Читать книгу Dying For You - CHARLOTTE LAMB - Страница 5

FOR a moment or two Annie was so shocked that she just sat there, pale and rigid, her mind struggling to cope with her situation, then she whispered, ‘Who are you?’

He didn’t reply, and when she looked into the driving mirror above his head she couldn’t see his eyes, only the olive-skinned curve of his profile turned away from her, the gleam of black hair above that. He had a strong, fleshless nose, powerful cheekbones. It was a tough face; Annie searched what she could see of it, trying to assess the sort of man this was, what he might plan to do to her.

‘Have we met before?’ she asked, but there was still no reply. She pretended to laugh, trying to hide her alarm. ‘I’m sorry not to recognise you, but I meet so many people, it’s hard to remember all their faces. Fans are always waiting after concerts, asking for autographs, talking to me—is that where we met? Are you a fan?’

He didn’t look like a fan, though. She didn’t really believe he was. Her fans were usually in their teens, or early twenties; they wore the same sort of clothes, same hairstyles, immediately recognisable as the latest street trend. Many of the girls dressed like her, actually, even to having black nails and lipstick, although that was something she had only done briefly, a year or so ago, and no longer did. She’d got bored with that.

This man was too old to be one of her fans. He had to be in his thirties and she thought his clothes were old-fashioned: that dark suit, the white shirt, the dark tie. Now that she focused on his clothes she began to realise what good quality they were: the suit looked as if it might have been tailor-made. It was certainly expensive; it hadn’t come off a peg in a shop. The shirt and tie, too, looked classy, from what she had seen of them.

The clothes puzzled her. Clothes usually told you something about the person wearing them, and the message she got from what he wore was that he was respectable, conventional, yet what he was doing was neither of those things.

So he wasn’t a typical kidnapper, either, although who knew what they would look like? This might, in fact, be a clever disguise meant to make him invisible, anonymous, someone police would discount as a possible suspect.

His silence was unnerving. Swallowing nervously, she tried, again, to get him to talk to her.

‘Why won’t you tell me who you are?’

‘Later,’ he said without looking in her direction, his eyes fixed steadily on the road ahead.

She broke out, ‘Well, where are you taking me?’

‘You’ll see, when we get there.’

‘Tell me now.’ She tried to sound cool, calm, unflustered, unafraid, but her throat was dry and her mouth moved stiffly.

He didn’t answer.

She shifted on the seat and could see his hands on the wheel: firm, capable hands, long-fingered, the skin tanned. They had a strength that worried her. Annie looked sideways out of the window at the green French countryside. Spring was only just beginning, a few new leaves appearing on the trees. The sky was blue but the sun wasn’t hot. Where had he been to get that tan?

And then another thought occurred to her. She had noted a faint foreign accent right from that first phone call—was he French? Or some other nationality? Had he just arrived from another country, somewhere hot? Sicily? she wondered. Hadn’t she heard that Sicilian shepherds often kidnapped people and held them to ransom? That it was a family trade? She looked at the driver’s black hair and olive skin. He could be Italian. But she was going to Italy later on the tour; why hadn’t he waited until she got there? Why snatch her in Paris?

‘Are you kidnapping me?’ she asked, and caught the dark flash of his eyes again as he looked at her in his driving mirror.

He still didn’t say anything, though, which in itself was disturbing, because not to answer was a sort of admission. It meant he wasn’t denying it, at the very least.

She burst out huskily, ‘People will soon be looking for me, you know.’

His face stayed averted; he didn’t respond.

‘There are a whole group of us coming to Paris—my agent, the band, the tour manger... If I don’t arrive at my hotel they’ll call the police.’

He shrugged indifferently, but she kept trying to make him see sense.

‘You can’t just snatch someone without anybody noticing! When they check up with the airport they’ll find out that a car collected me. Plenty of people saw me getting into your car, including the security men who flew from London with me. They saw you; they’ll have noticed the number of your car.’

Would they have done, though? They had talked to him, certainly, had looked at his car, but would they have thought of looking at the number of the black limousine? There hadn’t been many other people around, either; if anyone had been watching they would have been looking at her, because she had been escorted out to the car by security men and airport officials eager to avoid any problems with the media.

She wasn’t yet a big name in Europe, though. The Press wouldn’t have been over-excited by her arrival. She was just starting to sell records there, so she wasn’t likely to be big news, but with a concert tour starting a week later there might have been Press interest, so the airport hadn’t taken any chances.

That reminded her of something. ‘There was a limousine booked,’ she said slowly. ‘Was that you? Are you from the limousine firm? Because if you are, the police will track you down at once.’

He laughed.

Annie’s nerves grated. ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked him angrily, then something occurred to her and in a sudden pang of hope she asked, ‘This isn’t some elaborate joke, is it? I haven’t been set up? Are you taking me to meet Phil and Di somewhere? Is this one of Phil’s practical jokes?’

Phil was famous for practical jokes; the idea should have occurred to her before if she hadn’t been so unbalanced by recognising the voice that had made all those phone calls.

‘No, it isn’t a joke, Annie,’ he said, and the way he said it made the panic start up again.

She couldn’t breathe; she lay back against the upholstery, fighting to keep calm, fighting to breathe naturally. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out everything else, to stabilise herself.

There was no point in losing control. There was nothing she could do at that moment; she was locked inside this car behind smoky glass windows which would hide her from anyone looking in from outside, so that she couldn’t even attract attention by waving or screaming. She would just have to sit here and wait until they arrived at wherever he was taking her.

Her heart missed a beat. What would happen then? If only she knew what he meant to do to her. He didn’t look like a dangerous lunatic, or a criminal; in fact she had to admit he was strikingly attractive, if you liked Mediterranean colouring: the olive skin and black hair and dark, gleaming eyes. She always had, but then she had French blood, through her father, who had been born in France, of French descent, although he had spent most of his life in England.

Annie had only visited France a couple of times herself. It had been the one country she wanted to visit as soon as she started travelling with the band. She had never been there while her father was alive, and she had promised herself she would one day go in search of the place where he had been born, in the Jura mountains, but there had never been time so far for such a long trip. When you were giving concerts you did the gig and moved on, unfortunately.

Her father had been dark and olive-skinned with dark eyes, like this man. He hadn’t been tall, though; and he had been slightly built, not powerful. Annie’s long black hair had been inherited from him, but she had been born with her mother’s skin colour and green eyes. As a child she had often wished she had inherited her mother’s blonde hair, too, but now she was glad she was a mix of both parents. She wished now that she were even more like her father.

She had adored her father, and his death when she was eleven had darkened her childhood, especially when her mother married again within a year. Annie had never liked her stepfather, and made no effort to hide her hostility; and Bernard Tyler had soon come to dislike her too. So had her mother.

Joyce Tyler knew her daughter condemned her for marrying again so soon after her first husband’s death, and resented Annie’s open contempt. She had twin sons a couple of years later, and became totally engrossed in them. She had always been a man’s woman, never unkind, but largely indifferent to her daughter; now she was only interested in her sons.

When Bernard Tyler began slapping Annie around, Joyce Tyler did nothing to stop him. In fact she bluntly told Annie it served her right. ‘If you were nice to him, he’d be nice to you. You only have yourself to blame.’

By then fourteen, Annie began staying out of the house as much as possible, because she was afraid of Bernard Tyler as well as disliking him. She started living for the day when she would be old enough to leave home for good. When she met Philip and he offered her a career in music she packed a case with everything she valued and left, knowing that her mother wouldn’t even think about her again, and that Bernard and his two sons would be glad to see her go.

When she began to be well-known they had got in touch with her to ask her to lend them some money, offering a long, rambling story about financial hardship as an excuse, but Philip had dealt with that, as he did with all her financial affairs. They had been given tickets for a concert soon afterwards, and Annie had seen them briefly that night, but then they had vanished again, no doubt because Philip made it clear that he wasn’t paying them any more large sums of money; and she had been relieved, yet that reminder of past misery had made her unhappy for days.

Her life would have been so different if her father hadn’t died so young, her mother hadn’t then married Bernard Tyler. Annie’s happy childhood had ended at the age of eleven; until she was seventeen she had been lonely and un-happy. Even to remember those years now was to feel greyness steal over her. She frowned, pushing the memories away.

‘You’re very quiet,’ the driver said, and she started, looking at him again, but all she could see was his profile and the dark sweep of his lashes.

‘I was thinking. My friends are going to be very upset and worried when I don’t arrive. They’ll wonder what on earth has happened to me.’

‘They’ll soon find out.’ His voice was cool, dismissive, and she flinched.

‘What does that mean? Will you ring them?’ Saying what, though? Telling them that she had been kidnapped and they would have to pay a large ransom to get her back?

She wished she could see his face properly instead of merely getting glimpses now and then. People’s eyes usually told you a lot about them, but that wasn’t true about this man. His eyes were like bottomless wells: deep, lustrous, impossible to plumb. And yet she was beginning to feel an odd teasing familiarity...

Had they ever met before? she wondered. Or had he cleverly managed to plant the idea that she knew him in her head subliminally, with his phone calls, and ever since he picked her up at the airport?

The limousine slowed, turned at right angles, and left the road on which they had been travelling. Annie looked out and upwards, seeing that they were driving between deep, sunk green banks from which trees and bushes sprang, over a winding, unmade road.

No! she realised; this wasn’t a road—it was a driveway leading up to a house. A moment later the house itself came into view: not a large house, but detached, with trees and a garden around it, two-storeyed, with mossy pink tiles on the roof, the walls painted white and the closed shutters over every window painted black.

As the car halted outside the front door Annie tried to make out whether there were any other houses in view, and felt her heart sink as she saw that the white house stood on the edge of some sort of wood, which lay behind it, and that there were only fields in front of it. It could hardly have been more isolated. She couldn’t see another house anywhere.

Nerves jumped under her skin. She bit her lip, feeling real fear growing inside her.

The driver got out and came round to open her door. Annie stayed obstinately on the seat, her chin up, defying him.

‘I’m not getting out; I’m staying here until you drive me back to Paris. Take me back to Paris and I’ll forget this ever happened, but if you don’t...’

He reached one long arm into the car, took her by the hand, and jerked her forwards. He took her by surprise, and he was even more powerful than he looked. She couldn’t resist the tug he gave her. She almost fell off the seat, and the next minute had been scooped up by his other arm going round her waist, lifting her off her feet and out of the car, kicking and struggling helplessly.

He carried her up the steps to the front door, holding her under his arm as if she were a child, ignoring her increasingly wild attempts to escape. While he was unlocking the door Annie wrenched her head round and bit his hand; he gave a stifled grunt of pain, but didn’t let go of her until they were inside the house and he had kicked the front door shut behind them.

Slowly he lowered her feet to the floor, his arm still round her waist, holding her tightly against him so that she helplessly slithered down his body, aware of every slow, deliberate contact, her breasts brushing his chest, their thighs touching, the warmth of his skin reaching her through their clothes. The effect was electrifying. She didn’t want to feel it, but she did: a deep physical wrench that made her almost giddy. Breathless and shuddering, she tried to push away once she was standing up, on her feet, but his arm was immovable; she couldn’t break the lock he had on her. Her long black hair dishevelled, a mass of it falling over her face, she watched him through it, her almond-green eyes like the eyes of a scared child in the dark.

He lifted the hand she had bitten, looked at it. So did Annie. ‘I’m bleeding,’ he said, sounding surprised. ‘You have sharp little teeth.’

And then he absently put out his pink tongue-tip and licked the blood away. Annie watched him, her nerves prickling. The little gesture had an intimacy that shocked her, yet sent another of those quivers of response through her body.

It was at that moment that she really began to be afraid, to believe that this was actually happening, that she had been kidnapped for motives she didn’t yet understand by a man who frightened her and attracted her at one and the same time.

Her insides collapsed, but she fought not to show how scared she was, throwing back her head and looking straight at him, hoping she looked calm and confident.

‘Why don’t you take me back to Paris now, before this gets really serious? Kidnapping is a very serious offence, you know.’

‘Very,’ he agreed, straight-faced.

Flushing at what she suspected to be mockery, she snapped, ‘You could end up going to prison for the rest of your life!’

‘They have to catch me first,’ he pointed out coolly, brushing the tangled black hair back from her face with those powerful tanned fingers. The light touch of his hand sent a trickle of icy awareness down her spine, and yet there was something like tenderness in the gentle movement of his fingers. Even that made Annie afraid—afraid of what might be coming, what he meant to do with her.

‘Why don’t I show you the room I’ve got ready for you?’

Her stomach turned over. She wondered if he could hear the acceleration of her heartbeat, see the spring of perspiration on her face.

If he picked up her nervous reaction he didn’t show it. ‘Then we’ll have lunch,’ he added, and she bristled.

‘I’m not hungry! I couldn’t eat; I feel sick!’

‘You’ll feel better with some food inside you,’ he said, as if she were a child. ‘It won’t be anything elaborate—I’m no cook—but I’ve got plenty of salad and cheese and fruit. It was freshly bought this morning in the market; you’ll find it’s delicious. And I’ve got a bottle of very good wine.’

‘I don’t drink wine!’

He raised straight black brows at her, looking genuinely incredulous. ‘You don’t drink wine? You’re missing out on one of life’s great pleasures. I shall have to teach you to enjoy it while you’re here. It will calm your nerves down, relax you.’

That was what she was afraid of, what she must not allow to happen. She had to stay on the alert, on her guard against him, and watchful for an opportunity to escape. If she could only get out of the house she might be able to hide among the trees until it was dark and then walk until she reached a village; there must be one somewhere near here!

‘If you want to calm my nerves you might start by letting go of me!’ she told him, and without a word he let his arm fall.

She took several steps away, looked around the small, shadowy hall from which a staircase led upstairs.

‘Does this house belong to you?’

He didn’t answer, but she sensed from the expression in his eyes that it didn’t.’

‘Look, Mr...? You still haven’t told me your name. Or at least told me what to call you. I must call you something.’

He frowned oddly, hesitated, then said curtly, ‘Marc.’

From the way he watched her she couldn’t tell whether it was really his name but she didn’t query it. ‘Marc,’ she repeated. ‘You’re French, aren’t you?’

‘How did you guess?’

He was kidding. Solemnly she said, ‘A wild stab.’ She put her head on one side, listened to the silence surrounding them. No sound of traffic from outside, just the constant murmur of the trees in the wood behind the house, yet there was something familiar to her about the noise. She couldn’t track it down for a minute until she realised it reminded her of the sound she had heard in her dream the other night—a sound like the sea. This was it, not traffic, not the sea, but the rustle and whisper of hundreds of branches swaying and bending in the wind.

Why on earth had she heard that sound in her dream? There was something uncanny about it. It made her shiver. She had never been here before; why had this sound got into her dreams? Maybe he had rung her from here. Maybe the noise had been a background sound on the answering machine tape.

‘Did you ring me from here?’ she asked him, and he gave her a sharp look, shaking his head.

‘The phone has been cut off.’

She was sorry to hear that, but maybe it had been telepathy. He must have had this sound in his head when he talked to her on the phone and she had picked up on it. Nothing uncanny about telepathy—she had several times had ideas leap into her head from Di or Phil when they were working together. If you were on the same wavelength it could easily happen.

But she wasn’t on this man’s wavelength! she hurriedly thought. She couldn’t be.

‘Why has the phone been cut off?’ she asked, thinking that the house had the strange, echoing feel of a house which was always empty; it didn’t feel like anybody’s home.

‘I didn’t need it.’

‘Then where did you ring me from?’

He didn’t answer, eyeing her drily.

She noticed that from the hall several doors opened into rooms which were gloomy with shadow because of the closed shutters over the windows. She only got an impression of them, a fleeting glimpse of dark oak furniture and leather chairs, a wallpaper with trails of ivy and blue flowers.

‘Is there anyone else here?’ she asked huskily, listening.

He half smiled again. ‘No, we’re quite alone, Annie.’

She tensed, bit her lower lip, watching him and wishing she knew what went on inside his head. Or did she? Maybe she was better off not knowing! ‘At least tell me what this is all about! Why have you brought me here? Do you want money? Are you going to ask my record company for a lot of money before you let me go?’ Her mind worked feverishly. But even if Philip paid him whatever ransom he demanded, would he let her go? Alive?

She had seen his face now; he hadn’t tried to hide it. Didn’t kidnappers usually kill their victims so that they could never identify them? Fear made her stomach clench, sent waves of sickness through her.

‘This has nothing at all to do with money!’ he bit out, and she stared at him, afraid to feel relief. If he wasn’t holding her for ransom, what did he mean to do with her?

‘Then why have you brought me here?’ She searched his face for a clue. The hard, insistent lines of it did nothing to lessen her tension. ‘Are you sure you really know who I am? You aren’t mixing me up with someone else, are you? Because you keep asking if I remember you, but I don’t, and I’m sure we’ve never met before. I have a good memory; I’d remember if we had met.’

His dark eyes hypnotically stared down into hers. ‘You’ll remember Annie,’ he said softly. ‘I can wait; I’ve waited a long time already.’

A shiver ran down her back. If she wasn’t careful, he would start convincing her! He didn’t look it, but he must be crazy.

‘Stop arguing, Annie,’ he said. ‘Come upstairs and I’ll show you your room.’

She dug her heels in, resisting the hand that seized her elbow and tried to move her towards the stairs.

‘You can’t keep me here against my will and get away with it! I don’t know what the penalty is for kidnapping in France, but you don’t want to go to prison for years, do you? Look, if you just want to get to know me, I’ll have lunch with you now, and then you can drive me back to Paris, and I’ll see you again there. I’ll get you a ticket for my concert and—’

He laughed harshly. ‘You know you don’t mean it; if you made a date with me it would be the police who kept it, I imagine. I’m not stupid, Annie. You’re ready to promise me anything to get away. Do you think I don’t know that?’

‘What are you going to do to me?’ She tried to hide her fear, but he would have had to be blind to miss that look in her eyes.

His brows met. ‘I’m not going to hurt you, Annie; don’t look like that!’

He sounded so convincing. She let out a long sigh, put her hand out to him. ‘Then please let me go, Marc—please...’

Taking her hand, he looked down at the slight, pale fingers he held, slowly entwined his own tanned fingers with them. Annie felt her heart skip sideways in a little kick of awareness.

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Just for the moment, you’re my guest. You’ll find the house very comfortable, and it’s tranquil here, much more peaceful than you would have been in Paris. No media clamouring for interviews, no telephones, no fans waiting outside to hassle you. Why don’t you stop worrying and enjoy it?’

Annie considered him soberly. If she kept her temper and was not unfriendly maybe she would be able to talk him round, get him to see sense and take her back to Paris.

She pulled her hand away; he let it go without comment. Annie began to walk upstairs, aware of him following close behind her.

‘In here,’ he said, throwing open a door on the landing above.

Halting on the threshold, she watched him walk across the darkened room to the windows. He opened them, flung back the shutters, and light flooded in, making her blink, dazzled, staring at him.

She felt a strange flash of surprise, a jerk of dislocation, like mental whiplash, and for that instant had the oddest feeling, and then it was gone, and she was watching him with wide, half-blind green eyes.

He stared back at her with a curious eagerness, as if he knew that something had happened to her just then, as if he could read her thoughts, or her feelings; and that bothered her. That could be very dangerous. From now on she must try to hide from him what she was thinking, or she would have no defences against him.

‘Annie?’ he whispered.

‘Where’s the bathroom?’ she asked, trying to keep all intonation out of her voice.

She thought she heard him sigh. Then he gestured. ‘Through that door. I’ll go downstairs and start preparing lunch, so don’t be long. I’ll bring your cases in from the car later and you can unpack after lunch.’

She waited until she heard him reach the bottom of the stairs, then she went over to the window. How far was it to the ground from up here? If there was a handy drainpipe it might be worth risking the climb down. She peered down at the garden below and grimaced. No, that was out.

There was no drainpipe close enough—the nearest was outside the bathroom, and the bathroom window looked far too small for her to climb through it. From here, too, the ground seemed a very long way off. She wouldn’t like to risk breaking a leg, or worse, by jumping out of the window. In films people knotted sheets together and climbed down them; maybe she could try that.

But not now. She could hear noises from the room below, a tap running, the sound of china clattering. That must be the kitchen. If she tried to climb out of here now he’d be sure to spot her.

She went into the bathroom and found it very pretty: the fittings a primrose-yellow, a pine shelf along the wall filled with French toiletries—bath oil, soaps, gels, shampoo, talc.

Annie washed, then deliberately left her face bare of make-up, brushed her long black hair up into a neat bun at the back of her neck, made herself look as unattractive as possible.

Looking at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, she saw the nervous awareness in her green eyes and turned away quickly. In this situation it was very dangerous to admit, even to herself, in the privacy of her own head, that she found him attractive. No, more than that, if she was honest. Ever since she first saw him she had been mesmerised; and that was scary.

He might keep telling her not to be scared, that he wouldn’t hurt her, but the fact remained—he had kidnapped her, brought her here by force. Why had he done that, if not for ransom? What on earth was going on here? She was afraid to think about it.

Was he out of his head? Look at his obsession that they had met before! Yes, one of them had to be crazy, and it wasn’t her. She was one hundred per cent certain she had never seen him in her life until today.

Then she remembered that fleeting dizziness when he opened the shutters, the feeling of déjà vu, and she frowned, bit her lip. What on earth had that been about? For a second she almost had thought she remembered...something...

Angrily she pushed the thought away. She was letting him get to her, that was all. She must not let him hypnotise her into joining him in his fantasy. That way lay madness.

Feeling calmer, she went downstairs, started looking into rooms, until she opened a door into a large, bright kitchen with golden pine fittings, white walls and red and white gingham curtains. There were bowls of hyacinths in bloom on the windowsill, and the whole room was full of their scent and the fragrance of fresh coffee.

While she hesitated at the door, Marc turned to look at her, his narrowed eyes skating over her face and hair, his brows rising sardonically.

‘You look about fifteen! Is that meant to make me keep my distance?’

‘I hope you will anyway,’ she said primly, not meeting his eyes.

There was a long silence, and at last she had to look up. He was watching her seriously, his dark eyes level and frowning.

‘I told you, you don’t need to be afraid. I’m not holding you for ransom, I won’t hurt you, and, I assure you, I won’t leap on you suddenly. I won’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do.’

Red burned in her cheeks. ‘You forced me to come here, and you’re forcing me to stay here against my will.’

‘It was the only way I could get you to myself for long enough,’ he coolly told her.

‘Long enough for what?’

‘To get to know me,’ he said. ‘Now come and sit down at the table and we’ll have lunch.’

Still absorbed in thinking over what he had just said, she didn’t argue. She sat down automatically and looked at the food he had put out on the square pine kitchen table—a large bowl of crisp green salad tossed in dressing, black olives in a dish, some hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, a gingham-covered wicker basket of sliced French bread, a platter of various French cheeses and a bowl of fruit.

Annie hadn’t felt hungry until then, but the food looked so good that she felt a surprising pang of hunger.

‘Help yourself,’ he said as he sat down opposite her.

She took salad—a mixture of avocado, lettuces, cucumber, green peppers—a hard-boiled egg, a tomato, some black olives, a slice of Brie, some of the golden bread.

‘I’m sorry there’s nothing more exciting,’ he said, and she looked up, her green eyes startled, then smiled.

‘It’s great food—I’ve always loved a picnic; that’s what this is—a picnic indoors.’

‘But picnic food tastes better in the open air,’ he said, reaching over to pour white wine into her glass, and that was when Annie had another of those strange déjà vu flashes, a baffling sense of having seen him do that before.

As she drew a sharp, startled breath he looked up at her, his body stiffening, his face watchful.

‘Annie?’ he said again, as he had before, and she slowly lifted her own eyes to stare back at him, dazed.

He held her eyes. ‘Tell me what you felt,’ he softly said.

‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘It was...nothing...’

‘It was something,’ he said, and his black eyes glittered. ‘You’re beginning to remember.’