they do.’
Every summer girls had fluttered around Caid—glorious, self-assured creatures with pretty laughs and beautiful faces and bodies. Before she could stop herself Sanchia glanced surreptitiously down at the slight mounds beneath her thin shirt. How she’d envied those girls, their voluptuous, brazen breasts! And their confident sexuality.
Her flatmate sighed. ‘Yeah, you could see the testosterone pounding through his veins. It’s not fair that one man should have so much—an indecent amount of money, a face that’s handsome enough to make your mouth water, and a brilliant business brain too!’ She undulated sexily across the room, shaking her head so that her hair swung around her like a shampoo commercial. ‘As well as being tough enough to grab a huge conglomerate like Hunter’s by the neck when he wasn’t much more than a kid, shake it out and strip it down into the leaner, more efficient, infinitely more profitable business that’s taking on the world today. Where does this gorgeous man live? I might go looking for him.’
Rose, the owner of the house, laughed. ‘Didn’t they say he’s based in Australia?’
Sanchia shrugged. ‘He has houses all over the world.’ Yes, she’d achieved the right casual, mildly amused tone.
‘I could cope with a man who has houses all over the world,’ Jane decided generously. ‘And because I’m always suspicious of pampered heirs, I thoroughly approve of the fact that Caid Hunter had to fight to get his father’s company back on its feet. I do love a powerful, masterful, dynamic man!’
‘I don’t think he was ever pampered,’ Sanchia told her, smiling with irony.
‘He must have a thumping great character flaw,’ Jane said, frowning. ‘There has to be a catch. Does he cheat at Monopoly?’
‘I’ve never played Monopoly with him.’ They’d played for much more dangerous stakes. ‘We said hello whenever we met on the beach, and his mother used to ask us up to dinner every holiday, but the Hunters were well out of our league.’
Until the summer she’d finished university…
Rose asked, ‘Is he likely to be at the Bay?’
Sanchia’s stomach muscles knotted again. ‘Possibly.’
‘If he’s not, will you mind being alone there without a phone?’
‘I won’t be alone.’ Two questioning glances persuaded her to expand, ‘The farm manager and the caretaker both live nearby. For heaven’s sake, both of you, I’ll be fine—I want one last holiday there, that’s all.’
Rose asked, ‘A kind of pilgrimage?’
‘Exactly,’ Sanchia said gratefully. A pilgrimage to say a private, final farewell to Great-Aunt Kate, the only person who’d ever loved her unconditionally, and to the only place she’d ever called home.
And a pilgrimage that would achieve some sort of closure on the love affair she’d never really had.
So now her elderly car was leaving the smooth road across Caid’s land to rattle down the hill through a remnant of coastal bush where tree-ferns cast starkly primeval shadows on the rutted track. Narrowing her eyes behind her sunglasses, Sanchia drove across the iron bars of the cattle-stop and over the grassy flat towards the small cottage.
On a short sigh of relief she braked and came to a stop. Small, rugged, wearing its eighty years with a jaunty, unashamed air, the cottage—never renovated and so called a bach—contrasted blatantly with the opulent mansion on the low headland to the west. To Sanchia’s fury, her heart skipped a beat.
‘You had a crush on him, but you grew out of it. It’s dead, done and gone,’ she pronounced firmly, dragging her gaze away from the trees that surrounded the Hunter mansion.
Her flatmates might admire a man who’d survived and won after being thrust into the cut-throat world of big business—but men like that were dangerous. And Caid Hunter wanted Waiora Bay. He had both power and the resources to fight her great-aunt’s plans for it.
Trying to ignore the cold emptiness beneath her midriff, Sanchia switched off the engine and sat for a moment, letting her tired eyes feast on the scene before her.
Huge, crimson-tasselled pohutukawa trees sprawled between a newly mown lawn—for which she’d have to thank Will Spence, the Hunters’ caretaker—and a glittering, sultry sea. Beneath the violent sun, sand blazed incandescently white. The tension behind her eyes began to wind more tightly as her gaze travelled to the leonine bulk of the island that sheltered the beach from northerly winds. A scattering of sails hinted at destinations beyond the horizon.
Tears aching in her throat, she pushed open the door of the car. Eventually she’d be able to remember the good times without grief, but she suspected it wasn’t going to happen easily or quickly.
With an inelegant sniff, she manoeuvred her long legs out of the car and stood up.
Heat hit her like a blow, sucking the air from her lungs and pasting her thin cotton T-shirt to her back and breasts. After a swift tug at the clammy material, she accepted the sun’s prodigal radiance on her shoulders and head, almost swaying with a poignant mixture of pain and mute relief.
With the soft hiss of the sluggish waves filling her ears, she bent to open the back door. As she touched the hot metal she yelped and leapt back, shaking her tingling hand.
‘What the hell—?’ A male voice, forceful and harsh and sexy.
Strong hands jerked her away from the car and Caid Hunter interposed his big, rangy body between her and the vehicle in a movement as unexpected as it was protective. ‘What happened?’ he demanded, lifting her hand and scrutinising it.
The foreboding that had lodged itself under Sanchia’s ribs over the past weeks—ever since she’d received the offer for her great-aunt’s property—expanded into an iceberg. Words clogging her tongue, she stared mindlessly up into eyes the intense blue of industrial strength cobalt.
Caid frowned. ‘Did you burn yourself?’
She shook her head.
Handsome as the gods his mother’s ancestors had summoned to rule the olive-silvered heights of Greece, Caid had inherited their fiercely compelling authority and self-assurance, their dark aura of power. During her adolescence she’d watched him with curious, fascinated eyes, secretly fantasising about him because he’d been unattainable and therefore safe.
Three years previously she’d crashed and burned against the difference between romantic fantasies and reality. Since then she hadn’t seen him except in photographs and on television, usually with a glamorous woman clinging to his arm.
Although he still stole her breath away she lifted her chin and met his gaze squarely. Caid Hunter might have beauty and power, status and brains and money, but to her he was nothing more than an obstacle.
No, not an obstacle—the obstacle, the only person who stood between her and her great-aunt’s dearest wish.
He persisted, ‘If nothing happened why did you yelp?’
Forcing herself to sound briskly practical, she answered, ‘I’m fine—you can let me go.’
Five foot ten
