The Seduction of Suzanne (12 page)

Only Annette could make a word like ‘gumption’ sound natural in a modern world. Justin hid a smile as he considered his PA’s towering mountain of gumption.

“I’m glad to see you’ve found time to get started on the Speedway project. Michael’s been slavering for it.”

“Yes, I’m sorry about that. I’ve been a bit distracted lately.” A vision of sparkling brown eyes and a heart-breaking smile rose before him. Then he thought of mile-long legs wrapped around his waist and shifted in his chair, his shorts growing tight. She had him as horny as a teenager, and about as capable of focusing on work.

“Yes, sir,” Annette agreed blandly. He chortled at her deadpan delivery, raised his hands in mock surrender and said:

“Alright, alright. A lot distracted. I’ve got a personal project I’m working on here.”

“Anything I should know about? One of your worthy causes? Do you want some publicity?”

“No, nothing like that. And I’d prefer you keep my whereabouts off the radar. I probably won’t touch base for a few days at least, but message me if you need anything. I’ll get back to you within the day.”

“Will do.”

He cut the connection and scrolled through his email, half his mind elsewhere as he sorted and discarded. Distracted by her of course.
Suzanne. Strong and sweet as Turkish coffee.

He was starting to feel uneasy about the things he was keeping from her. Which was odd. It was a sound strategy with women: keep quiet about his background, enjoy their company on his own terms, let things run their own course without all his money muddying the waters.

Once a woman knew you were rich, there was no way to tell if she was making her decisions based on that. Maybe it was childish but he enjoyed standing or falling on his own merit in a woman’s eyes. Not the merit of his bank accounts.

Not that it ever did any harm to keep things quiet.

Two times he had been deeply involved enough with a woman to share the details of his privileged upbringing and the fortune he’d added to it through his own hard work. Each of those girlfriends had been delighted.

I
t was like all her fantasies come true, Michelle had gushed. She got to have her darling Justin
and
enjoy a luxuriously lavish style of living. What could be more perfect?

Katrina was more quietly pleased but she’d certainly taken to the high life once she knew it was available, luring him into any number of pleasant extravagances and trading up from the basic lifestyle to which he gravitated, to a much
more 5-star existence. He didn’t mind spending the money, but he didn’t bother for his own sake.

No, there was no harm in keeping his secrets. If it came down to it he’d tell her sometime. And it might come to it. She was swiftly becoming an obsession. She held him at arm’s length like a woman who knew exactly what she was doing, advancing and retreating with diabolical timing.

Yet for all that there was a fineness to her, a strong thread of integrity and . . . was innocence possible in this jaded world? . . . that left him wondering if it was calculation, blind instinct or something else that had her pushing his buttons with such sure knowledge.

He planned to peel those layers away gently, with relish, until he understood what lay beneath. A fascinating, frustrating puzzle of a woman.

Chapter Eight

That day at the pool formed the pattern for the next two weeks. Every morning Justin met her on the front verandah of her house. He never asked to see inside, and she never invited him in. They wandered the island together, tramping, swim-ming, cycling, fishing, kayaking, even snorkelling.

Over the many hours spent with him, he was always the perfect companion. His conversation was intelligent and interesting, at times light hearted, occasionally philosophical. He proved to be much more well-read and erudite than she had expected from a man whom she was ashamed to admit she had initially thought of as a ‘mere surfer’.

She was forced to reassess her prejudices. There was no doubt that this particular drifting layabout would be clever and able enough to hold down virtually any job he wanted. His lack of motivation puzzled her.

Even more bewildering was their relationship. He was at all times friendly and obliging, but in the casual way of a friend. She would start to wonder if she was the only one tamping down lust and trying to act normal.

And then he would turn to her with that heat in his eyes, or touch her with hands that lingered. And his kisses. Oh, he kissed with a blazing passion that thrilled and terrified her. Again and again she broke away, skittish and aroused. Each time he let her go, watching, always watching.

And slowly she began to believe in him, his self-control, his respect for her. She craved his kisses more and more, circling back for another taste in a spiral of desire that grew tighter and tighter. A web. Or maybe a noose. She still wasn’t sure. She didn’t have the experience to judge what was between them. And his control was too complete to penetrate, to figure out what he wanted.

Beyond her. Oh, he wanted her alright. He didn’t try to hide the way his body responded to her. In the darkness of night, in her solitary bed, she thought of the hardness of his body and longed fiercely to have him there with her, wrapped around her, inside her, completing the equation he started.

But where she could be bold and fearless in her fantasies, in reality the depth of passion between them made her break and run.

She couldn’t imagine what he thought of her. She had heard the word cocktease. She hoped it hadn’t occurred to him to apply it to her. She couldn’t explain herself to him. Couldn’t bear to talk about their relationship at all. She simply lived in it, day by day, hoping and fearing and hoping again until she was dizzy with it.

The hard edge of resistance within her softened. Her body grew to know him. When he held her she held him back, fitting into him like he was the missing piece of her puzzle, slotted against her.
And though there still came that moment when she would instinctively back away, needing to escape, her reactivity dimmed, flickered, made way for passion and her handmaiden: lust.

Even when she wasn’t with him, all she seemed to think of was him. He filled both her days and her nights. She became bad-tempered and capricious in her frustration, but he took her moods in his stride, teasing her gently until she fell back into reluctant good-humour. Nothing seemed to dent his equanimity.

She just couldn’t work him out. What were his intentions? If all he wanted from her was a sexual relationship, he was certainly going about it a most peculiar way. To always step back after a kiss, and spend the rest of the day playing hands-off . . . it was like no seduction she’d ever heard of.

They spent an enormous amount of time together. But never at night. She was afraid to share the darkness with him, its shadows and secrets reminded her of that other night long ago. He didn’t pry about why only the daytime, didn’t even mention it in fact. So maybe it suited him too.

If he was doing any surfing at all, it was in the long, light-filled summer evenings after he had dropped her back home. Yet with determination she continued to brush aside the suspicion of him being serious about her.

She refused to nurse foolish hopes about this gorgeous, clever, charming man.

She had no doubt that he could have virtually any woman he wanted, so why should he choose her? Ordinary, everyday Suzanne, who had spent most of her life on an island just off the coast of New Zealand.

The more she came to know about Justin, the more she admired him. He was like no one she’d ever met before. Her father had raised her with a straightforward ethos: work diligently, and set aside time to rest and play. She still sometimes felt decadent and sybaritic about the long, leisure-filled holidays that teaching allowed her.

But Justin took the philosophy of enjoying life to a new level. Sometimes she shook her head at herself for looking up to a man she would previously have dismissed as an unproductive hedonist. Yet he was so centred and well grounded. He knew exactly who he was, and what he wanted from his life.

Most of all he was happy. Simply, intensely happy.
Suzanne realised she had only ever before encountered that kind of joy in children. It was a magnetic quality, which adulthood hadn’t managed to extract from him.

And he
was
an adult, there was no question of that. He was a deep, complex man. If she hadn’t taken to observing him so closely, she might have missed the layers of thought and awareness that he occasionally revealed. She got the feeling that not only did he get on easily with people, he also understood them very well. He certainly seemed to be able to read her at times with remarkable ease.

And oh, she loved his stories. She laughed so much sometimes her cheeks ached. When Justin spoke of his travels around the world, she could feel the soles of her feet begin to itch, and had to acknowledge how limited the scope of her safe little life was. He described the people and places he had seen so vividly, a hunger to see them had been rebuilt in her, despite her half-hearted attempts to deny it.

She started to think that it would be no bad thing to save money in order to travel. After all, she was only twenty-four. Without her father around she had no ties to the island beyond her house and job. The house could be rented out, and when she had last spoken to Marie, the teacher whose post she had taken over after Marie had gone on maternity leave, the woman had mentioned the idea of returning to work now her son was older.

Yet when
Suzanne envisaged going to Europe or Asia, Africa or America, her imagination seemed always to place the tall figure of Justin by her side. In fact she was finding it increasingly difficult to visualise her life without him in it, for all that she had known him for little more than three weeks.

Still, she would be going back to work in seven days, and then she would
have
to see less of him.

She reminded him of it that very evening. Wishing to break their routine of only spending the days together – and the associations dictating that choice –  she invited him to dinner. More than half-expecting him to politely refuse, the offer was
made tentatively. He accepted with pleasure.

They had spent the day fishing off a friend
’s large dinghy on the sheltered side of the island. The sun had blazed down, was still doing so now at six o’clock in the evening. It would continue to be hot until sunset, shortly after nine. Then the steady breeze would offer some respite as the air cooled.

With a sigh of relief she opened her front door and ushered him inside, where it was dimmer and relatively cool. She dropped the backpack she was carrying on the floor and headed for the kitchen sink. Her face felt a little tight from a combination of salt and reflected sunshine, and she wanted to splash some of the icy water from her underground cistern on herself.

It was only after she had done so, and was wiping the excess off with her hands and looking for a towel, that she realised Justin was still standing in the doorway

He was staring at one of her paintings, a large landscape which hung on the kitchen wall and seemed almost to glow in the warm sunlight that streamed in through the west-facing French doors.

“That,” he said reverently, “is beautiful.”

“Do you like it?” she asked rhetorically, feeling a rush of gladness. She had never said much to him ab
out her painting, though she wasn’t sure why. She didn’t usually discuss it with anyone, but then that could be said of most of what she’d told him about herself.

“Very much. Is it by an artist on the island? It
must be,” he went on, without waiting for her answer. “It has that loving familiarity with the subject.” He walked forward and put out a hand as if he must touch the canvas, stopping at the last moment with his fingers just above its surface.

She was delighted with his wholehearted response.

“Does the artist have more for sale? Will I be able to buy one?” he asked.

“I should think so, although she might be persuaded to give you a painting if you’re nice to her,” she said playfully, mindful of his financial situation and unwilling to take his money.

“Really?” he asked doubtfully, with a slight frown. “I can’t imagine anyone simply giving away an artwork of this quality.”

She gave an involuntary gurgle of delight, then grasped his large hand and pulled him out the door and down the hall. As he saw more of her work hanging on the plain cream walls she watched a dawning comprehension battle disbelief on his features. With a final tug she propelled him into her workroom, where her current work took pride of place on an easel. Stacked in the racks against the walls were other canvases, some finished and dry, others blank and waiting. The walls were stark white, to reflect the bright light from the large windows and overhead skylight.

“This is where I paint mostly,” she said, holding back her laughter at his dumbfounded expression. “Occasionally I work from life, but usually I make sketches and then come back here to complete them, as the mood strikes.” She gestured to the wall, where several pencil, charcoal and acrylic paint studies of her current subject hung.

“And all this time, you haven’t said a word to me about this vital part of your life,” he said slowly.