Читать книгу A Forbidden Desire - Robyn Donald - Страница 7
ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE
‘MY COUSIN Paul,’ Gerard said in his pedantic way, ‘is the only man I’ve ever known to decide that if he couldn’t have the woman he loved he’d have no other.’
To hide her astonishment Jacinta Lyttelton gazed around Auckland’s busy airport lounge. ‘Really?’
Gerard sighed. ‘Yes. Aura was exquisite, and utterly charming. They were the perfect match but she ran away with his best friend only days before the wedding.’
‘Then they couldn’t have been a perfect match,’ Jacinta pointed out, smiling a little to show she was joking. During the nine months she’d known Gerard she’d learned that he needed such clues. He was a dear, kind man, but he didn’t have much of a sense of humour.
‘I don’t know what she saw in Flint Jansen,’ Gerard pursued, surprising her because he didn’t normally gossip. Perhaps he thought some background information might smooth her way with his cousin. ‘He was—I suppose he still is—a big, tough, dangerous man, bulldozing his way through life, hard-bitten enough to deal with anything that came his way. He was some sort of troubleshooter for one of the big corporations. Yet he was Paul’s best friend right from school, and Paul is a very urbane man, worldly and cosmopolitan—a lawyer.’
Jacinta nodded politely. Perhaps Aura Whoever-she’d-been liked rough trade. ‘Friendship can be just as mysterious as love. Your cousin and Flint must have had something in common for it to last so long.’
The same taste in women, to start with!
Her eyes followed a small Japanese child, fragile and solemn but clearly at home in such surroundings, her hand lost in that of her mother.
My biological clock, Jacinta thought wryly, must be ticking away. Twenty-nine wasn’t over the hill, but occasionally she was oppressed by a feeling of being shunted quietly out of the mainstream, banished to float peacefully and dully in a backwater.
‘I could never understand it,’ Gerard said, for the fourth time turning the label on his cabin bag to check that he’d addressed it. ‘She and Paul looked wonderful together and he worshipped her, whereas Flint—oh, well, it doesn’t matter, but the whole sordid episode was incredibly hard on Paul.’
Being jilted would be incredibly hard on anyone. Jacinta nodded sympathetically
Gerard frowned. ‘He had to pick up the pieces of his life with everyone knowing and pitying him—and Paul is a proud man. He sold the house he and Aura were going to live in and bought Waitapu as a refuge—I suppose he thought he’d get some peace half an hour’s drive north of Auckland—but then Flint and Aura settled only about twenty minutes away! In a vineyard!’
Jacinta composed her face into a sympathetic expression. Gerard’s loyalty did him credit, and this wasn’t the time to tell him that things had changed. Nowadays guilty couples didn’t retreat to some far-flung part of the world and live in abject, if happy, retirement
‘When did this all happen?’ she asked.
‘Almost six years ago,’ Gerard said in a mournful tone, fiddling with his boarding pass and passport.
Almost six years! Jacinta said mischievously, ‘What about that exquisitely beautiful woman you pointed out to me in Ponsonby a couple of months ago? You didn’t exactly say so, but you implied that she and Paul are very good friends.’
Gerard blinked and stood up. ‘He’s a normal man,’ he said austerely, ‘but I doubt very much whether Paul intends to marry her. She’s an actress.’
As well as being kind, loyal and pedantic, it appeared that Gerard was a snob.
A voice on the communications system announced that passengers for Air New Zealand’s flight from Auckland to Los Angeles should make their way through the departure gate.
Gerard bent down and picked up his bag. ‘So don’t go falling in love with him,’ he directed half seriously. ‘Women do, and although he doesn’t like hurting people he’s broken hearts these last five years. Aura’s defection killed some essential compassion in him, I think.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Jacinta said dryly. ‘I’m not planning to fall in love.’
‘Not until you’ve finished your Masters,’ he said, and to her astonishment bestowed a swift peck on her cheek. ‘I’d better go.’
She hoped she’d concealed her startled response. ‘Have a great trip, and I hope your research goes well.’
‘It will, but thank you. Enjoy the summer,’ he said, ‘and work out exactly what you want to do for your thesis. Have you got the books?’
‘Yes, and your list of suggestions to mull over.’
He nodded and turned away, tall, slightly stooped, his fair hair shining in the lights. Watching as he made his way through the people, Jacinta thought he always seemed out of place except when he was lecturing. Anyone looking at him would immediately pick him as an academic. If his projected book was a success he might turn out to be one of the youngest history professors in the country.
At the gate he turned and waved. Smiling, she waved back, waiting until he’d disappeared before turning to go down the escalator to the car park.
An hour and a half later she opened the car door just a hundred metres from a glorious beach, and unfurled her long, thin body and legs.
Sun-warmed, salt-tanged, the air slid into her lungs—smooth as wine and just as heady. The big grey roof of a house loomed above the dark barrier of a high, clipped hedge—Cape honeysuckle, she noted, eyeing the orange flowers—and the lazy mew of a gull smoothed across the mellow sky.
New Zealand in summer; for the first time in years, anticipation coiled indolently through her. Not that it was officially summer—November was the last month of spring—but it had been a weary, wet, grinding winter and she was eager for the sun.
A half-smile lifted the corners of her controlled mouth as she unlatched the gate and walked up the white shell path, amused at how pale her narrow feet looked. Ah, well, a few walks along that sweep of sand she’d seen from the hill would soon give them some colour. Although she turned sallow in winter her skin loved summer, gilding slowly under layers of sunscreen.
The house was huge, a white Victorian villa superbly settled in a bower of lawns and flowery borders, sheltered from the small breeze off the sea. The scents of the garden and newly mown lawns were concentrated into an erotic, drugging perfume.
She hoped that the man who owned all this appreciated it.
‘My cousin Paul,’ Gerard had told her when he’d suggested she spend the summer at Waitapu, ‘was born into old money, and because he’s both hard-headed and very intelligent he’s added considerably to the paternal legacy.’
Obviously. The house and the gardens bore the unmistakable sheen of affluence.
A bead of sweat gathered on each of Jacinta’s temples. Before leaving town she’d clipped back the hair that reached halfway down her back, but during the drive the curly, slippery tresses had oozed free. Tucking a bright ginger strand behind one ear, she walked up three steps onto a wide, grey-painted wooden verandah and knocked at the door before turning to admire the gardens more closely.
She must look madly out of place here, Jacinta thought wryly, dressed in clothes without a vestige of style. And although she was tall enough to be a model she hadn’t been granted a model’s grace.
Her green-gold gaze roamed across the felicitous mixture of trees and shrubs, lingering on the slim grey trunks of a giant cabbage tree, each smooth branch topped by a sunburst of thin leaves. At its feet nasturtiums and Californian poppies struck sparks off each other.
The soft wind of the door opening dragged her smiling attention away from a gaudy orange and black monarch butterfly. With the smile still lingering, she turned. ‘Hello, I’m Jacinta Lyttelton...’
The words dried on her tongue. She knew that handsome face—the strong jaw and arrogant cheekbones—as well as her own. The intervening months hadn’t dimmed the brilliance of those eyes, a blue so intense they blazed with the colour and fire of sapphires. Yet in spite of that clarity they were oddly difficult to read.
Suddenly aware that the trousers she wore were five years old and had been cheap to start with, and that her tee-shirt had faded to a washed-out blue that did nothing for her, Jacinta realised she was standing with her jaw dangling. Clamping it shut, she swallowed, and tried to repulse a sudden, insistent warning of fate advancing inexorably, mercilessly on its way, crushing everything in its path.
‘Welcome to Waitapu, Jacinta.’ His deep, flexible voice wove magic, conjured darkly enchanted dreams that had dazzled her nights for months.
Fortunately her numbed brain jolted into action long enough to provide her with the location of their previous meeting.
Fiji.
The lazy, glorious week she and her mother had spent on a tiny, palm-shadowed resort island. One night he’d asked her to dance, and she’d been horrified by her fierce, runaway response to the nearness of his lean, big body. When the music had stopped he’d thanked her gravely and taken her to the room she had shared with her mother before, no doubt, rejoining the seriously glamorous woman he was on holiday with.
And for too many weeks afterwards Jacinta had let herself drift off to sleep on the memory of how it had felt to be held in those strong arms, and the faint, evocative fragrance that had owed nothing to aftershave—the essence of masculinity...
An embarrassing flash of colour stained her high cheekbones.
Damn, she thought helplessly. How unfair that this man was Paul McAlpine, her landlord for the next three months.
Hoping desperately that her weak smile showed nothing of her chagrin, she said, ‘I didn’t know you were Gerard’s cousin.’ She tried to sound mildly amused, but each word emerged tinged with her discomfiture.
‘Whereas I,’ he said, ‘had a pretty good idea that the Jacinta I met in Fiji and Gerard’s Jacinta had to be the same person. He mentioned your height and was rather poetic about your hair. It didn’t seem likely there’d be two of you about.’
He was the most handsome man she’d ever seen in her life, the impact of his strong, regular features emphasised by his startling colouring. Not many men of his age had hair the warm ash blond of childhood, so close to gold, and blue eyes without a trace of green or grey, and those who did were usually afflicted with pale brows and lashes that made them look pallid and juiceless. Paul McAlpine’s were a brown so dark they were almost black.
On that hot, enchanted Fijian atoll he’d smiled—a smile both utterly compelling and completely trustworthy. It had been almost too good to be true, that smile.
No sign of it now. The chiselled mouth was straight and the narrowed eyes aloof.
Jacinta’s face set. Gerard’s Jacinta? He’d merely repeated her sentence construction; of course he wasn’t implying that she and Gerard had some sort of relationship. Nevertheless she felt she should make it very clear that Gerard was simply a good friend.
Before she could do that, Gerard’s cousin said smoothly, ‘Unfortunately there’s been a hitch in plans. You can’t stay in the bach because penguins have moved in.’
Wondering whether she’d heard correctly, she stared at him. ‘Sorry,’ she said inanely, wishing her brain hadn’t fogged up. ‘Penguins?’
‘Little blue penguins are quite common around the coast. Normally they nest in caves, but sometimes they find a convenient building and nest under the floors.’
Surely he couldn’t be serious? One glance at those eyes—so cool they were almost cold, limpid and unshadowed—told her he was.
‘I see,’ she said numbly. Until that moment she hadn’t realised how much she wanted to get away from Auckland. A kind of desperation sharpened her voice. ‘Can’t they be removed?’
‘They have young.’
Something about his glance bothered her, and she stopped chewing her bottom lip.
He added, ‘And they’re protected.’
‘Oh, then I suppose... No, they can’t be disturbed.’
‘They make gruesome noises when they return to their den at night—like a demented donkey being slaughtered. They also smell of decaying fish.’ He met her suspicious glance with unwavering self-possession. ‘Would you like to go and smell them?’ he asked.
Unable to think of a sensible reply, Jacinta shook her head.
‘You’d better come inside,’ Paul McAlpine said.
Within seconds Jacinta found herself walking down a wide hall and into a beautifully decorated sitting room. Windows opening out onto an expansive roofed terrace looked over a lush lawn bordered with flowers and shrubs, with glimpses of the sea through sentinel pohutukawa trees.
Jacinta thought fiercely, I am not going back to town.
It would be like returning to prison.
And where had that thought come from?
‘Sit down and I’ll get you some tea,’ Paul McAlpine said with remote courtesy, and went through another door.
Reluctantly Jacinta lowered herself into a very comfortable armchair and contemplated her legs, almost as ungraceful as her too-thin arms. Why on earth had she chosen to wear trousers of such a depressing shade of brown?
Because they were the best she had and she couldn’t afford new ones. What did it matter? She didn’t care what he or anybody else thought, she told herself sturdily, and knew that she lied.
‘Tea’ll be ready soon,’ Paul McAlpine said, startling her with his swift reappearance.
Averting her eyes from his broad shoulders, and the way his well-cut trousers hugged muscular thighs, Jacinta swallowed. She even thought she could smell the elusive male fragrance that still infiltrated the occasional dream.
With a shock strong enough to be physical, she braved the icy brilliance of his eyes.
‘Don’t look so tragic, Jacinta. I have a suggestion to make.’ There was a faint, barely discernible undertone to the words, a hint of cynical amusement that startled her.
Especially as she hadn’t realised she was looking tragic. Taken aback, certainly, but ‘tragic’ was altogether overstating the case. Her hackles rose as he sat in the chair opposite her, so completely, uncompromisingly self-sufficient that her spine stiffened and she angled her chin in mute resistance.
Jacinta had no illusions about her looks; she knew that her height and thinness and the clearly defined, high-bridged nose that dominated her face were not redeemed by thick, violently ginger hair, or green eyes hazed with gold and set beneath straight, dark copper brows. Accustomed to feeling out of place amongst the chic women she saw everywhere, she was nevertheless outraged that Paul McAlpine should make her feel the same.
‘Yes?’ she said, aware that she sounded curt but unable to alter the tone to her usual confidence.
‘I have several spare bedrooms,’ Paul McAlpine told her. ‘You’re more than welcome to use one. My housekeeper lives in a flat at the back, so you won’t be alone in the house with me.’
No sarcasm sharpened that beautiful voice, nothing even obliquely hostile glimmered in those blue eyes, but the skin pulled tight on the nape of Jacinta’s neck as a shiver of cold foreboding slithered the length of her spine.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said warily, ‘but I don’t think—’
He smiled. It was a smile that had probably stunned more women than she’d had showers. Silenced by its impact, she had to swallow when her words dried on her tongue.
Calmly, almost blandly, he said, ‘If you feel awkward about living here with me I’ll stay in a flat I own in Auckland.’
‘I can’t drive you out of your house,’ she said, feeling both irritated and awkward.
His dark brows inched inwards. ‘I believe that you had to move out of your flat, and as Gerard’s sold his apartment you can’t go there. I spend quite a lot of time either travelling or in my flat in Auckland; a few extra nights there won’t be much of a hardship.’
What would it be like to own several houses?
After one swift, circumspect glance Jacinta realised she didn’t have a chance of changing his mind. Thoughts churned around her mind, to be promptly discarded. She didn’t have enough money to stay in a motel or rent another flat; the main advantage of Paul McAlpine’s bach had been that it was free of charge.
He watched her with eyes half hidden by his lashes, waiting with a sort of vigilant patience—the remorseless tenacity of a hunter—that intimidated her in a way she didn’t understand.
For heaven’s sake! She was letting the aftermath of one dance ten months ago scramble her brain entirely.
With enormous reluctance she finally said, ‘Then—thank you. I’ll try not to get in your way.’
‘Gerard said you’re starting on your thesis.’
‘Did he?’ she said non-committally. ‘What about Christmas?’ she asked. ‘Will the penguins be out from under the bach by then?’
‘It’s unlikely.’ An enquiring eyebrow lifted. ‘Were you planning to stay in the bach over Christmas?’
This would be her first Christmas alone. Through the lump in her throat she said raggedly, ‘Yes. My mother died only a week after we came back from Fiji.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘That was hard for you.’
Looking away, she nodded, swallowed and went on, ‘I never had the chance to thank you for your kindness to her in Fiji. You left the day before us, and I—’
‘I wasn’t kind,’ he interrupted. ‘I liked her very much, and admired her gallantry.’
‘She liked you, too.’ Jacinta paused to steady her wobbly voice. ‘She really enjoyed talking to you. It made her holiday. She was so determined I shouldn’t miss anything...’
Cynthia Lyttelton had insisted Jacinta use the facilities at the resort, pleading with her to swim, to sail, to go snorkelling. ‘Then you can tell me all about it,’ she’d said.
Because the resort staff had been kind and attentive to her mother, Jacinta had given in. When she’d returned, salt-slicked and excited, after her first snorkelling expedition, Cynthia had told her about this man who had joined her beneath her sun-umbrella—handsome as Adonis, she’d said, and funny, with a good, sharp brain.
Gently, he said now, ‘She told me she didn’t have long to live. I gather she’d been ill for a long time, yet she was completely without self-pity.’
‘She had arthritis, but she died of cancer.’ I will not cry, she averred silently, clenching her jaw against the onset of gnef.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he repeated, and she knew he was.
So many people—considerate, well-meaning people—had told her that her mother’s death must have been a blessed relief to them both She’d understood that they were giving her what sympathy they could, but although often in great pain Cynthia had enjoyed life, and she hadn’t wanted to die.
And Jacinta still mourned her loss.
She nodded, and they sat without speaking for some moments while she regained control of her emotions.
Eventually she looked up, to meet a gaze that rested on her face with unsettling penetration. Instantly his lashes covered his eyes, and when they swept up again there was nothing but that vivid, unrevealing intensity of colour, hiding all emotion, all speculation. His sculptured mouth had thinned to a straight, forceful line.
A firebrand plummeted to the pit of her stomach. Instinct, so deeply buried in her unconscious she’d never known of its existence, stirred, flexed, and muttered a warning.
What am I getting into? she thought.
Common sense, brisk and practical, told her she wasn’t getting into anything, because she wouldn’t allow herself to. Paul McAlpine might look like every woman’s idea of a dream hero, with his golden hair and athlete’s body and disturbing mouth, but she didn’t have to worship at his shrine if she didn’t want to.
‘I usually have a quiet Christmas,’ he told her. ‘Anyway, it’s almost two months before we have to think of that. Our tea’s probably ready, but if you’d like to come with me now I’ll show you where the bedrooms are and you can choose one.’
Stiffly she got to her feet and went with him in and out of five superbly furnished bedrooms, all with both double-hung and French windows leading onto the encircling verandah. Just like something from a glossy magazine.
Jacinta refused to be impressed. In the end she chose one with a view of the sea solely because it had a long, businesslike desk on one wall.
‘This one doesn’t have its own bathroom,’ Paul told her, ‘but there’s one right next door.’
‘It’ll be super, thank you.’ Outside, the verandah had been furnished with a lounger and several chairs. Below the wooden balustrade flowers frothed and rioted. The room was pleasantly cool, with a daybed in one corner and an elegant Victorian dressing table, less ornamented than most of its kind. ‘It looks lovely,’ Jacinta finished sincerely. ‘Thank you.’
‘It’s nothing.’
The negligent disclaimer was delivered in a deep voice, its obscurely equivocal intonation setting her teeth on edge.
She was being paranoid.
Well, it was probably normal. Although earlier that year she’d endured an unpleasant experience with a man, eventually her suspicions regarding masculine intentions must fade. Unfortunately it wasn’t going to be a speedy process. Even with Gerard, who couldn’t have been nicer, she’d found herself searching for sinister motives.
And now she was doing it again. Possibly because Paul McAlpine was so—so—well, so gorgeous. Her nervousness didn’t mean she sensed anything ulterior; it arose from her physical awareness of him, which was her problem, not his. Behind Paul McAlpine’s air of calm, confident good humour was simply that—calm, confident good humour.
Any ordinary woman would be jittery and a bit overwhelmed when confronted by one of the favoured few, a golden man with everything, including a presence that automatically made him a man to be noticed.
Exhausted, and therefore easily influenced, she simply needed time and peace to catch up with herself again. And here, in this beautiful, peaceful place, she’d get them.
Especially if her host was going to be away a lot.
They were halfway down the hall on the way to the kitchen when he said, ‘Gerard tells me he’s doing research for another book. I thought he’d just finished one.’
‘Yes, but he found out that an old rival of his is intending to move in on his territory so he thought he’d better get going on this one and pre-empt him. Even in the academic world things can get rough when it comes to ego and staking claims.’
‘I see. Is he planning to spend all his leave in the archives?’
‘I think so. It was organised in such a rush that I’m not too sure of his plans.’
One eyebrow arched in a manner that showed only too clearly what Paul McAlpine thought of that, but he said nothing more. As she accompanied him Jacinta thought acidly that it was impossible to imagine this man ever doing anything on impulse.
In the spacious, very modern kitchen he introduced her to his housekeeper, a large-boned, blue-jeaned woman in her late thirties called Fran Borthwick, who smiled at her and said, ‘Welcome to Waitapu. The tea’s ready. Where do you want it?’
‘I’ll take it into the conservatory,’ Paul said serenely, lifting the tray.
Jacinta returned the housekeeper’s smile and went with him.
The conservatory, a delicious Victorian folly, was equipped with rattan furniture upholstered in muted stripes. Jungly tropical growth sprouted from splendid pots; in one a huge frangipani held up white and gold flowers, their sweet scent reminding Jacinta forcibly of the week she’d spent in Fiji.
‘Would you like to pour?’ Paul McAlpine invited, setting the tray on a table.
Jacinta’s gaze lingered too long on his elegant, long-fingered hands—hands that promised great strength as well as sureness. Resenting the mindless response that shivered across her nerve-ends, she said, ‘Yes, of course,’ sat down and lifted the teapot.
He liked his tea without milk and unsugared. Spartan tastes, Jacinta thought as she poured, then set down his cup and saucer.
It was an oddly intimate little rite, one that seemed right for the old-fashioned house and teaset. Ruthlessly ignoring the niggling edge of tension that sawed at her composure, she drank her tea and made polite conversation, wondering as she listened to his even, regulated voice whether authority and imperturbable good humour was all there was to Paul McAlpine.
No, he wouldn’t have reached the top of his profession without intelligence and, she suspected, ruthlessness.
No doubt with women, too. The lover Gerard had pointed out that day in Ponsonby was a woman so beautiful she’d dazzled. However she was not the woman who had been with Paul in Fiji.
Perhaps he was promiscuous. Was that what Gerard had been hinting at with his reference to broken hearts?
Her quick revulsion at the idea was a warning, as was her conviction that he was too fastidious for crude promiscuity. All she knew about him was that he’d been kind to her mother, he’d been jilted—and he’d had two lovers in ten months.
And he danced well.
When his cool voice broke into her memories she jumped guiltily, and had to pull herself together to answer his question about her degree.
‘I majored in history,’ she said.
‘Yes, of course. Gerard’s speciality. That’s where you met him, I suppose?’
It was impossible to accuse him of prying. He must, she thought—surely irrelevantly—be hell in a courtroom. Any witness would be lulled into a sense of security by that lazy, calm voice that expressed nothing more than interest.
But he must have heard the reservation in her voice when she replied, ‘I—yes.’
Dark lashes almost hid his eyes. ‘I believe he offered you bed and board in his apartment. That must have been very convenient.’
Tautly she responded, ‘He realised that things were—difficult—where I was living, and very kindly told me about a flat a friend of his wanted looked after while she took up a scholarship in England.’
For a moment the classically shaped mouth straightened, but when she looked again it was relaxed, even curved in a slight smile. ‘Flatmates can be trying, can’t they.’
It was not a question. Trying to lift the flatness of her tone, she agreed, ‘Oh, they certainly can.’
‘It sounds as though you had the ones from hell’
‘He—one was not—not congenial.’ She put her cup and saucer down, relieved when they arrived on the table without any betraying chinks.
Paul said nothing, and after an awkward moment she went on, ‘Gerard found me in the university library one night and realised that I was having a bad time.’
‘Ah,’ Paul said smoothly, ‘he’s always found it difficult to cope with tears.’
She fastened down her indignation. ‘I wasn’t crying,’ she told him firmly, and added, ‘He’s very kind.’
‘I’m sure he is,’ Paul said, his voice soothing, almost mesmeric. ‘Why can’t you stay in your flat over the holidays?’
‘A friend of the woman who owns it has moved in.’
When Gerard came back in February he’d go into his new house, a house with a flat joined to it, and she’d have a home once more. There was no reason she shouldn’t tell Paul McAlpine that, but she fenced the words behind her teeth.
‘And now you’re waiting for the results of your final exams. Getting your BA has been a long haul. I believe there was a gap between the first two years and the last?’
Had her mother told him that her arthritis had become so bad after her daughter’s second year at university that Jacinta had to give up her studies and come home to take care of her? No, she’d been a very private woman, so it had to have been Gerard. Hoping he hadn’t coaxed Paul to lend her the bach by implying that she was a deserving case, she said evenly, ‘Yes, nine years.’
‘What do you intend to do when you’ve done your Master’s? Teach?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think I’d be very good at that.’
Judicially, he observed, ‘I shouldn’t think there’s much call for history masters outside the halls of academe.’
Why was she so—so nervous about her plans, so secretive? Because she didn’t yet know whether they were possible—and because she didn’t like the prospect of appearing a fool. ‘Probably not,’ she agreed, feeling ineffectual and foolish.
Goaded by his measuring look, she added, ‘Actually, the Master’s degree is a promise I made to my mother.’
There, that would show him she wasn’t just drifting.
‘And you always keep your promises?’
‘Yes.’
Without haste her unwilling host surveyed her face, his vivid blue gaze roaming the thick, now untidy mass of her hair, its damp curls clinging to the margins of her high forehead.
Heat burned through her skin. Straight copper brows drawn over her long nose, she met his scrutiny with defiance, knowing that the golden specks in her eyes would be glittering against the green matrix.
Starry Eyes, her mother used to call her when she was a child.
She could read nothing in Paul’s scrutiny beyond a cool assessment that prickled her skin and tightened her muscles in a primitive reflex, but when his glance moved to her wide, soft mouth she jutted her chin, fighting back a response in which anger and a forbidden excitement warred.
She didn’t want this overwhelming physical attraction. It was something she’d never experienced before, and it was dangerous.
Paul’s enigmatic gaze didn’t drop any further—and that, she thought angrily, was just as well. Although his scrutiny was too impersonal to be a leer, he’d checked her out beyond the bounds of politeness.
‘“Mine honour is my life”,’ he quoted.
Shakespeare, of course. An equivocal note in his voice scratched at her nerves again. ‘Something like that,’ she said curtly:
Each word dropped into the tense silence that stretched between them—humming, she thought edgily, with unspoken thoughts, with emotions she didn’t intend to examine.
Just when she thought she was going to have to break it, he drawled, ‘Very worthy.’
‘Hardly.’ She wondered why his words should sound like a warning. ‘Every child learns the importance of keeping promises.’
‘But children often forget as they grow older.’
Too late Jacinta remembered Aura, who had broken her vows to him in the most dramatic way. She opened her mouth to say something—anything—then closed it again when a covert glance at his shuttered expression warned her that nothing she could say would help ease the tension.
He asked her about the new fee structure at the university, and while they discussed the implications Jacinta forgot her reservations, forgot that almost insolent survey of her face. His astute, acerbic sagacity made her think hard and fast, and his understanding of people’s motives startled her with its blend of tolerance and cynicism.
‘Gerard seems to think you’ll get honours when you do your MA,’ he said, the blue eyes indolent behind his lashes.
Some obscure note in his voice made the comment ambiguous. ‘He’s a bit prejudiced,’ she said stiffly. She might be Paul’s guest, but she didn’t owe him any more revelations.
‘We’re always inclined to be prejudiced about the people we’re fond of,’ Paul McAlpine said.
She looked sharply up, but those eyes, so transparent she could drown in them, hid his thoughts very effectively.
‘Or those people we’ve taught,’ she returned, just as pleasantly. ‘I’ll unpack now. Shall I take the tray through to the kitchen?’
‘I will;’ he said, getting to his feet and lifting the tray.
Although Jacinta always noticed hands, it was uncanny that the sight of his sent a tiny shudder of sensation chasing down her spine. Walking back along the hall, she felt an odd weight in her breasts, a kind of tingling fullness that embarrassed and irritated her.
Oh, be sensible, she told herself with self-derisory crispness, trying to be blase and objective. It was hardly surprising that she should be attracted to him. He was magnificent—a splendid figure of a man. There was something about him that made her think of sanity and freedom and enviable, disciplined self-assurance.
Paul McAlpine would probably never find himself in a situation he couldn’t control.
Lucky man, she decided crossly, blinking as she stepped from the shaded verandah into the bright light of the sun.
