Prince Of Lies

Questions jostled around her aching head, forcing their way through to her conscious mind, battering her precarious self-control. How long was this journey going to take? She felt as though she’d been in the car for hours. Although they were now climbing quite steeply she couldn’t smell any exhaust fumes. Perhaps when you travelled in the boot of a car you left the fumes behind. No, she told herself, don’t get side-tracked. Think!

While the car twisted and turned smoothly around corners, she decided to do nothing. Her suspicions could be entirely wrong, and anyway, common sense told her she wasn’t going to be able to do any running or hiding until she’d regained some strength. The two men who had kidnapped her were around somewhere, and if she ran away and they caught up with her again, she thought with a shudder, they might kill her outright. After all, she could identify one of them.

So she’d eat and rest, and she’d probe as subtly as she could. If her rescuer was a villain she might be safe while she pretended to take him at face value.

Of course, there might be a perfectly logical explanation for those keys. All she had to do was ask. And if she didn’t like the answer, she could fake belief until she found an opportunity to get away from him.

As the car slid to halt, she froze. Striving to look weak and pathetic and entirely brainless, she coerced her muscles into looseness, wondering despairingly whether she should try to get away now, when he would be least likely to expect it.

Before she had time to make up her mind the lock on the boot clicked. ‘We’re here,’ he said, reaching in and gathering her up.

She said raggedly, ‘Where’s here? And what happens now?’

‘This is where we’re staying.’

‘It looks old,’ she said inanely.

‘Not very. It was built last century.’ He set off for a door across the garage.

Frowning, she looked around. ‘It doesn’t look like the stables.’

‘It’s not. This is the old laundry, which was converted into a garage some time in the thirties.’

Apparently he wasn’t given to fulsome explanations. She said stubbornly, ‘What’s going to happen now?’

‘I’m going to carry you upstairs, where you can shower and go to bed. Then you eat, and after that you sleep.’

It should have sounded wonderful but the greyness she had fought so long and vehemently had finally caught up with her. Blankly she said beneath her breath, ‘Thank you.’

Some emotion sawed through him, but his voice was steady and deliberate as he said, ‘It’s nothing. Think of me as your doctor.’

Her doctor was forty, a married woman wearing her sophistication with cheerful cynicism and an understanding heart. Stephanie smiled wearily.

‘Shower first,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to stay with you, I’m afraid, in case you fall.’

A week ago she would have refused point-blank, but it didn’t matter now. She didn’t think she would ever be modest again.

She forced herself to look around as he carried her across a high, mock-Gothic hall and up some narrow stairs.

‘This looks like a castle,’ she said.

‘Seen plenty of them, have you, princess?’ His voice was dry.

‘A few,’ she admitted. It couldn’t hurt. He knew who she was. What he might not know, she thought vengefully, was how formidable Saul was. On the first suitable occasion she’d make sure he learnt.

However, not even Saul was invincible, and she’d have to try to get herself out of this situation. So, she decided with an odd lurch in her heartbeat, she had better take a good look at the man who might well be her greatest obstacle. Fractionally turning her head, she sent a sideways glance through her lashes.

He wasn’t handsome, but strength and a compelling and concentrated authority marked the slashing lines of his face. Not a man you would forget, she thought, wishing her head didn’t ache so much that she couldn’t think clearly. Surely kidnappers didn’t look as though they strode through the world forcing it to accept them on their own terms? The two who had snatched her certainly hadn’t. The one she’d seen was short and thin, inconspicuous except for his flat, emotionless black eyes, and the other had behaved with all the flashy arrogance of a small-time criminal.

This man couldn’t have been taken for a small-time anything.

Stephanie felt physically ill; her whole body was screaming with pain, she was tired and hungry and frantic with thirst, and in spite of her efforts to keep a calm head she was terrified with the sort of fear that only needed a touch to spill into panic, yet her first reaction to eyes where the light splintered into scintillating energy was a sensation of something heated and unmanageable racing through her with the force of a stampede. Some hitherto inviolate part of her shattered in a subtle breaching of barricades that left her raw and undefended.

Eyes locked on to his face, she was thinking dazedly, What’s happening to me? when the corners of that ruthless, equivocal mouth tilted a fraction. ‘Do you think you’d recognise me again?’ he asked, his tone imbuing the words with a hidden meaning.

‘I’m sure of it.’ Self-protection impelled her to add, ‘I believe it’s a well-known syndrome; people do tend to remember those who rescue them from durance vile. Incidentally, how did you get into that cellar?’

He shouldered through a small door off a landing at the top of the stairs, walked across a room dimmed by heavy curtains, through another door, and stood her on her feet, turning her at the same time so that she had her back to him.

They were in a bathroom, neat, white, with a startlingly luxurious shower, all glass and modern fittings. As his hands supported her for the first agonising moments, he said calmly, ‘It’s not a cellar, it’s a fake crypt. The locks on the doors are not brand-new, and the men who put you there didn’t bother to change them. Your brother wields a lot of power, and it didn’t take long for me to get a complete set of skeleton keys.’

‘And the handcuffs?’

His mouth tightened, but his eyes held hers steadily as he said, ‘There are techniques for picking them.’

Stephanie almost sagged with relief, her reassured brain spinning into dizziness. Of course; she had read of skeleton keys often enough; she should have thought of them herself. And hadn’t Saul’s chief of security told her once that there was no lock invented that couldn’t be picked, given time, equipment and a deft hand?

Before she had time to say the incautious words that came tumbling to her lips, the man who had rescued her began to strip her as efficiently and swiftly as he had dressed her.

‘No,’ she muttered, trying to stop his hands.

‘You can’t do it yourself.’ He unzipped the jeans and pushed them down around her hips.

He was right, but in spite of her previous conviction about her lack of modesty she actually felt intense embarrassment. She had her back to him, but there was a mirror, and for a breathless second she saw their reflections, her pale, thin, hollow-eyed face beneath a wild tangle of rusty curls, the swift movements of his long-fingered hands unbuttoning her shirt.

Hastily she looked away, confusion and shame battling for supremacy. Although he was gentle, those tanned fingers branded her skin, leaving it hot and tender, connected by shimmering, glittering wires to her spine and the pit of her stomach. A lazy, coiled heat stirred there, as though his touch summoned something forbidden but irresistible.

Stephanie bit her lip, trying to use pain to drown out those other, treacherous sensations. It didn’t work, and in the end she gave in, her eyes caught and held by the strange power of his.

‘You have eyes like cornflowers,’ he astounded her by saying. ‘That brilliant, rare, clear sapphire. It must be a Jerrard trait.’

So he had met Saul. Stephanie’s suspicions fell from her like an ugly, discarded shroud. Bewitched by the new and unusual responses of her body, pulses jumping, she waited until he moved away to turn on the shower before shrugging off the shirt and stepping out of her jeans. A quick flick of her wrist hooked a towel from the rail to wrap around herself.

She stumbled, and he caught her, pulling her against the solid length of his body. Stephanie flinched, that insidious, unwanted awareness reinforced by his nearness. Although she was tall and not slightly built, against him she felt tiny, delicately fragile, an experience intensified by the unexpected burgeoning of a languorous femininity.

Her rescuer’s austere face was intent as he juggled with the shower controls, but that concentrated attention was not bent on her; he showed no signs of a reciprocal response.

You’re mad, she told herself as steam began to fill the shower stall. Look in the mirror—your bones stick out, you’re filthy, and you smell. The sort of first impression no one ever overcomes. Who in their right mind would be anything but casual and very, very detached?

‘There, that should be right,’ he said, urging her into the big, tiled, warm shower with its glass doors now tactfully obscured by steam. He didn’t move away from the door, but at least he couldn’t see much through the hazy mist.

A singing, surging relief persuaded her to release the bonds of the obstinacy that had held her together for so long. Only for a few hours, she thought as with eyes tightly shut she tried to wash herself. She could give up for a few hours and use some of this man’s strength until she regained her own.

The water was like nectar over her skin, but its heat drained her waning energy, and her hands shook so much that she couldn’t get soap on to the flannel. As tears squeezed their way beneath her lashes she continued grimly on, aware of the man who stood so close, a large, dim figure through the glass doors.

The cake of soap plummeted between her fingers and landed on her foot. Unable to prevent a soft cry of pain, she cut it short and crouched to pick up the wretched thing. It took a vast effort to push herself upright, and when she got there she could feel her legs trembling. Refusing to look at the man who watched, hating him for not leaving her alone, she gripped the flannel and passed it over the cake of soap.

He asked tonelessly, ‘Do you want me to wash you?’