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Even though he was dressed in Karl’s sloppy clothes, Nina found it hard to picture Ryan Flint doing mundane domestic chores. There was a kind of natural arrogance about him that made it easier to visualise him paying someone else to do his cleaning.
‘Oh, you don’t have to do that…’ she began awkwardly.
He rose, holding out his flat hand to instruct a quivering Zorro to sit and stay, which—miraculously—he did!
‘I may have lost my memory, but I’m not helpless,’ he said firmly. ‘I know I’ve been foisted on you and I don’t intend to be a burden. I want to make myself useful, not just lie around brooding over my problems. Please—go ahead with your work and forget that I’m here.’
Faced with such a graceful offer, what could Nina do but grudgingly accept? However, just as she had expected, it was easier said than done, and over the next two days, cooped up inside with him by the continuing bad weather, Nina felt more and more like a prisoner in her own home, the boundaries of her personal space shrinking with each successive encounter with her unsettling guest.
Even tucked away in her studio with the door firmly shut, radio going and the wind providing sufficient ambient noise to block out anything that was happening in the rest of the house, she found that she couldn’t summon the tightly focused concentration she needed for sustained close work.
So while George’s plants languished on her drawing board, she turned to practising some sky studies, creating free adaptations from the sketches she had made the last time she had walked on the beach, early on the morning of the storm, when striking formations of clouds were building up against the horizon, the rising wind tugging at the pages of her sketchbook as she raced to capture pencilled snapshots of the rapidly changing scene.
She worked quickly as she painted, keeping the paper damp so that the edges of the clouds melted into one another, their varying tones building in intensity where the colours overlaid one another. The longer she worked on that first day, the more relaxed she became, and she might have eventually succeeded in her aim of pushing Ryan Flint right out of her mind if he hadn’t come knocking on her studio door.
‘I hope it’s okay that I helped myself to some lunch. I thought you might be hungry by now, too,’ he said, handing her a piled plate as he sauntered past. ‘So this is where you work. Would you mind if I had a look around?’
Since he was already doing so, his polite question was rather redundant, but Nina had minded, and the delicious grilled cheese-and-tomato sandwiches were not enough of a bribe to prevent her from firmly telling him that her studio was off-limits to visitors. She didn’t like the expression of curious absorption on his face as he roamed the room, studying the orderly clutter. Even when he pronounced himself fascinated by the contrast between her botanical drawings and the moody seascapes lining the walls, she felt no pleasure in his praise, only a knotted tension in her stomach that didn’t go away until she had shooed him out of the studio.
‘I think I know about this,’ he said quietly as she hustled him out the door. ‘It feels familiar….’
‘Really? Good for you,’ she said, in no mood to deal with another of his spooky forays into the distant past. She was an artist, not a therapist, she told him.
But out of sight was not out of mind, and although she tried to keep their contact to a minimum, she was haunted by a passionate awareness that with every word, every look, every touch, he was drawing her closer to the brink of a dangerous abyss.
When she woke on the third morning to the weak rays of the sun and the raucous cries of gulls reclaiming their scavenging rights on the beach, Nina felt a sharp sense of anticlimax.
The air was still. The storm was over. The danger was past. She hadn’t given in to her treacherous desires. Today Ryan Flint would be out of her life forever.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘RYAN?Ryan?’ Nina moved through the house, her voice bouncing emptily off the painted walls.
When she had had her shower, the walls were still dewy, the small cake of guest soap she had put out still covered with remnants of foam, so she had assumed that Ryan was already up and about, probably getting breakfast for both of them as he had insisted on doing the previous morning.
