Читать книгу Tamed By Her Husband - Elizabeth Power, Elizabeth Power - Страница 6

THE drone of the helicopter was growing louder. The children were laughing and waving, calling to her while the whirr of blades kept drawing nearer, whipping through the heat and the dust. She could just make out the faces of the children now. They weren’t laughing any more. They were looking at her in alarm—some were crying, others screaming—while she lashed frantically at the air, and the sound wasn’t the buzz of a helicopter any more, but of a whole hatch of attacking insects…

’No!’ Shannon shot up, heart thudding, face buried in her cupped hands as she gasped for air.

It was all right, she thought, looking around her, trying to steady her breathing. She had just fallen asleep and she was still in the cabin on Kane’s boat—a swift survey of the pale lacquered wood and rich furnishings around her confirmed it—and the sound she had heard was the throb of the—

Quickly she sat upright on the big, luxurious bed, frowning, listening. The engine? she thought, puzzled.

Feet groping for the mules she had kicked off—goodness knew how long before!—Shannon thrust her toes into them and raced over to peer through the blind.

Through the oval porthole, Barcelona was just a view, and a rapidly diminishing view at that, she realised, aghast.

Without wasting a second, she stumbled back across the cabin, unsteady from the motion, still groggy with sleep.

Kane wasn’t at the lower helm, she noticed as she emerged from below and saw the vacant control seats behind the galley, which meant he had to be powering the boat from the upper deck.

He was sitting at the helm as she climbed the steep steps to the flybridge, and was steering the vessel through the open waters, capable hands dealing with the wheel.

He had changed out of his suit into a black T-shirt and jeans and, in spite of everything, Shannon couldn’t fail to notice the width and power of his shoulders, how dauntingly masculine he was, as she came across the open deck.

‘Where are we going?’

He sent a surprised glance up at her as she moved to stand beside him, her pale features challenging, her hair blowing softly in the wind.

‘So you’re awake at last,’ he observed, returning his attention to the various switches and screens on the instrument panel. ‘How are you feeling?’

How could he dare ask that? Impatiently, Shannon glared down at his bent head. The rays of the low sun were picking out the fiery highlights in his hair. ‘I said, where are we going?’

He was monitoring something on the panel, didn’t even look up as he said, ‘You might have been killing time back there, Shannon, but I wasn’t. I’ve got a schedule to meet.’

‘A sched—What schedule?’ she demanded anxiously. They were cruising at a rate of knots, each powerful slicing of the waves carrying them further and further into the open sea. ‘Where the hell do you think you’re taking me?’ she demanded again.

He was handling the craft with the skill of a master, she realised as she waited for his answer, looking behind at the sun streaking fire across their foaming wake.

‘I have to deliver this thing to Cannes before the end of the week and I’ve already lost valuable time,’ he told her phlegmatically, ‘so I’m afraid you’re going to have to stick with me until delivery.’

‘Cannes. Cannes!’ she repeated, horrified. She couldn’t believe he was saying this. He had to be joking surely? ‘That’s France!’

His mouth moved in mock appreciation as he kept his course, making progress seaward, still following the coast. ‘Ten out of ten for geography, Shannon. It’s good to know you learnt something at those fancy schools you attended.’

‘You arrogant louse!’ With a swish of her hair, angrily she glared at the diminishing coastline, then Kane’s hard countenance again. ‘Turn this thing around this minute!’ And when he simply ignored her, sitting there with that determined thrust to his jaw: ‘I said turn it around!’ she ordered.

‘I’m sorry, Shannon. I can’t do that,’ he said calmly. ‘As I told you, I’m already behind schedule. I’m down a crew member from my outbound journey and you’ve already admitted you weren’t doing anything particular back there.’

‘You abduct me…and you’ve got the audacity to ask me to crew for you?’ It came out as a squeak.

‘You said you were looking for excitement.’

‘I said—’ Had she said that?

‘And I know you’ve done it for your father.’

Yes, in the past. He had even come out on the yacht with them once or twice, she remembered, recalling how excited—how gauche—she had felt in his company. But that was different…

‘So you’re kidnapping me to do it?’ Suddenly fear was the overriding emotion, fear and a deepening anger over the fact that he had tricked her onto the vessel in the first place. ‘If you don’t turn this thing around, so help me, I’ll swim back!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

‘Just watch me!’ Already she was stumbling away, unaware of Kane reducing their speed, only of knocking her hip on the hard casing that housed a fridge and barbecue, in her crazy bid to carry out her threat.

‘Don’t be such a fool!’ As she made it to the steps, he was just that bit too quick for her and she let out a small cry when his arm came round her middle like an iron bar.

‘Let me go!’ She twisted round in his grasp, pummelling at the hard wall of his chest. ‘Let me go, you big bully!’

‘For heaven’s sake, Shannon! Calm down! Do you really think I would have chosen to bring you with me? I’d already lost valuable time through my meeting starting late this afternoon, but you were sleeping far too peacefully for me to disturb. You had a pretty hard smack on the head—and even without that, you weren’t in any fit state for me to leave back there!’

Head swimming, feeling weak—but from his nearness—forcibly, she pulled out of his grasp. ‘Oh, so now you’re doing it for my benefit!’

‘Ultimately, I hope so.’

The evening sun was dazzling, making her squint as she tilted her head to look challengingly up at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means that I think you could do with a few days’ looking-after. And if I can persuade you to see what you’re doing to yourself—what you’re throwing away by not facing facts and going home in the process—so much the better!’

Anger turned her eyes almost to sapphire. ‘What do you mean? Face facts? What facts?’

‘A company that will very probably be yours one day—whether you like it or not. A father who isn’t getting any younger.’

Anxiety was suddenly replacing the hot emotion staining her cheeks, corrugating her otherwise smooth forehead. ‘You said you hadn’t seen him.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

Hadn’t he? She couldn’t remember all of what he had said back there in Las Ramblas.

‘What, then? He’s all right, isn’t he?’ The question was a worried whisper.

‘Is that actual concern I see, Shannon?’

‘What do you think?’ she snapped, recognising scepticism in that hard face. Ranulph Bouvier might not have shown himself to be a loving and affectionate parent, but he was her father.

‘What I think is that it’s time you stepped off the merry-go-round of socialising and living it up with your fancy friends and start to consider that your father might possibly need you. Consider that in some things he might also be right instead of opposing and rebelling against everything he stands for just for the sheer hell of it!’

‘For the sheer hell of it?’ Was that what he thought? ‘Why?’ she contested angrily. ‘If I happen to disagree with a lot of what he believes in? I might be a lot of things, but I’m not a hypocrite, Kane. And I don’t recall you always being so deferential to my father. In fact, you were very much against him when you walked out and left him in the lurch!’

His mouth took on a grim cast. Perhaps he didn’t like being reminded, she thought suddenly, wondering also if he remembered how bitterly they had faced each other that last time he had called at the house.

‘If anyone left him in the lurch it was his dearly beloved and very wayward daughter! And only after she’d managed to drag the Bouvier name through the mud!’

‘That’s not true!’ she defended, her flesh tautening over her high, gaunt cheeks as she remembered. She had been slated—and unjustly—by a scandal-raking Press; made a scapegoat and a victim by people who had more power than she had and who, after putting her through the wringer, had effectively hung her out to dry. But being misunderstood and blamed by a father who was too busy and uninterested even to notice what was happening to his only child was worse than anything else. ‘And I left because he refused to acknowledge that I had views and opinions—just as you did!’

‘With one difference,’ Kane uttered succinctly.

‘Oh?’

‘He didn’t raise me.’

She turned around with her shoulders hunched, her arms wrapped protectively around her, staring unseeingly at the diminutive buildings of the Spanish mainland in the distance, dark silhouettes against the vivid red ball of the setting sun.

She couldn’t go back to the oppression—to being dictated to. Nor could she stand everyone believing the worst about her when her only crime was being taken in by a man she had thought was—to all intents and purposes—free to love her. The fact that he’d ranked highly in a couple of world-class races and had a prominent politician father only served to make the supposed affair front-page news when his still very resident wife had taken that overdose and lost her unborn baby because of it. Perhaps, Shannon thought now, it would have been better if she had divulged her side of the story, but she had remained silent when those reporters had hounded her, preferring to be thought an adulteress rather than a fool. Afterwards Ranulph Bouvier had tried to tighten his control of her, tried to deprive her of her independence and her freedom, until his authority had stifled her. Eventually, only weeks after Kane had left the firm, she had fled London for good.

‘Did my father ask you to find me?’ Suspicion narrowed her eyes as she turned back to Kane. ‘Try to bring me home?’ And when he didn’t answer, his mouth still set in that inexorable cast, ‘So that’s it!’ she breathed, letting her arms fall in clarification, her pose no longer defensive, but all-attacking now. ‘He’s got you back working for him again, hasn’t he?’ she accused, certain of it, her lips tightening mutinously when she noticed that almost indiscernible shrug of his shoulder. ‘This is my father’s boat, isn’t it? It isn’t yours at all. And I thought you’d done better for yourself!’ She couldn’t contain the derisory little laugh that trembled through those last words, her laughter masking the pain she had nursed for what seemed like centuries from his cruel opinion of her; the frustration of never being able to tell him that he was wrong; that nothing was as it seemed. ‘So the Bouvier name isn’t that muddied for you after all!’ she continued to taunt him. ‘Or was the deal being offered so much more attractive to you this time?’

Almost inaudibly, she heard him catch his breath. ‘You think that’s all it boils down to, don’t you?’ he said scathingly. ‘Money?’ With that he was striding away from her, back to the helm.

‘Doesn’t it?’ Shannon, following, threw at his broad back. In her experience, it had ranked very highly on most people’s list of priorities, in the men she had met, in the obvious hangers-on, in the long line of superficial, so-called ‘friends’. ‘What’s he offered you? A nice fat bonus if you bring me back?’ She watched him take up his position behind the wheel again and increase the vessel’s speed with a swift, controlling ease. ‘Whatever he’s paying you, I’ll double it,’ she suggested desperately through the sudden, ominous throbbing of the powerful engine.

‘Out of your allowance?’ From that half-cocked eyebrow, as the boat surged forward, he looked remarkably sceptical.

Perhaps he thought she couldn’t afford him, she considered, wondering how much he knew.

‘I have assets!’ she assured him, clutching the cool steel of a handrail, having to raise her voice above the upsurge of the water, the rush of the stiff and freshening wind. There was the jewellery she hadn’t wanted. The paintings she had left back in England. Not Monets or Constables, it was true, but certainly worth a lot of money by anyone’s standards. And there was her Porsche…

‘So I see.’

‘Not that!’ she berated, when she saw the way his eyes were roving over the slender lines of her body with mocking sensuality, causing her breathing to quicken, her cheeks to flame from the realisation that he had deliberately misinterpreted what she had meant.

‘I’m relieved to hear it,’ he called back over the increasing turbulence of the water, ‘for both our sakes. Much as I find you tempting, it’s not my policy to get involved with news-courting little socialites, so your honour’s quite safe, if that’s what you’re worried about.’ And then, before she could retaliate, stung as she was by his remarks, he was adding, ‘And what makes you think your father’s offered me anything?’

‘Because I know my father.’ Deftly she watched him flick a switch, saw a jumble of data appear on one of the screens. ‘And I know now that, like most people, you can be bought if the price is right.’

‘Well, Shannon,’ he said without looking at her, ‘I’m afraid taking you back there is going to cost me far more than you can afford.’ Then with a pointed glance at her small breasts and the logo stamped blatantly across them, ‘so I’m afraid,’ he intoned firmly, ‘the bulls are going to have to manage without your gallant support for a while.’

‘You…’ The little invective she uttered was barely audible above the boat’s powerful slicing through the waves. ‘And I used to think you were a cut above the rest.’

For a moment as his eyes met hers she saw in his a silent query; a studied contemplation as though she had surprised him with that reckless little confession. Swiftly, though, he was turning away, giving all his attention to the task of steering and navigation. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ he said.

Lips tightening, Shannon swung away from him, down the steps and through the doors into the saloon, where she flopped wearily onto one of the pale leather settees. He’d said he was sorry to disappoint her. Well, she was sorry too, she thought.

She had always admired and envied him: his candidness; his refusal to be anything but his own man. Now she was profoundly disappointed to discover that, when it came down to it, he was just the same as everybody else.

And why? she asked herself bitterly. Surely these feelings he still aroused were only the leftovers of a fierce and painful adolescent crush? And even if she was still affected by that hard, masculine, bred-in-the-bone confidence and by his intensely powerful sexuality, it was only that, just sexual, after all.

Which was just as well, she decided with a sudden clenching of her teeth, because he had certainly made it clear—and with no beating about the bush—that he wasn’t interested in her! As far as he was concerned, she was just a spoilt rich bitch whom he was being paid to return to where he thought she belonged, without knowing anything about her, what made her tick, her values, her hopes, her dreams.

Well, carry on, Kane Falconer! she thought, flicking angrily through a glossy magazine she had plucked from the floor-mounted coffee table before tossing it back down again. You don’t know anything about me—nor are you going to! she determined wretchedly, retreating behind the wall of self-protection she had built around herself. If you want to think the worst about me, then carry on!

Having glanced back over his shoulder when Shannon had stormed off, Kane hadn’t failed to notice that deflated look about her.

She had said she’d thought him a cut above the rest, which surprised him immensely, but he was also surprised to discover how much it pleased him too. He had always thought her opinion of him low to say the least, and now, because of the way she had sounded when she had—unintentionally, he felt—dispelled him of that notion, suddenly he felt like a first-rate heel. He’d condemned her, not because everybody else did. It had never been in his nature to listen to mere gossip—follow the common trend—but because, like everyone else with a gram of common sense, he could see the road she was going down, and he couldn’t deny that that crazy lifestyle of hers invited criticism. But even the most condemned of men—or women, he amended wryly—deserved a hearing, and he hadn’t even allowed her that. Perhaps he should have left her back there, instead of trying to get her to see things his way when she was so hell-bent on refusing to. But if he had, and then something happened to her…

He shook off the thought, wishing he didn’t feel so inextricably involved.

She had been right, when she had accused him of being seduced back to Bouvier’s by an attractive deal, although it wouldn’t have been in his interests—and much less the company’s—to refuse. But if she really knew the ‘deal’ Ranulph had initially offered him for bringing her home—a deal he himself had had no compunction about turning down flat—she would probably have jumped over the side without a backward glance.

Checking the compass, estimating the distance from his intended mooring, he wondered if she had believed him when he had admitted to being worried about her; wondered whether, in using her health and safety as the only reason for keeping her with him, he was being entirely honest with himself.

Because the whole truth was that, ever since the first day he had seen her when she had breezed into her father’s office nearly five years ago, she had stirred in him every masculine instinct it was possible to stir. Concern. Anger. Protectiveness. As well as downright lust! And that was it, he thought, despairing at himself, because, young as she had been then—and angry—as she had been that last time when she had stood there calling him a Judas, she had had the power to arouse him, and still arouse him, like no other girl or woman he had ever met.

With a tense clamping of his jaw, fingers tightening around the wheel, he steered the powerful vessel through the gathering dusk. How the hell he was going to keep his mind on getting this thing to Cannes with her on board was anybody’s guess when he wanted to undress her every time he looked at her. Even in that urchin outfit he found himself wanting to peel her clothes off her, and he had only made that ridiculously outmoded statement about her honour to warn himself to watch his own step. Even thinking about her lying on that big bed—as she’d been earlier when he had gone below with some tea and found her sleeping, her blonde hair splashed across the pillow—filled his mind with thoughts that were anything but honourable. Just as in the past, even while he’d been bitterly disappointed and angry with her—with himself—after that scandalous affair, for still wanting her, he found himself envying every man whose bed she might have shared, wanting to be the one whose name that soft voice whispered, for whom those blue eyes grew heavy with desire; to hear her moan in acquiescence as he kissed the pale satin of her body and feel his own body harden—as it was doing now—from the unbelievable ecstasy of pleasuring her…

‘What happened to your last passenger?’

‘What?’ He swung round so fast that he almost sent a mug beside the control panel flying.

‘Your last passenger. The one who helped you crew? What happened to them?’ Shannon repeated.

‘Nothing happened to them.’ He sounded tense—impatient, she noted, her eyes drawn reluctantly to those strong, tanned hands steadying a mug; hands, she realised through that familiar unwelcome tension, that were experienced in handling more than just an ocean-cruiser… ‘She got off in Barcelona.’