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  For some obscure reason that hurt. Aura’s lips parted on a swift retort, then closed firmly before the hot words had a chance to burst out. Over the years she had learned how to deal with her mother, and an angry response was the worst way. The nasty incident on One Tree Hill must have shaken her usual restraint.

  Smiling wryly she said, ‘No, not in the least. You can have the dishy Flint; your friends might laugh at the difference in ages, but they’ll probably envy you. However, I wouldn’t bore him with any more details of our personal affairs, or you’ll see him rush off to more exciting conversation.’

  From her mother’s expression she saw that her shaft had struck home. If Flint Jansen pumped her mother again he’d probably get what he wanted easily enough— he was that sort of man—but with any luck, from now on Natalie wouldn’t spill out unasked-for details.

  It had been a strange day. As Aura curled up in her cramped room and closed her eyes against the glare of the streetlight that managed to find her face every night through the gap between the blind and the window-frame, she tried to woo sleep with an incantation that never failed.

  In two weeks’ time she would be married to Paul, darling, gentle, kind, understanding Paul, and she would be able to relax and live the serene, happy life she had always longed for.

  Of course there would be troubles, but they’d be able to overcome them together. Her mother, for one. Natalie would always demand the constant attention she considered her due. But when they were married, Aura’s first loyalty would be to Paul. Dearest Paul. She intended to make him so happy, as happy as he would make her.

  Two weeks. A fortnight. Only fourteen more days.

  Firmly banishing Flint Jansen’s fiercely chiselled face from her mind, she turned her head and drifted off to sleep.

  She woke the next morning slightly headachey and as edgy as a cat whose fur had been stroked the wrong way. The clear sky of the night before had been transmuted into a dank, overhanging pall of heavy cloud; rain hushed persistently against the window panes.

  Listening to the early traffic swish by on the road outside, she wondered why she felt as though she had spent all night in a smoky room. It couldn’t be the weather. It had rained for most of the autumn, so she was quite reconciled to a wet wedding day.

  And everything was under control. Mentally she went through the list. The caterer knew to ignore any instructions her mother gave; her wedding-dress was made in the simple, flowing lines that suited both her figure and the informal occasion, not the elaborate and unsuitable costume Natalie had suggested. And the florist had no illusions about the sort of flowers she wanted.

  A wedding, even one as small as theirs, was like a juggernaut, caught up in its own momentum, rolling serenely on towards an inevitable conclusion. The simile made her smile, and stretch languidly. This wedding was going to be perfect, from the hymns to the best man—Flint Jansen.

  Like the outburst of a nova the memory of the previous evening lit up her mind, and with a shame that sickened her she recalled the dream that had woken her halfway through the night. Explicit, sensual, only too vivid, they had lain tangled together in a bed swathed with white netting. Through the wide windows came the soft sounds of the sea. Scents that hinted at the tropics floated on the heated, drowsy air.

  She tried to convince herself that the other man in that wide bed had been Paul, but it was Flint’s bronzed, harsh-featured face that had been above hers, Flint’s hard mouth that had kissed her with such passion and such bold eroticism, Flint who had touched her in ways Paul never had.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she whispered, burying her face into her hot pillow.

  Somehow Flint Jansen had slid right through her defences and taken over that most unmanageable part of her mind, the hidden area that manufactured dreams and symbols, the secret source of the imagination. Such a betrayal had never happened to her before.

  Perhaps that vengeful little daydream on the way home from One Tree Hill had given her inner self permission to fantasise? Had the strength of her anger carried over into her unconscious and been transmuted for some reason into the passion she hadn’t yet known?

  In the end, after mulling over the whole wretched business for far too long, she was forced to accept that for some reason she was physically attracted to Flint.

  Of course it had nothing to do with love, it was a mere matter of chemicals. Aura might be relatively unsophisticated, but she knew that such an explosion of the senses usually died as quickly as it flamed into being. She had seen what happened to those of her friends who believed it to be love. They had found that within a horrifyingly short time, when desire was sated, they were left with nothing but the dross of a failed affair.

  Jessica Stratton, her best friend and bridesmaid, had tripped into such a pit only a year ago. Recalling the subsequent disillusionment, Aura sat up, shivering in the cold dampness of her room, and reached for her dressing-gown.

  ‘I don’t even like him,’ Jessica had wailed. ‘I thought it was the greatest romance since Romeo and Juliet, I thought he was wonderful, and then I woke up beside him one morning and saw a boorish, sports-mad yob with hairy toes and a bad case of egotism. He wasn’t even a good lover; he did it by numbers! What on earth did I see in him?’

  ‘Chemistry,’ Aura had told her pertly, secretly rather proud that she had never fallen prey to it.

  Clearly pride went before a fall. Because when she looked at Flint Jansen funny things happened to her legs and her spine, and her insides melted into a strangeness that was shot through with exhilaration and eagerness.

  Paul’s touch was warmth, and love, and happiness. What she felt when Flint looked at her was a heated sexual excitement, the basic lust of a woman for the most potent man around.

  Her soft, full mouth firmed in distaste as she shrugged into her robe and tied it. Appetite, that was all it was, a primeval pull at the senses, a straight biological urge that had nothing to do with love or trust. She-animals felt its force, and mated with the strongest male because of it.

  In spite of his striking, unhandsome face and unyielding expression, Flint was a very sexy man, edged with an aura of danger that some women found smoulderingly sensual. However, she was immune to what he offered.

  Uncomfortable and disturbing although her reaction to Flint was, she could deal with it. All she had to do was remember that it would pass. She would not exchange the pure gold of her feeling for Paul, the affection and companionship, the fact that she respected and admired and loved him, for all the enticing tinsel and gloss of sexual desire, however it blazed in the moonlight.

  Braced by common sense, Aura showered and cleaned her teeth in the tiny, dingy bathroom, then made coffee and took her mother the glass of mineral water and slice of lemon that was her first meal of the day. When that was done she sat down to her toast in the dining end of the sitting-room.

  Almost immediately the telephone rang. ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ Paul said. ‘Everything all right for tonight?’

  ‘So far, so good.’ Aura smiled at the gloomy day outside. ‘I’ve no doubt there’ll be more crises today, but at the moment I’m on top of everything.’

  She could hear his smile. ‘Good. How did you get on with Flint last night?’

  So unnerved was Aura by her dreams that she immediately wondered whether somehow he knew...

  No, of course he couldn’t!

  ‘Fine,’ she said automatically. ‘It was rather touching, really. He took me to the top of One Tree Hill and tried to satisfy himself that I have your best interests at heart.’

  There was a moment of silence before Paul said in an amused voice, ‘Did he, indeed? And do you think you convinced him? Or did you tell him to mind his own business?’

  Aura laughed softly. ‘You know me too well. To be honest, I don’t really care what he thinks. If I convince you, that’s all I worry about. And I’ve got a long time to do that; at least sixty years.’

  With immense tenderness he said, ‘Darling, I love you.’

>   ‘I love you, too.’

  ‘Not as much as you’re going to,’ he said quietly, almost as though he was making a vow. Before she could answer he said, ‘Enough of this! I can’t spend all morning dallying with you, I’ve got work to do. It’s this afternoon you’re going to do the flowers, isn’t it, so you’ll be here when the caterers come at three?’

  ‘Yes. It shouldn’t take me more than an hour to arrange the flowers, and all I’ve got to do for the caterers is show them where things are in the kitchen. I’ll have plenty of time to come home and get changed before you pick me up.’

  ‘Good. Although it would take a lot less time if you’d just get off your high horse and accept a car. All right, we’ve been through it all, but you must be the most stubborn, exasperating woman I’ve ever met. I have to go, darling, I can hear Flint surfacing, and if I’m not to be late I have to leave within three minutes.’

  Aura hung up, wondering whether Flint would be in the flat that afternoon.

  Of course not, she scoffed as she finished her toast and drank a cup of coffee. He had this important, slightly sinister-sounding job; he’d be at work giving the women there a thrill.

  After the final fitting of the wedding-dress, she had lunch with an old friend of her grandmother’s before catching the bus to Paul’s apartment, walking the last hundred metres through the downpour that had been threatening all day. Her umbrella saved her head and shoulders, but she grimaced at the cold wetness of the rain on her legs and shoes. Much of this, and she’d have to think of getting a coat.

  No, she thought as the last of the autumn leaves fluttered like dank brown parachutes to land in a soggy layer on the footpath, after they were married she’d have a car and life would be more convenient. But she still didn’t regret not having accepted Paul’s offer.

  At least Flint couldn’t accuse her of unseemly greed.

  Even the perfect, radiant flowers of the camellias were turning brown under the rain’s relentless attack, while pink and white and yellow daisies were being beaten into the dirt. In one garden dahlia plants in a wide bed were still green and leafy at the base; only the stalks that had held the brilliant flowers towards the sun were blackened and stiff.

  Aura was overcome by a sudden, stringent melancholy, a weariness of the spirit that gripped her heart. It was the weather, she thought, shaking off her umbrella before she tapped out the code that opened the street door of the apartment complex. June was often fine, but this year it had decided to go straight into winter.

  In two weeks’ time she’d be married to the nicest man she had ever met, and they would be flying to a luxurious little island of the coast of Fiji for their honeymoon, where she would have nothing to do but soak up the heat and the soft tropical ambience, and learn how to please Paul.

  As though summoned by an evil angel, Flint’s voice echoed mockingly through her mind. ‘It’s about lying in a bed with him, making love, giving yourself to him, accepting his body, his sexuality with complete trust and enthusiasm...’

  The door opened to her suddenly unsteady hand. She walked quickly across the foyer, nodding to the porter, her heels tapping coldly on the smooth, shiny marble. In the lift she pressed the button for the third floor.

  Oh, she was a fool, letting him get to her like that. Of course she wanted to make love with Paul; she enjoyed his kisses, his caresses, they made her feel warm and loved and secure. That was why she had broken the other two engagements. Although she had liked both men very much, she had been unable to let them touch her beyond the mildest of caresses.

  Paul was different. He had understood her wariness, the tentative fear she had never really overcome, and he hadn’t tried to rush her into a sexual relationship before they were married.

  Of course Flint didn’t have the faintest idea that she was still a virgin! Forcing her mind away from his relentless tone as he accused her of being no better than a whore, she opened the door into Paul’s apartment.

  The flowers had already arrived. Great sheaves of roses and carnations and Peruvian lilies stood in buckets in the kitchen, with sprays of little Singapore orchids and exquisitely bold cymbidiums, all in shades of pink and bronze and creamy-green. After hanging up her coat, Aura tried to banish her odd weariness by walking slowly around the big rooms of the flat, working out where to put vases.

  An hour later she was arranging the roses in a huge vase on the hall table when, against the sounds of Kiri Te Kanawa’s magnificent voice singing Gershwin, she heard the front door open. A quick glance over her shoulder revealed the lean form of Flint Jansen strolling in through the door, completely at home, a perfectly detestable smile not softening his arrogant face.

  Aura’s eyes evaded his and flew to the cheek she had slapped. Little sign of the blow remained, except for a slight reddening of the skin about the thin scar. Remorse and self-disgust roiled unpleasantly inside her.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, nervously banishing the fragmented images of last night’s dream that threatened to surge up from wherever she had marooned them.

  The smile widened as he conducted a leisurely survey. Aura had slid her wet shoes off and was standing barefoot in a narrow tan skirt topped by a jersey the exact gold at the heart of the big cream chrysanthemums; her bronze and dark brown scarf was twisted a little sideways. Beneath Flint’s narrowed scrutiny she felt like an urchin.

  ‘The spirit of autumn,’ he said blandly, closing the door behind him and advancing into the hall. ‘Don’t let me interrupt you.’

  ‘I won’t.’ It was a short answer and far too revealing, but she felt as though someone had tilted the stable world on which she stood. An odd breathlessness made it difficult for her to speak. Turning back to the flowers, she pushed a splendid bronze-pink candelabrum of cymbidiums home.

  ‘I’m sorry I slapped you last night,’ she said abruptly.

  Silence stretched tautly between them. She kept her eyes on the flowers in the vase.

  ‘Are you? I didn’t leave you with much option.’ There was no measurable emotion in his tone, nothing to tell her what he was thinking.

  Her shoulders moved. ‘Nevertheless,’ she said gruffly, thrusting another large sprig of black matipo into the back of the arrangement, ‘I don’t normally go around hitting people.’

  ‘Your apology is accepted.’ Clearly he didn’t care a bit.

  From the corner of her eye she watched him pick up one of the long-stemmed rosebuds. Hastily Aura averted her gaze, strangely affected by the sight of the fragile flower held so carefully in his lean strong hand as he raised it to his face.

  ‘It has no scent,’ he said on a detached note.

  ‘No. Most flowers cultivated for the markets have lost their scent. Even the carnations have very little.’ She was babbling, so she drew in a deep breath. Much more of his presence, she thought with slight hysteria, and she’d end up hyperventilating.

  ‘A pity. I’d rather have scent and fewer inches in the stem.’

  ‘Not all roses have scent.’

  ‘I prefer the ones that do.’

  She nodded. ‘So do I.’

  He held out the stem. Carefully avoiding his fingers, she took it.

  ‘Will they open?’ he asked.

  She shrugged, and put the rose into the vase. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes they do, sometimes they die like that.’

  ‘Poor things. No scent, no blossoming, no seeding. Hardly flowers at all. I wonder what gave anyone the idea that these were preferable to the real thing.’ He walked into the sitting-room, saying off-handedly, ‘I’ll get you a drink.’

  ‘No, thanks, I don’t need one.’

  But when he reappeared it was with a wine glass in one hand, and a glass of whisky well qualified with water in the other.

  ‘You might not,’ he said, ‘but I do, and as I never drink alone, you can accompany me. You look as though you could do with something. It’s only white wine, dry, with a hint of floral bouquet and a disconcerting note of passion. Heavy day?’

 
‘Not really,’ she said, reluctantly accepting the glass. He had made the description of the wine too intimate, too personal, his abrasive voice lingering over the words as though he was applying them to her, not the wine.

  ‘What shall we drink to?’ he asked, not trying to hide the note of mockery in his voice.

  Eyes the colour and clarity of a topaz searched her face; he seemed to be trying to probe through the skin to the thoughts in her brain, the emotions in her heart.

  Determined not to let him see how uncomfortable she was, she said lightly, ‘The future is always a good toast. It covers a lot of ground.’

  ‘So it does. Well, Aura Forsythe, here’s to the future. May it be all that you need.’

  Made gauche by the unexpected wording, she said, ‘And yours, too,’ and swallowed some of the wine before setting the glass down.

  ‘Do you intend leaving yours to fate?’ he asked with apparent disinterest, tilting his glass so that the light refracted in the liquid like a thousand glinting crystals, exactly the same shade as his eyes.

  ‘What else can I do?’ Picking up a marbled swordleaf of flax, she positioned it carefully, as carefully as she kept her face turned away.

  He laughed softly. ‘Oh, I believe in making my own future. Somehow I thought you would too.’

  ‘I don’t believe one can,’ she said, stung by the inference that she was a manipulator.

  ‘Of course you can. There is always the unexpected, but we lay the ground rules.’

  ‘We plan,’ she returned crisply. ‘But quite often our plans go awry.’

  ‘Not mine,’ he said with such assurance that she believed him. ‘Not when you know what you’re doing. And I make sure I do.’

  Aura had always been quick to read signals. The circumstances of her upbringing had honed a natural skill to razor sharpness. His voice was even, without inflection, his eyes hooded in an immobile face, his words laconic, yet the threat was naked and open between them.

  ‘But of course,’ he finished almost indifferently, ‘you have to understand what you’re doing. And gathering information can take a little time.’