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She hit the ground with a groan of relief and bent to brush the bark and twigs off her clothes and legs, and straighten the seams of her skirt. She was retucking her blouse into her waistband when a prickle on the back of her neck made her swing around, her heart pattering like that of a baby bird who’d fallen out of its nest.
A thin, gangly youth, with hair the colour of used rope straggling to his shoulders and round, wire-framed glasses that accentuated the boniness of his face, stood watching her from the bushes.
Regan nervously flicked her hair behind her ears and pinned on a reassuring smile. ‘Hello. Where did you come from?’
And more importantly—how long had he been there? She bit her lip. Had Adam grabbed a handy accomplice for the chase?
He didn’t smile back at her, his brown eyes unnervingly intense. ‘Hi.’
‘Do you live here?’ she asked brightly, scraping at the sticky residue of pine-sap on her reddened palms.
He pushed his hands into the pockets of his baggy khaki shorts, hunching his thin shoulders under the plain white T-shirt. ‘Nah.’
He looked at the scratches on her legs. ‘What were you doing up that tree?’
Her mind went blank. ‘I…thought I saw an interesting bird,’ she improvised. Heavens, how low she had sunk—now she was even lying to children! Although judging from the squeak and scrape of his breaking voice he wasn?
?t really a child any more. In his early teens, she estimated.
‘What kind of bird?’
‘Uh, I don’t know…that’s why I wanted to get a closer look.’ She tried another smile.
‘Didn’t you know someone was calling for you?’
‘No—were they?’ She rounded her eyes innocently. ‘I must be hard of hearing. Who was it—do you know?’ she asked, hoping she might find out enough to plan herself a disaster strategy.
His light brown eyes looked innocently back. ‘Big or small?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The bird you saw, was it big or small?’ he wanted to know.
‘Big,’ she said firmly.
‘What colour was it?’
‘Well…brown, I suppose.’
‘Light brown or dark brown?’
‘Both,’ she said desperately. ‘Sort of speckled.’
‘Flying or perching?’
‘It flew and landed in the tree, then it perched,’ she said through clenched teeth.
‘What colour legs did it have?’
She looked at him incredulously. ‘Who do you think you are, James Bond?’ she joked.
‘Are you talking about the ornithologist or the spy named after him?’ he responded, and suddenly she knew that the weedy adolescent look was extremely deceptive.
She had tossed him a condescending comment, expecting its subtlety to be totally over his head, and he had fielded it with precocious dexterity. He knew very well she had been stringing him a line because he had been the one spinning it into a noose!
She folded her arms defensively across her chest. ‘I’m surprised anyone of your generation knows where Ian Fleming got the idea for his character’s name.’
He shifted his weight, sifting his battered sneakers amongst the fallen leaves. ‘I read a lot.’
