ability to summon waiters from the void fascinated Lecia. Perhaps it was because Keane was well-known in the restaurant and a good customer.
Perhaps, but she thought wryly that it probably happened whenever Keane Paget looked up. He had presence, the sort of aura that caught people’s attention.
Paying for the meal took little time, and when they rose Keane once more took Lecia’s arm. Scoffing that the tingle of electricity that leapt from nerve-end to nerve-end when he touched her was not only improbable but a cliché, she allowed herself to be steered across the Italian tiled floor towards the bright sunlight outside.
From somewhere close by a man said something and laughed.
Lecia felt the colour drain from her skin in a clammy rush. Blinking, she forced her gaze in the direction of the voice.
Of course it wasn’t Anthony. A perfectly strange man with a blond moustache leaned across a table and lifted a woman’s hand to his mouth. Anthony had been dark and sophisticated, and he’d no more have kissed her hand in public than he’d have taken his shoes off.
As she registered the sweet rush of deliverance Lecia realised that it wouldn’t have mattered if the stranger had been Anthony. She no longer loved him—had never loved the real Anthony, the married man whose mistress she’d been for a few short weeks until someone had told her about his wife.
Without missing a step, she walked on.
‘Are you all right?’ Keane asked, the sensuously rough timbre in his voice suddenly transmuted to harshness.
Remotely she said, ‘I’m fine, thank you.’
But she wasn’t, because when he said, ‘I’ll drop you off,’ she nodded and thanked him and went into the parking building with him.
In the car, Keane asked, ‘What happened?’ He didn’t switch on the engine, so the words hung heavily in the dim quietness.
Lecia drew in a painful breath. ‘It was just—I was surprised.’
‘Is he the man you were engaged to?’
‘No!’ And before he could probe further she said aloofly. ‘I’m surprised your detective didn’t discover that Barry lives in Wellington now.’
Keane ignored that. ‘Then who was the man who laughed inside the restaurant?’
‘A total stranger. I’ve never seen him before in my life.’
‘But he reminded you of someone you’re afraid of.’
‘No!’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’m not afraid of anyone.’
Only of herself. Of this weakness that made her fall in lust with a certain sort of man.
‘Do you usually go white so dramatically whenever a man laughs?’ Keane touched her cheek. ‘You’re still cold,’ he added judicially, his sharp, perceptive eyes relentless.
His hand slid to the pulse beneath her ear, lingering there for a second. Lecia’s breath clogged her throat so that she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think above the fast chatter of her heartbeat in her ears.
Clenching her jaw, she froze. What prevented her from seeking comfort by turning her face into that warm, strong hand was not willpower; it was an understanding, based on intuition rather than reason, that Keane Paget would take swift advantage of any surrender, however symbolic.
When he pulled his hand away she felt bereft, cold, aching for something she couldn’t even name.
‘Clearly whoever you mistook him for was the last person you wanted to see,’ Keane said aloofly.
Rallying, Lecia told him, ‘He reminded me of somene I disliked.’
Keane must have decided that he didn’t want to get any further involved, for he didn’t press her.
However, after starting the vehicle and avoiding a car that had stalled in the middle of the road, he said thoughtfully, ‘I find it rather difficult to imagine any circumstances that would shock you to that extent. I thought you were going to faint.’
‘Hardly. And, like most other people, I have an occasional skeleton walled up in the past.’
‘Not entirely forgotten.’ Buried beneath the level voice, like hidden rocks in a stream, was anger.
Taken aback, Lecia deliberately stilled her nervous hands and stared out of the side window.
The harbour danced under the summer sun; sails flew above it, white and rainbow-coloured against the low peninsula that ended in the naval base at Devonport. Behind it, separated by a narrow channel, brooded the forest-covered slopes of Rangitoto, the last little volcano to emerge on the isthmus. That had happened only a few hundred years ago, and geologists expected more to thrust up from the hot spot that lurked a hundred kilometres or so beneath Auckland.
Not in her time, Lecia fervently hoped. She felt as though she was sitting over that hot spot right then.
Keane observed, ‘I suppose it was an affair.’
‘I’m sure that if you had a sister she’d tell you to mind your own business.’ She tried to make her voice amused rather than tense, but didn’t think she’d succeeded.
He’d come too close to the truth, and she couldn’t bear him to learn how stupid and utterly naïve she’d once been. Lecia’s mouth twisted in derision. She’d never thought she’d be glad of Anthony’s sordid discretion, but at least it meant there were no records for anyone to paw through.
‘I rather wish you were my sister,’ Keane said, halting the car outside the entrance to her block.
Of course—his private detective would have told him where she lived.
The hard angles of Keane’s face were much more pronounced, and there was an unsettling watchfulness in the compelling eyes—eyes the colour of the sheen on a gun barrel, Lecia thought suddenly, and shivered, because he’d admitted that she wasn’t the only one fighting the dark temptation of desire.
‘Yes, you’d be much more comfortable as a brother,’ she said quietly, formally. ‘Thank you for lunch; I enjoyed it very much.’
Dark brows pulled together. ‘I’ll come up with you,’ he said.
Shaking her head, Lecia opened the door. ‘There’s no need, I’m perfectly all right. Goodbye.’ And she got out, closed the door firmly behind her, and walked across to the entrance of the apartment block without once looking back.
Nevertheless, she knew that Keane waited until she got to the two shallow steps before he drove away.
Lecia headed straight across the foyer and out into the garden, collapsing on a seat beneath the jacaranda tree.
That had been a nasty moment. Odd that although she no longer cared for Anthony at all she couldn’t get over this sickening guilt.
Staring at the starry flowers of the summer jasmine that draped itself eagerly over a nearby pergola, inhaling the sweet scent drifting on the humid air, she tried
