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CHAPTER TWO
AFTER a restless, dream-hounded night, Ianthe drank two cups of tea and forced herself to eat a slice of toast before driving down to the nearest town, the sleepy little port of Dargaville on the wide reaches of the Northern Wairoa River.
When she’d stocked up on the groceries that weren’t available in the small shop at the motor camp, she bought a couple of magazines and tried hard to resist several new paperbacks. Succumbing, she appeased her conscience by buying another four from the reject rack at the library.
About halfway home she saw a Range Rover pushed sideways into the ditch. A familiar figure stood beside it, surveying the damage.
She almost put her foot down and accelerated past Mark the frogmarcher, but in some odd way his behaviour had formed a tenuous bond between them, so she drew in behind and got out. ‘Hello,’ she said coolly. ‘Are you all right?’
Mark stood unsmiling. ‘I’m fine.’
Wondering why she’d bothered, Ianthe persevered, ‘Do you want me to call in at the Kaihu garage for you?’
‘Everything’s under control,’ he told her, ‘but you could do me a favour—I’ve got frozen goods, and although they’re well-wrapped they aren’t going to last. Would you drop them off at the house?’
He must have decided she was relatively harmless. Fighting down an odd sense of darkening destiny, Ianthe said crisply, ‘Yes, I’ll do that. Will you need a ride back after the Rover’s been towed to the garage?’
‘No.’
‘All right,’ she said, still feeling that she was burning unknown bridges behind her. ‘Hand over the frozen stuff and I’ll deliver it.’
Five minutes later she was on her way, with a large plastic bag in the boot of her car and a frown pulling at the smooth skin above her brows. If she’d had any common sense at all she’d have driven on past, but she was too imbued with the New Zealand instinct to help.
And now she had to beard the lion in his den—no, the hawk in his nest.
Perhaps hawks had eyries, like eagles, she thought with a faint smile, flicking down the visor as the sun shimmered like a mirage on the tarseal in front of her. A hawk in a summer sky, proud and fierce and lethal…
And handsome. That disturbing familiarity tugging at her mind was probably instinctive female homage to an ideal of masculine beauty. The arrangement of his features pleased some integral pattern set up by the human brain so she recognised him as good-looking.
Logical, when you thought it through.
A too-fast swerve around the next corner banished the enigma of her unwilling host of the previous day. From then on she concentrated, driving past the other three lakes and the locked gate that separated the reserve from the fourth lake in its nest of pines, along a road with farms on one side and the sombre green of the plantation on the other, until she made a right-angle turn over a cattlestop onto a very ordinary drive. It didn’t look as though a man of mystery lived at the end of it.
As she drew up under that splendid porte-cochère every cell in Ianthe’s body thrummed with a hidden excitement, heating her skin and sharpening her senses.
She got out and rang the doorbell to the accompaniment of the busy, high-pitched chattering of a fantail fluttering amongst the gold-spotted aurelia leaves. Instead of the rich golden brown of the common variety, this one was sooty, with a breast of dark chocolate, the comical white brow and collar missing. Ianthe wasn’t a bird person, but she knew enough about the small, cheerful birds to be aware that black fantails were unusual in the North Island.
Its complete lack of fear and its sombre colouring shouldn’t have lifted the hair on the back of her neck. Although she was aware of the bird’s Maori reputation as a harbinger of death, she was a scientist, for heaven’s sake. Yet, as she stood before the big wooden door, the fantail seemed like a magic messenger, the emissary from another world who summons the hero to a quest.
How’s that for logical, professional thinking? she mocked. Darwin would be proud of you.
With a shrug she turned to ring the bell again, but before her finger touched it the door opened silently and the man who had haunted her sleep looked at her.
Something flared in the light eyes, a response she couldn’t read; it was instantly replaced by an aloof withdrawal.
Stung, she summoned a glib professional smile. ‘I have some frozen groceries that your—chauffeur asked me to deliver.’
The frown remained, albeit reduced to a pleat of the black brows. His eyes revealed nothing but shimmering silver depths, cold and lucent. ‘Thank you.’
He walked beside her to the car. ‘Which are the frozen goods? I’ll get them.’ Straightening with the plastic bag, he told her, ‘Mark got pushed into the ditch by a truck that was avoiding a dog. Thank you for being a good samaritan.’
So he’d known she was on her way. She said lightly, ‘You can’t compare delivering a parcel of frozen peas to rescuing a man who fell among thieves. I’d better be off. I hope all goes well with the Rover.’
Ianthe couldn’t read any emotion in his expression or his tone. Silence stretched between them, taut, obscurely equivocal.
Evenly, without emphasis, he said, ‘Come and have something to drink. You look hot and tired and thirsty.’
A flicker of movement from the little fantail caught Ianthe’s eye. Perched on the topmost twig of the leafy plant, the bird spread its tail feathers, black plumage a startling contrast to green and gold leaves. Round, bright eyes seemed to fix onto Ianthe, insistent, commanding.
It was stupid to give any significance to such a tiny creature, seen almost every day in New Zealand. It would be even more stupid to accept this invitation.
Yet some impulse, a heartbeat away from refusal, changed her mind. Slowly she said, ‘That sounds wonderful. I am hot and tired and thirsty.’
He smiled, and her heart flipped. ‘But perhaps we should be introduced first,’ he said, and held out his free hand. ‘I’m Alex Considine.’
She knew that name! She just couldn’t place it. On a subtly exhaled breath she said, ‘I’m Ianthe Brown,’ and with a kind of resignation put her hand into his.
The moment it closed over hers a wildfire response stormed through her, drowning out common sense and caution. Dizzily she thought that the handshake was a claiming, a symbolic gesture of possession taken and granted.
Ridiculous, she thought, panicking. Utterly ridiculous!
Possibly she jerked her hand away, but he let it go as though women who shivered when he touched them weren’t uncommon in his life.
It probably happened all the time, she thought, and said inanely, ‘How do you do?’
‘How do you do, Miss Brown?’ he said, amusement deepening his voice. ‘Come in. Is there anything you want to bring with you? Some frozen goods, perhaps, to add to mine in the freezer?’
Damn! She should have dropped her meat off on the way here. But, no, she’d been so excited at the prospect of seeing him again she’d driven mindlessly past the turn-off. ‘Actually, yes, there is,’ she admitted, grateful to be able to stoop and lift her parcel from the car.
Adding it to his, he motioned her to go ahead. Chin tilted, she obeyed, saying with a casual smile, ‘Miss Brown sounds incredibly formal. I answer better to Ianthe.’
His lashes drooped for a micro-second. ‘Then you must call me Alex,’ he said, and showed her into the sitting room with its wonderful view of the beach and the lake. ‘If you don’t mind waiting, I’ll put these in the freezer.’
He was not, Ianthe thought as she walked across to the open doors and squinted at the violent contrast