Forbidden Pleasure

She didn’t hold up her reddened wrist, or even look at it, but the man’s gaze fastened onto her skin and something explosive splintered its cold clarity before the long lashes, dark as jealousy, covered his eyes again. ‘Did he hurt you?’ he asked in a voice that pulled every tiny hair upright over her body.

‘No.’

He came across the room with silent speed. Ianthe watched with bewilderment as he picked up her hand and looked at her wrist. A chill tightened her skin, jerked with sickening impact in the depths of her stomach.

‘He’s bruised you,’ he said slowly.

Feeling strangely sorry for the frogmarcher, Ianthe said, ‘I bruise very easily, and he didn’t hurt me. In fact, he did this when I stumbled. He stopped me from falling into the water.’

Her voice faded. Looking down at the contrast of dark fingers locked around the delicate whiteness of her wrist, she swallowed and pulled away; he resisted a moment, then the long fingers loosened and she was free. Completely unnerved by his reaction, she took a stumbling step backwards and leaned heavily against the windowsill.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said with a frigid remoteness.

Quickly, her voice oddly gruff, she said with stubborn insistence, ‘Besides, I was on the Queen’s Chain.’

‘The Queen’s Chain?’ he asked silkily, pinning her with that laser glance.

Sensation slithered the length of Ianthe’s spine. Doing her best to ignore it, she replied didactically, ‘In New Zealand almost all waterways are surrounded by the Queen’s Chain. The land twenty metres back from the water’s edge, although used by the landowner, is actually owned by the Crown—specifically so that people have access.’

‘Your Queen is a landowner indeed,’ he said softly, not attempting to hide the mockery in his words. ‘And to get to that Queen’s Chain you had to cross private property.’

Your Queen, so he wasn’t English. Her confident tone belying her hollow stomach, Ianthe snapped, ‘Possibly, but I wasn’t trespassing when that idiot decided to prove what a big, tough man he is by dragging me here.’

Ianthe was of medium height, but a year in and out of hospital had stripped flesh from her bones so that she weighed less than she had for the last five years. She’d been no match at all for a frogmarcher built like a rugby forward.

His boss smiled at her. ‘He’ll apologise,’ he said.

How could a mere movement of muscles transform aloof arrogance into something so charismatic? He looked like a Renaissance princeling, at once blazingly attractive yet dangerous, cultured yet barbaric, his handsome features strengthened by the disciplined ruthlessness underpinning them.

‘You are,’ he went on, ‘quite right, and I apologise for Mark’s rather officious protection of my privacy. He had no right to touch you or haul you in here.’

Ianthe suspected that behind that spell-binding face was a keen brain that had rapidly chosen this response, knowing it would soothe her. In other words, she thought sturdily, she was being manipulated.

After returning his smile with one of her own—detached, she hoped, and coolly dismissive—she said, ‘New Zealanders love their country, and one reason is because they can go almost wherever they like in it.’

‘Subject, one assumes, to the laws of the countryside? Closing gates and so forth?’

‘Of course,’ she said, knowing that she’d left no gate undone behind her.

Dark lashes drooped, narrowing the pale gaze. ‘To make up a little for Mark’s unceremonious intrusion into your life, can I offer you a drink? Tea, perhaps, or something alcoholic if you’d prefer that? And then I’ll take you back to your car.’

Stiffly, nerves still jangling from the after-effects of that smile, Ianthe said, ‘No, thank you. I’m not thirsty.’

‘I can understand that you have no wish to stay in a house where you underwent such an unpleasant experience,’ he said smoothly, ‘but I’d like to show you that I’m not some Mafia don on holiday.’

Her glance flashed to his unreadable face. Could he read her mind? No, of course not. She’d barely articulated the thought.

Off balance, she said hastily, ‘I’m sure you’re not—’

‘Then let me make whatever amends I can.’

Charm was a rare gift, and an unfair one. When backed by pure steel it was almost unforgivable. Reluctant, angry because her leg was threatening imminent collapse, Ianthe said, ‘You don’t need to make amends, but—I’d like a cup of tea, thank you.’

‘It would be my pleasure.’

She eased herself away from the window and limped towards him, waiting for signs of shock. But the ice-blue gaze remained fixed on her face, although he took her elbow in an impersonal grip.

He’d probably blench when he saw the scar, she thought savagely, but she was used to that.

The long tanned fingers at her elbow lent confidence as well as support. They also sent a slow pulse of excitement through her. Of course she didn’t allow herself to lean on him as he escorted her through the door, across a hall floored with pale Italian ceramic tiles and into a breathtaking room where the light from the lake played across superb angles and planes and surfaces.

‘Oh!’ Ianthe said, abruptly stopping.

His fingers tightened a moment on her elbow, then relaxed. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing.’ Feeling foolish, she explained lamely, ‘The lake looks wonderful from here.’

He urged her across to a comfortable seat. ‘It looks wonderful from any vantage point,’ he said. ‘I’ve travelled widely, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like the colour of this water.’

Ianthe sat down, keeping her face averted. Glass doors had been pushed right back to reveal a wide terrace and the brilliant beach. ‘It’s because it’s a dune lake,’ she said. ‘The white sand reflects the sky more intensely.’

‘Whatever causes it, it’s beautiful,’ he said, sitting down in a chair close by. ‘But then, New Zealand is a glorious country. So varied a landscape, usually with mountains to back up each magnificent vista.’

‘Mountains are all very well in the background, but that’s where they should stay. Give me a nice warm beach any day.’ A year ago she’d have meant it.

His considering glance fomented a disturbing, forbidden pleasure deep within her. They were so distant, those eyes, so dispassionately at variance with his warm Mediterranean colouring. Bronze skin and blue-black hair sharpened the impact of their frosty intensity, until she felt their impact like an earthquake, inescapable, terrifying.

In an amused voice he said, ‘You don’t look as though anything much frightens you.’

‘I like to be warm,’ she said, thinking, If you only knew! ‘I was born in Northland, so I’m not used to snow.’

‘Yet water can be cold.’

He still hadn’t looked at her leg, but Ianthe wished fervently that she’d chosen to wear trousers rather than shorts. She had no illusions about the ugliness of the puckered, distorted skin that ran almost the full length of her leg. Although future plastic surgery would tidy it up, it would always be there, a jagged, unlovely reminder of past pain.

‘Only if you’re silly enough to keep swimming after you start to shiver,’ she said, adding drily, ‘And unless you’re swimming in the Arctic, it’s nowhere near as cold as snow. Of course, where you come from the mountains all have either a rack railway up the side or a hotel perched on top. Or both. It makes them hard to take seriously.’

Strong white teeth flashed for a second as he smiled. ‘So you didn’t enjoy the European Alps,’ he said blandly. ‘Although I was born in Europe, I spent much of my youth in Australia.’ His eyes glimmered. ‘No mountains there, nothing much but sky.’

‘I’ve never been to either place, but I’ve seen photos.’

‘Perhaps it’s a human characteristic to want to tame those things that threaten us.’ His gaze moved slowly over her face, rested a tingling fraction of a second on her soft mouth, then flicked to the tumbled bounty of her hair, its gentle, honey-coloured waves streaked with natural highlights the colour of untarnished copper. In a cool, speculative voice he continued, ‘I don’t think mountains in New Zealand have either railways or restaurants, do they?’

Her nerves jumping, she said huskily, ‘Not to the summit, no.’

The door opened. Ianthe watched warily as Mark the frogmarcher, fair and with the solid, blocky body of a surfer, carried in a tea-tray. Her host—whoever he was—must have given the order before he’d seen her, Ianthe thought, wondering why she let herself be irritated at such blatant damage control.

Mark set the tray down on the table close to her chair, then moved the table so that she didn’t have to reach. Both tea and coffee, she noticed. He’d left nothing to chance.