out of time before it plummeted lethally to earth and its prey.
Beautifully cut shirt and trousers fitted him with the casual elegance of excellent tailoring. Irritated, Ianthe realised that if he’d been clad in scruffy jeans and a shirt off the peg he’d be just as imperious and formidable and dangerously compelling.
In old shorts and a loose T-shirt that had faded into shabbiness, she must look downmarket and conspicuous. Her chin lifted a fraction of an inch. ‘Trespassing laws in New Zealand are lenient. Anyway, these lakes are reserves.’
‘Not this one. The land around it is privately owned—as you are well aware. You had to climb over a locked gate to get here.’
Ianthe had wondered, but her need for solitude had been greater than her curiosity. She drew in a deep breath. For the first time since she’d woken in hospital with over a hundred stitches in her leg she felt alive, every cell in her body alert and flooded with adrenalin.
‘Whatever,’ she countered, ‘it still doesn’t give your henchman the right to manhandle me. All he’s entitled to do is tell me to get off your property. If I’d refused to go after that you might have a case, although it’s probably only fair to warn you that you’d have to prove I’d done some damage before any court would take you seriously.’
‘It sounds as though you make a habit of trespassing.’
Ianthe stared at him.
‘You know so much about your rights,’ he elaborated, a lurking note of sarcasm biting into her composure.
Crisply she retorted, ‘I once worked for a summer with the Department of Conservation, where you soon learn all about the laws of trespassing. By dragging me here, your offsider has put himself well and truly in the wrong. The New Zealand police don’t take a kindly view of assault. As he knows, because he’s a New Zealander himself.’
She didn’t hold up her reddened wrist, or even look at it, but the man’s gaze fastened onto her skin and something explosive splintered its cold clarity before the long lashes, dark as jealousy, covered his eyes again. ‘Did he hurt you?’ he asked in a voice that pulled every tiny hair upright over her body.
‘No.’
He came across the room with silent speed. Ianthe watched with bewilderment as he picked up her hand and looked at her wrist. A chill tightened her skin, jerked with sickening impact in the depths of her stomach.
‘He’s bruised you,’ he said slowly.
Feeling strangely sorry for the frogmarcher, Ianthe said, ‘I bruise very easily, and he didn’t hurt me. In fact, he did this when I stumbled. He stopped me from falling into the water.’
Her voice faded. Looking down at the contrast of dark fingers locked around the delicate whiteness of her wrist, she swallowed and pulled away; he resisted a moment, then the long fingers loosened and she was free. Completely unnerved by his reaction, she took a stumbling step backwards and leaned heavily against the windowsill.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said with a frigid remoteness.
Quickly, her voice oddly gruff, she said with stubborn insistence, ‘Besides, I was on the Queen’s Chain.’
‘The Queen’s Chain?’ he asked silkily, pinning her with that laser glance.
Sensation slithered the length of Ianthe’s spine. Doing her best to ignore it, she replied didactically, ‘In New Zealand almost all waterways are surrounded by the Queen’s Chain. The land twenty metres back from the water’s edge, although used by the landowner, is actually owned by the Crown—specifically so that people have access.’
‘Your Queen is a landowner indeed,’ he said softly, not attempting to hide the mockery in his words. ‘And to get to that Queen’s Chain you had to cross private property.’
Your Queen, so he wasn’t English. Her confident tone belying her hollow stomach, Ianthe snapped, ‘Possibly, but I wasn’t trespassing when that idiot decided to prove what a big, tough man he is by dragging me here.’
Ianthe was of medium height, but a year in and out of hospital had stripped flesh from her bones so that she weighed less than she had for the last five years. She’d been no match at all for a frogmarcher built like a rugby forward.
His boss smiled at her. ‘He’ll apologise,’ he said.
How could a mere movement of muscles transform aloof arrogance into something so charismatic? He looked like a Renaissance princeling, at once blazingly attractive yet dangerous, cultured yet barbaric, his handsome features strengthened by the disciplined ruthlessness underpinning them.
‘You are,’ he went on, ‘quite right, and I apologise for Mark’s rather officious protection of my privacy. He had no right to touch you or haul you in here.’
Ianthe suspected that behind that spell-binding face was a keen brain that had rapidly chosen this response, knowing it would soothe her. In other words, she thought sturdily, she was being manipulated.
After returning his smile with one of her own—detached, she hoped, and coolly dismissive—she said, ‘New Zealanders love their country, and one reason is because they can go almost wherever they like in it.’
‘Subject, one assumes, to the laws of the countryside? Closing gates and so forth?’
‘Of course,’ she said, knowing that she’d left no gate undone behind her.
Dark lashes drooped, narrowing the pale gaze. ‘To make up a little for Mark’s unceremonious intrusion into your life, can I offer you a drink? Tea, perhaps, or something alcoholic if you’d prefer that? And then I’ll take you back to your car.’
Stiffly, nerves still jangling from the after-effects of that smile, Ianthe said, ‘No, thank you. I’m not thirsty.’
‘I can understand that you have no wish to stay in a house where you underwent such an unpleasant experience,’ he said smoothly, ‘but I’d like to show you that I’m not some Mafia don on holiday.’
Her glance flashed to his unreadable face. Could he read her mind? No, of course not. She’d barely articulated the thought.
Off balance, she said hastily, ‘I’m sure you’re not—’
‘Then let me make whatever amends I can.’
Charm was a rare gift, and an unfair one. When backed by pure steel it was almost unforgivable. Reluctant, angry because her leg was threatening imminent collapse, Ianthe said, ‘You don’t need to make amends, but—I’d like a cup of tea, thank you.’
‘It would be my pleasure.’
She eased herself away from the window and limped towards him, waiting for signs of shock. But the ice-blue gaze remained fixed on her face, although he took her elbow in an impersonal grip.
He’d probably blench when he saw the scar, she thought savagely, but she was used to that.
The long tanned fingers at her elbow lent confidence as well as support. They also sent a slow pulse of excitement through her. Of course she didn’t allow herself to lean on him as he escorted her through the door, across a hall floored with pale
