The Sister Swap by Susan Napier

Author:Susan Napier [Susan Napier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781459276031
Publisher: Harlequin

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE theory of sublimation was just so much hot air, Anne thought raggedly as she sipped her liqueur coffee and nibbled desperately on a chocolate-covered mint wafer. She had eaten everything in sight, including dipping into Hunter’s left-over fondue, and she was still sizzlingly aware of the man across the table.

And he wasn’t doing anything to help. All the while they were talking of other things—innocent, innocuous, everyday things—he kept letting those hot, dark eyes wander all over her upper body, staking a claim, making her feel thoroughly self-conscious and flagrantly female.

Her teasing flirtation had got her into trouble and she had not the first idea of how to extricate herself…or even if she wanted to. Ever since he had made that outrageous proposition, her delicious uncertainty had grown. Had he been joking? Or was he as serious as his body language suggested?

‘Does your mother visit you often?’ she asked, seeking the most mundane of subjects to try and cool her increasingly heated speculation.

‘Only often enough to disrupt what she calls the “comfortable complacency” of my life,’ Hunter said wryly, stirring his coffee. He took it plain, she noticed, black and bitter. ‘She travels a great deal. Although she has a home in Wellington she has artist friends all over the world who provide her with studio space whenever she wants it.’

‘That’s what I want to do.’ Anne’s eyes were full of dreams. ‘Experience different cultures at first hand by living in them instead of having to read about them in books. Languages are going to be my passport. When I get my degree I’m going to apply to the Department of Foreign Affairs, maybe even become a UN translator…’

‘I thought you wanted to be an author?’

Anne bumped back to the ground. ‘Art doesn’t recognise national boundaries. If your mother can do it, so can I.’

‘I do see a certain resemblance,’ Hunter murmured, and watched her eyes flicker in dismay. She reminded him of his mother?

‘I’m nothing like your mother!’

‘Maybe not in looks—’ Anne’s anxiety subsided a little ‘—but you certainly have her eternal, exhausting optimism.’

‘Because I’ve learnt that believing the worst will happen is a powerful reason for giving up on life,’ said Anne fiercely, thinking of her mother who had, in the early days after her accident, come close to accepting the medical opinion that she would probably never walk again. ‘You’re an optimist too, even if you don’t want to admit it, or you wouldn’t write books where the hero triumphs in the end. You’d write gloomy, turgid tomes that pander to the intellectual snobbery that insists that only the certainty of death and the misery of human suffering make literature worthwhile—’

‘Pax, pax.’ He was laughing, catching her waving hand in both of his. ‘Calm down. I wasn’t criticising you—it was merely an idle comment…’

‘None of your comments is idle,’ she retorted, trying to ignore the way he was gently separating her fingers. ‘They work very hard at being cryptic.’

’What was so cryptic about saying you’re an optimist?’ he asked, turning her hand over so that his fingers slid between hers.

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