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She relaxed and smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back. She put the photos back in their folder and began to slide them across to him.
‘Keep them. You never know. Each time you look at them you might be able to build on that feeling of familiarity.’ He got up, running his fingers through his hair in a weary gesture that exposed the edge of the healing red wound on his upper temple.
‘You really should see about getting someone to take out those stitches,’ she said. ‘Dave said they shouldn’t need to stay in for more than a week.’
‘Has it been only a week?’ Ryan murmured. ‘Somehow it seems a lot longer than that.’
Nina agreed. It felt like a lifetime!
He gave himself a mental shake and looked down at her, his mouth curving humourlessly. ‘Actually, I am seeing someone right now. I’ll get the hot water and towel while you sterilise the scissors.’
‘You don’t expect me to take them out!’
‘Why not? Dave said it was so straightforward I could almost do it myself. Just snip and pull.’
Nina shuddered, but her protests were ruthlessly overridden and she soon found herself bending over him, the hot scissors betraying a fine tremble in her hand as they approached his forehead.
She hesitated, half straightening. ‘I don’t want to hurt you….’ she worried.
‘On that spectacular piece of irony, you can proceed,’ he told her harshly. ‘I doubt that you could hurt me more than you already have!’
She gasped. ‘That’s not fair—’
‘Life isn’t fair, darling. Haven’t you figured that out yet? Now stop torturing me, dammit, and just get it over with.’
She did, with the utmost delicacy—and wincing all the way.
‘There, you see?’ He took the scissors from her nerveless hand when she had finished and dabbed a piece of clean gauze against the scar. ‘You did fine. It just goes to prove that sometimes the anticipation of pain is worse than the actual pain itself…even when we’re inflicting it on someone else from the best possible motives,’ he added huskily.
On that cryptic note he departed to see if Ray’s new balcony rail had arrived, and Nina didn’t see him for the rest of the afternoon.
And, wretchedly, she missed him. Too restless to settle down to her study of the final set of specimen plants that George had brought with him and determined not to traipse next door to gawp at him fixing Ray’s rail like a lovesick schoolgirl, Nina was reduced to doing housework and subsequently was in a bad mood when Ryan came back with the news that the five Peterson children were building a huge pyre of driftwood on the beach, and they were invited to take a blanket along and watch the bonfire when the pyre was ceremoniously torched after dark.
‘Look at those clouds coming in. And the wind is getting up, too. I bet it’s going to rain,’ Nina said dampeningly, but Ryan was as eager as a boy, confiding that he hadn’t been to a beach bonfire since he was a child, and gradually she found herself infected with his enthusiasm to the extent of fossicking out miniatures of liqueur—given to her by one of her boarders as a farewell gift—to toast the blaze.
Later, bundled up in layers of clothing and huddled against Ryan’s side under the mohair blanket, his heavy arm cuddled around her shoulders, Nina conceded to the Peterson children in a voice hoarse from a raucous sing-along that, yes, it could well qualify as the best bonfire ever, any time in history, anywhere on the planet.
Ryan rewarded her for her graciousness with a nip of the peach schnapps, which was Ray’s contribution to the adult entertainment, and pounded her laughingly on the back when the fiery spirit seared her throat and brought tears to her eyes.
As the interlaced cone of wood collapsed inwards on itself in a shower of sparks that whirled up into the night sky, the youngest Peterson, a plump toddler, made a sudden dash past Nina towards the fascinating embers.
Ryan lunged forward and scooped the errant child back to the safety of the blanket, balancing him on his outstretched legs and warning him in a deep, gentle voice that that wasn’t a wise thing to do. Nina stiffened and shrank away as Rosalie Peterson rushed over to pick up her son. ‘Oh, dear, I’m sorry,’ she said with a rueful smile at Nina. ‘I know you don’t like being bothered by the little ones, but you know how toddlers are!’
