Kelly took grim satisfaction in imagining him as the self-centred type who would never give enough of himself to make a relationship work. A sexy body was all he would ever offer. And he'd consider that the woman who shared a bed with him for a while was positively privileged to have the honour.
Kelly had experienced that before. When she had been at Cumberland College she had been naive enough to fall for a handsome face. But once bitten, twice shy. The sexiest guys were always egotistic and self-centred and didn't care how they hurt you. The nice guys were totally unexciting. How on earth was a girl to find someone just right?
She stared resentfully at the body stretched out in front of her. It certainly wasn't fair for Justin St John to have everything: looks and wealth and Marian Park and her horses and Grandpa's land!
Kelly's rage boiled up again. She switched off the interferential and removed the suction cups. She didn't feel like going on with the treatment, but she had principles to live up to even if Justin St John didn't!
'I'm going to do mobilisations on the hip-joint,' she informed him. 'Tell me when the pain gets bad.'
'How do you measure pain?' he rumbled.
'Imagine a scale from one to ten. How does this feel?' She pushed into the warm flesh of his left buttock, finding the top of the femur.
He grunted. 'One!'
She pushed down harder.
'You've just zoomed up to five,' he gasped.
She eased back a little. The inclination to throw her whole weight on to him was almost irresistible. 'How's that?' she bit out, thinking of her grandfather's misery and her bitter frustration over the horses.
'Better!' he croaked.
But the temptation to push on was a malevolent cloud on her mind. She pressed down a bit harder. He groaned. It was then that Kelly knew she couldn't go on. She really did want to hurt him. Horrified at her own driven urge to cruelty, she snatched her hands away from him.
He looked back at her in surprise.
'I can't! I just can't!' she cried, appalled and distressed that she could be tempted into taking such a dreadful advantage of anyone, no matter how vengeful she felt. 'That's the end of it!' she snapped, all the more angry with him because she was so upset with herself. 'If it wasn't against my own personal ethics, I'd give you every measure of pain there was, Justin St John! You deserve every bit you get. But I'm not as callous as you, so you can just go on suffering by yourself.'
His eyes were wide open now, sharply alert and diamond-hard. His arm shot out and a vice-like hand fastened around Kelly's wrist. 'You'd better explain yourself,' he said in a low, dangerous tone.
It shocked her for a moment, the electric contact of his touch… the frightening sense of being captured by him… the impact of his sudden closeness. Kelly's reaction was all the more intense because of it.
'Let go of me!' she blazed, then plunged on recklessly, desperate to repel him and his confusing effect on her. 'It's not exactly hard to work it out, is it? I can't trust myself to touch you any longer. I want to rip you apart for what you've done.'
'What I've done?' His eyes narrowed. He released her wrist and rolled on to his right side, propping himself up on his elbow with an air of suffering patience. 'I see you're bursting to enlighten me, so go ahead,' he invited, his mouth taking on a grim curve. 'This is your chance. Maybe it's the last you'll ever have.'
CHAPTER THREE
Kelly folded her arms, needing to wipe away the feeling his hand had branded on her wrist, but not wanting to be conspicuous about it. She fixed Justin St John with a baleful glare and chose her words with bitter precision.
'The name Hanrahan apparently means nothing to you, Mr St John. You either don't know, or you don't care. But my grandfather and I are the so-called tenants that you wish to evict from our home. A home, I might add, that was built by my grandfather and his father almost seventy years ago. And which has been occupied continuously by our family ever since.'
She paused for that information to sink in, but there was not even a flicker of reaction on Justin St John's face. His expression might have been carved from granite. His gaze returned hers with the steadiness of a rock.
'It was presented to me that there were tenants on property that belonged to Marian Park. That they were freeloaders who were not paying any rent,' he stated flatly.
Blind fury overwhelmed her. She would have hit him if she had been a man. 'How dare you talk of my family like that?' Outrage almost choked her. 'Rent?' she spat out. 'Freeloaders?' she shrieked.
Her hands flew out in v
ehement dismissal of his argument, and the blazing green daggers of her eyes sliced viciously at Justin St John. 'My family has always paid its way! Always! Of course there wasn't any rent-Henry Lloyd would have scorned to take Grandpa's money. Henry Lloyd was a gentleman…'
'You are not making any sense,' he cut in impatiently.
'You want sense?' she shouted at him. 'I bet you had baked lamb for dinner last night. Or grilled lamb. Or lamb stew. Or something lamb!'
'Yes, but…' He sighed in resignation. 'What has that got to do with anything?'