The girl bent over, her hands on her hips in a pugnacious pose that Anya recognised from their previous encounter. ‘That was such a dumb thing to do—I could have killed you!’
Anya gaped up at the scowling face framed in its distinctive dye-job, the spikes of gold-tipped black hair standing up in defiance of gravity, the ring in her nose matched by two smaller ones in each ear. The words were spoken in relief rather than anger, she thought, and with a strong Australian twang.
‘Stopped—you—hurting yourself,’ she panted out in between whistling breaths, in defence of the scolding. At any other time she might have been amused at the role-reversal.
‘Yeah, and it’s probably going to cost me, big time,’ was the disgruntled reply. Anya decided to try and sit up, but the girl dropped onto her skinny haunches and planted a surprisingly strong hand on Anya’s collarbone, holding her flat against the uneven bricks. ‘No! Don’t try and move yet. I’ll go and get some help—’
Anya suddenly remembered where she was. ‘No, really, I’m OK—’ she protested weakly. ‘I can feel everything…’ She wiggled her toes to prove it.
‘Just wait!’ The young voice, formerly shrill, had now sunk back to its natural husky register and carried an amazing amount of authority for one so young. ‘Jeez, lady, don’t be in such a hurry. Please—don’t try and get up until I get someone to help. I don’t want you dying on me. I’m too young to have that on my conscience. I’d be traumatised for life!’
Anya doubted it. Not with that resilient sense of humour. ‘You…didn’t mean to…do it,’ she huffed, gracious to a fault.
‘No, well…’ The blue eyes sparked with a devilish light that plucked a familiar chord in Anya’s mind. ‘Be a real mate and hold that thought for me, will you?’
‘What—?’ But she was already gone, sprinting like a black gazelle towards the back of the house, leaping and hopping from leg to leg as she whipped off her running shoes along the way, dangling them by their laces as she ran. Did she think she was faster in bare feet?
Anya remained spread-eagled on the ground, not because she was following instructions but because she felt slightly giddy when she lifted her head, and her breathing was still catching unpleasantly in her chest. She would get up in slow stages, she decided, carefully straightening in her limbs in preparation to rolling over and pushing up on her knees.
She thought she was starting to hallucinate when she suddenly saw the girl’s head and shoulders poke out of the selfsame dormer window high up under the gabled roof. The weirdly skewed sense of déjà vu was shattered as the girl gave her an encouraging wave and launched into a series of ear-piercing screams. Her head abruptly disappeared back inside the room and Anya was left staring blankly upwards, thinking perhaps she was unconscious after all.
To her confused mind it only seemed bare seconds later when the girl came dashing back up to her prone body, this time from the direction of the front of the house and closely trailed by a babble of voices wanting to know what was going on. One of them, deep and resonant, made Anya utter a fatalistic cry of pained frustration.
‘What the—?’ Scott Tyler’s exclamation was cut short as he dropped to his knees beside her, his large hand going to her forehead to brushed away a few crumpled leaves. In his dark trousers and casual open shirt he looked younger and less ruthlessly constrained than he did in his elegant suits.
‘What on earth have you done to yourself?’ he muttered, running his eyes rapidly over her body, looking for clues. Over his shoulder Anya was dismayed to see the curious faces of Sean and Samantha, his niece and nephew, falling into startled expressions as they realised who it was lying on the path.
‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ he continued, ‘I didn’t see your car parked out front.’
‘I—I walked over,’ she said, watching Sean turn around and hurriedly slope off while his sister craned forward.
‘Did you trip and hit your head on the bricks?’ he said, sliding his fingers around the back of her skull and feeling for any telltale sponginess.
‘No, I—’ Anya tried to pull her head away from his touch and saw the young girl looking down at her with pleading eyes, her hands steepled under her chin. ‘—I f
ell,’ she finished lamely. The girl silently folded her hands to her heart in a mime of swooning gratitude.
‘Not watching where you were going?’ murmured Scott Tyler, his dark brows drawn together as he bent over her and placed his flattened palms on either side of her neck, making her pulse jerk. Dark hair flopped across his forehead and she could see the pulse jumping at the base of his own throat through his open shirt-collar.
‘The bricks on this path are very uneven, and the steps do tend to sort of blend in,’ chipped in the cause of the accident with inventive flair.
‘I was looking up at the house,’ Anya said truthfully, gasping as his big hands smoothed over her shoulders and arms, and down her sides, his fingers trailing over the front of her ribs. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ She squirmed as his hands kept going south, moving over her hips and down her legs.
‘Stop writhing about,’ he growled.
‘You’re tickling,’ she complained, and blushed when his dark lashes flicked up so that he looked directly into her eyes. Could he tell she was lying?
‘Well, at least you don’t appear to be suffering from any loss of feeling,’ he said drily. ‘And your colour seems to be coming back.’
‘I had the wind knocked out of me, that’s all,’ she said, putting a hand to her scooped neckline, drawing his attention to her yellow knitted top.
‘You look like a wilted buttercup,’ he murmured, ‘mown down by a summer breeze.’
Anya was flustered by the unexpected whimsicality of his words. Was that a poetical way of saying that she was a weakling? How would he fare on being struck by a human cannonball?
‘If you move out of the way I’ll get up,’ she said gruffly.
She began to hoist herself up on her hands but he remained where he was, tilting his head to frown at the scrape on her arm below her bunched sleeve. ‘I think it was a little more than a winding, but lying there on the damp ground certainly isn’t doing you any good.’