Читать книгу Dark Fire - Robyn Donald - Страница 4
ОглавлениеWHEN Paul came to pick her up, Aura Forsythe’s heart swelled with pride.
He looked so good, the black and white of his evening clothes setting off his fair hair and skin. But she didn’t love him for his blond handsomeness. Aura knew, none better, that good looks and regular features had little to do with the person beneath the fleshy veneer.
It had been his smile that first caught her attention, and his air of calm, confident good humour. However, very soon after meeting Paul McAlpine she had realised that he was utterly, completely reliable. It made him irresistible.
Over the past three months she’d come to understand him very well, this man she was to marry in a fortnight’s time. Bathed in the warmth of his love, her turbulent search for some measure of peace in her life was transformed into serenity. She had never been so happy.
‘We’re meeting Flint at the restaurant,’ he said as he opened the door of his expensive car for her. ‘He wants to shower and change, but he’ll probably be at Quaglino’s before we are.’ Flint Jansen was to be best man at their wedding in two weeks’ time.
‘Where does he live?’
‘In Remuera, but he’s staying with me.’
‘Oh. Why?’
‘His place is being redecorated. Wet paint everywhere, so he’s going to stay with me for at least a week, and possibly until the wedding.’
He lifted her hand to kiss the slender fingers. Aura’s full mouth curved into a smile.
‘You look very pretty tonight,’ Paul murmured as he released her.
‘Thank you. I like this dress.’
Although compliments still made her uneasy, experience had trained her to handle them with poise. And compliments from Paul were no threat.
The dress was one she had had for some years, but the rich, muted green silk played up hair the colour of good burgundy wine and ivory skin, darkened and emphasised her huge green eyes.
‘So the fabled Flint Jansen is here. It seems odd that I haven’t met your best friend yet,’ she said, deliberately steadying her voice as she changed the subject with automatic skill.
Paul laughed softly. ‘He was saying the same thing. I told him that if he insists on staying in Indonesia for months at a time he must expect things to happen while he’s gone.’
Suddenly a car roared across the intersection in front of them. Paul reacted swiftly and without alarm, but Aura was flung forward on to the seatbelt.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked sharply.
She flashed him a reassuring smile. The way he looked after her, as though she were a precious piece of porcelain, made her feel safe and cherished.
‘Yes, I’m fine. You’ve got very fast reactions.’
His mouth turned up at the corner. ‘Not so fast as Flint’s. He’s like greased lightning. We went hunting in the Uraweras once and he stopped me from going over a cliff.’ He paused, then finished enviously, ‘Man, did he move! Faster than a king cobra and stronger than a horse. I’m no lightweight, but he hauled me back out of the air as though I were made of balsa wood.’
‘He sounds very macho.’ Her voice was cool and non-committal.
Paul laughed. ‘It’s not the way I’d describe him. Macho has a ring of fundamental insecurity to it, whereas Flint is honest right through. And completely self-sufficient.’
‘Honesty,’ Aura said cynically, ‘can be a much overrated quality.’
Paul’s smile was tender and tolerant. ‘Don’t try to shock me, darling, I know your little tricks. Although I must admit Flint’s complete self-assurance does antagonise people—mostly people who envy it!’
‘Well, we all envy the things we haven’t got,’ Aura agreed, thinking of the many qualities she yearned for.
‘How would you know? You’ve got everything.’
Aura’s snort was followed by a smile. ‘I’m glad you think so. You and he don’t seem to have much in common.’
‘We don’t, but Flint’s the best friend I’ve ever had. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly—if at all—he’s about as yielding as granite bedrock, and he has the sort of ominous patience that makes a cat hunting a mouse look testy. But I like him, and I think you will too. He’ll certainly be impressed by you. He has an eye for a beautiful woman.’
I’ll just bet he has, Aura thought wearily. A cold foreboding sandpapered her nerves. She didn’t want to meet Flint Jansen; she already knew she wasn’t going to like him.
‘He hasn’t had much sleep these last few days,’ Paul went on. ‘He’s been tidying up a very hush-hush situation in Indonesia and he strode off the plane looking like something piratical and fierce from the South China Sea.’
‘He must be exhausted! Perhaps we should have skipped tonight, and just met at the party tomorrow night.’
‘He’s tough enough to cope.’ Paul smiled indulgently. ‘It’s inborn. I remember when he first arrived in primary school he was given a rugged time—kids can be little heathens, can’t they?—and we’ve been friends ever since.’
Aura already knew that Flint Jansen and Paul had gone to the same expensive boarding school. She was surprised to hear the rest, however. From the few allusions that Paul had made to his best friend, she’d visualised him as being born able to deal with anything the world threw at him, an iron baby who’d progressed inexorably into an iron child, then hardened more as he grew into an iron man.
‘Why did he have such a bad time at school?’
Paul’s shoulders lifted. ‘Family scandal. His father decamped with a vast amount of other people’s money—turned out he’d been spending it on a rather notorious woman who was his mistress. There was a luridly salacious fuss in the newspapers, ending in a court case and even more gaudy revelations. Some of the people his father had defrauded had kids at school. The whole thing got out of hand a bit. Mind you, Flint gave as good as he got, but it was an unhappy couple of years for him.’
‘How old was he?’
‘Only eight. Old enough to know what was going on, too young to be able to protect himself from older boys who tormented him. Although he tried.’ He laughed reminiscently. ‘Lord, he must have fought every kid in the school who even looked sideways at him. He didn’t care what size they were, and a fair few of them he beat, too.’
Only too well Aura knew what it was like to find no haven from a tormenter. Unwillingly, a pang of fellow feeling softened her attitude. She, too, had been eight when her father had deserted his wife and child to go as a missionary doctor to Africa. Even now, fifteen years later, she felt a shadow of that old grief and bewilderment.
Sighing silently, she told herself that a friend of Paul’s had to have a gentler side. At least she and Flint would have something in common: their mutual affection for the man who was to be her husband.
But her first sight of the formidable Flint Jansen changed her mind completely. There was not a hint of softness in him. At least three inches taller than Paul, he had to be six foot four, and, with a thin scar curling in a sinister fashion from his left cheekbone to the arrogant jut of his jaw, his image seared into her brain, leaving a dark, indelible imprint.
A discord of emotions jostled her, confusing her into silence; only gradually did she realise that the most predominant was a turbulent, piercing recognition.
Which was ridiculous, because she had never seen this man before, not even in a grainy photograph in a newspaper. If she had, she’d have known him; he was not a man easily forgotten. Beneath the black material of his dinner jacket his shoulders were broad and powerful. A crisp white shirt contrasted with skin the bronze of an ancient artefact. Those wide shoulders and long, heavily muscled legs beneath smoothly tailored trousers combined with a lithe grace of movement to make him instantly, lethally impressive.
Dark brown hair, conventionally cut, waved sleekly beneath lights that spun a dangerous red halo around his head. He had a starkly featured buccaneer’s face, hard and unhandsome, yet it was Flint everyone was watching from beneath their lashes, not her good-looking Paul.
The man was awesomely conspicuous, the power of his personality underlined by a barely curbed, impatient energy that crackled like lightning across the richly furnished room.
Whatever he might have been like at the age of eight, Aura thought dazedly as Paul, beaming and endearingly pompous with pride, introduced them, Flint Jansen certainly didn’t need sympathy now; he was more than capable of dealing with anything life threw at him. Except that this man didn’t deal with anything; he conquered. Flint Jansen made his own terms, and forced the world to accept them.
Smiling stiffly, Aura extended her hand, felt it enveloped by long, strong fingers. It took an effort of will to persuade her unwilling lashes up, and when she did her gaze was captured by golden eyes as clear and startling as a tiger’s, with a predator’s uncompromising assumption of power and authority, eyes fixed on her face in a gaze that stripped away the superficial mask of her beauty to spotlight the woman who hid behind it. A premonition ran with swift, icy steps through her body and mind.
‘Aura,’ Flint said in a deep, subtly raw voice that played across her nerve ends with sensual precision. ‘Paul’s told me several times that you are beautiful, but I thought it was just the maunderings of a man in love. Now I know he understated the case.’
Long past the age when praise for her beauty gave her more than a mild pleasure, Aura winced under a stab of stupid disappointment.
It seemed, she thought ironically, that in spite of that unrestrained magnetism, the fierce, lawless penetration of his glance, Flint Jansen was no more perceptive than other men. The physical accident of her features, the legacy of her ancestors, fooled him as it did most others into believing that her beauty was all she was.
Hoping her maverick chagrin didn’t show, she smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said aloofly.
His hand was firm and warm and hard, and for a moment the conventional grip felt like some kind of claim, a staking of ownership, a challenge. It took all her self-command not to flinch and pull away.
And then it was over. Their hands relaxed, dropped; Flint turned with a comment that made Paul laugh, and Aura was left wondering whether the shivers that tightened her skin were simply attributable to a cold winter’s night and the fact that she, with typical vanity, was wearing no more than the barest essentials beneath her green silk dress.
Of course they were.
Yet as they walked towards the table she felt Flint’s probing regard, and once again that eerie sense of dislocation cut her adrift from her usual composure.
Casting a quick upward glance at Paul’s pleasant, handsome face, she wondered what on earth her kind, reliable, trustworthy fiancé had in common with this arrogant, intolerant man; it must be one of the mysterious masculine friendships that women couldn’t fathom.
Apart from their schooldays, the only attributes they seemed to share were intelligence and ambition. Perhaps they were enough to sustain a friendship.
Paul was rapidly heading for the top of his profession, and people spoke of Flint Jansen as being right in line for position as the next chief executive officer of Robertson’s, the big conglomerate he worked for. Paul, a partner in a big City law office, knew a lot about the City, and had told her that the present CEO trusted him implicitly.
Aura understood why. Her first look had convinced her that Flint possessed enough concentrated, effortless authority to take over any organisation, even one as big as Robertson’s, and run it with the decision and uncompromising strength that such an enterprise needed.
By the time they arrived at their table tension was jagging through her, snarling up her thought processes, pulling her skin taut. She retained enough presence of mind to smile at various acquaintances, but her whole attention was focused on the man who walked behind her. Although she couldn’t see him, she knew when he nodded a couple of times at people who greeted him with transparent interest.
Smiling her thanks at the waiter, Aura allowed him to seat her. As the two men sat down, the little buzz of conversation that had greeted their progress across the room died back to the normal low hum.
Aura drew in a deep breath, purposefully commanding her thudding pulses to slow down, using her considerable willpower to control her wildly unsuitable reactions. Unfortunately, she wasn’t given much time to re-erect the barriers of her self-possession.
The formalities of ordering their meals barely over, Flint asked her with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, ‘What do you do, Aura? For a living, I mean?’
Talk about throwing down the gauntlet! Clearly, like most of Paul’s friends, like his mother, Flint believed that Aura looked at the man she was going to marry with greed rather than love in her heart.
For a fleeting second she wished she had a high-powered, important job to throw in his teeth.
But she hadn’t, and it was no use playing for sympathy. Flint Jansen was too hard, too dynamic, too much master of his own destiny to understand the clinging bonds that entangled her.
It wasn’t her fault she had no job. In spite of opposition and ridicule she had worked damned hard for her double degree, and if circumstances had been kinder she would already be on the first rungs of her chosen career. Nevertheless, Flint’s expression revealed that she wouldn’t get anywhere by pleading for understanding.
So with nothing but limpid innocence in her face and voice she looked directly into eyes as clear and sharp as golden crystals, and said, ‘Nothing.’
He lifted uncompromising black brows. ‘Not a career woman, then.’
There was no scorn in his words, nothing more apparent than mild interest, but the invisible hairs on Aura’s skin were pulled upright by a sudden tension.
Cheerfully, yet with a hint of warning in his tone, Paul interposed, ‘I know dynamic, forceful, professional women are your cup of tea, Flint, but Aura was brought up the old-fashioned way, so don’t you get that note in your voice when you’re talking to her. Until the end of last year she was at university. Unfortunately, she also has—responsibilities.’
He and Aura exchanged a glance. Paul not only understood her situation with her mother, he approved of her handling of it.
‘Resposibilities?’ Flint was smiling, but thick, straight lashes covered the tiger eyes so that it was impossible to see what emotions hid behind that rugged façade.
‘A mother,’ Aura said lightly, ‘and if you think I’ve been brought up the old-fashioned way, wait till you meet Natalie. She’s straight out of the ark.’ She primmed her mouth. ‘She had a very sheltered upbringing. Her father believed that women were constitutionally incapable of understanding matters more complicated than the set of a sleeve, so he didn’t bother to have her taught anything beyond womanly accomplishments like playing the piano and running a dinner party with flair and poise. Consequently she’s as sweetly unconcerned about practicalities as a babe in arms.’
‘It sounds a considerable responsibility,’ Flint agreed in his slightly grating voice. ‘Will she be living with you after you—after the wedding?’
At the look of sheer horror that spread over Paul’s face, Aura bubbled into laughter. ‘No,’ she said demurely.
Recovering his equanimity, Paul told him, ‘She’ll be living quite close to us, so we’ll be able to keep an eye on her.’
‘I see.’ Flint sounded remote and more than a little bored.
Aura asked, ‘What are you doing in Indonesia, Mr Jansen?’
‘Flint,’ he said, smiling with an assured, disturbing magnetism that made every other man in the big, luxurious room fade into the wallpaper. ‘I was tidying up a mess.’
‘Oh?’
‘Don’t ask,’ Paul advised kindly, directing a purely masculine look at the man opposite. ‘He won’t tell you anyway. Flint’s work is highly confidential.’
Thoroughly irritated by the unspoken male conspiracy, Aura fluttered her lashes and cooed, ‘How fascinating. Is it dangerous, too?’
‘Sometimes,’ Flint said, the intriguing, gravelly texture in his voice intensifying. ‘Does danger excite you, Aura?’
From beneath half-closed eyelids he was watching the way the light shimmered across her hair. Uneasily she shook her head; an unknown sensation stirred in the pit of her stomach. Perhaps, instead of letting her hair float around her shoudlers in a gleaming burgundy cloud, she should have confined it into a formal pleat.
‘No, far from it,’ she said, trying to make her tone easy and inconsequential. ‘I’m a complete coward.’
‘Aura,’ Paul said, touching her hand for a second, ‘is not into risk.’
As she turned her head to give him a quick, tender smile, she caught in the corner of her eye the ironic movement of Flint’s lips.
‘Yet you’re getting married,’ he said speculatively. ‘I’ve always thought that to be the greatest risk in the world, giving another person such power in your life. Unless, of course, the other person is too besotted to be any threat.’
‘Ah, you’ve guessed my secret,’ Paul retorted, his blue eyes warmly caressing as they rested on Aura’s face.
Without reason, Aura was hit by a wave of profound disquiet. Her gaze clung a moment to Paul’s, then slid sideways as the wine waiter appeared.
When the small business of handing the drinks out was over, Paul began talking of a political scandal that had erupted a couple of weeks before. Hiding an absurd relief, Aura listened to the deep male voices, sipping her wine a little faster than usual because something was keeping her on edge.
No, not something; someone, and he was sitting next to her. If she lowered her eyes she could see Flint’s long fingers on the round tabletop, his bronze skin a shocking contrast to the white, starched damask cloth. He had a beautiful hand, lean and masculine and strong.
He had to spend a lot of time in hot sunlight to acquire a tan like that, she thought vaguely. Of course, he had just returned from the tropics, but, even so, he was far darker skinned than either her or Paul. It was one of the reasons those glittering golden eyes were so spectacular, set as they were in black lashes beneath straight black brows.
The hum of conversation receded, became overlaid by the sudden throbbing of her heart in her eardrums. From beneath her lashes Aura’s gaze followed his hand as he lifted his wine glass and sipped some of the pale straw-coloured liquid. When he’d greeted her the rough hardness of calluses against her softer palm had made her catch her breath, and set up a strange, hot melting at the base of her spine. It had receded somewhat, but now it was starting all over again.
She didn’t know what was happening to her, although instinct warned her it was dangerous. With a determined attempt to ignore it, she joined in the conversation.
To share a meal with someone who disapproved profoundly of her was nothing new; hatred she could deal with.
But Flint Jansen despised her. He had taken one look at her, and for a frightening second contempt had flickered like cold flames in the depths of his eyes. The moment her eyes had focused on that harshly commanding face, an intuition as old as her first female ancestor had warned her that he was no friend of hers, that he never would be. For some reason they were fated to be enemies.
And Paul hadn’t noticed.
She looked up at him, half listening as he expounded some interesting point of law to the other man. Apart from her cousin Alick, Paul was the most intelligent man she had ever known, yet he thought they were getting along well.
Flint’s textured voice dragged her glance sideways. He was smiling, and even as she tried to jerk her eyes free his gaze snared hers.
For the length of a heartbeat green eyes and gold clashed. His mouth curved in the smiling snarl of a tiger playing with something small and not worthy of it.
A question from Paul shattered the tension, his beloved tones both an intrusion and a shield. As Flint answered, Aura breathed deeply.
Stop it, her brain screamed. But she had no idea what it was. Her reaction was totally new to her; it seemed that a new person had moved in to inhabit her body, a bewildering renegade, a woman she didn’t know.
She had to calm down, reimpose some sort of control over her wayward responses.
Something Paul said brought a smile to Flint’s face, revealing strong white teeth that did more uncomfortable things to the pit of Aura’s stomach. Snatching at her slipping self-possession, she concentrated fiercely on the words, not the man; on the occasion, not her reactions.
He had excellent manners. He was entertaining in a dry, wittily cynical fashion. When Aura spoke he listened attentively with nothing more obvious than lazy appreciation in his hooded eyes, yet she felt the track of his eyes like little whips across the clear ivory of her skin. And she sensed his contempt.
Oh, he was clever, he hid it well; he was a man whose feelings were caged by a ferocious will. But Aura had spent too many years noting hidden, subliminal signals to be fooled. This was not the casual disdain of a man faced by a woman out to feather her nest. Flint Jansen’s anger burned with a white-hot intensity that made him more than dangerous. And all that savage emotion was directed at her.
It bewildered her and upset her, but the most astonishing thing was that in some obscure way it was exciting. She looked across the table to the shadowed, clever face slashed by the scar, a countenance almost primitive in its force and power, and a feral shudder ran down her spine, set off warning signals all through her, flashpoints of heat and light leaping from cell to cell.
Shaken, at the mercy of forbidden and equivocal sensations, she managed to disguise her response with a sparkling glow of laughter and bright conversation, while Paul watched her with pride and the tiniest hint of possessive smugness. Amazingly, the secret, seething undercurrent of ambiguous emotions appeared to swirl around him without touching him.
She didn’t begrudge him his pride; all men, she knew, wanted to stand well in the eyes of their fellows. It was at once one of their strengths, and rather endearingly childish.
‘Paul tells me we’re having a party tomorrow night,’ Flint said coolly while they waited for dessert.
Natalie had insisted that as mother of the bride she owed friends and relatives a drinks party. Behind Aura’s back she had wheedled Aura’s cousin, Alick Forsythe, into paying for it, and because she refused to entertain in the small unit she and Aura lived in now it was being held at Paul’s apartment.
Aura nodded, hoping her irritation didn’t show. ‘Yes.’ She sent Flint a sideways glance.
His eyes darkened into tawny slits, and for one pulsing second he watched her as though she’d started to strip for him. Then his lashes concealed eyes cold and brilliant as the fire in the heart of a diamond.
Aura’s mouth dried. ‘You’ll meet my mother and my bridesmaid, and an assortment of other people. It should be fun.’
‘I’m sure it will be.’
Aura resented his bland tone, but more the sardonic quirk of his lips that accompanied it. Although she had fought against the whole idea of this wretched party, now that it was inevitable she was prepared to do what she could to make it a success.
By the time the evening wound towards its close Aura was heartily glad. Every nerve in her body was chafed into painful sensitivity, her head ached dully and bed had never seemed so desirable.
By then she knew she would never like Flint Jansen, and found herself hoping savagely that his job kept him well away from them. The less she saw of the beastly man, the better. Fortunately the feeling was mutual, so she wasn’t likely to be plagued with too much of his presence after she and Paul were married.
She expected to be taken straight home, but as Flint held open the car door for her with an aloof, studied smile Paul asked, ‘Do you mind if we go back to the apartment first, darling? I’m expecting a call from London, and I’d like to be there when it comes.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Halfway there she yawned. Instantly Paul said, ‘Poor sweet, you’re exhausted, and no wonder. Look, why don’t I get off at home, then Flint can drive you the rest of the way? That way you’ll be tucked up in bed at a reasonable hour.’
‘Oh, no, there’s—’
Aura’s swift, horrified, thoughtless answer was interrupted by Flint’s amused voice from the back seat. ‘Sounds like a good idea to me,’ he said lazily. ‘Where does Aura live?’
Bristling, but recognising that protests would only make her antagonism more obvious, Aura gave him her address.
‘Really?’
The hardly hidden speculation in his tone made her prickle. ‘Yes,’ she said stiffly.
‘I know how to get there.’
The hidden insolence in his words scorched her skin with a sudden betraying flush. Aura’s tense fingers clasped the beaded work of her fringed Victorian bag. She most emphatically did not want to be cooped up with Flint for the twenty minutes or so it would take to get her home. However, as there was no alternative she was going to have to cope as well as she could.
‘Goodnight, sweetheart. Try not to push yourself too hard tomorrow,’ Paul said when the transfer of drivers had been effected. He bent down and kissed her gently. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow night.’
She watched him walk across the footpath and in through the door of the elegant block of apartments where they were going to live until they had children.
Aura bit her lip. She had always thought Paul big, but beside Flint Jansen he was somehow diminished.
With a suddenness that took her by surprise Flint set the car in motion. Aura turned her head to look straight ahead, battered by a ridiculous sense of bereavement, almost of panic.
She searched for some light, innocuous, sophisticated comment. Her mind remained obstinately blank.
The man beside her, driving with skill and control if slightly too much speed, didn’t speak either. Aura kept her glance away from his hands on the wheel, but even the thought of them turned her insides to unstable quicksilver. A shattering corollary was the image that flashed into her mind, of those lean tanned hands against the pale translucence of her skin.
Aura stared very hard at the houses on the side of the road. Lights gleamed in windows, on gateposts, highlighted gardens that bore the signs of expensive, skilful attention. Although it was winter, flowers lifted innocent blooms to the shining disc of the moon, early jonquils, daisies, the aristocratic cornucopias of arum lilies. To the left a wall of volcanic stones fenced off a park where the delicate pointed leaves of olive trees moved slightly, their silver reverses shimmering in a swift, soon-dead breeze. Beyond them rose the sharp outlines of a hill.
Aura said sharply, ‘This isn’t the way.’
‘I thought we’d go up One Tree Hill and look at the city lights,’ Flint said in his cool, imperturable voice.
Aura’s head whipped around. Against the glow of the street-lights his profile was a rigorously autocratic silhouette of high forehead and dominating nose, the clear statement of his mouth, a chin and jaw chiselled into lines of power and force.
Speaking evenly, she said, ‘Thanks very much, but I’d rather go straight home.’
A blaze of lights from the showgrounds disclosed his half smile, revealed for a stark moment the narrow, deadly line of the scar. He looked calculating and unreachable. ‘That’s a pity,’ he said calmly. ‘I won’t keep you long.’
Aura felt the first inchoate stirrings of fear. ‘I’m actually rather tired,’ she confessed, keeping up the pretence of reluctantly refusing a small treat, trying to smooth a gloss of civilisation over a situation that frightened her needlessly, to hide her uncalled-for alarm and anger with poise and control. ‘Organising a wedding is far more exhausting than I’d expected it to be.’
His unamused smile held a distinctly carnivorous gleam.
Oh, lord, she thought frantically, keep things in perspective, Aura, and don’t let your imagination run away with you. The man is a barbarian, but he won’t hurt you. After all, he’s Paul’s best friend.
‘I’m sure it is,’ he said, ‘especially at such short notice, but a few minutes spent looking down on the most beautiful city in the world won’t hurt you. Who knows, it could even recharge your batteries.’
‘It might be dangerous up there,’ she said quickly, although she had never heard of anything unpleasant happening on top of One Tree Hill.
His laughter was brief and unamused. ‘I don’t think so.’
She didn’t think so, either. For other people, possibly, but not the ruthlessly competent Flint Jansen.
Opening her mouth to object further, she cast a fulminating glance at that inexorable profile then closed it again. He was a man who made up his mind and didn’t let anyone change it.
The exact reverse of her mother, Aura thought acidly, trying to fight back the fear that curled with sinister menace through her. Natalie’s mind was like a straw caught in a summer wind, whirled this way and that by each small eddy, held only on one course, that of her own self-interest.
Flint Jansen was bedrock, immovable, dominating, impervious, a threat to any woman’s peace of mind. Even a woman in love with another man.
Aura pretended to look about her as they wound up the sides of the terraced volcano and along the narrow ridges. For centuries the Maori settlers of New Zealand had grown kumara in the fertile volcanic soil of the little craters below, but the rows of sweet potato were long gone and now sheep cropped English grasses there.
At the top the car park was empty. Nobody looked down over the spangled carpet of city lights, no one gazed up at the obelisk past the lone pine tree, past the statue of the Maori warrior, past the grave of the pioneer who had given this green oasis to the people of Auckland, nobody gazed with her into the black infinity that ached in Aura’s heart, the unimaginable reaches of space.
Switching off the engine, Flint turned to look at her. The consuming heat of his scrutiny seared her skin, yet banished immediately the haunted isolation, the insignificance she felt whenever she looked at the night sky.
Tension crawled between her shoulder-blades, tightened every sinew in her body, clogged her breath and her pulse, made her eyes dilate and her skin creep. When he spoke she recoiled in nervous shock.
‘I assume,’ he drawled, ‘that you know what you’re doing.’
She ran the tip of her tongue along dry lips. ‘I assume so, too. In what particular thing?’
‘Marrying Paul.’
It had to be that, of course. So why did she feel as though they were talking about two different subjects? She was letting him get to her. Calmly, and with a confidence that sounded genuine, she said, ‘Oh, yes, I know exactly what I’m doing.’
‘I do hope so, pretty lady. For everyone’s sake. Because if you do to him what you’ve done to two others and jilt him, you’re in trouble. Paul may be too besotted to deal with you properly, but I’m not.’
For a moment Aura couldn’t speak. Then she returned haughtily, ‘I presume you’ve been snooping through my life.’
‘Yes.’ He sounded as though her naïvete amused him.
Aura felt sick, but she managed to keep her voice steady, almost objective. ‘Mr Jansen—’
His smile was cold and mirthless. ‘You’ve been calling me Flint all evening. Reverting to my surname now is not going to put any distance between us.’
She said aridly, ‘Flint then. I won’t hurt Paul in any way, if that’s what you’re afraid of. I’m going to make him very happy. This time it’s real.’
‘I suppose each of the other poor fools you were engaged to thought it was real, too.’ He paused, and when she didn’t reply, added, ‘And presumably that you’d make them very happy.’
The obvious sexual innuendo made her feel sick. She stared sightlessly ahead. ‘Paul knows about them,’ she said.
‘So it’s none of my business?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Not even when he finds out—as he’s bound to do—that you’re not in love with him?’
Aura said angrily, ‘I love him very much.’
He laughed softly, an immense cynicism colouring his tone. ‘Oh, I have to admire the languishing glances, the smiles and the gentle touches. But they didn’t look like love to me, and if Paul wasn’t so enamoured that he can’t think straight he’d know that what you feel for him is not the sort of love that leads to a happy marriage.’
‘You’d know all about it, I suppose.’ Struggling for control, she caught her breath. ‘I love him,’ she repeated at last, but the conviction in her voice was eaten away by a sense of futility. One quick glance at Flint’s unyielding profile and she knew that whatever she said, she couldn’t convince this man.
‘Just as you’d love your older brother, with respect and admiration and even a bit of gratitude,’ he agreed dispassionately. ‘But that’s not what marrige is all about, beautiful, seductive, sexy Aura. It’s also about lying in a bed with him, making love, giving yourself to him, accepting his body, his sexuality with complete trust and enthusiasm.’
Her small gasp echoed in the darkened car. She searched for some reply, but her mind was held prisoner by the bleak and studied impersonality of his tone.
After a moment he continued, ‘When Paul looks at you it’s with love, but I don’t see much more in you than satisfaction at having got what you want: a complacent and easygoing husband.’
Stonily, Aura said, ‘I want to go home.’
‘I’m sure you do.’ He sounded amused, almost lazily so, and satisfied, as though her reaction was just what he had expected. ‘But you’re going to stay here until I’ve finished.’
‘What gives you the right to talk like this to me?’
The words tumbled out, hot with feeling, shamingly defiant, giving away far more than was wise. Aura tried desperately to curb the wild temper that used to get her into so much trouble before she found ways to restrain it.
‘Paul is my friend,’ Flint said coolly. ‘I care about him and his happiness. And I’d hate to see him tied to a calculating little tramp when a few words could save him. That’s what friends are for, surely?’ The last question was drawled with mockery.
She didn’t intend to hit him. In fact, she didn’t even realise she had until the high sweep of his cheekbone stopped her hand with such implacable suddenness that every bone in her arm ached with the impact.
Gulping with shock and pain, she snatched her hand back, cradled it to her stomach and said in a voice she had hoped never to hear again, ‘Don’t you call me a tramp. Don’t ever call me a tramp.’
He hadn’t moved. For long, taut seconds the imprint of her hand, white in the darkness, stood out with stark, disgraceful precision.
So coldly that it congealed even her righteous indignation, he said, ‘Why not? You’re selling yourself to him. That’s what tramps do. Money for sexual services.’
‘I am not selling myself to him.’ Her voice cracked, but she rushed on, hurling the words at him, ‘And it’s not just sex, damn you, you ignorant swine, there’s more—’
‘Not much more. For you it’s security, for him love. You need his money, he wants to spend the rest of your life making you happy. And, not so incidentally, sleeping with you. If that’s the bargain it’s fair enough, I suppose. Just don’t renege on it, Aura, when he’s so far under your spell that the poor sod can’t crawl out.’
It took a vast effort to moderate her tone, to summon the cadences of bored sophistication, but Aura hoped she managed it. ‘Paul is thirty-two—old enough, don’t you think, to fall in love without needing someone to vet his choice?’
‘Paul is a romantic,’ he returned unemotionally. ‘And God knows, you’re enough to turn even the most level-headed man’s brain into mush. However, I’m not in the least romantic. I’ve seen enough women who looked like angels and behaved like the scourings of the streets to be able to ignore huge green eyes scattered with gold dust and a mouth that’s full and sulkily cushioned with promises of unattainable erotic delights. Even so, I took one look at you and found myself wondering.’
‘Wondering what?’ The moment the words trembled from her lips she knew she’d made a mistake. ‘It doesn’t m—’
But he interrupted with blasé precision. ‘Wondering whether in bed you live up to the promises you make.’
Aura froze as nausea climbed her throat. Sexy talk, the kind of sensual, seductive words that men used when they wanted to coax a woman into bed, made her shiver with an unremitting fear.
She had been barely fourteen when the husband of one of her mother’s friends had told her of his fantasies, all of them starring her, as he drove her home from the house where he lived with his wife and three children. He had seemed to think that her beauty gave him the right to tell her specifically just what he wanted to do to her, in bed and out. His words had been detailed and obscene, summoning scenarios that chilled her right through to her soul.
He had made no attempt to touch her, then or ever, but his perverted pleasure in seeing the shock and fear in her face had destroyed her innocence.
Sickened and disgusted, she had spent the next three years avoiding him, until eventually she had found the courage to threaten him with disclosure of his sexual harassment.
Since then other men had accused her of teasing, of being provocative, believing that her face was the mirror of her character, that the intensity of their desire put her under an obligation to respond.
Oh, she had learned to deal with them; she knew when a light touch was needed, when indignation and threats were necessary. But she had been scarred, her inner soul as much mutilated as whatever had slashed through Flint’s skin. And she still felt that sick helplessness when a man looked at her with that knowing speculation, when a certain thickness appeared in his voice. She hated being fodder for fantasy.
Strangely enough, in spite of Flint’s words, she didn’t feel that sinking nausea now.
One of the things she liked so much about Paul was his light touch, his wry, self-deprecating amusement. He never made her feel that he wanted too much from her, and when he looked at her it was without greed, with tenderness. She felt safe with Paul.
Since that first experience she had viewed compliments on her looks as preliminaries to demands she had no intention of satisyfing, but listening to Flint Jansen’s gravelly voice as he passionlessly catalogued her physical assets brought heat bursting through her in a drenching flood of sensation.
Appalled, mortified, she said huskily, ‘Mr—Flint, I know you’re Paul’s oldest friend, and I know you and he are very fond of each other, but you shouldn’t be talking to me like this. I’m going to make Paul very happy. Please take me home.’
‘I hope you mean that,’ he said, every menacing syllable clear and silky above the pounding of her heart, ‘because if you don’t, beautiful Aura, if you find a richer man than Paul one day and decide to shuck him off like an old coat, I’ll come looking for you. And when I find you, I’ll make you sorrier than you’ve ever thought you could be.’
