lay danger.
Although she’d snatched up a straw hat as they left the bach, the sun beat down on her shoulders and summoned a rare blue sheen from Alex’s bare head. She should tell him he needed some protection, but it seemed an oddly personal and intimate thing to talk about.
‘You obviously know this place very well,’ Alex commented.
Nodding, she kept her eyes on the low bushes—a mixture of sedges, rushes and sprawling teatree—that scrambled from the pine plantation to the water, effectively marking the limit of the beach. ‘For years I spent every school holiday here with my best friend. Her parents own the bach.’
Once she’d known every inch of the shoreline. In those long, golden, distant summers she and Tricia had spent every day on or in the lake. And now Tricia was a wife and mother, and Ianthe was trying to reassemble her life.
‘We’d better go back,’ she said evenly. ‘It’s swampy in there.’ She glanced down at his feet and added with a spark of malice, ‘You won’t want to get those shoes wet.’
He laughed softly. ‘I’d noticed that I was overdressed,’ he said, turning the tables neatly on her.
Biting her lip, she swivelled, and of course her wretched leg chose just that moment to let her down again. Gasping, she jerked back, but too late. Her sideways lurch had thrown her into the tangle of bushes, and her foot sank into the lake so that water rose halfway up her calf.
Panic, sickening and immediate, clawed at her. For a horrifying second she couldn’t move, until the clamouring terror forced her free of the water. Whimpering, she pushed past Alex, blundering across the hot sand in a desperate rush to reach the safety of solid ground.
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