‘What is?’ she said, afraid to put the cup down again in case she spilled the contents. She hastily drank some more, pulling a face at the syrupy sweetness.
‘Surviving. I guess it was tough enough doing things with one hand, but Graham says it will be several days before that burn starts to heal. Meantime the dressing has to be changed each day and kept clean and dry so infection doesn’t set in if the blisters burst. You can hardly even hold a cup of tea straight; how are you going to cook, or wash, or clean...in fact do anything around the house?’
‘I can manage,’ she claimed, infuriated by his logic. He was so smug and male, so...whole.
‘But why should you have to?’ he said smoothly. ‘After all, as you pointed out, it’s my fault you’re in this state, and I did promise Ava I’d make sure you were OK. She was most concerned to learn that you’d come down here with a broken hand. You didn’t tell her that, either...’
Her cup crashed down sloppily in its saucer. ‘Damn you, she hadn’t seen the newspapers—I didn’t want to go into all that—’
‘Neither did I, so I didn’t tell her you’d broken it on my face! Didn’t you believe me when I said I was calling it quits? When you come back to Auckland you’ll find I’ve already spread the word that you and I have settled whatever differences we had.’
Jane looked down at her hands as the realisation that had been slowly building over the past two weeks burst, fully-formed, upon her consciousness. She didn’t want to go back. Ryan’s act of revenge had inadvertently given her the chance to start life completely afresh. Yes, she was afraid of her uncertain future, but she was also exhilarated by her freedom. Cut adrift from the stresses and expectations of the past, she could shape her own destiny. She didn’t ever want to go back to being the person she had been—obsessed with success and maintaining control, lonely, driven, profoundly unfulfilled...
She drew in a deep breath. ‘Look, I don’t know why you bothered to follow me down here—’
‘Don’t you?’ He moved around the table. ‘You think I should have accepted your insultingly brief note as the last word on the matter? If you were serious about giving me the kiss-off the least you could have done was to give it to me in person!’
At the mention of kissing her eyes moved helplessly to his mouth and flickered away, but he had seen the brief flash of hunger.
His voice deepened with predatory shrewdness. ‘Or maybe you just didn’t trust yourself to be able to say no to me face to face. Afraid your desires might slip the leash again, Jane, and that we’d end up back in bed together? Is that what sent you scuttling down here?’
As usual he made her
uncomfortably aware of the conflict in her behaviour. Had she been subconsciously delivering a challenge when she had run away? Jane crossed her arms over her chest, shaking her head sharply again, but this time Ryan reached out and caught her pony-tail as it flipped past her ear, winding the silky black skein around his hand, forcing her head to a stop. With his other hand he tipped up her chin.
‘Coward!’ he taunted.
For once she didn’t rise to his bait. ‘Is it so impossible for you to believe that I’m just not interested?’ she asked steadily.
‘Not impossible...’ He dragged his thumb suggestively across her lower lip and watched her eyes dilate and her breasts tremble with a ragged inhalation. ‘Just highly unlikely.’
And before she could argue with the breathtaking arrogance of that he added quietly, ‘Given our history, maybe you’re right to be afraid...but why let the past deny us a chance to explore the unique pleasure that we give each other? Why not let something good come out of the bad, get it out of both our systems...?’
His thumb rubbed at her mouth. ‘You’re a city girl. You don’t have to live like this—you don’t belong out here. Come back with me and I’ll provide you with as much challenge and excitement as you can handle. We both know from bitter experience there are no guarantees in life, but one thing I can promise is that I’ll do nothing more to deliberately hurt you...’
She believed in the sincerity of his words but the promise rang hollow in her heart.
No, Ryan might never hurt her deliberately, but he would hurt her all the same. It was as inevitable as the tide rolling up Piha beach each day that if they became lovers Jane would be the one to suffer most from a break-up. If anything, she felt even less equipped to handle an affair than she had been two weeks ago. This time alone had stripped from her the hard shell of sophistication that she had always worked so hard to maintain.
Becoming Ryan’s lover might temporarily satisfy the yearning of her body but it would only intensify the craving in her soul. He was like an escalating addiction, and the only safe way to escape before she was totally hooked was to give him up cold turkey.
‘Good, you’ll turn around and leave, then,’ she said stonily. ‘Because it so happens that I actually like living “like this”.’ She jerked her pony-tail out of his grip with a fierceness that made her eyes brighten with tears, waving her bandaged hands vaguely in the air. ‘I don’t want to leave Piha and I certainly don’t want to get involved in an affair with anyone at the moment! I just want to be left alone. Is that clear enough for you?’
She was devastated when he didn’t even try to argue. He merely gave her a hard, all-encompassing look, a grim nod and strode out of the house. She watched his powerful car spitting angry stones from the tyres as he turned on the gravel shoulder of the road outside her gate and roared out of her life. Then she sat back down at the table and sobbed her heart out.
Mopping up, she told herself that his giving up so easily had proved her doubts about any relationship they might have had. He couldn’t have wanted her so badly after all. His ego had demanded he track her down but when he found her in her unkempt surroundings looking plain and scruffy, an object of pity rather than lust, he had realised that she was no longer a challenge to either his intellect or libido.
All morning, as she doggedly struggled against her new handicap, she told herself that she was better off without him. She would survive this as she had survived every other setback in her life—alone.
Several hours later she was out in the back garden, tired and sweaty, hunting along the hedge for more eggs, when she thought she heard a strange noise in the house. She put her basket down and moved around the side of the garage, frowning at the sight of a white panel van parked on the sun-burned grass of her front yard, a telephone company logo emblazoned on its side. She walked around the front just in time to see a man in white overalls disappearing through the open front door.
‘Hey!’ Jane shouted, and ran after him, nearly tripping over a woman in the same telephone company overalls who was crouched in the narrow hall, drilling into the chipped skirting board. ‘Hey, what’s going on here?’
‘Hooking you up for phone and fax,’ said the woman, around several screws clenched in her teeth. ‘Your connection to the house checks out OK, but some of this cabling has to be upgraded.’
‘You must have the wrong place. I didn’t order anything. You’ve got to stop!’ When the woman didn’t take any notice Jane gritted her teeth. She still hadn’t got used to the fact that people no longer jumped to comply when she gave orders. ‘Who’s in charge here?’
The woman jerked her cropped blonde head in the direction of the living room where the man had gone, and Jane hurried to confront the culprit. He was setting up a top-of-the-range fax in the corner on an old kauri desk that Jane had devoted her evenings to restoring, scrubbing away the grime of years and rebuilding a fine patina with oil and beeswax. He was young, and aggravatingly unconcerned by her protests.