CHAPTER ONE
TAMARA sat up slowly, pushing a heavy swathe of wheat blonde hair back off her face. She didn’t normally wear it down, and already the hot Caribbean sun was beginning to bleach the loose wisps on her forehead silver. Cool grey eyes gazed thoughtfully out of a high-cheekboned, oval face of almost classical perfection, their expression faintly withdrawn, wary almost. It was Tamara’s habitual expression and one which had attracted the interest of more than one predatory male, until they realised that with Tamara the cool façade was more than merely skin-deep.
From the beach the sound of merrymaking and laughter was borne towards her on the light tropical breeze; from the swimming pool she could hear splashes and high-pitched childish voices, but here in the gardens of the luxurious holiday complex on St Stephen’s, there was no interruption and she had their beauty to herself.
She put down her paperback and glanced at her watch. Not long until lunch. The paperback was more of a safeguard against unwanted intruders than a compelling read; that was one of the problems about holidaying alone, but she had had little option—Malcolm hadn’t been able to come with her.
Malcolm! Sunlight glinted on the solitaire diamond on her left hand, the stone large enough to reveal its value, and yet not so large that it could ever be described as ostentatious. So typical of Malcolm. Eyebrows several shades darker than her hair drew together in a faint frown, What was the matter with her? Until now she had been perfectly content with Malcolm and their engagement. She sighed pensively. Perhaps it was the atmosphere of this tropical island paradise; or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the majority of the other guests were young couples, still at the honeymoon stage, or older couples free of growing families for the first time, bent on recapturing the magic of those earlier days. Certainly there were families among the hotel’s many guests, but somehow the atmosphere pervading the complex was essentially one of a sensuous lethargy, which was beginning to have its effect on Tamara’s thoughts, releasing doubts and breaking down barriers she hadn’t even been aware were there.
One of the main reasons she had agreed to marry Malcolm was because of his solid dependability, his lack of imagination and sexual magnetism. That wasn’t what she wanted in a husband. In the world of publishing in which she worked, as personal assistant to the fiction editor of a prestigious small publishing firm, she had seen all too often the results of hastily and ill-considered marriages, where two people declared that they had fallen madly in love only to change their minds within six or twelve months. That wasn’t for her. She wanted the sort of marriage her parents had had. Her parents. She sighed again, remembering the love and laughter which had pervaded the first fifteen years of her life, but all that love and laughter had gone the night they lost their lives in a motorway pile-up, leaving Tamara to be brought up by her father’s aunt, Lilian Forbes. Of course Aunt Lilian had been well-intentioned—it couldn’t have been an easy task to be faced with sole responsibility for a fifteen-year-old who was perhaps too emotional for her own good, but she was a distant, unbending woman, unused to children and found it difficult to show the spontaneous affection Tamara had been used to sharing with her parents, so gradually Tamara had learned to conceal behind a cool smile the turmoil of growing up feeling herself unloved and rejected. Eventually she herself, without realising it, had adopted her aunt’s mistrust of physically displayed affection, so that the boys she met found her cool and standoffish, turning to other girls less unapproachable and thus reinforcing Tamara’s conviction that she lacked the desirability of her peers.
To compensate for this she had pursued a career while other girls in the small village in which she lived got married and had babies, and at twenty-six she now considered herself immune from the emotions which seemed to possess other girls, and had been quite happy to accept Malcolm’s proposal.
Not that she had accepted him only for the sake of being married. London was no small village and there were plenty of men alive to the possibilities hidden deep within her cool exterior, but Tamara could never overcome the deep mistrust of what she termed ‘charmers’, which she had learned from her aunt.
She had even approved of the way in which Malcolm had taken her home to meet his parents, not once but twice, for what she knew to be a ‘vetting’. Colonel and Mrs Mellors had been polite but unforthcoming, and Tamara had sensed that they would have preferred to see their son married to one of their own set. Tamara could understand why. Although she had a well paid job and had done well for herself, she did not have the ‘county’ connections to appeal to the rather snobbish Mellors. Malcolm’s father owned and ran a small country estate which Malcolm had told her would come down to him in due course, but for now he was quite content with his accountancy partnership which enabled him to maintain an expensive London flat, and the BMW car he had bought just before their engagement.
Life with Malcolm would be as calm and orderly as drifting down a canal, and suddenly for the first time Tamara wondered if she really wanted such a narrow existence.
Suddenly feeling restless, she got up, and walked towards the beach; a tall slender girl with a cool ‘touch me not’ air which clung protectively to her.
Through the cluster of palms fringing the silver crescent of sand, Tamara could see one of the couples who had been on the same flight as herself. In their early twenties, and patently on honeymoon, their pleasure in one another was like a tiny piece of grit marring the placid surface of her life, and irritating her into the admission that Malcolm and the marriage they would have was not what her parents would have wanted for her.
The young couple were ducking one another playfully in the water; Malcolm hated any demonstrations of affection in public. What would their honeymoon be like? He had suggested they spent it in the Algarve; his parents had friends who owned a villa there and the golf courses were excellent.
Was that really what she wanted? she wondered; a husband who devoted himself to golf while she played bridge with his friends’ wives?
Telling herself that she was being stupidly emotional, Tamara gathered up her belongings prior to changing for lunch. Many people didn’t bother, simply eating at the poolside tables dressed completely informally, but Tamara felt after a morning in the intense heat of the tropical sun, her body covered in oil, that she wanted to shower and then eat somewhere where it was cool. She normally tanned well, despite her fair skin, but because she had never been so near the Equator before she was deliberately taking extra care to protect her skin from burning.
The hotel complex was attractive—bungalows for family occupation dotted the grounds, ablaze with jacaranda, bougainvillea, hibiscus, and passion flowers, but she had a room in the hotel itself—a double one, since she had originally b
een coming away on holiday with another girl from the publishing firm, but she had been transferred to their New York office at short notice and so Tamara had come away alone.
Malcolm had encouraged her. He was rather busy and felt that he himself would be unable to get away until their honeymoon, and as it was almost two years since she had had a proper holiday—her aunt had been very ill for a long time and Tamara had helped to nurse her through her terminal illness, using up all her holiday leave—Tamara had felt that she needed the break.
To get to her room she had to walk through the hotel foyer, a cool, shady room with a terrazzo-tiled floor, cane furniture and plenty of greenery. The receptionist smiled at her as she asked for her key. All the staff were exceptionally pleasant and ready to help. Tamara smiled back, and ran quickly up the flight of stairs leading to the bedrooms.
By law no building on the island could be higher than two storeys, and it was pleasant to be able to look out of her bedroom window, and to find that the only thing obstructing her view of the Caribbean was a clump of palm trees, waving slightly in the onshore breeze.
As she stripped off her swimsuit Tamara was pleased to see that already her skin was turning a warm honey shade—Malcolm did not approve of bikinis, nor had Aunt Lilian, and Tamara had never owned one. There was a boutique attached to the hotel, and she had noticed some particularly attractive swimwear in the window when she walked past it. Her swimsuit was completely plain—a dull navy, which when compared with the bright beach clothes worn by the other visitors seemed very schoolgirlish and almost frumpish.
The water pressure in the shower could sometimes be erratic, as Tamara had already learned, but today it worked reasonably efficiently, the cool spray delicious against her hot skin.
As she stepped out she caught sight of her naked body in the mirror, her breasts warmly full, but firm, the nipples a delicate pink against the pale flesh. She tried to visualise Malcolm as her husband, the two of them sharing the intimacies of the bedroom, but her imagination refused to conjure up the image. Cross with herself, she pulled a slender cotton dress from the wardrobe, brushing her hair vigorously, and constraining it into a neat knot at the back, before slipping on loose espadrilles.
The dining room was busier than she had anticipated. She had brought her book with her as protection and had hoped to secure one of the smaller tables furthest away from the huge windows overlooking the sea, so that she could eat there unnoticed by the other guests.
This hope was forestalled the moment she entered the restaurant because she was hailed by a plump, dark-haired woman with a friendly smile.
‘Tamara! Come and join us.’
She indicated one of the two spare chairs at the table she was sharing with her husband, and Tamara had no option but to slide into one of them, and accept the menu George Partington was handing her.
George and Dot had been on the same flight from Heathrow as Tamara and had introduced themselves to her at the airport. They were an outward-going couple, obviously quick to make friends, and Tamara suspected that, unlike her, they already knew most of their fellow guests.
The hotel was a relatively new one, and had not previously been used by package holiday firms, and consequently only half a dozen or so people on board their flight from Heathrow had had as their final destination, this particular hotel.
Among them had been the honeymooners Tamara had seen on the beach; a foursome, comprising two young couples who tended to stick together; George and Dot; two young girls, Tamara herself and a man who seemed to have come on his own and whom Tamara had glimpsed momentarily at the airport.
‘Try the shrimp and avocado salad,’ Dot encouraged her. ‘It’s delicious. Even now after several days I still can’t get used to the sight of avocados actually growing!’ Her eyes went to Tamara’s engagement ring. ‘You’re here on your own, aren’t you?’ she asked curiously.
‘Yes.’
Tamara felt reluctant to answer any questions about herself and was glad when Dot’s attention was transferred from her to the man just entering the restaurant.
Dressed in black jeans and a thin black cotton shirt, he looked sombrely out of place in a room where most of the men were wearing brightly patterned beach shirts and light-coloured trousers. He was different in other ways, too, she reflected, unable to pinpoint exactly why the man standing by the door should look so unlike any of the other holidaymakers. A shock of thick dark hair brushed the collar of his shirt, thick dark lashes concealing his eyes from her quick scrutiny.
‘There’s Zachary Fletcher,’ Dot murmured to George. ‘Ask him if he wants to join us. Isn’t he devastatingly sexy?’ she appealed to Tamara while George redoubled his efforts to catch the other man’s eye. ‘We were talking to him in the bar last night. Oh, he hasn’t seen us!’ she exclaimed in disappointment as the other man turned and walked towards one of the small tables almost hidden away in a corner of the room.
Even the way he walked was different from other people. Tamara reflected, aware of a tense watching quality in the way he moved, quickly and incredibly quietly for so tall and muscular a man. As he moved muscles rippled under the thin black shirt, the fabric of his jeans moving against the taut pressure of his thighs. Tamara found that she was holding her breath, studying the harshly chiselled features of a face that gave absolutely nothing away; a hard, too cynical face for a man who at most could only be in his mid-thirties.
‘Devastatingly sexy’, Dot had called him, and on a wave of revulsion Tamara acknowledged that the older woman was right. The man exuded a sensuality which was quite unmistakable. There wasn’t a woman in the room who had not watched him covertly as he walked across it, and Tamara felt almost sickened by their, and her own, avid interest in a man so patently uninterested in them.
He barely raised his eyes from the table except to order his meal, and Tamara noticed that his right arm hung a little awkwardly.
‘He’s here to recuperate from an accident,’ Dot told her excitedly, adding in a confiding tone, ‘He’s in the Army—oh, he didn’t tell us that, but I couldn’t help noticing it on his passport as we came through Customs.’
Tamara glanced at him again, convinced that Dot must have made a mistake. He didn’t strike her as the type of man who would accept the tight discipline of the Army—unlike Colonel Mellor, Malcolm’s father, whose considered opinion it was that Modern Youth badly needed a spell of ‘square bashing’—he looked like a loner, a man who deliberately withdrew himself from the pack. And that thick long hair didn’t suggest the Army either. He lifted his head, catching her off guard, cool green eyes surveying her with devastating intensity, before she was released, trembling inwardly, from the laser beam of his searching glance.
After they had finished their lunch Tamara accompanied the Partingtons back through the hotel foyer, lingering with Dot over the window display in the boutique.
‘Won’t you just look at that bikini!’ Dot sighed, pointing out the briefest scraps of cyclamen pink cotton Tamara had ever seen in her life. ‘If only I had a figure like yours! Why don’t you go in and try it on?’ she urged, her eyes twinkling as she added, ‘Treat yourself and your fiancé.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t!’