She realised that his fingers around her wrists could feel her pounding pulse. Trapped by her fresh awareness of his superior strength and fitness, she resorted to striking back with words.
‘Trust you? Why should I trust someone who pretends to be something he’s not...who can’t even be open with me about something as innocent as what he does in his spare time?’
His fingers tightened briefly. ‘I’m Luke James. I’ve never pretended to be anyone else. Unlike you—’
‘I had good reasons.’
‘Escaping publicity? Oh, come on; publicity is something you’ve always thrived on.’ He suddenly let her wrists go, his loosely encircling hands sliding the length of her arms as she lowered them to her sides and felt her fingers tingle with the returning blood.
He gripped her shoulders and spun her around to face him. She was shocked by his darkly intense expression and the rigid tension that gripped his entire body. She realised that she had finally goaded him into real anger. There was no gentle diffidence in him now, no shy uncertainty. The adrenalin which had been pumping into his system during the run was still saturating his blood.
‘No, there’s much more to it than avoiding a few newspaper reporters, isn’t there, Rosalind?’ he said harshly. ‘I’m an intelligent man. Do you think I haven’t realised why you practically dragooned me into letting you take over my holiday? It isn’t solely for my benefit, is it? All I am to you is a distraction to keep your mind off whatever it is you’re running away from...’
“That’s not true—’
‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’
‘No!’ Her gaze faltered, even though she realised at that moment that it was indeed the literal truth. That wasn’t all he was to her, not by a long chalk...
She stepped back, and found her buttocks coming hard up against the dipping curve of the misshapen palm that she had grabbed to catch her breath. She clutched at it again as Luke simultaneously mirrored her movement, leaning forward to brace his hands on either side of her hips, trapping her even more effectively than he had a few moments before, this time in a position in which he could read every nuance of her expression.
‘Your personality shines with such incandescent brightness that most people are too dazzled to see the shadows,’ he said quietly. ‘What are they, Roz? What is it that makes you run?’
‘Apart from you, you mean?’ She couldn’t look away from the hypnotic black gaze. She had an odd sensation of falling and the even odder one of knowing that she could rely on Luke to catch her, that he would be a steady, rock-solid support. Perhaps he did have the right to some answers, she thought, and by giving them to him perhaps she might find out something she needed to know.
So she told him about the bombardment of letters and gifts she had been receiving from an unknown fan, about her efforts to ignore the growing sense of menace in his attentions. This time she made no attempt to make her experience sound amusing and, lured on by Luke’s silence she found herself impulsively exposing the heart of her anxiety—the stage fright that had caused her to question the core of her belief in herself.
‘All my life all I’ve ever wanted to be is an actress,’ she said starkly. ‘It’s what I’ve worked for. It’s what I am.’
‘You mean it’s the only thing in your life that you take seriously.’ Luke broke his silence with a sudden, shrewd insight into the essence of her bright, bubbly, fun-loving character. He felt a savage rush of pure adrenalin as he fitted a major piece into the elusive puzzle that was Roz Marlow. No wonder she had so few inhibitions about enjoying the pleasures of life—because she knew how truly inessential such things were to her happiness. The social butterfly flitted compulsively not because she was unable to care deeply enough about anyone or anything to commit but because she was already committed elsewhere.
‘If I can’t perform, if I’m not Rosalind Marlow the actress, who am I? My parents offered me this holiday as a kind of escape, but I suppose the one thing that I’m never going to escape is myself...’
‘And you have absolutely no idea who this Peter is...?’
She almost—almost—said a name.
The relief would have been enormous.
But she couldn’t permit herself the luxury. If Rosalind mentioned Peter Noble by name, Luke would want to know why she hadn’t reported him to the police. He would want to know who he was and how Rosalind had found out about him.
How could she tell him that Peter was Peggy Staines’s illegitimate son, given up for adoption after a secret teenage pregnancy? Peggy had been adamant that no one else was to know. She had never even told her husband about the bitter mistake that haunted her past and she had been appalled when her adult son had somehow traced her and confronted her one day when she was out shopping.
For weeks she had been torn between curiosity about the baby she had been forced to give up all those years ago and fear of the moody adult that he had become. She’d been especially afraid that Peter’s persistent attempts to make her accept him in her life would result in the old shame becoming public and thus jeopardise her marriage and her husband’s all-important career. To add to her guilt, she had found out that Peter had not been happy with his adoptive family, which had broken up and dispersed when he was a teenager.
In an attempt to placate both Peter and her conscience, Peggy had agreed to visit him at his flat, but the more she’d seen of him, the more disturbed she had become by his erratic behaviour. She’d discovered that he had been an outpatient at a psychiatric clinic and her fears about his mental stability had seemed to be confirmed after she’d seen his bizarrely decorated flat and r
ealised the extent to which his fan-worship of his favourite actress had taken over his life.
Peter had no job and was on limited medical benefit, yet in his closet he’d had a complete wardrobe of expensive new clothes in Rosalind’s size, still with their sales tags attached, and a range of her favourite make-up and toiletries lined up beside his razor in the bathroom. A home-made pin-up calendar of Rosalind had been marked with a detailed log of her activities, and when Peggy had found copies of his letters to Rosalind she had panicked at the thought of what would happen if Peter got into trouble and was exposed to the public spotlight.
Rosalind’s knowledge from here on was very sketchy, because by the time she had met Peggy in that infamous hotel room the distraught woman had worked herself into such a state that she had only had time to sob out the bare bones of her story before she had succumbed to the pain of her heart attack, gasping incoherently about something that Peter had done that had made all her soul-searching and suffering pointless...
Rosalind, who had just got out of the shower and had still been in her damp robe when her visitor had arrived at her hotel room fully two hours early for their meeting, hadn’t been quite quick enough when Peggy had suddenly crumpled to the floor. In spite of the choking pain, she had struggled vainly to communicate, only subsiding when a frightened Rosalind had firmly promised that she wouldn’t do or say anything to anyone about Peter until she had Peggy’s permission.
Now she was trapped by the integrity that the Press claimed she didn’t possess. It was ironic that in order to produce proof of her honour she would have to violate it.
‘I know that it’s someone who’s much more disturbed than I wanted to believe,’ she sighed, hoping that Luke hadn’t read the long pause as significant.