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A thrill of dumbfounded horror turned her blood to ice.
Adam!
The leaf fluttered to the grass as her hand flew to her mouth.
He noticed her at the very instant of her appalled recognition, and for a moment they were both motionless, staring at each other.
Even at a hundred metres she could read his body language. His back stiffened in surprise and then his torso tilted forward in puzzlement. He moved right up to the open window and she began to edge backwards into the undergrowth, praying that he wouldn’t realise who it was that he was seeing. Surely in her summery skirt, short-sleeved blouse and simple flat shoes she was a far cry from the sophisticated Eve whom he had tumbled in his bed.
The phone still plastered to the side of his head, he suddenly thrust his shoulders out of the window.
‘Hey—you!’
Regan’s body jerked. She took another step back. No—this nightmare couldn’t be happening. Not here—not now!
‘Hey! Don’t go!’ To her horror he dropped the phone from his ear and put one long leg over the windowsill. ‘Eve?’
Oh, God!
‘Eve, is that you?’
He was already out on the verandah, striding along to the wooden steps. Regan whirled around and blindly fled, crashing through the shrubbery in a desperate attempt to put as much space between them as possible before those long, powerful legs hit the grass running. Even in full business-kit, with a one hundred-metre handicap, he could probably still sprint her down on a flat track.
Fortunately she was small enough to scuttle through chinks in the tangled undergrowth that would have snagged larger bodies, but as she got deeper into the trees she could still hear him thrashing somewhere behind her, hoarsely yelling at her to stop, pausing now and then in his pursuit to gauge her direction.
When she almost ran slap-bang into the sturdy trunk of an old macrocarpa pine, top-heavy with needle-like green foliage, she let instinct take hold and shinned up the untrimmed branches until she reached a high fork into which she could safely wedge herself, out of sight of the ground.
None too soon. She clutched at her perch, the rough bark pricking her cheek and bare forearms as she flattened herself against the trunk, holding her breath as dried pine needles crunched under the pounding feet below.
‘Eve? Dammit—answer me—is that you?’
To her dismay he halted almost directly beneath her, breathing heavily. Thank God she wasn’t wearing anything bright that might give her away if he thought to look up. She felt dizzy, and suddenly remembered to breathe. She didn’t want to faint and flatten him with the proof of her presence.
‘What the hell…!’ he muttered to himself. ‘Look—whoever you are, you’re not in trouble for trespassing, if that’s what you’re worried about!’ he called, his voice rasping with controlled impatience. ‘Come on out—I’m not going to hurt you…’
He fell silent until the hush of leaves stirring in the gentle seaward breeze was shattered by the muffled shrill of a cellphone. An angry curse floated up into the boughs as he ripped the phone out of the inside pocket of his buttoned jacket.
‘Yes! What…? No—I put down the phone and got distracted for a moment…No, no, of course it’s not—you’re right; we need to get this settled now…’ Her eyes hunted for the sight of him as he wheeled in a half-circle one last time and then began retracing his steps. ‘Sorry…we’ll pick up at the clause we left off and go through it point by point…just let me put my hands on that contract again—’
Regan remained frozen for a few minutes after she had listened to his retreat. When she was certain that his words weren’t just a cunning ruse to flush her out, she uncramped her limbs and began to climb down with a great deal more care than she had tackled the ascension, thankful that her skirt was cut on an A-line rather than tight around her knees and that she had no pantyhose to snag.
She hit the ground with a groan of relief and bent to brush the bark and twigs off her clothes and legs, and straighten the seams of her skirt. She was retucking her blouse into her waistband when a prickle on the back of her neck made her swing around, her heart pattering like that of a baby bird who’d fallen out of its nest.
A thin, gangly youth, with hair the colour of used rope straggling to his shoulders and round, wire-framed glasses that accentuated the boniness of his face, stood watching her from the bushes.
Regan nervously flicked her hair behind her ears and pinned on a reassuring smile. ‘Hello. Where did you come from?’
And more importantly—how long had he been there? She bit her lip. Had Adam grabbed a handy accomplice for the chase?
He didn’t smile back at her, his brown eyes unnervingly intense. ‘Hi.’
‘Do you live here?’ she asked brightly, scraping at the sticky residue of pine-sap on her reddened palms.
He pushed his hands into the pockets of his baggy khaki shorts, hunching his thin shoulders under the plain white T-shirt. ‘Nah.’
He looked at the scratches on her legs. ‘What were you doing up that tree?’
Her mind went blank. ‘I…thought I saw an interesting bird,’ she improvised. Heavens, how low she had sunk—now she was even lying to children! Although judging from the squeak and scrape of his breaking voice he wasn’t really a child any more. In his early teens, she estimated.
‘What kind of bird?’
‘Uh, I don’t know…that’s why I wanted to get a closer look.’ She tried another smile.
‘Didn’t you know someone was calling for you?’
‘No—were they?’ She rounded her eyes innocently. ‘I must be hard of hearing. Who was it—do you know?’ she asked, hoping she might find out enough to plan herself a disaster strategy.
His light brown eyes looked innocently back. ‘Big or small?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The bird you saw, was it big or small?’ he wanted to know.
‘Big,’ she said firmly.
‘What colour was it?’
‘Well…brown, I suppose.’
‘Light brown or dark brown?’
‘Both,’ she said desperately. ‘Sort of speckled.’
‘Flying or perching?’
‘It flew and landed in the tree, then it perched,’ she said through clenched teeth.
‘What colour legs did it have?’
She looked at him incredulously. ‘Who do you think you are, James Bond?’ she joked.
‘Are you talking about the ornithologist or the spy named after him?’ he responded, and suddenly she knew that the weedy adolescent look was extremely deceptive.
She had tossed him a condescending comment, expecting its subtlety to be totally over his head, and he had fielded it with precocious dexterity. He knew very well she had been stringing him a line because he had been the one spinning it into a noose!
She folded her arms defensively across her chest. ‘I’m surprised anyone of your generation knows where Ian Fleming got the idea for his character’s name.’
He shifted his weight, sifting his battered sneakers