Читать книгу A Ruthless Passion - Robyn Donald - Страница 9

A TENSE week later Cat was walking out of the university library when her companion nudged her and growled, ‘Whooor! Fantasy fodder at eleven o’clock.’

It was Nick, leaning indolently against a long, low car of the sort that had even the carefully sophisticated students looking sideways.

‘What’s my favourite colour?’ her companion asked rhetorically. ‘The colour of the last piece of clothing that man takes off in my bedroom!’

Cat unclenched her teeth to say with a lightness she hoped sounded real, ‘Sinead, you’ve already got Jonathan—don’t be greedy. Anyway, this one would break your heart.’

‘Hearts mend, and from the look of him it’d be a wild affair, the sort you shock your great-grandchildren with.’ She stopped as Nick straightened up and scrutinised Cat. ‘Hey, you know him?’

The spring sun beat down on Nick’s black head, glowed lovingly along the high, flaring cheekbones. He looked like a pirate—ruthless and forceful.

‘I know him,’ Cat said. ‘Not well, but enough to be very wary.’

‘If you don’t want him, introduce me?’ She laughed at the glint Cat couldn’t banish from her eyes. ‘It was worth a try. Go on, off you go—you can tell me all about him tonight.’

Alone, Cat walked over to the car, shoulders held stiffly, her face composed.

Nick’s dark suit clung with the finesse of superb tailoring to his wide shoulders and narrow hips, but the formidable assurance and the slow burn of danger came from him alone.

Foolishly, Cat wished she’d worn her pretty blue suit again; jeans, even when topped by a cream shirt and a jersey the colour of her hair, couldn’t live up to his clothes.

‘Hello, Nick,’ she said as she came up to him, her voice so constrained she sounded like a prim schoolgirl.

His mouth curved into a speculative smile. ‘Cat.’ He pushed the door open and held out a hand for her bag.

After a moment’s hesitation she handed it over.

‘This is far too heavy for you,’ he said, frowning, as he dumped the bag in the back seat.

‘Books always weigh a lot. Where are we going?’

‘Somewhere that isn’t quite so public as this.’

She nodded and slid past him into the car, folding her hands in her lap with a stern mental command to them to stay still. Resolutely she kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, although she registered nothing of the streetscape until they arrived at an elderly Art Deco apartment building beside one of Auckland’s mid-city parks.

‘This isn’t your office,’ she said sharply.

He switched off the engine. ‘No.’

Just one word, but she sensed there was no moving him.

When she reached for her bag he said, ‘It’s all right where it is. I’ll take you home later.’

At her straight look he smiled, a cool, intimidating smile that pulled every tiny hair on her body on end. He was up to something—but what?

‘I’ll bring it anyway,’ she said evenly.

‘Then I’ll carry it.’ He hauled the bag out in one smooth, powerful movement.

The modernised lift whisked them up quickly and silently, but once inside Nick’s apartment Cat noted that the high ceilings and worldly charm had been left intact.

Nick ushered her into a huge sitting room that overlooked a sea of budding branches in the park. The usual municipal obsession with neat rows of flowers hadn’t prevailed there; instead, showered by soft pink petals from a cherry tree, a graceful marble goose acted as a fountain, standing in a pond bordered by clumps of irises and freesias and small, starry, silver-blue flowers.

Grass stretched to a line of oaks; a few weeks previously they’d exploded into huge lime-yellow ice-creams and were now settling down with a dignified, dark green mantle. Their branches stirred with austere beauty in the lazy wind that was all this unusually warm season could produce.

Just keep your cool, Cat told herself, swallowing to relieve the stress that had built up beneath her breastbone.

‘Can I get you something to drink?’ Nick asked.

‘No, thank you.’ Not even though her mouth and throat felt as dry as the Gobi Desert.

‘I’m thirsty, so excuse me,’ he said abruptly, and disappeared through a door.

Tensely she looked around the room. If Nick had chosen the furniture he’d made a good job. It suited him, the proportions matching both the big room and his height and presence, but the black leather chairs and sofas, the exquisite Persian rug and the stark abstracts on the wall, intimidated her.

This, she thought distractedly, was how children must feel—helpless, ineffectual in a huge adult world.

Well, small she might be, but ineffectual she was not. Squaring her shoulders, she marched across to the bookshelves, oddly cheered when she noted some well-thumbed favourites of her own.

She was glancing through one when Nick returned with a tray. Setting it down on the table, he said, ‘I made some for you too. Sit down and pour, and for heaven’s sake stop looking at me with the whites of your eyes showing. I’m not going to leap on you.’

With a distrustful glance, Cat put the book down and lowered herself onto a cold, smooth leather chair. At least the coffee gave her restless hands something to do. She poured his as he liked it, black and strong and fierce, and added a lot of milk to her own.

Nick had seated himself opposite, long legs stretched out. Accepting his cup, he asked, ‘Why did you go back to your maiden name?’

Startled, she kept her gaze on the milky surface of her coffee. ‘I wanted to.’

It was the wrong answer, but with Nick there were no right ones.

‘You still wear his ring on occasion.’ Smile hardening into contempt, his gold eyes flicked over the telltale lack of white skin on her bare finger. ‘No doubt only when it’s expedient to remind me that the man you married gave me a future.’

Shamed heat burned her cheeks; she’d used the ring as a talisman because it gave her the illusion of safety. ‘Then you should understand how I feel about Juana. Glen gave you a future; I want to do it for her.’

‘That’s very clever, Cat,’ he said softly. After a taut silence he went on, ‘I checked with the clinic. What whim persuaded you to take responsibility for the child?’

Filled with a strange reluctance, she muttered, ‘She only had an aunt—her mother’s sister Rosita, just fourteen. Her father had been killed by the insurgents and I don’t know what happened to the rest of her family. Rosita couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say.’

‘That hasn’t answered my question.’ When she didn’t go on he probed uncompromisingly, ‘What made the baby your responsibility?’

‘Rosita had no money and no way of earning any. They were refugees. I couldn’t just let the baby die when I knew she could be saved.’

He frowned. ‘How did you find out about her?’

‘I was there when she was born. I held her while the doctor tried to save her mother.’ She gave him a swift glance from beneath her lashes, but his face was stern and unreadable. ‘And she was special because she was born on the day my mother died. It seemed—significant, somehow. Symbolic.’

She waited for a sneer, for anger, but none came.

He was watching her through half-closed eyes, his mouth an unreadable line. ‘Do you want to adopt her?’

She shook her head. ‘Sister Bernadette convinced me she’ll do better in her own culture with an aunt who loves her. Juana is all that Rosita has left—the only thing she has to live for.’ Cat lifted her cup and drank some of the hot liquid, then set the cup down and looked him straight in the eye. ‘I want to make sure she has all the surgery she needs—the doctors in Brisbane said there’ll be at least a couple more operations, and she might need a dental plate too.’

‘How long will all this take?’

‘At least five years.’

‘A long-term commitment,’ he said coolly. ‘And after that?’

‘At the very least I’m going to make sure Rosita gets onto her feet somehow, so she can continue to care for Juana. Life for a girl with no family, no one to protect her, is difficult in Romit.’

‘So you’re planning the future of two girls?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

Silence hummed between them, heavy with unspoken thoughts. Nick said quietly, ‘In his will Glen made it impossible for me, as the trustee, to advance you any more than your yearly allowance.’

Cat bit back a protest; she’d been so shocked after Glen’s death that she hadn’t taken in much of what the solicitor had explained to her. Glen had always seen her as the naïve adolescent he’d swept off her feet, so his refusal to trust her didn’t surprise her as much as it dismayed her.

Nick said deliberately, ‘You could always ask me to help you.’

Why did suspicion darken her mind with ugly speed? ‘I have asked you. You’ve just refused.’

‘I can’t ignore Glen’s instructions. However, he trusted me to look after you.’ He looked down at the letter and her passport. ‘I could make you a personal loan. Or a gift.’

For a moment hope clutched her, but one glance at his hard, hunter’s face killed it. She said with icy, desperate precision, ‘For a price, no doubt. What do you want in return?’

‘Perhaps I don’t want anything,’ he said, his eyes gleaming with a predatory light.

She gave a cynical little laugh. ‘I doubt that very much. That’s not how things work.’

Unblinking, he surveyed her. ‘What are you prepared to give?’

More than anything she wanted to lick her dry lips, drink some more coffee to ease the passage of words through her arid throat. ‘I only give to the people I love,’ she said.

‘By your own admission, you’ve broken that rule twice. Three times if we accept that you didn’t love Glen when you married him.’

Colour burned her skin but she met his cold, golden gaze unwaveringly. ‘But I did love him.’ Because she’d been a starry-eyed innocent, dazzled and overwhelmed by Glen’s sophistication.

‘Setting aside your marriage to Glen, the other incidents were certainly errors of taste.’ His voice was level, almost amused, but each word flicked her on the raw. ‘After all, it’s not done to make passionate love to—’

‘We didn’t make passionate love—we kissed; that’s all,’ she interrupted, hot-faced and shamed. ‘And there were two of us—’

‘Oh, there were indeed two,’ he returned roughly. ‘You and me, kissing as though we wanted to make love right there and then, the day before you married Glen, and the day we buried him.’

Coffee splashed over the edge of the cup onto her hand; Cat dragged in a shuddering breath.

‘Have you scalded yourself?’ Nick demanded, leaping to his feet to crouch by her chair. ‘Let me see.’

He removed the coffee cup from her grip and set it down on the table. In spite of the sunny room ice froze Cat down to her bones.

‘Just as well you drink it with a lot of milk,’ he said, and lifted her stinging hand to his mouth as though he couldn’t stop himself.

Cat’s throat constricted. Dazed, she stared at him with dilating eyes, watching his lashes fall as his beautiful mouth touched the fragile skin of her wrist. Her fingers curled at the warmth of his mouth and sensation poured through her—hot, languid, remorseless as a river breaching its banks.

Shudders racked her body when she tried to pull away, but her strength had gone. She knew what he saw when he looked at her face—drowsy eyes and seeking, sensuous mouth—and she expected his slow, bitter smile. Hunger banished everything but a stark, stripped need; his angular features were stamped with it, the amber eyes smouldering, and his mouth—oh, God, his mouth…

She’d tried so hard to forget how it had felt on hers; for years she’d lied to herself, refused to accept that her desire for this man had never died. Unwanted and baseless, the treacherous physical attraction still burned inside her.

At eighteen she’d known too little of men to understand that Nick had been caught up in the same powerful attraction—until he’d kissed her and she’d gone up in flames, for the first time understanding the force of explosive sexual hunger.

Shocked and afraid, she’d turned her back on it, because she’d been naïvely certain it meant nothing compared to her respect and affection for Glen. During her marriage she’d banished Nick from her mind, only to crash and burn in the powerful force-field of that elemental hunger after Glen’s death. The kiss after his funeral had begun as an attempt to comfort Nick—and ended when he’d pushed her aside and walked white-faced out of the house.

Nick hated himself for those endless moments in each other’s arms. Cat understood; his regard for the man who’d given him his chance in life meant that there was no possibility of any future for them.

Not then, not ever.

Still with her hand against his mouth, Nick said harshly, ‘Cat.’

He stood up, pulling her with him, and kissed her, and again it was like being spun into some alternative reality where the only thing that counted was Nick’s mouth and his hard body against her, and the mingled scents of coffee and the musk of arousal.

And then she was free, clutching her shaking arms around her, and he was watching her with a guarded face, no expression on it at all.

‘Damn you,’ he said sardonically, ‘you still kiss like a virgin.’

‘And you,’ she hurled back, ‘still kiss as though you know exactly what you’re doing, as though it’s part of some plan.’

‘It was never my plan to want you. At first I told myself that it was that patrician little face, those impeccable manners, that background. Not much money, but birth and breeding by the century.’ His smile was cynical. ‘An untouchable princess, irresistible to a boy from the streets.’

She said shakily, ‘That’s incredibly offensive.’

‘But true.’ He turned away, reached for the coffee cup and pushed it towards her. A muscle flicked in his jaw, and leashed tension prowled through him like a baulked tiger. ‘Drink up.’

Her heart cramped. Ignoring the coffee, she started to leave. ‘This is getting us nowhere; I’d better go.’

He shrugged. ‘If you want that money, you’d better stay.’

Cat hesitated, hating this, hating him, but eventually she sat down again. She’d made herself responsible for Juana and she’d stick it out whatever it cost in pride.

Nick said with scathing honesty, ‘Can you look me in the face and tell me you don’t want me?’ He waited, and when she remained stubbornly silent he finished, ‘And that you don’t hate being imprisoned by such a degrading desire? You resent it as much as I do.’

Cat’s fingers tightened around the mug of coffee; any denial would be a lie. She lifted the cup to her mouth and drank the liquid, longing for the caffeine to kick in. She could do with some artificial support.

Nick let the silence stretch on until she said stiffly, ‘Wanting is not enough.’

He laughed without humour. ‘It’s all we’ve got, Cat.’

Nothing had changed.

All they had in common was this driving sexual urge and money, she thought distastefully, trying to banish the image of Juana’s face from her mind, because the sex would be wonderful, and the money would give the child a future.

She watched the coffee swirl as she turned the cup back and forth. Scraps of thoughts jostled and pushed in her brain, coloured by emotion’s false hues, patternless and inchoate until one gained form, tantalising her into wondering if this was a chance to make Nick see her as she really was…

Seductive, alluring, the possibility filled her mind, banishing prosaic common sense.

Nick paced over to the window and stood staring out at the park, completely at home in the room he’d earned with determination and discipline and a huge expenditure of energy. From somewhere outside a horn tooted, followed almost immediately by the clear, liquid call of a thrush.

He said remotely, ‘I’d give you fidelity, but I’d expect it too.’

Did he know Glen had been unfaithful, the first time within a year of their marriage when she’d insisted on going to university? Glen hadn’t been a good loser.

Nick turned and looked at her, amber eyes missing nothing.

‘No,’ she said aloud, making up her mind in a flash of anger. She might have developed a taste for danger, but she was worth more than this! ‘I won’t have an affair with you, Nick, so that you can get me out of your system. I’m not some kind of disease you can inoculate yourself against. Yes, I want you, but I’m not going to sleep with you to scratch an itch that won’t go away. I can do without you. I’m making a good life for myself; I’m settled and contented—’

‘Contented!’ He came across and took the mug from her, setting it down on the table. ‘Contentment is for cows!’ Eyes narrowed and hard and bright, he touched her face, long fingers stroking her cheek, easing down the line of her throat. ‘You’re so lovely,’ he said, his voice dropping several notes, ‘and when you smile you light up the world. Smile for me, Cat.’

His words melted her defences like flames on ice. Although she fought it, the beginnings of a fugitive smile curled her lips.

‘And when you say my name,’ he murmured, drawing her closer, ‘it sounds like “I want you”. I like to hear you say it, like the way you look at me when you think I can’t see you…’

He bent his head until his mouth was a fraction away from hers and she could feel the words as he said them. ‘The tiny flutter in your throat drives me crazy, and so does the colour that stains your skin, the way those exotic eyes go heavy and smoky and seductive when you look at me….’

By then she was desperate for him, her body so keenly attuned to his voice, to the faint fragrance that was his alone, to the shimmering sexual aura surrounding them, that she couldn’t have refused the kiss.

Stark self-preservation clamped her eyes shut, and once she’d blocked out his face she could summon the energy to say hoarsely, ‘I will not prostitute myself, not even to help Juana.’

‘Why not? You prostituted yourself for your mother.’

Eyes flying open in shock, she whispered, ‘I did not!’ As his brows lifted she said lamely, ‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘If she hadn’t suffered from a heart complaint that meant she needed twenty-four-hour care, would you have married Glen?’ Nick’s voice was remote, his cloak of control pulled around him so that she could no longer guess at the emotions that lay beneath. He dropped his hand and stepped back, watching her with the merciless calculation of an enemy.

‘If your father hadn’t just died, leaving you penniless, would you have married Glen?’ he probed unsparingly. ‘You were alone and adrift, with a sick mother, no house, no job, and, thanks to some pretty antiquated ideas of child-rearing, no idea of how to find anything that would pay more than the most basic wage. When Glen came along like a slightly tarnished knight waving a chequebook, you saw deliverance and you couldn’t marry him fast enough.’

She said indistinctly, ‘My reasons for marrying him are none of your business.’

‘Would you have left him at the altar if I’d offered marriage, Cat?’ he asked cruelly. ‘Or perhaps you’d have found the offer of money more attractive.’

She had no answer. When he’d asked her to cancel the wedding he’d offered her nothing. The prospect of failing her mother, of betraying Glen, had filled her with appalled apprehension.

And she had really believed that she loved Glen.

‘No,’ he said with a smile that chilled her soul, ‘of course you wouldn’t have. I didn’t have half the money he had.’

In a quick, acid voice she returned, ‘None of this matters now. My mother’s dead, and Glen is too. Forget I asked for the money, all right? Forget I came to see you. Make things easier for both of us and pretend I’m still on Romit.’

Desperately she headed for the door.

But before she got there Nick caught her by the arm, swinging her around to face him, the gypsyish face taut with arrogant anger. ‘What have you spent your income from the trust on? Why are you living in a hovel with five other students? Why are you working in a backstreet restaurant to put yourself through university?’

‘You have been busy spying since I saw you last!’ She’d expected him to check out her time in Romit, but the discovery that he’d run a survey on her since she’d got back to Auckland fuelled a feverish rage.

So angry that she could have slapped his face, she grabbed his shoulders and shook him. It was like trying to move a kauri, the largest tree in the southern hemisphere. ‘Keep out of my life, Nick.’

‘You invited me back into it.’ But his voice had changed—become deeper, less furious.

The fingers around her arm eased their grip and slid up to her shoulder just as Cat realised that she’d got herself into an extremely perilous situation. Run! prudence yelled, but she couldn’t let him go. Instead her hands moulded the sleek, firm muscles across his shoulders.

Eyes glinting, he said, ‘You made the first move, Cat,’ and kissed her, and this time she went under like a stone dropped into still, deep waters.

Always previously there had been anger and a driving desperation in his kiss; this time the anger was muted, soon replaced by a hunger that roused both urgency and an avid need—a potent, ferocious combination against which she had no defences.

Sensation tore through her; in a surrender as symbolic as it was unconscious, she opened her mouth to his, shuddering with pleasure when he accepted her yielding response and plundered the innermost reaches of her mouth, his arms tightening around her as he picked her up.

His mouth branded the length of her throat, summoning a raging tempest from every part of her singing, exultant body. Suddenly the progression from desire to passion, and thence to fulfilment seemed so simple, so natural and inevitable, tempting Cat unbearably with its honeyed promise of rapture.

His face against her throat was hot, his mouth demanding, yet she had never felt so safe, she thought dazedly, registering with a violent shock the touch of his hand on her breast, confident, overpoweringly erotic.

She shivered as passion needled exquisitely through her; expectant, breathless, she waited while he cupped the gentle curves.

And she knew she had to stop it now, while there was still time.

‘Cat,’ he muttered, the word slurred and heavy.

Summoning every ounce of will-power, she put her hands on either side of his face, lifting it until she could meet his eyes. ‘No,’ she said as distinctly as she could.

And watched helplessly as icy self-control drowned the golden turbulence of his eyes. He set her on her feet and stepped back, looking down at his hands as though they had betrayed him.

Grief proved greater temptation even than desire; shivering, she stopped herself swaying towards him.

‘It won’t work,’ she said raggedly, stepping out of the danger zone. ‘I’m going home.’

‘I’ll take you.’ He ignored her headshake, picking up her bag.

Silently Cat went with him down to the car. She didn’t give him her address, and he didn’t ask; he drove straight to one of the few old houses in the inner city still divided into students’ apartments. Cheap, dilapidated, it was close to the university and the restaurant she worked in at night.

‘Did you know this place is due for demolition?’ he asked as he braked outside it.

‘Something else your spy discovered? Yes, I knew.’ His dark frustration beat at her as she slid out of the car and pulled her bag out of the back. ‘Goodbye, Nick,’ she said in a calm voice that hid the painful thudding of her heart.

He didn’t start the car until she looked out from her bedroom window.

Whenever she’d seen him she’d watched Nick secretly, imprinting on her too-susceptible heart the exact shade of his eyes, the way his lean cheek creased when he smiled, the sheer male grace with which he walked, the inborn aura of power that shimmered around him.

Yet somehow she’d managed to convince herself that her absorption meant nothing. She’d tried so hard to be a good wife that she’d lost herself, concealing the real Cat beneath the glossy surface of Glen’s wife.

How foolishly naïve she’d been. Impressed, secretly proud that someone like Glen could fall in love with her, she’d let herself be persuaded into a marriage that had been fake from the moment she’d seen Nick. Would she have abandoned Glen if Nick had made some move towards her, had followed up on the potent attraction that spun itself between them? If he’d claimed her instead of standing back that day at the hotel?

One hand clenched at her side, she turned away from the window. She’d never know.