Читать книгу Element Of Risk - Robyn Donald - Страница 9

PRECISELY at that time Perdita presented herself at the solicitor’s office. She had already contacted the expert in family law in Auckland, and been warned to sign nothing that might prejudice her chances of access to the girls.

Actually, he had suggested very strongly that she forward any documents to him for scrutiny, but Perdita had almost made up her mind to sign. She didn’t want to take her daughters away from the only home they had known; she merely wanted to make sure that they were happy.

And perhaps when Luke realised that she wasn’t a bad influence he would allow her to get to know them properly. Although his accusation still rankled, there was, she had to admit, some cause for it. Gossip columnists had had a field day with one or two of her supposed lovers.

The legal document, short and to the point, was waiting for her. She agreed not to tell the children that she was their birth mother, and she agreed that this meeting constituted no claim to further access or custody.

That seemed fair enough. Ignoring the elderly solicitor’s somewhat censorious attitude, she signed, then got gracefully to her feet.

He said, ‘I would urge you to think of the welfare of these children, Ms Gladstone.’

She gave him a cool, remote glance. He had come out to Pigeon Hill occasionally to parties, seeming older then to a teenaged girl than he did now. Their slight acquaintanceship gave him no right to imagine that he could influence her. He, and everyone else who had known her then, would have to realise that the child who used to stay at Pigeon Hill during the holidays, the recipient of her cousin’s charity, had grown up.

‘I don’t think this is any of your business. Goodbye,’ she said calmly, and walked across the room, ignoring the faint sputtering from behind her.

She had just reached the door when the telephone rang. Stepping through, she closed the door behind her, only to re-open it swiftly when her name was called from inside the room.

‘Yes?’ she asked aloofly.

He put the receiver down. “That was Luke,’ he said with stiff precision. ‘He wants to see you out at Pigeon Hill. Now.’

Her brows shot up. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

As she turned to go once more he said, ‘Take some advice from an old man, Perdita. Luke can be ruthless, especially where those children are concerned. They were all that kept him sane when Natalie died. He is intensely protective of them.’

A tight smile barely moved her mouth. ‘Thank you,’ she said sweetly, and left.

Whether or not he meant it kindly, she preferred to treat it as such. Not that he needed to tell her anything about Luke Dennison. She knew all about him, including the fact that he was a superbly tender lover.

But she, too, could be ruthless. First Natalie, then her life as a model, had taught her that she had to stand up for herself, fight for what she wanted and believed in.

And there was nothing she wanted more than to see her children.

What did his summons to the station mean? Were the girls there? Her heart thudded as she got into her car and set it in motion, concentrating on keeping to the left. Where there was other traffic it was simple, but once she got on to the no-exit road to Pigeon Hill she found her attention wavering, and a couple of times had to head back on to the correct side.

As before, Luke met her at the door, his angular face without expression. ‘They’re in the morning-room,’ he said.

Now that the ambition that had sustained her for ten long years was about to be realised, Perdita found she didn’t dare move. Instead, she stared at him as though she had never seen a man before. His image wavered and blurred. Colour leached from her skin as the floor tilted beneath her feet.

‘Perdital’ he said sharply.

Shivering, she was swept up in his arms and carried across the hall and into another room. He put her down on a sofa and ordered, ‘Don’t move. I’ll get you some brandy.’

Perdita closed her eyes. Almost immediately she heard whispering, and lifted heavy lashes to see the two girls coming across the room to her.

She’d always known they weren’t identical; what she hadn’t expected was for them to be quite so different.

One was a willowy creature with long limbs and a face whose bones had come straight from her mother, whereas her sister was small and sleek and—seeking the right word to describe her, Perdita could only find merry. Her eyes twinkled, she smiled with heart-lifting brightness, and her expression was alert and alive and vital, a contrast to the grave thoughtfulness of the other girl. The taller of the two had blue eyes whereas the other’s, Perdita was shaken to see, were the same green as hers; both had hair that was gloriously, unashamedly red, but the taller had straight, shoulder-length locks and the shorter’s curled around her piquant face.

‘Hello,’ Perdita said, smiling at them. Her heart clattered noisily, almost suffocating her. The last time she had seen them they had been seven days old, and she had been numb with despair, her throat raw from weeping. Something of the same agony of spirit racked her now, desolation and a sense of bitter deprivation, of loneliness so intense she’d had to repress it to be able to bear it.

‘Hello,’ they chorused, then looked at each other, said, ‘Tennyson,’ and linked little fingers, shutting their eyes as they made a wish.

The age-old ritual soothed something in Perdita’s heart. She said, ‘I hope your wish comes true.’

‘So do we,’ the shorter one said cheekily. She looked Perdita over with open interest and said, ‘Don’t you feel well?’

‘No, I—’

‘She almost fell at my feet.’ Luke appeared with a small glass of brandy. ‘Here, drink it down,’ he said.

‘I feel much better already.’

‘Drink it.’

She opened her mouth and the girls giggled. ‘You’d better do what he says,’ the shorter advised. ‘Mummy used to say when he gets that note in his voice he means to be obeyed.’

Perdita knew their names, even knew that the taller one was Olivia and the shorter Rosalind, but until Luke introduced them with the same austere courtesy he used for adult women she had always thought of them as Tara and Melissa. By the time she had adjusted to this they were all sitting down and the girls were looking at her with interest and a certain astonishment.

‘I know who you are,’ Rosalind said eagerly. ‘You’re a model, aren’t you? You’re the Adventurous Woman.’

A famous, old-established firm of cosmetic makers had rejuvenated its rather stuffy image with an advertising campaign that had aroused an enormous amount of interest. The Adventurous Woman concept had boosted sales to delirious, unexpected heights, doing wonders for the bank balances of the company, the advertising agency and Perdita.

‘I used to be,’ she said, setting the barely tasted brandy down on the small side table. “Not any more. I’m retired.’

She didn’t look at Luke but she felt his keen attention; her skin tightened.

Rosalind laughed. ‘You look too young to be retired. Didn’t you like being a model?’

‘Some of it was fun,’ Perdita admitted. ‘But a lot of it is pretty boring, just flicking your head around for photographers. And it was very hard work. Still, I didn’t go to university and get qualifications, so I had to take what I could get.’

They had Natalie’s exquisite manners. They talked freely and pleasantly, of their grandmother, of school, they asked questions about places she had been to, and Perdita found herself telling funny little anecdotes, absurdly thrilled when they laughed and commented. Occasionally she had to prompt them, but they were infinitely more confident than she had been at the same age.

Although afraid to let any emotions other than the most superficial pleasure in their company show through, Perdita gave herself up to an exquisite heartache.

After an hour Luke intervened smoothly, and she found herself being escorted to the door. The girls wanted to come too, but when Luke refused they gave in without demur, saying their farewells with a poised charm that was so like their dead mother that Perdita had to look away in case they saw the tears in her eyes.

He walked down the path with her, waiting until they got to the car before saying abruptly, ‘I hope you’re satisfied.’

Nodding, face averted, she put out a hand to open the door.

‘And I have your promise that you won’t contact them in any way?’

Again her head moved.

He said on a steely note, ‘Look at me, Perdita,’ and his hand caught her chin and tilted her face.

Through the mist of her tears the forceful, uncompromising contours of his face were indistinct, only the pale glitter of his eyes burning clear and brilliant.

For a moment time froze. Then she gave a great sob, and he said furiously, ‘God, Perdita, don’t—’

‘I’m sorry,’ she wept. ‘It’s nothing. I’ll be all right soon.’

‘I can’t let you go like that.’ But he released her.

His reluctance enveloped her, palpable and disabling. Shivering, she tried to open the door of the car.

‘You can’t drive in that state,’ he said curtly.

She let the handle go to scrabble for a handkerchief, finally found the one that lurked in the bottom of her bag, and blew her nose. Fresh tears welled up, but she fought them back. She had to get out of here before she really lost control and started to bellow like a kid with a lost toy.

‘Goodbye,’ she said thickly, and this time she managed to drag the door open and get in. Luke said something but she shook her head and started the engine and took off along the drive, her hands gripping the wheel as though it was the only stable thing in her life. Just before the trees cut off the house her eyes flicked to the rear vision mirror; she registered that he hadn’t moved, and was still looking after her like a tall, angry god of olden times.

She held out until she got back to the motel and there, casting herself on to the green and brown and orange sunflowers of the duvet, she wept. Eventually, when her head was aching and her throat raw, the preceding almost sleepless weeks finally caught up with her; from tears she slid straight to unconsciousness.

Some time later she woke with a jolt to the sound of knocking and a voice calling her name with an urgency that had her on her feet and running across to the door.

Luke stood outside; she realised with a shock that it was getting dark, so she must have been asleep for several hours.

‘What is it?’ she demanded, her voice shaky, clutching the arm that was lifted to knock again on the door. ‘The girls—?’

‘No, they’re fine. I came to make sure you were all right.’

Slowly her hands relaxed and fell to her side. ‘Of course I’m all right,’ she said in a voice still husky from weeping.

Someone came to the motel office door and peered out at them. Instantly Luke pushed her inside and followed, looking around the room with something like distaste.

‘No, don’t put the light on,’ he commanded as her hand went towards the switch.

She understood immediately. ‘Guarding your reputation?’ she asked huskily, and went over to the windows to pull the curtains. ‘Won’t they recognise your car?’

He said shortly, ‘I’m sorry, it was a stupid thing to say.’

She knew why he’d said it. Small towns were a hotbed of gossip, especially if you were Luke Dennison, and he hadn’t wanted word to get back to the wife who had been dead for eighteen months. Like Perdita, he suffered from a guilt that could never be absolved because it could never be confessed.

If anything was needed to convince her that his heart was buried with Natalie, it was that swift, unconscious remark.

‘It’s probably wisest,’ she said, trying not to let anything but self-possession appear in her tone. Carefully avoiding his eyes, she flicked the light switch down. “The Manley gossips would have a field day.’

‘What are your plans now?’ he asked. He stood still in the middle of the small, unmemorable room, taking up most of the space.

She looked at him with studied composure. ‘I don’t really know,’ she said. The florist’s remark flashed into her mind, followed by an imp of malice that persuaded her to add, ‘I might decide to settle here.’

Although he was so big, the lean muscle on his frame stopped him from being bulky, so the swift, overwhelming sensation of being loomed over was sharp and intimidating. He wasn’t blocking any light from her, yet the room was suddenly darker and colder.

Then a straight black brow rose and something like derision glinted through his lashes. ‘Here? Out of your milieu, isn’t it? You’re too expensive, too sophisticated to settle in a one-horse town like Manley. There’s no Gerard Defarge, no Kurt Maxwell, no Whoever-he-was Albemarle here, no nightclubs or casinos or chic, expensive fashion boutiques. You’d die of boredom.’

She froze, lifting incredulous eyes to meet his sardonic gaze.

‘Somehow,’ she said, hiding the quick, unbidden flicker of fear with her most dismissive voice, ‘I didn’t see you as an avid reader of gossip columns.’

‘Natalie used to read them out to me,’ he said. ‘She thought I’d be interested.’

Natalie would have been interested. It was part of her charm, that absorption in everyone she met. When Natalie spoke to you, it was as though for her you were the only person in the world at that moment.

‘But you weren’t,’ Perdita said coolly.

His mouth hardened. ‘I wondered whether it was your abrupt introduction to sex that had set you on that path.’

She looked warily at him. For years, until Frank’s revelations of five months ago, she had thought of him as a Sir Galahad, a man who had made a mistake and would spend the rest of his life paying for it, a noble man who loved his wife beyond all reckoning.

Now she didn’t know. The missing files and great gaps in the adoption record had made her suspicious.

That first, keenly anticipated meeting with her daughters over, she could think of other things. Someone had tried to make sure she never found her children. Luke was capable of doing such a thing if he considered that it would protect his children or his wife.

Of course, that would mean that he had known all along that the girls were his. Had the biographical details of the parents made him wonder? Had he lived a lie for ten years?

‘I really don’t remember much of that first time; I was asleep during most of it.’ With the memory of his kiss still imprinted in her cells, she let her anger with herself for falling prey once more to her adolescent desires lead her into continuing acidly, ‘Sorry, I’m sure you’re an expert lover, but you didn’t register. And don’t worry about ruining my young life and directing me onto the primrose path. I didn’t blame you then, and I don’t now. I’m a perfectly normal woman with perfectly normal needs, and I satisfy them in perfectly normal ways.’

And put that in your pipe and smoke it, she thought fiercely, ashamed because she was lying to him. Oh, there had been one other man, but their affair had faded because she couldn’t return his passion.

The skin over Luke’s jaw tightened. Something savage and untamed leapt into his eyes, was almost brought under control.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he said brusquely. ‘But you won’t find glamorous, rich men here in Manley.’

‘And you don’t want me anywhere near the children,’ she said, not trying to hide the irony in her smile.

He shrugged. ‘Do you blame me for looking after their interests?’ Astonishingly, he put up a hand and touched the dried tear track on her cheek.

Mesmerised by the gentleness of his touch, Perdita stared at him. His eyes gleamed, slivers of pure colour beneath half-closed lids, and his mouth was set in a thin, straight line. Her heartbeat suddenly increased speed. She had to force herself to step backwards, away from the swift, sharp lance of sensation.

‘Of course I don’t,’ she said, aware that he was manipulating her, yet unable to resent it. She too would protect her children to the utmost of her ability. ‘But I don’t want to hurt them, or upset them, or even make them wonder who I am. I gather that Natalie didn’t mention me to them?’

He didn’t try to spare her feelings. ‘Not that I know of. Why should she?’

Why, indeed? Because Natalie had known of her pregnancy, it didn’t mean that her cousin had even considered the possibility of her being the girls’ mother. Perdita hadn’t told her she was expecting twins. ‘In that case, I can just be their mother’s distant cousin. At least they don’t look like either of us.’

‘Not too obviously, anyway. Just remember the document you signed this afternoon,’ he said with harsh insistence.

She didn’t need to be reminded. ‘Oh, I do,’ she said tonelessly.

‘When are you going?’

‘That’s none of your business,’ she returned, ‘but don’t worry, I’ll keep in contact.’

She knew it sounded like a threat and she was pleased until she saw the expression on his face. Stark and potent, he looked at her with such a formidable impression of force and power that she was almost cowed.

For the first time she realised that her childhood impressions of Luke had not necessarily been correct. She had been infatuated with this man, made love with him, borne his children, and although he had cruelly driven her away she had understood his reaction— indeed, she had felt much the same as he had. But she had always thought of him as a gentleman.

Now, beneath the aristocratic bones and the polished veneer she recognised the authentic, chilling tang of the barbarian. Luke was fighting for his children, and if she met him head-on it would be a bloody, vicious, no-holds-barred battle.

He would use whatever means he needed to keep his daughters safe. If he thought she presented any danger to them at all, she’d find herself banished again. It seemed ridiculous to believe such a thing could happen in New Zealand, but she had no doubt that he’d find some way.

She said quietly, ‘I want only what’s best for the girls, Luke. I always have. If I hadn’t, I’d have kept them, and they’d have grown up as I did, without stability. I knew I was too young. I learn from my experiences; I wasn’t having my children go through that sort of childhood.’ Looking away from him down the passage of the years, she said half to herself, ‘Do you know that my father went back to his old life? Apparently, after a probationary period no one—least of all he and his wife—was in the least worried that he had seduced and abandoned my mother after making her pregnant. He kept his position, whereas my mother was subjected to the most appalling pressure to have me adopted, and when she wouldn’t, was literally thrown out on to the street.’

Luke said relentlessly, ‘Your mother was spoiled and headstrong and completely selfish. Think about it, Perdita. What sort of mother was she to you? The only reason she kept you was to make everyone suffer, you especially.’

He was cruelly perceptive, but what he didn’t know was that her mother had truly loved Perdita’s father; his defection had killed something in her. There had never been another man for Katherine Gladstone. Ill-equipped to earn her living, she had struggled for years, and because there hadn’t been the support systems there were now for solo mothers she had been forced to leave her daughter with childminders while she worked at a succession of low-paying jobs. It didn’t exactly make for good bonding.

Although not physically cruel, she had never made any attempt to love or understand the child she saw as the source of all her problems. Perdita had grown up knowing that her father had left her mother because she had been conceived, that she was to blame for her mother’s unhappiness and their poverty.

Those bitter memories had led Perdita to give up her twins.

‘She suffered too,’ she said now. ‘Not that it matters— it’s all over and done with.’ She hesitated, until some dark compulsion made her ask, ‘When you got my letter did you believe it?’

His eyes were hooded. ‘That you were their mother? Yes, after I’d made enquiries.’

‘And that they were yours?’ For some reason she had to know.

A muscle flicked in his jaw. ‘Yes.’ He paused, then went on dispassionately, ‘You’d been a virgin. They were born eight and half months after that night. I knew they had to be mine.’

What had he felt when he realised that the children he’d adopted were his own daughters? One look at the stark, impassive features revealed that she’d never know.

Besides, she wasn’t sure she believed his version of events. More than five years ago, well before she had started seriously searching, someone had tried to make sure that no one would ever be able to discover the twins’ identity. If it wasn’t Luke, who had it been, and for what reason?

She was never likely to know that, either, and now was not the time to pursue it. So she nodded as though the subject wasn’t very interesting and said, ‘I’ve done what I wanted to. I’ve seen the twins and satisfied myself that they’re happy.’ Casting a fleeting look at his implacable face, she touched her tongue to suddenly dry lips and said more forcefully than she’d intended, ‘I want to keep in touch.’

‘You are not to write—’

She said levelly, ‘I want to keep in touch, Luke.’ Resentment at his high-handedness broke through the guard she’d set on her emotions. Without volition, her hand stole up to touch the locket at her throat. ‘I think you owe me that, don’t you? You’ve enjoyed them all their lives while I’ve spent untold hours wondering how they are, whether they’ve been loved as I’d have loved them, worrying that they might be mistreated, unhappy.’

He said harshly, ‘You make it sound as though Natalie and I stole them. You gave them up.’

Her smile was the celebrated bittersweet one that had made her face hauntingly famous. ‘It worked out very well for you, didn’t it? I assume that it was Natalie who couldn’t have children, but you got your own.’

‘What the hell are you insinuating? That I deliberately set out to—?’

‘Impregnate me, is that the term you’re looking for?’ Reining in her temper, she said more moderately, ‘No, I know you didn’t. I’m sorry, I’m behaving stupidly, but can’t you see my point of view? Is it so strange that I want to keep in touch? You may not think I’m a very worthwhile character, but I swear to you that I would not willingly hurt them for anything in the world.’

‘When you look at me like that I’d believe anything you say,’ he said in a controlled voice that almost hid the hard-edged anger beneath the austere facade, ‘and I have to remind myself that you’ve made a very good living these past years producing whatever looks you were asked for.’

Humiliation washed through her. Turning her head sharply so that he couldn’t see what his brutal words had done to her, she fought it back. She wasn’t ashamed of being a model. He was muddying the waters, diverting her attention from the point under discussion. She set her jaw. Excellent tactics, but they were going to fail because she had no intention of losing her children again. She didn’t want to interfere in their lives—no, that was a lie.

Of course she wanted to be there for them, to see them all the time, but she accepted that it was impossible. When she had surrendered them for adoption she had given up her rights to mother them.

However, she hadn’t given up her natural instincts, and she wanted to learn to understand her daughters, to be able to fathom the lights and shades of their personalities, to be someone to them. Losing Natalie must have wrenched them from happiness to insecurity, and Perdita wouldn’t do anything to add to that. But she was going to be a part of their lives in some way.

She looked him square in the face and said collectedly, ‘I mean it, Luke. Unless they ask me I won’t tell them who II am, but sooner or later they’ll want to know, and it would be easier for them if their birth mother is not a total stranger.’

‘All right,’ he said slowly. ‘Give me your address.’

She could feel his reluctance, taste it on her tongue, and she knew how much effort it had cost him to say that. It was a major victory, but she was careful not to let him see her relief.

‘I don’t have one. I’ll contact you when I get settled.’

They had been standing like antagonists, facing each other, ©yes locked, searching for weaknesses, the air bristling with tension. Now Perdita felt awkward, the tension somehow metamorphosed into unease and embarrassment.

Her eyes slid away from the pale, cold intensity of his. ‘Well,’ she said awkwardly, ‘thanks for coming to see whether I was all right. As you can see, I am.’

‘You’d better wash the tearstains from your face,’ he said curtly.

She put a hand to her cheek, felt the faint encrustations and pulled a face. ‘Ugh.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said caustically, ‘you could probably roll in mud and still come up looking like Helen of Troy and Eve mingled in one glorious woman. Tearstains merely add another dimension to that maddening smile. It’s a wonder the advertising agency who dreamed up the Adventurous Woman project didn’t think of them— they certainly thought of everything else.’

She said calmly, ‘If they’d believed tears would sell more cosmetics they’d have done it. However, I was supposed to be an adventurous woman, not a wimp.’

‘Why did you give modelling up? There isn’t a flaw in that perfect face—I imagine you could have gone on for another five years yet. Ten, with filters.’

Perdita had spent years hearing her face and body discussed in the most clinical of terms, and would have said that she had no false vanity, no emotion but gratitude for the quirk of heredity that had given her looks and a body that matched the ideal for this decade. But something about the way Luke spoke sent a tiny whisper of foreboding through her.

He sounded every bit as blase as her agent, as the photographers who’d called forth hundreds of incarnations of her. His gaze as it measured her high cheekbones and satiny, full mouth was cool and dispassionate. Yet she detected an oblique anger, all the more intense for being so tightly leashed.

Many men had looked at her with desire. She was accustomed to it, knew how to deal with it. There was nothing in Luke’s demeanour to indicate anything but a rigidly disciplined self-possession, but the air sparkled and quivered between them, and deep in her body a flicker of white-hot response flamed treacherously into life.

It had to be because she’d never had a chance to get over her crush on him. Most adolescents fell in and out of love until slowly they built up a pattern of understanding, so that when real love arrived they recognised the differences. Pitchforked into an early maturity before she’d been ready to say goodbye to childhood, it was no wonder she was still in thrall to a purely physical response.

Caution steadied her voice, made her voice offhand as she shrugged. ‘I’m not greedy. I’ve earned enough to make me secure for the rest of my life, and apart from interesting things like the Adventurous Woman promotion, modelling was just sheer hard work after a couple of years. I didn’t enjoy being treated like a commodity.’

Now why had she told him that? Her lashes covered a momentarily uncertain gaze. Normally she wouldn’t have said that to anyone but a trusted friend. She didn’t trust Luke Dennison. She couldn’t afford to. In many ways he was the enemy, and, like all the most dangerous ones, he had the ability to infiltrate her defences. Which meant she was going to have to stop unbuttoning her lip whenever he asked a simple question.

‘Even though you conspired with a whole industry to do exactly that? So we aren’t going to see that lovely face in any more magazines?’

‘For a year or so,’ she said, ‘and then no.’

‘What are you going to do?’

She shrugged again. ‘I’ll find something. I might go to university.’

His hard mouth suddenly twisted into an enigmatic smile. ‘You’d cause a riot,’ he said softly.

Perdita’s breath caught in her throat. No, she thought. No! She had to remember that this was just a hangover from adolescence.

‘As you see,’ she said with unhurried self-possession, ‘I don’t look the way I do in the magazines.’

His brows lifted, but he said merely, ‘Modest as well as famous.’

A sudden weariness fogged her brain. She managed to contrive a yawn and an enquiring look. He understood and his smile became even more sardonic. ‘I’d better go. Goodbye, Perdita.’

‘Goodbye,’ she said, trying to sound businesslike and dismissive, but courteous nevertheless. An unnerving glint in his eyes told her she hadn’t succeeded.

She watched him go, her eyes unconsciously straying to the breadth of his shoulders, the lean hips and taut buttocks, the long, powerfully muscled legs. Closing the door behind him with a sudden vicious jerk, she turned and leaned back, her hands spread against the smooth, cool wood, her breath locked in her chest. She had lied when she said she didn’t remember his lovemaking.

He had been tender, his hands slow and skilful as he caressed her into wakefulness. Bemused, her whole being singing with delight, she hadn’t even thought of Natalie; she was lost to everything but the wonderful sensations that were rippling through her at the behest of those clever, experienced hands.

Darkness had hidden him, yet she hadn’t been afraid. She’d known who he was. His scent, she thought now, trying to be objective. He had a particular male scent that still had the power to liquefy her bones. That night it had been spiked with the flavour of wine.

Her slow awakening had been something spun out of the fantasies she’d indulged in during the warm, welcoming nights of that summer. Still dreaming, her heart thudding like a piston in her chest, her mind drugged by the lazy tide of desire his touch summoned, she’d been gathered into his arms while his mouth searched for and finally, after a series of kisses, found the frantic pulse in her throat.

He hadn’t spoken. If he had, she thought now, she’d probably have woken up to her danger, realised what was happening to her. She’d always loved him with the uncritical adoration of a child, but those holidays her serene, unashamed affection had altered into something deeper, forbidden. During the slow, heated days she had watched him, knowing that he never saw her, yet longing for him with a growing woman’s intense passion, her ripening body aching with hidden, unfulfilled needs.

And each night just before she had dropped off to sleep she had called up images in her mind, telling herself guiltily that she was hurting nobody because nobody knew; nobody, especially Natalie, would ever know. Young and inexperienced though she was, she’d understood that such feverish emotions couldn’t last, but when she’d woken in his arms she had had no defences from needs she had only just recognised.

His mouth seduced her into acquiesecence, his hands stroked a feverish response from her body; the fumes of her hunger hazed her brain to banish any moral restrictions she might have felt. Enslaved by the passion that shimmered through her like molten silver, the first love that until then had been so rigorously disciplined, she surrendered mindlessly.

His mouth on her breast set her shuddering, not with fear but with an awed delight at the exquisite pangs her body was capable of. She writhed voluptuously, seeking more, seeking something to ease the throbbing ache between her legs, pressing herself against the lean, heated body so close to hers. The unfamiliar pressure of his erection didn’t shock her; instinct produced a swift, provoking answer from her hips, setting off chills through every nerve cell.

‘Darling,’ he’d said, ‘such enthusiasm…’

Thinking about it made her heart weep. There had been such love, such lazy, amused tenderness in his tone.

Looking back with the awareness of experience she understood now that he had been immensely gentle, using his practised expertise to ready her until finally he had moved over her, and taken her in one slow, compulsive thrust, measuring the length of himself in her.

It hadn’t hurt at all. Instead, everything within her had tightened in anticipation, sensations intensifying into a white-hot explosion, and she had gasped and opened herself to him, hips rotating, enclosing him with the force of her strong young body.

He had hesitated, his body rigid, but when she moved beneath him and around him he had groaned, and settled into a driving rhythm.