From Glowing Embers

  ~ ~ ~

  Not exactly cousins. Adam allowed himself a small smile. At least, not cousins in the Pakeha way. Still, his words had produced the desired effect. Miss Paige Duvall had said nothing more. She trudged along behind him, keeping up the pace he set without so much as stumbling on the rock-strewn path.

  Adam didn't even need to glance behind him to know exactly how close she was, how determined to match his stride, and how irritated. He didn't have to glance at her to know that none of those things would show on her face.

  Nothing showed on Paige Duvall's face. Not fear that she was lost in a place unlike any she had seen before, not surprise that a man had materialized out of the mists to rescue her, not anger that the man dared to herald their blood bond. The face was inscrutable, but the woman was not.

  He could read every emotion in the veins of her long, slender neck, in the movement of her shoulders, in the nearly invisible shudders of her gloriously perfect body. He could read the way she tossed the short, gleaming mass of black hair off her face and the way one delicately arched eyebrow lifted as she worked to conceal her thoughts.

  He could read her. For what it was worth.

  Adam crested a hill and stopped, waiting for Paige to catch up to him. "If you're tired, we can rest. But we're almost there."

  "I don't think this is the way I came."

  He turned and admired her mixture of haughty displeasure and exhaustion. If she hadn't been warm since arriving on the North Island, she was warm now. A thin sheen of perspiration decorated the smooth skin of her forehead. "Perhaps we should go back and let you lead us home, then," he said politely.

  He watched her body tense. "I'm not going back. I've seen enough geothermal activity to last me for the day."

  "Have you seen enough of New Zealand, too?"

  Paige heard the challenge. "Why do you dislike me?"

  He was surprised that she had cut so quickly to the point, and he felt a moment of reluctant admiration. She was going to save them both time. "It's not you I dislike, cousin," he said, watching to see her reaction. "It's what you stand for, what your coming here means."

  Paige lowered herself to the ground and rested her head against a tree trunk. "I have no cousins in New Zealand," she said, closing her eyes. "My mother was an only child, raised here in Waimauri. Both her parents are dead. My father was raised in New Orleans. My only living relative in New Zealand was a distant relation of my mother's, a woman named Jane Abbott, and she died last year leaving this—" she raised her hand as if words had failed her "—this place to my mother. So you have me confused with someone else."

  "Do I?" Adam watched Paige as she rested. She had grown into an extraordinarily beautiful woman, but then, she had been an extraordinarily beautiful child, a child wrenched from all of them by the untimely appearance of her father. Even now he remembered the sound of her grandmother's weeping.

  Maori and Pakeha. Polynesian and Caucasian. Brown-skinned and light. How strange that a mixture of blood could produce the rare, perfect creature sitting so placidly in front of him, her lies no more than words she had been taught to believe.

  "Do you dislike me because I'm an American and I own part of your country?" Paige opened her eyes to find that he'd been staring at her. "Well, rest easy. I don't want it. I've come to sell it back."

  "Have you?"

  Strangely, it irritated Paige that she couldn't read his tone. She was the unfathomable one. She wasn't sure she liked having her own inscrutability reflected back at her. "How far are we from the house where I'm staying?" She stood, brushing off the seat of her pants.

  "Over that ridge." Adam pointed to the next hill. "And through the grove." He said no more, just waited for a bellbird to cease its melodious chiming before he turned and started back the way they had come.

  He had been swallowed by the thick, scrubby forest before Paige realized he was leaving her. "Adam?" She heard his first name roll off her tongue and wondered why it had come so easily. There was no answer. "Thank you," she called into the silence.

  The bellbird's sweet chimes were her only answer.