He shrugged with quiet resignation. ‘I’m calling off the dogs, Jane.’
Instead of relief she felt a gush of pure, unadulterated terror. To believe she would have to trust him without reservation...
‘Why?’ She pushed him away, scrambling off the bed in a flurry of towelling, and this time he made no effort to stop her. ‘Why now? If this is another one of your mind games...’ she faltered to a halt, wrapping her arms around her waist to stop them reaching out to temptation.
He spread his hands in a gesture of surrender as he slowly rose to his feet. ‘No games. Just the truth—that we make good enemies but even better lovers. And one night of hot-blooded passion hasn’t doused the flames, has it, Jane? Until this thing burns itself out neither of us is going to get any peace.’
She could tell him that it was never going to burn itself out—not for her. ‘And then what? Then we become enemies again?’
His face was sombre, moody. ‘No, that’s over. You won’t get Sherwood’s back, but I won’t pursue the debts any further.’
He crossed to the black case that Carl Trevor had left and opened it, taking out a cordless electric razor and a clean shirt. Looking at his broad, unrevealing back, Jane was struck with a sudden burst of insight.
‘I could never quite work out why you came after me the way you did. Even considering what I’d done, it seemed like overkill... You didn’t just want to ruin me, you seemed to want to obliterate my identity.’
She moved until she could see his tense profile. ‘But it was never just me, was it?’ she said, slowly feeling her way with every word. ‘There was something else, something to do with my being a Sherwood. You always made my surname sound like an insult. It was my father, wasn’t it...?’ She wondered why she hadn’t made the connection before—perhaps she hadn’t wanted to compete yet again with the memory of her parent. ‘You knew my father—’
‘And to know him was to hate him?’ he interrupted, with a cool amusement that only strengthened her suspicions.
‘Did you hate him? Why? What did he do?’
He crossed to the mirror over the dressing table and switched on the razor. ‘Leave it, Jane.’
‘No, I won’t.’ She followed him and stayed his han
d before it reached his chin, meeting his gaze steadily in the mirror. ‘You asked for honesty from me, Ryan...don’t I get any in return? Are you going to make me find out for myself?’
His eyelids drooped and his voice took on a husky intonation. ‘Do you know, that’s the first time you’ve used my name this morning? Last night you couldn’t seem to stop yourself saying it...’
She almost wavered. ‘Don’t change the subject.’
His mouth thinned. ‘He’s dead. It’s nothing to do with us anymore. Whatever he did, it’s over and done with—’
‘He was dead yesterday, too, but it still mattered to you then,’ she persisted over the burr of the razor. ‘Why won’t you tell me? Do you think I’d be shocked? I wouldn’t. I know what kind of man my father was...’
‘He was like a Rottweiler when he scented blood. He sank his teeth in and never let go.’ Ryan sighed and clicked off the razor as he turned around. ‘Rather like you.’
The comparison cut her to the quick, and Jane lifted an imperious chin in a characteristic attempt to hide the hurt, but before she could dredge up a defensive reply he touched her cheek in a tacit apology.
‘I suppose his tenacity was the one thing I admired about him,’ he said ruefully. ‘All right, Jane, I suppose I owe it to you to tell you what you want to know—after you’ve dressed.’
He tunnelled his fingers under her hair and guided her into a kiss that warmed the chill of loneliness from her soul. His mouth was aggressive, but contained none of the repressed anger of the previous night, just a hunger he made no attempt to conceal. ‘I have to leave for the office soon and I need to make some phone calls first, so let me shave and make my calls and then we’ll talk...’
Jane stood on the porch of her dilapidated little beach house and watched the wind-tossed seagulls ride the swirling air currents in the sky above Lion Rock. If she hadn’t been so greedy for the poisonous fruit of knowledge maybe she would still be in Auckland, living in the hope that Ryan’s caring would one day become much more than casual...
But that was purely wishful thinking. The twenty-year-old scar that she had ripped open when she had sabotaged Ryan’s wedding could never be fully healed. To Ryan, she would always be the daughter of the man who had murdered his father.
Oh, Mark Sherwood hadn’t wielded a knife or a gun, but the impact of his actions on his victim had been ultimately just as fatal as a killing blow.
True to her word, Jane hadn’t been shocked by the tale of a crooked home-building deal which Mark Sherwood had set up two decades before; she knew all too well that her father had had little respect for the law where it interfered with his own interests and protected ‘fools and losers’.
By his definition Charles Blair would have been a loser, even though as a carpenter and builder he had built up a respectable business, because Ryan’s father had been too honest to take his profits and run when the deal had inevitably collapsed. Instead he had tried to honour the promises he had made. As a result he had been bankrupted, and his reputation and means of livelihood destroyed when rumours that he had been using substandard building materials began to circulate. In desperation he had naïvely confronted Mark Sherwood, pleading for help, and Jane’s father had laughed in his face, threatening to produce documentary evidence that it was Charles’s embezzling that had caused the scheme to fail.
Charles Blair had died not long afterwards, electrocuted in his home workshop, and rumours of suicide had thrown further shadows over his blackened reputation. His pregnant wife and thirteen-year-old son had been left homeless and destitute after the debts that he had assumed responsibility for had been paid.
While Mark Sherwood had gone on to build a financial empire on his ill-gotten gains, Charles’s widow had been trapped in a cycle of poverty, supporting her son and new baby daughter in a hand-to-mouth existence, taking menial positions because of her lack of qualifications and often working two jobs to make ends meet. She was now remarried, but for fourteen years she had struggled alone, haunted by her husband’s undeserved legacy of shame, watching her son grow from a secure little boy into an angry young man who had sworn that one day he would be rich and powerful enough to destroy the company that had been built on the ruins of his father’s honour.
But by the time Ryan had amassed a sufficient fortune and manoeuvred himself into a position to put his vengeful plan into action Mark Sherwood had been a dying man, no longer at the helm of Sherwood Properties. Unwilling to cause the innocent to suffer for someone else’s crimes, as he and his family had unjustly suffered, Ryan had reluctantly curbed his lust for revenge...until Jane had proved herself as treacherous, deceitful and lacking in moral conscience as her father.