Читать книгу Prince Of Lies - Robyn Donald - Страница 4

SOMBRE fir trees crowded against the small stone crypt constructed in the living rock of the mountain, concealing it from all but the keenest eyes.

The man who threaded his way so quietly that even the deer didn’t sense his presence had such eyes, strange, colourless eyes that refracted light like shattered glass. At a muffled sound in the still silence he froze, his big body somehow blending into the gloom, that fierce gaze searching through the trees and up the mountainside.

A hundred years ago an eccentric English gentleman had built a little castle high in the Swiss Alps, but it was his wife who decided that the estate needed something extra, a romantically outrageous touch to set it off properly. A couple of ruined follies sufficed for dramatic impact in the woods, but the pièce de résistance was the crypt, never intended to be used, constructed solely to induce the right mood.

During the past century the carefully laid path had become overgrown, scarcely noticeable, but the crypt had been built by good Victorian tradesmen, and it still stood in all its Gothic gloom, the rigid spikes of an elaborately detailed iron grille barring steps that led down to a solid wooden door.

Frozen in a purposeful, waiting immobility, ears and eyes attuned to the slightest disturbance, the man decided that as an example of the medieval sensibility admired by many Victorians the hidden crypt was perfect. Not his style, but then, his self-contained pragmatism was utterly at variance with the romantic attitudes of a century before.

In spite of the fugitive noise that had whispered across his ears, no birds shouted alarm, no animals fled between the trees. His penetrating gaze lingered a moment on stray beams of the hot Swiss sun fighting their way through the dense foliage.

He hadn’t seen anyone since entering the wood and his senses were so finely honed that he’d have known if he’d been followed, or if the crypt was being watched. The waiting was a mere formality. However, when a man lived on his wits it paid to have sharp ones, and the first thing he’d learned was to trust nothing, not even his own reactions.

A small, bronze butterfly settled on one broad shoulder. Not until the fragile thing had danced off up the nearest sunbeam did he move, and then it was soundlessly, with a smooth flowing grace very much at variance with his size. Within moments he was standing at the dark opening in the shoulder of the mountain.

The iron door looked suitably forbidding, but the old-fashioned lock that would have been, for all its ornate promise, ridiculously easy to pick, had been superseded by a modern one, sleek, workmanlike, somehow threatening. After a cursory glance he fished in his pocket and pulled out a ring of keys. No clink of metal pierced the silence. Selecting one, he inserted it, and as the key twisted and the lock snickered back a look of savage satisfaction passed over his hard, intimidating face.

He didn’t immediately accept the mute invitation. Instead, his eyes searched the stone steps that led down to another door, this one made of sturdy wood. For several seconds the cold, remote gaze lingered on what could have been scuff marks.

Eventually, with the measured, deliberate calculation of a predator, he turned his head. Again his eyes scanned the fir trees and the barely visible path through them, then flicked up the side of the mountain. Only then did he push the iron door open.

Although he knew it had been oiled, he half expected a dramatic shriek of rusty hinges. One corner of his straight mouth tilted in mordant appreciation of the horror films he and his friends used to watch years ago, when he was as innocent as he’d ever been.

Moving without noise or haste, he slipped through the narrow opening between the iron door and the stone wall, relocked the door, and turned, his back pressed against the damp, rough-hewn stone. Now, caught between the grille and the wooden door, he was most vulnerable to ambush.

Still no prickle of danger, no obscure warning conveyed by the primitive awareness that had saved his life a couple of times. Keeping well to the side where the shadows lay deepest, he walked noiselessly down the steps. Some part of his brain noted the chill that struck through his clothes and boots.

A different key freed the wooden door; slowly, he pushed it open, his black head turning as a slight scrabble sounded shockingly in the dank, opaque darkness within.

‘It’s all right, Stephanie,’ he said in a voice pitched to reach whoever was in the crypt. Grimly, he locked the door behind him. A hitherto concealed torch sent a thin beam of light slicing through the blackness to settle on a long box, eerily like a coffin, that rested on the flagstones. The man played the light on to the box until the keyhole glittered. For the space of three heartbeats he stood motionless, before, keys in hand, he approached the box.

* * *

Inside her prison she was blind, and earplugs made sure she could hear little. However, another sense had taken over, an ability to feel pressure, to respond somehow to the presence of another living being. For the last few minutes she had known he was near.

Almost certainly he was one of the two men who had abducted her on the road back to the chalet. The memory of those terrifying moments kept her still and quiet, her shackled limbs tense against the narrow sides of the box.

After the initial horrified incredulity she had fought viciously, desperation clearing her brain with amazing speed so that she was able to use every move Saul had taught her. She’d managed to get in some telling blows, scratching one’s face badly as she’d torn off his Balaclava. She had been trying for his eyes, but a blow to her head had jolted her enough to put off her aim.

Not badly enough, however, to stop her from crooking her fingers again and gouging at his face, so clearly seen in the moonlight.

Then the second man had punched her on the jaw.

Two days later the man whose face she’d seen had hit her again in exactly the same place when she’d refused to read the newspaper.

Half-mad with terror, convinced that she was going to die in the makeshift coffin, she had managed to shake her head when he’d forced her upright and thrust the newspaper in her hand, demanding that she say the headlines.

She’d known what he was doing. Saul must want some reassurance that she was alive before he paid any ransom. The torches that had blazed into her eyes had made it very clear that her assailant intended to video her.

Her refusal had made her gaoler angry, and he’d threatened to withhold the food and water he’d brought. Still she’d balked, folding her mouth tightly over the cowardly words fighting to escape, words that were pleas for freedom, craven offers to pay him anything he wanted if only he would let her go.

So he’d hit her, carefully choosing the site of the bruise he’d already made when he’d knocked her out in the street. Pain had cascaded through her but she’d only given in when he’d told her viciously that he was prepared to send a video of him beating her up to her brother if that was what it took.

It had been the only thing he could have said to persuade her. Saul must never know what had happened to her in that crypt.

And now, after an unknown number of days, someone else had returned to the crypt. Her jaw still ached, but that was the least of her worries.

Shuddering, she bent her attention to the person in her dungeon. It was a man; was he the man who had forced her to dramatise her own misery so that her brother Saul would know she was alive?

She lay still, trying to pick up with subliminal receptors some indication of his identity. Strangely, she felt, with a hidden, atavistic shrinking, a strong impression of power and intensity, and beneath that a controlled menace that made her shiver with terror.

The muffled sound of his voice again, low, oddly compelling even through the planks of her prison and the earplugs, sent quick panic flooding through her, humiliating, loathsome, unmanageable. She tried to breathe carefully, counting the seconds, but it didn’t help.

He spoke once more; although the words were somewhat louder they were still distorted by the physical response of her body. Her first reaction had been to will him to go away, but she suddenly wondered whether he was a passer-by who had merely stumbled on her prison. If that was so, he wouldn’t know she was in the box on the floor. He might be her only chance to get out of here.

Nevertheless, it took a real effort of will to move, and when she did she moaned soundlessly at the pain in her cramped muscles. Clenching her teeth, she lifted her hands and hit the manacles sharply against the top of the box, hoping that the noise would be enough to attract his attention.

Strung taut by fear and foreboding, she screamed into the gag as the lid came up silently, yet with a rush of air that hurt her skin and proclaimed a violent energy in the man who stood above her. Ever since she had been locked in this coffin she had been desperately trying to get free, rubbing her wrists raw against the unyielding metal of the handcuffs, yet now she shrank back because the impact of the stranger’s personality—intense, lethal, forceful—hit her like a blow.

Danger, her instincts drummed; this man is dangerous! Some primal, buried intuition warned her that he was infinitely more of a threat to her than either of the men who had kidnapped her. She sensed an icy, implacable authority, a concentrated will that beat harshly down on her.

But when he spoke his voice was level, almost impersonal. ‘Just lie still for a few seconds, Stephanie,’ he said, his voice pitched to pierce the earplugs.

So he was no casual passer-by.

Stephanie made herself stay quiescent as the gag was removed. This man knew exactly what he was doing, and did it as though he’d been wrenching off gags all his life. Life pulsed through him, an intensity of vigour, of purpose, a sheer, consuming energy that bathed her in white-hot fire.

Get a grip on yourself, she commanded. He still might come from the kidnappers. She said rustily, ‘Who are you?’ and strained to hear his answer.

‘I’ve come to take you out of this. How do you feel?’

Relief was a slow, reluctant warming. ‘I’m all right. Just numb all over.’

‘You’ll hurt like hell when the feeling starts to come back,’ he said.

Her kidnappers had left nothing to chance; they hadn’t intended her to escape. When he felt the steel manacles on her wrists and ankles the unknown man cursed roughly, but his hands on her body were warm and deft and gentle, and after a bit of manipulation the steel fell loose.

Nevertheless, it seemed an aeon before she was out of her coffin. Her legs wouldn’t support her, so her rescuer held her with an arm around her waist and then all she could think of was that she was filthy and naked and that she must smell and look disgusting. She put up a fleshless, quivering hand to remove the plugs from her ears.

‘I’ll do that,’ he said. In a moment the echo of her pulses that had been her sole companion for so many anguished hours was replaced by a rush of silence.

She didn’t have time to appreciate it, for the numbness that held her body in thrall was overwhelmed by an agony so intense, she thought she might faint from it. Biting her lips to hold back mortifying whimpers, she clung convulsively to his broad shoulders as returning sensation surged through her with accelerating agony.

‘How long have I been here?’ she mumbled, trying to keep her mind off the torment.

‘Three days.’

Free from distortion, his voice was deep and infinitely disturbing, detached, yet threaded by an equivocal undertone. English, she noted automatically, although there was something else, some hint of another country’s speech; not an accent, more an intonation, a slight inflexion...

He sounded as though he could have spent enough time in New Zealand or Australia to be affected by their special and particular way of speaking.

Giving it up as too hard, she set her jaw and forced her shaking legs to straighten, her knees to lock so that she could stand upright. Sweat stood out along her brow, settled with clammy persistence into her palms. When the torture receded a little she managed to mutter, ‘I tried to get free, but I couldn’t.’

‘It’s almost over, princess.’ His arm around her shoulders tightened. For several minutes he continued to support her trembling body, until at last he asked brusquely, ‘Can you walk? Here, you’d better get rid of this—’ Hands touched the blindfold.

Jerking her head away, she said, ‘No,’ because it gave her some sort of protection from his gaze. Not even when she had been stripped naked to the lewd sound of one of the kidnapper’s comments had she felt so exposed, so helpless.

‘Yes,’ he said relentlessly. ‘We’re not out of the woods yet—literally. I don’t think the men who snatched you will come back today, but if they do while we’re still here you need to be able to see, and this half-darkness will give your eyes time to get accustomed to the light.’

Ignoring her panted objections, he stripped the blindfold from her shaggy head. Obstinately, Stephanie kept her eyes closed. ‘Have you got any water?’ she asked, running her dry tongue around an even drier mouth. ‘I’m so thirsty.’

‘Don’t drink too much. It will make you sick.’

A metal flask pressed against her lips, and the blessed cool thinness of water seeped across her tongue. She gulped greedily, making a quick, involuntary protest when he took it away.

‘No,’ he said laconically, ‘you can have some more later.’ At her small sound of displeasure he went on, ‘If you have any more now you’ll be retching before you’ve gone fifty yards. Trust me, I know.’

An odd note in his voice coaxed her eyes slightly open. The torchlight barely reached the dank stone walls of her prison, but in its golden glow she saw a big man, tall and well-built, with a dark, angular, forceful face.

Shock hit her like a blow, followed by a strange, compelling recognition, as though she had always known he was out there, waiting. She would never forget him, she thought dazedly. He had rescued her from hell, and until the day she died she’d remember his warrior’s countenance, stark in the earthy dampness of her prison, as well as his curt, understated consideration.

‘That’s better,’ he said bluntly. ‘Put these on.’

He had brought clothes—jeans and a shirt in muted camouflage colours. Gratefully, she struggled a few moments with limp hands and weak wrists, before saying on a half-choked note of despair, ‘I can’t.’

Without impatience, he said, ‘All right, stand still.’

Competent hands pulled the clothes on to her thin body; he even managed to fit a pair of black trainers on her feet. Although the garments felt amazingly good after the soaked blanket she’d been lying on, she knew that she wouldn’t feel clean until she had washed herself free of this place.

In a hidden recess of her mind she wondered whether she would ever feel really clean again.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

Nothing in his tone indicated a need for hurry, but Stephanie suddenly realised that the longer they stayed in the crypt, the more dangerous it was.

Compliantly she tried to follow him across to the door, but her feet refused to obey her will. She began to shake.

‘I can’t walk,’ she said angrily.

‘You’ll have to.’

Although the words were completely unsympathetic, he grasped her hand in his lean, strong one, and somehow she could move once more. Each step felt like knives in her flesh. Abruptly the story of the little mermaid and the sacrifice she had made to gain a human soul flashed into Stephanie’s mind. When her mother had read it to her she hadn’t liked the tale, finding it too sad, but until that moment she hadn’t understood what a truly awful torture Hans Christian Andersen had devised for his heroine.

Tightening her lips, she held back any expression of pain. But when her rescuer switched off the torch and the blackness pressed in again, she couldn’t prevent a choked cry.

‘If you can’t keep quiet I’ll have to gag you again,’ he said, each word stark with the promise of retribution. ‘Walk softly, and don’t talk. If anything happens to me, climb a tree and stay there. Most people don’t think to look upwards.’

The next second she was stumbling behind a man who moved without sound. The door swung open silently, letting in a flood of dim light. At first it hurt her eyes, but as she squinted tearfully she saw stone steps leading up to bars, and beyond them a forest of firs, their trunks and thick foliage blocking out the sun.

Closing the door behind them, her rescuer locked it before leading her carefully up the steps, his back to the wall, his head turned towards the entrance so that all she could see of his face was the stern line of jaw above a hint of square chin, the sweeping angle of cheek, the dark, conventionally cut hair. His hand still engulfed hers; although it was warm and insistent, she understood with a purely female recognition that it could be cruel.

At the top of the steps he waited so long that she began to drift into a kind of trance. Then, apparently satisfied that the woods held no lurking enemies, he unlocked the bars and slipped through, shielding her with the graceful bulk of his body.

It was like all the thrillers she had ever read—the gallant, aloof hero, the abused heroine, the dangerous trek to safety. Perhaps if she could have viewed the situation as popular fiction she’d have been able to cope with the sick dismay that washed through her when he turned up the mountain and began to climb, half pulling her along behind him.

Gasping within seconds, exhausted in minutes, she knew she had to keep going, so she gritted her teeth and ignored the pain. He helped, hauling her over rocks, stopping occasionally to let her regain her breath. Her heart was thumping too heavily in her chest for anything but its erratic beating to be heard, and in a very short time she was engulfed by a headache and a spreading nausea that almost subdued her.

But anything was better than being locked in a box, unable to free herself. With the characteristic doggedness that came as a surprise to most people, Stephanie scrambled behind her unknown rescuer, grateful for the trees that sheltered them.

At last the steep slope levelled out. ‘Stay here,’ he said in a quiet, almost soundless voice, pushing her unceremoniously into a crevice beneath a rock.

Stephanie collapsed, peering through the bushes that concealed the narrow cleft, but he disappeared before she had time to query him, so she put her head on her knees, stiffened her jaw to stop the shameful whimpering she could barely control, and let her body do whatever it needed to recover. She was still panting when he slid back through the whippy, leafy branches with as little fuss as an animal.

Still in the same low voice he asked, ‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’ve felt better,’ she said quietly, avoiding the cold clarity of his gaze. ‘On the other hand, just recently I’ve felt worse. I’ll be all right. How much further?’

‘About a mile.’

As she struggled out he said, ‘I think it should be safe enough to carry you,’ and in spite of her automatic recoil he picked her up and set off.

Keeping her face rigidly turned away, she wondered why liberty didn’t taste as good as she’d imagined it would in those nightmare days of imprisonment. She should have been ecstatic, because she’d expected death, and now there was a future waiting for her. At the very least she should have been relieved. Instead, an icy chill eddied through her, robbing her of everything but a detached recognition that she had been imprisoned and was now free.

Freedom was easy to say, she thought with a scepticism that hurt. Common sense told her that her body would mend quickly enough, yet as she lay there in the powerful arms of the man who had released her she wondered whether some part of her mind would be incarcerated in that box for the rest of her life.

‘My car’s not too far away. When we get there I’m going to have to put you in the boot,’ her rescuer told her, his voice reassuring but firm enough to forestall any protest. He still spoke as though they could be overheard. ‘It will be bloody uncomfortable, but it’s necessary, and I’ve put a mattress in there to make it a bit easier. I’m almost certain no one’s been watching me, but we’ll be going through several villages and the last thing we want is someone remembering that I had a passenger. So you’ll have to stay hidden.’

Although her skin crawled at the thought of further confinement, Stephanie understood the need for caution. Mastering the flash of panic, she said, ‘Yes, all right.’ She thought his words over before asking slowly, ‘Will S—will my brother be there?’

‘No.’ He paused before explaining, ‘He’s busy dealing with the men who did this to you. You and I will have to lie low for a while until it’s over. I can’t even get a doctor for you in case they have a local contact, but I have some experience in this sort of thing.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said automatically, wondering where he’d gained this experience. First-aid training? A book on how to look after kidnappees?

Being rescued, she decided, closing her eyes, must have addled her brain.

He climbed for what seemed ages. Mostly Stephanie lay in a kind of stupor, accepting without thought the novelty of being carried, the controlled, purposeful toughness of the man. It did occur to her that he must be immensely strong, for he moved without any visible signs of exhaustion. And although he might not think there was anyone watching she could feel his alertness, a fierce concentration on every signal sent by the world around them. Several times he stopped and listened.

Whenever that happened she made herself still and quiet, trying to slow her heartbeat, calm her racing pulses and the rattle of air in her lungs, the interminable thud and throb of her headache. Although she too listened hard she could hear nothing but the sounds of the forest—an occasional bird, the soft rustling of a breeze in the trees.

Once she roused herself to whisper, ‘Are we there?’

‘Not quite.’ When he went to put her down she surprised herself by clinging. ‘It’s all right,’ he said gently. ‘I’m just going to scout around and make sure no one is about.’

‘Don’t leave me.’ Although she despised the note of panic in her voice, she couldn’t control it.

‘I’ll be keeping a good eye on you.’

A small, childish noise escaped her lips.

‘That’s enough,’ he said sternly, bending to thrust her into a cleft beneath a rock that broke through the bushes. ‘I haven’t gone to all this trouble to lose you now. Just sit there, princess, and I’ll be here again before you’ve had time to get lonely.’ He stepped behind a tree and disappeared, far too silently for a man of his size.

Disgusted by her feebleness, Stephanie waited, wishing she could point her ears like an animal to get a better fix on his whereabouts. A tangle of summer-green leaves hid her from any stray passer-by, but not, she knew, from a determined searcher. Her rescuer’s familiarity with this mountain slope surely meant that he had spent some time reconnoitring.

Fighting exhaustion, she peered past the leaves, trying to identify a glimmering patch of white that danced in the sun beyond a belt of trees. At first she thought it was a waterfall, but by narrowing her eyes she could see that it was too regular for that. Slowly, it coalesced into stone, a waterfall of stone—no, columns of stone.

There, some hundreds of yards away through the trees, was what looked to be a temple, chastely, classically Greek. Her eyes blurred; she blinked to clear them, but a cloud had passed over the sun, and the tantalising streak of white was gone.

Perhaps it had been a hallucination.

His return startled her. It was uncanny; he seemed to rise out of the ground like a primeval huntsman, so at one with his surroundings that the trees sheltered him in their embrace.

‘Not a soul in sight,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

His arms around her were intensely comforting, like coming home. Sighing, Stephanie leaned her head against his shoulder. He smelt slightly sweaty, so it wasn’t as easy carrying her as he made it seem. Another scent teased her nostrils, faint but ever present, evocative, with a hint of salt and musk. Masculinity, she decided dreamily.

She knew that she must smell hideous, reek with the stale odour of confinement. A pursuer, she thought with a wry twist of her lips, wouldn’t need to search for her; all he’d have to do was follow his nose to find her.

She was still wondering why this seemed so especially unbearable when he said, ‘Right, here we are.’

However, he didn’t go immediately to the car that waited in the heavy shade of a conifer. It wasn’t hidden, but few people would notice it, for it was painted a green that blended with the long needles of the trees.

Just inside the confines of the wood he put her against the trunk of a tree, and stood blocking her from anyone who might be watching, his whole being concentrated on a hawk-eyed, icily patient scrutiny of every tree, every blade of grass, and the big, dark car.

When at last he did move it was with a speed that shocked her. Within seconds she was deposited on the mattress in the boot, choking back a moan as he firmly closed the lid.

The engine sprang into life; with no delay the car drew away from the picnic spot and turned down the road.

Even on the mattress Stephanie was soon profoundly uncomfortable. Her bones seemed to have no fleshy covering to protect them; she ached all over, and she was shivering. She was also worrying. So great had her initial relief been that suspicion hadn’t had room to take hold. Now, cramped like a parcel, trying to ignore the thumping of her head and the tremors that racked her, she began to recall things she had noticed but not questioned. Whoever her rescuer was, he had keys not only to the crypt and the coffin, but also to the handcuffs that had manacled her in the coffin.

Saul, her brother, had an excellent security department, but it was highly unlikely that even the most skilled operative would have been able to get those keys. So unlikely that she had better stop believing that the man driving the BMW had anything to do with Saul.

Her quick, instinctive stab of revulsion warned her that she was halfway into the Stockholm syndrome—falling in with the wishes of her captor.

Think, she adjured her pounding brain. Think, damn it!

There had been no indication that she was a target; if her intensely protective brother had heard the slightest hint that she was in danger, he wouldn’t have let her come to Switzerland without a bodyguard. Or with one, for that matter. The close relatives of billionaires were sometimes at risk; she had long ago accepted the constraints of her world, and co-operated, so Saul had no reason to keep her in ignorance.

If Saul didn’t know, if he hadn’t been warned, then none of his agents would have been alerted. According to her rescuer, she’d been imprisoned for three days. She had no way of checking the accuracy of this, but if it was true, was that time enough for one of Saul’s men to discover who the kidnappers were and get close enough to them to be able to copy the keys?

It didn’t seem likely, unless the kidnappers had left clues the size of houses. And somehow she doubted that; they had been frighteningly efficient.

It seemed important to know exactly how many keys there were. Even understanding that it was a mechanism to push the truth away didn’t stop her from counting them: the keys to the box, then to the handcuffs, keys to both doors. Four sets of keys. And he had them all.

She dragged a deep breath into her lungs. All right, don’t panic! What sort of person was he, this man who had walked into her life?

Although she hadn’t looked at him carefully, so she couldn’t recall the colour of his eyes or even his colouring beyond the fact that he was dark, that first swift glance had seared his features into her brain: a blade of a nose, high, arrogant cheekbones, eyes that had something strange about them. Did he look like a criminal?

Not, she thought bitterly, that looks were any indication. The man whose face she had seen under his torn Balaclava hadn’t looked like a criminal. If he’d been any type at all, it was a small-time shopkeeper.

Whatever, until she knew for certain, it would be much safer to work on the assumption that either her rescuer was one of the kidnappers who wanted all of the ransom, not merely a share of it, or an associate who knew what they had done, was trusted by them, and had decided to cut himself a piece of the pie. That would explain why he was being so careful not to be seen by the original kidnappers.

It sounds, she thought feverishly, like the instructions in an Elizabethan play: Enter first kidnapper with gag, blindfold and coffin, exit first kidnapper. Almost immediately enter second kidnapper, a large, athletic man with keys and strong arms.

If that was so, she was in just as much danger as before. He could quite easily plan to keep her safe as long as Saul demanded reassurance that she was alive, then kill her when the money had been paid over.

Her heart skittered into a rapid cacophony while her brain veered off towards the messy heights of hysteria.

Calm down. Panic isn’t going to get you anywhere.

With an effort of will that made her teeth chatter she began to breathe slowly, regularly, forcing herself to count the seconds. Eventually the churning flood of fear in her stomach subsided, and with it her inability to think.

Paradoxically, the only thing that comforted her was that he’d used the keys quite openly. If she’d been less of a cynic she might take that to mean he was legitimate.

Of course, he could well be devious enough to use them deliberately so that she’d be confused into accepting him as completely above-board. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had imagined that because her brother was one of the richest men in the world Stephanie Jerrard was incapable of logical thought, with nothing but clothes and jewellery and gossip in her mind.

He could have fallen into that trap. However, in the few moments she had spent talking to him she had gained the impression of a keen, razor-sharp intelligence, the sort of mind that didn’t make obvious mistakes. Apart from the keys, what else was there to base suspicion on?

The tension clamping her muscles began to ebb as she realised how little there was. He’d been evasive when she’d asked about Saul. Or had he?

Questions jostled around her aching head, forcing their way through to her conscious mind, battering her precarious self-control. How long was this journey going to take? She felt as though she’d been in the car for hours. Although they were now climbing quite steeply she couldn’t smell any exhaust fumes. Perhaps when you travelled in the boot of a car you left the fumes behind. No, she told herself, don’t get side-tracked. Think!

While the car twisted and turned smoothly around corners, she decided to do nothing. Her suspicions could be entirely wrong, and anyway, common sense told her she wasn’t going to be able to do any running or hiding until she’d regained some strength. The two men who had kidnapped her were around somewhere, and if she ran away and they caught up with her again, she thought with a shudder, they might kill her outright. After all, she could identify one of them.

So she’d eat and rest, and she’d probe as subtly as she could. If her rescuer was a villain she might be safe while she pretended to take him at face value.

Of course, there might be a perfectly logical explanation for those keys. All she had to do was ask. And if she didn’t like the answer, she could fake belief until she found an opportunity to get away from him.

As the car slid to halt, she froze. Striving to look weak and pathetic and entirely brainless, she coerced her muscles into looseness, wondering despairingly whether she should try to get away now, when he would be least likely to expect it.

Before she had time to make up her mind the lock on the boot clicked. ‘We’re here,’ he said, reaching in and gathering her up.

She said raggedly, ‘Where’s here? And what happens now?’

‘This is where we’re staying.’

‘It looks old,’ she said inanely.

‘Not very. It was built last century.’ He set off for a door across the garage.

Frowning, she looked around. ‘It doesn’t look like the stables.’

‘It’s not. This is the old laundry, which was converted into a garage some time in the thirties.’

Apparently he wasn’t given to fulsome explanations. She said stubbornly, ‘What’s going to happen now?’

‘I’m going to carry you upstairs, where you can shower and go to bed. Then you eat, and after that you sleep.’

It should have sounded wonderful but the greyness she had fought so long and vehemently had finally caught up with her. Blankly she said beneath her breath, ‘Thank you.’

Some emotion sawed through him, but his voice was steady and deliberate as he said, ‘It’s nothing. Think of me as your doctor.’

Her doctor was forty, a married woman wearing her sophistication with cheerful cynicism and an understanding heart. Stephanie smiled wearily.

‘Shower first,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to stay with you, I’m afraid, in case you fall.’

A week ago she would have refused point-blank, but it didn’t matter now. She didn’t think she would ever be modest again.

She forced herself to look around as he carried her across a high, mock-Gothic hall and up some narrow stairs.

‘This looks like a castle,’ she said.

‘Seen plenty of them, have you, princess?’ His voice was dry.

‘A few,’ she admitted. It couldn’t hurt. He knew who she was. What he might not know, she thought vengefully, was how formidable Saul was. On the first suitable occasion she’d make sure he learnt.

However, not even Saul was invincible, and she’d have to try to get herself out of this situation. So, she decided with an odd lurch in her heartbeat, she had better take a good look at the man who might well be her greatest obstacle. Fractionally turning her head, she sent a sideways glance through her lashes.

He wasn’t handsome, but strength and a compelling and concentrated authority marked the slashing lines of his face. Not a man you would forget, she thought, wishing her head didn’t ache so much that she couldn’t think clearly. Surely kidnappers didn’t look as though they strode through the world forcing it to accept them on their own terms? The two who had snatched her certainly hadn’t. The one she’d seen was short and thin, inconspicuous except for his flat, emotionless black eyes, and the other had behaved with all the flashy arrogance of a small-time criminal.

This man couldn’t have been taken for a small-time anything.

Stephanie felt physically ill; her whole body was screaming with pain, she was tired and hungry and frantic with thirst, and in spite of her efforts to keep a calm head she was terrified with the sort of fear that only needed a touch to spill into panic, yet her first reaction to eyes where the light splintered into scintillating energy was a sensation of something heated and unmanageable racing through her with the force of a stampede. Some hitherto inviolate part of her shattered in a subtle breaching of barricades that left her raw and undefended.

Eyes locked on to his face, she was thinking dazedly, What’s happening to me? when the corners of that ruthless, equivocal mouth tilted a fraction. ‘Do you think you’d recognise me again?’ he asked, his tone imbuing the words with a hidden meaning.

‘I’m sure of it.’ Self-protection impelled her to add, ‘I believe it’s a well-known syndrome; people do tend to remember those who rescue them from durance vile. Incidentally, how did you get into that cellar?’

He shouldered through a small door off a landing at the top of the stairs, walked across a room dimmed by heavy curtains, through another door, and stood her on her feet, turning her at the same time so that she had her back to him.

They were in a bathroom, neat, white, with a startlingly luxurious shower, all glass and modern fittings. As his hands supported her for the first agonising moments, he said calmly, ‘It’s not a cellar, it’s a fake crypt. The locks on the doors are not brand-new, and the men who put you there didn’t bother to change them. Your brother wields a lot of power, and it didn’t take long for me to get a complete set of skeleton keys.’

‘And the handcuffs?’

His mouth tightened, but his eyes held hers steadily as he said, ‘There are techniques for picking them.’

Stephanie almost sagged with relief, her reassured brain spinning into dizziness. Of course; she had read of skeleton keys often enough; she should have thought of them herself. And hadn’t Saul’s chief of security told her once that there was no lock invented that couldn’t be picked, given time, equipment and a deft hand?

Before she had time to say the incautious words that came tumbling to her lips, the man who had rescued her began to strip her as efficiently and swiftly as he had dressed her.

‘No,’ she muttered, trying to stop his hands.

‘You can’t do it yourself.’ He unzipped the jeans and pushed them down around her hips.

He was right, but in spite of her previous conviction about her lack of modesty she actually felt intense embarrassment. She had her back to him, but there was a mirror, and for a breathless second she saw their reflections, her pale, thin, hollow-eyed face beneath a wild tangle of rusty curls, the swift movements of his long-fingered hands unbuttoning her shirt.

Hastily she looked away, confusion and shame battling for supremacy. Although he was gentle, those tanned fingers branded her skin, leaving it hot and tender, connected by shimmering, glittering wires to her spine and the pit of her stomach. A lazy, coiled heat stirred there, as though his touch summoned something forbidden but irresistible.

Stephanie bit her lip, trying to use pain to drown out those other, treacherous sensations. It didn’t work, and in the end she gave in, her eyes caught and held by the strange power of his.

‘You have eyes like cornflowers,’ he astounded her by saying. ‘That brilliant, rare, clear sapphire. It must be a Jerrard trait.’

So he had met Saul. Stephanie’s suspicions fell from her like an ugly, discarded shroud. Bewitched by the new and unusual responses of her body, pulses jumping, she waited until he moved away to turn on the shower before shrugging off the shirt and stepping out of her jeans. A quick flick of her wrist hooked a towel from the rail to wrap around herself.

She stumbled, and he caught her, pulling her against the solid length of his body. Stephanie flinched, that insidious, unwanted awareness reinforced by his nearness. Although she was tall and not slightly built, against him she felt tiny, delicately fragile, an experience intensified by the unexpected burgeoning of a languorous femininity.

Her rescuer’s austere face was intent as he juggled with the shower controls, but that concentrated attention was not bent on her; he showed no signs of a reciprocal response.

You’re mad, she told herself as steam began to fill the shower stall. Look in the mirror—your bones stick out, you’re filthy, and you smell. The sort of first impression no one ever overcomes. Who in their right mind would be anything but casual and very, very detached?

‘There, that should be right,’ he said, urging her into the big, tiled, warm shower with its glass doors now tactfully obscured by steam. He didn’t move away from the door, but at least he couldn’t see much through the hazy mist.

A singing, surging relief persuaded her to release the bonds of the obstinacy that had held her together for so long. Only for a few hours, she thought as with eyes tightly shut she tried to wash herself. She could give up for a few hours and use some of this man’s strength until she regained her own.

The water was like nectar over her skin, but its heat drained her waning energy, and her hands shook so much that she couldn’t get soap on to the flannel. As tears squeezed their way beneath her lashes she continued grimly on, aware of the man who stood so close, a large, dim figure through the glass doors.

The cake of soap plummeted between her fingers and landed on her foot. Unable to prevent a soft cry of pain, she cut it short and crouched to pick up the wretched thing. It took a vast effort to push herself upright, and when she got there she could feel her legs trembling. Refusing to look at the man who watched, hating him for not leaving her alone, she gripped the flannel and passed it over the cake of soap.

He asked tonelessly, ‘Do you want me to wash you?’

Lethargy enmeshed her, but she said, ‘No, I can do it.’

Only she couldn’t. Her arms ached, and her fingers wouldn’t obey her, and her legs felt as though the bones had been replaced by sponge rubber.

He waited until she dropped the soap again, then said curtly, ‘Here, give me that flannel. When you’ve as much strength as a cooked noodle courage and determination will only get you so far.’

Stephanie turned her face away, saying stiffly, ‘I’m all right—’

‘Shut up,’ he said, interrupting her by taking the cloth from her lax fingers.