Table of Contents

Cover Page

Excerpt

SUSAN NAPIER

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Copyright

“And what am I?”

“Don’t tempt me,” Anne threatened.

“Oh, come on. You’ve been perfectly free with your insulting opinions of me so far. Why stop now?”

“You’re intelligent, strong, utterly independent and self-confident to the point of arrogance.” She frankly listed the personal assets she found so irritating.

Hunter’s square mouth tilted slowly in amusement. “You forgot handsome.”

SUSAN NAPIER was born on St. Valentine’s Day, so it’s not surprising she has developed an enduring love of romantic stories. She started her writing career as a journalist in Auckland, New Zealand, try- ing her hand at romance fiction only after she had married her handsome boss! Numerous books later she still lives with her most enduring hero, two future heroes—her sons!—two cats and a computer. When she’s not writing she likes to read and cook, often simultaneously!

The Sister Swap
Susan Napier

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

THE loud, driving rock music shook the rafters and vibrated through the hardwood floor, sending a delicious hum up through Anne’s bones as she danced joyously around the room in her bare feet.

She extended her arms above her head, clicking her fingers in time to the raucous beat as she moved with the increasing frenzy of the music. The long rope of redbrown hair whipped around her hips as she took a running leap through the shaft of late afternoon summer sunshine that slanted in through the big windows at one end of the long room, landing with a dramatic thump beside the random stacks of cardboard cartons that held her belongings. Anticipating the approaching climactic crescendo, she performed two more exuberant leaping turns and had launched into a third when she was sud- denly left hanging by the abrupt cessation of her musical support.

Anne landed awkwardly, her heartbeat accelerating as she whirled to face the man who had wrenched out the plug from the portable music-centre that sat on the high bench that separated the rest of the room from the small kitchen area.

He was tall and bullishly big, chest and thighs bulging against the unfashionably tight, faded blue T-shirt and jeans he wore. The expression on his face was as bullish as the rest of him, black eyebrows lowered over glowering dark eyes.

‘What did you do that for?’ Anne panted nervously, as much from apprehension as from her wild exertions.

The open door behind him testified to her careless stupidity. The taxi-van driver who had kindly helped carry her boxes up six flights of stairs had departed half an hour ago and she was aware that the warehouse below was empty after four-thirty. There was no one to run to her aid if she screamed.

Suddenly all the cautionary tales she had laughingly dismissed about the big, bad city came back to haunt her. She had even forgotten the first basic rule—to lock her door!

‘You mean why did I shut down that shrieking racket?’ came the snarling reply. ‘I would have thought that was bloody obvious. I’ve been pounding at your door for five minutes!’

Anne relaxed slightly. He was certainly angry but if his intentions were violent he would have welcomed the loud music and shouted lyrics as a handy cover for her screams. She took a few steps towards him and then stopped, freshly aware of the disparity in their sizes.

At five feet four she liked to think she was of average height for a woman, but the closer she got to this colossus, the more aware she was of the slenderness of her build. She had a wiry strength concealed within her fragile-looking femininity but she was wise enough to know its limits. She would have to assert herself with her intellect rather than her physical person.

‘That “shrieking racket”,’ she began firmly, ‘happens to be one of the finest rock groups in the—’

‘I don’t care if it’s Kiri Te Kanawa and the Paris Opera.’ Her invader dropped the plug on top of the dead radio and adopted the quintessential threatening male attitude, fists on hips. ‘I don’t like having music rammed down my throat at ninety decibels—’

‘Your ears,’ corrected Anne absently, thinking that the man would probably be quite handsome if he didn’t scowl like that, in a way that engraved the lines of experience in the olive skin into a vivid warning sign: Here lurks bad temper!

His eyes weren’t just dark, she discovered as he continued to glower at her, they were as black as midnight, the same colour as the thick, shaggy, collar-length hair swept back from his broad forehead. He was somewhere in his mid-thirties, she guessed, and life had delivered enough knocks to turn him into a tough customer. His chin was so square you could chisel rock with it and his rectangular mouth looked just as cutting. Anne was pleased with her mental description and she smiled, which only made him frown even more as he barked, ‘What?’

‘I think you mixed your metaphors. You mean rammed into your ears, not down your throat. You don’t hear with your mouth.’

‘Then why did your infernal racket turn my stomach?’ he growled sardonically before adding impatiently, ‘I didn’t come here for a damned language lecture—’

‘If you’re going to keep using offensive language, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave,’ said Anne primly. She had never reacted well to being barked at, especially by big, arrogant males.

He made a sound deep in his large chest, like the ap- proaching rumble of a freight train. ‘I have no intention of staying—’

‘Then why did you come?’

‘To tell you to shut the hell up!’

Anne’s own impulsive temper began to build up steam. ‘Is your vocabulary so stunted you can’t express yourself without swearing?’

‘That’s rich, coming from you!’ he shot back. ‘That rock singer you’re so impressed with was shrieking out far worse at the top of his lungs.’

Anne had the grace to blush. ‘Well—er—the music puts it in a different context,’ she said weakly.

‘Oh, I see. You don’t mind being cursed at, as long as it’s to music.’

She was beginning to get the uncomfortable feeling that this hulking man might be able to run intellectual as well as physical rings around her. She was nervous enough about her move from a tiny rural town to the huge, sprawling city of Auckland and the new life she was embarking on, especially fraught as it was with guilty secrets. She didn’t need any additional undermining of her confidence. Katlin had been bad enough. Her elder sister had deeply impressed on Anne the dire conse- quences of being found out in their deception, at the same time hastily assuring her that the chances of dis- covery were infinitesimal…as long as Anne kept a cool head. Easier said than done.

‘Look, would you mind stating your business—?’

‘I thought I had.’

Anne frowned, her fly-away brows losing their faintly surprised natural arch. ‘You mean about the noise?’ Suddenly the light dawned. ‘Oh, are you from downstairs?’ That would explain the bulging muscles. The men she had seen in the docking bay of the warehouse when she had arrived had been heaving about enormous crates as if they were made of marshmallow. ‘I thought everyone in the warehouse knocked off at four, and anyway, I can’t believe that sound from here would travel—’

‘Not the warehouse. I live in the apartment next door,’ he snapped, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the open door. ‘And, believe me, the sound travels between the two all too well.’

Anne’s mouth dropped open. ‘Next door? But you can’t be.’ Her voice rose accusingly. ‘Nobody said any- thing about there being anyone else living here!’

Quite the reverse, in fact. She had been shown around the sparsely furnished loft atop the warehouse building by a representative from the foundation which had awarded the year-long grant. The man had given Anne the distinct impression that she would be totally alone and undisturbed in her cosy eyrie close to the sprawling city campus of Auckland University. He certainly hadn’t mentioned any surly, beetle-browed neighbour. The fact that she would have no interfering fellow-residents poking their curious noses into her life and work had been the deciding factor in her agreeing to fulfil the conditions of the grant. Now this, when it was too late to back out!

Thank God she had put her foot down over the money that went along with the grant—at least her conscience was clear on that score. Katlin had wanted to give her the majority of the modest monthly pension, but Anne had adamantly refused to accept anything more than direct expenses, of which she kept a very strict account, just in case there were any official questions later. For herself, Anne was using the precious savings that she had accrued over the years from selling eggs, honey and vegetables at the family farm gate.

‘Perhaps they assumed we wouldn’t notice each other,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Fat chance if you intend to run a one-woman disco at all hours of the day and night…’

Anne’s mouth snapped shut to stop herself saying something equally rude. Live and let live was her motto. If they were neighbours then she’d just have to try and make the best of it.

‘Hardly at all hours, since I’ve only just moved in. I was just celebrating, that’s all,’ she said in her normal, soft, conciliatory tones.

The reply she received was bluntly non-conciliatory. ‘Well, celebrate quietly in future. The walls here are paper-thin. And cut out the acrobatics. These floorboards run almost the length of the whole upper floor. Vibrations travel as effectively as noise.’

Anne’s hazel eyes narrowed. ‘Then you’d better get shock-absorbers as well as ear-muffs because I dance to keep fit.’

That led the fierce black gaze to wander down over her huge, baggy, less-than-pure-white T-shirt and calflength purple cotton leggings with the little darned patch on her knee.

‘Fit for what?’ The rag-bag, was the suggestion in his dismissive gaze.

‘To stand up to bullies like you,’ she snapped. ‘Now you’ve performed your neighbourly act of welcome, would you mind shutting the door behind you? And next time don’t come in until you’re invited!’

‘There won’t be a next time. As far as you’re concerned no one else does live in this building, understand?’

Anne blinked. She understood all right. He was insinuating that she might pester him with unwanted attentions …after he had come thrusting his way into her attention! ‘I won’t bother you as long as you don’t bother me!’ she told him. ‘For your information, Mr—Mr whoever-you-are—’

‘Lewis. Hunter Lewis, Miss Tremaine.’ He glared at her as if he expected to be challenged over his name, and she was momentarily side-tracked from her righteous indignation.

‘How do you know who I am?’

‘You’re the Markham Grant.’

That took the wind out of her sails. The private grant scheme was very low-key and had received no publicity beyond a brief announcement in a literary magazine, the aim being to create a totally unpressured environment in which a writer could work. Was it coincidence that he knew of it, or was he in some way connected with the foundation? Her heart sank at the thought.

‘Oh. Are you here on a grant too?’ she asked cautiously.

‘No, I’m not,’ he snapped, as if she had insulted him. ‘And I’m surprised they’re handing them out like lollies to children these days.’ He gave her brightly mismatched outfit another contemptuous study.

‘Whatever happened to the concept of struggle and suffering for the sake of one’s art? If every new writer got provided with a cushy number in his or her creative infanthood we’d have a generation of writers producing work with as much emotional depth as the telephone directory!’

The door had swung shut behind him before Anne could recover from her shock at the scathing attack. Belatedly she rushed over and flung it open again, just in time to see him duck through a door under the short flight of stairs at the end of the corridor which led to a small, flat section of the roof. She had noticed the door previously but had assumed from its battered appearance and narrow dimensions that it was some kind of caretaker’s store-room.

‘Well!’ she exclaimed disgustedly, annoyed that she hadn’t been quick enough to come up with some pithy little comment that would have hurried him on his way. Not that he’d needed any hurrying. He evidently couldn’t get away from her fast enough.

She turned back to survey her new home and was jolted out of her preoccupation by the sound of slow applause.

‘Oh, my gosh!’ She rushed over to the boxes, pushing them apart until she discovered her concealed audience. The applause was slow because every second clap failed to connect, the owner of the hands not quite having the co-ordination to match his enthusiasm.

‘Oh, Ivan, I forgot all about you!’ She snatched up the chubby baby, horrified by her lapse in attention. ‘What did you crawl in there for? Did that nasty man frighten you?’

Ivan’s face crunched up and for one horrifying moment his rumpled, downy black eyebrows and narrowed dark eyes actually resembled those of the obnoxious Hunter Lewis. Ivan even had the same midnightblack hair…

But no—Anne brought her panicked speculations to a screeching halt. He thought Anne was Katlin Tremaine, so he had never met her striking sister. Besides, Katlin said Ivan’s father was Russian. Hunter Lewis might have the temperament of a marauding Cossack but his accents were definitely Kiwi!

The strangely disturbing thought of that hulking brute as the father of her innocent little godson made Anne hug him tightly and he let out a squawk of protest.

‘Sorry. We won’t talk about that bad man. We won’t even think about him, will we? Now, what are we going to unpack next, Ivan? You show me. Point to a box…’

The active assistance of a seven-month-old wasn’t conducive to efficiency and it took a long time for Anne to organise her rather meagre possessions. Since the loft was furnished, albeit rather sparsely, she hadn’t needed to bring much, but she couldn’t have left her books at home and then there was all the considerable paraphernalia required to keep Ivan the Terrible happy, healthy and occupied.

Most of that she took into the small bedroom at the windowless end of the main room and while she was there, assembling, with her usual lack of mechanical genius, the portable baby Easi-cot—’Easy, my foot!’ she grumbled to Ivan as he busily babbled incoherent advice as to how to connect point D with section 2—she was distracted from her task by a sound on the other side of the wall. Music.

She scrambled up over the narrow bed and pressed her ear against the painted surface. Jazz.

‘Well, of all the cheek!’ She was almost tempted to go out and turn her own tape back on, even louder than before, but she had to concede that he didn’t appear to have the volume very high. Then she heard another sound, a very familiar electronic tap-tapping.

‘He’s got a typewriter.’ She looked down at Ivan in consternation. He grinned back, showing all six teeth. ‘Oh, no! Ivan, what if he’s a writer too?’ Overwhelmed with dismay, she slumped beside him on the floor. Ivan began to laugh his piping little shrill and she leapt up again, conscious of those listening walls. ‘No, no, darling—shush!’

Anne tucked Ivan under her arm and scurried back out to the big room, her heart beating like a drum. ‘We mustn’t let the bad man hear you,’ she admonished him, one finger held in front of her lips as she placed him in his high chair in the kitchenette and began to forage in the refrigerator. ‘If there’s one thing crabby old hermits hate more than loud rock music it’s crying babies. So you will be good while we’re here, won’t you, darling?’

Ivan issued a scornful babble at her words, as well he might. The Terrible was Anne’s purely ironic nickname. Ivan was the most friendly, good-natured and wellbehaved baby in the world. In fact, he was enough to make a capable adult feel inferior. Sometimes Anne felt as if he was not really a baby at all, but a computer-generated ideal. He didn’t dribble, he never threw up his food or cried for no apparent reason; he even messed his nappies in the tidiest possible fashion. You could set the clock by his naps and he had slept through the night since he was four weeks old. If it weren’t for the fact that he couldn’t walk or talk for himself Anne would almost feel superfluous to his well-ordered existence!

While Ivan amused himself by painting on a Charlie Chaplin moustache with a disintegrating rusk smothered with his favourite Vegemite spread, Anne whipped them both up an omelette for dinner, adding extra cheese to her own and herbs from the garden pots that her father had carefully packed in a wooden crate with plenty of damp newspaper for the flight north.

She sat on a stool at the breakfast-bar to eat hers, revelling in the peace as she popped the occasional spoonful from Ivan’s bunny-plate into his mouth while he diligently helped out with his fists, chuckling as the mixture squelched out from the bottom of his chubby fist on to his cotton bib.

Back at home mealtimes were always rowdy affairs, with her mother and father and her four brothers always competing to air their cheerful opinions. They were a very close-knit and gregarious family, except for Katlin, who at twenty-eight was the eldest, and had chosen to move off the small, isolated South Island family farm while still in her late teens and live in virtual seclusion in order to write. Ivan’s arrival on the scene had been a cataclysmic upheaval in her solitary life. As usual it had been her more responsible sister who had been left holding the baby…this time literally!

Anne grinned to herself as she mopped up Ivan’s efforts at feeding himself with a damp cloth. A big city and a small baby were hardly what most people would see as a peaceful combination, but for Anne it was the realisation of a dream and she intended to make the most of it. Just a simple thing like having what she wanted for dinner instead of what would sustain gargantuan farm appetites gave her a magnificent sense of independence.

She gave Ivan the bottle of milk which rounded off his meal and then sat him down on the floor to play with his plastic blocks while she dragged the lop-sided cot out of the bedroom and finished assembling it. By the time she managed to attach the wheels correctly Ivan was looking heavy-eyed, and sucking his thumb, a sure indication that he was tired. No doubt his incredibly accurate internal clock had told him it was past his bedtime but, true to type, he wasn’t complaining.

She bathed him in the kitchen sink since the tiny bathroom which opened off the kitchen—obviously for the convenience of the plumber rather than the tenant—only possessed a shower, toilet and small basin, but Ivan didn’t seem to mind. He kicked and splashed merrily, briefly regaining his liveliness, before dozing as she patted him dry and put on his thick night-nappy and stretchy sleep-suit.

He was asleep almost before his head hit the mattress, his hands clutching the fuzzy pink stuffed pig that was his prized possession. She kissed him on his button nose, a flood of tenderness warming her with contentment as she softly sang him his bedtime song and then quietly wheeled the cot through to the bedroom.

She tiptoed back out to the living-room and plumped herself down on the high, polished-cotton couch, pleased that it was long enough for her to stretch out full-length. There was also an easy-chair, a large bean-bag and four spindle-backed chairs around the oval wooden dining-table to choose from. At home it was a battle for the best sitting space in the evenings. A wooden roll-topped desk on which Anne had set her typewriter, a small coffee-table and a large bookcase were the only other furnishings in the room apart from a few scattered rugs on the bare floorboards.

The man from the foundation had been slightly apologetic that there was no television but Anne didn’t mind. She had her small music-centre and anyway she intended to be too busy to be a mere spectator of life from now on. There was no telephone either, which had given her a few qualms at first, but there was a phone box just up the street and she could appreciate that the usual grant recipients preferred to be incommunicado while they were beavering over their manuscripts.

She lay on the couch, her couch, listening to the muted sounds of the city, then she got up, dissatisfied, and dragged the heavy piece of furniture over to the arched windows. She had earlier opened the curved upper portions of the window with the long wooden window-hook and now she folded back the lower, rectangular segments. With the couch angled just right she could lie on it and look out at the last orange glow of the sun as it curtsied behind the jumble of city buildings. As the twilight turned to dusk she was able to see the lights burning at the entrance to the art school, and behind it in the multi-storeyed school of engineering. Across the road were the other main buildings, the library and theatre and administration blocks. Soon she would be a part of the stream of students that came and went each day from that campus city-within-a-city.

Fired with a fresh wave of enthusiasm, Anne made herself a cup of tea and got out the course leaflets and introductory material that the university had sent her when she had enrolled in her language courses. She had several days to familiarise herself with the city and make arrangements for Ivan’s day-care before orientation week started, but she intended to be well-prepared for her first foray into higher education. She had already purchased some of the basic required texts and she added them to the little pile and made herself comfortable on the couch.

She was reading about the gender endings of Russian nouns when the pendent lights overhead flickered once and then went out.

The dark wasn’t complete because of the street-lighting outside but it was enough to disorientate Anne as she tried to negotiate the shadowy loft, trying to remember if the man from the foundation had mentioned a fuse-box. She checked the refrigerator, just to make sure that it wasn’t just the light bulbs that had blown, but the light inside wasn’t operating either so she began opening cupboards and muttering to herself when the logical places didn’t yield anything that looked like a junctionbox.

The longer she searched, the more unpalatable became the most sensible solution to her problem. She could just go to bed and deal with it in the morning, of course, but she wouldn’t have hot water again until the following evening if the mains switch wasn’t re-set before morning. Maybe it was more than just her own problem anyway.

She cheered up at the thought that Hunter Lewis’s electricity might have gone off as well. A trouble shared was a trouble halved, and he wouldn’t be able to blame her if the whole floor was out.

She crept into the bedroom to listen to Ivan’s steady little snore, and frowned as she heard the tap-tap and the music still filtering through the wall.

Oh, well, at least she knew he was at home and still awake!

But in no better a mood, she realised five minutes later when he flung open his door and glared at her.

No wonder his door was so battered; he must be hell on joinery! she thought to herself as she smiled hopefully at him in the dimly lit passageway.

‘I wonder if you could help me—?’

‘No.’

‘My electricity has gone off and I don’t know where the fuse-box is located,’ she continued calmly as if he hadn’t spoken.

‘God defend me from helpless women!’ he said through his teeth.

‘Why, are you too feeble to defend yourself?’

‘Very funny!

‘Then why aren’t you smiling?’ She threw up a hand. ‘No, don’t tell me, let me guess. You smiled once and the sky fell on you. Well, Chicken Little, you can stop panicking now. All I want is a light and the fuse-box.’

‘And fuse-wire, and a screwdriver, and—’

‘Are you naturally this obnoxious, or is it something you’ve specially trained for?’

‘Look, lady, I didn’t ask you to come thumping on my door—’

‘I didn’t ask you to come thumping at mine either, Mr Lewis, but you did. So we’re even. Now, are you capable of answering one simple question without turning it into a tiresome lecture? Do you know where the fuse-box for my apartment is located?’

For an answer he shut the door in her face and she was just about to scream it down when he reopened it carrying a small toolkit. He looked down at her furiously flushed face, small clenched fists and bare toes curled with rage and, wonder of wonders, produced a slight smile that bracketed the rectangular mouth with deep lines.

‘Temper, temper!’

‘You can talk!’ she said tartly, fascinated in spite of herself. He didn’t look all that much different when he smiled, she realised in amusement. He still looked broodingly dangerous, his black eyes smouldering with hostility and suspicion, their hooded lids giving them a predatory quality.

He didn’t answer, turning his back and walking towards the stairs. Anne got the impression that he did that a lot—turned his back on people.

At the head of the main flight of wooden stairs a sensor turned on a light on the first landing down, revealing a small cupboard in the wall which proved to contain odds and ends of tools and cleaning equipment—and fuse-boxes numbered for both apartments.

‘Thank you.’ Anne waited for him to get out of the way. ‘Excuse me.’ She tapped him on the shoulder as he pulled out the rectangular fuses, checking them. Her finger practically bounced off the armoured muscle. Anne’s four brothers were well-built—even Mike who was still only fourteen was much bigger than she was—so she wasn’t usually impressed by male bulk, but this one was built like a tank.

‘Hold this.’

She ignored the screwdriver.

‘Look, Mr Lewis, I do know how to change a fuse—’

‘Hold this.’

‘No.’

He turned his head. In profile his nose looked every bit as arrogantly prominent as the rest of him. ‘Haven’t you ever been told not to look a gift-horse in the mouth?’

Her eyes shifted to his wide, straight mouth and for no particular reason she felt herself flushing.

‘I’ve also been warned about Greeks bearing gifts,’ she said hurriedly.

‘I’m not Greek,’ he commented, tucking the screwdriver between his teeth and turning back to his task.

‘You’re not a horse either.’ Except maybe the rear end of one! she added silently. ‘If you’ll just step aside I’ll handle my own problems.’

‘And risk you botching it up so you have to come simpering back to my door again? No, thanks.’

‘I’ve never simpered in my life!’ she fumed, eyeing the stiched denim pockets below the black leather belt. One good, hard kick to that tightly packed rear and she would feel a whole lot better.

‘Don’t even think about it, country girl. I’m not only bigger than you, I’m faster.’

He hadn’t even looked around and she was furious at him for guessing what she was thinking, as well as for that mocking dig about her origins. What chance had she to hide anything if he had such acutely perceptive instincts?

‘Yes—at jumping to conclusions. Tell me, what brought on this powerful paranoia you have regarding women? I can’t figure out why you think you’re such an irresistible dish that you have to warn off total strangers. As a “country girl” I’ve seen plenty of beef on the hoof and, believe me, you’re over-pricing yourself.’

He snapped the repaired fuse back into place and depressed the trip-switch before he backed out of the cupboard, forcing her to retreat. ‘That smart mouth of yours is going to get you into trouble one day.’

They were back to mouths again. Now he had turned and was looking at hers and she tightened it deliberately, knowing that her full lower lip tended to give a false impression of sultriness.

‘Is that a threat?’ She bristled under the insolent black stare.

‘More in the nature of kindly advice.’

‘Kindly!’ she snorted. ‘You?’

‘Don’t try and provoke me more than you already have, Miss Tremaine,’ he drawled in that aggravatingly warm voice that was so at odds with his manner. ‘I suppose I’d better check that everything is working…’

Before she realised what he had meant he was up the stairs and heading towards her half-open door. His boast about moving fast hadn’t been idle. Frantically trying to remember whether she had tidied everything away after putting Ivan to bed, Anne flew up after him, and nipped in front just in time to bar his entry with one slender arm across the doorway.

‘The lights are on so obviously everything’s OK,’ she said breathlessly, trying to act casually as his mo- mentum brought his chest up against her restraining arm. He froze and she smiled brilliantly at him. ‘Thank you ever so much for your help,’ she gushed. ‘I don’t know what I would have done without you.’

He was looking at her oddly, through thoughtfully narrowed eyes, and she instantly realised that she was overdoing the gratitude. After the scathing comments she had just flung at him he was bound to be suspicious of such a sudden volte face. ‘You can go back to—er—whatever you were doing now,’ she urged more calmly. ‘I don’t want to put you to any more trouble…’

To her dismay he shrugged. ‘No trouble.’ He leaned forward as he spoke and she felt the straining pressure of that deep chest against her upper arm.

‘No, really, there’s no need!’ she squeaked desperately as he lifted a big hand and effortlessly brushed her re- straining limb aside.

Three steps into the room he stopped, crossing his hands over his chest as he slowly surveyed the territory. Coming up beside him, Anne was relieved to see that there was nothing untoward in the scene. Relief brought back her courage. ‘Satisfied?’ she demanded defiantly.

‘At the very least, from your state of guilty panic, I expected to find an orgy going on in here,’ he mur- mured, confirming her opinion of his acumen. Worse than a nosy neighbour was a suspicious one who could read your mind like a book!

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you.’

‘Oh, you haven’t disappointed me, Miss Tremaine. My expectations of you aren’t high enough for that to be possible. I expect the worst, and if you don’t oblige then I can only be pleasantly surprised.’

‘What a ghastly philosophy of life!’ Anne stared at him disapprovingly. ‘No wonder you’re so bad-tempered. So would I be if I went around in a constant state of gloomy pessimism.’

‘Yes, I can see that you’re one of life’s noisy optimists,’ he said drily. ‘Relentlessly determined to enjoy yourself at all costs.’

‘Only a pessimist could make optimism sound depressing,’ was Anne’s tart reply. ‘And one person’s noise is music to another person’s ears.’

‘I’m a realist, not a pessimist, but we won’t get into an argument about it.’

‘Why not? Afraid you’d lose?’

‘I have better things to do with my time than argue semantics with starry-eyed Lolitas—’

‘Lolita! I’ll have you know I’m twenty—’ She stopped herself just in time and added haughtily, ‘I’m older than I look and I was never starry-eyed. Now that you’ve assured yourself you’re not missing out on an orgy, perhaps you’ll finally go back to where you belong.’

He gave her a small, ironic inclination of his head. ‘Ah, would that I knew where that was…’

She almost softened, intrigued by that weary, cryptic murmur, except that she saw the deep, hooded gleam in his eyes and suddenly knew that he was playing on her compassion deliberately, slyly proving his point about her unsophisticated gullibility.

‘Try hell,’ she said sweetly. ‘I’m sure people often direct you that way.’

A startled stillness gripped his expression, then he threw back his head and laughed, the warm sound rising richly to the high, sloping rafters. His eyes slitted and all the brooding lines of his face seemed to lift with the upward curve of his mouth. She had certainly been right about his handsomeness when he wasn’t scowling. Suddenly his cynical suspicion of a strange woman invading his personal space didn’t seem quite so untenable.

‘I don’t know what you’re laughing at—it wasn’t a compliment,’ she pointed out. ‘You know, for someone so inordinately keen to be left alone you’re singularly difficult to get rid of!’

His laughter ended as abruptly as it had begun and he gave her a slow, measuring look as he began to saunter towards the door in his own sweet time. ‘Such big, pompous words for such a little country girl.’

‘Size and geographical origin has nothing whatever to do with intelligence,’ she said icily. ‘And I’m a woman, not a girl.’

‘That remains to be seen.’

‘But not by you!’

This time she got to shut the door smartly in his face, although her satisfaction was somewhat dimmed by the memory of that last, grimly taunting smile.

It seemed to say that Hunter Lewis would see whatever he wanted to see, whenever he damned well wanted to see it.

She would just have to keep well out of his way and make sure he never got the opportunity.

CHAPTER TWO

‘I THINK they should call it disorientation week!’ Anne groaned as she collapsed with her small backpack on to a seat in the university quad.

‘Decided to give up and go home to the farm?’ grinned the plump blonde already sitting there as she carefully added a dollop of cream from her doughnut to a paper cup of coffee.

‘Are you kidding? I’m having a great time!’ Anne rallied. ‘It’s just taking me longer than I thought to find my way around this maze.’

She stretched out her legs in their age-softened jeans, enjoying the cool breeze playing about the loose neckline of the white shirt that Mike had grown out of six months ago. It had been part of the dress uniform at her brother’s school but her mother had added a jaunty feminine touch with embroidery along the pocket and collar. With sleeves rolled up and shirt-tails hanging out Anne had felt confident of blending in with her fellow students, despite the fact that she was older than most of the other first-years.

‘Don’t worry, even second-year students like me still get lost sometimes,’ Rachel Blake told her sympathetically. She had cheerfully admitted to being a student dilettante whose wealthy parents could afford for her to dabble at university for as long as it took her to get a degree—any degree.

To Anne, who loved to study but had to watch every cent of expenditure, it sounded like an existence to be envied, and yet she didn’t. Such aimlessness was a waste of time and effort and Anne didn’t want to waste a single moment of her time at university. Her aim was to gain her degree in the shortest possible time without overloading herself to the point where she didn’t have enough free time to earn the extra money essential to the continuation of her studies. After that, the world was her oyster!

‘At least you have the stamina for all the trekking about we have to do,’ Rachel added, with a mocking glance down at her own full figure. ‘You country girls probably have the strength of marathon runners from chasing all those sheep up and down the alps.’

Anne grinned. ‘Our farm’s nowhere near the Southern Alps and the dogs did all the running. I just leaned on the gates and whistled.’

Her new friend’s use of the phrase ‘country girl’ sent a small frisson up her spine. In the past two weeks she had seen very little of her surly neighbour, mainly be- cause she had adopted a policy of active avoidance. Apart from the occasional thunderous knocking on the wall whenever she forgot herself and played her tapes a little too loud, or to cover one of Ivan’s rare bouts of crying, he was just as scrupulous at avoiding contact.

Whatever it was that Hunter Lewis did for a living, his hours seemed to be erratic, so that it was no easy task to work out a schedule by which she could be sure of missing him whenever she ventured out. However, an ear to her bedroom wall was usually enough to ascertain if he was at home and therefore unlikely to be encoun- tered on the stairs. Coming back in she just had to keep a sharp look-out and take her chances. Every time she went up or down the stairs it was an adventure, and her heart pounded in her throat with nervous apprehension.

‘So…how’s the rest of your lecture schedule shaping up? I can’t believe you’re taking Japanese and Russian. One language at a time is enough for most of us!’

Anne shrugged. ‘I’ve already done basic correspondence courses in them so it won’t be too much of a shock. I used to love making up and solving codes and cryptograms when I was a kid. I even used to invent languages with proper alphabets and rules of grammar…put the whole works down in little notebooks. It’s just something that I’m good at.’

‘Inventing grammar’? Now I know you’re weird.’ Rachel rolled her eyes. ‘Most of us spend our childhood trying to avoid having to write any grammar! Your teachers must have loved you. So…what do you think of your lecturers so far?’

‘They seem OK.’ It was an understatement. Just to be at university was wonderful and Anne knew she was seeing everything through rose-coloured spectacles.

‘Lucky you. I’ve got some killers from last year. Him for example.’ She screwed up her face and inclined her head at one of the figures crossing the quad. ‘Gorgeous bod, personality of Dracula. You know, there are poor souls who actually take political studies because they think it’s going to be an easy option. Big mistake. The drop-out rate in his class is fierce. He has a fiendish temper and he just piles on the assignments!’

‘So how come you’re still taking it, then? Can’t resist the gorgeous bod?’ teased Anne with a smile as she casually scanned the quad.

‘I discovered I’m actually quite good at it,’ admitted Rachel sheepishly, making Anne laugh. ‘I know, I know…it shocked me even more than it did Professor Lewis. He thought I was just another blonde bimbo looking to plug a hole in my schedule—practically shredded me to pieces that first semester. The Pit Bull, I call him…let him scent a weakness and those big jaws just go chomp!’

Anne wasn’t listening. She had spotted him at the exact moment that Rachel had mentioned his name. He was walking towards them at an oblique angle but there was no mistaking that tight, impatient stride or the saturnine expression. He was wearing a sports jacket over dark trousers and pale shirt and tie, and was carrying a bulging leather briefcase.

‘Professor Lewis? Professor Hunter Lewis?’ she said hollowly, hoping against hope that it was merely a ghastly coincidence.

‘Yeah. You know him?’

‘He’s a lecturer here?’

‘I told you, political studies.’ To her horror Rachel lifted her hand and waved to the man as he approached to pass their seated figures. ‘Hi, Hunter.’

She received a grunt in reply and a brief glance that didn’t even break his stride. Anne was relaxing again when the big head suddenly snapped back around and he came to a halt. Before he could beat her to it Anne scowled at him. As if it weren’t enough that she had to avoid him around the flat, now she was going to have to worry about running into him on campus as well.

To her dismay he backed up, ignoring his student, and stared at Anne. ‘What are you doing here?’ he snapped.

As if it had anything to do with him!

‘Following you, of course,’ she snapped back, flicking her long plait back between her defiantly stiff shoulder- blades.

His face darkened. ‘What in the hell for?’

He believed her! The incredible egotism of the man. ‘I’m a masochist. I’m hoping if I throw myself in your path often enough you’ll fall in love with me and invite me to live miserably with you ever after.’

Anne heard Rachel’s soft gasp, but ignored it in favour of maintaining her defiant front. He wasn’t her professor. To her he was just an obnoxious stranger.

‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’

‘Not to someone who doesn’t have a sense of humour.’

He didn’t dispute the point, instead abruptly switching tactics. ‘Are you taking an extension course here at the university?’ he asked more politely.

Ah, it was finally beginning to sink in that her life might not revolve entirely around him. She widened her eyes innocently. ‘Actually I’m thinking of enrolling in political studies.’

A brief spark of emotion glowed in the hooded gaze and then Anne was subjected to a long, silent look that would have made her blush if she hadn’t been so annoyed. ‘Sorry, my class already has a waiting-list,’ he said with silky insincerity.

‘Oh, dear, and I’m sure there won’t be any vacancies opening up when the term is under way and your students realise what a sweet-tempered and tolerant being you really are behind that gruff exterior.’

This time Rachel gave her a sharp nudge of her elbow in the kidneys and Anne felt guilty for allowing her temper to get the better of her discretion.

The dark gaze switched from Anne to Rachel’s flushed and curious face. ‘Been telling tales out of school, Rachel?’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it, Professor,’ said Rachel with glib mock-deference.

‘Oh, be my guest,’ he responded mildly. ‘I’d much rather have the wheat sorted from the chaff before the first lecture.’

‘The chaff being those who don’t treat every utterance of yours as a pearl of indisputable wisdom, I suppose,’ Anne murmured.

‘I’m surprised at a country girl mixing up her barnyard analogies. Perhaps you don’t know as much as you think you do, Miss Tremaine. It’s swine and pearls.’

She knew his condescension was deliberate but she couldn’t help responding to the provocation. ‘We didn’t keep pigs. I had to come to Auckland to encounter the behaviour of common swine.’

‘Er…hadn’t we better be going now, Anne?’ Rachel said hastily, picking up her leather satchel and getting to her feet, tugging her friend up with her.

‘Anne?’ The black eyebrows flattened. ‘I thought your name was Katlin.’

It had had to happen and Anne was proud of the way she handled it, letting none of her trepidation show.

‘My family calls me Anne,’ she said with perfect truth. ‘With an “e”,’ she added helpfully.

‘Why?’

He wasn’t asking about the ‘e’.

‘Because it’s one of my names,’ she said evasively. ‘A lot of people don’t like their middle names,’ she said, choosing her random comments carefully to avoid an outright lie. ‘I happen to like Anne. It’s a good, plain, uncomplicated name.’

Now that was a lie. She had always wanted to be called something more dramatic. Alexandra or Laurel…or even Elizabeth would have done. A name you could do some- thing with…

His eyebrows rose again and she knew that he was thinking exactly what she was—that a plain, uncomplicated name suited her looks. Though her eyes were large and thickly lashed they were an indeterminate colour-sometimes hazel, sometimes muddy blue, more often hovering disappointingly somewhere in between. She might have just scraped by as pretty with her winged brows balanced by a nicely shaped mouth, except that in between was the noble Tremaine nose which threw her small face all out of kilter. Her brothers used to tease her that it was lucky she had also inherited the impressive Tremaine chest when she went through puberty, otherwise her centre of gravity wouldn’t have shifted south of her chin!

Another impressive attribute, one that her brothers never teased her about because it had proved so vital to the family’s well-being, was her unshakeable, unbreakable loyalty towards those she loved.

The car accident that had severely injured her mother’s back when Anne was fifteen had been the start of the long process that had shaped her adult personality into that of a deeply compassionate woman, always willing to help those less fortunate than herself. Katlin had always been hopeless on the domestic front and at the time of the accident had already embarked on her ob- session with writing, so it had naturally fallen to Anne to put aside her quiet dreams of university study and travel and buckle down to the task of being ‘little mother’ to the rest of the family. She had done it as she did most things, with a good-natured enthusiasm that had served to reassure her father and brothers, and especially her bed-ridden mother, that it was no great self-sacrifice for her to leave school without even minimum qualifications. In between the cooking and cleaning and caring for her mother Anne had plugged away at correspondence courses, which had gone some way to appeasing her hunger for knowledge and intellectual stimulation, and if occasionally she felt sorry for herself she never let it show.

Over the years she had maintained an attitude of obstinate optimism towards her mother’s condition while everyone around her was losing hope. It had been a long, slow haul, but after numerous operations and continuing physical therapy Peg Tremaine’s condition had gradually improved to the point where, although she still wasn’t pain-free, she could move about and perform most household tasks without help. At last Anne had felt free to reclaim some of her childhood dreams, to fly the family nest and seek her own destiny.

But that destiny had immediately become inextricably bound up with Katlin’s. Typically, Anne had found the bonds of love were too strong for her selfishly to ignore her sister’s cry for help. So here she was, plain Anne masquerading as complex Katlin and shamefully beginning to enjoy it.

She frowned, daring him to take advantage of the opportunity for a fresh insult. It struck her that she had never frowned so much as she did in Hunter Lewis’s company. It must be infectious.

‘Anne was my grandmother’s name,’ Hunter Lewis said unexpectedly, a taunting amusement lightening his expression as he watched Rachel try a second time to edge her fierce little friend away.

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me she was tough as old boots and as mad as a snake,’ said Anne darkly, shrugging off the tug at her elbow.

‘Actually she was a darling, a sweet little lady with a heart as soft as butter.’

Anne waited warily for the punch line but it didn’t come.

‘Yes, well, I’m sure any grandmother of yours wouldn’t dare be anything else,’ she told him stubbornly. The expression in his eyes was masked as he glanced down at his watch and she added sarcastically, ‘Oh, please, don’t let us keep you. I’m sure there must be other people who actually have appointments to be intimidated by you.’

She was faintly appalled at the way she was carrying on but he merely gave her a sardonic smile. ‘Are you saying I intimidate you, Anne?’

She had to tip her head back a long way to look him boldly in the eye. ‘No.’

‘I didn’t think so,’ he said drily. ‘Then you won’t be upset if I tell you that next time you leave anything behind in the washing machine I’m going to put it through the office shredder. Thanks to your carelessness I now have three pink shirts.’

Her red T-shirt! Anne put a hand over her mouth to stem a sudden giggle. She had wondered where it had gone after the last wash. Because it was a cheap one the unreliable dye meant it had to be separately washed in cold water and she had thrown it into the machine after having done Ivan’s nappies on a hot cycle and scurried back to her loft to hang the nappies on a makeshift drying frame she had rigged up in front of her window. They took longer to dry than they would have flapping on the clothes-line outside the rooftop laundry-room but Anne couldn’t risk using that any more than she dared leave them in the glass-fronted dryer.

‘Perhaps you can use them to soften your image,’ she said in a stifled voice.

‘And perhaps I can just bill you for three new shirts.’

‘And pigs might fly,’ scoffed Anne with the insouciance of one who knew there was no blood in a stone.

‘You were right.’ He paused for Anne’s puzzlement to register before he added smoothly, ‘Your ignorance of porcine behaviour is evidently woefully complete.’

‘Porcine behaviour?’ Anne began to giggle again. ‘Your pomposity is showing, Professor. You seem to have quite an interest in piggy—sorry, porcine activities. Is it a particular hobby of yours? What is it exactly that you’re professor of anyway? Oh, that’s right—piglitical studies…’

She went off into gales of irresistible laughter and Rachel began to laugh too, after first making sure that the volatile Professor Lewis wasn’t going to explode on the spot. Instead he chose to leave, with a succinct comment about the declining standards of undergraduate humour.

‘God, I thought you were begging him to blow his top, but you do know each other from somewhere, don’t you?’ giggled Rachel. ‘You’re not…? Well, he made it sort of sound as if you were…well…’

‘Living together? We are—sort of.’ Anne gave a heavily edited version of her rent-free accommodation arrange- ments, only vaguely referring to a grant. Then she hastened to impress on her friend the need for discretion.

‘If he asks you anything about me, don’t tell him. Especially don’t mention Ivan.’

‘He doesn’t know you have a baby next door?’ Rachel was astonished. ‘Does it negate the terms of your grant or something? I know I made Hunter sound a bit like Attila the Hun but he’s not actually on permanent staff here, just holding a visiting lectureship, so it’s not as if he was part of the stuffy university hierarchy or anything…’

‘I’m not really sure,’ said Anne, uncertainly answering all questions simultaneously. She hadn’t read the fine print of the grant but presumed it was probably legal and binding. All she really had to go on was what Katlin had told her and Katlin wasn’t exactly noted for her strict attention to detail.

‘Just…be careful what you say, that’s all. Not that I expect he’ll be interested enough to ask,’ she added hurriedly, seeing the speculation twinkling in Rachel’s laughing eyes.

Later that afternoon, struggling up the stairs with Ivan in his push-chair, she rather regretted the pride that had made her refuse Rachel’s standing offer of a lift to the nearest supermarket. She had caught the bus and on the way back it had rained, and although she had a plastic rain-shield on Ivan’s push-chair she had had no cover for herself or the paper shopping bags on the uphill walk from the bus station.

She used her back to open the self-closing door beside the parking bay that led to the stairs, struggling to hook the laden push-chair up the concrete step after her. Inside the tiny bottom landing she paused to check the letterbox and stuff a letter into her damp pocket before unloading the two soggy shopping bags from the wire tray on top of the push-chair and placing them at the bottom of the stairs. After a quick check up the stairwell she picked up the push-chair containing Ivan and began to hurry up the stairs. She had found it easier to carry them both together than to take Ivan out and fold up the push-chair and then juggle them both, the folded push-chair being an unwieldy length for one of her height, invariably banging painfully against her ankles or trying to trip her up.

‘Lucky for you, my fine fat friend, that I spent all that time sheep-chasing otherwise I wouldn’t be able to manage this,’ she panted at the second landing.

Ivan’s dark eyes almost disappeared into his chubby cheeks as he favoured her with his peculiar, slit-eyed grin and sucked mightily at his fingers.

‘Oh, yes, I know you’re hungry. Aren’t you always? Well, you’ll just have to wait until I can go back down and get the food. I only have one pair of hands, you know. A pity we can’t ask the bad-tempered professor to help, isn’t it? I saw him today, and do you know what he had the gall to say…?’

She told him all about it as she unlocked the loft and carried him in, colouring the encounter by describing how she had felt and what she had wanted to do rather than what she actually had done. Ivan was a dream listener. He never interrupted her or tried to contradict her. His innocent baby ears were her diary into which she described her days. It eased her occasional attacks of loneliness and homesickness to have someone to chatter to. She just hoped babies didn’t have total recall. She wouldn’t like to think that in twenty years’ time Ivan would throw it all back at her.

She took him out of the push-chair and strapped him into his slanting baby-bouncer to keep him safe while she raced down to get the supermarket bags.

She was trying to cut down her shopping trips as much as possible but she was limited by the amount that she could carry at any one time.

Hugging a limp paper sack under each arm, she slogged back up the stairs, going ever faster as she felt the paper fibres beginning to collapse.

When she reached the last landing she stopped to readjust her cargo and suddenly became aware of a swift, almost noiseless step behind her. She whirled around, just in time for the man hurrying up the stairs behind her to cannon straight into her burdened arms.

Anne let out a soft shriek as she felt one of the soggy sacks split completely and watched in horror as a cascade of groceries poured down Hunter Lewis’s chest. Fortunately they were all packaged goods and none broke open on impact, but Anne heard him swear under his breath as several cans bounced off his shoes.

There was a small silence punctuated by a staccato series of fading thumps as a can of baked beans rolled away down the stairs. Then Anne felt the bottom of the other bag begin to give and automatically clutched it tighter, one hand cupping the disintegrating packages at the same moment that Hunter reached forward with an impatient growl.

‘Allow me—’

‘No!’ Remembering the packet of disposable nappies resting just below the serrated rim of paper, Anne jerked the bag sideways, out of his reach, and the carton of eggs which was lying on top of the nappies tilted and slid off the slippery surface of plastic wrapping, the lid flying open and three of the eggs catapulting through the air to smash against Hunter’s chest.

‘Oh, no!’

They both watched the broken yolks bleed into the slimy whites and drip down Hunter’s tie. It was silk, by the look of it, pale blue with no pattern to hide the critical damage. His shirt had been cream.

‘Why am I not surprised?’ he rasped wearily.

‘Well, I guess that’s the price you pay for helping the environment,’ Anne said weakly, raising her eyes to meet his smouldering gaze. ‘The supermarket uses recycled paper bags rather than plastic—kinder to the environment but not as rainproof!’

‘Which environment? It’s obviously not mine,’ he bit out. ‘That makes it four shirts, I believe.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said hurriedly, envisaging her budget for the whole term going into his wardrobe. ‘That one will be right as rain if it’s washed straight away. It’s only egg!’

‘And the tie?’

‘I suppose I could pay to have it dry-cleaned,’ she said with a sigh, hoping he would gallantly refuse.

‘I’d like it back by Friday.’

She scowled at his black head as he bent down to pick up the fallen groceries. ‘If you’ll open your door I’ll put these in your kitchen.’

He wanted to go into her flat? Her eyes widened in dismay. ‘No! I mean, you just collect the things up. I’ll nip in and get a carton to put them in.’

She didn’t given him a chance to reply. She delivered his orders and turned tail, dropping several more packets in her wake as she scrambled up the last few stairs and jiggled her key in the lock. She shut and bolted the door behind her before dumping her burden on the kitchen counter. The nappy pack was virtually the only thing that hadn’t fallen out.

She grabbed one of the empty boxes left over from her move, making a quick, soothing sound to Ivan as she shot by him, and went through the same routine with the front door in reverse, making sure it was securely fastened before she joined Hunter Lewis on his haunches beside the neat stack of her goods.

‘If you give me your shirt I’ll wash it for you and get it back to you tomorrow,’ she offered awkwardly.

‘Thank you, but my wardrobe is depleted enough already. I’ll wash it myself by hand,’ he said, his hand pointedly brushing aside the thick braid that was leaking rainwater on to the contents of the open carton.

‘Suit yourself!’ Anne snapped, flicking the wet braid over her back.

‘I usually do.’

‘Why am I not surprised?’ she murmured, parodying his ironic first comment.

He didn’t answer, studying the side of a box of baby-rice with raised eyebrows. Uh-oh.

‘I happen to like it, OK?’ Anne snatched it out of his hand and stuffed it into the carton. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’

‘No. But I think you might. You must be even younger than you look,’ he said drily.

‘Just because I’m not impossibly cynical and trying to make everyone around me miserable, it doesn’t mean I’m a babe in arms!’ she said hotly.

‘So I see,’ he murmured, eyeing the formerly demure white shirt that was plastered by rain to her generous breasts. ‘Is that little homily supposed to be a jab at me?’

‘If the shoe fits!’

‘For a promising writer you have a very hackneyed turn of phrase.’

‘That’s because I save all the good stuff for my books,’ she told him tartly.

‘The good stuff?’ he echoed, his hard mouth kinking in mocking amusement. ‘Inelegant but succinct.’

‘Thank you for that critique, Professor,’ Anne said sarcastically as she straightened, grateful to have the heavy carton to hug to her chest. The way he had looked at her breasts had made her tingle uncomfortably.

‘Let me carry that for you.’

‘Thank you, but I’m quite capable,’ she said, starting up the few remaining steps.

‘At least give me your key so that you don’t have to put that down to open your door.’

‘I can manage,’ she told him, stopping at the top and waiting for him to move on.

He studied her stubborn expression. A muscle moved in his bluntly square jaw as he said through his teeth, ‘You really are the most incredibly…irritating woman…’

At least she had finally graduated to adulthood in his eyes! She grinned.

‘Oh, I can be a lot more irritating than this,’ she told him cheerfully. ‘See you later, Professor!’

‘Not if I see you first,’ he delighted her by growling with childish petulance as he stumped off in the direction of his own door. ‘And stop calling me Professor.’

‘Why? Does it make you feel your age?’ She wasn’t going to let him have the last word.

‘I’m only thirty-seven,’ he shot back, ramming his key into the deadlock that adorned the battered entrance to his flat.

‘Really?’ she said wickedly, squinting at him along the length of the hall. ‘You look much older. Maybe it’s just because you’re so surly—’

‘I am not surly!’

He was yelling. Anne beamed at him. ‘Don’t burst a boiler, Prof. I’m sure you’re utterly charming when you’re with people of your own generation…’

She was giggling as she bolted him out. It was rather risky of her to taunt him but she just couldn’t seem to help it. Something about him just seemed to beg her for a provoking response. She had never known a man whose emotions simmered so close to the surface. Her father and brothers were real men of the land who had an earthy sense of humour and were stoically good-natured. Anne could tease and provoke them and they would only laugh and brush her off like a pesky fly.

Hunter Lewis was definitely outside her experience and, as Anne wistfully informed Ivan over his puréed vegetables, experience was one of the things she had come to Auckland to obtain!

CHAPTER THREE

ANNE took a big breath before knocking on the door, her nervousness making her fist land a little harder than she had intended. She took another deep, unsteady breath as the door began to open and then nearly fell over at the sight of Hunter Lewis in a towel.

Much as she hated to admit it, he was very impressive, the bulky, well-defined muscles flowing over his shoulders into a deep chest, the sculpted power of which was evident even through the masking of dense, dark hair. He was certainly every inch a man, she thought as her eyes helplessly traced the inverted triangle of hair that tapered from a broad hand span between his masculine nipples to an enticing narrow line that dipped beneath the white towel insecurely hitched around lean hips. His belly was as taut and tanned as the rest of him and his long legs were strong and sinewy, smothered with the same silky-rough black hair that covered his chest. Patches of water glistened on his bare skin and glinted in his body hair, as if he had been interrupted in the process of drying himself.

‘Seen enough?’

She wondered wickedly what he would do if she said no. Hurriedly she tore her gaze away from the taut pull of towelling across his flanks and summoned all her meagre acting powers. She edged closer.

‘Uh, I made some pasta sauce and I thought you might like some…as a kind of thank-you—for helping me with my shopping the other day. And I have your tie here too, all cleaned and pressed.’ He had said he had wanted it by Friday and she hoped she would get Brownie points for delivering it a day early although his expression wasn’t encouraging.

She gave him a coolly restrained smile that she hoped was unthreatening and lifted the covered plastic con- tainer in one hand, offering his tie with the other. She had no intention of telling him that she had carefully washed and pressed it herself in clear defiance of its bossy care-tag. At the moment a dry-cleaning bill was effectively as far beyond her budget as a new silk tie would have been, so she’d figured she had nothing to lose.

He reached for the tie but made no attempt to accept the pasta sauce, and she took advantage of his sudden need to anchor his slipping towel and ducked under his arm to saunter into his flat.

‘Come in, why don’t you?’ he murmured ironically, turning to follow her.

‘Thanks, I will…just for a moment,’ she said cheerfully, as if he had uttered a gushing welcome and she was merely being polite.

The physical layout of his loft, she discovered to her intense interest, was virtually a mirror-image of her own, but there any resemblance ended. Here lived sinful luxury instead of artful practicality.

There was oatmeal carpet underfoot, so thick and soft that her sandalled feet sank down into it, and the walls were colour-washed a pale terracotta, dappled with either sponge or brush to produce a stippled effect that provided an interesting background for the gilt-framed paintings which lined the walls. Floor-to-ceiling wooden bookcases surrounded the familiar high, arched windows at one end and at the other was a huge, ornately goldframed mirror that took up almost the whole of the wall that backed on to her flat, effectively doubling the apparent length of the room, the reflection of the sky making it seem lighter and airier even now, with rain pouring down outside and dusk approaching. The dancer in Anne coveted that mirror immediately, while the lazy hedonist in her lusted after the butter-soft apricot leather of the squatly over-sized couch and chairs.

His kitchen was larger than hers, cleverly designed to encompass the leading edge of culinary technology, and as she put the plastic tub down on the marble bench Anne had the uneasy feeling that her economical but tasty recipe for pasta sauce might be somewhat out of its element. Rather as she was in her swirling home-made skirt and loose peasant blouse. Then her glance fell on the reason for her generosity and damped down her qualms.

‘All you have to do is heat this for…’ As she turned back from her spying mission she discovered that her instructions were being delivered to empty air. Hunter Lewis had disappeared with the same uncanny quietness with which he was prone to appear. She looked at the telephone on the kitchen wall and wondered if she dared take advantage of his absence, but decided that it would be unwise to antagonise him further than she already had. It was a major achievement just to have got inside his flat.

She moved to take a closer look at some of his paintings. Originals, of course—prints were probably beneath his dignity, she thought wryly—but his selection was an eclectic mix which suggested that they were chosen with the heart and eye rather than the dictates of an investment portfolio.

‘Don’t you like it?’

She jumped as Hunter materialised in the doorway beside the painting which she was studying with a frown. His bedroom, she surmised, and realised with a small hitch of her breathing that his cotton crew-necked shirt and unbleached linen trousers didn’t quite blot out the mental image of him in a towel.

She looked at the painting again. ‘No,’ she said bluntly, before she remembered that she was supposed to be buttering him up and began hurriedly back-tracking. ‘Th-that is, I don’t really know much about art so I really can’t—’

‘I didn’t ask for artistic criticism. I asked whether you liked it.’

‘Does it matter?’ she hedged, wondering belatedly whether he might have painted it himself. She tried to squint at the signature without being too obvious.

‘No, it isn’t mine. I have no skill with a paintbrush whatsoever. So you’re not going to be insulting my talent by telling me you don’t like my taste in art…nor, I hope, my intelligence with polite lies,’ he added silkily as she nibbled at her lower lip.

‘All right, I loathe it,’ she was neatly trapped into admitting sullenly. ‘I can’t make head or tail of it and I don’t like the colours. Satisfied?’ Her eyebrows almost flew off her face as she regarded him haughtily.

‘Completely. Actually, it was painted by my mother.’

Anne closed her eyes. When she opened them again gold flecks were smouldering in the blue irises at the discovery that he was laughing at her. ‘My commiserations to your father,’ she said insultingly.

‘My parents were divorced when I was still at primary school. My father’s dead now, but he shared your dislike of my mother’s art.’

Anne gave up and allowed the vivid blush of remorse that had been lurking under her temper to swallow her up.

‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. Why did her good intentions towards this man always go up in smoke? ‘I’m sure your mother is a very good artist—’

‘The international art world seems to think so,’ Hunter interrupted blandly. ‘She’s very well-known. In fact, I had to pay several thousand dollars for that painting that you find so unlikeable.’

Anne was instantly outraged on his behalf. ‘She made you pay for one of her paintings? Her own son?’

‘Only indirectly. I bought it retail from a gallery. My mother often gives me a painting for my birthday or for Christmas. But when I asked for this particular one she refused—sold it outright to the gallery instead…’

‘Why?’

Anne knew all about artistic temperament. It was prone to flights of illogic that could verge on the ridiculous —which she and Ivan could thank for their current sojourn in the city. In Katlin’s view the artistic ends justified the means. It was left to Anne to endure the pangs of conscience suffered by less talented mortals.

She had smothered her deepest doubts about what they were doing by insisting on an absolute minimum of outright lying, enrolling at the university under her own name and simply saying, ‘Call me Anne,’ whenever someone addressed her as Katlin. It usually worked—they accepted the correction politely, without question… except for this man, of course.

But it was tough. Not least because she still worried about whether she was doing the right thing for Katlin and Ivan in the long term.

Anne herself could never envisage a situation where she would put her career ahead of the needs of her own baby, but neither could she condemn Katlin for being different. Her pregnancy had been a very difficult one and mother and child had almost died during Ivan’s premature birth.

Afterwards, when Katlin had taken the baby back to the tiny, isolated cabin on the coast that she called home, she had found to her horror that the words that had once flowed so easily from her pen had completely dried up. With another’s needs taking precedence over her own she could no longer achieve the necessary physical and mental peace that she required for her writing. She had stubbornly resisted Anne’s pleas to contact the baby’s father.

Anne, who had stayed with her sister to help her through the first month of solo parenthood, had been alarmed on later visits by her sister’s deepening list-lessness. She had been thrilled when the recipient of this year’s Markham Grant had been finally announced, thinking that it might be just what Katlin needed to bounce her out of her slough of despond.

It had, but not in the way that Anne had fondly en-visaged. She had been a great deal less thrilled with her sister’s brilliant solution to the problem of her ongoing writer’s block but, after discreetly consulting Katlin’s doctor about his concerns for his patient’s mental and physical health, she had reluctantly allowed herself to be persuaded.

Hunter was regarding her morose expression thoughtfully. ‘My mother doesn’t like this painting either. She regards it as a depressing aberration in her abstract style.’

Anne perked up at the realisation that her faux pas hadn’t been quite so bad after all. ‘Then why did you buy it?’

His square-cut mouth pulled into a mocking curve. ‘To annoy her. She lives in a rarefied environment of more or less undiluted praise these days. She sometimes needs reminding that she’s as human as the rest of us.’

‘A very expensive way to make your point,’ said Anne disapprovingly, thinking that Hunter Lewis evidently didn’t have to struggle along on a mere lecturer’s income, to be able to indulge such an expensive whim. ‘And not very filial either.’

‘Do I take it you believe that family loyalty should override other ethical considerations…like personal integrity or honesty, or expecting people to accept responsibility for their own actions?’

Anne’s eyes skated away from his. He was speaking idly and at random, she reminded herself. ‘Blood is thicker than water,’ she muttered uneasily.

‘Ah, yes, I forgot you have a cliché for every occasion. So you believe that the rights of the individual are paramount over the rights of the state?’

‘I didn’t come here for a political discussion,’ she said gruffly, feeling guiltier than ever before.

‘No, that’s right.’ He strolled over to the kitchen and lifted the lid off her pasta sauce, giving her a cynical smile as he bent to inhale the smell of the contents. ‘You came to deliver the poor bachelor a wholesome, home-cooked meal—purely out of the goodness of your heart…A bit heavy-handed with the dried basil, weren’t you?’

‘I’ll have you know I only use fresh herbs when I cook and there’s exactly the right amount of basil in there,’ Anne said, infuriated by his casual criticism. ‘I’ve made that sauce hundreds of times and no one’s ever com-plained before…’

‘Perhaps country palates aren’t as discriminating as city-bred ones—’

Anne said a rude word, then blushed when his eyebrows rose.

‘What makes you such an expert anyway?’ she said defensively.

‘I was taught classic cuisine by an Italian chef.’

Anne resisted the urge to snatch back her modest offering. ‘You took a cooking course?’

‘Not as such. Maria gave me lessons purely out of the goodness of her heart.’

Irony threaded the innocent statement and the wicked glint of anticipation in his black eyes warned Anne not to make the obvious mistake of enquiring further into Maria’s identity. She had a feeling that he would enjoy embarrassing her by telling her that it was not only as a chef that the woman had excelled.

‘Naturally you don’t have to eat it if it’s not up to your impeccable standard,’ she said stiffly.

‘No doubt I’ll manage to choke it down.’

She felt a very strong desire to empty the sauce over his supercilious head. The amount of best-quality beef mince that she had used in the sauce would have lasted her three meals.

‘Oh, please, don’t suffer on my account,’ she snapped.

‘I won’t,’ he assured her smoothly, and there was a small silence.

She sighed. It would appear that she was going to have to grovel after all, since her bribery had patently failed to charm. She caught her plait over her shoulder and began fiddling with the end as the silence lengthened.

‘By the way, while you’re here…’

‘Yes?’ She brightened, her eyes shifting from gloomy hazel to hopeful blue at his apparent tentativeness. Perhaps he wanted to ask a small favour of her, thereby enabling her casually to suggest a trade!

‘Perhaps you’d like to use my telephone?’

‘Telephone?’ she echoed blankly, hoping her shock would be mistaken for polite surprise.

‘That is why you’re here, isn’t it?’ His voice was a strange mixture of gravel and silk.

‘Whatever makes you say that?’ she said bravely.

‘The way you keep sneaking glances at it. The phone box down the street has been vandalised, I noticed yesterday. And now here you are, oozing charm to a surly brute—’

‘I never called you a brute!’ she protested weakly. ‘A brute is unreasoning and unintelligent—’

‘You must think me both if you expected to fool me so easily, after making such a point of avoiding me like the plague since you moved in—’

‘Since you’ve so kindly and unexpectedly offered, I may as well take advantage of your good temper,’ interrupted Anne loftily. She marched over to the wall and lifted up the receiver. ‘You know, you’re a very mistrustful man,’ she said as she dialled the number. ‘If you remember it was your

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