AllFreeNovel
Share Us
As if she hadn’t already caused him enough trouble today on top of all his real woes, she thought guiltily. ‘I was just thinking aloud. I wouldn’t say things like that to the police,’ she said hurriedly, her small, capable hand automatically patting the broad shoulder nearest to her reassuringly as she added darkly, ‘I know what it’s like to be an innocent under suspicion.’
‘Thank you,’ he repeated with the same thread of sardonic amusement. A warm hand wrapped around her wrist, holding her palm against the heavily shifting muscle as he tipped his head back. ‘You’re awfully gullible, aren’t you, Honor?’
‘Gullible?’
‘Susceptible to emotional pressure. Easily distracted from your purpose.’
Her generous mouth tightened, sensing something unpleasant coming. He made her sound disgustingly feeble.
‘I don’t think so,’ she denied firmly. Her captured fingers curled into the rough weave of his jacket. He was beginning to make an unwelcome habit of shackling her to his side while he took point-blank pot-shots at her character.
‘You were all set to screw me for every cent you could get until I reminded you I had a daughter,’ he pointed out, ‘then all your hostility melted like ice in the sun. How on earth does someone as tender-hearted as you stand up for herself in the real world?’
It was too late to save face but she made a valiant try to outface his callous opportunism.
‘Don’t think I still won’t,’ she said fiercely.
‘Won’t what? Screw me?’ The tiny white lines around his eyes and mouth disappeared into the smoothly tanned skin as he grinned with wicked complacency.
‘With pleasure!’ she snapped, desperately wanting to wipe the smirk off his face. Instead he shouted with laughter and she belatedly recognised the crudity of his remark and the indecency of her response. She jerked her hand out of his and backed up against the desk. Now he would think her even more idiotically naïve.
‘I look forward to the experience,’ he chuckled. ‘I’m glad you’re working with me rather than against me. In troubled times like this a man likes to know he has an utterly ruthless bitch like you on his side.’
‘I hope you don’t use language like that around your daughter,’ she said quellingly, his words a clear indication that the emotion he had been so obviously suppressing earlier had been amusement rather than anger. He hadn’t feared her any more than a lion feared a feckless fawn. He had been callously leading her on, playing heartlessly on her sympathy—and she had fallen for it—again!
‘No, ma’am,’ he affirmed gravely, his tawny eyes still dancing with insufferable mockery. She wanted to smack him. Her hands clenched on the desk-top behind her as she struggled to control the violent impulse.
Maybe it was a good thing that she had allowed herself to be manoeuvred into this ignominious situation, she thought furiously, striving to find a bright side to her gloomy situation. So it hurt to discover that he was laughing at her...good! After foolishly falling in love with an imaginary hero, a harsh dose of infuriating reality was exactly what she needed to halt the creeping rot. She would hang around just long enough for propinquity to do its dirty, disillusioning work and then she would walk out, heart-whole and pride intact—not to mention financially better off!
And, of course, while she was here she would be living in the lap of luxury. She probably wouldn’t have to lift a finger
around the house. She would also be putting Tania’s snooty nose thoroughly out of joint, sweet revenge for being treated like something the cat had dragged in. It would almost be worth the inevitable strife for that pleasure alone! Then there was the opportunity for a journalistic coup, although it was hardly a tribute to her professionalism that the prospect of a scoop came a poor second to the chance of thoroughly annoying one of the rural aristocracy.
She listened broodingly as Adam briskly outlined the terms under which she was to stay, which included her sharing the elementary safety precautions the family had adopted on police advice. Whether she was on the property or off it, she had to make sure that at least one other person in the household knew where she was at all times.
‘Since I don’t have my bicycle and my car is still being fixed I don’t see myself being able to venture very far,’ she said truculently. Everything he said sounded so reasonable that she knew there had to be a catch but, try as she might, she couldn’t find it.
‘There’s usually at least one of the farm vehicles around at any given time. If you go down to the orchard office in the paddock behind the house and ask, I’m sure someone will find the time to run you where you want to go,’ Adam said equably. ‘I’ll mention it to Dave—he’s our orchard manager. However, try and keep it down to essential trips and don’t tell all and sundry where you’re staying. It’s bad enough that Tania won’t take it seriously and keeps flitting off, but then she was ever one for burying her head in the sand to avoid facing unpleasantness.’
Honor looked at him in disbelief. That certainly hadn’t been her impression. Tania had been all for burying her in unpleasantness!
‘She doesn’t want me here,’ she said bluntly, wondering exactly what his feelings for his glamorous sister-in-law were.
‘As I pointed out to her earlier, owning this house gives me certain privileges. Tania will just have to grin and bear it,’ he replied evenly.
Honor felt a twinge of unwelcome sympathy for the woman. After all, she was probably just fighting for her own security in the only way she knew how. If her only training had been as a pampered wife and social butterfly, how else was she supposed to cope with the dramatic changes Zach’s death had brought?
‘Whoever owns it, this is still her home. She’s entitled to resent me barging in...’
‘Resent, yes, dictate, no. Don’t invest Tania with your own sentimentality. She has no emotional attachment to the land or this place. She was always trying to get Zach to move closer to town. If he had left it to her she would have sold a three-generation-old farm in a flash and bought something along Auckland’s wildly inflated golden mile. But she’s not poverty-stricken by a long chalk. She knows damned well she could buy something in the city tomorrow if it suited her. So don’t fall into the trap of feeling sorry for her. Tania can well look after herself, in spite of her indications to the contrary.’
‘So why does she stay?’ she asked challengingly.
He gave her a droll look as he rose lazily to his feet. ‘Why, Honor, like you she finds me utterly irresistible and thinks propinquity might succeed where artful dissembling failed!’
* * *
Lying awake in bed a few hours later, Honor was still trying to come up with a crushing response to his arrogant throw-away remark. She should have flung at him that they obviously had radically different theories on the effects of propinquity! Lumping her in with Tania was enough of an insult. How dared he joke about what to Honor was a thoroughly mortifying situation? What made him think he was so irresistible, anyway?
