Sarah Morgan - Temporary Mistress

‘Nearly where ?’

Nora gave another smothered shriek as Blake hit the brakes and spun the car down a roughly sealed side road cut into the side of the hill—a road so steep that it was almost vertical, and so narrow there seemed barely room for the car.

‘Karekare Beach is just over to your right.’ He nodded towards the flash of glittering sea that revealed itself between the bisecting hills.

‘How can it be? You were supposed to be dropping me off at work!’ she squeaked, instinctively bracing her feet against the floor in the vain hope of stopping their plunging descent.

‘I changed my mind.’

‘You can’t do that!’ she spluttered, clutching the edge of her seat as he rounded another tight corner.

His eyebrow shot up in an ironic slant that said he already had.

Outside her window, the forest fell away into a steep-sided valley and Nora blanched, her heart leaping into her mouth at the sight of the flimsy wooden crash barrier that marked the edge of the drop.

‘Oh, God!’ she groaned weakly. The music which had earlier soothed her now seemed to mock her fear. ‘You lying rat!’

‘A pity you had to wake up during this bit,’ Blake murmured with abrasive sympathy. ‘But once we get down under the bush canopy again you won’t notice the elevation.’

‘Don’t bank on it!’ She sucked in a nervous breath that did nothing to reassure her. ‘Is it my imagination or is the air thinner up here?’

‘We’re not that high,’ he replied with an admirably straight face. ‘You needn’t worry about me passing out at the wheel from hypoxia.’

She shuddered. ‘What happens if we meet someone coming the other way?’ she fretted.

‘One of us has to back up until there’s room to pass,’ he said, with a calmness that told her he had done this many times before.

Suspicion congealed into full-blown certainty: this was no random drive to blow away the mental cobwebs. ‘Where exactly are we going, MacLeod?’

‘Somewhere nice and secluded—’

‘—where no one will hear me scream?’ she concluded with acid sarcasm.

‘Where you can take time out—relax and unwind in the peace and quiet of tranquil surroundings.’ His deep voice mingled with the sexy growl of the car. ‘No stress, no pressure, no prying friends…You can catch some sun and laze about in luxury while you consider all your options…’

It sounded achingly like heaven to Nora’s bruised soul.

‘One of them being to have you arrested for kidnapping!’

‘What kidnapping?’ he countered blandly. ‘I suggested we spend the long weekend at my beach house. I didn’t hear you object, so naturally I assumed that you were willing…’

‘How could I have objected? I was asleep !’ she blustered, her outrage at his blatant manipulation of the facts ambushed by a treacherous thrill of excitement.

His beach house? The long weekend? She had forgotten it was a public holiday on Monday. She was on the brink of being stranded for days in Blake MacLeod’s sole company!

She didn’t flatter herself that Blake was whisking her away to his private hideaway because he was crazed by love, but there was a certain provocative undercurrent to his threats that charged them with erotic meaning. Even knowing that he had some devious ulterior motive for wanting to keep her isolated for the next few days didn’t stop her from feeling a rush of feminine triumph. Boring women didn’t drive sexy bachelors to reckless acts of piracy…

‘You’re taking a serious risk, you know,’ she told him. ‘I could cause you a heap of trouble.’

‘More than you have already, you mean?’ he asked, unruffled by the threat. ‘Perhaps I believe that the potential rewards far outweigh the risk.’

She wondered what kind of rewards he was talking about. They hit a pothole and the car momentarily swerved, jolting her out of her abstraction. ‘Why doesn’t the council do something to fix this road?’ she gasped.

‘Because it dead-ends at a beach with no public facilities and there are only a few private homes along the way. The road doesn’t generate enough traffic to justify the expense of regular upgrades.’

‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ she gulped as an overhanging fern slapped the windscreen.

‘As long as you’re with me, Nora, you’re as safe as you want to be…’

That was what she was afraid of! ‘And if I said I wanted to go back?’ She knew it was what she should say.

‘To what? You didn’t really want to go anywhere near work today. You were just saying that out of misplaced bravado.’

She gritted her teeth at the accuracy of the thrust. ‘I was actually trying to get rid of you. ’

‘Didn’t work, though, did it? Face it, I’m doing you a favour. Remember, revenge is a dish best served cold.’

‘I don’t want revenge.’ She had wasted more than enough time and energy on Ryan already.

‘Then you must be unique amongst human beings,’ he replied drily. ‘If someone I loved betrayed me, I’d take great pleasure in stripping them of everything they valued in life, piece by painful piece.’

Nora shivered at the icy implacability of his words and the implicit passion behind them. The kind of passionate intensity that had clearly been lacking in her relationship with Ryan.

‘Maybe I wasn’t really in love with him,’ she muttered. ‘He seemed like an unattainable god at university—he had a rugby blue and was hugely popular with everyone, whereas I was a geeky teenager who’d never even had a real boyfriend. Most of the other girls threw themselves at him, but I was too shy, so I—I—’

‘Contented yourself with worshipping from afar until he deigned to notice you?’ He sliced cleanly through her self-pitying gloom. ‘Sounds like a normal teenage crush to me. I had one on my biology teacher when I was thirteen. It’s one of those things you outgrow and laugh about afterwards.’

She tried, and failed, to imagine an adolescent Blake MacLeod in the throes of unrequited love. ‘Yes, well…I was obviously a late bloomer. When he moved up to Auckland to work for Maitlands and suggested there was a job for me there I thought it was because he missed having me around. I guess I didn’t really have a chance to grow out of my infatuation—’

‘Perhaps because Superjock didn’t want you to. I bet he fed off your innocent admiration. How many people who challenged his superior self-image remained his friends?’

‘At least I can blame my idiocy on youth and inexperience—what’s your excuse?’ she jabbed back. ‘Why are you really doing this? I doubt if you normally encourage people to run away from their problems!’

He turned his head to study her, his gaze taunting. ‘Do you really want to get into it with me right now?’

‘Keep your eyes on the road, for God’s sake!’ she yelled, clutching the seatbelt across her chest.

He obeyed her ear-splitting command, scouring around the next corner. ‘Sorry, but I like to look people in the eye when I’m having a serious discussion,’ he said with pious calm.

‘Then you can save the discussion until we get wherever it is we’re going!’ she gritted, knowing full well she was being manipulated. And to think she had been on the verge of forgiving him for preying on her vulnerability!

She simmered and suffered in burning silence until Blake pulled off the steep road on to a long, even steeper, concrete driveway which drilled down through the thick screen of bush covering the coastal side of the hill.

‘I thought you said your house was at the beach,’ she said nervously as the green canopy meshed overhead, further hemming them into the leafy shadows.