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‘But listen.’
She was disconcerted when he read out a passage which was a physical description of the book’s hero, a lustful billionaire, who had kidnapped the prim, unawakened heroine and whisked her to his private tropical island to ravish and seduce her into being his sex slave, only to find the tables turned when his innocent captive discovered the true sensuality of her own nature. She even tied him to the bed at one stage, Jennifer remembered.
‘Well?’
She hastily wiped off her dreamy smile. ‘Well, what?’
‘Don’t you think he sounds familiar?’
‘I’ve read the book, so of course it sounds familiar,’ she said stiffly, saying a rude word under her breath as she saw the brown mark on the crocheted edging of the napkin.
‘No, I mean, don’t you think the character sounds like me?’
Her scalp prickled. ‘No!’
‘Very like me.’ He looked down at the page and picked out the salient points again—eyes, hair, face shape, height, build, lean athleticism... ‘You’d almost think she was describing a picture of me,’ he mused.
A picture of him lounging against a white pillar staring sullenly at the camera and wearing nothing but a famous brand of jeans and a sneer. At least she had had the sense to make her heroine a flaming redhead!
‘Don’t flatter yourself. It’s an idealised generic type, that’s all. You can’t take a word-picture as literally as you can a visual representation,’ she said, driving the iron across the third white linen square.
‘Come to think of it, Lacey’s most successful heroes have always been light-eyed blondes,’ he commented.
‘There’s no accounting for taste,’ said Jennifer, concentrating intently on her difficult task.
‘Mmm.’ In the periphery of her vision she could see him tuck one hand behind his head, fanning open his jacket, as he lowered the open book to rest page-down against his white shirt. ‘It must be your taste too, or you wouldn’t be such a fan of her books,’ he pointed out.
Jennifer’s eyes narrowed on the knife-edged crease she was making along the folded edge of a napkin.
‘And you did say that you asked for blond sperm.’
Jennifer slammed the iron down flat. ‘Keep your voice down!’ she hissed, looking furtively around, even though she knew Dot had gone for a nap and her mother was baking. In her feverish imagination even Fergus seemed to be leaning a little further on his perch, in order to eavesdrop on their conversation.
‘Well, you did,’ he answered in a theatrical whisper. ‘You asked for your ideal man, didn’t you: big, blond, sexy...’
Never, never in a million years would he get her to confess to the eye-colour she had ticked on the clinical form.
‘I never asked for sexy!’ she spluttered.
‘You needed virile, though, which amounts to the same thing. Maybe you would have got me even if my father hadn’t interfered.’
It was a devastatingly seductive thought.
‘But, since intelligence was top of my list, that would certainly have eliminated you,’ she said, using acid to counteract the sweet surge in her breast.
He grinned, supremely secure in his own intellect. ‘I thought you were supposed to be steaming those things, not smoking them.’
Jennifer groaned as she lifted the iron and saw the smouldering ruin of the third napkin. At this rate they were going to have no table linen left.
‘You should have asked me for help after all,’ he said smugly propping up the book again. ‘I do all my own ironing at home.’
Jennifer had enough. ‘Good, then you can do the rest,’ she said, emerging from behind the ironing board and snatching the book out of his hand. ‘And I’ll do the reading.’
She was reluctantly impressed when he meekly took over the job without turning a hair, but unfortunately, just as she was about to spirit the book safely back upstairs, she was waylaid by Margaret Carter, who was taking off her padded jacket to hang on the brass hook beside the door.
‘Oh, Jennifer, I hope it’s not too late, but we were wondering if you could possibly do dinner for us tonight?’ There was an apologetic smile on her plump, seamed face as she took off her headscarf and draped it over her jacket. ‘The roads are awfully dusty—after we went through Turangi, every time we passed a car it was like being caught in a sandstorm. I don’t think Ron likes the idea of navigating after sunset, and we don’t want to get stranded again, as we were yesterday.’
‘Of course we can,’ smiled Jennifer, clasping the book behind her back in her linked hands. ‘Mum is doing her famous pheasant cassoulet, with a feijoa and banana flan for dessert. Did you have a good cruise yesterday?’
