of you.
With a shrug she turned to ring the bell again, but before her finger touched it the door opened silently and the man who had haunted her sleep looked at her.
Something flared in the light eyes, a response she couldn’t read; it was instantly replaced by an aloof withdrawal.
Stung, she summoned a glib professional smile. ‘I have some frozen groceries that your—chauffeur asked me to deliver.’
The frown remained, albeit reduced to a pleat of the black brows. His eyes revealed nothing but shimmering silver depths, cold and lucent. ‘Thank you.’
He walked beside her to the car. ‘Which are the frozen goods? I’ll get them.’ Straightening with the plastic bag, he told her, ‘Mark got pushed into the ditch by a truck that was avoiding a dog. Thank you for being a good samaritan.’
So he’d known she was on her way. She said lightly, ‘You can’t compare delivering a parcel of frozen peas to rescuing a man who fell among thieves. I’d better be off. I hope all goes well with the Rover.’
Ianthe couldn’t read any emotion in his expression or his tone. Silence stretched between them, taut, obscurely equivocal.
Evenly, without emphasis, he said, ‘Come and have something to drink. You look hot and tired and thirsty.’
A flicker of movement from the little fantail caught Ianthe’s eye. Perched on the topmost twig of the leafy plant, the bird spread its tail feathers, black plumage a startling contrast to green and gold leaves. Round, bright eyes seemed to fix onto Ianthe, insistent, commanding.
It was stupid to give any significance to such a tiny creature, seen almost every day in New Zealand. It would be even more stupid to accept this invitation.
Yet some impulse, a heartbeat away from refusal, changed her mind. Slowly she said, ‘That sounds wonderful. I am hot and tired and thirsty.’
He smiled, and her heart flipped. ‘But perhaps we should be introduced first,’ he said, and held out his free hand. ‘I’m Alex Considine.’
She knew that name! She just couldn’t place it. On a subtly exhaled breath she said, ‘I’m Ianthe Brown,’ and with a kind of resignation put her hand into his.
The moment it closed over hers a wildfire response stormed through her, drowning out common sense and caution. Dizzily she thought that the handshake was a claiming, a symbolic gesture of possession taken and granted.
Ridiculous, she thought, panicking. Utterly ridiculous!
Possibly she jerked her hand away, but he let it go as though women who shivered when he touched them weren’t uncommon in his life.
It probably happened all the time, she thought, and said inanely, ‘How do you do?’
‘How do you do, Miss Brown?’ he said, amusement deepening his voice. ‘Come in. Is there anything you want to bring with you? Some frozen goods, perhaps, to add to mine in the freezer?’
Damn! She should have dropped her meat off on the way here. But, no, she’d been so excited at the prospect of seeing him again she’d driven mindlessly past the turn-off. ‘Actually, yes, there is,’ she admitted, grateful to be able to stoop and lift her parcel from the car.
Adding it to his, he motioned her to go ahead. Chin tilted, she obeyed, saying with a casual smile, ‘Miss Brown sounds incredibly formal. I answer better to Ianthe.’
His lashes drooped for a micro-second. ‘Then you must call me Alex,’ he said, and showed her into the sitting room with its wonderful view of the beach and the lake. ‘If you don’t mind waiting, I’ll put these in the freezer.’
He was not, Ianthe thought as she walked across to the open doors and squinted at the violent contrast of white sand against the bold blue of the water, the sort of man you offered to help.
Cicadas played their tiny penetrating zithers in the branches of the trees behind the house. The familiar noise set Ianthe’s nerves jumping; trying to centre herself, she took a few deep breaths, but her skin tightened. She turned a little clumsily, and there was Alex coming in through the door with a tray that held bottles of various sorts.
‘I can make tea or coffee if you’d prefer either,’ he said when she glanced at the tray.
Ianthe shook her head. ‘No, something cold would be wonderful,’ she said gratefully.
‘Come outside; it’s marginally cooler.’
A terrace stretched along the front of the house, and there, shaded by the roof, was a sitting-out area—comfortable white squabs and cushions on long benches. Above, a pergola draped with vines shaded eyes from the vibrating intensity of the sun. It was completely private. You could, Ianthe thought enviously, lie naked on those squabs and let the sun soak bone deep.
Unfortunately she couldn’t risk it with skin as pale as hers. Not so Alex Considine, whose darker skin would only deepen in colour under the sun’s caress. However, his aura of leashed energy made it difficult to imagine him lying around with no aim but to polish up his tan.
Her stomach contracting at the images that flashed across her far too co-operative brain, she asked swiftly, ‘Why did you decide to come here for your holidays, Alex?’
He answered readily enough. ‘I wanted somewhere peaceful where I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew. What would you like—orange juice, lime, or something else?’
His explanation was, Ianthe thought shrewdly, the truth, but not the whole truth. ‘Lime, thank you.’
Accepting the glass he handed her, she observed, ‘I bet before you go home you’ll have tripped over someone you know. New Zealand’s notorious for coincidences.’
Long black lashes hid his eyes for a second. ‘I hope not,’ he said neutrally. ‘But if it’s inevitable, I certainly hope I see them before they see me. Have you come here for peace and solitude too?’
Ianthe turned her head to stare at the lake. Even through the thin cotton of her trousers she could feel the canvas squabs radiate the heat they’d trapped from the sun.
‘Yes,’ she said simply, for some reason no longer unwilling to talk about it. ‘I got bitten by a shark, and when the whole media circus ended and I came out of hospital for the third time I just wanted to crawl away to heal by myself.’
If he’d shown any sign of pity she’d have set her glass down and made some excuse and left, but he said in a judicial voice, ‘That must be the most terrifying thing that can happen to anyone.’
‘Oddly enough, I don’t think it was. I was half out of the water when it happened, climbing the ladder into the boat. I can’t remember much, but I do recall thinking that I was in the shark’s hunting grounds. And being surprised that there was no pain, although when it grabbed my leg I was shocked enough to punch it on the nose! I was lucky. It wasn’t a big one, and apparently it didn’t like being hit fair and square on its most sensitive spot.’
‘What sort of shark?’ he asked.
Surprised into laughter, because that was what her professor at university had asked when he’d come to see her in hospital, she told him, ‘A Tiger Shark.’
‘And did they catch it?’
She shook her head. ‘No, they didn’t try. Why kill something that’s only doing what it was born to do? As far as we know—and in spite of Jaws—sharks don’t turn into man-eaters, the way leopards or lions can. They just eat whatever comes to hand, and that day I was it.’
‘You’re remarkably tolerant,’ he said, his tone oblique, almost cryptic. ‘I’d be inclined to kill something that tried to eat me.’
After flicking him a glance, she became absorbed in the pattern of leaves on the ground. She believed him.
‘They’re an endangered species,’ she said. ‘I was in its element, and whenever you swim you risk bumping into something large and carnivorous or small and poisonous.’
