Jane shivered as the breeze whipped across the porch and she turned to enter the shabby kitchen.
She had never had a chance. As soon as Ryan had been once more in a position to attack he had done so without hesitation and without mercy—and who could blame him?
Not Jane.
That was why she couldn’t believe that Ryan really wanted her in his life, except as the crowning achievement of his search for natural justice. Maybe it wasn’t even conscious. Maybe he genuinely thought that the attraction that had flared between them was worth burying his resentment to explore. But Jane didn’t flatter herself that she was so special that he could be persuaded to permanently relinquish the jealously guarded bitterness that had shaped his ambition.
No, it was more likely that by making her his mistress he would be completing his revenge. He couldn’t make Mark Sherwood suffer, but he could spit on his grave by stamping both his company and his daughter as his own personal possessions.
Jane had spent too much of her girlhood loving a man who had been incapable of appreciating the preciousness of her gift. She had no intention of wasting her adulthood in the same way.
So, like the coward that she was, she had let Ryan leave the hotel that morning confident of his impression that she would fall in with his arrangements. Then, sitting on the unmade hotel bed in her tacky green dress, she had picked up the telephone and reluctantly called Ava.
And, to her surprise, found her secret bolt-hole.
CHAPTER SEVEN
FOR breakfast Jane boiled herself an egg obligingly laid by one of the clutch of bantam hens that scratched a living in the bach’s huge back yard and set the kettle on top of the wood-burning stove. As she ate at the scrubbed kitchen table she inhaled the rich, yeasty scent of baking bread that swelled out of the oven.
In two short weeks she had come to greatly appreciate the simple pleasures of life, just as she had begun to enjoy the challenge of bringing domestic order to the chaos that had greeted her on arrival.
Ava, who had inherited the run-down property only a few weeks previously on the death of a curmudgeonly great-aunt, had told Jane that she could have the place as long as she needed it. She had warned her that a real-estate agent had told them they wouldn’t be able to rent the house out anyway, until it was cleaned up and repaired, so that the living might be rough, but Jane had grabbed at the chance to do something useful in her self-imposed exile, offering to earn her keep by giving the place a thorough clean-out and making a list of the maintenance work that was beyond the capabilities of her limited handyman skills.
Not that she needed to earn her keep, for Ava had insisted that she and her husband already owed Jane more than they could ever repay. She had been understandably shocked by Jane’s telephone call begging for help in finding an inexpensive place to hide, for she had had no idea that her friend’s recent business problems had become so extreme, nor that they were directly related to Ryan Blair.
Ava and Conrad Martin had moved to Wellington shortly after their wedding, and their decision to settle a comfortable few hundred kilometres away from Ava’s interfering parents had enabled Jane to make light of the catastrophic impact that Ryan’s return to Auckland had had on her life. She had seen no point in upsetting Ava when there was nothing that she could do to help.
Conrad, who was a mechanic looking to own his own workshop, was too proud—or too wise—to accept financial assistance from his in-laws, so the couple, already with two young children to support, were in no position to rush to Jane’s aid either physically or financially. And, anyway, Jane had promised herself three years ago that she would never raise the spectre of the past as a test of their continuing friendship.
Making that phone call was the hardest thing that she had ever done, but fortunately, and somewhat unexpectedly, Ava had risen magnificently to the occasion. She had instantly acceded to Jane’s strained plea that she ask no questions—even though she had obviously been bursting with curiosity—so Jane didn’t have to tell any awkward lies. To admit that she had become enmeshed in Ryan’s vengeful toils was one thing; to confess that she had also slept with Ava’s former fiancé was quite another!
Even more fortunately, it turned out that Ava’s great-aunt Gertrude had harboured a distrust of authority, and had held gloomy opinions about the fate of civilisation that had turned her into something of a survivalist. Every bit of storage space in her house had been crammed with hoarded groceries and bulk supplies and there was a huge rambling vegetable patch which, along with the hens and fruit trees, supplied most of Jane’s dietary requirements.
All she required to complete her self-sufficiency was a cow, thought Jane with a wry grin as she poured some of the hot water from the kettle over the dishes in a plastic bowl and the rest into a teapot. Milk and butter were the only staples she had to buy.
Of course there were drawbacks to the simple life, especially to someone who had to cope with the inconveniences one-handed. Thankfully Ava had arranged for a relative of Conrad’s to give Jane and her cartons and plastic bags of possessions a lift out to Piha in his van, but once there she was effectively stranded by her need to eke out her funds for an indefinite period.
There was an infrequent bus service to Auckland, but so far she hadn’t had to use it, and although the house was wired for electricity there was no p
hone, and Jane was minimising power bills by using the tilly lamps and candles that Great-Aunt Gertrude had stored in generous quantities.
She had also turned off the hot-water cylinder, heating washing-up water on the wood stove in which she burned the rubbish she was gradually cleaning out of the crammed rooms and blessing the balmy summer as she took refreshingly cold showers. All Piha residences relied on tank water, so she was also careful to economise on her water usage, recycling washing water on the vegetable patch and placing a brick in the toilet cistern.
At least she had one source of help to hand. Her present reading material was a number of battered ‘do-it-yourself’ books and old-fashioned housewifely tomes that she had found in a dusty carton under one of the sagging beds.
Hence her fledgling bread-making skills. Jane glanced at the clock on the kitchen mantelpiece and decided it was time to see if she had yet conquered the problem of iron crusts. She opened the oven door and used a quilted oven-cloth to lift out the heavy loaf tin she had put in to bake while she went for her usual morning walk along the beach. Setting it carefully down on the work-scarred table, she pressed her finger into the raised crust, smiling at its springiness. Not perfect, but since she had been at Piha Jane had stopped trying to live up to impossible standards. She had even discovered that failing could be fun if you were willing to laugh at your mistakes instead of punishing yourself for them.
‘So this is your “better offer”!’
Jane whirled, bumping the table with her hip, knocking the bread flying. Instinctively she reached out with her good hand to catch the tin before it hit the floor and spilled its contents, gaping at the man who filled the narrow doorway. Her confusion was such that it was several moments before she responded to the pain receptors screaming for attention. She yelped and threw the loaf back down on the table, gazing down at her seared palm in macabre fascination as a blister began to bubble up from the abused flesh.
‘What have you done?’ Ryan was by her side, his hand clamping on her wrist as he spun her over to the sink and turned on the cold tap, holding her hand steady under the gentle stream of water as he pushed in the plug.
He made her stand there with her hand in the sinkful of water while he fetched the cellphone from his car and made a call to Dr Frey.
‘Yes. Yes, she does, doesn’t she? No, no skin broken—blisters, though, on her palm and the pads of her fingers. Yes. Fine—I can do that. Yes, yes I will. Thanks Graham—just add it to my bill.’
As he flipped his portable phone closed and tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans Jane, still leaning over the sink, said weakly, ‘You didn’t have to do that.’