‘Better him than you,’ she jeered, hell-bent on making him suffer before she let him off the hook.
‘Then, I guess we have a deal.’
He picked up the room key and pressed it into her captive palm, folding her fingers slowly down over the rectangular piece of plastic, one by one, his blue eyes smouldering with deadly challenge.
‘So be it.’
Jane’s breath stopped in her throat as she realised that he wasn’t going to back down. He was daring her to go through with their devil’s bargain! He really didn’t care about the money...he was rich enough not to miss the odd ten thousand, and had already proved that he would go to extraordinary lengths to gather her totally under his power.
Her head whirled in confusion, one certainty forming in the increasingly foggy muddle of thoughts: he was never going to give up and go away. Maybe the only way to win against him was to let him have the revenge he craved. Maybe then he would leave her alone.
But Sherwoods never gave up! Her father might not have had any principles but Jane had created a set of her own that she had sworn to live by: her word was her bond, never cheat on a deal, never betray a friend. And this man—this man was the reason she hadn’t been able to live up to those high ideals. He had haunted her past and now here he was once again trying to seduce her into forgetting her principles, turning herself into a cheat and a liar. A coward.
‘Well, are we going to party, honey?’ Dan asked, his hand appearing over her shoulder to plonk his empty brandy-glass down on the table. He tilted the back of her chair with a suddenness that made her gasp and clutch the seat, and grinned teasingly down into her upturned face.
Jane glanced back at Ryan, but he had swivelled away to put his signature on the bill which had been presented on a silver tray, the slashing downward strokes of his pen almost penetrating the paper. His angry profile was bleak and unrelenting.
‘Sure...’ Her voice seemed to come from a long, long way away as she let Dan help her to her feet. Her brain felt oddly separated from her body and her feet seemed to float above the floor as she accompanied him out of the restaurant into the thickly carpeted foyer of the hotel, conscious of Ryan prowling silently on their heels. She could feel his brooding stare pressing on her rigid back like the barrel of a gun—cold, hard and lethally unforgiving.
An icy calm settled over her. Time seemed to stretch, acquiring a dreamlike unreality as they walked past the reception desk to the bank of lifts where the two men shook hands and exchanged final pleasantries. Ryan sounded smooth and unruffled, but when Dan noticed that the receptionist was idle, and told Jane to summon the lift while he scooted over to check his messages, she discovered otherwise. She found herself abruptly backed into the nearest pillar, corralled by a solid body and big hands planted flat against the marble on either side of her shoulders.
‘He’s old enough to be your father—doesn’t that even bother you?’ Jane could feel Ryan’s burning gaze raking her pale, averted face. If she moved she would have to touch him so she froze, barely breathing, hoping that passive resistance would serve where open confrontation had so
miserably failed.
When she didn’t answer, his voice hardened sardonically. ‘The next customer mightn’t be so much to your taste. What happens then, Jane? You’re selling your right to say “no”. What happens if I offer your services to someone who makes your skin crawl? Will you close your eyes and think of the money while some sweating pig of a man grunts and heaves between your legs?’
Jane’s response to his lurid taunts was to retreat deep within herself, beyond the reach of his controlling fury.
His hands fell to his sides and he stepped back, as if suddenly contaminated by their closeness. ‘You know that if you do this there’ll be no going back,’ he warned harshly.
‘Thanks to you I have nothing to go back to,’ she pointed out, stepping around him to smile brittly at Dan, who returned just as the lift doors opened to disgorge a group of American tourists. She slid her arm through his and tugged him inside the vacant lift, not caring that her eagerness to get away from Ryan might be interpreted as something else.
Like a sleepwalker she accompanied Dan to room 703, handing him the key-card to unlock the door and watching him prowl around, twitching the curtains and switching on the radio, turning the lights on and off until he had created the effect he wanted. He left only a small, shaded lamp burning on the long, low, polished wood dresser, and Jane was glad of the near-darkness that shrouded the other side of the room where the big double bed loomed.
The room itself was luxurious, bland, anonymous... containing nothing to jar the senses or cling in the memory, and for that she was also grateful.
She put her black drawstring bag on the spindly table by the door, but even that movement took an effort. A stunned inertia weighted the limbs that had minutes ago been floating free of gravity, and rational thought eluded her.
She had made a deal...
The thought blazed through the fog in her brain as she let Dan take her into his arms. His hands felt dry and leathery on her skin as he tugged her face down to his. His cologne was sharp and unpleasantly astringent as it mixed with the strong aroma of alcohol on his breath She turned her head so that the lips that were about to fasten on her mouth crawled moistly down her cheek instead. She had to do this, she told herself desperately. It was a matter of honour. She had to do it to prove...to prove.
She couldn’t remember what she was supposed to be proving or to whom. The cloak of inertia began to slip. A vague sense of panic broke through the drug-induced lethargy and the blood thumped in her ears as she pushed frantically at Dan’s chest, conscious of the bull-like strength compressed into his stocky frame.
‘What? What’s the matter?’ Dan lifted his head, his brown eyes puzzled rather than annoyed, and Jane felt her brief burst of terror subside as he allowed her to ease away.
‘Uh, there’s someone at the door,’ she said shakily, having realised that the source of the thumping wasn’t inside her head.
Her knees almost crumbled in relief. Ryan! It had to be him! His conscience had got the better of him. In spite of his callous threats he hadn’t abandoned her to her just deserts. For that she was almost prepared to forgive him!
‘Oh, good, the champagne’s arrived!’ Dan crowed, opening the door and beckoning the hotel waiter inside. ‘I ordered it while I was down at the reception desk,’ he told Jane sheepishly. ‘Know how you girls like your bubbly...and flowers and chocolates—so I got some of them, too...’
Somewhere deep inside her she had been certain that Ryan would come. ‘I...I have to go...to the bathroom,’ she muttered from the depths of her shock, and dived through the door behind her, her hands scrabbling with the lock.
She braced herself over the marble basin, staring at her bloodless face in the mirror. Two hectic hot spots glowed on her cheekbones where Collette had applied blusher, and although her lipstick had completely worn off her lower lip was still red where she had been unconsciously worrying it with her teeth.
She looked down at her hands. Although there was no pain the left glove was beginning to strain at the seams. Soon her circulation might be affected. Better to take the gloves off now than have to have them cut off later...