A Haunting Obsession

Something strangely compelling pulled Bonnie down till she was also sitting there, her back against the wooden window-frame, her green eyes glazing as they travelled along the same path those weary old eyes had travelled... into the past.

Only this time the past was Bonnie’s...

Keith had been getting ready for work that final day, buttoning up his policeman’s uniform, looking as handsome and dashing as ever. She’d watched him from where she lay, huddled up under the sheets, still not able to believe what had happened the night before.

It wasn’t that Keith had never hit her before. He had. But only with his hand, and never more than once, or twice.

But last night...

Oh, God, she could hardly bear to remember. The pain had been excruciating. It was still excruciating.

When he came over and sat down on the side of the bed, she couldn’t help cringing away from him.

‘Don’t be like that, Bonnie,’ he reproached. ‘It wasn’t my fault, you know. You made me lose my temper. Why didn’t you just tell me where you went yesterday in the first place? I knew you weren’t shopping. There were too many miles on the speedometer. You should have admitted you’d driven up to Morriset to visit your sister in the first place. I don’t mind you visiting Louise, as long as you ask permission first. If you’d done that, there would have been no reason for you to lie, and no reason for me to punish you for it.’

Bonnie stared at him, her head dizzy with fear.

‘Promise me you’ll ask permission next time,’ he said, cupping her chin and squeezing tight.

Her heart began to thud.

‘I want to hear you say it, Bonnie,’ he snarled. ‘Say, I promise I will ask permission next time.’

‘I... I promise I’ll ask permission next time,’ she choked out, her throat dry, her tongue thick.

‘Good girl.’

When he lowered his mouth to give her an obscenely deep kiss, his hands slipping under the sheets to play with her breasts at the same time, she was almost sick. When his mouth lifted and he began pinching one of her nipples, watching coldly while the pain registered in her eyes, she wanted to kill him.

‘Just a little reminder of what you can expect if you lie to me again,’ he warned before standing up abruptly and striding from the room. ‘Make sure you’re here when I get home,’ he called back over his shoulder.

She would never know if she would have been home at the end of that day, because Keith never came home. He was killed that morning, during a car chase, at an intersection. One of his colleagues called at the house soon afterwards to give her the bad news. He thought her tears were tears of grief, but he was wrong. They were tears of relief.

CHAPTER THREE

JORDAN studied the rough map that the chap at Coastal Properties had given him before gunning the engine of his car and driving off in search of the increasingly enigmatic Mrs Merrick.

His disappointment when he’d found out she wasn’t in the office had been sharp. But his unexpectedly early arrival had drawn some interesting information which he might not otherwise have gleaned about the woman.

Her dashing young colleague had not hidden his contempt for her business ethics, suggesting with a smirk that Jordan was a very lucky man to have someone like Mrs Merrick ‘handle’ him. Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.

The various implications would have been clear to a brain-dead moron. A queen’s counsel certainly did not need to have it beaten into his head with a hammer.

Mrs Merrick, in her workmate’s opinion, was obviously not above using her physical assets when trying to make a sale. Jordan wasn’t sure if he was repelled or excited by that thought. It would seem likely that the lady must have some special assets worth trading on if she did business that way. In his experience, females with lax morals were pretty well always easy on the eye.

Yet tramps had never held any fascination for him. And he’d come across a good few in his thirty-six years.

If she was a tramp, that was. He’d found that people eager to offer unsought-after information about others were often lying. Or at least exaggerating. He resolved to keep an open mind on the subject of Mrs Merrick’s morals.

It took him a good ten minutes to find the dirt road, having driven right past it the first time. His patience was wearing thin by the time he made it down the rough track and up to what must have been the weirdest, ugliest old house he had ever seen. Parking next to a green Falcon, he climbed out, did up his suit jacket and dragged in a deep breath.

The moment of truth had come...

Bonnie sighed softly as she sat on in that room of dreams, mindless of time passing. It was as if she had entered another world where time stood still, where people could rest a while before picking up the strands of their lives again.

What first roused her from her trance-like state? Was it a sound, or the draught that suddenly chilled her legs? She stiffened in the window-seat, her eyelids fluttering nervously as they became fixed on the open doorway. Her ears strained to catch any more sounds but instantly all was very, very quiet.

Then she heard them. Unmistakable footsteps on the stairs, coming closer...closer...each soft thud a warning for her to move, to get up, to investigate. Her eyes grew wider as the footsteps reached the top of the stairs, turned, then moved inexorably towards the nursery. Her heart began hammering wildly against her chest.

When a tall, dark figure loomed into the dimly lit rectangle that was the doorway, even her breathing ceased. All she could do was stare, her eyes round, her lips parted. Common sense told her this was not some ghost, come to haunt her. But her mind was too far from reality to grasp that fact sufficiently, to act upon it. And so she sat frozen on that window-seat, struggling to get some breath back into her stunned body.

Jordan could do nothing but stare, every muscle within his body having gone rigid with shock.

Dear God...

He’d expected a beauty of some sort, especially after his encounter with that chap from the office. But his mental picture of Mrs Merrick had shifted from a classy, sleek-haired brunette to a cheap, brassy blond. He certainly hadn’t been expecting an angel.

Yet that was exactly what she looked like sitting there in the sunlight... a gloriously golden angel. His breath caught in his throat as she lifted her chin slightly, and the rays of the sun caused a halo effect behind her head.

He took a startled step forward, a shift in the light allowing him to focus on the details of her face. Once again, he had to smother a gasp of shock. For there was nothing angelic about that face.

Oh, it was lovely all right. Exquisitely so. But there was something about those widely spaced green eyes and sinfully lush mouth which made one think of hell, not heaven, sin, not virtue, temptation, not restraint.

Suddenly, he wanted to pull her to her feet, drag her into his arms and bury his face into everything she was...and promised to be...from her hair to her breasts to her...

When the stranger took an abrupt step forward and his facial features broke into the light, Bonnie drew in a sharp breath.

Dear heaven, she thought shakily. She had come across a couple of exceptionally good-looking men in her life—her husband had been one of them—but this was something else. This man gave tall, dark and handsome new meaning.

But it wasn’t just his looks that held her momentarily captive. There was an intensity about him, especially in those deeply set dark eyes which were at that moment locked on her own. She could not stop staring at him. Neither could she find her voice. The seconds ticked away and the room started to swim around her. She tried to break her eyes away, but could not seem to find the strength, or will-power.

‘Mrs Merrick from Coastal Properties, I presume,’ the object of her staring said at last in a strangely cold voice.

It was enough to snap Bonnie out of herself, though not with as much instant composure as she would have liked.

‘Yes...yes...that’s right...that’s me,’ she said, slipping from the window-seat on to slightly numb feet. When a long golden curl came loose to fall across her right eye, she quickly looped it back behind her ear and drew in a deep, steadying breath.

‘And who might you be?’ she returned, hoping she sounded a darn sight calmer than she felt. Her rattled brain struggled to find the identity of this man who not only knew her name and place of employment, but who felt he had the right to walk into this house uninvited and unannounced.

Inspiration struck in a rush. ‘Oh, of course!’ she exclaimed ‘You must be Mrs McClelland’s nephew.’

The handsome stranger made no attempt to confirm this guess, or to come further forward. He slid his hands into the trouser pockets of his navy pin-striped suit and proceeded to survey her with unnerving attention to detail, his eyes sweeping slowly down her body, lingering on where her cream jacket was lying open at the front.

Bonnie’s chest tightened with dismay. It took all of her self-control not to grab the lapels of her jacket and hold the garment defensively closed across her chest.

For she wasn’t wearing a bra.

Frankly, she never wore one if she was wearing a suit with a lined jacket, simply because she looked less busty without one. Since she normally never undid her jacket at work, no one ever noticed. All she had to remember to do was not walk too fast. And what woman did that in high heels?