Читать книгу The Nanny Affair - Robyn Donald - Страница 7

CHAPTER ONE

‘LUCKY! No!’

Emma Saunders deepened her normally gentle voice into an authoritative roar, but the barely half-grown dog ignored her, slithering beneath the bottom wire of the fence like an eel before racing towards the flock of sheep some two hundred metres away.

Their heads came up; a few of the nearer ones began to run, and Lucky recognised a new and exciting variation of chase. Barking, he set off after them.

Panic grabbed Emma beneath the breastbone. ‘Lucky, no,’ she yelled ferociously, not pleased when the elderly corgi at her side barked imperatively.

However, that summons did the trick. Reluctantly Lucky skidded to a halt, wistfully panting after the sheep, which were now in full flight across the paddock.

‘Here!’ Emma ordered, muttering, ‘Thank you, Babe,’ to the corgi as relief surged through her and her pulse rate slowed.

Realising he’d committed some unknown sin, Lucky approached carefully and with ingratiating whines. Her senses honed by adrenalin, Emma tried to ignore the car that drew up behind her.

It didn’t work. The skin on her back prickled in a primitive warning. Because she didn’t dare take her eyes off the puppy, every sound the driver made as he or she got out assumed vast significance. The solid thunk of the closing door almost made her jump.

A cold, dark, very male voice stated, ‘If I see that dog chasing my sheep again I’ll shoot him.’

Emma had to swallow to ease her dry throat. ‘It won’t happen again,’ she said without turning her head. Her voice sounded oddly tinny in her ears.

Although not yet a year old, Lucky’s mostly Rottweiler blood—and dominant male genes-told him that Emma might need protection. In a streak of black and tan he hurtled beneath the fence and positioned himself on four stiff legs between Emma and the unknown man, hackles raised, ears slightly flattened as he watched with wary alertness.

‘Heel!’ Emma said sharply as she turned to face both man and dog.

Lucky stood firm. Not now! Emma thought, repeating the command. This was a tussle of wills she couldn’t afford to lose. Her demand for obedience was not aided by the old corgi, who was eyeing the intruder with grave reserve.

‘Heel!’ Emma said steadily, refusing to accept the pup’s offer of a compromise, which was to sit just in front of her, black and brown face turned implacably towards the strange man.

Emma hadn’t yet looked directly at him, but from the corner of her eyes she could see that he took up too much room.

At least he understood dogs. Silently, with ominous stillness, he waited as she ordered again, ‘Heel.’

Lucky didn’t want to move, but he knew who was the leader in his particular pack. Unwillingly, keeping a cautious gaze on the stranger, he got to his feet.

Emma waited until he stood at heel before saying, ‘Good boy. Sit.’

He sat.

After patting him, Emma lifted her head. Because the setting sun shimmered in a dazzling aura around the stranger’s head she couldn’t discern his features, but the rest of him was formidable enough to make her check an instinctive step backwards. She didn’t need to see his face to be aware of an overwhelming presence, made more impressive by a curbed patience that sent a swift, chilling shiver through her.

Talk about dominant males! she thought, stubbornly refusing to be impressed. He and Lucky were a good pair.

Big—too big—the stranger had shoulders that would have done a rugby forward credit. They surmounted a magnificent chest that tapered to narrow, masculine hips above long legs. Neither trousers nor checked shirt hid the powerful muscles of a man who used every single one every day.

He loomed at least a foot above her five feet three inches, and every inch of that height was significant.

But it wasn’t his physical configuration alone that fired Emma’s senses. It was his stance—the lithe, disciplined authority, self-possessed and uncompromising, of a man who could deal with anything that came his way.

Emma, who until that moment had considered herself to be confident and assured, despised the uncertain note in her voice as she said, ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, but if I don’t make him obey orders he’ll grow up undisciplined.’

Coolly, inflexibly the stranger said, ‘And for a Rottweiler that would be disastrous. I meant what I said. If I see him in my paddocks again I’ll shoot him.’

Delivered calmly, it was a simple statement, not a threat. Emma knew perfectly well that any farmer in New Zealand had the right to shoot a dog that chased stock; nevertheless she had to block an unwise and impetuous response.

‘And don’t say he wouldn’t worry sheep,’ the man continued, not trying to soften the grimness in his voice. ‘From chasing to killing is only a step.’ He bent his head a little to examine the corgi, now sitting at Emma’s feet. His voice hardened as he said, ‘Usually it’s the work of at least two dogs, one a bitch.’

‘Babe is fourteen years old,’ Emma retorted crisply. ‘She can hardly stagger along the road.’

‘I’ve seen older dogs than that bale up lambs and rip their throats out. Keep them both off my land.’ Delivered in the same inexorable tone as everything else he’d said, there was no room for negotiation in the warning.

Emma nodded stiffly, grateful for once that she had long curling lashes, eminently suitable for hiding any resentful, mutinous expression in her grey eyes. She found herself staring at the exact place where a button fastened his checked shirt, revealing the tanned skin of his throat. Slow and steady, a pulse beat in the smooth hollow there.

A primal reaction—sharp and dangerous as a lightning spike to the ground—ripped through her. Lucky pressed against her from behind, and she put her hand down to his blunt head, stroking behind the ears while she tried to regain her composure.

Nothing, she thought dazedly, will ever be the same again. In some strange, terrifying way she’d been fundamentally changed—almost as though her basic cellular structure had been twisted and she’d been transformed into a different woman.

Oh, for heaven’s sake!

Had she said the words or just thought them? Whatever, she was behaving like a schoolgirl imprisoned in the agony and exhilaration of her first crush.

It was his size, common sense soothed. He was big enough to be intimidating—bigger than enough, actually.

Then he moved slightly, so that the sun wasn’t behind his head.

Told often enough that she was pretty, Emma had come to despise the word and its implications of softness and sweetness with all her heart, so she was normally unimpressed by outward appearances. Because she had big grey eyes and a soft red mouth, white skin with a delicate pink tinge, and because her black hair and lashes curled and shone, many people expected her to flirt and laugh and be light-hearted and docile and slightly stupid.

So she distrusted those who read character from the random mishmash of genetic inheritance that formed most faces. But this man’s personality as revealed in his countenance hit her with the full-blown impact of an earthquake.

He certainly wasn’t handsome. Beneath hair as black as sorrow the strong framework of his face added authority to his powerful presence, a presence emphasised by blazing, remote, tawny eyes, keen and fierce and impersonal as those of a raptor.

Striking, her stunned mind supplied, trying to be helpful by using words to distance her from that first, mind-blowing shock. Oh, yes, he was striking—and impressive, and disturbing, forceful and dynamic. And a whole lot of other adjectives she couldn’t think of just then because her brain had collapsed into curds.

In his thirties—old enough to set every one of her twenty-three years at naught—the stranger had a face defined by a blade of a nose and a jaw that took no prisoners.

And yet...

And yet, although his mouth was held straight by an uncompromising will, it was beautifully sculpted, and there was a probably deceptive fullness about the bottom lip. The man himself might make her think of a granite peak in a mountain range, bleak and stony and compelling, but in spite of the discipline he exerted on that chiselled mouth it hinted at caged emotions.

Interesting.

But not to her. Emma knew her limitations, and this man was so far beyond them she and he might as well inhabit different worlds.

He said, ‘Those are Mrs Firth’s dogs.’

‘Yes.’ It would serve him right, she thought, if she refused to answer his implied question, but one glance at the arrogant features and the cold fire of those eyes convinced her that discretion was the way to go. She added, ‘I’m looking after them while she’s in Canada.’

Straight dark brows drew together above the blade of his nose. ‘At her daughter’s?’ After Emma’s reluctant nod he pursued, ‘When did she go?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘When will she be back?’

With frigid politeness Emma said, ‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’

‘You must have some idea of how long you intend to stay here.’

Definitely not a subtle man. Emma’s tone chilled further as she replied, Three weeks.’

‘And you’re wondering what business it is of mine.’

He might be nosy and unsubtle, but he wasn’t stupid. She contented herself with a slight, dismissive smile.

‘It’s my business,’ he said, in a voice that had dropped to a dangerous, silky quietness, ‘because you can’t control that Rottweiler. I’m Kane Talbot and those are my sheep he was chasing.’

Resisting the urge to wipe suddenly clammy hands down the side seams of her jeans, Emma said, ‘I’m Emma Saunders, and from now on whenever we’re near your sheep I’ll keep Lucky on a leash.’

‘Will you be able to manage him?’ The fierce predator’s gaze assessed her from the top of her curly head to her gumboots. ‘You don’t look strong enough.’

Every hair on her skin pulled tight. Furious at the involuntary reaction, Emma said woodenly, ‘I’m stronger than I look, and Lucky walks well on a leash.’ He didn’t like it, but his sweet temper kept him obedient.

‘I hope so.’ After a taut, humming moment he ordered, ‘And shut both of them up at night.’

‘They are always locked up at night.’

Kane Talbot looked down his arrogant nose. ‘Good.’

Pushing her luck, she said sweetly, ‘Thank you. Come on, Lucky, Babe, we’ll head for home.’

Straight black brows rose as the man’s glance switched to the dogs at her feet. No doubt, she thought sarcastically, he called his sheepdogs names like Dig and Flo and Tip, good, practical names that could be heard over the noise of a flock of sheep and were easy to combine with swear words.

‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he said. He was driving a Land Rover, both dusty and mud-splashed, entirely suitable for dogs.

Formally, although not without a trace of relish in her tone, Emma replied, ‘That’s very kind of you, but the idea of the exercise is—well, exercise. We’ll walk back.’ She turned away, saying, ‘Home, Babe. Home, Lucky.’

As she and the reluctant dogs marched back up the road she could feel the cold burn of his gaze on the back of her neck. Her shoulders stiffened until the sound of the engine told her that he was safely back in his Land Rover.

She knew where he lived. Right opposite Mrs Firth’s house.

Oh, not in anything so ordinary as Mrs Firth’s charming bungalow set in its acre of garden and orchard, with a lazy little stream running over an ancient lava flow at the bottom of the garden. No, Kane Talbot, who owned large chunks of New Zealand’s northernmost peninsula, lived in a splendid house a mile or so from the road.

Kane Talbot, Mrs Firth had informed her, was old money and old influence; as well as holding a position of power on one of the big cooperative enterprises that ran the producer boards in New Zealand, he had varied business interests, moving easily between his life as one of New Zealand’s most efficient and productive station owners and his wider urban and international interests.

Furthermore, he was suspected of being almost engaged to an Australian woman from an impeccable and influential family.

While they’d waited at Auckland airport for the plane to Vancouver Mrs Firth, a cryptic crossword addict who enjoyed searching out the meaning of words, had told Emma that the most probable derivation of his surname was the old French word talebot, meaning bandit.

‘I’m not in the least surprised,’ Emma observed beneath her breath now, waving briefly as the Land Rover went by with a sharp toot.

Once well past, Kane Talbot accelerated up the metal road before turning onto a drive lined with huge magnolia trees, now coming into bloom. Just as no one could deny the pink and white fairytale glory of that avenue, it was impossible to deny the impact of its owner.

Whose first name, according to Mrs Firth, could be derived from the Welsh language. If so, it meant beautiful.

Emma grinned with involuntary enjoyment. Not likely!

On the other hand, if it came from the Manx language that was much more suitable because then it would mean warrior. And she could certainly see Kane Talbot as a warrior bandit. He exuded a no-holds-barred toughness, the hard, dynamic determination of a man who didn’t know when to give up.

Recreating that autocratic face in her mind, she recalled the harsh moulding of chin and jaw and nose, the decisive authority that revealed itself in every line and angle and plane, and in the intelligent, icy fire of his eyes. He’d make a bad enemy.

Yet he had, she acknowledged reluctantly as she called Lucky to heel again, been surprisingly calm about the situation. Most farmers confronted by a dog clearly chasing sheep would have gone ballistic.

Odd, then, that his controlled detachment had set warning bells clashing.

Her mouth twisted. Her response was probably an atavistic relic from the days when a woman confronted by so much male presence packaged in well-honed muscles had had good reason to be wary.

‘Lucky, heel!’ she commanded forcefully, frowning at another male seething with presence and packaged in smoothly flowing muscles, with a strength of will almost as formidable as Kane Talbot’s.

Oh, well, she knew how to handle dogs, and she wouldn’t be seeing much of Kane Talbot.

And if Mrs Firth, who had let her charming pup get away with murder, was to be able to manage him when she got back from staying with her pregnant daughter, then Emma would have to teach Lucky that dogs who wanted to survive in the country didn’t go chasing sheep.

She looked at his alert black and tan head and began to laugh quietly. Until that moment she hadn’t realised that as well as attitude he and Kane Talbot were an almost identical match in colouring, with the same sable hair; the tawny markings of the Rottweiler were only slightly darker than the man’s unusual eyes.

At least their black hair was sleek, not fluffy with curls like hers. Combine those curls with big grey eyes, fine, fragile skin, and a cupid’s bow of a mouth, and what you got was a vapid, baby face. The fact that Emma knew why she was always being treated as though she were much younger than twenty-three didn’t make it any easier to bear.

Oh, she was glad she wasn’t ugly, but she’d like to have a face with some character to it.

Once home, she rubbed both dogs down and fed them, then went into the house and surveyed the contents of the refrigerator. Tomorrow she’d have to drive into Parahai and buy some more food.

She had just steered Mrs Firth’s elderly silver Volvo through the gate when a large dark green car debouched onto the road from beneath the avenue of magnolias.

Overnight Emma had decided that her first impressions of Kane Talbot must have been coloured by her guilt about Lucky’s behaviour. No man could possibly be so-well, so much!

It was a conclusion she revised now as he stopped, got out of the vehicle and strode across while she closed the gates behind Mrs Firth’s car.

How could one man reduce the beauty around him to a mere accompaniment, Emma asked the universe crossly, his force of character effortlessly overpowering the natural loveliness of the valley?

Head erect, she waited at the car door while her pulses skipped a beat. Remember that Australian almost-fiancée, she reminded herself sternly.

‘Good morning.’ Kane’s tawny eyes examined her with a leisurely interest that lifted her hackles. ‘The warrant of fitness on the Volvo is overdue.’

Brows drawn together, Emma swung around to peer at the windscreen. Sure enough, in the excitement of leaving Mrs Firth must have forgotten to have it renewed. ‘I’ll make an appointment to have it seen to,’ she said, adding with rigid politeness, ‘Thank you for pointing it out.’

He said negligently, ‘I’ve got a cellphone in the car. Why not ask the garage if they’ll do it today?’

‘Well-thank you.’

She preferred, she thought as she accompanied him across the road, the man who had been so aloof yesterday. She didn’t want neighbourly actions and consideration from Kane Talbot He made her feel small and incompetent and—pretty.

After keying in a number he handed the phone to her, then moved a few steps away. He had good manners; she watched as he bent to examine some weed growing on the verge.

She blinked as a man’s voice answered, and regrouped her scattered thoughts to explain to the mechanic what she wanted.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to do it today, but I haven’t seen the car before so it might take a bit longer than usual.’

Emma frowned, then remembered that as Mrs Firth had only moved north a month ago the last warrant would have been issued in Taupo, a good six hours’ drive southwards. Where, she thought feverishly, dragging her gaze away from the muscled contours of Kane’s backside and thighs, she wished she was at this very moment. Except that Taupo was no longer her home.

She said, ‘That’s all right—I’ve got shopping to do.’

‘OK, drop it off, then.’

Kane stood up. She handed the phone back and smiled with what she hoped was cool and impersonal friendliness. ‘Thank you,’ she said again, ignoring Lucky’s deep barking from inside the house.

‘You’ve got ragwort growing on the verge,’ he said crisply.

Emma bristled; she’d seen the bright yellow flowers in incompetent farmers’ paddocks and was well aware that it was a vile pest, poisonous to sheep as well as smothering good grass. ‘Where?’

He pointed out a small rosette of leaves. ‘I’ll send someone down to spray it.’

‘I’ll dig it out.’

‘It would be a waste of time. In fact it would make matters worse because you can never get all the roots, and each one left in the ground sends up another shoot. Unfortunately spraying is the only way to kill it. Don’t worry—it’s as much to my advantage to see that it’s dealt with as it is to Mrs Firth’s. I don’t want to have to conduct a mop-up operation on my own property.’

Emma’s gaze flew to the paddocks on the other side of the road. Smooth and vigorously green, they had the opulent air of good husbandry.

‘I don’t suppose you do,’ she said. ‘Thank you. Mrs Firth will be very grateful when she comes back.’

‘I gather you’re house-sitting for her,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ She smiled politely. ‘Dog-sitting, really. Babe pines in kennels, and Mrs Firth thought this would be less stressful for her.’

‘Obviously you know her well.’

He certainly chose the straightest and most direct route to get information. Whipping up resentment, because it smothered more complex emotions she didn’t want to examine, Emma explained aloofly, ‘Until Mrs Firth came up here she lived next door to me.’

‘So you’re from Taupo.’

‘Yes.’ She was not going to tell him that Taupo was no longer her home; when she left Parahai she’d be going to a new job and a new life in Hamilton.

‘And how do you enjoy being nanny to a couple of dogs?’ he asked, smiling.

Amusement turned his eyes to pure, glinting gold, Emma registered dazedly. And that smile! Although it didn’t soften the hard framework of his face, it transformed his powerful male charisma into a potent sexuality.

‘Very much,’ she said, using the words to distract her from the intensity of her response. ‘Babe’s a darling, and Lucky—well, Rottweilers are very determined animals, so they need guidance and firm training, otherwise they believe they’re the leaders of the pack. Then they can become dangerous because they see their job as protecting the others in the pack and enforcing discipline. Lucky has to understand that in his pack he’s down at the bottom. He takes orders; he doesn’t give them.’

‘Can you make him do that?’

At the note of scepticism in his question, Emma lifted her round chin. ‘Yes,’ she said with complete confidence. ‘As any nanny will tell you, it’s just a matter of training and praise, training and praise until eventually he gets the idea.’

‘And what training do you have for this?’ he asked, looking down at her with unreadable eyes.

‘I’m a registered vet nurse,’ she told him coolly, ‘and

I’ve done a lot of work with a man who breeds dogs for obedience trials. I’ve known Lucky since he was six weeks old, and I can handle him because he really wants to please me.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ he said, his voice somehow goading.

Acutely and suspiciously aware of the breeze lifting her curls, the sun’s golden caress on her skin, the way the light emphasised the rugged strength of Kane Talbot’s features, Emma said, ‘Dogs usually do want to please,’ trying to cut off the conversation without making it seem obvious.

Foolishly, she looked him straight in the eyes.

She’d heard the clichés—‘my heart stood still,’ friends had told her, or, ‘I sizzled right down to my toes.’

She’d never thought to experience that sort of reaction to any man. Yet when she met Kane Talbot’s gaze she fell headfirst into topaz fire; alien sensations scorched down her backbone and she stiffened at the clutch of an unbidden hunger in the pit of her stomach.

Mercifully, a renewed fusillade of barks from the house dragged her back from that dangerous brink.

Twisting away, she blinked several times at the silver hood of Mrs Firth’s car to clear her sight. ‘I’d better get going,’ she said—how strange that her voice was perfectly steady—‘before Lucky decides to break a window to rescue me.’

It was a stupid thing to say, and to his credit Kane didn’t pick her up on it. Instead he said, ‘One day you must tell me how he managed to acquire a name like that.’

She slid into the car, realising only when she’d finished clicking on the seatbelt that he held the door for her. ‘I’ll do that,’ she said, nodding at a point just over his left shoulder.

‘If you wait, I’ll go ahead and show you the way to the garage.’

A little too sharply she countered, ‘That’s very kind of you, but if you tell me where it is you won’t need to bother.’ She managed to produce a smile. ‘It must be difficult to get lost in Parahai.’

‘Impossible. Turn left at the crossroads. The workshop is on the right about three hundred metres past it.’

‘Thank you.’

Her breath sighed out as he closed the door and stood back to let her drive on.

Accelerating down the road, she thought with real gratitude that she wasn’t likely to see much of him. According to Mrs Firth he had interests in Australia and North America, so he was often out of the country.

Which was just as well, because he didn’t appear to be attacked by the same treacherous weakness that still quickened her pulses. His hard, angular face hadn’t changed, and there’d been no answering glitter in the glacial depths of those eyes. Naturally, because he was in love with another woman. Since all of her friends who had fallen in lust had assured her that it was mutual, a meeting of desires across a crowded room, this had to be a crush rather than lust. She’d get over it.

And it had better happen soon, she thought, noticing that his car was already in her rearview mirror. Apart from anything else, the physical manifestations were embarrassing and extravagant

And scary. She’d never realised she could feel like this—as though the world and all her interests had suddenly condensed to an unbearable focus on one man. Exciting it certainly was, but far from comfortable.

Not to mention the fact that she was much too busy to waste time developing a hopeless crush on someone at least ten years older than she was, and light-years ahead of her in sophistication. Who belonged to another woman.

Setting her jaw, she drove sedately for ten minutes through farms and orchards, finally coming down a steep hill to the village. Parahai was a small town on the edge of a narrow, winding inlet Once a busy coastal shipping port and now a yachting haven, it served a diverse area of farms and stations and orchards. Because there were beaches close by it was a holiday town, so during summer the tree-lined streets were probably frantic.

In spring it was laid back enough to be friendly, and that holiday rush ensured that the shops were of a higher standard than she’d expected in such a small place. Emma liked the ambience, admired the pohutukawa trees shading the main street, and enjoyed the quick smiles of the locals.

She followed Kane’s directions to the workshop and got out, tensing as his car drew up beside her. Leaning into the Volvo, she pulled out her bag and asked sweetly as she straightened, ‘Have you discovered that your warrant is overdue too?’

He got out—all long legs and shoulders, she thought crossly—and surveyed her with tawny eyes iced by mockery. ‘No.’

Quelling the urge to be very rude, Emma headed towards the workshop. He caught her up within two strides.

The owner looked up as they walked in. ‘Hi, Kane,’ he said amiably, ‘I didn’t know you were coming in today.’ But that’s all right, his tone revealed.

Kane introduced him to Emma, who had to suffer the open interest in the man’s eyes as he said, ‘Yep, fine, no problem. She should be done in a couple of hours, no sweat.’

Clearly, having Kane with her made her someone to be reckoned with, Emma decided irritably. In spite of his easygoing attitude, there was no mistaking the mechanic’s respect. She handed over the keys and he got into the Volvo and drove it into the workshop.

Kane said, ‘I’ll drop you off wherever you want to go.’

It wasn’t actually a suggestion. With a small, acid pleasure Emma said, ‘If you don’t mind I’ll walk into town. I’d like to look at the gardens on the way and it’s not far.’

No doubt her smile was as insincere as her excuse, because the dark brows drew together for a second and heavy eyelids masked the topaz glitter of his gaze before he said evenly, ‘Of course. But you should wear a hat. Spring comes early up here and the sun can burn any time of the year.’

His eyes lingered a moment on the fine, pale skin of her face, bringing heat flaring to the surface.

‘I’ll remember that,’ she said primly, and set off down the road. Arrogant oaf!

Well, no, ‘oaf’ was the wrong word. He wore clothes that had been made for him by a very good tailor, and there was nothing provincial about him at all; he possessed a worldliness and self-assurance that was all the more potent for being entirely unconscious.

And beneath it there was strength and something predatory, something untamed and battle-hardened, she thought, walking briskly up the road.

Now where had that idea come from?

From the man himself. He had a warrior’s discipline, a power based on cold, unemotional courage and expertise.

And that, Emma scoffed, ignoring a particularly colourful garden, was pure imagination! He possessed a natural male magnetism that attracted a woman’s interest, and she could tell by his muscles that he worked hard, but, although she was certain he could handle himself in any situation, he wasn’t a superhero. They didn’t exist. She’d simply been overwhelmed by an excess of pure male charisma.

And everyone knows, she thought with a faint, malicious smile, that charisma has nothing to do with character—it’s a fairy godmother’s doting gift, handed to the unworthy as well as the good.

The big green car passed her with almost no sound beyond a little toot that irritated her even more; setting her chin, she strode down the footpath, examining magnolias and camellias and daffodils with a determined interest.

Kane had been right when he’d said spring came early in the north; the daffodils were in full glory, daphne bushes perfumed the air with their sharp, exquisite scent, the poplar-like cherry trees she’d noticed were ablaze with tiny rosy-cerise bells, and freesias and annuals mingled in bright profusion in every flowerbed.

Clearly no gardener in Parahai worried about late frosts.

The walk calmed her, so that by the time Emma got to the village she was ready to enjoy its atmosphere. First she called into the bank, to make sure that everything was under control with her account, and then she spent a very pleasant hour acquainting herself with the stock in both the bookshop and a small boutique that specialised in chic, casual clothes.

Nice, but too expensive, she thought, eyeing a smart pair of capri pants with a matching shirt and waistcoat in the crisp, clear grey that suited her. The move from her flat in Taupo to a unit in Hamilton, a bustling city some distance away, had drained more from her bank balance than she’d budgeted for. As she didn’t start her new job for three weeks, she’d have to be careful with her savings.

She found the local library and organised a temporary membership before choosing a detective novel set in ancient Rome and a big, fat historical novel written by a woman who was both a scholar and a brilliant author. Though Mrs Firth had many books, they were mostly about gardening and cooking; Emma enjoyed them, but wanted a little variety.

After that she sat out a shower in a coffee bar that overlooked a little courtyard, where a fountain spilled a shimmer of water over three graduated cockle shells and more flowers bloomed in pots, mostly big, blowzy pansies in shades of blue and purple and yellow. Smiling over her coffee cup at the antics of the sparrows outside, Emma let her irritation fade.

No doubt Kane Talbot didn’t intend to be so autocratic. He’d probably been born that way, she thought, and grinned at the image of a small baby with that imperious nose and chin bending an entire household to his will.

Finally she went to the supermarket, buying the staples she needed before allowing herself the pleasure of choosing a few mandarins, cushiony and glowing, a dark purplish-green avocado and some smooth, ruby, egg-shaped tamarillos, her favourite fruit, so frost-tender they only survived where winters were mild and short.

Leaving the bags to be called for, she set off for the garage again, enjoying the salt-tanged, sunlit air and the huge white clouds that sailed rapidly across the bright sky.

She was a few minutes early, but the mechanic had finished. Wiping his hands on a piece of cloth, he said, ‘I can’t give you a warrant, Ms Saunders, because she needs a new clutch plate. You must have noticed she was shuddering a bit when you started.’

‘Oh,’ Emma said blankly. ‘Well, yes, but I thought it was just because the car was old.’

‘She’s a dowager, all right, but she’s in great heart and a new clutch plate will make all the difference,’ he said encouragingly.

Emma asked the probable cost, and frowned at his reply. ‘That’s a lot of money,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to—’

And stopped, because he glanced past her as someone joined them.

‘Trouble?’ Kane Talbot asked.

The garage owner explained again, and Kane said calmly, That’s all right. We’ll leave the car here and Emma can contact Mrs Firth when she gets home.’ He switched that hard-edged glance to her. ‘If Mrs Firth agrees to the repairs, ring Joe before five this afternoon and he’ll get the part couriered up from Auckland tonight. That way you’ll have the car back almost as soon as if you told him to go ahead now.’

‘Yep, that’s right,’ the mechanic said cheerfully.

Aware that her reluctance to do this was based entirely on the fact that it was Kane who’d suggested it, Emma nodded. ‘OK,’ she said to the mechanic. ‘I’ll contact you as soon as I’ve rung Mrs Firth.’

‘Fine.’ The mechanic nodded at Kane before going back into the workshop.

Emma stood quite still, battling a chill, empty feeling as though somehow the ground had been neatly cut from under her feet.

‘Have you left parcels somewhere?’ Kane asked.

‘At the supermarket.’

‘Right, we’ll go and get them.’

Because there was nothing else to do she went with him, accepting the unforced politeness that put her into the passenger’s seat. He obviously didn’t care whether she wanted him to extend such courtesies to her—he performed them automatically. After a rapid glance Emma decided that he’d probably never even heard of political correctness or the feminist movement.

She felt, she told herself crisply, sorry for that woman in Australia.

The seats were leather and very comfortable. Emma folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them. The seatbelt fitting snugly across her chest seemed to be blocking her breath. Deliberately she inhaled, but barely had time to fill her lungs before Kane opened the door and got in behind the wheel.