Meant To Marry. Robyn Donald

‘describes you exactly. And solid.’

      Everything about her was big—broad shoulders, wide hips, long, powerful legs. Since she’d given up field sports the heavy layers of muscle in her thighs and shoulders had sleeked down, but with her bone structure she’d never be anything but big.

      ‘Just like your father,’ her petite mother used to say, hugging her, unable to hide the note of regret in her voice.

      Anet’s eyes moved to examine her face with dispassionate interest. She was certainly no beauty, although she had her mother’s pale, clear, fine skin. The best she could be called was striking, with her wide mouth and square jaw beneath cheekbones flaring away from a straight nose. Black short hair and barely arched brows contrasted shockingly with eyes of a light, limpid grey. If they’d been blue or brown their size would have been emphasised, but in spite of the curly dark lashes that surrounded them their transparency seemed to rob her of personality.

      She and the woman in the miniature had nothing in common except their gender, she thought with a self-mocking smile. Not even in her cradle had she been called dainty. What on earth had made Olivia think she would like her gift?

      Although perhaps Olivia knew her better than she did herself, because she did; she loved it.

      Into her mind there popped Scott’s words about Cara Tremaine. ‘Beautiful...made you feel that just to be alive was a wonderful thing...’

      Of course Lucas would marry an exceptional woman. Exceptional men did—it was the law of the jungle, or the survival of the fittest, or something. Alpha men married alpha women. She, as she had always known, was not an alpha woman. In fact, on occasion she had been the butt of remarks questioning her femininity; they had hurt when she was young, but she ignored them these days.

      Which made the shivery inner feelings now assailing her ridiculous.

      Perhaps some weakness in her made her fall passionately—futilely—in lust with tall, handsome men who possessed uncompromising authority and intense, bone-deep sexuality, men with charisma. And that, she thought derisively, was a much overrated word that meant nothing.

      Anyway, Lucas was going to Hawaii, so she was safe.

      Suddenly realising that she had been staring at her reflection with the still solemnity of a moonstruck owl—she, who never looked at herself except to comb her hair—she pulled a hideous face and walked out of the room.

      Lucas and Scott were in the sitting room drinking beer. Both looked up as she came into the room, but it was Scott who demanded, ‘What did she say?’

      ‘If she weren’t Olivia,’ Anet answered thoughtfully, ‘I’d say she was being cagey.’

      Scott brought a glass of lime juice across to her. She’d have preferred wine, but when she’d found how much it cost on the island she’d blenched and given it up for the duration.

      ‘That doesn’t sound like Olivia,’ Lucas commented, sounding amused and indulgent.

      ‘No, it doesn’t, but she wasn’t exactly forthcoming.’ She recounted Olivia’s words.

      ‘A whim,’ Scott decided. ‘She suddenly thought you’d like it.’

      Anet suppressed her inchoate suspicion that there was more to the unexpected present than a mere feminine whim. Conjuring up a social smile copied from her mother, she turned to Lucas and said, ‘Thank you very much for breaking your journey to deliver it.’

      ‘It was nothing,’ he said with negligent courtesy.

      ‘You’re too kind,’ she said automatically, and felt heat run along her cheekbones and hairline at the subtly taunting smile he directed at her. Hurriedly she continued, ‘Do you have your flight booked for Hawaii?’

      ‘I had to cancel when I stopped off here, but it’ll be easy enough to get another one.’

      Scott put his glass down. ‘How long do you think you’ll be there?’

      ‘Until I’ve finished my research. A week or so, I imagine, then I’ll head back to New Zealand to write.’ He drained his glass, throat muscles working. ‘I have a house on a hill overlooking a beach on the Coromandel,’ he said. ‘It’s primitive and isolated and gut-wrenchingly beautiful. Perfect for a writer.’

      Scott nodded, then enquired after someone called Old Ropy, who’d been at school with them. Lucas didn’t know where this improbably named person was, but Scott wasn’t deterred. He mentioned other names, and they slipped into the sort of conversation that consisted mainly of, ‘Do you remember...?’ until Lucas said, ‘We must be boring Anet rigid.’

      Scott gave her a fond smile. ‘Not Annie,’ he said. ‘She’s very restful, is Annie. Doesn’t drive a man crazy with her yattering all the time.’

      ‘Don’t talk about me as though I’m not here,’ she said, laughing in spite of herself. ‘And shouldn’t we be going?’

      CHAPTER THREE

      SCOTT had not overpraised the restaurant. Although the big room was packed, and noisy with local Chinese families, islanders and tourists, and the clicking ceiling fans barely disturbed the humid, spice-scented air, the food was divine.

      ‘Ambrosia,’ Anet sighed as she lifted her bowl of jasmine tea in a silent toast to her cousin. ‘One of the best meals I’ve ever tasted, anywhere.’

      Scott looked pleased. ‘I thought you’d like it. Serena and I come here whenever we feel rich.’

      ‘I never stop being surprised at how extraordinarily well you can eat throughout the Pacific,’ Lucas commented.

      ‘You should write a book about it,’ Scott said, grinning. ‘Eating your way around the Pacific. You’d have every armchair traveller in the world buying it.’

      Lucas laughed. ‘One day I might just do that.’

      He’d been a good companion—witty, amusing and an excellent raconteur, and obviously enjoying the evening, yet Anet suspected that one part of him stood back and viewed the world with an unemotional, disinterested gaze, safe behind the barrier he’d constructed to keep the rest of humankind at a distance.

      He didn’t reveal much of himself in his books either. Although exciting and topical and searingly written, the personal outrage that must fuel his need to track down perpetrators of crime was always kept under vigilant control.

      ‘Time to go,’ Scott told them, getting to his feet as the waiter brought back the tray and his credit card. When the bill had arrived he and Lucas had exchanged a few cryptic remarks, from which Anet had gathered that Lucas would reimburse him later for his share.

      Outside, breathing in air scented with the myriad odours of growth and fecundity, Anet realised that Lucas was to accompany them to the nightclub. Stop jittering, she told her stomach firmly as she looked out of the car windows at the thin line of white where the combers met the reef. As her legs were marginally shorter than his she had insisted on sitting in the back—which position, unfortunately for her peace of mind, gave her an excellent view of an autocratic, angular profile every time Lucas turned his head to speak.

      The nightclub was quite skilfully decorated with a ceiling of thatched pandanus leaves so that it looked like a very large fale—one of the island’s superbly simple traditional houses—and it hummed. Everyone under twenty-three on the island seemed to be there, dancing enthusiastically to a band that played a clever mixture of rock music and Hawaiian pop.