Sanchia's Secret

‘He must have a thumping great character flaw,’ Jane said, frowning. ‘There has to be a catch. Does he cheat at Monopoly?’

‘I’ve never played Monopoly with him.’ They’d played for much more dangerous stakes. ‘We said hello whenever we met on the beach, and his mother used to ask us up to dinner every holiday, but the Hunters were well out of our league.’

Until the summer she’d finished university…

Rose asked, ‘Is he likely to be at the Bay?’

Sanchia’s stomach muscles knotted again. ‘Possibly.’

‘If he’s not, will you mind being alone there without a phone?’

‘I won’t be alone.’ Two questioning glances persuaded her to expand, ‘The farm manager and the caretaker both live nearby. For heaven’s sake, both of you, I’ll be fine—I want one last holiday there, that’s all.’

Rose asked, ‘A kind of pilgrimage?’

‘Exactly,’ Sanchia said gratefully. A pilgrimage to say a private, final farewell to Great-Aunt Kate, the only person who’d ever loved her unconditionally, and to the only place she’d ever called home.

And a pilgrimage that would achieve some sort of closure on the love affair she’d never really had.

So now her elderly car was leaving the smooth road across Caid’s land to rattle down the hill through a remnant of coastal bush where tree-ferns cast starkly primeval shadows on the rutted track. Narrowing her eyes behind her sunglasses, Sanchia drove across the iron bars of the cattle-stop and over the grassy flat towards the small cottage.

On a short sigh of relief she braked and came to a stop. Small, rugged, wearing its eighty years with a jaunty, unashamed air, the cottage—never renovated and so called a bach—contrasted blatantly with the opulent mansion on the low headland to the west. To Sanchia’s fury, her heart skipped a beat.

‘You had a crush on him, but you grew out of it. It’s dead, done and gone,’ she pronounced firmly, dragging her gaze away from the trees that surrounded the Hunter mansion.

Her flatmates might admire a man who’d survived and won after being thrust into the cut-throat world of big business—but men like that were dangerous. And Caid Hunter wanted Waiora Bay. He had both power and the resources to fight her great-aunt’s plans for it.

Trying to ignore the cold emptiness beneath her midriff, Sanchia switched off the engine and sat for a moment, letting her tired eyes feast on the scene before her.

Huge, crimson-tasselled pohutukawa trees sprawled between a newly mown lawn—for which she’d have to thank Will Spence, the Hunters’ caretaker—and a glittering, sultry sea. Beneath the violent sun, sand blazed incandescently white. The tension behind her eyes began to wind more tightly as her gaze travelled to the leonine bulk of the island that sheltered the beach from northerly winds. A scattering of sails hinted at destinations beyond the horizon.

Tears aching in her throat, she pushed open the door of the car. Eventually she’d be able to remember the good times without grief, but she suspected it wasn’t going to happen easily or quickly.

With an inelegant sniff, she manoeuvred her long legs out of the car and stood up.

Heat hit her like a blow, sucking the air from her lungs and pasting her thin cotton T-shirt to her back and breasts. After a swift tug at the clammy material, she accepted the sun’s prodigal radiance on her shoulders and head, almost swaying with a poignant mixture of pain and mute relief.

With the soft hiss of the sluggish waves filling her ears, she bent to open the back door. As she touched the hot metal she yelped and leapt back, shaking her tingling hand.

‘What the hell—?’ A male voice, forceful and harsh and sexy.

Strong hands jerked her away from the car and Caid Hunter interposed his big, rangy body between her and the vehicle in a movement as unexpected as it was protective. ‘What happened?’ he demanded, lifting her hand and scrutinising it.

The foreboding that had lodged itself under Sanchia’s ribs over the past weeks—ever since she’d received the offer for her great-aunt’s property—expanded into an iceberg. Words clogging her tongue, she stared mindlessly up into eyes the intense blue of industrial strength cobalt.

Caid frowned. ‘Did you burn yourself?’

She shook her head.

Handsome as the gods his mother’s ancestors had summoned to rule the olive-silvered heights of Greece, Caid had inherited their fiercely compelling authority and self-assurance, their dark aura of power. During her adolescence she’d watched him with curious, fascinated eyes, secretly fantasising about him because he’d been unattainable and therefore safe.

Three years previously she’d crashed and burned against the difference between romantic fantasies and reality. Since then she hadn’t seen him except in photographs and on television, usually with a glamorous woman clinging to his arm.

Although he still stole her breath away she lifted her chin and met his gaze squarely. Caid Hunter might have beauty and power, status and brains and money, but to her he was nothing more than an obstacle.

No, not an obstacle—the obstacle, the only person who stood between her and her great-aunt’s dearest wish.

He persisted, ‘If nothing happened why did you yelp?’

Forcing herself to sound briskly practical, she answered, ‘I’m fine—you can let me go.’

Five foot ten tall herself, Sanchia didn’t have to crane her neck to look into that spectacular face, although her eyes lifted six inches or so. Yet, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, with long, heavily-muscled legs, Caid swamped her. Already she could feel her stomach knotting, the stress from taut muscles.

Frowning, he dropped her hand and stepped back with a lithe grace that revealed effortless physical dominance. ‘I’ve let you go,’ he said laconically. ‘You can relax.’

Across the short distance that separated them she saw his pulse beat strongly in the brown column of his throat, the slight sheen of moisture on his tanned skin.

Sanchia’s heart gave a frantic shudder. In some distant region of her mind she thanked whoever had invented sunglasses for their minor protection. Her low-pitched voice sinking into huskiness, she explained, ‘The car gave me a shock.’

He switched his gaze to the car. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Not it, me,’ she said. ‘Cars often shock me when I touch them after I get out. It’s something to do with my body’s electricity, I think.’

Oh, God! It sounded ominously close to a flirtatious come-on. She set her teeth in a smile that probably made her face look like a death-mask. ‘I’m on a different wavelength from cars, and they let me know it.’

He was too sophisticated to openly eye her up and down, but the curve of his beautiful mouth—a trap for impressionable women—was tinged with satire. ‘It must make life interesting.’

That smile smashed what was left of her composure with the energy of a well-aimed stone crashing through a bubble. ‘Shocking, actually,’ she said, despising herself for her total lack of cool. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here. How are you…’ She hesitated a mini-second before ending, ‘…now?’

‘I’m fine, Sanchia.’ A lazy mockery simmered just below the words. ‘And you?’ This time the blue eyes skimmed her from head to feet.

Although his glance didn’t linger enough to be impertinent or threatening, intent male interest smouldered like a shuttered flame behind it.

Terrified and exhilarated, she wished she’d worn jeans instead of exposing her long legs in shorts. Using a deliberately formal tone to distance herself, she said crisply, ‘I’m very well, thank you.’

‘I was sorry to hear that your great-aunt had died.’

The deep, almost harsh voice with its sensual undertone even sounded sorry. The Hunters had been very kind; his mother had sent flowers with a sympathetic note that had made Sanchia cry, Caid had written a brief but genuine letter of condolence, and a representative from the Auckland office of his firm had attended the funeral.

‘It’s the way she’d have chosen to go,’ Sanchia returned gruffly.

‘Dying peacefully in your sleep the night after your eightieth birthday party is the way we’d all choose to go,’ Caid Hunter observed, ‘but it’s hard on the ones left behind.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, as though saying it often enough could make it true.

‘Grief takes time, but eventually it becomes bearable.’ There was an odd pause, a kind of hesitation in the atmosphere, before he resumed blandly, ‘So here you are, Sanchia, all grown up and more lovely than ever.’

And again he let his gaze wander, if such a leisurely survey could be likened to anything as indecisive as wandering. Heat and ice chased each other across her skin when his blue eyes narrowed and turned molten.