he said laconically. ‘A pretty name—Celtic, isn’t it? What does it mean?’
Morna forced her lips into a stiff, unnatural smile. Still in that level, unemotional tone, she said, ‘Beloved, or so my mother always told me. But then, she got a lot of things wrong.’
Stop behaving like a shrinking violet, she commanded. She was no sweet, shy virgin—in fact she’d never been sweet or shy in her life! Fighting for survival soon demolished any softness in a child.
‘Yours is unusual too,’ she said. ‘Were you born in Hawke’s Bay?’ She’d only visited that sun-baked province once, but she’d fallen in love with its Art Deco cities and superb vineyards.
Green eyes mocked her. ‘No, and although my mother was a Hawke she didn’t belong to the family Hawke’s Bay was named after,’ he told her calmly. ‘However, she’s the last of her line, and she wanted the name to continue.’
The confident reference to breeding and background scraped across Morna’s already sensitised nerves. She’d grown up in poverty and hopelessness without knowing the name of her father.
Hawke watched her. She might think she’d camouflaged her emotions behind those sunglasses, but her square chin, angled with a hint of defiance, told him more than she realised.
As did that tantalising mouth. His hormones growled softly in unexpected need. She had the mouth of a born sensualist—and that was a total contradiction of the little he knew about her.
A second glance revealed the discipline that tucked in the corners of her lips, keeping them under control. Sensualist, certainly, but he suspected her appetites were firmly leashed, an asset to be used rather than a tendency to be indulged.
He wanted her.
So? He’d wanted other women. But not, he thought with the cold logic he used even on his own reactions, with this fierce intensity. And none of them had ever looked at him with such aloof indifference. He smiled, ruthlessly summoning the charm he knew gave him an advantage over most other men.
Her sultry mouth parted for a second before colour swept along her high cheekbones and she compressed her lips into a straight line.
Yes, she too felt that elemental, fiery tug of the senses; controlled she might be, but she was giving off signals like a sunstorm.
In a judicial way he admired her composure when Cathy Harding bridged the tense atmosphere with conversation. Instinctively courteous, he followed Cathy’s lead, realising with an elemental satisfaction that Morna Vause wasn’t normally as quiet as she was now.
A few minutes later the sound of his name thrust its way through the air.
‘Hawke Challenger,’ the loudspeaker asked, ‘can you come up here and present the prizes now, please? Come on, Hawke, I can see you—’
‘I have to go,’ he said abruptly. Ignoring the silent woman beside her, he smiled at Cathy. ‘I hope we’ll be seeing you and your husband at the dinner after the show?’
‘Yes, we’re going.’
He transferred his gaze to Morna, imprinting the lines of her half-shadowed face on his memory. ‘And of course you must come too,’ he said politely.
Without waiting for an answer he swung off through the crowd—a crowd, Morna noted, that separated in front of him like the sea before Moses.
‘Well!’ Cathy laughed. ‘That was more or less the equivalent of a royal invitation.’
‘Ha! If he thinks I’m impressed—’
‘Get off your high horse,’ Cathy interrupted. ‘He’s going to be your neighbour, so it might be a good way to get to know him.’
‘Get to know whom?’ Nick asked from behind them.
Cathy turned swiftly, her face lighting up. ‘We were talking about Hawke,’ she told her husband.
A stab of painful, undiluted envy alarmed Morna. Cathy glowed with a radiance that increased almost to incandescence when Nick tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow. Perhaps one day she’d look at a man with the same naked love that lit Cathy’s face now.
But probably not, she thought cynically.
Nick asked, ‘What did you think of him?’
Morna watched Hawke Challenger present a large silver cup to a slim woman on a shimmering chestnut horse, her excellent legs revealed by skin-tight jodhpurs. Blonde hair flowed as she removed her helmet and bent to kiss him. The crowd applauded, and when Hawke stepped back he said something that made the woman laugh.
‘He’s probably gay,’ Morna said outrageously.
‘If he is, no one’s told the actress from that TV show The Watchers,’ Cathy returned. ‘They’ve just broken up and apparently she’s shattered, poor woman.’
Morna didn’t want to ask, but the words escaped before she could pen them up. ‘How long had they been together?’
‘I don’t know that they ever lived together, but they must have been an item for six months or so.’ Cathy smiled at her husband. ‘What do you know about him, darling?’
Nick shrugged broad shoulders. ‘Good family, money for generations, rigorous ethical standards. Hawke’s no self-absorbed lightweight—he’s tough all the way through, and he’s got a brilliant business brain. He might have started out with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he’s going to end up with the keys to the kingdom. Don’t be fooled by the handsome face. If you cross him you can expect to suffer for it.’
Morna dangled her sunglasses from her forefinger and said lightly, ‘Thanks for the warning, but I wasn’t thinking about crossing him. I wasn’t even thinking about having a fling with him, although your wife seems to feel I should at least be considering it.’
Nick glanced at Cathy, who said indignantly, ‘All I said was that you work too hard and that it’s time you started a social life!’ She laughed at Morna’s wicked, unrepentant grin and said, ‘Oh, all right—I want everyone to be as happy as I am. But I don’t think Hawke is the sort of man you have a fling with. He’s dangerous.’
Morna slid her sunglasses back onto her nose. ‘Dangerous? Surely not. Anyway, I don’t play with toy boys; I like maturity in my men.’
‘What men?’ Cathy shot back. ‘In the years I’ve known you, you haven’t gone out with one.’ She indicated Hawke Challenger, who’d moved on from the woman with the perfect legs and was now presenting a smaller cup to an immaculately turned out child on a stubby chestnut pony. ‘I certainly wouldn’t call him immature, or a toy boy. I doubt very much whether he’d be so easy to manage.’
Something torrid and primitive stirred inside Morna. ‘All the better reason to stay away from him,’ she said casually. ‘I don’t go looking for trouble.’
The elderly car struggled a bit on the hills, complaining with a couple of coughs as it crested the last one and swung around the worst of an endless series of tight corners.
‘There, I knew you could do it,’ Morna encouraged it, turning onto a drive that
