‘What a waste,’ Andrea mourned. ‘He could be making the lives of all young women—and a good few older ones, I bet—so much brighter if he just smiled at the camera occasionally. We could all practise swooning.’
‘Coffee’s ready,’ Lecia said, cutting into her friend’s flight of fancy as she carried the tray across to the low table in front of the sofa.
She steered the conversation away from Keane Paget, away from anything personal, her nerves tightening when Peter admired her flat, congratulating her on her clever design for the conversion of the old factory into apartments. He was amusing and intelligent and often perceptive, but his open desire to know her better sawed across emotions already fretted by the stranger with her face.
With great relief she heard Andrea redeem her earlier tactlessness by jumping to her feet and saying, ‘Time to go! Come on, Peter, we’ll share a taxi, shall we?’
Reluctantly, after an appealing glance at Lecia, he nodded, trailing behind Andrea as she strode off towards the lift.
Peter, Lecia decided when she’d waved them goodbye and locked the door behind them, looked like becoming a bit of problem. Unfortunately he was really a nice man, and she just didn’t have it in her to be rude to nice men.
‘Although you should have learned that lesson well and truly...’ she muttered, remembering another nice man she hadn’t been able to turn down. Poor Barry.
Well, that had been seven years ago. She’d grown up a lot since then, and as soon as possible she’d make sure Peter understood that they had no future together.
After she’d showered off the sunscreen and sweat she pulled on a loose cotton wrap striped in her favourite peach and cream, colours that went so well with her hair and clear ivory skin.
Keane Paget would look good in them too.
Wry amusement softened the wide curves of her mouth as she imagined that very masculine face and form decked out in such gentle, pretty shades.
The amusement faded as she stared at herself in the mirror. He’d cope; he looked as though he could cope with anything! He knew what colours suited him too; he’d been wearing a cream shirt with trousers the same intense dark blue as his eyes.
At the memory of those eyes something hot and tight knotted in the pit of Lecia’s stomach. ‘You’re an idiot,’ she told her reflection, slathering on moisturiser before using the hairdrier.
Only then did she go into her bedroom and take his card from her bag.
It was severe, restrained and conventional—a personal one, not a business affair. Keane Paget lived across the harbour bridge in the marine suburb of Takapuna, and from the street name his house probably overlooked Rangitoto, the dormant volcanic island that gave Auckland its distinctive skyline.
Money, she thought, and put the card down.
She was horrified at her disappointment when he didn’t ring the next day. Her Christmas and New Year had been so hectically social she’d decided to keep just for herself the January weekend when Auckland celebrated its status as a province of New Zealand.
However, in spite of having looked forward to it for weeks, she found Sunday echoing emptily, with yet another holiday on Monday to live through. The usually busy streets were empty and simmering with heat; everyone who could get there had deserted Auckland for the country or the beach.
Lecia opened every window in the flat, watered her plants and went down into the communal garden in search of inspiration. She’d been asked to supply sketches for a house needed by a vigorous middle-aged woman who’d bought a cross-leased section in the heart of one of the more expensive suburbs.
For such a decisive person, the prospective client had few ideas on what she needed beyond two bedrooms and space close by for a potting shed. Lecia played around with sketches, fitting rough floor plans into the site, knowing that if the woman decided to commission her she’d choose the house that allowed her most scope for a splendid garden and time to spend in it.
Absorbed by the challenge, Lecia spent hours in the lounger beneath the jacaranda, doodling and scribbling.
When she wasn’t thinking with a pencil in her hand she cleaned out two cupboards, went to the gym, ate dinner with her godson—a twenty-month-old charmer called Hugh, who spent the night with her—and delivered him to his parents the next morning, brushing aside their thanks for the opportunity to have had a glorious evening on the town.
Keane Paget still didn’t contact her.
And she did not ring him.
By the end of the week, Lecia had given up hope of hearing from the man. Not that it was hope, she told herself firmly on the too-frequent occasions when she recalled that proud, angular face. No, she certainly wasn’t hopeful, just curious, because she’d never previously experienced anything like that moment of obstinate, elemental identification. For a second she’d been wrenched out of time and space, as though she and Keane Paget had fused together.
During the hot, humid days of late summer Lecia tried to persuade herself that the half-hidden, inchoate feeling was a simple sense of kinship—and that the primal recognition, the compulsion of affinity, had not been darkened by a shadowy foreboding that still imprisoned her in a nebulous enthrallment.
Each lazy, sultry evening she thought of Keane Paget as she drifted off to sleep; she woke, tense and aching after nights of restless, urgent dreams, with his name and arrogant face stamped so strongly on her mind that she couldn’t banish either.
And sometimes during the day the dreams she couldn’t recall resurfaced as fleeting images, clear and bright as miniatures, each erotic glimpse firing her skin and drying her mouth.
The telephone rang early one morning while she was halfway through toast and Earl Grey tea. After swallowing some toast in such a rush it scraped her throat, she said, ‘Hello.’
‘Lecia, it’s Keane Paget. I’d like to take you out to lunch today if that’s possible.’
‘I’ll see,’ she said, not even thinking of refusing as she scrabbled through her diary. ‘Yes, I can do lunch.’
‘Good. Can you manage the South Seas at twelve-thirty?’
She had an appointment at three, so that gave her plenty of time. ‘No problem,’ she said, and because she must have sounded curt, added, ‘I’ll look forward to it.’
‘I’ll see you then,’ he said, and hung up.
Short and to the point, she thought, replacing the receiver.
A bubble of—what? Elation? Excitement? Apprehension? No, an unnerving mixture of all three—expanded in her stomach. Lecia looked down at her fingers. Long and tense and—seeking—they were curled across the plastic handpiece as though she couldn’t bear to break contact.
Only once before in her life had she been so intensely conscious of her physicalness, of the nerves and cells, the atoms and electrons that made up the body she took for granted. Only once before had she been seduced by an inner force that bewitched her with a compulsi ve siren song,
