Devil And The Deep Sea

Devil And The Deep Sea
Sara Craven

Mills & Boon proudly presents THE SARA CRAVEN COLLECTION. Sara’s powerful and passionate romances have captivated and thrilled readers all over the world for five decades making her an international bestseller."A year out of your life. What price would you ask?"Samma supposed that any other woman would surely slap the face of a man who would pose such a question. But Samma couldn't afford that luxury with Roche Delacroix.With her stepfather ready to sell her "favors" to clear his gambling debts, Roche represented Samma's only avenue of escape from an unthinkable future on Cristoforo Island.Only a few hours earlier, the lips that opened the suggestive negotiation had made Samma so thoroughly aware of being female. Samma couldn't help feeling that life was doubly unfair.

Devil and the Deep Sea

Sara Craven

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

Former journalist SARA CRAVEN published her first novel ‘Garden of Dreams’ for Mills & Boon in 1975. Apart from her writing (naturally!) her passions include reading, bridge, Italian cities, Greek islands, the French language and countryside, and her rescue Jack Russell/cross Button. She has appeared on several TV quiz shows and in 1997 became UK TV Mastermind champion. She lives near her family in Warwickshire – Shakespeare country.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

COVER (#u209af197-edad-5c51-bf1d-a1c943d36471)

TITLE PAGE (#ue2e0b4d8-b9b9-56ce-8519-aefaa1a4837b)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#u6d91a179-0ab2-56ea-8e75-7344e2f959c0)

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

ENDPAGE (#litres_trial_promo)

COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ONE (#ua1db9062-2319-5d92-a394-cb4f8dd65f57)

THE breeze from the sea whipped a strand of pale fair hair across Samma Briant’s cheek, and she flicked it back impatiently as she bent over her drawing-board.

The waterfront at Cristoforo was crowded, as it always was when a cruise ship was in. Tourists were eagerly exploring the bars and souvenir shops along the quayside, and stopping to look at the stalls which sold locally made jewellery, carvings and paintings of island scenes. And a lot of them lingered where Samma sat on an upturned crate, amused and fascinated by her talent for capturing an instant likeness on paper, and willing to pay the modest fee she charged for her portraits.

She didn’t consider herself to be an artist. She possessed a knack, no more, for fixing on some facial characteristic of each subject, and subtly exploiting it. But she enjoyed her work, and on days like this it was even reasonably lucrative.

She had a small crowd around her already, and her day would have been just about perfect, except for one large, mauve, chrome-glittering cloud on her horizon—Sea Anemone, surely the most vulgar motor yacht in the Caribbean, currently moored a few hundred yards away in Porto Cristo’s marina. Because Sea Anemone’s presence at Cristoforo meant that her owner, the equally large and garish Mr Hugo Baxter, would be at the hotel tonight, playing poker with Samma’s stepfather, Clyde Lawson.

One glimpse of that monstrous mauve hulk lying at anchor had been enough to start Samma’s stomach churning uneasily. It was only six weeks since Hugo Baxter’s last visit. She’d thought they were safe for at least another month or two. Yet, here he was again closing in for the kill, she thought bitterly, as she signed the portrait she’d just finished with a small flourish, and handed it over to her delighted sitter with a brief, professional smile.

The fact was they couldn’t afford another visit from Hugo Baxter. Samma had no idea what her stepfather’s exact financial position was—he would never discuss it with her—but she suspected it might be desperately precarious.

When Clyde had met and married her mother during a visit to Britain, he had been a moderately affluent businessman, owning a small but prosperous hotel, and a restaurant on the small Caribbean island of Cristoforo. The island was just beginning to take off as a cruise ship stopping-point, and the future should have been rosy—except for Clyde’s predilection for gambling. While Samma’s mother had been alive, he’d kept his proclivities more or less under control, but since her death two years earlier things had gone from bad to worse. The restaurant had had to be sold to pay his debts, and the hotel hadn’t had the redecoration and refurbishment it needed, either.

Clyde seemed to win so seldom, Samma thought broodingly, and when Hugo Baxter was in the game his losses worsened to a frightening extent.

She motioned her next customer to the folding chair in front of her, and began to sketch in the preliminary shape of her head and shoulders with rapid, confident strokes.

Clyde’s only remaining asset was the hotel. And if we lose that, she thought despondently, I’m never going to get off this island.

Probably the woman she was sketching would have thrown up her hands in horror at the thought of anyone wanting to leave Cristoforo. ‘Isn’t this paradise?’ was the usual tourist cry.

Well, it was and it wasn’t, Samma thought cynically. During the years when she’d spent her school holidays here, she’d taken the romantic view, too. She’d been in the middle of her A-level course when her mother had collapsed and died from a heart attack. She’d flown to Cristoforo for the funeral, only to discover when it was over that the trust which was paying her school fees had ceased with her mother’s death, and that Clyde had no intention of paying out for her to complete her education.

‘It’s time you started working to keep yourself,’ he told her aggressively. ‘Besides, I need you here to take your mother’s place.’

Sick at heart, confused by her grief for her mother, Samma had agreed to stay. But it had been a serious mistake. When Clyde had spoken of her working for her keep, he meant just that, she’d found. She received no wage for her work at the hotel. The only money she earned was through her sketches, and although she saved as much as she could towards her airfare back to the United Kingdom, it was a wretchedly slow process.

But even if she’d been reasonably affluent, she would still have been disenchanted with Cristoforo. It was a small island, socially and culturally limited, with a hideously high cost of living. And, when the holiday season ended, it was dull.

And working at the hotel, and more particularly in the small nightclub Clyde had opened in the grounds, Samma had been shocked when she’d experienced the leering attentions of many of the male guests. Coming from the comparative shelter of boarding-school, almost overnight she’d discovered that to most of the male visitors to the island she was an object, rather than a person, and she’d been revolted by the blatant sexism of their attitude to her. She’d soon learned to hide herself in a shell of aloof reserve which chilled the ardour of the most determined predator. But she was aware that, by doing so, she was also cutting herself off from the chance of perhaps forming a real and lasting relationship. However, this was a risk she had to take, although she was forced to admit she’d never been even mildly attracted by any of the men who stayed at the hotel, or hung round the bar at the Black Grotto club.

One day, she thought, one day, when she got back to England and found herself a decent job, and a life of her own, she would meet someone she could be happy with. Until then, she’d stay insulated in her cocoon of indifference.

Except when Hugo Baxter was around, she reminded herself uneasily. He seemed impervious to any rebuff, seeking her out, taking any opportunity to touch her, Samma’s skin crawled at the thought. One thing was certain, she was keeping well away from the Black Grotto tonight.

She handed over her completed portrait, and glanced at her watch. It was nearly noon, and people were drifting away in search of lunch and shade. Time for a break, Samma thought, getting to her feet and stretching vigorously. As she lifted her arms above her head, she was suddenly aware she was being watched, and she looked round.

Startled, her eyes met another gaze, dark, faintly amused and totally male in its assessment of the thrust of her rounded breasts against her brief cotton top, Samma realised in the embarrassed moment before she looked away with icy disdain.

But she was left with a disturbing impression of height and strength, and sun-bronzed skin revealed by a brief pair of cut-off denims. As well as an absurd feeling of self-consciousness, she thought resentfully.

She should be used to being looked at. In a community where most people were dark-haired and dark-skinned, her pale skin and blonde hair, as straight and shining as rain water, naturally attracted attention, and usually she could cope with this.

But there had been something so provocatively and deliberately—masculine about this stranger’s regard that it had flicked her on the raw.

And her antennae told her that he was still looking. She picked up her sketch-block, and began drawing at random—the neighbouring stall, where Mindy, its owner, was selling a view of the marina to a tourist couple who were trying and failing to beat him down over the price. But her fingers, inexplicably, were all thumbs, fudging the lines, and she tore the sheet off, crumpling it irritably.

She stole a sideways glance under her lashes, making an assessment of her own. He was leaning on the rail of one of the sleekest and glossiest of the many craft in the marina, and looking totally out of place, she decided critically, although she supposed he was good-looking, in a disreputable way—that was, if you liked over-long and untidy black hair, and a great beak of a nose which looked as if it had been broken at least once in its career.