The Temptation Test Read online

  He sighed, but it wasn’t the usual pained sigh he often used when she was around.

  ‘I guess,’ he admitted, and looked out towards the lake.

  She knew the twinkle would have disappeared, and regretted her remark. In the dusky night air she felt attuned to the man and could sense a battle raging beneath his skin.

  Not that she didn’t have troubles of her own beneath her outer covering. It was as if a sense of him had coiled its way into her being, twining around her heart and lungs, so glimpses of twinkling eyes and lurking smiles were greeted with an inner tightening.

  ‘Tell me about the halfway house,’ she suggested, as her thoughts veered dangerously towards considerations of attraction. ‘You said Lucy thought you were mad, giving away your city house, so obviously you haven’t been involved with drug rehabilitation for a long time or she’d have accepted, if not expected, it.’

  This time the sigh was different, merely a flutter of escaping air from lips which had featured vividly in her dreams. When he spoke, Jena felt it was a story he’d been more than ready to tell.

  ‘The single motivating factor was a thirteen-year-old girl I couldn’t save.’

  The words shocked Jena, wrenching at the coils inside her, and for a moment she regretted her questions. But the sense that Noah needed to talk remained. Maybe some of his anger was a result of bottling up too much of his emotional reaction.

  ‘Thirteen is too young to die,’ she said quietly, not wanting to prompt more revelations, or cut them off.

  ‘Far too young,’ he agreed. ‘It made my inability to save her so much worse.’

  She heard heartache as well as deep regret in the words and felt remorse at having teased him for not having ‘fun’. How petty it must have sounded.

  ‘I’m sure no one expects doctors to be able to save everyone,’ she protested.

  ‘No one except the doctor himself.’

  The words lingered momentarily, but Jena couldn’t let it rest. Not when he was hurting with the memory.

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’ she said. ‘And insane! No one could work effectively with such a huge load of self-expectation. You must have known before you even started studying that doctors aren’t invincible, that they can’t alter fate or totally defeat death.’

  Noah found himself smiling at her passion. He could remember feeling it himself—once upon a time!

  ‘No, I had no God-like concept of my own or my colleagues’ infallibility, but Amy was a youngster I felt I should have saved. She’d been in before when she’d taken some poor-quality drug, and she’d talked about going into a rehab programme, then suddenly she was there again. I tried everything I knew, but she was too far gone. It was as if her heart didn’t want to keep beating—as if it had no reason to battle on.’

  He looked across at Jena, and told her something he’d only previously acknowledged to himself.

  ‘It was the waste that got to me. A life thrown away like last week’s flowers. She was still a child, but one who’d had no chance to know real childhood.’

  He felt pressure on his fingers and realised Jena had taken his hand, so he told her what he knew of Amy’s story and saw tears slide down his listener’s cheeks.

  ‘She had a lottery ticket in her hand the last time,’ he explained, now so far into the story he couldn’t stop. ‘She gave it to me before she died. It won a lot of money.’

  The words dried up, but Jena had followed closely, apparently in her heart as well as in her mind, for she leapt to what he’d felt had been the only conclusion.

  ‘You spent it on the rehab place in Brisbane. To help other Amys.’

  ‘A lot of them don’t want to be helped,’ he said, absurdly pleased by her guess. ‘And others find the going far too tough. But for those who make it through the programme, we needed somewhere for them to begin to put their lives back together.’

  She’d released his hand, and now sat back.

  ‘But did you need to be involved in that part of it?’ she asked. ‘Did you feel you had to give up your job and come up here to supervise things? And why Kareela? Couldn’t you have stayed involved in the programme in Brisbane? Given time there if you wanted a hands-on input? ‘

  She was going on and on again, but he didn’t find it irritating. In fact, her questions were forcing him to think through what might have been gut decisions—though Lucy and many of his friends had described them less charitably. And even without Jena’s hand in his, he felt connected to her somehow.

  ‘I didn’t and don’t need to be involved at all—in fact, I’m not. As far as the programme in Brisbane is concerned, the money from the lottery win went into a trust and income from the trust pays professional staff. Getting people off drugs is way beyond my capabilities—and patience, too, I suspect.’

  ‘But Kareela? The house here?’

  ‘Did anyone ever tell you you’d make a good interrogator?’ he asked, then he answered anyway. ‘I had another house in Brisbane, which I was in the process of selling and which netted me more than enough to buy in Kareela, for all the foolish reasons I’ve already explained. So letting the rehab people have the old student house wasn’t any great sacrifice.’

  He hesitated.

  ‘It’s hard to remember what happened when, because so many changes occurred in a short time. No, I didn’t need to be here from the point of view of involvement with the programme, but experience suggests that people using halfway houses are still very vulnerable. They’re still in touch with their counsellors, of course, but if we’d sited it in another town, we could just as easily have found a local who’d be willing to act as a…

  How to describe what he perceived to be his role.

  ‘A listener, really! Someone available to talk to when the going gets tough. It’s a non-judgmental kind of role. Then my aunt left me the house and it all fell into place. Later, the money from the television programme came in handy to set up a maintenance fund for the Kareela house.’

  ‘Somewhere along the track you must have mentioned some of this to Lucy,’ Jena murmured, shaking her head as if the scenario still had massive gaps. ‘She must have had some clue as to what was going on!’

  The movement made her hair move around her shoulders, shimmering like spun silver in the lamplight. He didn’t want to talk about Lucy—or about the past. Not any more. Though talking was better than thinking the kind of thoughts now rampant in his head.

  ‘She knew about the trust and the old house in Brisbane—’

  ‘And understood?’

  ‘Of course!’ Noah snapped, more out of loyalty than truth, for Lucy had given him all kinds of grief over what she’d seen as his foolish generosity. ‘The rest of it, the halfway house, came later. When we’d already decided to separate.’

  ‘For a year,’ Jena reminded him. ‘When, should she want to, she’ll tug your string and you’ll go running back.’

  ‘It’s not that way at all,’ he said, angry because she’d spoiled a mood so pleasant it had wrapped around him like an old jacket on a cool night. ‘We both needed time apart to work out how we felt about each other.’

  The companion he’d thought so empathetic gave a loud snort of derision.

  ‘Surely you’re intelligent enough to realise how stupid that sounds! If you really cared about each other, wouldn’t a minute apart be too long, a day endless, a week unbearable? And who’s going to crack? Are you going to give up your view that the country’s a better place to raise children? Or is she going to decide a great house in Kareela is better than a city-hospital career?’

  ‘You can talk!’ Noah snorted, though the words made far too much sense. ‘What’s your life goal? To go traipsing off through bush and desert, proving beautiful women can be as game as any man?’

  Lamplight did little to diminish the glare Jena shot at him, but she recovered quickly.

  ‘It’s hardly a life goal, simply a job I’d like to tackle, thank you very much!’

  She smiled sweetly, added somethi
ng about him having cooked so it was only fair she did the dishes, then she stacked the plates, lifted them and glided away, leaving an emptiness he couldn’t understand.

  In the end, he followed, carrying the lamp and setting it down on the bench then turning off the battery light she’d been using.

  Tiny bumps of awareness rose on Jena’s skin and she pressed against the bench, willing the pot of water she’d put on the stove to boil. Then she felt his fingers touch her hair, his voice murmur, ‘It’s still a bit damp. Will it tangle if it doesn’t dry before you go to bed?’

  Such a practical conversation, such a sensible question, so why did the tendrils around her heart tighten painfully, and why was every nerve in her body aching to turn into his arms?

  ‘I’ll plait it and tomorrow it’ll be all crinkly,’ she managed to reply, though her mouth was dry with desire and the crinkly hair the last thing on her mind.

  ‘I could plait it for you,’ he offered, his hand now lifting the strands, so close behind her the skin on her neck quivered in expectation of his touch. ‘Or rub it, help you dry it off.’

  Jena closed her eyes, wondering how much more she could stand. They were talking about her hair, yet her body was responding as if his words were the ultimate in verbal foreplay.

  ‘Tangles in my hair I can handle,’ she told him, her voice wobbling with the effort to sound calm. ‘It’s tangles in my life I’ve doubts about.’

  ‘Me, too,’ he murmured, but he kissed her anyway, right on the back of her neck where the already sensitised skin burned to his touch.

  She turned into his arms, felt him reach out to turn off the gas, then met his lips in a kiss that had been so long anticipated she shuddered with the relief of it.

  ‘I don’t want to get involved,’ he reminded her, breathlessly, a little later.

  She kissed the words away, although when once again the exploration left lips to savour skin she did manage a slightly shaky, ‘Nor do I.’

  Then suddenly she was peeling off his shirt, while his fingers fumbled with her bra catch.

  ‘Could we look on it as a one-night stand?’ he asked, now standing in front of her and reverently stroking her breasts.

  The ache between her thighs suggested one night might not be enough, but she nodded anyway.

  ‘Or maybe two,’ she amended. ‘A brief affair.’

  He’d stepped back a little so she saw him smile, then he touched her face.

  ‘So beautiful,’ he murmured.

  She sensed he was prolonging the moment before they ventured further, raising the excitement in both their bodies to a feverish intensity. She lifted her own hands, and ran her thumbs across the hard ridges of his cheekbones.

  ‘You’re not so bad yourself,’ she whispered back, then let her hands trail downwards, along his jaw, lingering on his shoulders, flitting past nipples already ridged and hard, resting on his belly, her little finger teasing at the indentation.

  ‘Dangerous ground, lady, if you don’t want to take it further,’ he warned, the words a husky growl which added more fuel to her inner heat.

  ‘Who’s seducing who here?’ she demanded, smiling at the excitement even words could generate between them.

  Her fingers slid lower, thumbs hooking inside the waistline of his bathing trunks.

  ‘There’s not even a decent bed!’ he grumbled, but the hands that now held her breasts were trembling, and his thumbs teasing gently at her nipples were creating an agony of desire so strong she could barely breathe, let alone respond with words.

  She leaned into him, crossing the distance and pressing her aching breasts against his chest, trapping his hands.

  ‘One-night stand!’ She confirmed his words, breathing them against his lips, while her hands clung to his shoulders, only will and his strength keeping her upright now.

  Noah held her close, as if letting her go would somehow break the spell, yet managed to make a bed for them, using his swag and her thin foam mattress. Then their clothes were grappled off and the urgency they’d held at bay for so long forced the pace. Tangled limbs and murmurs of desire, questions and confirmations, exploration of what worked and didn’t, escalating the tension until it reached a cataclysmic release which left them trembling in each other’s arms.

  Jena let him hold her, revelling in his strength, slowly feeling something like normality seeping back into her body. As the silence lengthened, doubts sneaked in—ecstasy giving way to confusion as to what might happen next.

  But no regrets, she realised, searching through what she thought of as her soul. Not a one.

  Awkwardness, though.

  Trepidation.

  A tiny smidgen of panic.

  She eased herself a little away from him and looked into what she could see of his face.

  ‘Well, that was fun,’ she said, hoping words would ease the strain.

  ‘Fun?’ he echoed. ‘That’s all?’

  He ran his fingers lightly down her arm, then slid them across the soft skin on the top of her breast, avoiding an already puckering nipple but alerting senses she’d thought would lie dormant through exhaustion for at least a couple of hours.

  Then slowly and meticulously he aroused her again, her growing excitement feeding his own need until she was in no doubt as to his intentions.

  Yet again he held back, tormenting her with his sensual teasing touches until she had to bite back the whimper of want which kept trembling on her lips.

  ‘Still fun,’ he murmured, moving to lie almost on top of her but with his weight still supported on his side. ‘Show me how much fun it is. Touch me and tell me, blonde witch that you are!’

  This time their lovemaking was slow, and deep, and consciously prolonged—so exhausting that Jena’s toes had barely stopped tingling, the tremors of orgasm barely stilled, when she felt sleep dragging her deep into its clutches.

  She woke to birdsong, and a warm body curled around her back. Sensed he was awake, and lying still so as not to wake her.

  She snuggled closer.

  ‘Asking for trouble, lady,’ he grumbled. ‘We’re already way behind in our going-to-work preparations.’

  She eased herself as far away as his grip would allow, but couldn’t bring herself to break the final contact.

  ‘My aunt’s house is finished. I could shift the kids and go back to town today.’ Sadness gathered in her heart as she read ‘goodbye’ in the sombrely spoken final words.

  ‘And I should be here on my own,’ she told him, agreeing to what he hadn’t said, ‘if I’m to honestly fulfil Matt’s trial run.’

  His grasp tightened, strong arms folding her body into his.

  ‘It was a great night, Blondie,’ he whispered.

  ‘And fun,’ she reminded him.

  Then she eased right away this time, standing up and hurrying towards the back verandah, glad about the shower although she knew darned well the cold water wouldn’t be enough to wash away the memories of the night.

  Or anaesthetise the ache in her heart.

  For a man she barely knew?

  Get real here, Jena! she scolded herself.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  NOAH had disappeared when Jena, wrapped in a towel because she’d neglected to take clothes with her, came tentatively back into the room. A quick look through the door told her the Jeep was still there so he was probably swimming.

  She dressed quickly, though suspecting an armour of clothes would be little protection if they were foolish enough to kiss again. Then, because she’d already decided to go to the laundromat at lunchtime today, she picked up the scattered articles of clothing off the floor and dropped them into her laundry bag.

  Noah returned as she was staring at the plate of breakfast cereal she usually enjoyed. He was in swimming trunks and a shirt, but the trunks were dry.

  ‘I jogged down to check on Greg and his family,’ he explained, gathering up a selection of clean clothes as he spoke then disappearing towards the shower.

  Jena stared a
t the empty doorway. If this taut politeness continued, she’d be glad he was shifting back to town—though whether she’d survive this morning’s drive without tearing out her hair was another matter.

  ‘It was a one-night thing, you both agreed,’ she reminded herself, then she poured milk on her cereal, walked out to the front deck and threw the soggy flakes out for the birds to eat later.

  She made herself a cup of coffee instead and, as she carried it out onto the deck, wished she’d taken up smoking as she was reasonably certain this was one of those occasions where a cigarette would have helped.

  Or sublimation! Think of something else.

  She went back inside, dug through her handbag for her notebook, a pen and her glasses, then returned to the verandah. She’d start on a summary of a typical day at Kareela Hospital, something the director could use to get a handle on the shots he’d want.

  She settled into one of Noah’s chairs, slipped off her sandals and propped her feet on the railing, and began to write.

  She’s got those darned glasses on again! Noah realised, as he came back, fully dressed, into the main room of the shack.

  He watched her for a moment, then shook his head. Even if he wasn’t off relationships, which he was, she didn’t want him anyway.

  Didn’t want any entanglement.

  Somehow the broader concept failed to stop the unsettled feeling in his stomach. Though it might just have been hunger.

  Even as he offered the limp explanation to himself, he knew it wasn’t true. Hunger didn’t manifest itself in tension and a kind of faltering in his pulse when he glanced her way.

  He ate some cereal anyway, just in case it might help, but breakfasted propped against the bench inside rather than risk further confusion on the deck.

  ‘Ready in two minutes?’ he asked, when he’d put off the moment they would both have to get in the same vehicle as long as he possibly could.

  ‘Be right there,’ she assured him, and he saw her ease gracefully to her feet, removing the black-rimmed glasses at the same time and pushing her hair back with one hand.