A Forbidden Desire

Like the faint scent of her skin—pure essence of enchantment, he thought grimly.

Like the brush of her breasts across his chest, and the sleek strength of her long legs as they negotiated an elderly couple enjoying themselves enormously doing what looked like a forties jitterbug.

Anger—sheer and hot and potent—only fuelled his runaway response. Of all things, he despised being at the mercy of his emotions; it had been five years since he’d felt such an elemental hunger, and even then he hadn’t been tormented by this intense immediacy, this compulsion.

Thank God he was leaving tomorrow. Once back in New Zealand and deprived of nourishment, this obsession would starve and he’d be his own man again.

CHAPTER ONE

‘MY COUSIN Paul,’ Gerard said in his pedantic way, ‘is the only man I’ve ever known to decide that if he couldn’t have the woman he loved he’d have no other.’

To hide her astonishment Jacinta Lyttelton gazed around Auckland’s busy airport lounge. ‘Really?’

Gerard sighed. ‘Yes. Aura was exquisite, and utterly charming. They were the perfect match but she ran away with his best friend only days before the wedding.’

‘Then they couldn’t have been a perfect match,’ Jacinta pointed out, smiling a little to show she was joking. During the nine months she’d known Gerard she’d learned that he needed such clues. He was a dear, kind man, but he didn’t have much of a sense of humour.

‘I don’t know what she saw in Flint Jansen,’ Gerard pursued, surprising her because he didn’t normally gossip. Perhaps he thought some background information might smooth her way with his cousin. ‘He was—I suppose he still is—a big, tough, dangerous man, bulldozing his way through life, hard-bitten enough to deal with anything that came his way. He was some sort of troubleshooter for one of the big corporations. Yet he was Paul’s best friend right from school, and Paul is a very urbane man, worldly and cosmopolitan—a lawyer.’

Jacinta nodded politely. Perhaps Aura Whoever-she’d-been liked rough trade. ‘Friendship can be just as mysterious as love. Your cousin and Flint must have had something in common for it to last so long.’

The same taste in women, to start with!

Her eyes followed a small Japanese child, fragile and solemn but clearly at home in such surroundings, her hand lost in that of her mother.

My biological clock, Jacinta thought wryly, must be ticking away. Twenty-nine wasn’t over the hill, but occasionally she was oppressed by a feeling of being shunted quietly out of the mainstream, banished to float peacefully and dully in a backwater.

‘I could never understand it,’ Gerard said, for the fourth time turning the label on his cabin bag to check that he’d addressed it. ‘She and Paul looked wonderful together and he worshipped her, whereas Flint—oh, well, it doesn’t matter, but the whole sordid episode was incredibly hard on Paul.’

Being jilted would be incredibly hard on anyone. Jacinta nodded sympathetically

Gerard frowned. ‘He had to pick up the pieces of his life with everyone knowing and pitying him—and Paul is a proud man. He sold the house he and Aura were going to live in and bought Waitapu as a refuge—I suppose he thought he’d get some peace half an hour’s drive north of Auckland—but then Flint and Aura settled only about twenty minutes away! In a vineyard!’

Jacinta composed her face into a sympathetic expression. Gerard’s loyalty did him credit, and this wasn’t the time to tell him that things had changed. Nowadays guilty couples didn’t retreat to some far-flung part of the world and live in abject, if happy, retirement

‘When did this all happen?’ she asked.

‘Almost six years ago,’ Gerard said in a mournful tone, fiddling with his boarding pass and passport.

Almost six years! Jacinta said mischievously, ‘What about that exquisitely beautiful woman you pointed out to me in Ponsonby a couple of months ago? You didn’t exactly say so, but you implied that she and Paul are very good friends.’

Gerard blinked and stood up. ‘He’s a normal man,’ he said austerely, ‘but I doubt very much whether Paul intends to marry her. She’s an actress.’

As well as being kind, loyal and pedantic, it appeared that Gerard was a snob.

A voice on the communications system announced that passengers for Air New Zealand’s flight from Auckland to Los Angeles should make their way through the departure gate.

Gerard bent down and picked up his bag. ‘So don’t go falling in love with him,’ he directed half seriously. ‘Women do, and although he doesn’t like hurting people he’s broken hearts these last five years. Aura’s defection killed some essential compassion in him, I think.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Jacinta said dryly. ‘I’m not planning to fall in love.’

‘Not until you’ve finished your Masters,’ he said, and to her astonishment bestowed a swift peck on her cheek. ‘I’d better go.’

She hoped she’d concealed her startled response. ‘Have a great trip, and I hope your research goes well.’

‘It will, but thank you. Enjoy the summer,’ he said, ‘and work out exactly what you want to do for your thesis. Have you got the books?’

‘Yes, and your list of suggestions to mull over.’

He nodded and turned away, tall, slightly stooped, his fair hair shining in the lights. Watching as he made his way through the people, Jacinta thought he always seemed out of place except when he was lecturing. Anyone looking at him would immediately pick him as an academic. If his projected book was a success he might turn out to be one of the youngest history professors in the country.

At the gate he turned and waved. Smiling, she waved back, waiting until he’d disappeared before turning to go down the escalator to the car park.

An hour and a half later she opened the car door just a hundred metres from a glorious beach, and unfurled her long, thin body and legs.

Sun-warmed, salt-tanged, the air slid into her lungs—smooth as wine and just as heady. The big grey roof of a house loomed above the dark barrier of a high, clipped hedge—Cape honeysuckle, she noted, eyeing the orange flowers—and the lazy mew of a gull smoothed across the mellow sky.

New Zealand in summer; for the first time in years, anticipation coiled indolently through her. Not that it was officially summer—November was the last month of spring—but it had been a weary, wet, grinding winter and she was eager for the sun.

A half-smile lifted the corners of her controlled mouth as she unlatched the gate and walked up the white shell path, amused at how pale her narrow feet looked. Ah, well, a few walks along that sweep of sand she’d seen from the hill would soon give them some colour. Although she turned sallow in winter her skin loved summer, gilding slowly under layers of sunscreen.

The house was huge, a white Victorian villa superbly settled in a bower of lawns and flowery borders, sheltered from the small breeze off the sea. The scents of the garden and newly mown lawns were concentrated into an erotic, drugging perfume.

She hoped that the man who owned all this appreciated it.

‘My cousin Paul,’ Gerard had told her when he’d suggested she spend the summer at Waitapu, ‘was born into old money, and because he’s both hard-headed and very intelligent he’s added considerably to the paternal legacy.’

Obviously. The house and the gardens bore the unmistakable sheen of affluence.

A bead of sweat gathered on each of Jacinta’s temples. Before leaving town she’d clipped back the hair that reached halfway down her back, but during the drive the curly, slippery tresses had oozed free. Tucking a bright ginger strand behind one ear, she walked up three steps onto a wide, grey-painted wooden verandah and knocked at the door before turning to admire the gardens more closely.

She must look madly out of place here, Jacinta thought wryly, dressed in clothes without a vestige of style. And although she was tall enough to be a model she hadn’t been granted a model’s grace.

Her green-gold gaze roamed across the felicitous mixture of trees and shrubs, lingering on the slim grey trunks of a giant cabbage tree, each smooth branch topped by a sunburst of thin leaves. At its feet nasturtiums and Californian poppies struck sparks off each other.

The soft wind of the door opening dragged her smiling attention away from a gaudy orange and black monarch butterfly. With the smile still lingering, she turned. ‘Hello, I’m Jacinta Lyttelton...’

The words dried on her tongue. She knew that handsome face—the strong jaw and arrogant cheekbones—as well as her own. The intervening months hadn’t dimmed the brilliance of those eyes, a blue so intense they blazed with the colour and fire of sapphires. Yet in spite of that clarity they were oddly difficult to read.

Suddenly aware that the trousers she wore were five years old and had been cheap to start with, and that her tee-shirt had faded to a washed-out blue that did nothing for her, Jacinta realised she was standing with her jaw dangling. Clamping it shut, she swallowed, and tried to repulse a sudden, insistent warning of fate advancing inexorably, mercilessly on its way, crushing everything in its path.

‘Welcome to Waitapu, Jacinta.’ His deep, flexible voice wove magic, conjured darkly enchanted dreams that had dazzled her nights for months.

Fortunately her numbed brain jolted into action long enough to provide her with the location of their previous meeting.

Fiji.

The lazy, glorious week she and her mother had spent on a tiny, palm-shadowed resort island. One night he’d asked her to dance, and she’d been horrified by her fierce, runaway response to the nearness of his lean, big body. When the music had stopped he’d thanked her gravely and taken her to the room she had shared with her mother before, no doubt, rejoining the seriously glamorous woman he was on holiday with.