Fugitive Bride

For ages he just sat there and stared at the paper. When his hands started shaking, he crumpled the note into a crushed ball and leapt to his feet, his face flushing angrily.

‘You read this?’ he growled, glaring at Enid.

She nodded.

He swore, then whirled to stalk over to the far window which overlooked the Brisbane river. But he didn’t look at the view. With hands still shaking, he unfolded the crushed note and read it again.

Suddenly he spun back to face Enid, his blue eyes glittering as they did when he got the bit between his teeth over something and was about to run with it.

‘Do you have the envelope this came in?’

Enid nodded again, but she was quaking in her sensible shoes. One look at that envelope and he might question her discretion in opening it.

‘Get it for me,’ he snapped. ‘And get Burt Lathom on the phone.’

Enid’s eyes rounded. Burt Lathom was a private investigator Gerard used sometimes when he needed to find some dirt on one of his competitors. The man was thorough and usually came through with the goods.

‘Well, don’t just stand there gawking at me,’ Gerard snarled. ‘That won’t bring Leah back, will it?’

‘But… she said she didn’t want to come back,’ Enid was driven to protest for a fellow female.

‘The only thing Leah wants,’ Gerard ground out with his usual one-eyed stubbornness, ‘is to be my wife. Unfortunately, she has totally misunderstood some things I said to a man who was distressed over his divorce at the time. When Burt finds her I’ll make her see that. Now hop to it, woman. Time is a-wasting. I have an important business dinner this coming Saturday night and my wife is going to be there, by my side, as usual!’

Enid had no choice but to do as she was told, but she did so resentfully, hoping all the while that Burt Lathom would be unsuccessful. Leah was a sweet girl and deserved better than to be hoodwinked by the likes of Gerard Woodward.

Handsome he might be. And clever. And rich. But there wasn’t a soft-hearted cell in his entire body. He was a ruthless predator who was incapable of really loving a woman. He was a user and a manipulator. A conscienceless cynic.

Unfortunately, Leah loved him. Even Enid had seen that. She fairly glowed whenever he looked at her. In all likelihood she still loved him, despite that letter.

Enid prayed Gerard would never find his fugitive bride. For God knows what would happen to her, if and when he did.

CHAPTER ONE

SIX months.

Leah leant against the mast of the old pearling lugger, dragged in a deep breath of sea air, then let it out slowly.

Six months…

Time to relax at last, perhaps? Time to stop looking over her shoulder and expecting Gerard to be standing there?

He hadn’t found her yet.

Which still surprised her.

Admittedly, she’d planned her escape well, had known how imperative it was not to leave anything for him to go on. She’d taken nothing which belonged to her life as Mrs Gerard Woodward. Not her gleaming white Porsche. None of the glamorous clothes hanging in her massive walk-in wardrobe. Certainly none of her credit cards.

Only cash. And then only as much as she needed.

Leah had wanted nothing from her marriage except escape.

She hadn’t gone home to Hidden Bay, not even for a moment, because that would have been the first place Gerard would look. She’d fled to Townsville where her brothers had organised for her to help a friend take a racing boat to Indonesia, after which she’d crewed on another racing boat, returning it to its rich owners on the Riviera.

Now she was back in Australia, but in a place Gerard would not think to look.

Leah closed her eyes momentarily, a tremor racing through her. She might have physically escaped, but it would be a long time before she found emotional escape. Gerard was out of sight, but would he ever be dispelled from her mind? Or ejected from her traitorous body?

She still dreamt of him at night, disturbing dreams in which Gerard was inevitably making love to her as only he could. She would always wake just as the act was being consummated, leaving her hot and trembling from a desire as real as the dream had seemed.

How long, she agonised, before the fires Gerard had carefully and callously stoked within her were extinguished? How long before she stopped needing what he’d made her addicted to? Him, every night in her bed. Him, making her respond, even when she didn’t want to.

Leah shuddered at the memory of her appalling weakness for the man, even after her shocking discovery that Sunday.

How could she have let him make love to her that night when she’d known what he was? Worse, how could she have found pleasure in it?

She shuddered again, despising herself anew. It was wicked for a man to have such power over a woman. There again, Gerard was wicked.

Leah sighed. He’d looked anything but wicked that day eighteen months ago when he’d come striding down the pier at Hidden Bay, wearing dazzlingly white shorts and T-shirt, perfect foils for his deeply olive skin and jet-black hair. Perfect vehicles to display his tall, superbly muscled body.

Leah was not to learn till after their marriage how hard Gerard worked on that body, witnessing herself the gruelling daily weight routine he put himself through in his private gym to achieve such physical perfection.

He didn’t have to work on his face, however. It had been born perfect, with classically sculptured features, a mouth to die for and come-to-bed blue eyes.

Leah would never forget the instant lurching in her stomach when she’d looked up and seen that handsome face for the first time…

‘Hi, there,’ he said, coming to a halt near the prow of her brothers’ fishing charter boat and giving her a very slow and sexually charged once-over. ‘You for hire, honey?’

She just gaped at him, colour flooding up her throat and into her cheeks.

‘The boat, darling,’ he drawled, his eyes gleaming with wry amusement. ‘I meant the boat.’

‘Oh.’ She straightened from where she’d been swabbing the deck with a mop and bucket.

Of course he meant the boat! How could she have possibly imagined a man like him meant otherwise, even for a moment? Good grief, she must look a sight, with perspiration running down her face, her hair half falling down, and her shorts and top soggy from the water she’d been sloshing around in somewhat of a temper.

‘Hot and bothered’ did not begin to describe her at that moment, her discomfort not helped by this amazingly good-looking man who kept staring at her.

Not at her flushed face, however. At her…

A panicky downward glance confirmed that one of her braless breasts was clearly outlined against a patch of damp cotton, the startlingly erect nipple making a real exhibition of itself.

Embarrassment snapped Leah’s hands together across her chest, the inadequately shielding handle of the mop clasped between them.

‘Yes, it is,’ she said, hating her high-pitched voice. ‘But Mike and Pete aren’t here at the moment.’

‘Mike and Pete?’

Leah gulped down the lump in her throat and gathered a modicum of composure. ‘My brothers. They own the boat. They should be back soon. They went trail-bike riding with some mates early this morning.’ Which was the only time to go, before the heat of the day. If living on the Queensland coast had one major drawback it was the sometimes debilitating humidity.