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‘Anne—’
‘Because there’s nothing to smother. I don’t have any great literary aspirations—’
His hand suddenly clamped over her mouth. ‘Enough,’ he warned.
‘No, not enough,’ she said in a voice muffled by the press of his warm palm. ‘I don’t want to be a writer, Hunter. I never did—’
‘I said enough!’ He was laughing. He took his hand away, and she was suddenly speechless at the tenderness of his expression as he clasped her wrist and drew it over his lips in a feather-light caress.
‘I don’t want to argue with you,’ he went on with a husky intonation that made her body react with de- licious recognition. ‘I want to take you in my arms and make long, slow, rapturous love with you…’
He picked up and kissed her other wrist. ‘Would you like to do that with me, Anne?’ He gently touched her brow, her lips, her heart…his fingers curving delicately under her breast. She was stunned by the open adoration in his sensuous invitation. ‘I can be tender with you, darling; I can be anything you want…’ He leaned forward and kissed her parted mouth, his own warm and mellow, his tongue curling pliantly around hers, mating languidly with it until she began to tremble. ‘Give me this chance to show you how sweetly we can entwine together…’ he whispered thickly, his mouth moving on to cherish her throat, his hands flowing over her like warm honey, enticing them both with soft forays under the edges of the blue silk. ‘I can make this even more exciting for you than the other way…’ he promised bewitchingly. ‘Not as instantly electrifying perhaps, but more powerfully erotic and just as intoxicating in the end…’
Sixteen hours after the most earth-shattering proof of that promise Anne was deep in the throes of an entirely different kind of intoxication, shaking with a delirium of outraged fury as she read the letter that she had found on her doormat when she’d arrived back from her morning lecture.
The coward had run away!
On paper Hunter spouted a lot of phrases about their both ‘needing this time apart to reassess their priorities’ and his not wanting to take advantage of her ‘soft heart’ and her ‘dangerous habit of self-sacrifice’. He thought that at this time in her life she should be concentrating on pursuing her own dreams instead of continually setting them aside for the sake of others, him included.
But what it all boiled down to was that Hunter hadn’t had the guts to say goodbye to her face. He must have planned this extended research trip for weeks, probably months, and yet even on the brink of departure he had said nothing about going away. It had been his secret escape-hatch and her passionate declaration of love last night had sent him bolting smartly through it. Perhaps his reticence had been a superstitious hangover from the tragic way his marriage had ended during a similar overseas trip, but Anne was in no mood to give him the benefit of the doubt. Probably he had just wanted to avoid a scene!
‘I am not Deborah!’ she screamed futilely to the empty air, ripping his Dear Anne missive to shreds and then shakily trying to piece it back together a few minutes later in order to try and read between the lines. He hadn’t even bothered to write it by hand. His kiss-off letter was typewritten, like a page from one of his novels, and signed simply ‘Hunter’. Not ‘Best wishes’ or ‘Regards’ or ‘Till we meet again’. And, glaringly obviou
s, not ‘Love’…
The most unforgivable thing of all was his destination. While Anne spent three weeks rattling around her flat in wintry August with no classes and no job because she had assumed that she and Hunter would be spending the time together, he was going to be swanning around Russia. Russia! The one country in the world that she would most love to visit! He couldn’t have calculated a greater insult to her humiliating injury.
When she found out from one of his fellow lecturers that Hunter had two months’ leave it was the last straw, and Anne did what any heartbroken, well brought up girl did in a crisis.
She went home to Mum.
Fortunately she managed to hitch a ride as far as Wellington with a student relative of Rachel’s who was returning home for the holidays, a nice, gangly boy whose idea of conversation, to her relief, was singing along to heavy metal tapes played at full volume in the stereo on wheels that passed for his car.
At Wellington Anne caught the Cook Strait Ferry and stood on the deck in the biting wind hunched into the jacket Hunter had given her, staring out at the whitecapped grey waters between the two islands of New Zealand and wondering what wonderful experiences he was having without her. And what if they weren’t so wonderful? What if he got somehow caught up in the internal politics of the former Soviet states? What if he got hurt or went missing? What if he was waylaid by a ravishingly beautiful, karate-kicking former KGB agent with big breasts and emotions of pure steel—all his unreasonable macho fantasies come true. He would probably have her tied to his bed in no time!
At Picton her brother Don met her in the family station wagon and there was another two hours of driving before they reached the farm, where Anne was finally free to sob out her misery on her mother’s ample breast and accept a warm soothing of maternal outrage spiced with womanly understanding.
After a week being fussed over and cossetted like an invalid, Anne was shooed off to the coast to visit Katlin and Ivan, and she found Dmitri there, finally out of his officer’s whites and temporarily employed by a local yacht charter company. After she had marvelled dutifully at Ivan’s miraculous new ability to walk, she had a quiet session with Katlin and was relieved to be told that she was on to the last chapter of her book. Then she took Ivan down to the beach to dig in the sand and catch up on her news, specifically about that lovely man next door who had turned out to be a snake in the grass. Ivan nodded sagely at this, as if he had suspected it all along, and consolingly pushed a fistful of sand into her down-turned mouth.
Over lunch Dmitri dropped his bombshell, gravely thanking her for her vital assistance with his residency application, which seemed certain now to be approved.
When she protested she hadn’t done anything he corrected her.
‘Yes, you have, for without your Professor Lewis things would be going much more slowly. He has cut through much officialdom in Russian Foreign Service by using his contacts here, and in Russia.’
‘Hunter did? But how? Why?’
‘He does it for you, perhaps? Because he knows your family means much to you. He left a message with my shipping company that he wants to help and they passed it on to me…’
Two weeks later, back in Auckland preparing for a new term, Anne was still fuming about what she had found out. If Hunter had involved himself in Dmitri’s application, then he must have seen the form which identified the mother of Dmitri’s son as one Katlin Clare Tremaine of Golden Bay, and the biographical information that mentioned a sister named, Anne, a student, in Auckland.
No wonder he had finally stopped nagging her about her so-called book. No wonder he had seduced her into shutting up that last night! He didn’t need her confession, he knew already. She had been dragging around that great burden of guilt for goodness’ knows how long for nothing! And all that ‘you have to pursue dreams’ stuff in the letter had obviously been his subtle and miserably apt revenge.
But if he knew, then at least he hadn’t informed on her and Kat…yet. There had been not a peep from the grants people. Perhaps he hadn’t had time before he left. Perhaps he intended to hold the threat over her head when he returned, she thought with a frisson of excitement… to blackmail her into his bed. Or more likely, she decided glumly, to keep her out of it!
She was thinking just such dark thoughts on the last Saturday before term, walking up an inner-city side-street from the department store where she had just landed herself a weekend job. Gusts of wind were blowing the rain across the footpath, wetting her woollen leggings, and she glanced through the glass frontage of a hotel café, envying the people tucked snugly inside, and came to a dead halt. She leaned over and pressed her face against the window-pane, ignoring the glare of the waitress inside.
Hunter!
