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She held her breath, wondering if the talk of art might trigger a shaft of remembrance, but the moment slipped past as Ryan squinted at a boat sailing in around the point. While the patchy and wildly uneven return of his memories had become a source of escalating guilt and anxiety for Nina, he seemed to have adopted an attitude of resolute acceptance, a determination to treat the whole unpredictable episode as a holiday. Perhaps, subconsciously, he was aware that he was on holiday in his real life and his biorhythms had adjusted accordingly.
‘Why do you think you came here?’ She turned the question on him, intensely bothered by the coincidence. The islands of the gulf seemed an unsophisticated holiday destination for such a wealthy, worldly, cultivated man.
‘Perhaps I was looking for something magical, too.’
‘You don’t strike me as the sort of man who believes in magic—except as a clever conjuring trick,’ she countered, her voice unknowingly reflecting his cynical tone.
‘There’s a part of all of us that wants to believe in magic,’ he said quietly. ‘The innocent child in us…’
Nina turned abruptly away and the conversation languished. Ryan took Zorro down to where the hard-packed wet sand was pricked with air bubbles, to show him that digging for live crabs was much more exciting than chasing a boring old stick. Returning, he lay on his back and dozed, and Nina’s pencil flew across the paper. A while later, when he stirred, she quickly turned the page and began to sketch Zorro, visible only as a pair of hind legs and perky tail protruding from the hole he was digging to China.
Ryan got up, dusting the sand from his jeans and stretching lazily. ‘I guess I’d better go back to work,’ he said, yawning. ‘See you later. By the way, Ray said to tell you someone’s given him a bundle of fresh scallops that we can have for dinner.’
He was practically drooling as he spoke, and she remembered the scallops in mornay sauce that he had ordered at the expensive restaurant to which Karl had invited what he hoped was his future bride and her brother to dine. But instead of being impressed by his generous hospitality, Ryan had provoked an argument that had ended with Karl and Katy storming out just as their main course arrived, leaving Nina to cope with an embarrassing situation and a smouldering fellow diner who had relished her discomfort and insisted on their finishing the meal.
Since he had magnanimously offered to pay the impending huge bill, for which Karl had failed to make arrangements as he had angrily swept out, Nina—with only a few dollars in her purse and no credit card—had been compelled to agree. She had been forced to spend another hour of verbal fencing that had left her feverish and flustered as Ryan’s sophisticated teasing had skilfully inflamed her emotions, ripping away the calm facade with which she had been trying to handle him.
‘Maybe you’re allergic to shellfish,’ she called after his retreating back, goaded by the memory of that sultry evening and the steamy goodnight kiss he had punished her with under the amused eyes of the restaurant doorman before handing her into the waiting taxi and tossing a fifty-dollar note through the window for what he knew was only a twenty-dollar fare. ‘You’d better not have any!’
He glanced back over his shoulder, his eyes glinting with a challenge that made her insides shiver. ‘As it happens, I’ve just remembered. I love all kinds of seafood.’
‘How very convenient,’ she muttered suspiciously as he strolled away, his hips rolling in a masculine swagger that was as arrogant as it was sexy, an impossibly well-behaved Zorro meekly coming to heel at a single command.
That brooding suspicion was still with her hours later as she packed up her sketchbook and retraced her steps, carefully avoiding looking up at Ray’s house as she skulked along below the bank of puriri trees until she was parallel with her door, then scuttled across her lawn.
It was a suspicion that had been hovering in the back recesses of her mind, but one she had been loath to drag out into the light of day for fear of the consequences if it were true.
It nagged at her as she rattled about her studio, assembling the completed set of watercolours that George was due to collect the next day, then eventually drove her down to Ryan’s room where her hand hovered sweatily on the doorknob.
