Sweet Vixen

He didn't wait for an answer. He strode out to the deck and vaulted over on to her side. Probably off to raid her fridge, whistling a tuneless song that told Sarah the rest was up to her. He hated explaining his art, declaring it should speak for itself to those who were willing to under­stand. Sarah, at last, was willing.

For too long she had been afraid, cheated on the courage and strength she had so grimly gained from living with Simon—her medals of honour, dishonoured by cowardice. She had been afraid of the woman who now looked at her with such sensual pleasure in the satisfied smile. Afraid of her power. Afraid of her vulnerability. So, like a child afraid of the dark, she had pulled the bed­clothes over her head and tried to deny the existence of the temptress. 'Don't be silly, there's nothing there' her nurse used to say when Sarah awoke in the dark in the grip of a nightmare. Nothing but herself. The most frightening and persistent fears were always the ones that came from within.

Since Simon's death her imagination had had a field-day. Her guilt that she had failed him in some way had grown all out of proportion. But what did she owe him now? Only memory, the memory of the good times. To herself she owed life, fulfilment, the realisation of her full potential as a woman and she couldn't do that by refusing to acknowledge her basic drives. She had been frustrated, angered and hurt by the limitations that Simon had tried to impose on her personality, yet here she had been, imposing even stricter limitations on herself in an ulti­mately more damaging way.

Stepping closer to the mirror-image-that-wasn't, Sarah appreciated for the first time the composed, natural de­licacy of the painted image. A woman welcoming her lover, or perhaps bidding a temporary farewell, quite unselfconsciously—a moment of joyous feeling sus­pended forever.

If only such moments, such feelings were not so rare in real life. When was the last time she felt happy? Not just content but truly happy, the kind of happiness that grabbed the throat and sharpened the perceptions. It was chilling to realise that the answer was not counted in weeks or in months, but in years. She had held herself in like a tightly clenched fist. . . clutching nothing.

Be honest, Roy had said, and she was honest enough to admit that these things did not come as a blinding revela­tion. She had known for some time that her life had lost its cutting edge, that she was marking time on the brink of change, waiting for the final push that would provide the impetus to finally free her from the constraints of the past.

And Roy had given it to her—a gift of all the things that had been unsaid between them. A gift that, in spite ofthat first, nervous rejection, she had never seriously considered refusing to accept.

For was she, secretly, not curious? She had not allowed herself to be attracted by, or attractive to, men for fear of being trapped again in a suffocating relationship, but the thought of endless, empty, arid years stretching ahead was equally suffocating. Freedom was an internal, not external quality.

Sarah had experienced, and enjoyed, the physical side of love and knew that her body had needs that were no longer being fulfilled. Simon had been her first lover, and her last. But not the last . . . she had never consciously made that decision. Yet she was too intelligent and fasti­dious to go in for casual sex, too wary to fall in love again so soon. Perhaps the answer was merely to be receptive, to begin to test out those womanly instincts that had been so long ignored.

She shivered. What would it be like? She asked silently of the enigmatic painted image in front of her. To feel another man's hands upon her body? To reach out and touch, be touched? To offer herself up to the drenching sweetness of male invasion? The prospect both excited and frightened her, but she no longer feared to 'think it. She smiled into the dark, desirous eyes.

'Hello, Sarah,' she said.

Out on the balcony she found Roy wolfing salami, cheese and olives. 'For breakfast?'

'And last night's dinner, and lunch yesterday. I was busy. I finished the McKenzie portrait, did you see it on the other easel.'

'No.' The word spoke volumes.

'Well, it's not as good as yours anyway.' Roy grinned.

'I've decided I do like it.'

'What made you change your mind?' he asked, in­nocently, knowingly.

‘I like it. But. . .'

'Ah.' He sighed. 'You're going to raise the spectre of that promise.'

'Do you mind?' The private part of her still rebelled at the thought of the public speculation the portrait would cause if shown in Auckland. Roy's work inevitably attracted a lot of publicity. If it hadn't been so. . .good . . .

'No.' He scrubbed some crumbles of cheese out of his beard. 'Actually I had decided to send it over to Tony when I was still halfway through. I knew it was going to be special. My market in the States is pretty strong at the moment, it'll fetch a far more inflated price there than here.'

'Mercenary beast. That's me you're blithely offering for sale.'

'Tony’ll make sure you go to a good home, a very expensive home.' He rubbed his hands together and cackled. Sarah gave him a friendly thump.

'So my cowardice is doing you a favour.'

'If you were such a coward you wouldn't have sat for me in the first place.'

'The honour was too great to refuse,' she said gravely, and was amused to see the worldly Roy, used to critical acclaim, flush at her sincerity.

'Your freckles are joining up,' she said innocently and found herself bundled across to her own balcony.

'On your bike, brat, I've got work to do. Oh, by the way . . .' Sarah paused. 'My hot water heater went on the blink again last night. Can I use your bath until I get it fixed?'

'Well, get it done by a registered electrician this time,' said Sarah with a long-suffering sigh, 'not a mate's mate. And maybe you'd better stick to showers, last time I recall being locked out of my own bathroom for hours at a time while you turned yourself into a wrinkled prune.'

'But a clean prune, love, and didn't I clean the paint off the bathtub when you asked?'