frowned, then remembered that as Mrs Firth had only moved north a month ago the last warrant would have been issued in Taupo, a good six hours’ drive southwards. Where, she thought feverishly, dragging her gaze away from the muscled contours of Kane’s backside and thighs, she wished she was at this very moment. Except that Taupo was no longer her home.
She said, ‘That’s all right—I’ve got shopping to do.’
‘OK, drop it off, then.’
Kane stood up. She handed the phone back and smiled with what she hoped was cool and impersonal friendliness. ‘Thank you,’ she said again, ignoring Lucky’s deep barking from inside the house.
‘You’ve got ragwort growing on the verge,’ he said crisply.
Emma bristled; she’d seen the bright yellow flowers in incompetent farmers’ paddocks and was well aware that it was a vile pest, poisonous to sheep as well as smothering good grass. ‘Where?’
He pointed out a small rosette of leaves. ‘I’ll send someone down to spray it.’
‘I’ll dig it out.’
‘It would be a waste of time. In fact it would make matters worse because you can never get all the roots, and each one left in the ground sends up another shoot. Unfortunately spraying is the only way to kill it. Don’t worry—it’s as much to my advantage to see that it’s dealt with as it is to Mrs Firth’s. I don’t want to have to conduct a mop-up operation on my own property.’
Emma’s gaze flew to the paddocks on the other side of the road. Smooth and vigorously green, they had the opulent air of good husbandry.
‘I don’t suppose you do,’ she said. ‘Thank you. Mrs Firth will be very grateful when she comes back.’
‘I gather you’re house-sitting for her,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ She smiled politely. ‘Dog-sitting, really. Babe pines in kennels, and Mrs Firth thought this would be less stressful for her.’
‘Obviously you know her well.’
He certainly chose the straightest and most direct route to get information. Whipping up resentment, because it smothered more complex emotions she didn’t want to examine, Emma explained aloofly, ‘Until Mrs Firth came up here she lived next door to me.’
‘So you’re from Taupo.’
‘Yes.’ She was not going to tell him that Taupo was no longer her home; when she left Parahai she’d be going to a new job and a new life in Hamilton.
‘And how do you enjoy being nanny to a couple of dogs?’ he asked, smiling.
Amusement turned his eyes to pure, glinting gold, Emma registered dazedly. And that smile! Although it didn’t soften the hard framework of his face, it transformed his powerful male charisma into a potent sexuality.
‘Very much,’ she said, using the words to distract her from the intensity of her response. ‘Babe’s a darling, and Lucky—well, Rottweilers are very determined animals, so they need guidance and firm training, otherwise they believe they’re the leaders of the pack. Then they can become dangerous because they see their job as protecting the others in the pack and enforcing discipline. Lucky has to understand that in his pack he’s down at the bottom. He takes orders; he doesn’t give them.’
‘Can you make him do that?’
At the note of scepticism in his question, Emma lifted her round chin. ‘Yes,’ she said with complete confidence. ‘As any nanny will tell you, it’s just a matter of training and praise, training and praise until eventually he gets the idea.’
‘And what training do you have for this?’ he asked, looking down at her with unreadable eyes.
‘I’m a registered vet nurse,’ she told him coolly, ‘and
I’ve done a lot of work with a man who breeds dogs for obedience trials. I’ve known Lucky since he was six weeks old, and I can handle him because he really wants to please me.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ he said, his voice somehow goading.
Acutely and suspiciously aware of the breeze lifting her curls, the sun’s golden caress on her skin, the way the light emphasised the rugged strength of Kane Talbot’s features, Emma said, ‘Dogs usually do want to please,’ trying to cut off the conversation without making it seem obvious.
Foolishly, she looked him straight in the eyes.
She’d heard the clichés—‘my heart stood still,’ friends had told her, or, ‘I sizzled right down to my toes.’
She’d never thought to experience that sort of reaction to any man. Yet when she met Kane Talbot’s gaze she fell headfirst into topaz fire; alien sensations scorched down her backbone and she stiffened at the clutch of an unbidden hunger in the pit of her stomach.
Mercifully, a renewed fusillade of barks from the house dragged her back from that dangerous brink.
Twisting away, she blinked several times at the silver hood of Mrs Firth’s car to clear her sight. ‘I’d better get going,’ she said—how strange that her voice was perfectly steady—‘before Lucky decides to break a window to rescue me.’
It was a stupid thing to say, and to his credit Kane didn’t pick her up on it. Instead he said, ‘One day you must tell me how he managed to acquire a name like that.’
She slid into the car, realising only when she’d finished clicking on the seatbelt that he held the door for her. ‘I’ll do that,’ she said, nodding at a point just over his left shoulder.
‘If you wait, I’ll go ahead and show you the way to the garage.’
A little too sharply she countered, ‘That’s very kind of you, but if you tell me where it is you won’t need to bother.’ She managed to produce a smile. ‘It must be difficult to get lost in Parahai.’
‘Impossible. Turn left at the crossroads. The workshop is on the right about three hundred metres past it.’
‘Thank you.’
Her breath sighed out as he closed the door and stood back to let her drive on.
Accelerating down the road, she thought with real gratitude that she wasn’t likely to see much of him. According to Mrs Firth he had interests in Australia and North America, so he was often out of the country.
Which was just as well, because he didn’t appear to be attacked by the same treacherous weakness that still quickened her pulses. His hard, angular face hadn’t changed, and there’d been no answering glitter in the glacial depths of those eyes. Naturally, because he was in love with another woman. Since all of her friends who had fallen in lust had assured her that it was mutual, a meeting of desires across a crowded room, this had to be a crush rather than lust. She’d get over it.
And it had better happen soon, she thought, noticing that his car was already in her rearview mirror. Apart from anything else, the physical manifestations were embarrassing and extravagant
And scary. She’d never
