Forbidden Pleasure

‘Ianthe Brown. For a while she turned up on all the covers of the women’s magazines. She lost her job after she got bitten, of course.’ He shrugged. ‘The girl they got to replace her looks just as good in a bikini, but she’s not as good in her job. You could tell Ianthe Brown really liked what she was doing.’

Alex nodded, and Mark said, ‘By the way, I didn’t mean to hurt her wrist. She almost fell into the water and then she just lost it—started to shake and went as white as a sheet. Scared the hell out of me, so I hauled her out a bit too roughly. But I didn’t mean to hurt her,’ he repeated bluntly.

‘She’s probably nervous in the water,’ Alex said. ‘After an attack like that, anyone would be.’

‘Well, yeah, she might be, although we don’t have any sharks in the lakes.’

Alex laughed. ‘It’s not quite so easy as that,’ he said drily. ‘All right, on your way.’

‘What time do you want dinner?’

‘Eight.’ He was already looking at the first paper, and barely heard the door close behind the other man.

An hour later he lifted his head and got up, walking out onto the deck. The lake danced before him, ripely blue as the sheen on a kingfisher’s wings, and he summoned the face of the woman.

Intriguing, he thought.

But he’d known women who were more than intriguing, who exuded sexual promise with every smile, every movement of their bodies. This one wasn’t like that. Oh, she had a good figure and skin, and her golden eyes were miraculous, but she limped badly, and although she had regular, neat features she wasn’t beautiful in the modern sense.

He frowned. At first those hot amber eyes had glittered with anger, the long dark lashes almost hiding the wariness. And that hair! Hair to tangle around a man’s heart, he thought sardonically, knowing his was safe. This was a more primitive reaction; he wanted to see her hair spread out on his pillow, that delicately sensuous mouth blurred by his kisses, those eyes heavy and slumbrous with passion.

When their eyes had met, his stomach had contracted as though he’d been punched in the solar plexus. A savage, unmanageable physical desire had bypassed defences set up and reinforced since early adolescence.

Using the cold, analytical brain that served him so well, he recalled her face, her defiant stance, the square chin, the gentle, womanly curves—and watched his hands clench in front of him as his body responded helplessly.

What quality in her summoned such a response? She’d had no tricks, no artifice. The soft mouth had been naked of lipstick, and the glinting eyes hadn’t been emphasised by mascara and eyeshadow. Yet beneath her delicate, slightly old-fashioned prettiness he’d sensed a smouldering intensity, a primitive carnal power that threatened while it beckoned.

What had those amazing eyes seen when she’d looked at him the first time?

Grimacing, he forced his hands to relax. She’d seen what he saw in the mirror every morning—the face that proclaimed his pedigree and announced his heritage, features that could be traced back a thousand years.

Those great eyes had viewed him with nothing but suspicion, he thought, trying to find something amusing in that, a thread of irony that would quench the fever curling through his loins.

Her cool composure had challenged the primitive, fundamental male in him, as had her burning, golden eyes and her pale skin and that hair. And, he thought ironically, the body beneath those appalling clothes. Oh, yes, he’d responded fiercely to the slim legs and the sleek, lithe curves of breast and hip, the oddly fragile line of her throat and the thin wrists and ankles.

Different, but just as fierce, had been his reaction to that abomination of a scar, to her limp, to the pain in her eyes and the pallor of her face when her leg hurt. That unwilling, highly suspect need to protect her shocked him.

He was a man of strong passions and even stronger control. Celibacy was no stranger to him. And he was, he admitted, cynical about women, and regrettably bored with professional beauties.

Yet when he’d opened the door and seen her staring out of the window, her long legs and neat little backside revealed by her shorts, somewhere at a deep, cellular level he’d responded with a white-hot leap of recognition.

Damned inconvenient, he thought caustically, walking back into the room to straighten the pile of papers beside the laptop computer. He might crave the physical release of sex, but now, of all times, he needed to keep his mind clear.

For a moment he summoned the face and gorgeously voluptuous body of a woman who would have been furious to hear herself described as a call girl, but who would, he knew, be on the next flight if he asked her. His mouth tightened. He had no illusions; apart from his power and his money, Isabel wanted him because he had never succumbed to her lush expertise. He’d never used women, and his irritating desire for the interesting intruder wasn’t going to drive him in that direction.

There were other, far more important things to think about. That was why he’d come to New Zealand—to think. The decision he had to make would affect not only his life, but those of millions.

And for the only time since he’d grown up he couldn’t weigh the facts and measure the results of any given decision. His self-contained mind—razor-sharp and cold-blooded he’d been called often enough to make the terms clichés—didn’t even want to face the prospect.

The finely etched features of Ianthe Brown coalesced in the recesses of his brain. The contrast between her elaborate first name and her prosaic surname amused him. Ianthe meant violet flower, although the first Ianthe, his classical education reminded him, had been a Greek nymph, the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys.

All suspiciously appropriate.

Those delicately etched features were the sort adored by the camera. He caught himself wondering if the camera also revealed that latent wildness in her. Had she ever indulged it? Or was she a passionate puritan, afraid to give rein to her emotions?

Frowning, he looked out of the window and across the impossibly blue water of the lake. Once Mark had told him who she was it had been easy to find out more about her. The investigator in Auckland had worked fast and the pages had come through on the fax a few minutes ago.

Nothing, however, about her personal life. Apparently when featured by the women’s magazines she’d spoken only about her work, which had seemed to consist of swimming decoratively with whales and dolphins.

And sharks. No doubt the tense line of her succulent mouth and the frequent opacity of her eyes were other, more subtle results of that attack.

Once again gripped by a ferocious instinct to protect her, he pressed the buzzer beside the desk, then put the detective’s findings into a drawer.

When Mark appeared he said, ‘You’re going into Dargaville tomorrow morning, aren’t you? Go to the video shop and get me any that have Ianthe Brown in them.’

When he was alone again he picked up the papers on his desk and began to read, banishing memories of a passionately sculpted mouth, and hair the mixed colours of gold and new-minted copper, and skin translucent and delicate as silk.

And huge golden eyes that reflected the sheen of firelight and hinted at passions he’d never waken.

CHAPTER TWO

AFTER a restless, dream-hounded night, Ianthe drank two cups of tea and forced herself to eat a slice of toast before driving down to the nearest town, the sleepy little port of Dargaville on the wide reaches of the Northern Wairoa River.

When she’d stocked up on the groceries that weren’t available in the small shop at the motor camp, she bought a couple of magazines and tried hard to resist several new paperbacks. Succumbing, she appeased her conscience by buying another four from the reject rack at the library.

About halfway home she saw a Range Rover pushed sideways into the ditch. A familiar figure stood beside it, surveying the damage.

She almost put her foot down and accelerated past Mark the frogmarcher, but in some odd way his behaviour had formed a tenuous bond between them, so she drew in behind and got out. ‘Hello,’ she said coolly. ‘Are you all right?’

Mark stood unsmiling. ‘I’m fine.’

Wondering why she’d bothered, Ianthe persevered, ‘Do you want me to call in at the Kaihu garage for you?’

‘Everything’s under control,’ he told her, ‘but you could do me a favour—I’ve got frozen goods, and although they’re well-wrapped they aren’t going to last. Would you drop them off at the house?’

He must have decided she was relatively harmless. Fighting down an odd sense of darkening destiny, Ianthe said crisply, ‘Yes, I’ll do that. Will you need a ride back after the Rover’s been towed to the garage?’

‘No.’

‘All right,’ she said, still feeling that she was burning unknown bridges behind her. ‘Hand over the frozen stuff and I’ll deliver it.’

Five minutes later she was on her way, with a large plastic bag in the boot of her car and a frown pulling at the smooth skin above her brows. If she’d had any common sense at all she’d have driven on past, but she was too imbued with the New Zealand instinct to help.

And now she had to beard the lion in his den—no, the hawk in his nest.

Perhaps hawks had eyries, like eagles, she thought with a faint smile, flicking down the visor as the sun shimmered like a mirage on the tarseal in front of her. A hawk in a summer sky, proud and fierce and lethal…

And handsome. That disturbing familiarity tugging at her mind was probably instinctive female homage to an ideal of masculine beauty. The arrangement of his features pleased some integral pattern set up by the human brain so she recognised him as good-looking.