CHAPTER ONE
BY THE TIME the jet had climbed to thirty-five thousand feet Elizabeth Lamb had resigned herself to the destruction of her secret fantasies. She would make a terrible spy. A life of glamorous intrigue and spine-tingling excitement was definitely not for her. Why, the plane hadn’t even levelled off yet and she was desperate for the drinks trolley to come around so that she might steady her shattered nerves with a savage slug of pure, potent alcohol.
Elizabeth forced her hands to relax in her lap and allowed her clever brain to attack the problem from another angle. She wasn’t incompetent—or insane. She was doing what had to be done. She had never dealt well with surprises and the one that had been sprung on her at the airport had been bound temporarily to unnerve her. In the circumstances she was handling herself rather well.
She grimaced. Perhaps that was a slight exaggeration. She had been trying to behave with the utmost discretion, to attract as little attention as possible to herself—a task that she usually accomplished effortlessly—and had bungled it badly. First there had been the altercation at the check-in desk when the harassed airline representative had tried to tell her that because she was a few minutes late checking in there was no longer a seat available for her. If she were travelling purely on her own behalf Elizabeth would have happily accepted the offer of a later flight, but as it was she had had no choice but to make a fuss until the airline had backed down. Unfortunately the fuss had generated a ripple of interest through the surrounding queues of semibored travellers including the small, disdainful queue of first-class passengers at the adjacent desk.
Then there had been the incident at the security checkpoint in the departure hall. Elizabeth had set the alarms screaming as she walked through the scanning arch. She had been made to walk through twice more, each time becoming more flustered, before the security officer had run his hand-scanner over her and asked politely if she was wearing any jewellery under her clothes.
Elizabeth had clapped a hand to her chest, her whole body going hot with guilt. 'Yes, but it's gold—a necklace—surely it wouldn’t set that thing off,' she said in her distinctively deep voice.
'It may have some other metal mixed in with it; may I see?' the officer asked in a bored tone that didn’t reassure Elizabeth's anxieties at all. He obviously didn’t think she was a criminal type, but his opinion might change when he saw what she was wearing!
She unbuttoned the neck of her blouse cautiously, conscious of the curious eyes around them, some sympathetic, most amused and one casual silver-grey glance she was most particularly anxious to avoid. She turned protectively away from the passing crowd as she opened the blouse to show the guard what she was wearing, feeling embarrassingly like a flasher as he looked into her parted clothing. His eyes flicked up to her flushed face and down again.
'Looks rather valuable.'
'It is,' Elizabeth admitted in an agony of apprehension. 'It's—sort of a family heirloom. That's why I'm wearing it. I didn’t like to put it in my luggage.'
To her eternal gratitude he didn’t ask whose family heirloom. The officer ran his scanner over her chest and it beeped obligingly. The metal it was detecting was probably the hard, cold lump of terror in her chest where her warm, pulsing heart used to be! 'You're probably wise, ma'am. Going on holiday or business?'
'Oh, holiday,' she said only semi-truthfully. 'To Nouméa—the Isle of Hawks, actually.' Her name-dropping would explain the necklace if the man knew anything about New Caledonia. The off-shore resort was renowned for the glamour of its nightclub and casino.
He turned and had a murmured word with his senior colleague who moved obligingly over and peered into Elizabeth's exposed cleavage, making her acutely aware of the fullness of her breasts. This man wasn’t in the least bored and the faint gleam in his eye told Elizabeth he knew exactly what was going through her mind to make her blush. Or thought he did. If he had known everything he would have arrested her on the spot!
'Would you mind taking off your sunglasses for a moment, ma'am?' the second man asked, and Elizabeth did so, reluctantly, hurriedly re-buttoning her blouse as one of the more curious spectators edged around to see what the men were finding so interesting.
The officer cleared his throat, staring into her guilty eyes.
Oh, God, he could read her like a book. He was trained to detect the give-away signs of incipient panic. He was going to make his move now. Drag her away in front of all these people for an interrogation and full body-search.
Instead he smiled at her, the gleam now full-blown admiration. 'Did anyone ever tell you that you have Elizabeth Taylor eyes?'
'I—er—yes, no—that's my name—Elizabeth, I mean,' she fumbled, aghast at this sudden personal interest. She knew her big violet eyes with their thick, dark brows were her most memorable feature—that was why she was trying to hide them.
Luckily some other innocent traveller triggered the security alarm and Elizabeth took advantage of the moment to walk away with her fragile calm still intact. Her spine prickled all the way from skull to coccyx as she did so, expecting any moment to feel the heavy hand of the law on her shoulder. It took all her concentration not to break into a frenzied dash as she approached the foreign exchange window and exchanged her few remaining New Zealand dollars for the Pacific French francs used in New Caledonia.
She then scuttled into the crowded departure lounge, sure that she was over the worst, only to stumble over a stray suitcase and knock a young child's paper cup of water flying. The little boy burst into tears and Elizabeth cringed as everyone stared at her, assessing her culpability as a bully. Her furtive effort to bribe the child back into smiles with the offer of a tiny, crumpled pack of sweets earned her a suspicious look and a tart refusal from his parent. Feeling like a convicted child-molester, she slunk into the nearest available seat and discovered the man with the silver-grey eyes sitting directly across from her, idly watching her flustered arrival.
Hastily she raised the magazine she had bought to read on the plane in front of her flushed face and took several deep breaths under the contemptuous gaze of a rail-thin model who looked as if she didn’t know what a blush was. Elizabeth had never wanted to be a model herself, but that wasn’t to say she wouldn’t have liked the option of being a great beauty. However, a lovely pair of eyes didn’t offset a regrettable lack of vertical inches and a superfluity of horizontal ones. Not that she felt physically insignificant. Quite the reverse. Up until she was thirteen she had always been the tallest girl in class and by the time her friends' growth spurts had overtaken her own it was too late, her mind-set was fixed. She had always thought of herself as tall, and tall was the way she acted—with a little help from the footwear industry. She was the tallest five-foot-six woman she knew.
The seatbelt sign pinged off now as the jet achieved its cruising height for the three-hour flight and Elizabeth unrolled her tortured magazine and opened it to take her mind off the laggardly drinks trolley. The self-same haughty model, now stretched invitingly out on some namelessly beautiful Caribbean beach, sneered up at her, and she sneered back. Soon Elizabeth, too, would be lolling without a care in the world on warm white sands lapped by a crystal lagoon, the wettest New Zealand winter on record a mere memory... providing she could take care of one or two little matters first! She m
ight not have a gorgeous, tanned, muscle-bound and no doubt muscle-brained beach-boy to loll about with like the model, but she had something much more satisfying, not to mention healthy—a pile of bestsellers that she had been dying to read for months.
Of course, if Marge had accompanied her on this holiday as had been planned, Elizabeth might have ended up with both, but part of her was secretly relieved that she could now be thoroughly selfish and unsociable if she chose. Marge found it difficult to believe that any woman could be satisfied without a man in her life, but Elizabeth knew better than to believe that there was a designated 'Mr Right' for every woman. There had always been a surfeit of men in her life. She didn’t regard them, as Marge did, as excitingly mysterious or challengingly elusive. She understood them all too well and found them comfortingly but sometimes tiresomely predictable. She enjoyed their company but never made the mistake of taking them seriously. Elizabeth's job as a researcher and assistant to a professor of literature at Auckland University meant that she was surrounded by intelligent young men and women, many of whom took themselves far too seriously and paid the price for it in unnecessary suffering, both physical and mental. But then anguish was supposed to be good for the soul. If so Elizabeth's soul was obviously as indolent as the rest of her.
'Double gin and tonic, please.' Elizabeth roused herself to give her order to the air hostess who had bent enquiringly over her seat.
'Miss Lamb?' Belatedly Elizabeth noticed the lack of a trolley. Instead the woman held a piece of paper headed with the airline's logo, her French accent somehow making her words sound more ominous. 'I wonder if you would mind coming forward with me?' Elizabeth froze. 'Er—'
'And could you bring your things? Do you have any hand luggage in the overhead carrier?'
Elizabeth shook her head blankly, indicating the handbag and camera case down by her feet, her heart racing all over again. 'Is something wrong? Am I in the wrong seat?'