Nina quietly hung up. And then she began to shake. Wrapping her arms around her waist, she leaned her shuddering body against the bench for support as the memory of the two months immediately following her grandmother’s death suddenly emerged from the blank wall in her mind, crystallising into images so bright and sharp that she found it hard to believe that she hadn’t been able to summon them before.
But then, she hadn’t summoned them this time, either. They had ambushed her when she least expected it, hitting her with the force of an avalanche and sweeping away all the smug certainties that she had nurtured in the past nine months. Memories that she had thought were lost forever, severed from her experience and locked away in an inaccessible part of her brain, had found an escape portal.
Ryan Flint.
…The starkly beautiful gallery in a renovated church a short stroll from Auckland’s Albert Park, where Nina used to lunch alfresco when she was working in the city. The gallery she used to visit and in which she innocently fantasised her paintings might one day hang!
…The elegant city restaurant where there had been such a ghastly scene.
…The fateful party in the elegant Parnell house where Ryan had shredded her pride and she had slapped his arrogant face.
What miserable freak of fate had brought Ryan Flint back into her unknowing orbit? Ryan Flint, the former professional gambler who—according to Karl—had won a rundown Sydney art gallery in a high-rolling poker game when he was twenty-six and parlayed it into a string of prestigious galleries that had made him into a multimillionaire and serious art collector in his own right.
The bastard!
The rage erupted in her veins.
No wonder she had found his presence obscurely threatening! No wonder she had instinctively erected such strong mental barriers against him.
She remembered the shock she had felt when she first touched him out in the storm. Although she had shrugged it off at the time, it had obviously been a shock of physical recognition; only her mind had refused to acknowledge what her senses were telling her.
Of course she knew who he was. He was the unprincipled swine who had nearly ruined Karl’s life!
The stormy emotions that Nina had felt at the time came back in a devastating rush.
She hadn’t taken off on her travels straight after her grandmother’s funeral as she had hazily assumed. She had decided to stay on in Auckland until the lease on the flat had officially run out, working out her notice at the commercial art firm and saving every cent she could for her planned trip. For the first time in three years, Nina had been able to look towards a cloudless future.
Then Karl had entangled her in his disastrous romance. A few days after her grandmother’s funeral, he had introduced her to Ryan Flint in the hope that she would influence him to look favourably on Karl’s desire to marry his sister.
Karl had been dating Katy Flint for several months—secretly, because wealthy Big Brother didn’t approve of his pretty nineteen-year-old sister hanging around with a long-haired, chain-smoking, antiauthoritarian drop-out who spent most of his time surfing and the rest of it living suspiciously well on unspecified odd jobs that he picked up from amongst his dubious set of friends.
Nina, who had never felt comfortable with her foster-brother’s previous free-and-easy attitude to drugs and selfish avoidance of any sort of responsibility, had been in secret sympathy with Big Brother’s protective instincts…until she had actually met him!
Sparks had flown immediately, Ryan tarring her with the same brush as her brother and Nina loyally refusing to admit that she, too, doubted Karl’s suitability for marriage—especially to a gentle-natured girl like Katy.
Karl had revelled in the role of star-crossed lover, but only because his youthful arrogance could not conceive of his beloved actually choosing her brother over him. In any event, he had grossly underestimated Ryan’s ruthless determination to smash up the relationship. It had all ended very messily, with Karl arrested on a cannabis charge and Katy dumping him when he tried to blame her brother for setting him up.
Nina’s last memory of Ryan was the triumphant smile on his face as he had taken a furious punch on the jaw from Karl outside the courthouse, while at his side, Katy had screamed at her erstwhile lover to stop.