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“I never thought it would go this far. I had no right to let you love me.”
“No, you didn’t!” she cried. “Not if you can’t love me back!”
He looked up again and shook his head. “You don’t understand.”
“So make me understand! You owe me that much, at least!”
He looked startled, and then gave a slow nod and said fumblingly, “I never meant to…act on my feelings for you. I knew it wouldn’t be fair. I tried my damnedest to keep away. Only…when you reached out to me, I felt as though I’d been living in darkness and suddenly the sun had appeared and filled my world with light. Only one other person made me feel like that.”
“Your wife.” She had always known deep down that he still grieved his loss. How could she have thought to replace his first and only love?
“No.” He took a breath, paused, and said as if the words were dragged from him, “My daughter.”
“Your…daughter?” He had a child?
DAPHNE CLAIR lives in subtropical New Zealand with her Dutch-born husband. They have five children. At eight years old she embarked on her first novel, about taming a tiger. This epic never reached a publisher, but metamorphosed male tigers still prowl the pages of her romances, of which she has written over thirty for Harlequin® and over fifty all told. Her other writing includes nonfiction, poetry and short stories, and she has won literary prizes in New Zealand and America.
Summer Seduction
Daphne Clair
Reference to the work of Mr. Barry Mazur as published
in Barry Mazur, “Number Theory as Gadfly,” American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 98, 1991, p.593, as made on page 45 of this novel, is made with the kind permission of Mr. Barry Mazur.
IT WAS the music that first told Blythe the other house in the gully was occupied again.
When she opened her side door just after sunrise, haunting organ notes reached into the fresh saltiness of the morning, drawing her gaze down and along the gully to the old house, its empty windows burnished to flax-flower orange by the morning sun.
A classic of New Zealand architectural style, the house was a no-nonsense weather-board square, the wide front veranda sheltered by a curve of corrugated iron in need of a coat of paint. The builders had placed it at the narrow end of the pear-shaped gully near the foot of a gentle rise, facing the scrubby hills along the shoreline where they dipped to frame a tiny corner of the limitless Pacific Ocean.
The melody swelled and soared above the windbent manuka bushes and tall, broadleaved flax, set the creamy plumes of the toe-toe shivering, and rose to Blythe’s white-painted cottage, stubbornly perched on a slope overlooking the gully to one side, the sea to the other.
She was tending seedlings in the plastic-shrouded tunnel house when the music stopped. Its sudden cessation in the middle of a bar made her pause and lift her head, curbing a loose corkscrew of soft russet hair that had escaped from her carelessly fastened ponytail. When the lovely sounds didn’t resume, she felt vaguely, irrationally troubled.
Silly. Whoever had been listening to the recording was tired of it and had switched it off.
But in the afternoon she made a batch of biscuits, wrapped a small bunch of dried strawflowers and grasses in a square of dark burgundy tissue and tied it with a bow of yellow-dyed flax fibre. Then she walked to the old house, along the sparse, tough grass growing between the wheel ruts that formed a rough road along the gully and beyond.
The silvery wood of the veranda steps was smooth under her sneakers. The uncurtained up-and-down windows were freshly cleaned and shining. Blythe kept her eyes from them despite her curiosity about the new occupants, and tapped on the door.
No response, even when she knocked again, and yet she sensed that the house was occupied.
She waited a little longer, then laid the bouquet and the plastic ice-cream container full of biscuits on the doorstep.
She was straightening when the door opened.
Flustered, she pushed back the stubborn curl falling across her eyes. ‘I didn’t hear you coming!’
The man who faced her was tall enough to make her feel even smaller than her slightly-below-average height, and he hadn’t shaved that morning. His hair, dark but not quite black, looked as if he’d been running his fingers through it. Under emphatic brows his eyes were an intriguing deep, deep green with amber flecks about the irises, and an imperious nose jutted above a firm, masculine mouth and inflexible chin. His loose T-shirt echoed the green of his eyes.
‘You were listening at the keyhole?’ he asked with cool enquiry.
‘No, of course not!’ Blythe denied, blinking at him. ‘I brought you some biscuits and…’
Flowers