Читать книгу The Devil and Miss Jones - Kate Walker - Страница 5

‘WHAT the devil…!’

He had to be imagining things, Carlos Ortega told himself. He couldn’t actually be seeing what was ahead of him.

Easing up on the throttle, he slowed the powerful motorbike to an almost crawl that was far more suited to the narrow country lane he had originally been riding down at a speed that much better expressed the turmoil of his inner feelings and stared straight ahead, frowning. But no matter how he blinked or adjusted his vision, the sight remained the same. The same impossible, unbelievable image just ahead of him. One that set his bemused mind wandering down strange and over-imaginative paths and into crazy ideas.

He’d heard stories of local ghosts. His companions in the bar last night had been only too keen to regale him with them over a pint of beer. This road, the villagers said, was haunted. By a bride who had been left at the altar, and had died broken-hearted, pining away for the man she had once loved but who had deserted her so cruelly. At least, that was the way that the traditional story went.

Not that Carlos believed in any such thing. The small, sleepy backwater of a place he had stayed in for the past couple of days was obviously riddled with stories and superstitions, some of which had been amusing enough last night while propping up the bar in the black-beamed old-fashioned inn where he had been staying. But now?

‘No way!’

He found he was shaking his head inside his crash helmet and almost laughing as he had done last night when they had first fed him the story, obviously thinking they needed to earn the drinks he had bought them.

He’d gone down to the bar from his room because for the first time in a long while he’d wanted company. He’d moved from the point of being alone and finding that that was the way he wanted things to be after all that had happened, to feeling strangely lonely, which wasn’t something he’d expected. He was used to his own company and he had, after all, come here deliberately to be on his own, to get away from the mess he had left behind him. He had wanted to be as far away from that—as far away from home as possible.

Home. Argentina wasn’t any sort of home to him, but then, where was? It had hit with a wrenching jolt that there was now nowhere in the world he could call home. Oh, he had houses of course, several of them in the most expensive and exclusive parts of the world, and any one of them he would be happy to live in. But none of them was where he had any roots; where he thought he truly belonged. Where his family…

‘Hah! Family!’ His laugh was harsh, raw.

What family? He didn’t have any family any more. Everything he had thought was his had been taken away from him at a blow. And the only thing he had been left with was his mother. His lying, cheating, unfaithful mother. The mother who had made him a bastard right from birth and who had never wanted him in her life after that. He didn’t even know who he was any more. His whole life had apparently been a fiction, his background, his ancestry, turning into a lie in the space of the time it had taken his grandfather to tell him the truth. A truth that had left him with precisely nothing of everything he had once valued, and once thought was what made him who he was.

So the stories he’d heard had been an amusement, a distraction from feelings he wasn’t used to dealing with. They’d helped him pass an unexpectedly restless evening. But this morning in the very cold light of an early April day, belief in ghosts, ghouls and things that went bump in the night was very far from his mind.

And yet…

The freezing fog was shrouding the edges of the road in swirling shadows, occasionally drifting to obscure the vision on the grass verge on the left-hand side. It came and went so that he was forced to blink hard to clear his vision and make sure there actually was anything up ahead.

And it—she—was still there.

A woman. Tall, curvaceous, pale. Hair a rich honey gold—what he could see of it through the mist. And because it was pulled up in some ornate style on top of her hair, most of it was covered by the filmy veil—white like the ankle-length dress—that covered her face and fell down her back. Her arms were bare, as were her shoulders, the pale skin almost as white as the fitted bodice that shaped her high, rounded breasts.

A bride?

The figure of a bride, in full wedding regalia. Just as in the legend of the ghostly bride that had formed part of the evening’s entertainment in the bar. But this was definitely no ghost because this particular bride was standing at the side of the road—incongruously clutching a bright blue very modern handbag.

And with her thumb raised in the time honoured gesture of someone hitching a lift.

‘What the…?’

This time he slowed the bike to a complete halt, coming to a careful stop just a short distance away from the woman.

‘Oh, thank God!

The voice was real. Not just something he had heard in his imagination or inside his head. Soft and slightly husky, it sent a shiver through him that had nothing to do with the paranormal ideas he had been conjuring up just moments before. A response that was all to do with the very real world. And the soft rustle of her silken skirts as she hurried towards him was not the silent drift of a spirit that didn’t actually exist but very clearly made by something totally physical.

So just what the devil was she doing here?

‘Oh, thank God!’

The cry escaped Martha’s lips involuntarily, pushed from her by the sheer disbelieving delight of seeing the motorbike pull to a halt at the side of the road.

‘At last!’

At last she was not alone. At last someone else was in the same place as her. Someone—a man—a big man from the size and shape of him—had appeared on the road that had been empty and isolated for almost too long to bear. Someone who might be able to help her and maybe even get her somewhere safe and warm before she actually froze. She was dangerously close to that already, she admitted to herself as just the effort of running towards him made the blood quicken in her veins, bringing stinging life to the toes she had feared might actually become iced to the ground.

Not for the first time she cursed the wild romantic impulse that had led to her choosing this isolated spot in which to hold her wedding. Of course, originally, the isolation had been everything she had wanted. The large stately home, set in its huge grounds, was miles from anywhere, and hopefully too far from civilisation and too hidden to attract the attention of the paparazzi or anyone else who had been trying to find out just who she was. When she had first seen Haskell Hall it had looked absolutely perfect. The wedding venue of her dreams. A fantasy come true. Here she could have her special day in total privacy and, after that, who cared if anyone who lived nearby ever found out why her life had changed so totally, so dramatically?

But the day she had seen the hall had been a bright, clear, crisp morning, with the sun high in a wide blue sky. The sweeping drive up to the big house had been clear of the mist that had swirled around it this morning, and the temperature had been a good ten degrees or more higher than the bitter chill that seemed to have crept into her bones, turning them to ice as she had trudged up the path towards the road.

It had never seemed such a long, long trek either, when she had first imagined the journey in a horse-drawn carriage that would take her from her fairy-tale wedding and off on the honeymoon of a lifetime, her new husband at her side. But that had been when she had only driven down it in the secure, warm confines of a sleek, powerful car, snugly wrapped in jeans and a cashmere sweater. She would give her soul to be able to wrap something like that around her right now and ease some of the chill that had made the last half an hour or more such sheer misery. Though the truth was that it was the coldness inside that was far worse even than the weather.

Back then, her feet had been comfy and protected inside soft leather boots, not the delicate satin, crystal-decorated slippers that were now totally soaked through and feeling like little more than sodden paper between her feet and the rough surface of the road. Her hair was damp and had started to slide out of the ornate style that had been created only an hour or so before, her carefully applied make-up running down her face, washed away by the rain as she ran down the drive.

And the man she had been planning on marrying was still somewhere back in the Hall, hastily erasing all evidence of the dirty, illicit passion he had just indulged in. A passion that he had never felt for her, except in his lies.

‘Please stop…’

She couldn’t get to her rescuer fast enough, almost tripping over her long skirts as she ran towards him.

Two cars had already rushed past her. She wasn’t sure if the drivers had actually seen her or, having seen, had decided to put their foot down and rush past, the sight of a bedraggled, mud-splattered bride, miles from anywhere, just too much for them to cope with. And she’d stood there, her feet turning into blocks of ice, her hands going blue, the skin of her face stinging with the cold.

She had thought that today was to be the start of her happy ever after. But for that to happen, then Gavin would have had to be her prince, instead of the ugly toad he had turned out to be. She supposed it could have been worse. If she’d still been caught up in the fantasy of being in love—in love with the idea of being in love—then she could have had her heart shattered as well. But she’d already had second thoughts, and it seemed that her instincts had been working true. But all the same the vicious, cruel words she had heard had taken every last trace of her self-esteem, her sense of herself as a woman, and shattered it into tiny pieces.

The thrum of the motorbike’s engine had her running headlong down the rutted road, suddenly fearful that this unexpected rescuer too would put his foot on the accelerator and speed away, abandoning her totally.

‘Please—please don’t go…’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

The voice, muffled slightly by the silver helmet he wore, didn’t sound quite English. Or perhaps that was because of the wind roaring in her ears, the racing of her heart in panic at the thought that he might be about to leave her alone again. She was so cold she couldn’t think straight.

But at least he had switched off the engine on his bike, had swung his long leg over the machine so that he was standing, tall and dark—so tall!—in front of her.

‘I promise I’m not going anywhere,’ he repeated.

‘Oh, thank heaven!’ It was a fervent sigh, rather ruined by the way that her teeth chattered together on the last word. ‘I…’

‘What the hell happened to you?’ he demanded, the rich dark voice rough with something she hoped was concern.

How much did she tell him? What did she tell him? It wasn’t just the cold that had numbed her brain so that she couldn’t think straight. In the moments that she had run to be near him, coming to a halt at his side, she had suddenly found that her mood had swung from relief and delight to a new and disturbing rush of something very different. A sense of apprehension mixed with a sharp, intense awareness of the simple fact that he was a man. A man whose powerful figure and strong frame suddenly made her heart lurch in a mind-spinning shock of response.

‘No—wait!’

It was a command, sharp, autocratic, and she realised that he was unzipping the substantial leather jacket he wore with battered denim jeans and heavy black leather boots. Shrugging himself out of it, he moved closer.

‘Here…’

He slung it around her shoulders, letting it settle like a thick black cape over the exposed skin, the soaked silk of her bodice.

‘You’re frozen.’

‘U-understatement.’

It was all that Martha could manage and even then her voice shook on the words. She was beginning to feel as if she had lost contact with her mouth, her lips frozen stiff so that it was hard to speak. The shivers she had been fighting off suddenly returned in full force, driving her to tug the jacket tightly around her, huddling into it for comfort. It was still deliciously warm from his body and it smelled faintly of clean musky male skin, and some tangy cologne that unexpectedly made her heart skip a beat. The feeling of relief from the cold was overlaid with another, unexpected pulse of heat that had nothing to do with the jacket but was a stunning, unexpected sensual response.

‘Th-thank you.’

She wasn’t quite sure how she got the words out. The shock that ricocheted through her in that moment seemed to clear her head, bringing her up short. She had been so overjoyed to have help, to see some other human being out here in the wilds, to have someone actually stop to help, that she hadn’t stopped to think—about anything. But right now she realised that thinking was what she had to do—and fast.

She didn’t know this man from Adam. Had no idea who he was and why he had actually stopped. She was here in the middle of nowhere, alone, defenceless— she couldn’t even run if she wanted to with the narrow, sleek skirt of her dress clinging close around her legs and ankles. She had thought that it looked so elegant when she had first tried it on. She had even—wonder of wonders—felt almost beautiful when she had looked in the mirror of her room back in the Hall when she had got ready. Well, Gavin had taken that impression and crushed it beneath his heel just moments later.

Was it really just an hour or so before?

His cruelty had driven her out of the house in a desperate need to escape—first from the wedding that had turned into her idea of a personal sort of hell and now, possibly from this man—this stranger…

Did he even plan to help her?

All at once the rush of warmth and delight that had sizzled through her when she had first seen him ebbed away fast, leaving behind a sort of bruised, painful feeling. Still clutching the jacket around her, pulling it tighter than ever as a sort of protection against the way she was feeling, at the same time she knew a longing to tear it off and throw it from her as if accepting it had led her into reckless danger. Unable to think straight, she took a couple of hasty steps backwards, almost missing her footing on a rough patch of grass and turning her ankle sharply so that she cried out in shock and pain.

‘Hey…’

The man’s hands, big, strong, encased in black leather gloves, came out to catch her, pulling her upright when she almost fell. Supporting her easily, he shook his head.

‘No—do not look at me like that.’

It was there again, that hint of something foreign—exotic—in his words. This time she was sure that it was not her hearing that was deceiving her, but very definitely the sound of some accent that was nothing like the local flat-vowelled burr. It was unexpected, somehow shockingly appealing.

‘I have no intention of hurting you, I swear… Look—’

His free hand unfastened his helmet swiftly. As he pulled it off he shook his head sharply, freeing the rather long jet black hair that was now exposed. The wind howled round them, blowing it against his face so that as he turned back to her he had to toss it out of his eyes.

And what eyes! Martha didn’t know what she had been expecting. She could see so little of him, with his long body, those powerful hands, all encased in black leather and denim, his face hidden under the silver helmet. But from the hint of skin she could just see—golden, olive-toned skin that was not the pallid white of an Englishman at the tag end of winter—and the trace of accent she realised that she had anticipated something dark, deep brown or maybe a polished jet. Instead she found herself looking into a pair of mossy green eyes, glinting with the light of a many-faceted jewel stone that made them deep and dark while at the same time shot through with an almost golden hue. They gleamed above high, slanting cheekbones, fringed with impossibly long, lush black lashes that should have looked effeminate on a man but that somehow, in this strongly carved, stunning face just looked amazing—and incredibly, gorgeously sexy.

But he also looked dangerous. Big and dark and powerful. Those impossibly long, lush eyelashes should have softened his face, but instead they somehow contrasted so sharply with the high, carved cheekbones, the square, forceful jaw and uncompromising mouth that the impression they left was one of concealment, hiding the beauty of those stunning green eyes behind their dark fringe, and turning it into something secret, inscrutable—disturbing.

Just who was this man who had come to her rescue—knight in shining armour or the devil himself?

‘Believe me, I have no intention of hurting you.’

He repeated the words with an added edge for emphasis and while they relieved her tension, that double edge to them had exactly the opposite effect. That accent didn’t help either. It was too foreign, too exotic, to belong in any sort of world where she lived.

‘How do I know that?’

He sighed, tossed back an overlong strand of hair that the wind had blown against his face. As she watched that sensual mouth twitch in something that might have been amusement—or an acknowledgement of her right to indignation—she felt a twisting bite of response that had nothing to do with unease and everything to do with a purely female reaction to a glorious specimen of manhood.

The problem was that it was not usually the way she felt about the opposite sex. The way she had ever felt about any man… even Gavin. That was one of the things that had made her face the fact that she was deluding herself about her proposed marriage.

‘I can give you my word.’

‘And what exactly will that mean to me?’

Once awoken, her sense of self-preservation had coming rushing back in double force. If she hadn’t learned anything about the way that since her life had changed, everyone would react so differently towards her, then surely the devastating scene she had witnessed back at the Hall would finally—finally have taught her that she needed to take so much more care with relationships from now on.

But surprisingly, the memory of the sight that had met her eyes as she had walked into Cindy’s room was having the strangest effect on her. Just when it should have made her stop and think, should have pushed her to have second and then very probably third thoughts about what she was doing, instead it seemed to have exactly the opposite effect. When she should have thought extra carefully and played things cautiously, sensibly, in the way that she had lived most of her life up to now, she suddenly felt that what she actually wanted was to break free, be less constrained. Sensible was very definitely not what she wanted to be.

Her life had been turned on its head. It had been blasted apart and there was no way she was ever going to be able to put the pieces back together again. At least not in a way that rebuilt the picture as it had been before. She had tried the safe, the careful—the damn sensible—and look where it had got her. Out here on an exposed moor, wearing a bridal dress for a wedding that had never meant a single thing that she had believed in. A future that had been a mistake from the start.

‘What good is your word to me when I don’t know who you are? Or anything about you.’

The look he shot her gleamed with challenge, a touch of dark humour flaring gold in those amazing eyes, reminding her that the truth was that she was in no real position to argue.

‘You know that I am probably your only chance of getting to where you need to be—or back to wherever you came from.’

His cool gaze swept along the deserted road, the rain soaked hills surrounding them.

‘Do you see a couple of hundred other cars—other bikes—queuing up to come to your rescue?’ he drawled sardonically. ‘To take you wherever you want to go?’

‘There’ll be someone else along…’

Even as she flung the words at him she knew that she was risking making a big mistake; cutting off her nose to spite her very cold and miserable face. His sceptical sidelong glance questioned her sanity in that statement just at the same moment as her own thoughts demanded to know if she was losing her mind.

‘Fine,’ he said, the single word curt and harsh. ‘Have it your own way.’

He turned away from her, towards his bike, putting a couple of strides between them, the silver helmet swinging from its strap at his side. The gesture was so obviously meant to show that he was calling her bluff that the sparks of irritation it ignited held her silent even as she knew she was risking possibly her last chance of rescue. She could challenge him too, and she would even if her stretched nerves screamed at her that this was crazy, that she was risking being abandoned again. But he couldn’t do that—could he?

But it seemed that he could as his long legs and powerful stride took him further from her, leaving her with only a view of his strong, straight back, those wide shoulders encased in tautly stretched white cotton, the black hair blowing wildly in the wind.

Indecision tore at her, making her feel raw and uneasy. Surely if he actually meant to do her harm then he wouldn’t just walk away like this? If only she had brought her mobile phone with her—but she’d left that on the dressing table in her bedroom at the Hall, forgetting to put it into her handbag at the last minute.

‘Wait…’ she tried, low and uncertain, but the wind whipped away the sound of her voice, scattering it across the deserted hillside.

He had only got a few metres away from her and yet already she felt shockingly lost and alone. The leather of his jacket seemed to have lost some of its protection against the wind, and she was gripped by a terrible sense of fear at the thought of being alone again. It had been bad enough before but she suddenly knew that it would be terribly, frighteningly worse this time after the brief spell of human contact that this man had provided.

‘Wait!’ she tried again, louder this time.

She saw his determined footsteps slow, come to a gradual but definite halt. He didn’t turn, but he had stopped, and the way that her heart lurched told her how important that was. Safe or not, her mind was made up.

‘What time is it?’

It was perhaps the last question he had been anticipating, and as he turned the quick dark frown that drew his black brows together told her that. But he turned a quick glance at the workmanlike watch on a heavy leather strap around his strong-boned wrist and then brought his eyes back to her face.

‘Almost two o’clock—is that important?’ His gaze and his tone had sharpened on the last words.

Her reaction had given her away. The start she had been unable to suppress, the way that her breath had hissed in through her teeth at the thought of the way her day should have been going right now.

‘Might have been,’ was all she could manage.

It should have been the beginning of her new life. The start of what she had foolishly believed was the happiness she had been looking for for so long. She might have turned up at Gavin’s door to tell him that she thought she was making a mistake, but the things she had heard and seen had stopped her dead, unable to deliver her message. And Gavin had been so intent on his own sensual pleasure that he hadn’t even heard the door open. So he would have no idea the wedding was not going ahead and if it was nearly two o’clock then the ceremony she had run from was officially about to begin.

‘Will you help me? Can we get out of here?’ A rather wild gesture of her hand indicated the sleek, powerful black and silver motorbike that stood at the side of the road. ‘On that.’

She had to get as far away as possible from the Hall where no doubt there must now be a search in progress, everyone wondering what had happened to the bride who seemed to have disappeared into thin air.

‘I take it that you need to get to your wedding?’ he asked now.

‘Oh, no!’

She couldn’t hold back on the horror that flooded her mind at just the thought of it. She could still hear those words, muttered in the thick rough tones of sexual passion.

‘It’s worth putting up with her in my bed—taking her much prized and held-onto virginity to be legally and fully her husband. Just think, darling—half of seven million when we get a quickie divorce—that’s worth consummating the damn marriage with Miss Prim, even if I do have to lie back and think of the money. Maybe that will turn me on because she sure as hell doesn’t. She’s so big, it’ll be like sleeping with a horse…’

‘No way! That’s the last thing I want!’

She’d shocked him so that his dark head went back, his amazing eyes widening for a second before narrowing again in swift assessment. Her nerves twisted painfully as she saw his frown.

‘I—I want nothing to do with my wedding,’ she declared, the bitter truth ironing out the shake in her voice. ‘It would have been the worst possible mistake I could make so I—got out of there fast. Leaving it all behind me. And I want it to stay behind me—as far behind me as possible.’

‘Es que la verdad?’

The slow drawl had a faintly mocking edge to it, one that had her tensing every muscle as she nerved herself for his next comment. His next question—inevitably it would be something on the lines of exactly what she had left behind and why. And she wasn’t ready to answer that.

‘What language is that?’ she asked sharply. ‘Are you—Spanish?’

She’d asked something that had sparked a new mood in him, one that seemed to have a shade coming down over his eyes, hiding their expression from her. But now she was intrigued, wanting to know more.

‘Argentinian, actually.’

‘And what do you do there?’

Somehow she’d stepped over a line that he didn’t want crossing and his response was brusque, dismissive.

‘Horses and wine.’

So, a gambler? Or a breeder? A drinker or… She didn’t know how to phrase the question and his stony face did nothing to encourage her to go further.

‘You—you’re a long way from home.’

‘A very long way,’ he agreed, his tone sombre in a way that made her feel he was talking of so much more than a physical distance.

‘So are you on holiday—or—?’

The rough shake of his head, sending that wild wet hair flying, had her cutting off the question sharply.

‘It seems that really we’re two of a kind,’ he said slowly.

There was a touch of dark amusement in his words, but there was also something more than that. Something that swirled, harsh and disturbing, at the bottom of his voice.

‘How so?’ Her voice caught sharply on the words.

That deep green gaze swept over her in cool assessment then swung back to his motorbike, eyes narrowed against the rain.

‘We both just took off—turned our backs, left everything behind. Two of a kind.’