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‘Stroke me with your hair.’
The now familiar weakness invaded her belly with a warm tingling. ‘You’re not going to answer my question, are you?’ she made herself ask.
He studied her stubborn face for a moment. ‘No, I’m not. I consider it intrusive and an invasion of privacy.’
She paled as if she had been slapped, turning her head sharply aside so that she didn’t notice his hand beginning to lift in a brief gesture of conciliation, then dropping back to his side.
‘Anne, we’re two mature adults with separate pasts and personalities and a way of life that demands a great deal of personal space,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t like being crowded and neither, if today’s events are anything to go by, do you. We’ve both made mistakes but only because we were impatient for this…’ He splayed his hand between them on the bed, his tone drifting into detached ‘lecturer’ mode that made her long to shake him. ‘If we’re going to be lovers we have to set the boundaries of mutual consideration, so that neither of us develops unreal expectations of the other. This business with Ivan is an illustration in point. There are obviously areas of your life in which you want to keep your own counsel and make your own decisions without my advice or interference and I respect that. In turn you need to respect my need for the same kind of personal privacy. It doesn’t mean we can’t ask questions, only that we shouldn’t be offended if the answer is not the one we want it to be. Just because we’re lovers it doesn’t mean that we have to turn each other inside out…’
‘I rather thought that was just what we had done,’ said Anne, recovering her sense of humour and giving him a pert grin.
‘Lovers’. That was what he had called them. Not sex partners or friends. ‘Lovers’. It had a lovely, warm, semipermanent kind of sound to it. Some people were lovers for years, for decades, for the rest of their natural lives…
He responded with a rakish answering smile but his words were cautious. ‘You may be right. So we’re agreed, then—no encroachment, no tantrums—’
‘I’m not the one who had the big tantrum,’ she pointed out.
‘Mmm.’ His eyes narrowed resentfully. He didn’t like being reminded of it. ‘Acquit me on this occasion because personal privacy does not include the right to take other lovers, let alone flaunt them under my nose. I’m not that liberated and I never will be!’
He swung abruptly off the bed and began picking up his clothes, his movements masking his expression.
‘So I’m allowed to be jealous, then?’ said Anne a trifle snippily, thinking that he didn’t seem to notice that, for all his obsession with mutual benefits, he was the one setting all the rules.
At least he hadn’t ordered her not to fall in love with him—she had broken that one already! ‘I have permission to run off an
y strange blondes who might follow you home?’
His mouth twitched and he turned, clothes in hand, to fluster her with another full-frontal. ‘By all means. I like you when you’re fierce, stroking me with that sharp little tongue, especially as it lies in such a delectable sheath.’
He confirmed his approval by leaning over and kissing her, delicately stroking the tongue in question with his own. ‘Mind if I use your shower before I go?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, sauntering out with a long, easy stride that in a younger man might have been mistaken for a self-satisfied swagger.
He was gone so long that Anne took fright, thinking that he might have left without bothering to say goodbye, or that he had merely been some grief-induced hallucination. She hurriedly pulled on her modest robe and scuttled out, coming to a skidding stop on the wooden floor.
She might have known!
Showered but unshaven, Hunter was sitting in his jeans and shirt at her small desk, reading Katlin’s manuscript. At least, he was holding it—but he was actually staring at the painting on the wall directly across from him with a brooding expression that made her nervous.
‘Er…your mother absolutely insisted I have it,’ she began uneasily.
‘Where’s the rest of it?’
Anne was bewildered. ‘What do you mean? That’s all there is.’
‘Three chapters?’
He was talking about the book! ‘Oh, that—’
‘Yes, that.’ He held the sheaf of papers out to her. ‘This is exactly what was submitted to the awards committee, no more, no less. Not even any revisions. You don’t seem to have written a single usable line since you’ve been here.’ He threw the manuscript down on the desk where it drifted in the mess of university papers. ‘There’s nothing here, not even a draft of your next few chapters. Well, from now on you’re just going to have to get your head down and finish it.’
‘Me?’ she squeaked.
He frowned at her inanity. ‘I certainly don’t see anyone else in the room,’ he said in the acid tones for which he was famous.
She gaped at him. ‘Hunter, what are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about the fact that I believe you have a brilliant career ahead of you if you can only learn to discipline your talent. I’m talking about the people who’ve put their trust in that talent. You owe it to them to finish this. You owe it to me, dammit! I’m not going to be trotted out as another excuse for your procrastination and I certainly don’t want Arnold Markham on my back accusing me of sabotaging one of his cherished protégées…’
‘You know Arnold Markham…personally?’ Anne gulped, wiping her sweating palms against her robe, feeling dizzy as she racked her brains as to why on earth Hunter was still going on at her as if she were the Markham prize-winner.
