you mind slowing down a bit? I don’t think I can take too many corners like that,’ she asked through clenched teeth.
He eased off the accelerator and the car instantly responded to his command, the aggressive bark settling back into a guttural growl. ‘Better?’
Sweat prickled across her brow. She swallowed the moisture that had gathered under her tongue before she answered. ‘Thanks.’
‘If you’re feeling too weak to do this, I could turn around and take you back home,’ he offered.
Too weak? So he no longer saw her as a sexy seductress, a proud Boadicea to his Roman general, but an object of pity? ‘It’s just the sudden change in direction. Keep driving—I’ll be fine.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Don’t worry; I’m not going to throw up on your expensive upholstery.’
‘It’s you I’m worried about, not the car,’ he said, showing a stunning disregard for the possessive pleasure with which his fingers caressed the steering wheel. ‘Why don’t you just try to relax—take a power nap for a few minutes? Here, maybe this will help.’ She heard a muted click and a delicious breeze sprang up to whisper against her face and throat, chilling the perspiration on her exposed skin. A soft burr signalled the loading of a CD and quiet classical music began to flow around the sculpted curves of the sealed cabin.
‘Mmm, that’s lovely…’ Her smooth brow wrinkled as she pursued an elusive familiarity. ‘What is it?’
‘Ravel’s Pavane,’ His voice was leaden with patience.
‘Do you usually listen to music like this as you drive?’ she murmured.
He was quick to detect the trace of surprise in her tone. ‘Do you expect me to be a cultural barbarian just because I don’t have a higher education?’
Behind her closed eyes she mentally blinked. Did he carry a chip on his shoulder about his background? If he cultivated the image of himself as a ruthless savage in the business arena then he could hardly complain when there was a spill over of that opinion into his private life. ‘No, it’s just that it doesn’t really gel with your public image. I expected something more…more—’
‘Crude?’
‘Elemental.’
‘Gangsta rap, perhaps?’
She blunted his sarcasm with a yawn. ‘Why should I think that? Was there a lot of gang activity where you grew up?’ she wondered.
‘You could say that.’ Ironic humour replaced the sardonic edge in his voice. ‘If you’re one of those people who think official trade unions are legalised gangs. As for street gangs—yeah, we lived in a fairly rough neighbourhood, but I was too busy to waste my time posturing about on the streets. Dad was a hard-line unionist with no time for slackers—a rough-asguts waterside worker who died on the job when I was twenty. Mum’s a union activist from way back. There were four of us kids and we were all expected to pull our own weight from the time we were old enough to hold down a job.’
‘You have three brothers?’ It would be no surprise if he was raised in a swamp of testosterone.
‘Sisters. I have three strong and opinionated older sisters,’ he corrected, squelching her theory about his macho origins.
‘So you’re the baby of the family.’ She smiled dreamily at a startling vision of Blake MacLeod as a chubby toddler bossed about by a trio of females. ‘Do you still see much of them?’
‘Too much. They live to complicate my life.’ His wry affection congealed into irritation. ‘Now, why don’t you give that insatiable curiosity of yours a rest and let me concentrate on my driving?’
‘Surely not difficult in a car like this,’ she scoffed, her consonants slurring slightly as a pleasant lethargy stole through her veins. ‘What kind is it, anyway?’
‘A ninety-six TVR Cerbera—a classic British sports car.’ He sounded typically male, shedding the hard-bitten cynicism for an endearingly boyish enthusiasm.
‘Really?’ Her eyelids were far too heavy to lift. She conquered another cracking yawn. ‘I bet it costs a fortune to run.’
‘You sound like my mother.’
Great! Now she reminded the most dangerously sexy man of her acquaintance of his mother! ‘Cerbera…isn’t that some character in Greek mythology?’ she mumbled vaguely, hoping to redeem herself.
‘Cerberus is the three-headed dog who guarded the entrance to Hades.’
‘Mmm…hell and wheels—now what phrase does that particular combination of words bring readily to mind?’ she teased drowsily, the leather of the padded headrest cool against her cheek as she sought a more comfortable position.
When he didn’t immediately pick up the thread of the conversation, it slipped beyond her grasp. Nora’s lightly drugged consciousness floated away with the music, weaving it into dreams, her weary body rocked deeper into the arms of Morpheus by the rumbling vibration of the car.
Her curls shivered in the breeze from the air conditioner as she slumped bonelessly in the cradle of her seat, her lips parted on a soundless sigh, her sunglasses sliding askew down her lightly freckled nose. When her companion reached out to tip them off and let them drop into her lap she didn’t stir by as much as the flicker of a lash.
Blake’s hard mouth kicked into a triumphant grin as he abruptly changed lanes and turned down a narrow side street. Snarling his way out of the prison of downtown traffic, he joined the steady flow of cars on the motorway and within half an hour was cruising on the open road.
Keeping a sharp eye out for the law, he exploited the road-hugging aerodynamics of the car as he wound up over the bush-clad Waitakere Ranges north-west of the city. Apart from the network of walking and tramping tracks in the dense native forest, the narrow dual carriageway was the only route to the isolated enclave of famously wild surf beaches on the other side of the ranges.
Blake’s fierce satisfaction at the unexpected turn of events was charged with exhilaration. The Cerbera was a challenge to handle at higher speeds—a pleasure that he rarely permitted himself—but now he had the perfect excuse to put the car through its high-performance paces. Dust kicked up at the ragged edge of the sealed surface as he hurtled towards his destination, the leafy undergrowth and graceful ferns that fringed the roadside whipping and bowing in homage to his velocity.
The leisurely trip to his beach house from his home in central Auckland usually took just over an hour, but right now he wanted to get as far as he could, as fast as he could—before his unwitting passenger awoke to the fact that she had been hijacked.
Her story was so bizarre it was probably true, but there was too much at stake for him to risk giving her the benefit of the doubt. The fact that she had been pathetically easy to manipulate into assisting in her own abduction didn’t automatically make her innocent of all charges. Unfortunately, at this point, wilful naivety could be just as damaging as malicious intent. Guilty or innocent, Nora was the equivalent of an unexploded bomb—one that it was going to be his very great pleasure to defuse…
A kick of anticipation
