now begun to throb, and she knew that the only way to keep it from getting worse was to lie down. ‘All right,’ she said reluctantly, adding, ‘Thank you very much.’
‘It’s very little recompense for Mark’s officiousness.’
He’d come to take her elbow again. Ianthe knew that his fingers didn’t burn her skin as he helped her up, but that was what it felt like. ‘Mark’s responsible for that,’ she said tersely, tightening her lips against the odd, shivery sensations running through her.
‘He’s employed by me,’ he said, ‘so I’m responsible.’
Ianthe took a few stiff steps, her limp becoming more pronounced as the ache in her leg suddenly intensified.
He said something under his breath, and with an economy of movement that shocked her, lifted her in his arms.
‘Hey!’ she exclaimed, unable to say anything more as a secret, feverish excitement swallowed her up.
‘Perhaps you’d rather Mark carried you,’ he said, locking her against his hard-muscled torso with casual strength as he strode with surprising ease towards the wide hall that led to a big front door.
The promise of masculine power hadn’t been an illusion. The self-control that gave authority to his spectacular, hawkish good looks had been transmuted into sheer, determined energy.
An alarming combination of flame and ice electrified Ianthe. Striving to sound level and prosaic, she said, ‘I don’t need to be carried.’
‘You’re as white as a sheet and sweat is standing out on your forehead. Please don’t try to make me feel worse than I already do.’
Because Ianthe hated being pitied she returned coldly, ‘I’m not. My leg hurts, but I’d get there.’
‘Even if you had to crawl,’ he said with caustic disapproval. ‘Cutting off your nose to spite your face not only wastes time, it turns perfectly legitimate sympathy into intense irritation.’
Which left her with nothing to say. Clearly he did feel responsible for his henchman’s behaviour, but Mark’s macho hijacking no longer concerned her.
Her heart jumped as she stole a glance at the splendid profile, outlined by an unexpected blaze of gold as they stepped out of the door beneath a skylight. Attraction, she told herself with contemptuous bravado. It’s just attraction—that common meeting point between male and female. It means nothing.
Bracing herself against it, she forced her attention away from him and onto her surroundings.
Whoever had designed the house had understood Northland’s climate. A porte-cochère extended from the door across the gravel drive, offering shelter from summer’s heat as well as from the downpours that could batter the peninsula at any season. In its shade waited a Range Rover, large and luxurious and dusty.
‘I’ll have to put you down,’ her host said, and did so with exquisite care.
She clutched at the handle of the vehicle, and for a second his arms tightened around her again. Her bones heated, slackened, melted in the swift warmth of his embrace and the faint, potently masculine tang she’d been carefully not registering. He waited until she let go of the door handle and straightened up, then stepped back.
‘Can you manage?’ he enquired evenly as he opened the door.
‘Yes.’ Refusing to acknowledge the ache in her leg, she climbed in, took a deep, steadying breath and reached down to clip on her seatbelt. She didn’t look at the man who walked around to his side and got in.
‘I presume you left your car at the gate,’ he said as he started the engine.
‘Yes. In the pull-off.’
He handled the big machine with skill on the narrow gravel road. Ianthe sat silently until she saw her car huddled against a pine plantation, shielded from the dusty road by a thick growth of teatree and scrub.
‘Here,’ she said.
‘I see it.’ He drove in behind her car and stopped.
As she got quickly down and limped across to her elderly Japanese import, Ianthe repressed an ironic smile. The only things her car shared with the opulent Rover were the basic equipment and a coat of dust.
The sun had sailed far enough across the sky to bypass the dark shade of the trees and heat up the car’s interior. With a last uncharitable thought for Mark, Ianthe wound down windows and held the door open, wishing desperately that her unwilling host would just get back into his big vehicle and leave her alone. She felt balanced on a knife-edge, her past hidden by shadow, her future almost echoing with emptiness.
‘There, that’s cool enough,’ she said with a bright smile. ‘Thank you.’
‘I should be thanking you for not prosecuting me,’ he said, amusement glimmering for a second in the frigid depths of his eyes. ‘The only recompense I can make is to offer the beach to you whenever you wish to swim.’
‘That’s very kind of you—thank you.’ The words were clumsy and she couldn’t keep the surprise from her voice, so she nodded and retreated to her car, thinking, Not likely.
Pity had produced that offer, and she loathed pity. Since the accident she’d endured more than a lifetime’s quota, defended from its enfeebling effects only by a stubborn, mute pride.
With a savage twist she switched on the engine, furious when it grumbled and stuttered before coughing into silence. Thin-lipped, she tried it again, and this time it caught and purred into life. Smiling politely, she waved.
Before she let the brake off he leaned forward. ‘I’ll follow you home, just to make sure you’re all right.’
‘There’s no need,’ she began, but he’d already stepped back and headed towards the Rover.
Unease crept across her skin on sinister cat’s paws. For a moment she even toyed with the idea of going to someone else’s bach, until common sense scoffed that a few questions would soon tell him where she lived.
She wasn’t scared—she had no reason to fear him.
So she drove sedately down the road until she came to the third bach by the second lake, and turned through the shade of the huge macrocarpa cypress on the front lawn, then into the garage. The Range Rover drew to a halt on the road outside, its engine purring while she got out of the car, locked it, and went towards the door of the bach.
He waited until she’d actually unlocked it before tooting once and turning around.
The last Ianthe saw of him was an arrogant, angular profile against the swirling white dust from the road and the negligent wave of one long hand. Her breath hissed out. For a moment she stared at the faded paint on the door, then jerkily opened it and went inside.
Heat hit her like a blow. Pushing wide the windows, she thought briefly of the wall of glass, open to the lake and the air, then shrugged. When this bach had been built bi-fold windows that turned rooms into pavilions had not been a part of the ordinary house, let alone a holiday place like this.
Who was he? And why did he feel the need for someone
