Phantom Lover

Bewildered by such consideration in the midst of his raging fury, and guilty that she had suspected him, even for a moment, of carnal motives, Honor’s eyes flicked to the vivid, red-beaded line down the side of his face.

‘I-I have some antiseptic ointment in the bathroom if you want some...’ she offered, clutching the front of her shirt and nervously backing away.

Something feral gleamed deep in the golden eyes. ‘Good idea. Why don’t you go and get it and we can tend to each other’s wounds?’

Have him touch her breasts again with that strange, gentle insistence? Honor could feel her face heat up as she turned and fled for the bathroom. After all the trouble she had gone to to dress up nicely for him earlier, he had to walk in on her when she was clad in scruffy jeans and a shirt she had picked up in a jumble sale!

Only two of the four scratches she had sustained were seeping blood but Honor cleaned and applied the cream to all of them. She didn’t want to give Adam the excuse of demanding an inspection, and the ruthless satisfaction on his face when she had begun to blush had told her that he had instantly perceived her physical awareness of his masculinity as a weakness that could be exploited to his advantage.

Remember the letters, she told herself severely as she tucked her shirt firmly back into her jeans. Adam Blake is not really the snarling, aggressive, insulting bully he appears to be. He is a warm, charming, sensitive man who just happens to be justifiably confused at the moment. Grabbing the tube of ointment, she kept repeating the incantation as she went back to face him.

The warm, charming and sensitive man was sitting behind her desk rifling through the drawers. His concern had been merely a ploy to get her out of the room, she realised with an acute sense of betrayal.

‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing?’

He ignored her, bending in the chair to pull out another drawer, and tip out its contents on the floor. Realising that she had no hope of physically stopping him, Honor tried to use sweet reason.

‘Mr—Adam, if you want those letters back I’ll be happy to give them to you. I know you’re angry but truly, I had no idea that you thought you were writing to my sister—how could I? You wrote to this address and I’m the only H. Sheldon who lives here. I didn’t even know that you and Helen had met—I thought you just must have seen me at the ball and...and...’

His head lifted, his eyes chilly with contemptuous disbelief. ‘Found you so instantly and devastatingly attractive that I couldn’t forget you?’ Honor blushed painfully as her foolish fantasies were stripped to their unlikely origins. ‘Yes, I can see how often that must happen to you.’ His sarcasm was as glacial as his stare.

‘Perhaps that’s how you get your kicks—by enticing strange men to write to you under false pretences. Do you advertise in the personal columns, too, and send your gullible prospects a photograph of your beautiful sister to stimulate their interest? Are you so jealous of her that in some sick and twisted way you try to be her—?’

‘I’m perfectly happy being myself! You seem to be forgetting that you’re the one who made the approach to me,’ Honor flung at him, mortified by his interpretation of her character. ‘All I did was innocently answer a card that I received—’

‘You have an interesting interpretation of innocence,’ Adam rapped out. ‘The police tell a different version...the one about how you thought it was great fun to lead me on until you decided I was becoming too persistent, an embarrassing annoyance, and thought it was time to front up and deliver the punch line in person.’

Oh, damn! She knew that somehow her lies would return to haunt her.

‘I only said that because I was trying to keep Helen out of it. I didn’t want the police involving her in any awkward publicity—’ she protested.

‘But she is involved, isn’t she, right up to her beautiful neck?’ he cut in savagely. Honor could practically see his wounded male pride throbbing. ‘I suppose she was in on the joke, too?’

‘There wasn’t any joke.’ Honor stared him straight in the eye, willing him to believe her. ‘I didn’t realise what had been going on myself until I was reading one of your letters this morning and...well, of course I showed them to Helen straight away and she told me about what you did for her at the ball, and then I knew...’

‘You showed her?’ Adam’s voice rose sharply in conjunction with his powerful body as he came sweeping to his feet. ‘Helen’s here?’

The flare of anticipation that glowed momentarily in his eyes said it all. The beauteous Helen would be forgiven her transgressions whereas her plain, unprepossessing sister would not. Honor felt a little kick of malicious temper. If he could be insensitive so could she.

‘Not now, no. She was staying with me for a few days, but she flew to Sydney this afternoon. When I told her about the mix-up she wasn’t really interested. She doesn’t answer fan letters, you see, so she probably would never have written to you even if you had sent your letters to the right address in New York.’

Instead of flinching Adam fixed her with a drilling look. ‘Something else you lied to the detective inspector about? You told him your sister was in New York—’

‘I didn’t lie, I said she lives in New York, not that she was there right at this moment—’

‘A lie by implication is no less a lie,’ said Adam grimly. ‘You seem to make a habit of taking advantage of other people’s mistakes, don’t you, Honor? Quite the little opportunist, in fact. I wonder what else you’re hiding...?’

With that he sat back down and continued his search, his careless violation of her tidy drawers a deliberate goad to which Honor instinctively responded. She marched around the desk and pulled open the bottom drawer. She took out the stack of letters that the detective had put back in meticulous order and dumped them in front of him.

‘There! Satisfied?’

He was shuffling impatiently through them. ‘Not nearly. I don’t care about these. Where are the others?’

‘What others?’

‘You know very well. The ones I didn’t send.’

Honor stared at his gritty profile, wondering whether the blow from Monty’s claws could have caused a mild concussion in so hard a head. Now she looked more closely she could see the fine tension lines radiating out around his mouth and eyes, signs of powerful emotions kept in rigid check. He looked like a man at the very edge of his control. What anger he had released so far was merely the tip of the iceberg.

‘They’re all there,’ she said warily, feeling like a passenger on the Titanic. ‘Except for the one that the detective took with him, of course...’

‘And you can thank God that he handed it back to me instead of filing it as evidence,’ he growled, and suddenly she thought she understood. He wanted reassurance that she hadn’t showed the most revealing letters to anyone else.

‘Look—’ She reached for the envelopes and yelped as her hand was slapped down on to the desk under a savage paw. ‘I was only going to show you,’ she said reproachfully. ‘If you’re talking about the last few letters they’re right here, at the back. See?’ She showed him with her free hand.

‘Matching envelopes,’ he said cryptically as he checked the contents. ‘Hide them in plain sight. Clever.’

The press of his encompassing palm loosened over hers but just as she slid her flattened fingers gratefully free he curled his hand around her wrist and jerked her closer. Sitting down he was still almost as tall as she was standing. His voice was silky with cold menace. ‘Now, be a good girl and show where you’ve hidden the others. If you give them to me we’ll call it quits—after you’ve answered one or two pressing questions...’

She didn’t like the sound of that. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about; there are no others.’ She strained away from him while trying not to let the extent of her panic show. Maybe Adam Blake had a split personality; maybe his letters had been dictated by a separate persona that he wasn’t consciously aware existed.

‘If that’s the way you want to play it.’ The smile he gave her sent a chill up her spine. It was almost as if he relished her resistance.

‘I’m not playing.’ But he was...playing her straining body like a fish on a line, reeling her slowly in between his splayed knees with a gradually increasing pressure of her captured wrist.

‘However many letters you might have posted, those are all that arrived here,’ she told him, her normally rich, warm voice reedy with rising hysteria. How did you reason with a madman? ‘Why don’t you let me go and we can have a drink and talk about this sensibly?’ Maybe alcohol was a bad idea. It might feed his paranoia. ‘Or a cup of tea. That scratch is probably throbbing by now. Why don’t you let me clean it for you and—? Oh!’ With a slight flick of his wrist he brought her down on her knees, his thighs levering shut on either side of her torso. She gasped at the ruthless compression of her ribs, her hands pushing helplessly against the thick muscles bunching under the dark trousers.

He watched her twist and struggle in silence for a moment or two and then he leaned forward and cupped her pale face in his big hands with a tenderness that terrified her far more than his anger.

‘Forget the tea and sympathy—I want something much more valuable. Would you like me to hurt you, Honor?’ His thumbs stroked behind her ears, his fingers threading up under her hair, cradling her skull, making her aware of its mortal fragility.

‘Is that the only way I can make you tell the truth? The things about yourself you told me in your letters—I don’t suppose all of them were lies. I remember you telling me once that you have a low pain threshold...’ The slightly calloused edge of the outside of his palm lifted her jaw, stretching her soft throat uncomfortably taut. ‘Shall we test the veracity of that statement first...?’

‘Adam, please—’

His thumbs shifted to press across her trembling mouth. ‘Don’t beg yet, I haven’t started.’ His fingers massaged her scalp gently and suddenly black dots were dancing in front of Honor’s eyes that had nothing to do with pain. After a shattering day this emotional overload was just too much.

‘You’re being totally unreasonable,’ she whispered.

‘And you don’t think I have a right to be? I don’t give in to blackmail. Not ever. I don’t know how you got hold of those damned letters but if you thought you could use them against me you made a bad mistake—’

‘But you know how I got them...you sent them to me!’ The black dots had become red and Honor could hear the blood pounding in her ears. If he leaned any closer he would be kissing her. Or, more likely, biting...

‘Did you think you’d get money for them? From me? Or are you more ambitious? Did you think you could use them to advance your journalistic career by flogging them off to the highest bidder? Maybe it was just malice. You wanted to make me pay for the sin of having wanted your sister instead of you. There are plenty of motives to choose from, aren’t there?’

His breath was hot against her face. ‘I—I’m not that kind of reporter,’ she said weakly.

‘You admitted you work for a newspaper.’