Mistress Of The Groom

He should have looked less intimidating in casual clothes than he did in a suit, but somehow they just made him look tougher.

‘You should know by now that I never do anything because I have to,’ he told her. ‘How’s it feeling?’

She grimaced. ‘Not too bad.’ It was only a half-lie— the cold water was having an anaesthetic effect on the fierce stinging. ‘What did he say?’

‘That there might be some psychological reason you’re so accident-prone around me.’

Jane swung to face him, sending splashes across the white polo shirt he wore under an unzipped navy cotton jacket. ‘I am not! It was your fault. You shouldn’t have crept up on me!’

‘That’s right, blame someone else for the trouble you’re in.’ He dunked her hand back in the water. ‘You need to keep it there for at least ten minutes to draw the heat out of the skin and ease the pain. Where’s your first-aid kit?’

‘I—I suppose there must be one around here somewhere,’ she said vaguely, fighting to think of something other than the solid warmth of his body as it had pressed against her spine. Why did he have to arrive when she was in shorts and a T-shirt with her hair scraped into a childish pony-tail?

‘You mean you don’t know?’ Ryan’s gaze swept disapprovingly around the cluttered kitchen, noting the holes in the discoloured linoleum floor and the crack in the window. His mouth thinned. ‘I’ve got one in the boot of the car. And here—sit down before you fall down!’

He pushed one of the stout kitchen chairs up against the back of her knees and waited until she had slumped down on it before he slammed out of the door.

Jane’s eyes began to sting in sympathy with the raw, stinging redness of her right hand. She had learned the value of a good cry since she had been down at Piha. There had been no need to keep a stiff upper lip when there had been no one around to jeer at her tears, so she had shamelessly indulged herself. In just two weeks she had cried out years of repressed emotion. The sense of release had been enormous and now she was finding it difficult to stuff all those wayward feelings back into the tight little box of self-control where they had always belonged.

She was shivering when Ryan got back, and without a word he disappeared into the back rooms. He was gone for a few minutes and she could hear him poking around the chaos before he returned with a blanket which he tucked around her shoulders and over her bare knees. He made her try and take her hand out of the water several times before she could do so without an increase in pain. Then he sat her at the table and carefully dried off the affected area with sterile swabs and applied a large, dry non-stick dressing which he covered with a thick pad of cotton wool before bandaging it firmly.

‘You should have been a doctor,’ she joked into the thick silence as her slender hand was turned into an unwieldy fin. This was the second time he had handled her wounded person with a gentleness that belied his intimidating size and ruthless demeanour. In spite of the violence Ryan had brought into her life it wasn’t difficult to visualise him in the role of healer.

He flashed her an unsmiling look. ‘I wanted to be, but we couldn’t have afforded what it would have cost to send me to med school. I went into the building sector because I needed to get a full paying job to help Mum out. She tried to be tough but she had health problems, and working at more than one job became too much for her. I didn’t do a formal apprenticeship because the wages were too low, but I learnt enough about all aspects of the building business to know a good deal when I saw one.’

‘Oh.’ So, he had become a successful, self-made tycoon, but it was because of her father that he hadn’t been able to pursue his original dream. That made two of them.

‘I wanted to become a dress designer,’ she blurted out, and immediately felt stupid. There was no comparison between being thwarted of entering a noble profession and one based on the frivolities of fashion.

To her surprise he didn’t scoff. He glanced at her freshly scrubbed face, her plainness emphasised by the pale mouth and dragged back hair, the frowning expression. ‘So why didn’t you?’

She shrugged and looked away from the fingers securing the bandage, ignoring a faint ringing in her ears. She had excelled at design classes at high school but had dropped them because of her father’s scorn of ‘soft’ subjects. Her artistic imagination had been stifled by years of trying to live up to what was expected of her, rather than asking herself what she wanted. But here at Piha the old, creative impulses had begun to stir again.

‘Because you didn’t have the guts to go against your father’s wishes in case he disinherited you?’ Ryan supplied when she didn’t answer.

He was still kneeling by the chair, in the perfect position to see the flaring temper in her blue eyes before she abruptly doused it. ‘Yes, I suppose that was it,’ she said, her voice tight with the effort of not defending herself.

‘Or was he withholding something else you wanted even more?’ he asked softly, refusing to allow her to close herself off from him. ‘Like love... Was Jane Sherwood a poor little rich girl desperately trying to earn Daddy’s love...?’ His jeering grin burrowed under her control. ‘Or should I say a poor big rich girl...?’

‘Oh, shut up!’ she snarled, embarrassed at the pathetic picture of herself he had sketched. That might have been her at sixteen, but at twenty-six she had a lot more confidence i

n herself.

‘Whatever else I might have wanted to do, I was damned good at managing Sherwood’s. It would have been a good career for me if you hadn’t come along and bulldozed it!’

He got up. ‘That’s better. You were looking a little pale and shocky there for a moment. We’d better get some fluids into you.’

Jane watched him pour the tea, moving about the kitchen as if it was his own, and suddenly remembered what she would have preferred to forget.

‘How did you find me?’

He spooned several sugars into her cup, ignoring her protest that she didn’t like sweetened tea.

‘You made a toll call from the hotel room just after I left. It conveniently appeared on the printout that accompanied the receipt they posted me—time, duration and the number that you called. Certainly it proved more informative than that polite little note you sent to my office thanking me for my generosity but saying you preferred to accept another offer.’

Jane put a bandaged hand over her mouth. She had forgotten about payment for the long-distance call. ‘Oh, God—you phoned the number—’

‘I find it astonishing that you’ve remained such good friends with the woman you humiliated and lied to at the altar, but then, as Ava said herself, she has a very forgiving nature. A pity she didn’t exhibit that forgiving side of herself where I was concerned...’