The Sister Swap Read online

  ‘I see,’ he murmured, and she was too shattered to ask him just what it was that he saw. ‘Isn’t he a bit old for that?’

  ‘He’s only seven months. A lot of women breast-feed their babies until they’re a year or more,’ she said, numbly trotting out the knowledge she had acquired from her much thumbed child-care book and trying desperately to ignore the focus of that speculative male curiosity.

  He frowned. ‘But he already has teeth. He could hurt you.’

  Oh, God, he actually looked worried at the prospect. He would be demanding an inspection next! ‘Babies don’t bite, they suck,’ she choked. ‘It’s an instinctive survival mechanism. Now, why don’t you—?’

  ‘He bit my finger quite hard,’ he pointed out with an infuriating single-mindedness.

  ‘Yes, well, a finger poking around in his mouth is obviously quite different from—from…’ She floundered to a halt, overwhelmed by the indelicacy of the conversation. She took a deep breath to try and calm herself. ‘Look, if you find the subject so fascinating I suggest you get a book out of the library. I have better things to do than stand here and try to explain it all to you.’

  ‘So you do.’ He blinked slowly, and thankfully his attention shifted. He smiled ruefully down at his chubby burden. ‘Well, since I can’t offer to be of any assistance…’

  Anne thought that if she got any hotter she was going to explode. She had a devastating vision of those big, dark hands peeling back her clothes and guiding a baby’s head to her naked breast. Their baby. ‘Certainly not!’

  Her gasping protest jerked his head up and his smile widened mockingly at the sight of her brilliantly shocked eyes. ‘Pity.’

  He held Ivan expectantly out towards her and she couldn’t refuse to take him without looking foolishly skittish. Her instinctive wariness proved justified, however, as Hunter’s hands brushed her breasts, lingering deliberately this time, she was sure.

  She was even more certain when he said, with patent insincerity, ‘Sorry.’

  She would have liked to smack his mocking face, except that that would have been the action of an out- raged virgin rather than a sultry vamp.

  ‘Don’t let me keep you,’ she said sweetly, adding with a touch of malice, ‘I do hope your dinner isn’t burnt to a crisp by now.’

  ‘It won’t be. I flicked the elements off before I left,’ he said, revealing an aggravating forethought. ‘I might have to cook another batch of fettucine, though. How long does it take you to feed Ivan?’

  Was this a test? Anne had no idea. She had skipped that section of the book since it was irrelevant. She wondered whether the natural method was any swifter than the artificial and then decided it didn’t matter. Hunter wouldn’t know the difference either.

  ‘About twenty minutes, depending on whether he’s fussing or not…’

  To her relief he left without further discussion and she was able to give Ivan his bottle and some mashed banana and warm custard while telling him how impossibly interfering and bossy their neighbour was. She could tell that Ivan agreed by the way his mouth gaped at the catalogue of Hunter’s faults.

  She was kneeling on the floor, drying him off after his bath, when she heard a staccato rap on the door.

  She sat back on her heels, pulling a face at Ivan who lay kicking joyfully on the towel. ‘Now, who do you suppose that could be?’ she sighed. ‘I thought he went off rather too meekly. He’s probably brought the spotlight and thumbscrews this time.’

  She had underestimated him. He had brought something far more prosaic…and persuasive. Dinner.

  He didn’t even wait for her to open the door. Before Anne had risen to her feet he had strolled in, bearing a large covered chafing dish and an already opened bottle of red wine tucked under his arm.

  ‘You should lock your door,’ he said with irritating complacency as he set his burdens down on the table.

  ‘You were the last one out of it,’ she said sourly. ‘I didn’t know you were coming back or I would have made sure it was barred and bolted.’

  ‘I invited you to dinner, remember?’ He came over to stand beside her, his thigh almost brushing her shoulder as he looked down at the cheerfully threshing baby.

  ‘And I distinctly remember refusing,’ she replied, but her rejection lacked enthusiasm. She knew she didn’t stand a chance against that air of steely determination. Besides, she was hungry, so why shouldn’t she let him feed her? Perhaps he even meant it as a peace-offering, she thought with unwarranted optimism as she folded the nappy across Ivan’s hips, deftly avoiding his churning legs.

  Knowing she was being closely observed made her un-characteristically clumsy. ‘Ouch!’ She had jabbed herself with one of the safety-pins and dropped it on the floor as a small spot of blood welled out of her thumb.

  Hunter crouched down beside her and picked up the pin, nudging her aside with his broad shoulder. ‘Here. Let me. You set the table.’

  She watched suspiciously as he completed the task with surprising speed. ‘Have you got nephews and nieces?’

  ‘I’m an only child. I do, however, have a functioning brain and reasonable hand-eye co-ordination. What goes on next?’

  Oh, so he thought it was that simple, did he? She rose to her feet and told him, then lingered to watch, hoping to find something to criticise, but he was as quick and competent at the task as he seemed to be at almost everything else and she found herself fascinated at the way the big hands handled the wriggling baby’s un- cooperative limbs, gently but firmly threading them into the stretchy towelling sleep-suit.

  ‘Will he go to sleep now, or watch us eat?’

  As if he understood, Ivan tucked a thumb in his mouth and looked at them through drooping eyelids.

  ‘Well, he doesn’t usually go to sleep right away,’ Anne lied.

  Ivan closed his eyes and an angelic smile slackened around the thumb.

  ‘That tooth will probably keep him awake for ages,’ she added hopefully.

  Ivan began to snore.

  Still crouching, Hunter swayed back to look up at Anne’s frustrated expression, the muscles of his thighs bulging against the taut linen of his trousers with the action. ‘Mmm. If you think we need a chaperon perhaps we could prop his eyes open with toothpicks.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Anne, although he wasn’t far off the mark. It wasn’t a chaperon she wanted, it was a distraction. Spending the evening as the sole focus of Hunter Lewis’s suspicions was hardly her idea of relaxing.

  Once again she discovered that she had underestimated him. For all his volatile temper and impatient directness, Hunter now proved himself capable of alarming subtlety.

  While she tucked Ivan into his cot and wheeled it into the bedroom Hunter found the crockery and cutlery, apparently as at home in her kitchen as he was in his own. There were no wine glasses, only tumblers, and when she sat down Anne found that only one of them contained wine. The glass in front of her plate was brimming with chilled milk.

  ‘I know breast-feeding mothers are advised to avoid alcohol,’ Hunter commented piously when he saw her brief frown. ‘I hope you don’t mind my drinking in front of you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Anne, longing to dump the milk over his know-it-all head. She loved good red wine but was rarely able to afford to drink it and the bottle he had brought was a Premier Cru. She sneaked another wistful look at the label as she picked up her glass and glumly sipped her milk.

  She cheered up as she tucked into the fettucine, remembering at the first, heady taste of sauce that he had added a good slug of red wine to it, probably from that very same superior bottle. She relaxed even more when Hunter began to talk casually of trivialities, entertaining her with some pithy descriptions of campus life. Anne was entranced, tipsy with the knowledge that this was now her world too, and she was soon chattering with her usual friendly enthusiasm, so that she hardly noticed when the conversation crept around to the personal. As long as they kept away from the subject of books and writing and
Ivan she was cheerfully under the illusion that she was revealing nothing about herself as she talked about her mother’s accident and the years of recovery, her father’s love of the land and the character quirks of her four rowdy brothers.

  ‘You sound like a very close family.’

  ‘Do we?’ Anne had never thought about it before. They were just…family. ‘I suppose so…if that means that we’re always there for each other. Isn’t yours?’

  He ignored the invitation to be similarly confiding. ‘And were they there for you when Ivan was born?’

  Alarm bells began to ring. Anne concentrated intently on her plate, winding a curl of fettucine around her fork. ‘They all love Ivan as much as I do. He’s my parents’ first grandchild, you know. Don is engaged and Rex and Ken have steady girlfriends, but late marriages seem to run in the Tremaine family. Mum and Dad didn’t get married until they were…’ She stopped, aware that she was starting to babble under that steady, dark-eyed stare.

  ‘How did they feel about your coming to Auckland?’

  ‘Oh, they were glad for me,’ she said truthfully. ‘Mum especially. She knows I always wanted to go to u—’ she had been about to say ‘university’ and switched it to, ‘You know—uh, the city and write…’

  ‘They must miss you both.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t live at home any more, anyway,’ she said hurriedly, crossing her fingers under the overhanging rim of her plate. ‘But yes, they must do—I’ve received a letter from home practically every other day!’ She laughed to counteract a small pang of homesickness. ‘I don’t think it really sank in for them that there might be anything to worry about until I had actually left.’ All her parents’ worries had at that stage been directed towards Katlin. They trusted Anne to behave sensibly whereas they despaired of ever understanding the behaviour of her unpredictable sister. ‘Mum’s never lived in a city in her life but suddenly she’s an expert on life in the fast lane. She keeps sending me newspaper and magazine clippings about coping with life in the urban jungle and I get regular care packages of home cooking. She has this vision of city people as cold and uncaring. She doesn’t seem to realise that the people here are the same as they are anywhere else, there are just more of them…’

  ‘An innocent abroad,’ Hunter murmured. ‘No wonder they’re worried.’

  ‘Hardly an innocent,’ Anne said tartly.

  He looked at her under dark brows. ‘Hardly an urban sophisticate either. A sophisticate protects herself. You don’t even remember to lock your door, let alone use the most intimate form of self-protection.’

  It took a heartbeat before she realised what he was talking about and in a flare of temper she forgot she was supposed to be avoiding the subject. ‘What makes you think I forgot? Maybe I wanted to get pregnant!’ she snapped.

  ‘Why? To trap your Russian virgin into marriage?’

  ‘No, for the experience of motherhood,’ she parroted Katlin’s astonishing explanation. ‘How can I write from a true female perspective if I haven’t experienced the completeness of being a woman?’

  He froze in the act of raising his glass. ‘You got pregnant as an intellectual experiment?’

  Her first reaction was purely instinctive and she quickly tried to disguise her exclamation of shocked distaste. ‘No! I mean, yes—I mean, of course it wasn’t quite that deliberate, but…’

  He drank, watching her over the rim. ‘Somehow I can’t see you being that calculating. Maybe that’s what you tell yourself now, but I think the truth is that you lost your head in the heat of passion.’

  Anne’s eyes flashed pure gold. ‘I never lose my head.’

  ‘Really?’ he drawled disbelievingly.

  ‘Yes, really.’ A clever idea occurred to her as he continued to regard her with obvious scepticism. ‘I save all my passion for my writing,’ she said loftily.

  ‘How disappointing for Dmitri.’ He looked amused rather than impressed. ‘In that case I look forward immensely to reading your book,’ he continued smoothly. ‘When do you expect to finish it?’

  ‘I don’t. I mean, I haven’t given myself a deadline, I just go with the flow. And I don’t like to talk about work I have in progress,’ she said, forestalling any further question. ‘It drains the—er—’

  ‘Passion? The creative juices?’

  Was he laughing at her? She looked at him with narrowed eyes but his were rounded and innocent.

  ‘Does Ivan usually sleep all night?’ he said casually as he poured himself another glass of wine. His third, she mentally counted, and wondered whether the faint glitter in his dark eyes was the beginnings of drunk- enness. Certainly he seemed a great deal less aggressive.

  ‘Why?’ she asked warily.

  ‘Because I want to know whether my plan to ravish you right here and now on the floor can proceed without interruption.’

  She winced at the irony in his voice. ‘He’s always slept through the night.’ She couldn’t help looking at the hard, polished floor out of the corner of her eye and frowning. It would have to be very uncomfortable, particularly with a man as big as Hunter…

  ‘I’d let you get on top,’ he said silkily, catching her out in her mental gymnastics and causing her clear, sungold complexion to bloom.

  To her relief he didn’t pursue her embarrassment. ‘Is that the real reason you prefer writing at night? Because it’s the only time you can get uninterrupted peace? Why don’t you just pay a baby-sitter during the day?’

  ‘Because I can’t afford to.’ She was still distracted by her furtive imagination, trying to damp down the awful little thrill prompted by an image of herself dominantly astride that big, muscular body.

  ‘I understood that the grant is pretty generous. Certainly enough for you to afford day-care.’

  ‘I can. Ivan stays at the university crèche—’

  ‘Only when you’re in class. I would have thought it was more important for you to free up your writing time—’

  She woke up suddenly to the trend of the conversation. ‘I told you, I’m best at night.’ She jumped to her feet and began to clear away the dirty plates. ‘Speaking of which, I suppose I’d better get down to it.’

  He rose meekly, but getting rid of him wasn’t so easy, she discovered, as he insisted on helping her with the dishes while he finished his wine.

  ‘Just don’t think this means I’m coming next door to help you wash your pots,’ she warned him, her attempts at polite denial giving way to a flat-out rudeness to which the man seemed equally impervious.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of thwarting the nightly flow of your passion.’

  Her toes curled in her shoes at the teasing remark. ‘At least I don’t have to worry about you driving home,’ she grumbled as she filled the sink with hot water.

  ‘Would you worry?’ he asked, moving up behind her.

  ‘Not about you, but about others you might meet on the way,’ she said bluntly. ‘My mother’s accident happened when a drunk ran into her. He got off with a few scratches, the loss of his licence and a couple of months of periodic detention while Mum got seven years of confinement and pain.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ His quiet sincerity took her off guard and she turned, just as he moved to pick up the tea-towel on the bench beyond her. Trapped against the cupboards, Anne could feel every inch of him from chest to knee…every impressive inch! ‘Anne?’ He picked up her plait, which had flopped on to the bench, winding it around his hand as she maintained her silent resistance, forcing her to look at him. ‘I’m sorry.’

  She meant to say something flippant, something smart, something sophisticated. Instead she could only stand there, transfixed by the dark compassion in the heavy-lidded gaze, aware of simmering heat that had nothing whatsoever to do with the sultry, late-summer night.

  And then he kissed her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SHE might have known that something would go awry. After all, nothing so far in her life had gone precisely to plan—why should kissing be any differen
t?

  Anne pushed the button on her tape-deck and grinned at the staccato sound that issued. She turned up the volume and directed the speaker towards the wall so that the incessant typewriter tap-tapping mingled with a similar sound issuing faintly from the other side. She cocked her head as the distant echo faltered while hers continued with machine-gun precision.

  Aha, she thought smugly, dusting off her hands as she left the bedroom, let Hunter now accuse her of not working hard enough!

  She went back to her Russian text, sprawling on her stomach on the floor beside Ivan’s cot, surrounded by her books, but found it next to impossible to concen- trate. She sighed and pillowed her chin on folded arms, her drying hair sprayed like a damp blanket across her back, providing a cool relief from the sultry evening air that wafted in the open window.

  She hadn’t had any trouble concentrating on that damned kiss. It had absorbed her whole being. A week later, just thinking about it still made her go warm all over. Nothing in her unadventurous past had prepared her for the impact of all that concentrated masculinity on her senses. Funny, she had never thought of herself as being a particularly sensual person. Hunter Lewis had changed all that.

  She closed her eyes as she remembered with a stab of satisfaction that Hunter had seemed every bit as shaken by their kiss as she had been.

  She had seen the faint look of surprise in his dark eyes when his head had bent towards hers, as if what he was doing had caught him completely unawares. Then her thoughts had been scattered under an avalanche of sweet sensation…

  His fist tightened on her plait, pulling her head back, and she instinctively went up on tiptoe to meet his descending mouth. It was hard, hot, and faintly hostile. Instead of frightening her, his restrained aggression was fiercely exciting. He wasn’t asking for a response, he was demanding it, and Anne gave with greedy gener- osity. When he bit at her soft lips they parted instantly and he plunged inside, making a rough sound of triumph that vibrated on her tongue. He tasted deliciously warm and spicy, and as he sank recklessly deeper she pressed her palms flat against his chest to steady herself and was entranced by the straining tension in his body, the rapid, erratic pounding of his heart. Her hands slid to his sides, fingers curling jerkily into the taut muscle as he made another primitive sound and shifted, crowding her closer against the cupboards. His thighs tangled with hers, his hips pushing, forcing her to acknowledge his superior strength and aggressive maleness.