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‘No…’ she protested weakly, caught between two equally unacceptable realities.
‘Yes…I’m still here,’ he confirmed remorselessly. ‘I told you I wasn’t going anywhere. I’m part of your magical world now.’ He stroked her hair back from her hot forehead in a gesture of mingled triumph and reassurance. ‘You were only out for a few seconds.’
A few seconds! Nina shuddered. Her mind was playing tricks on her. She didn’t know what to believe any more. Only she knew—in her heart she knew—that that frenzied coupling against the wall of her flat had been no erotic fantasy. No fantasy she had invented had ever been that vividly explicit!
‘You said you tracked me down,’ she said in a feathery whisper. ‘Why? How?’
His hand returned to the back of the couch, bracing his leaning body across her.
‘Since you haven’t entered any database or made any official applications or opened any bank or utility accounts since you got here, it wasn’t easy. It was pure chance. The daughter of a friend bought a watercolour of yours on a trip to Waiheke. Your style might have matured almost out of recognition, but your signature is still that distinctive N. So I made a few discreet inquiries about the artist—’
‘What do you know about my style?’ she broke in jerkily, thinking of that intimidating gallery where paintings sold for thousands of dollars rather than the mere couple of hundred that she commanded for some of her larger works.
‘I had a studio built for you at my house.’ His mouth twisted. ‘It was one of the major inducements for you to come and live with me—that you could spend your free hours in the studio, painting.’
The wall in her mind shivered on its rock-solid foundations. ‘You’re lying,’ she said, desperately grasping at straws. ‘Even if we had been lovers, I wouldn’t have moved in with you—I couldn’t have done that to Karl.’
‘Neither of us had a lot of choice in the matter,’ he said wryly. ‘Our body chemistry was too strong. We were like two halves of a biological equation. Karl had nothing to do with what happened between us.’
‘How can you say that? He was the reason we met. You were the one who got him arrested—’
‘He got himself arrested,’ Ryan corrected harshly. ‘Karl was in trouble before I ever came along, and you know it. He would have dragged Katy down with him, too. He got in too deep with the wrong people and ended up having to pay the price for it. He was damned lucky he didn’t have to do any jail time.’
Nina felt a tremor of relief as he looked grimly down on her.
‘Karl might have preferred to blame me, and yes, it suited me to let him think I had that kind of muscle, but I make it a point never to involve the police in my personal conflicts. I much prefer to deal with my enemies in my own time on my own terms.’ His faintly cruel smile sealed the sincerity of his words.
Nina shivered. Was she his enemy now?
‘If it were true…about you and me, Karl would have told me…’ Her voice petered out as she pressed her hands against her face. ‘He did tell me. I couldn’t have been living with you. He told me that after Gran died, I travelled around…backpacking, never staying in one place long enough to settle down.’
‘He lied. You never went anywhere. You were with me.’ Ryan’s implacable certainty hammered the words into her skull. ‘Karl still hates my guts for seeing through his charming facade, for opening up Katy’s eyes to his real character, and yes, for opening yours, too. When we became lovers, it was obvious you were choosing me over him, and that ate at him. We were happy and he only had himself to blame for his misfortune—that was reason enough for the selfish bastard to resent our relationship.
‘He was one of the first people I got in touch with when you disappeared.’ He drove his point home with painful precision. ‘He visited you on the day you left and claimed you were talking about taking off to Australia to “find yourself”. He told me to leave you alone, that you didn’t need me any more. He’s known all this time what happened to you, where you were, that you’d lost your memory—and yet he never bothered to tell either one of us about the other. Ask yourself why that is, Nina, why.’
