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‘Maybe you just like to watch, hmm?’ He dropped his belt and boldly unzipped his jeans. ‘Is this what you’re waiting for, Mrs Jordan?’ he jeered, sliding his hands inside the denim to cup himself.
That got her!
She gasped, blushing furiously, and backed away, almost stumbling over Rafe’s roll-bag and losing a flat shoe. He withdrew his hands and bent to toss his bag out of the way while she frantically nudged her loose shoe back onto her foot and continued to skitter towards the door.
‘Not going to join me in the shower, then?’ he said, sauntering after her fleeing figure, his unsnapped jeans peeled back to reveal silky white briefs which brazenly outlined the contours of his semi-arousal.
‘I’m told I give incredibly good showers...’
Jennifer was incredibly proud of herself for keeping her eyes firmly at chest level.
‘In that case I’m sure you’ll remember to wash your mouth out with soap while you’re in there!’ she said, as her hip bumped the door handle and she grabbed at it, spinning to safety and slamming the door behind her.
She might have had the last word but it didn’t feel like it as his mocking laughter, muffled by the solid door, followed her down the stairs. He had routed her from her own private territory and he knew it!
It took a good hour of solid dusting and stuffing of draught excluders into every structural chink and crack that she could find for her to cool off. It didn’t help that while she was doing the kitchen her mother, chopping vegetables for dinner on a specially lowered section of bench, wanted to rhapsodise about how nice he was, how intelligent and articulate, interesting and amusing, and terribly, terribly sexy...
‘Mum!’
‘Well, so he is, darling. I’d have to be blind not to notice.’ Paula heaved a sigh. In her softly draped blue dress, with spiral tendrils of her long brown hair escaping from the plump chignon at the back of her head, she looked exactly what she was—a hopeless romantic.
‘And that secret smoulder in his eyes whenever he looks at you—as if he’s longing to pounce on you and eat you up!’
Jennifer shivered. Chew her up and spit her out, more like!
Dot brought in the cats—Maxie, the lazy white Persian, looking extremely disgruntled at the disruption to his afternoon snooze as he was carried off to the laundry for an extra grooming of his long, grit-laden fur, and Milo, the short-haired Burmese-cross, sneezing when the panting golden Labrador which had bounced in at Dot’s heels thumped down on the floor and began scratching vigorously, raising a cloud of dust around the disdainful chocolate nose.
‘Bonzer!’ Jennifer tugged him to his feet by his brown leather collar. ‘Go into the laundry with Dot and she’ll give you a brush. Then you can scratch.’
Since they were fed in there, ‘laundry’ was a word both animals associated with food, and they responded with amusing alacrity, as usual Milo getting there first by taking a shortcut under Paula’s chair while Bonzer, whose enthusiasm outran his intelligence, took the corner too fast and surfed the mat into the wall before rebounding out of sight with a sheepish bark.
Jennifer got out the vacuum cleaner to whisk across the kitchen floor, and then figured she might as well do the rest of the ground floor. Anything to take her mind off the man upstairs.
The temperature continued to drop rapidly as the afternoon moved into evening and the mountain continued to push more dense clouds of black ash high into the atmosphere, blotting out the remaining warmth of the sun. Wearing a mask that couldn’t obscure the sour smell of sulphur in the air, Jennifer went out to the woodshed behind the garage and brought in several loads of split and round logs and a scuttle of coal. She restoked the small pot-belly stove in the dining room and lit the fire she had reset that morning in the grate of the huge stone fireplace in the living room.
Dot took her camera out onto the verandah and took several shots of the new cloud formations, part of her project to document the progress of the eruption in her daily journal. Then she helped Jennifer disconnect the pipes from the roof to the concrete water-tank, to make sure that their water supply didn’t get contaminated if it rained and the compacted ash in the gutters washed into the system. Fortunately the tank was fairly full, and Jennifer was confident that with careful usage they wouldn’t run out before the crisis passed.
The phone shrilled several times as the local grapevine swung into action and friends and acquaintances passed on information and gossip about the latest developments, and Jennifer was unsurprised when the Carters phoned to say they’d heard the warnings on the radio and decided to remain in Taupo for the night and drive back the next day, conditions permitting.
Jennifer’s brief flare of elation died as she realised that there was no way to suggest Rafe use the unexpected extra bed without raising awkward questions about her marriage. And she couldn’t see him meekly agreeing to sneak down under cover of darkness—or allowing her to do it. He had no intention of making things easier for her.
She went to tell her mother about the Carters and found herself quizzed about Rafe’s food preferences as Paula pondered over the next day’s menu.
‘What about chicken? He must like chicken,’ Paula said as the list of ‘don’t knows’ grew. She leafed through the recipe book she had open on the dining room table.
‘I never saw him eat it,’ Jennifer said truthfully. She had dined with him a few times in Sebastian’s company, but had always been too self-conscious, too tensely aware of his cynical gaze, to pay any attention to what they were eating. The atmosphere between father and son had been none too conducive to digestion, either. Their relationship seemed to be based more on tolerance than affection, and although there was a certain mutual respect it was strictly man-to-man rather than father-to-son. They held opposing views on almost everything, and Sebastian’s habit of hammering endlessly at his point in order to prod a reaction out of Rafe only served to make his son withdraw deeper into the cynical indifference that infuriated the father.
‘I think he likes sweetbreads, brains, liver, ox-heart—things like that,’ she said, in a burst of malicious inspiration.
Paula’s brow wrinkled. ‘Offal, you mean?’
Jennifer grinned. ‘Yes.’
Her mother tapped her pencil against her greying temple, looking dubious. ‘Are you sure, dear? He just doesn’t look the offal type.’
‘What type do you think he is?’
‘Oh...hot and spicy, sharp and crunchy—he looks as if he’d enjoy Thai food and pickles.’
