Shocking creature! she scolded herself now, but with a smile which was pure ‘old’ Madeline.
The silence was acting like a balm, soothing away a bleakness she had been struggling with from the moment she had stepped into the house this afternoon. She knew exactly why it was there. Her problem was how to come to terms with it.
She had not expected Dominic’s presence to be so forcefully stamped into everything she rested her eyes upon.
‘Damn him,’ she whispered softly to the night, and huddled deeper into her coat.
‘Another step, and you’ll fall down the bank,’ a quiet voice warned from somewhere behind her.
The moon slid behind a lonely cloud. Blackness engulfed her suddenly, and Madeline let out a strangled cry, her heart leaping to her mouth as she jumped, almost doing exactly what that voice warned against and plunging down the riverbank in sheer fright.
Heart hammering, the breath stripped clean from her body, she spun around, eyes wide and frightened as they searched the inky blackness for a glimpse of a body to go with the voice.
Another horse stood calmly beside Minty. And Madeline realised that she had been so engrossed in her own thoughts that she hadn’t heard the other rider come up. But she could see no one, and a fine chilling thread of alarm began slinking along her spine while she stood there breathless and still, the sudden deathly silence filling her ears, drying her mouth while her eyes flicked anxiously around the dark clearing.
By legend, this was highwayman country. And she could conjure up at least three gruesome tales of ghostly sightings in these parts. She’d always laughed them off before—while secretly wishing she could witness something supernatural. Now, she was rueing that foolish wish.
The horses shifted, bridles jingling as they nudged against each other. Madeline blinked, her eyes stinging with the effort it took to pierce the pitch-blackness.
‘Who’s there?’ she demanded shakily.
‘Who do you think?’ drawled a mocking voice.
It was then, as she caught the lazy mockery, the dark velvet resonance of the voice, that the fear went flying as a new and far more disturbing emotion took over, making her hands clench in her pockets as she saw a movement over to the right of the horses.
A tall figure of a man detached itself from the shadow of a tree, looking more wicked than any highwayman could to Madeline’s agitated mind. She had known him to come upon her like this many times, using shock tactics to heighten her awareness of him. He was that kind of man. A man who thrived on others’ uncertainty.
‘So, the prodigal has returned at last.’
‘Hello, Dom,’ she said, forcing herself to sound cool and unaffected by his sudden presence, even as her nerve-ends scrambled desperately for something she refused to acknowledge. ‘What brings you out here tonight of all nights?’
The moon came out from behind its cloud, and his smile flashed white in his shadowed face. ‘The same thing as you, I should imagine,’ he answered, close enough for her to see the clean taut lines of his handsome face. ‘Hello, Maddie,’ he belatedly responded.
He seemed to loom like the trees, tall and dark, black jeans and a heavy black sweater exaggerating the muscled power of his body. Everything about Dominic Stanton was in general larger than life, she mused acidly. Including his vows of undying love.
Abruptly she turned away from him, a hard pang of pain twisting in her ribs. They had used to meet here often once. It had been their place—among several others along this eerie riverbank. She would always arrive first, the more eager, she bitterly recalled. And he would come out of the darkness to take her in his—
A hand touched her shoulder. She reacted violently, his unexpected touch coinciding so closely with her thoughts that she took a jerky step back, and felt the riverbank tilt dangerously beneath her feet.
‘You stupid fool!’ he growled, fingers digging into her shoulders as he yanked her on to safer ground. ‘What do you think I’m going to do—rape you?’
Rape? A noise left her throat like a hysterical choke. Since when had he had to resort to rape with her? Surely it had been the other way around.
‘Let go of me,’ she insisted, disgusted with herself because even now, after four long years, one look at him and everything she had in her was clamouring in hungry greeting, sending her pulses leaping wildly.
His eyes still looked down at her with that same passionate intensity; his mouth was still firm-lipped and sensual. He still stood eight inches above her, still exuded that same hardcore sexuality that had always driven her mad with wanting—and still had the ability to stir her wayward nature.
She hated him for that. Hated him for making it happen.
His hands left her instantly, and she almost sagged in groaning relief. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said tightly. ‘I want to touch you probably less than you want to feel my touch on you.’
‘W-what are you doing here?’ she demanded, wanting to rub her arms where his fingers had dug in—not because he’d hurt her, but because her flesh was stinging as if she’d just been burned.
‘To see you, what else?’ He moved back a step to thrust his own hands out of sight in the tight pockets of his jeans. ‘Four years is a long time not to set eyes on the woman who made a public spectacle of me.’
She had made a public spectacle of him? Madeline almost laughed out loud. ‘As I remember it,’ she smiled bitterly, ‘it was the other way around.’
‘Not from where I was standing, it wasn’t,’ he grunted. ‘Humiliated by a spoiled if beautiful black-haired brat who has never given a care for anyone but herself!’