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If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her:
The devil take her!
She had to come to him in the full knowledge of what it meant or the conquest would be a Pyrrhic victory.
When Nina’s hands began sinking lower on his chest, sliding down the tense ridges of his abdomen towards the band of his jeans, Ryan sucked in a sharp breath and stayed them with a wrenching curse.
‘Ryan…?’
‘You came out here to sketch, remember?’ he said, easing himself away from her mouth with a series of biting kisses. He relaxed back on the sand, drawing up his knees to ease the pressure of his jeans on his fierce erection.
The second pencil had rolled off her sketchbook and dropped by her feet, and Nina reached shakily down for it, her mouth and breasts still hotly throbbing, mortified by her wanton behaviour and the fact that Ryan, not she, had been the one to call a halt.
Suddenly, a small shower of cold water hit her, practically hissing as it landed on her burning cheeks.
‘Zorro!’ Her voice blended with Ryan’s in a scolding chorus. The small dog finished shaking the sea water from his spiky coat and regarded them with a cocked head, tongue lolling from his open jaw.
‘And the dish ran away with the spoon,’ Ryan muttered, buttoning up his shirt
‘What?’ Nina asked as she shook off her sketchbook.
‘The little dog laughed to see such sport,’ he recited dryly.
It gave her a strange pang to hear his deep voice quoting nursery rhymes and she hurriedly transferred her attention to Zorro. It did look as if Zorro was grinning at them, she thought.
‘You little wretch!’ she threatened. ‘If my book had been open and you’d got the pages wet, you would have been in real trouble.’
Ryan sifted about in the surrounding sand and unearthed a short piece of driftwood, which he hurled down onto the wet sand, sending Zorro hurtling in pursuit to snatch it from the encroaching waves.
‘He was probably just tired of being ignored.’
Nina refused to blush. She folded over the loose leaves of her sketchbook until she reached a fresh page, which she dated along the bottom. ‘He’s used to amusing himself when he invites himself along on my sketching trips,’ she countered.
Zorro returned with his lump of wood and had it thrown for him again.
‘Then maybe he was jealous.’
She gritted her teeth and stared resolutely at the grouping of weed-covered rocks she had come to sketch.
‘He’s never been known to get bored with a game of fetch,’ she felt bound to warn him.
‘That’s okay. I’m a patient man,’ he said, which she didn’t believe for a moment.
But so it proved, and as the game continued, Nina began to relax and find her creative impulses surprisingly unhindered by the unsettling company. Zorro’s timely intervention had defused a fraught situation and his continuing antics further dissipated the tension until Nina was absently chatting as she sketched, describing in idyllic terms the childhood summers she had spent on Shearwater Island.
‘Do you think that’s why you were on the ferry that day, why you were coming here? You were pursuing those unsullied memories of golden summers, when life was safe and secure—all childish pleasures and no responsibilities?’
Nina’s pencil hatched in a patch of shade around the base of the rock. ‘I never really thought about it, but…yes, I suppose that could have been what drew me here and why I felt such a powerful urge to stay. Shearwater is magical, a perfect artist’s retreat. It’s also where I got my first set of real artists’ watercolours—Ray gave them to me the Christmas I was nine.’
‘He says you’re so ensconced here that you never leave the island.’
‘He exaggerates.’ With a few expert flicks of a craft knife, Nina trimmed her pencil and went back to work. ‘It’s not as if I’m a recluse. I’ve been over to Waiheke a few times, to the library and to buy supplies. One of the craft shops over there sells my paintings on commission, and also my note cards—I do scenic watercolour sketches on handmade paper that a neighbour over the hill makes. The cards sell really well and they’re quite fun to do because they’re so small and I can be completely spontaneous.’
