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‘I write best at night,’ protested Anne, hating him for trapping her into another lie.
‘All the more reason to take it easy during the day,’ Hunter pointed out, his shrewd, black-eyed gaze steady as he returned to the main attack. ‘Exactly when at night? I stay up pretty late myself and I haven’t heard your typewriter pounding away very often.’
‘I like to revise my work by hand,’ she said quickly. If he could hear her typewriter from her living-room, then the walls were even thinner than she had realised.
‘You must be doing an awful lot of editing compared to the amount you’re writing,’ he commented thoughtfully.
‘Uh, well, I haven’t really settled to a routine yet…’
‘After several weeks? In my experience writers usually have to have their regular creative fix or go crazy. Have you set yourself goals? Or are you suffering from writer’s block?’
‘I guess, in a way,’ Anne said wryly. ‘I’m just going through a period of adjustment—’
‘Then probably the worst thing you could do is to stop, or load yourself up with other distractions!’
She might have known that his sympathy would be backed with infuriating logic. ‘Thank you for your advice but I’m sure everything will sort itself out,’ she said firmly, hoping that Katlin was justifying her confidence by writing her head off in her isolated little eyrie at Golden Bay.
‘Translated: you’re going to ignore the problem and hope it goes away of its own accord.’ His disapproval was obvious. Anne didn’t doubt that any difficulties he encountered he met head-up and head-on.
‘One of my problems, anyway,’ Anne said meaning-fully. ‘I suppose it’s an occupational hazard of being a professor—this constant urge to lecture people. I thought politics, not literature, was your particular field of expertise.’
‘The whole essence of politics is human behaviour—the complex of relationships that people form to empower their beliefs and invest themselves with authority over others. In its adjectival sense it was very politic of you to evade my original question…Do you resent me for what I have?’
‘Not for what you have but for what you are,’ Anne said flatly, glad to get off the subject of her non-existent novel.
‘And what am I?’
‘Don’t tempt me,’ she threatened.
His heavy lids drooped lazily. ‘Oh, come on. You’ve been perfectly free with your insulting opinions of me so far. Why stop now?’
Is that what he thought? Not so devastatingly perceptive after all, thought Anne impishly. ‘You’re intelligent, strong, utterly independent and self-confident to the point of arrogance,’ she frankly listed the personal assets she found so irritating.
He stared at her for a moment, his eyes narrowing with a faintly arrested intensity as he realised that she was perfectly serious. Then the square mouth tilted slowly in amusement. ‘You forgot handsome.’
‘That’s because you’re not,’ she snapped.
‘Then why did you look me over in my towel as if I were a Cosmopolitan centrefold?’
She could hardly deny it but she refused to blush at the remembered image of his semi-nudity, lifting her chin and answering baldly. ‘Because you looked like one. You have a big, sexy body. That doesn’t make you handsome. And it doesn’t help that you frown too much. You’ll probably have train-tracks across your forehead by the time you’re forty,’ she took pleasure in telling him.
‘But I’ll still have my big, sexy body,’ he reminded her slyly. ‘I’d rather have that than a pretty face.’
‘Is that why you’re not married?’ she said, wilfully misunderstanding in order not to be in agreement with him. ‘Do you live alone because you don’t want a feminine face around, distracting you from your loving self-absorption?’
‘Are you accusing me of being an onanist, Anne?’ he asked blandly.
‘I might…if I knew what it meant,’ she confessed warily.
‘Someone who actively enjoys sexual self-sufficiency,’ he said obliquely, so that it was a moment before she fully comprehended his meaning.
‘Oh. Oh!’ She blushed vividly under his glittering black gaze and he laughed. His laugh, like his voice, was unexpectedly mellow for a man of his temperament and toughness. He was, she was beginning to realise to her dismay, a very much more attractive man than she had at first suspected.
‘So you were wrong about my being utterly independent,’ he pointed out, turning his attention back to the bench. ‘There are certain things that I still have to depend on others to provide for me. And I was married…once. How much fettucine would you like?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ she murmured, still trying to conquer her embarrassment, and her curiosity over that casual mention of his marriage. And his phrasing was intriguing—’still have to depend’—as if the most intimate form of human interaction was something he looked upon as a tiresome, practical physical necessity rather than a deeply desirable, emotionally fulfilling experience.
‘I can hardly eat all this myself.’
