Reasons Of the Heart Read online

  'If you mean Jack Trent, go ahead, then we'll see which one of us gets kicked out.' Jack Trent had been the sole police presence in Whaler's Bay for at least twenty years, and Fran wasn't surprised to discover he was still on the job. She was surprised, though, by Ross's unconcern.

  'Why should I get kicked out?'

  'Because, Princess, you're not the ruler of this castle.'

  'Not ? But...this is Grandpa's cabin. Of course

  it's going to be mine!' she stated starkly.

  'Is it? Or did you just assume it would be? Actually, your grandfather said he was leaving the place to me when he died.' Ross calmly put the prepared fillets into sizzling butter and pushed them around the pan.

  Outrage blazed in Fran's eyes. 'To you! I don't be­lieve it.' He had to be lying, she was counting on being heir, had committed herself on the strength of it... 'If you think you can just come along and appropriate my inheritance you've got another think coming!'

  'I didn't just "come along",' he interrupted her curtly. 'I've been living in this cabin for months—leasing it. Ian and I got to know each other rather well during that time, and when I said that I'd be interested if he wanted to sell, he said that he wanted to hang on to the cabin but that I could have it when he died. He promised, in fact... in front of a witness, too.'

  'Grandpa wouldn't do that!' Fran retorted fiercely, ignoring her own uncertainty, seeing her lovingly planned future dissipating like smoke around her ears.

  'Cut out his own grandchild? Why not? You certainly did your best to cut him out of your life. It didn't seem to occur to you that Ian was a lonely old man after Agatha died.' He gave her a look of contempt. 'You're something else, you know that, Princess? You take on a caring profession like nursing, but you don't seem capable of caring on a personal basis. I guess you thought the old man didn't deserve your attention because he wasn't sick. Well, I have news for you, Sister Lewis! Ian said he was diagnosed as having a heart condition years ago, and was having angina attacks even before your grandmother died.'

  'I never knew, they never told me,' said Fran, stiff with guilt and resentment, familiar companions both. The estrangement hadn't been totally one-sided, but she didn't see why she should have to explain the painful details of her life to Ross Tarrant.

  'You never gave them a chance to tell you. You always were a stuck-up bitch, too good for the rest of humanity.'

  Stung by the reminder of the extreme shyness that had been misinterpreted by her fellow pupils, Fran drew herself up to launch a volley of her own. 'And what made you suddenly so all-fired interest in my lonely grand­father's welfare? You were never loaded down with much responsibility yourself, as I recall. Could it be that you thought you might get something out of it...like this cabin?'

  She froze at the stillness of his expression, remem­bering the teenager's hot temper, but when he spoke it was with a coldness that matched the ice-storm in his eyes. 'Be careful when you start casting stones, Fran-cesca. Your own motives don't seem to be too pristine. You didn't even bother to come up for the funeral, but you're pretty quick off the mark when it comes to settling the estate.'

  'I've been ill,' she snapped, angry at having the tables turned.

  'Too ill even to send a wreath?' The blue eyes were deeply sceptical.

  'As a matter of fact, yes!' It gave her satisfaction to tell him. 'Just after I got the telegram about Grandpa's death I collapsed. I've had pneumonia and compli­cations ...'

  'All the more stupid of you to lie around in an outside spa in the middle of winter,' he stunned her by saying, completely undercutting her anger with his apparent concern. 'Were you hospitalised? Are you still on medication?'

  'Yes...and none of your business,' she snapped, even more disturbed by his concern than by his contempt. 'And as for the property, when I spoke to Simpson, Grandpa's lawyer, he said that there was no will. That means that everything will automatically come to me as the only relative.'

  'Not necessarily,' he punctured her smugness. 'Simpson seemed to think that the verbal promise would probably stand up in court if it came to that.'

  'You've spoken to him?' Francesca frowned, wishing now that she had stopped off in Whangarei to appraise the lawyer of her unexpected visit. But his letter in­forming her of the lack of a will hadn't mentioned any possible problems and, as it had been nearing dusk by the time she'd reached the city, she had decided to press on through the last half-hour of winding roads to Whaler's Bay. She still had the key to the beach cabin, and had naturally assumed that it would be empty at this time of the year. There had been no question of staying at the old farmhouse on the hill which had been her grandfather's home, since the lawyer had told her it had been almost completely destroyed by the fire which had coincided with the old man's death. 'He can't be your lawyer, too,' she objected. 'That would be a con­flict of interest.'

  'We were both at the funeral, so naturally we talked. In case you don't already know, I was the one who called the fire brigade that night. I was out here on the deck when I saw the smoky glow over the hill. Thank God I'd got Ian to put in a telephone here. I made the call and raced up across the fields, but although I got there before the volunteers, it was too late. The old place had gone up like tinder and there wasn't a hope in hell of getting to Ian.'

  'I'll bet there wasn't...' Guilt and resentment uttered the sly sneer and Francesca closed her eyes briefly in horror and self-digust. She wasn't really surprised to feel Ross grab her wrist and drag her against the hard edge of the bench. She opened reluctant eyes. His were glit­tering slits, the ridge of his cheekbone dark with angry blood. A rasp of whiskers coated the rigid jawline, em­phasising his tough masculinity, and Fran felt a frisson of fear.

  'If you intend to sling mud like that you can do it in a court of law, and back it up with more proof than just your avaricious insinuations,' he grated rawly. 'You know damned well that the coroner's report stated that your grandfather died of a heart attack before that electrical fire ever started. Or are you going to suggest that he was in on a conspiracy to murder?'

  'I... I...' Francesca licked her lips, knowing he was due an abject apology for her unwarranted bitchiness, but choking over the words. She strained against the iron fingers, breaking the grip only when he let her.

  'If I had doubts about keeping this place, you've ban­ished them,' he told her grimly. 'Ian said that you never pretended to like coming back, and that you were bound to sell out to the highest bidder. Have you thought what that'll mean to the people who live here? No? He shrugged contemptuously at her flush. 'I thought not. Well, I can't stop you turning over the top twenty acres to some greedy, get-rich-quick developer, but I can sure as hell stop you getting your hands on this beach.'

  'We'll see about that!' Fran turned on her heel and marched unsteadily towards the bedroom. She wanted a fair price for her land, but she wasn't out to rape the environment, for goodness' sake!

  'Where are you going? This fish is nearly done.'

  Jolted, Fran turned and stared. Did he really expect her to sit down and share a meal with him, after what they'd just said to each other? 'I'm going to get dressed. If you won't leave, I will. I'll get a room at the Bay Hotel until I can get an eviction notice.'

  'My lease isn't up yet, Princess, and you're not going anywhere at this time of night, in your frame of mind, with a storm settling in. That's a treacherous road back down the cliffs. You'd be over the side in no time.'

  'You can't stop me!' Fran's anger overrode her nor­mally strong common sense.

  'Can't I?' There was a chink as he dangled her car keys from his hand. He must have picked them up from the top of the fridge where she had tossed them when she had arrived.

  'Give them to me, please,' she said firmly, resisting the urge to dash over and wrest them physically from his taunting fingers.

  'In the morning, when you've calmed down.' He grinned at her fury and pushed the keys into his jeans pocket, sucking in a breath to get them past the straining denim hip. 'Of course
, if you're determined to get them...' He trailed off suggestively, and Fran swal­lowed her rage as she toyed with the idea of accepting the challenge.

  But, eyeing the outline of her keys so close to the zip-pered fly of his jeans, she knew she didn't dare. She imagined having to thrust her hand into the tight pocket and wriggle it down the angle of his groin to reach the keys. Oh, he would love that! And it would remind her of that other time she had struggled with his tight jeans, of his groans of delight and her illicit sense of power. Oh, damn this weakness! She could feel her limbs trembling with fatigue and it galled her to admit that he was right, it would be foolish to try and leave now.

  'I'm not eating with you,' she said flatly, as a feeble attempt to reassert her authority, and his grin widened. He shrugged and thick, mahogany lashes screened the blue eyes as he slid the crisp, golden fillets of fish from the pan on to a platter garnished with lemon slices and bread and butter. Fran felt her mouth water treacher­ously and her nostrils twitch at the tempting aroma as he carried the platter over to the kauri slab table that dominated one half of the living-room. She noticed that his movements didn't have quite the old fluid grace. He must be just over thirty now, perhaps he was beginning to pay for the many follies of his youth... and probably his adulthood, too!

  He sat and began to eat hungrily, ignoring her hover­ing figure until he had finished his first two pieces of fish. It flaked gently as he ate, lemon juice glistening on the crusty surface.

  'Come on, Princess,' he jeered softly, when her hunger became embarrassingly obvious. 'Come down off that high horse and eat.'

  She could have gone out and got her own carton of food supplies from the boot of her car, but Francesca found herself sitting down opposite Ross and allowing him to dish up a second plate.

  The fish was juicy and tender and meltingly good, but although Fran ate hungrily she was too furtively aware of her companion to enjoy it. Just being in the same room with him made her feel like a gauche fifteen-year-old again, and that led her on to remember the last time they had been alone together, in the cramped back seat of a car...

  'No!' Fran clenched her teeth in an effort to keep the heat from her face as she realised that she had yelped the denial aloud. She stood up hastily and carried her plate to the kitchen, avoiding his gaze as she cleared her throat. 'I... I'm tired... I think I'll go to bed now.' She was too nervous to care about being rude. Let Ross do the dishes—he had been the one to insist on making the mess!

  He studied her agitation curiously for a moment then shrugged. 'Suit yourself.' He began to swab up the juices from his plate with a folded piece of bread.

  'I've been using the bed by the window,' he added as she crossed the room with jerky steps, 'so I'll keep it if you don't mind.'

  Sleep in the same room? Fran felt her stomach knot. She opened the bedroom door and paused as she noted the sturdy lock on the inside. She turned, and gave Ross a primly triumphant smile. 'As a matter of fact, I do. Since you're the temporary guest, you can sleep out here.'

  She leant against the locked door and grinned at the memory of his disgusted expression. The wisdom of years might have dictated that she forgive Ross Tarrant for the adolescent humiliation she had suffered, but that didn't mean that she had ever forgotten it!

  She froze as the doorhandle twisted experimentally against her back. 'It's locked,' she said unnecessarily, her voice high-pitched with apprehension. What did she really know about the man out there?

  An exaggerated sigh buffeted the door. 'Well, at least pass out some blankets for me. It's going to get a lot colder out here before the night's through, and we've only got a limited amount of firewood left.'

  Fran chewed her lip as a distant roll of thunder backed his claim. He sounded resigned, but...

  'Promise you won't come in if I open the door?'

  'Francesca—' He sounded more impatient than an-

  noyed, and Fran decided to risk it. She opened one of

  the divan drawers and took out three thick blankets, then added the pillow from the window bed to the pile. She unlocked the door and thrust the blankets at Ross. His sudden move to take them made her shy nervously. The blankets fell between them, pushing the door open.

  'What in the hell did you think I was going to do?' he growled irritably, and Fran flushed. His face took on a sudden, mocking derision. 'Surely you don't imagine that I'm so hard up for a woman that I'll leap on any­thing remotely female?' He grinned at her reaction to his subtle insult. 'Look, Princess, I may have been a bit raw in the old days, but I've acquired a bit of polish since then. In fact, to set the record straight, my life is overcrowded with willing women.' His grin widened and Fran had the inescapable feeling that she had over­looked some vital point. Why did he look so thoroughly amused? 'Women are always ringing me up at all times of the day and night, begging me for attention, taking off their clothes for me at the slightest suggestion. It's one of the reasons I came back to Whaler's Bay, to get away from the insatiable women in my life...'

  He was exaggerating purely for effect, but the trouble was that Fran's overheated imagination could well be­lieve it. He was too handsome for his own good... and for hers. He shifted his weight in preparation to pick up the blankets at their feet and Fran jumped. He sighed.

  'I can see, Princess, that you're not going to rest until I've made the obligatory attack on your virtue, so...' He reached over and swept her across the jumbled pile and into his arms.

  His mouth was a shock of warmth against hers, his large hands spreading across her shoulderblades to ensure that any resistance on her part merely rubbed their bodies suggestively together.

  Thinking that it would be fruitless and undignified to struggle against his superior strength, Fran suffered the tiny, stinging burn of his tongue against the corner of her clamped mouth. His hands moved with a slow, sliding pressure all the way down her long, slender back to ride the upper curve of her buttocks, his thumbs curling around to press against her hipbones. As she tried to protest at the liberty, his tongue plunged into her mouth, filling it, whipping back and forth, stroking the sensitive upper palate, burrowing into the slick moistness under her tongue, smothering her senses with male taste and smell.

  Fran felt as if she had inadvertently touched an electric fence. A warning hum vibrated through her body, setting up a sharp tingling in her breasts and shivering up the insides of her thighs until she dug her fingers into his shoulders and tried to arch away from the treacherous current.

  He took the opportunity to test the resilience of her hips with his own, his hands beginning to circle in slow, kneading motions as they sank to cup her closer to the centre of his heated hardness. The scrape of his whiskers against her tender chin provided an erotic sensual con­trast to the soft, moist pulse of his tongue in her mouth and Fran suddenly found herself clinging where she had pushed. The man could kiss up a storm!

  When he took his mouth away, Fran found that breathing required a voluntary command from her stunned brain.

  'Satisfied?' he murmured huskily, his hands moving back to the neutral territory at her waist, blue eyes alight with a surprised speculation that flustered her. 'I hope I've managed to prove that I don't necessarily take up every invitation I'm issued.'

  'I wasn't issuing any invitations!' Fran shook herself free, finding it hard to articulate with a tongue that felt twice its size after the sensual battering it had received.

  'No?' He cocked his head with a wicked smile as he touched a finger to the smooth skin just behind her ear. 'You're flushed...' His finger ran down to the pulse in the soft hollow of her throat. '...Your skin is damp, your temperature and pulse rate have increased... An invitation doesn't have to be verbal to be explicit.' His lids drooped, masking the intention in his eyes. 'And if you're so hot...' he pulled the front of her robe apart with a single, swift movement, his hands crowding in to capture her breasts, encircling the little, stiff peaks that thrust against the soft bodice of her modest nightdress '.. .why aren't these still swe
etly soft?'

  He bent his head and kissed the objects of his taunt with maddening precision before scooping up his blankets and backing out the door with a final salute of laughter at her furious confusion.

  'Night-night, Princess. Safe dreams...'

  CHAPTER TWO

  'As you can see, Miss Lewis, the lease agreement is pretty watertight and still has several weeks to run. The death of your grandfather doesn't invalidate the document; the lease will merely be paid to his estate until such time as it is settled.'

  Frustration seethed in Fran's breast as she listened to the dry, precise, ponderous tones of the elderly lawyer.

  Damn! She had bounced out of bed this morning, re­freshed by her first solid sleep in weeks. She was a woman with a purpose, and to achieve that purpose she was willing to talk things over in a calm and reasonable manner. She was even willing to overlook Ross's arro­gant, macho attempt at intimidating her last night.

  She had marched confidently out to battle, only to find her opponent missing. A note was taped to the fridge, an almost incomprehensible scrawl. Typical! she thought as she squinted at the message: 'Gone fishing. PS What's with the jungle on the porch?'

  Fran had shrieked and run outside. Her precious plants, how could she have let herself forget them? For­tunately the porch was fairly sheltered and none of them seemed to have suffered from their night out on the tiles, but her carelessness was most unnerving. She couldn't afford to forget such things, not now...

  'What about this option to buy?' Fran jabbed her finger at the offending clause.

  'It is only an option, Miss Lewis,' the lawyer said cau­tiously, seeing something of the old man in the stubborn set of her jaw. A most... determined lady. It was evident that she and Ross Tarrant had already clashed over the matter, and out of duty to his late client he felt obliged to try and smooth things over. 'All it means is that if your grandfather decided to sell within the next year, Tarrant would have first refusal.'

  'It gives strength to his claim about the cabin, too, doesn't it?' Fran said gloomily. 'Here it is in writing that Grandfather approved of him as a buyer. So even if I do get the entire estate, if I want to sell straight away I have to offer that part of the property to him first.' Why it disturbed her to think of Ross living in that cabin she couldn't quite fathom. But it did.