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Anne blushed. ‘That was different.’
‘Yes. There’s only one Louise. You, on the other hand, had a whole string of virile young men panting to your door. And what about that tubby, ageing bikie who was pounding on your door on Monday night? You can’t tell me he’s a sportsman.’
‘He’s a friend of my eldest brother. Don seems to have lined up some of his Auckland mates to check up on me every now and then. I’m sorry if he disturbed you.’ Her level stare made it clear that she thought he had deserved it.
‘They all disturbed me,’ he obliged her by admitting. ‘You didn’t have your music turned up quite loud enough to cover the grunts and yelps and groans. It sounded as if your strapping young men were in the throes of delirious ecstasy.’
Anne laughed. ‘More like agony. It’s amazing how wimpy the average macho male is about minor aches and pains. If we were making so much noise I wonder you didn’t yell at us to pipe down. You never hesitated to do it before.’
‘I didn’t want to put you off your stroke,’ he said, reddening very faintly.
‘Why, Hunter,’ she teased, ‘did you have your ear pressed to the wall?’
The colour on his face deepened and to her delight she realised that the sophisticated Hunter Lewis had indeed acted like a curious adolescent.
‘You must have wondered why I was always so quiet,’ she pursued him unmercifully, and couldn’t resist the dig, ‘Did you wonder whether I let them tie me up and gag me?’
‘Are you going to eat that or play with it?’ he said gruffly, referring to the wafer-thin slices of white chocolate she was breaking up with her spoon.
She
picked up a thin sliver in her fingers and brushed it back and forth across her moist lower lip. Hunter followed the movement with dark-eyed envy, mixed with a wariness that she found emboldening. ‘Do you want to share?’ she asked huskily, unable to believe her own foolishness. But flirting with Hunter, Anne was discovering, was quite as addictive as eating chocolate. One taste simply wasn’t enough.
‘It’s unhygienic,’ he murmured distractedly.
‘Not if you shower first.’
He blinked. ‘Anne…’
There was a trace of helplessness in his protest that was irresistibly alluring. She touched his hand where it lay on the table, running her fingers over the pad of his thumb to curl into his palm and stroke back and forth.
‘Would you like to exchange private fantasies with me, Hunter? You never know, we might find that we share the same one…’
So lost was she in a fantasy of her own—that she had him so off balance she could tease him with impunity—that she was stunned when Hunter’s strong fingers suddenly wrapped around hers.
‘What a good idea, Anne. Why don’t we do just that? After all, my mother has given us carte blanche for the entire night; we can spend it on a fascinating voyage of mutual discovery…’
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE theory of sublimation was just so much hot air, Anne thought raggedly as she sipped her liqueur coffee and nibbled desperately on a chocolate-covered mint wafer. She had eaten everything in sight, including dipping into Hunter’s left-over fondue, and she was still sizzlingly aware of the man across the table.
And he wasn’t doing anything to help. All the while they were talking of other things—innocent, innocuous, everyday things—he kept letting those hot, dark eyes wander all over her upper body, staking a claim, making her feel thoroughly self-conscious and flagrantly female.
Her teasing flirtation had got her into trouble and she had not the first idea of how to extricate herself…or even if she wanted to. Ever since he had made that outrageous proposition, her delicious uncertainty had grown. Had he been joking? Or was he as serious as his body language suggested?
‘Does your mother visit you often?’ she asked, seeking the most mundane of subjects to try and cool her increasingly heated speculation.
‘Only often enough to disrupt what she calls the “comfortable complacency” of my life,’ Hunter said wryly, stirring his coffee. He took it plain, she noticed, black and bitter. ‘She travels a great deal. Although she has a home in Wellington she has artist friends all over the world who provide her with studio space whenever she wants it.’
‘That’s what I want to do.’ Anne’s eyes were full of dreams. ‘Experience different cultures at first hand by living in them instead of having to read about them in books. Languages are going to be my passport. When I get my degree I’m going to apply to the Department of Foreign Affairs, maybe even become a UN translator…’
‘I thought you wanted to be an author?’
Anne bumped back to the ground. ‘Art doesn’t recognise national boundaries. If your mother can do it, so can I.’
‘I do see a certain resemblance,’ Hunter murmured, and watched her eyes flicker in dismay. She reminded him of his mother?
‘I’m nothing like your mother!’
