Sanchia's Secret

Bending his head, he said fiercely, ‘You can walk away if you want to.’

She lifted heavy eyelids. ‘I don’t want to.’

Triumph flashed in the blue eyes. ‘Good,’ he said, and kissed her.

It was like an earthquake: the foundations of her world shifted and she no longer had any reference points for normality as sensation stormed through her. Shattered by the violence of her response to Caid’s seeking, demanding mouth, Sanchia gave up trying to think and surrendered to the astonishing pleasure his kiss summoned.

Some time later she surfaced; locked in his arms, she was pressed against him from shoulder to thigh so that his arousal was more than obvious.

Appalled, she tried to pull away, but he lifted his head and said harshly, ‘It’s too late for that.’

‘Oh, no, it’s not,’ she muttered, beating back the first icy trickle of fear. ‘I must be mad. Caid, let me go!’

‘So nothing has changed,’ he said coldly, releasing her immediately. ‘Kissing is all right but I must go no further. Why, Sanchia?’

Twisting away, Sanchia ran a shaking hand through her hair and whispered, ‘I won’t let this happen again!’

He showed his teeth. ‘Hell, isn’t it?’ he agreed sardonically. ‘Just one of those mad attractions that shatter kingdoms and ruin lives.’ His eyes glinted. ‘Perhaps you have such a powerful effect on me because I spent several summers watching you grow up. And one infinitely frustrating holiday trying to get past the iron-clad barriers that slammed in my face whenever I touched you. What’s your excuse?’

Weighed down by reaction to the adrenalin overdose, Sanchia blinked and gathered the tattered remnants of her wits about her. ‘Look, produce this piece of paper, I’ll sign it and say goodbye, and we can forget that the—that this ever happened.’

‘Coward,’ he taunted.

‘Absolutely,’ she agreed fervently, thrumming with thwarted desire now that he’d let her go. ‘I like a peaceful life and you’re very definitely not peaceful. We’ve got nothing in common.’ She dragged her gaze from his enigmatic face to stare around the room. ‘Where is this option?’

‘In the office.’ But even as he nodded towards a door he said caustically, ‘We have one thing in common, Sanchia—a consuming physical passion that’s going to drive both of us crazy unless we do something about it. Why does it scare you so much? I won’t hurt you.’

Sanchia swallowed to ease her arid throat. For a second panic clutched her, and with it a soul-destroying shame. Had he guessed? No, she decided with a swift spurt of relief, not yet. She strode across the room in front of him, flinging over her shoulder, ‘I don’t want an affair with you!’

‘So you said three years ago. Why, Sanchia? Does passion terrify you so much?’

If only he knew…

She said jerkily, ‘I’m not cut out for being a diversion, a pretty toy to be used and then discarded. You forget that while you were checking the length of my legs and whether I laughed or not, I was watching girls chase you. You didn’t run very far, they didn’t last very long—just long enough to break their hearts. I noticed the pattern early and it’s not one that fits me. I need independence—to lead my own life, for myself.’

‘And does your wonderful independence,’ he queried in a dangerously silky voice, ‘keep you sated and warm at night?’

‘There are more important things in life than sex.’

He said something swift and angry in Greek, the language she had stubbornly refused to even consider learning. Switching to English, he said, ‘Or perhaps you work off that violent physical appetite of yours with strangers, with casual affairs?’

She’d kept so much from him she was tempted to add a whopping lie, but she said stiffly, ‘I don’t approve of petty, sordid affairs.’

So unnerved that she barely understood her own words, she yanked the door open and walked through, frowning when she saw she was in a passage. ‘Which way?’

‘To the left, second door down.’

He walked beside her, close enough to intimidate, not close enough to touch. Just as well—she’d go up like a fireball if he laid so much as a finger on her. All right, so it was merely the physical passion he’d called it, but oh, God, it was overwhelming—like being branded by him so that her body registered him, recognised him, yearned to know him intimately.

Feared him.

Because the one time she’d tried to break past the arbitrary limits her body had set, it had frozen in fierce, unreasoning rejection.

He asked coolly, ‘Does that mean there have been no affairs—or just no petty, sordid ones?’

‘Mind your own business!’ she retorted fiercely.

‘You are the person who used the word sordid.’ Stone-faced, he pushed the door open and stood back to let her through. ‘And any affair between us would never be petty. I promise you that.’

CHAPTER THREE

THAT last comment didn’t just sound like a threat, Sanchia realised with an inner shiver as she glanced at Caid’s harshly beautiful face, it definitely was one.

The intriguing scent—faint, potent—of aroused male made her grit her teeth as she walked past him into a room set up as an office. Apprehension roiled her stomach as she stopped in the middle of the room and waited in silence while he bent to open the door of a safe.

She’d hoped counselling would free her of the suffocating fear of sexuality that had preyed on her for so long, but, in spite of the therapist’s insights, ugly terror still lurked behind the fireflash of desire.

Caid straightened and put a piece of paper on the desk. ‘You’d better read it first.’

‘I don’t sign anything without reading it,’ she said huskily, but she had to concentrate ferociously on the print dancing in front of her eyes.

It was quite straightforward. When she came to sell the land known as such and such on the district plan she would offer it to him first, the price to be negotiated then. If he refused it she was at liberty to do what she wanted with it.

Sanchia read it through twice before handing it back. ‘It seems fair enough.’

‘Did you know that all the land in this area has just been revalued?’

She gave a brief nod.

‘Waiora Bay’s blue water title adds quite considerably to the value of the place because it means no one can land on the beach.’ Caid paused, and added smoothly, ‘I believe the rate increase this year is somewhere in the vicinity of twenty-five per cent.’

Sanchia had just emptied her bank account to pay a quarterly instalment of the rates, and it would take stringent saving to manage the other three instalments.

She set her jaw. Once she began negotiating with the council she should be able to come to some agreement about any charges due.

‘I know,’ she said coldly. ‘Do you want witnesses to my signature?’

‘Not unless you do—it’s not a will.’ A long, lean-fingered hand offered a silver pen.

Accepting it, she ignored the jump in her heart-rate when their fingers touched. Caid waited until the pen had almost reached the paper to say, ‘And of course I trust you.’

Sanchia signed and dated the option with slashing writing that came close to expressing her chaotic emotions. ‘There,’ she said, dropping the pen on the desk, ‘although you bought it dearly, even for a dollar.’

‘I like to cover all bases,’ Caid told her with a flinty, level glance that set alarm bells jangling. He folded the paper and dropped it onto the dark polished surface of the desk. Unsmiling, his eyes too calculating, he ushered her towards the door. ‘Can I get you something to drink? You look a little hot.’

No doubt her face was scarlet. Resisting the urge to moisten lips still tender from his kisses, she said quietly, ‘No, thank you. I’ll head back home now.’

‘Of course.’ Now that he’d got his worthless option he’d retreated behind a mask of polite indifference.