A Love Untamed

And then heavy steps came pounding up the stairs and there he was, standing right in front of her—the very devil indeed.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_90db919b-92ae-556e-822f-ef39270b37b0)

WILD black hair, penetrating black eyes, a bushy black beard. He was huge, looming over her, filling the small room with his bulk and the sense of dire threat. The very air shivered with it. As did her body. He wore faded jeans, disreputable running shoes and a wrinkled denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, revealing brown, muscled arms. All of him was big and strong, emanating a primitive masculine power and virility.

However, she saw no horns, no fangs or whatever else devils were supposed to have. Neither did she see a gun or knife. He stared down at her with his black devil eyes.

This was not a comfortable moment. Standing there barefoot wearing nothing but a long white nightgown, her hair loose, she was not an image radiating power and control, she was quite sure. She must look like a terrified heroine in a Gothic novel. Petrified, she continued to stare at him. It did not bear considering what he might be contemplating as his dark eyes moved over her from top to bottom.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

It was the tone of his voice that got her lungs going again. There was no threat or lechery in that deep voice, merely astonishment. This was extremely reassuring. Astonishment she could deal with. Astonishment was good.

She swallowed, then straightened her back, stretching as far as her meagre five feet four would allow, and put her hands on her hips.

‘Who the hell are you?’ she demanded.

His bushy brows shot up. ‘I believe I asked the question first, angel.’

Angel. And that from the devil. Oh, God.

Her legs began to shake. ‘I own this house and I want you out.’ Her heart was racing but her voice was steady, which was nothing short of a miracle. However, he seemed not impressed.

His brows rose up even further. ‘You own this house? I don’t know where you get that idea. The house is mine.’ He reached into his pocket and fished out a key. ’see? This is my key. It fits very nicely into the lock in the door of my house.’ The hand dangling the key in front of her was big and brown and very strong. The other one was a perfect match. Hands that had seen hard physical labour. Her stomach churned.

‘You may have a key, but I have a deed. The closing was this afternoon. The house is mine—all legal and above board. I signed all sorts of documents and the lawyers signed all sorts of documents and I wrote big cheques and then we all shook hands and smiled a lot. That’s how it’s done when you buy a house.’ Oh, shut up! she said to herself. She always talked too much, but when she was nervous she positively gushed.

‘You must have the wrong house.’

’that’s crazy! Of course I don’t have the wrong house! I bought this one.’

He frowned, then shrugged, raking a hand through his unruly hair. ‘I’m not going to stand here and pursue a pointless argument with a woman in her nightgown. I’ll find a way to disabuse you of your illusions tomorrow. What I need now is sleep.’

His arrogance infuriated her and she clenched her teeth hard. However, one thing she was noticing: in spite of his disreputable appearance, he spoke in complete sentences and his English sounded educated. Was this reassuring? Did it mean anything? Probably not a thing.

She willed her legs to stop trembling. ‘You’re not sleeping here,’ she said with a conviction she didn’t feel. ‘Find yourself a hotel. There’s a country inn five miles down the road. It’s a lovely place, all white with red shutters, and the rooms have four-poster beds in them and you’ll be perfectly comfortable there and…’ She stopped herself. Here she was doing it again.

He rubbed his beard. ‘It appears to me that you don’t understand,’ he said patiently, as if he were talking to a dimwitted child. ‘Let me be more clear: I’m not going anywhere. This is my house, so you should leave and find yourself a room in the inn. However, I don’t turn women in their nightgowns out into the street at this hour, so be my guest and stay the night.’

The audacity of the man! ‘I’ll call the police,’ she said between clenched teeth.

An amused little grin curved his mouth. He stroked his beard thoughtfully. ‘Oh, yes, good old Chuckie,’ he said lazily. ’sure, go ahead. And while you’ve got him on the line, tell him I won the bet and he owes me a hundred bucks.’

Her heart sank. There went that idea. Maybe he and Chuckie the sheriff were partners in crime. These things happened. You heard about it on TV: the nation’s finest seduced by the rewards of crime. It was a disgrace. Calling Chuckie would obviously do no good. Now what? She couldn’t think of a thing.

The man turned around. ‘I’m going to sleep. Goodnight, angel.’ And with that he strode out of the room. She didn’t hear him go down the stairs, and when all became quiet and her legs were more steady, she gathered enough courage to find out where he’d parked himself.

She discovered him in one of the other bedrooms. He lay sprawled on top of the big double bed, fully clothed and out cold. He had taken off his Nikes and socks, and that was about it. Like the rest of him, his feet looked big.

It was easy to see that neither flood, hurricane nor earthquake was going to move this man. He was dead to the world and by the looks of it he was going to stay that way for a while. Which meant she was going to be safe for a while.

She looked at the comatose shape and felt a shiver go down her spine. Where had he come from? Maybe he’d been driving for a long time. Maybe he had escaped from prison, stolen a car…Maybe she should have a look at the car, check out the licence plates.

She tiptoed down the stairs, although there was no need to be so quiet. Her footsteps weren’t going to wake him out of his stupor. In the hall by the front door she saw a huge duffel bag with airline tags. United Airlines. He’d arrived at Washington Dulles, but he could have come from anywhere. The name tag was a coded American Express affair that would only reveal its secrets to a computer. Then she noticed the papers sticking out of a side-pocket. Ticket carbons? It would supply the passenger’s name and flight information. She hesitated.

Why had the gods burdened her with an oversupply of principles? She didn’t snoop in other people’s drawers and she didn’t peep into their bathroom medicine cabinets. She didn’t cheat on her taxes. She didn’t steal ashtrays from hotel rooms; she didn’t even take the little soaps and bottles of shampoo. And she never lied. Well, almost never.

She did not go through other people’s papers, either.

She stared at the corner of grey peeping out from the duffel-bag pocket.

Well, she had the right, didn’t she? Shouldn’t she know the identity of a stranger who’d forced himself into her house and refused to leave? A dangerous-looking stranger now asleep under her roof?

Of course she did.

She went down on her knees, took the oblong booklet out of the pocket and leafed through the flimsy carbons, peering hard at the faint lettering to decipher it. Clint Bracamonte, it said. It seemed to fit him. He certainly didn’t look like a Jimmy Johnson.

It took a few minutes to piece together his itinerary from the collection of ticket carbons, but then she had it and it made her heart beat faster—not with fear this time, but from pure excitement.

Balikpapan-Jakarta-Hong Kong-San Francisco-Washington DC.

Balikpapan! Balikpapan was a town in the Indonesian province of Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, a wild place full of jungle and rough rivers and tiny villages and tribal people living traditional lives. She knew her geography, which was not so surprising since she had lived in many places in the world due to a globetrotting father who was a career diplomat. They’d resided in Jakarta, Indonesia, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in Dares Salaam, Tanzania, in Geneva, Switzerland, and other places of which she had no memory because she’d been too young.

She put the papers back in the duffel-bag pocket and straightened. She opened the heavy door. The hinges squealed in agony and she winced at the sound. The perfumy fragrance of lilacs greeted her. She stepped on to the front porch and the old wood creaked under her feet. Everything was making noise, setting her nerves on edge. She took a look at the car. As expected, it was a rental he’d procured at the airport, a silver-grey Ford Taurus.

She shivered in the cold night air and went back into the house, tiptoed up to her own bedroom and sat on the side of the bed. Jack would come early tomorrow morning. For now she should just go to bed. Mr Bracamonte had flown straight from Balikpapan to Washington without a stopover—two days without sleep, across the international date line and many time zones, his body clock gone haywire. He wasn’t going to wake up for a while.

Why did he think the house was his? It was crazy, impossible. She couldn’t think. She was simply too tired. A long afternoon of hard physical labour topped off with a big dose of heart-stopping terror tended to be exhausting.

She crawled into the sleeping-bag and closed her eyes. She should have lain awake anxious and afraid, but, strange as it might seem, she didn’t. She drifted right off and slept like a baby.

* * *

She awoke with the birds, which sang euphorically in the trees. She’d left the window open and the April morning was glorious, the air crisp like chilled champagne. For a moment she luxuriated in a sense of wellbeing—a very short moment, because her mind suddenly produced the image of the dark stranger who’d found his way into the house late last night. Black eyes, black hair, black beard.

Oh, God. She closed her eyes. Well, she was alive and well and she hadn’t even had to employ her meagre karate skills.

She locked the bathroom door and had a quick shower, then dressed in jeans and a bright red cotton sweater. Red was good. It made a statement. It showed confidence and power. She had a hunch she’d need some once Clint Bracamonte was awake. Hopefully that wouldn’t be until Jack had arrived.

She put on socks and trainers and tied her hair back in a ponytail and made up her face. It was no genetic accident that she had straight black hair and brown eyes. She was American by upbringing and citizenship, but her ancestral background sported Greeks, Italians, Hungarians, and even an outcast gypsy woman who’d had the audacity to fall in love with a gorgio. Her mother had researched the family tree with true passion, travelling to Europe to find out as much as she could, discovering long-lost relatives—a dentist, a goatherd, a butcher, a housewife, and, lo and behold, a toothless Greek great-great-grandma of one hundred and seven wearing black, totally lucid and not about to depart. She drank two shots of ouzo every day.

The family tree revealed many things. It was not so strange that her dearest passion was travel: gypsy genes. Also, she loved colourful clothes and dangling earrings, and she’d discovered a taste for ouzo. Her friends insisted it had to be genetic, because how else was it possible to like that vile stuff?

Quietly she slipped down the stairs into the kitchen, only to find that she had miscalculated. The man was standing by the sink, filling the kettle. The same huge male that had walked into her house last night—black eyes, black hair, but minus the bushy black beard. Her heart turned over. He looked fantastic. She couldn’t help thinking it. It was the truth. The evil had gone out of his appearance and what was left was a lot of very disturbing male sex appeal. He plunked the kettle on the stove and turned on the burner.

‘Well, good morning,’ he said, noticing her stand by the door.

‘Good morning,’ she returned, feeling the very air around her quiver with sudden tension.