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stole the last finger of toast. “Is there any more bread? I’m starving.”
     
    “I did the shop yesterday while you were swooning your way into the headlines. Your artery-clogging loaf of white is in the pantry. Enjoy your premature death at sixty.” Melissa shoved Dale’s hand away from her coffee mug and rose to her feet. “Didn’t they feed you at the hospital?” she asked as she took the empty plate to the dishwasher.
     
    “Oh.” Sophy thought back to the night before and Mick Hollister’s expression when he’d got up to leave and had finally noticed the contents of her dinner tray, the quiche not improved by having sat around for two hours. He’d handed her the sack of Thai food without a word and vanished from the room with that characteristic purposeful stride before she could protest. It had been her favourite: chicken stir-fry with cashew nuts, in quantities that could feed a small family. “No, they did.” She shook her head and rallied her fleeing wits. “But breakfast was at about six o’clock this morning. It was two Weet-bix and they forgot the milk.”
     
    Melissa and Dale departed for the tourist bureau where they worked, in a flurry of arm touches and admonishments to spend the morning in bed. Sophy, who until that moment had fully intended to pack up her stuff and head straight to campus to start prepping her new piece, suddenly felt exhausted in the wake of the extroverts.
     
    Walking wearily into her bedroom, she scooped up yesterday’s discarded clothing options, flung them over her desk chair, pushed a dog-eared Harry Potter book out of her way and flopped down on the bed. The sun shone red against her closed eyelids. She always got the sun in the morning; Melissa’s room trapped it in the afternoon. She opened her eyes and enjoyed the sensation of coming home after the long, sterile night in the hospital. She had always loved this room. The house belonged to her aunt and uncle, who had since moved to a large modern homestead ten minutes down the road by Lake Hayes. When she and Melissa had been growing up and before they’d started boarding school at thirteen in Dunedin, the nearest city, she had spent the afternoons at her cousin’s home while her parents were at work. This had then been the spare room. They’d taken it over with toys and forts and lip-synched to the latest pop songs, secure in the perks of being only children with no brothers on hand to witness the humiliation.
     
    In the fundamentals, the bedroom hadn’t changed much. The wallpaper was still a pink floral nightmare better suited to an elderly spinster’s nightgown and the lightshade was a fantastically fringed homage to the seventies. Her current student budget didn’t lend itself to extensive renovation, although she and Melissa had been in total agreement that a splurge was necessary when it came to the brown shagpile carpet.
     
    “It’s like somebody skinned Chewbacca,” Melissa had said with a shudder.
     
    Sophy shoved a pillow behind her head and glanced at the bedside clock, wondering if she could fit in a decent nap before she had to be on campus for lunch. A warm furry presence appeared at her back, drooly chin resting on the curve of her waist, tail beating the bedspread with rhythmic thumps. Tucking her hand under her cheek, she closed her eyes again and began to drift.
     
    She managed not to think about a pair of kind grey eyes for an entire six minutes.
     
     
     
     
     

Chapter Three
     
    Sophy’s hand slid rapidly across the parchment, lines webbing out and shading into familiar features. She was impatient as she blew loose charcoal from the page, eager and intent on her work. She could usually tell right from the beginning of a new piece if it was going to succeed or not and she felt the magic with this one.
     
    It was four days since the incident, as she thought of it, and Mick had called her cell at breakfast to say that he had the morning off and could sit for a couple of